I worked there (Watson Health) a few years back. All that happened is IBM. That's right. They bought us (a small start-up) and this is what they did in a year to us:
1. replaced managers with their own who didn't get anything, kind of old date executives taken away from mainframe
2. banned remote work (this costed them a few brilliant engineers)
3. opened one huge open space full of noise and chatter, I mean sales team next to the development team, etc (this cost them even more headcount among experienced developers)
4. For months we did nothing! There were whole teams doing nothing for months on an end. I wrote zero lines of code in over 6 month period. Why? Because management didn't know which direction should be taken... and they kept hiring too! They kept hiring new developers when the ones already at place had absolutely nothing to do!
This is from my (simple developer) perspective. Not sure how it looked in sales, among executives, etc. But that was very weird environment.
I had great Manager who asked me to learn react and take courses in react (mind you it was two years back!) As we "might want to do something in react in the future". So I basically spent my last six months there learning React, aka preparing to the job interviews... they even got us paid courses and all. I mean... IBM.
And once they fired me (these were lay-offs, thousands affected, many of them just hired in past year, like myself) I was paid severance pay too. I went there worked a year, last 6 months was learning for job interviews... fantastic pay too. IBM is crazy.
This is normal big corp thought process. The CEO decides upon a growth area, gets some yes men to agree on a growth trajectory, and applies some standard investment/hiring metrics to assure they stay on top of the designated curve.
This all rolls down a few levels of mgmt to the first line guys, who are told your in a growth area, and we expect to need to hire X people over the next 24 months, who will be tasked with XYZ (frequently fancy words which when analyzed boils down to support the product we are going to sell).
This goes on for a couple years until the projected vs real revenue divergence is so large that even an CEO can't ignore the lack of growth. At which point the plug gets pulled and the next adventure starts somewhere else.
Sadly though, IMHO none of that is a problem, the real problem is that the CEO's can't actually tell or make strategic decisions about why these projects are failing to have exponential growth. (see intel & mobile chips/wireless connectivity, those are so strategically necessary for their growth that they need to keep trying until they die). So, they ax them, sometimes just as they are getting a solid product portfolio together. But they don't know that because they have been fed the same line for the past 24-36 months.
>Because management didn't know which direction should be taken... and they kept hiring too! They kept hiring new developers when the ones already at place had absolutely nothing to do!
I think big companies trying to do things like "Capture a market segment that will be a trillion (I made this number up) dollars in 2025" suffer terrible analysis paralysis. The 5 year plan has an extreme revenue ramp up and insane targets. If you combine that with politics, there is a lot of business and financial justification that has to go into every decision, and many decisions will be safe ones that look innovative (we're going to build on Insert Latest Cloud and use AI!) but have no real value to many customers.
The end result is crazy hiring (and firing a few years later) and groups with opposite experiences. Some groups have no work to do and other groups are working 80 hour weeks trying to make it seem like the marketing and growth curves are all true.
It's a comedy (if you are able to stay out of the mess and politics) or a tragedy if you have a manager who feels they want to be the shining star that supports this mad rush.
/cynical/ So sad that nowadays Swedes can't have a say about radical immams. /cynical/ How cool it is to have fun of Jesus but to have fun of Mahommed? How "far" we have "progressed" ;-) In 40 years from having fun about religious leaders to burning heretics like witches.
Wouldn't it be fun to watch movie having fun about Mohammed in Sweden? Or we became some kind of cultural caliphat in the mean time? Joking about Jesus respecting Mohammed? There is a reason for which our era is referred to as "new middle-ages" by some philosophers.
Sad.
By the way there is much more comedy material in Mohammed case too.
As we know since Freud hypocrisy is this what makes the best jokes. I.e. saint God messiah who is a war lord and peadophile in the meantime. Try making movie about that.
Sure, people should be able to poke fun at Mohammed, freedom of speech etc etc. But why would you? Life of Brian was a movie about Christianity, made by those born into Christianity, meant to be watched by fellow Christians. Hence why it provided an opportunity for introspection and self-reflection.
A movie lampooning Mohammed, made by Christians and for the amusement of other Christians, offers no such opportunity for self-reflection or growth. It would be nothing more than 21st century blackface.
The prophet Mohammed in Islam is seen with more reverence than Jesus in Christianity, invoking his name is also very delicate in Islam (you are supposed to say a blessing anytime you do and avoid invoking it lightly, there's a lot of rules around it).
With these religious/cultural differences I can understand how Muslim take greater offence to people making fun of their most prominent prophet as opposed to Christians, but also you have to take into account that because of that, people usually are more provocative with their humour when it comes to Mohammed.
I can't remember having seen any sexually depraved depiction of Jesus in mainstream media whereas I can clearly remember many that depicted Mohammed.
IMO it's not as easy to make fun of Islam/Mohammed because people tend to go for the extreme in term of dark humour but also it's not perceived the same way by the religious communities.
> The prophet Mohammed in Islam is seen with more reverence than Jesus in Christianity, invoking his name is also very delicate in Islam...
Interestingly, the west does not, however, honor similar Jewish reverence towards utterance or the writing of the name of G-d. See, for example, http://www.jewfaq.org/name.htm. I always wondered about the discrepancy.
Well, this video was aired a few weeks ago on public television. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFzl4dEBmJE But you are perhaps right that we refrain from making fun of Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, Africans and other minorities. Reason being that they have been persecuted so it's like kicking downwards. We do make fun of Danes, Norweigans and Finns though. :)
Nowhere in the world can we have a comedy about Mohammed because the comedians want to live (a funny life), too. In a few progressive countries people tried to make fun of Mohammed and they're, for the most part, dead.
(And The Life of Brian doesn't make fun of Jesus in any way, that's what people who haven't seen the film think.)
Whilst they're careful in the action of the film to make it clear Brian isn't Jesus, surely the central premise is that "Jesus is Brian", that his presentation as Son of God is a [comedic] mishap, or misunderstanding.
IMO the idea was not to make fun of Jesus but the followers of Jesus.
This is clearly shown when people start following Brian for no freaking reason and start creating "miracles" just because they want to believe it.
The movie lives side-by-side Jesus and criticizes faith in a satire approach by using Brian and his cult followers.
That's interesting, it's almost as if we watched two different movies. Actually I was expecting a lot of Jesus and I was a bit disappointed by not seeing him much. On the contrary, I saw a lot of "people and times", portrayed in a comical way.
Like the way the original Terminator wasn't about cyborgs from the future because you never (seldom?) see the future? Or Lord of the Flies wasn't about how civilisation readily devolves, it was just about a group of kids?
Are you trying to tell me you don't think it is saying 'people are mistaken and Jesus was just a man'? (Or perhaps 'a very naughty boy'!)
To me it seemed carefully written to maintain deniability and skirt blasphemy regulations.
FWIW it's a film I've enjoyed watching both as an agnostic and as a Christian.
Yes, the film was about the times of Jesus, about groups of people that might have followed him, of people that might have helped to crucify him (for the same reasons - blindly following the crowd), about Romans, about Jews, about Jews hating Romans, about Romans oppressing Jews, about ridiculous laws, but... not really about Jesus. I watched the film again 2 weeks ago, hardly anything about Jesus. I can hardly believe anyone could identify Brian with Jesus, these are two completely different characters.
No, I believe we differ in our perception of the role of Brian, and you seem to hold the position that bishops and other offended people held: that the creators of the movie identified brian with Jesus. I agree that if you wanted. you coudl interpret the film in this way. But it's not necessary. You will watch a completely different film then. You will see a Jesus who was ridiculous, cowardly, a bit stupid. But this makes no sense - Jesus is already in the movie and he is a completely different person.
There are many examples in literature and film where the creators focus on a personage close to a celebrity and make them the main character. But I guess the film is well done if we can both claim our positions and believe the other person is wrong.
I specifically stated, twice, that I didn't believe Brian to be Jesus. I think that's the massive knee-jerk reaction of those who only saw clips at the initial release.
I don't think the writers took a post-modernist approach. Indeed, as I tried to explain, the inclusion of Jesus as a character is IMO a clear attempt to say "see, no blasphemy here" for the purposes of publishing the film. (FWIW I don't consider the film blasphemous without the Jesus scenes, not explicitly at least).
The intention is pretty clearly to say "Jesus is Brian", ie "he's elevated by the crowd to his position as Messiah, rather than that being an intrinsic part of the man known as Jesus".
> I don’t know you or your values, often racists disguise their views as some form of freedom and conflate concepts. I have no strong urge to watch comedies poking fun at other people’s sensitive topics perhaps you should consider why you want to
Well, I for one certainly want to see more comedies poking fun at people's sensitive topics - most of all, my own. If I can't enjoy a well crafted joke about views or subjects I hold dear, I cannot examine them seriously either, at which point I'm just holding on to a dogma. That to me seems far more tragic than feeling offense at the occasional crass or tasteless joke.
Furthermore, on the broader point about comedy and offense, if you hold freedom of speech in any regard at all, you should fight the most for the right to express the views you find most offensive [1]. Anything less is not a defense of freedom of speech, it's simply defending your preference to be pandered to.
[1] Yes, there are obvious caveats with actionable incitement to violence. Those are well covered by existing legislation in every developed country and have nothing to do with offending people.
Actually you can sometimes convince people their ideas are wrong by laughing at their ideas. I'll never forget my Dad's reaction when I bought a magazine about flying saucers.
Whether or not we can change each others views by laughing at them, it shouldn't be forbidden. In fact it's healthy. All religions, and atheists too, have ideas that should be subjected to the scrutiny of laughter.
Don't confuse hatred of people with laughing at ridiculous ideas. I 100% support everyone's right to hold ridiculous ideas (as long as they don't impact the rest of us).
Laugh at the ties people wear to the office, or the suits with tails that people wear to prestigious events; but laugh as well at pompous religious robes.
Laugh at the belief that flying saucers exist, the belief that fairies exist, the belief that god X Y or Z exists, or at the idea that the universe is just a soup of particles and radiation that cares nothing about us.
Any worthwhile idea or belief can withstand laughter, and probably did when it was young. The fact that some people cannot, means it's not reasonable to take the piss out of the shy kid in class. Laughing at a vulnerable person or group of people is wrong. But for ideas - especially for ideas that claim justification in mystical personal experience rather than rationality - laughter can be the best argument.
I'm not sure what it is that you're arguing against, where did I advocate shouting abuse outside a school as a productive way of doing anything? Perhaps you could clarify your argument somewhat.
Civil debates are great, I'm happy to have more of them. At the same time, works like the Life of Brian (and many others over the years) sometimes manage to convey more thought-provoking critique per unit time than any civil debate I've ever seen. Having to tune out a measure of tasteless humor is the price we pay for enjoying these brilliant works because there is no more a way of legislating good humor than there is of enforcing quality journalism, good music or any other creative human endeavour.
Why do you equate comedy production with obnoxious shouting in public? It doesn't even make sense as a strawman. I don't produce comedies because I'm not a filmmaker. I don't shout random insulting things in public because that's just dumb. Neither fact contradicts any of the views and beliefs I've expressed in this thread in any way.
Freedom of speech wasn't granted to us to talk about weather while drinking coffee. Freedom of speech was granted to us to talk about difficult topics quite often when we don't like discussing it in the first place.
This paraphrase of a quote is often attributed to both Churchill and Jefferson.
The whole idea is that people who you are uncomfortable listening to have the right to speech right in your face even when it makes you extremely uncomfortable. The whole current political system is morally bankrupt when some of us are granted this freedom (radical immams) while others aren't (i.e. racists). Because then regular people on the street stop believing and voting for liberal democrats. Liberal democrats criticizing freedom of speech (not granted to racists would seem to make you happy) and democratic process (i.e. electoral college, brexit) -- they start looking like they don't care about their own values (like freedom of speech and democracy). You can't call yourself liberal and then be anti-free speech to this or another group or perceived group. This makes you look as if you don't understand the words you use to describe ideas you believe in it. You are not liberal if you ban freedom of speech to racist. Period, and of story. Look up liberal in dictionary.
This is one of the reasons why people vote Trump or AfD or Social Democrats in Sweden. They recognize mainstream political parties as anti-democratic (ignoring EU referendums) and anti-liberal (opposition to freedom of speech). So if all the political spectrum in anti-liberal and anti-democratic why not to vote for a party that at least isn't hypocritical about it?
No, for the same reason I wouldn't go there and say priests are wrong in the middle-ages. I would be be killed by the mob. Burnt like a witch.
You can't create social environment, like in middle-ages, where discussing certain topis, like racial differences at universities, results in loosing employment, getting "killed by the mob", and then demand I come out. This is crazy! You mr. inquisition are not going to set me up into this trap.
And, yes, I know you would love to see me burnt at the stake because of my love of science and my scientific believe that there are differences between sexes and there are differences between races. But I will not give you the pleasure mr. grand inquisitor.
Human genome has been decoded since 2003. This is science. If your ideology destroys it, then you are inquisition. And we are living in new middle-ages. Not to believe in sex differences? Not to believe in race differences? 16 years after the genome has been decoded? Why? Because you have your ideology like some 600 years ago had their religion? And what do I care?
Please, could someone more knowledgeable explain to me. I have used computers since mid 1980s. Started with Atari 800XL. I have used Internet since mid or late 1990s. So first thing: please forget what the name of the Act is. Forget it. Not Net Neutrality. Let's call it "Act ABC". I know, ridicilous, but I want you to look at the issue... hmmm... in neutral manner. I remember the Internet that the ABC Act is supposed to protect us from. Internet in which you pay for the data used. I used a modem and was paying for my time online. So websites that took forever to load or didn't employ caching (looking at you youtube without cashing just streaming, but wth). This was muchmuch more diverse internet. That was the internet that forced p2p sharing and p2p platforms. Non-existent now because the current system where you don't pay for the data privilleges big oligopolies, big corporations that have the most data. Google (with its subsidaries), Facebook, Twitter are like what 70% of the internet now? Why? How is that good? I want my crazy websites back. I want diversity. I want copyrighted streaming to be kicked in the stomach. I want competition. I don't want Google, Facebook and Twitter monopolizing the internet. Look, ISPs have never censored the content. Google, Facebook, Twitter do it all the time. On the one hand they say, oh we're platform. On the other they edit content. So which one is it? Obviously you can't have both at the same time.
Paying for data would disrupt Google, i.e. it would kill youtube (owned by google) overnight or at least far reaching changes in it. Facebook also, spending 3-4 hours a day on it, and paying ? Noow, wouldn't it be better to spend 20 minutes there and then browse for other locations? Just to spend your expensive online time more wisely. With free cost of bytes send developers, and I'm sorry to say it, I'm a developer too though, can be lazy. No optimization what-so-ever. Building websites to make sure they are small, load fast, put important content up-front, don't waste users time... now how this could be bad?
Net Neutrality is the step in the future. Future of Googles, Twitters and Facebooks, Amazons, 3-4 oligopolies taking all traffic, killing all the innovation and competition in the process. This isn't the future I hoped for. I hoped for neevr ending 1990s internet. With dozens of websites I visited regularly. And these dozens changing every year too. Future of the internet looks so regulated now. The last step will be the Government taking over, or rather regulating, FANG. This is death of the innovation for this Industry.
And make no mistake: if Republicans won't pass Net Neutrality then Democrats will surely do it. But still they seem to recognize the same problem, Ms. Elizabeth Warren wants to break-down Google, Twitter, Facebook into smaller competing companies -- employing anti-trust laws against them via Department of Justice action. So I think we see the problem on both sides of the aisle. The thing is that solving the problem of big corporations governing the Internet like their own turf might be better done via making time on the internet or data sent paid again. Just seems more natural than taking Judical action against the offenders.
First, thanks for writing this post. I find it very hard to understand because you don't say what you think net neturality is. It sounds very different from mine.
My definition is roughly "price you pay only depends on how much data you want and how fast you want it, not what that data is or who it comes from."
So metering the internet is totally in line with net neutrality, as long as you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others. In fact, this definition pretty much fits everything you say is good and avoids everything you say is bad. But you seem to say net neutrality does the opposite. Now I don't know the details of this exact bill but can you explain what you think it's doing and how that relates to your post.
The key in your last statement: "as long as you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others."
But they will and do. Bandwidth caps and overage charges are a key way corporations like Comcast put fear uncertainty and doubt on watching things like Netflix. What if you go over? You can't with their Cable TV offering, but you can with Netflix, a competitor to Comcast.
What you will see is the corporations, and their proxies, will scream about the inability to "innovate". What they mean is the inability to find new ways to discriminate and double-dip.
They explicitly do NOT want a water bill system, when they can charge you much much more for water that comes out of the bathroom faucet than the garden hose.
There's a significant group of people adjacent to and overlapping with net neutrality advocates who are opposed to any form of bandwidth metering. https://stopthecap.com/
This is largely because metering is a precursor to network neutrality violations.
The vast majority of an ISP's costs are independent of usage. The actual incremental bandwidth cost is below $1/TB of transfer and is constantly declining. And if that's what they were charging, probably nobody would care. But if that's what they were charging then they would probably make less doing the charging than it costs to do the accounting. Also, customers hate metering in general and will happily pay $5/month extra to not have to worry about it even when their actual metered bill would only have averaged $1/month extra, which across all customers more than pays for that one guy who pays the extra $5/month and then uses $100 worth.
But that isn't why metering is imposed, and those aren't the prices charged. Because the point of metering is to exempt things from it, as a way to favor those things. If you have to pay $10/GB of transfer for Netflix but not for cable TV, advantage cable TV. If it wasn't for that, metering wouldn't be used on wired connections.
I agree that metering Internet access would cause far-reaching changes but I don't think we can predict what those would be. It could easily make the Internet much worse. And of course everyone hates it: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html
We accept metering for electricity and water because human intuitions still apply; this isn't the case for data. Two Web pages that appear similar could have vastly different transfer sizes. I'm reminded of the criticism of Xanadu that said "imagine an odometer that's taking money out of your pocket; now imagine it turning really fast".
Do you think you should be charged the same for charging a Macbook as for just turning on some lights, just because they use "the same" amount of elecricity? We figure if you can afford a Macbook you can afford to pay a little more! That's all. We just want the right to discriminate based on what you'll use electricity for, as opposed to how much of it. Electricity neutrality would remove our ability to do so. -your electrical company.
I don't know why you think people aren't paying for data. I pay for data every time I pay my cable/internet bill, and every time I pay my cell phone bill. Both even refer to what I'm purchasing as "data", unlimited data in the case of broadband, capped 5gb/month in the case of my cell plan.
What you describe from the early internet days is simply the transition from data plans that charged by units of time instead of a flat fee.
You seem to be extremely confused about what Net Neutrality even is. It has nothing to do with whether you pay for data or not.
Yes, Google and Facebook being so large is concerning, but it has nothing to do with this subject.
If anything, the entrenched players are helped by a lack of Net Neutrality. Say Facebook makes a payment to ISPs and suddenly all it's competitor websites are unreliable and slow to load.
She isn't that good at all and never have been. WSJ and Barron's complained about her for the longest time possible now.. There are very critical articles of her in serious business press and magazines. Sexism is bad. But granting free pass to every bad CEO when she is a woman just because of her sex isn't smart. These people are CEOs, getting paid millions, destroying businesses and sometimes lives. It is important to keep them to the same scrutiny regardless of their sex.
Firing bottom performers every quarter. Banning remote work. Spending $7m on fashion show she attended with friends.
If this was a man he would have basically no right to criticize any other business especially successful one like Google. She looks absolutely ridicilous in this position. It's like F-grade student giving lectures to straight A's student. Do these people have shame at all?
And examples like this, or even worse like infamous Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, should remind us that we shouldn't give free pass to CEOs just because they are women. CEOs have the highest rate of sociopaths, no matter the gender.
To me as someone who is in no way expert on automation or an economist but someone who knows how profit oriented big business is, especially banks, I have a question: this looks to me like they expect so much automation happening in the future that they can afford the move? Isn't that case with McDonald's too, where they can have self-serving locations in near future, so no problem with raising minimum hourly rates?
The ATMs nowadays do so much on their own. I was taken by surprise when last time I had 5 of my checks scanned and deposited cash into my checkings by a <big bank name here> ATM recently. No human interaction what-so-ever. So I can withdraw money using ATM, I can add money using ATM, and I can cash/deposit checks using ATM. Isn't that like 99% of what their 90% customers do? Isn't that the case that in 5-10 years they will need one person on premises to handle the remaining cases? So then that person can be making 20usd/hr, why not? If they're replacing 4-5 other workers, this is savings anyway.
Of course this won't touch things like mortgages or auto-loans. For now that is...
The only thing that's really new in the last 10 years (or more) though is depositing through mobile apps. I've been doing that with ATMs for a very long time.
I maybe go into a bank branch once every couple of years for some reason or another. I'm always a bit floored by just how much prime retail real estate bank branches consume in a typical city. I guess it's a form of advertising. (Of course, the same thing is true of mobile phone stores.)
Agreed. And ever more so, the mobile apps do a ton themselves. I absolutely love that that I can just deposit checks right from my banking mobile app, instead of having to go to the bank or an ATM.
Here is the thing: the US will be net energy exporter by 2021. As of now it is self-sufficient. At the time when we put such a emphasis on using less fossil fuels, we also have more and more countries producing the stuff.
All it did (Norwegians not drilling) is raised prices for the oil exported by the US. Thank you! Recently it has been very cheap. Hopefully this will help a bit.
So that's global perspective.
The local perspective I'm happy that Norwegians are so wealthy they don't need to drill as much anymore or can focus on other issues then providing to the Sovereign Fund. Good for them!
AFAIK Americans already don't plan to leave oil in the ground if it's economical to get it out. They can't drill more if they're already going to drill it all.
housing, healthcare, food, clothing. How the CPI works is that necessities are mixed with nice to haves. Like large TVs and smartphones. LCD TVs price is down, smartphones price is down (and they will include things like size of the TV or speed of the smartphone to proof it's cheaper even when it isn't). Healthcare prices are tremendously up, food prices are up, yes housing prices are up, they have been going up for 10 years. And the salaries are the same. CPI is an useless metric. If my health insurance was 500 bucks and is 1300 bucks, childcare was 1,100 usd and is 1,500 usd -- what do I care about LCD TV being down? Or being able to get 5 times faster smartphone for the same price compared to 3 years ago?
In the USA the middle class and white collar (middle upper class) now too -- are getting poorer by the year.
Serious question: does anyone know how are homosexual monkeys treated by their peers? Basically, I was wondering if there is a proof of them being discriminated/treated badly by their peers.
Unfortunately, I've seen documentaries and been to zoos where the zoo keepers have told us that homosexual moneys are subjected to violence. I think the brunt of it is against male monkeys making sexual advances towards an unwilling male partner.
I don’t know who badgerigar is, but his comment was flagged and killed, even though it is scientifially correct.
Although animals have been observed to have same-sex coupling, they mix it up with males and females. In the animal kingdom the only species that have been observed to have exclusively homosexual sex are humans and domesticated sheep. One would think that a sexual organism never having heterosexual sex would be a huge evolutionary fitness disadvantage, and such a trait would be extremely uncommon. There are some caveats, for example: Sharks are able to reproduce asexually, and frogs can “switch” genders AFTER reproduction, during adverse conditions. But lifelong homosexuality has not been observed in species other than humans and domesticated sheep, which suggests that relaxed evolutionary pressures may be a necessary component.
From Wikipedia
Simon LeVay introduced caveat that "[a]lthough homosexual behavior is very common in the animal world, it seems to be very uncommon that individual animals have a long-lasting predisposition to engage in such behavior to the exclusion of heterosexual activities. Thus, a homosexual orientation, if one can speak of such thing in animals, seems to be a rarity."[8] One species in which exclusive homosexual orientation occurs, however, is that of domesticated sheep (Ovis aries).[9][10] "About 10% of rams (males), refuse to mate with ewes (females) but do readily mate with other rams."[10]
> One would think that a sexual organism never having heterosexual sex would be a huge evolutionary fitness disadvantage
Genes do not "care" for individual organisms. If they did we would be immortal. Jared Diamond argued that the presence of homosexual uncles/aunts is the same kind of an advantage as the presence of no-longer-breeding grandparents.
The key difference between a gay aunt or uncle and a no longer reproducing grandparent is that the grandparent has already reproduced.
Also, if homosexuality is a strategy for childcare, why do homosexual relatives contribute so little to their nieces and nephews? And if it is a successful strategy, why does it occur at such a low prevalence?
There are no homosexual monkeys. While nearly all mammalian species have homosexual sex, homosexual individuals have only been observed in sheep and humans.
discrimination is a purely human thing. animals see sex and reproduction as a leisure activity, and as a result, don't nearly give it as much though as much as humans do. Plus they don't have the bible, which can be interpreted as not allowing for homosexual relations.
Really? If you took an animal and shaved it, you don’t think it would be ostracized even though nothing is wrong with it and it has no impact on its peers? I’d bet it would.
I’m sure animals do it based on behavior as well. If a peer is acting sick (even if not), I’m sure their behavior changes.
Sorry about the blogspam link. I have seen more reputable articles about chimpanzees with alopecia, but my search skills are failing me now. The gist always seems to be that hairless chimpanzees (there have been several in zoos) aren't treated differently by others.
Both wolves and humans are social creatures. They key ingredient is highly hierarchical structures. Where individuals compete among themselves for the position in the group. And capitalism is just reflection of that in human societies.
First social creatures that "discovered" hierarchies were lobsters about 300 milion years ago. This is before even trees existed. Very long time from the evolutionary perspective, i.e. they do provide advantage to species that employ it.
This is from my (simple developer) perspective. Not sure how it looked in sales, among executives, etc. But that was very weird environment.
I had great Manager who asked me to learn react and take courses in react (mind you it was two years back!) As we "might want to do something in react in the future". So I basically spent my last six months there learning React, aka preparing to the job interviews... they even got us paid courses and all. I mean... IBM.
And once they fired me (these were lay-offs, thousands affected, many of them just hired in past year, like myself) I was paid severance pay too. I went there worked a year, last 6 months was learning for job interviews... fantastic pay too. IBM is crazy.