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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • I have interviewed probably a thousand people, hired and managed many teams, though not retail I have to admit. I have had precisely one conversation about hair in all of that time. I was interviewing a guy who had a very large number of thick braids. I said, “the job sometimes requires wearing a hardhat. Is that a problem?” He said no, that he did it all the time, he just needed to tie them back. I should emphasize this dude had a truly impressive amount of hair so I really did doubt he could get it in a hat, but I hired him and he did.

    I’ve also had to have conversations about long nails and body odor. It’s not comfortable, but we should not be afraid of these topics ONLY if they are directly relevant to the job. I see nothing in this story where her hair interfered with the job, unless the job is pleasing bigots. Oh.





  • There’s a thing called HALT/HASS. HALT stands for highly accelerated life testing. Basically you put a product under extreme stress and try to find the failure points and mitigate them. Temperature, vibration (simulated or track), humidty, power cycles, … That said I’ve never seen one find everything. You can also do FMEAs, which again never find everything. In short this stuff is hard even for companies that presumably have lots of experience to draw on. Don’t know if Ford did something dumb to miss this or it was just one of those, “oops we missed it” that happens.


  • We’ve always had garbage people but the problem is unfettered capitalism literally rewards narcissistic sociopathic behavior and we for some reason decided to make that the dominant system. Which means the worst amongst us have the most power and resources and help set the tone. Those people then attract the terribly misguided like Lee Atwater (US example) and religious zealots (evangelicals in the US) who propagate the message that self-interest is all that matters.

    For the record I’m not anti-capitalist, but we did let the whole idea get out of control from the very beginning and I think it has a lot to do with the decline. Not to mention the coming death of hundreds of millions due to climate change.


  • Further our “singular conscious” is an illusion. People with various types of physical brain damage have had their awareness “split” and had something akin to two different consciouses in their brain. Even for “normal” people there are independent processes running in our brain. Our consciousness is in charge sort of the way the teacher is in charge of the nursey school. It might decide when recess is but it can’t stop that one kid from just singing for no reason.

    Also to your point I think that if we could transplant a head we’d find that our sentience involves more than the brain. I think we underestimate how connected all of our systems are.