Because treating people fairly often means treating them differently.
This is something that I teach my students during the first week of school and they understand it. Eight year olds can understand this and all it costs is a box of band-aids.
I have each students pretend they got hurt and need a band-aid. Children love band-aids. I ask the first one where they are hurt. If he says his finger, I put the band-aid on his finger. Then I ask the second one where they are hurt. No matter what that child says, I put the band-aid on their finger exactly like the first child. I keep doing that through the whole class. No matter where they say their pretend injury is, I do the same thing I did with the first one.
After they all have band-aids in the same spot, I ask if that actually helped any of them other than the first child. I say, “Well, I helped all of you the same! You all have one band-aid!” And they’ll try to get me to understand that they were hurt somewhere else. I act like I’m just now understanding it. Then I explain, “There might be moments this year where some of you get different things because you need them differently, just like you needed a band-aid in a different spot.”
If at any time any of my students ask why one student has a different assignment, or gets taken out of the class for a subject, or gets another teacher to come in and help them throughout the year, I remind my students of the band-aids they got at the start of the school year and they stop complaining. That’s why eight year olds can understand equity.
I remember reading somewhere once “we should be speaking of equity instead of equality” and that is a principle that applies here me thinks
At CES, the Verge’s Nilay Patel interviewed Vizio CTO Bill Baxter, who
told her that when it comes to the surveillance features of his
company’s “smart” TVs, “it’s not just about data collection. It’s about
post-purchase monetization of the TV…[When it comes to ‘dumb’ TVs,]
we’d collect a little bit more margin at retail to offset it.”
The remarks come in the context of the low margins in the TV market,
which Baxter gives as 6%, and how companies like his are driven to seek
out other revenue streams for their products.
But Baxter also implies that he doesn’t believe there’s a market for
dumb TVs, even at a premium. This is certainly what I discovered last
year when my family bought a house and went TV shopping: there were no
panels large enough for my wife’s satisfaction (she’s a retired pro
gamer and wanted a really big screen) unless we were willing to buy a
set with several kinds of built-in networking and sensors that would put
our home under surveillance.
In theory, you can turn all that stuff off, but then you have to trust
that the manufacturer is both honest and competent, both of which seem
like needless risks to take, especially in an era when companies face
virtually no liability for product defects, routinely cover them up, and
threaten whistleblowers who disclose their sneaky data-collection and
poor software quality.
One of my followers (who wants to remain anonymous) is looking for books featuring strong, inspiring female protagonists where their focus isn’t primarily on male characters. Please reply with your suggestions. Thank you!
A God in Every Stone, Kamila Shamsie (female archaeologist, early C20 England and India.)
The Passion, Jeanette Winterson (bisexual gondolier, magical C17 Venice)
Songs of Triumphant Love, Jessica Duchen (mother (opera singer) and daughter (university student), late C20 England, Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (spirited sisters, mid-C20 Nigeria)
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym (Mildred!! earnest, intelligent, mid C20 England)
Incidental Music, Lydia Perović (three fantastic women, three generations, three countries, it’s complicated and I love it, C20 Hungary/Canada/etc.)
Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf (CLARISSA. Also Lucia. 1930s England.)
Mrs. Miniver, Jan Struther (Mrs. Miniver is a gem. WWII England. You will cry.)
Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis (Orual <3 <3, ancient Greece)
The Queen of the Night, Alexander Chee (opera singer, spy, seductress, mid-C19 Europe, it’s so good)
The Odd Women, George Gissing (RHODA and other women having careers, late-C19 England)
In June, the New England Journal of Medicine published results of a study that showed the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol was more effective than misoprostol alone to help women expel a miscarriage, or what’s known as an early pregnancy loss. That’s when a pregnancy is not viable in the first trimester.
Before these findings were published, women who were miscarrying usually had three options: a surgical procedure to remove the miscarriage, misoprostol alone, or waiting for the miscarriage to pass on its own.
“It ends up adding insult to injury,” says Courtney Schreiber, an OB-GYN in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the New England Journal study. “The misoprostol alone has really not been a therapeutic intervention.”
In Schreiber’s study, which followed 300 women who were miscarrying, the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol was more effective in helping patients expel the miscarriage. The overall success rate was 90 percent for patients who took both medications, and 76 percent for those who who got misoprostol alone.
“It offers them a sense of control over their own bodies and their own process when they feel that they’ve already lost an element of control,” Schreiber says.
Humans are packbondy creatures. I mean, there’s just no arguing it. They packbond readily, and quickly, and unbelievably strongly. Once a human has packbonded with a thing, they will do anything to help and protect that thing.
There’s a downside to that, not often mentioned. It uses up a lot of their time and energy to build those packbonds, maintain those packbonds, and most especially to do the work of helping and protecting those with whom they have packbonded. It doesn’t leave them a lot of time and energy for helping other beings.
If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.
“Yeah? So?” So you’re probably going to be working with humans for most, if not all, of your career. No matter how good or bad you are at your job, there will come a time when you need someone else in your workspace to help you with something, whether that’s manning the fry station for 2 minutes while you pee, sending over those numbers from marketing, or dropping everything to teach you how to do a thing that your boss told you to do or else you’d be fired.
Not to mention the big things. They don’t give promotions to just their friends – at least not so much any more. Promotions go to the people who’ve completed big, visible, important projects. It seems fair until you consider,,,, who gets the big, important, visible projects assigned to them in the first place?
Humans give boosts to the people they’ve packbonded with. They mention packbondee’s accomplishments to the boss (or the boss’ boss). They cover for the mistakes of people they’ve packbonded with.
“That’s not right! It shouldn’t be a popularity contest! It should be about who does the best –” Listen to me. Listen.
You may be right. You may be the most correct creature to have ever spoken since the beginning of galactic civilization.
It does not matter
Humans packbond. It’s what they do. I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it. No power in the ‘verse can stop it. This is how the human do.
All you can do is work with it.
If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.
“Look, I’m introverted and scared of people and I have social anxiety so I really don’t know how to –” Hey, my pal, I feel you. I, too, am introverted. And I have social anxiety. And I have PTSD that actually – and I recognize that this is bizarre – has ‘business networking’ as a trigger.
For you, I have good news: Humans will packbond with anything.
Like, you don’t really actually have to do anything. You kinda just have to… exist. In their presence. They kinda do the rest.
If you can talk with them, that speeds things up. But it doesn’t have to be, like, good conversation. Like, it can totally go
You: boy, sure is hot out! Human: Man oh man, can you believe it? You: Wow, yeah Human: Totally You: …. Human: ….
This conversation – as awkward and uncomfortable as it felt to you, has caused this human to packbond with you a little more. If you repeat it weekly, you will get good results.
THE TAKEAWAYS
You need to packbond with the humans you come in contact with
Taking time to do that is not only justifiable, it is an important part of your job, and should be treated as such
That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers
Tips
Plan out your packbonding time. It’s easier if you can initiate than if a human springs packbonding-time on you all unexpected. In an office job I like to use Friday afternoon, but adjust according to what makes sense to you and your situation.
Keep some packbonding-time questions handy. My go-to list is:
(If it’s Monday or Tuesday) How was your weekend?
(If it’s Wednesday) How’s your week been so far?
(If it’s Thursday or Friday) Any big plans for the weekend?
How’s your day been?
You don’t have to care about the answers to these questions. All you have to do is remember that if the human is answering questions, they are not asking you any questions. Therefore questions are your friend. If you ask follow-up questions, you may be able to get through the entire packbonding time without having to do any of the talking
Learn to disengage from packbonding. You can use basically the same sentence (or variants on it), but you’ll want to practice it so that you can make it sound natural. I use “Awesome! Well, I gotta get going. Have a good one!”
I know it feels overwhelming, but a few minutes of packbonding, once a week, is all you need. Once you build it into your habits it can be no more annoying than doing dishes or showering.
So we’re just not gonna talk about how OP is an alien anthropologist investigating the human species before infiltrating huh
“That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers”
In many of my shittiest jobs I wasn’t allowed to talk to the other employees because the bosses say we couldn’t do our jobs if we were socializing. Now that it has been phrased this way it makes me realize how not only just how life-sucking that is but also how dehumanizing.
They won’t even let us packbond.
Pretty sure that’s by design. They know you won’t talk to the bosses, much less packbond with them, but if you bond with your coworkers? Well. That’s perilously close to unionizing, but arguably more dangerous. Now you actually care about them, like with your real *heart*.
I love that this concept has gone full circle from “let’s talk about how humans interact to aliens” to “let’s look at humans through an alien lens” to “let’s use our observations about humans to now interact with other humans.” It’s exactly what scifi is supposed to make you do: challenge your assumptions about how you view the world so that maybe you can approach your world from a new POV. Just perfect.
Today in class we were asked to write personal statements for college applications and I found out I shouldn’t write anything after having an energy drink
So everyone kept asking and today I got my grade and she called it “brash” but gave me an A+
wait….are any americans aware that the cia overthrew the democratically-elected premier of iran in 1953 because he wouldn’t concede to western oil demands….and how that coup was the reason for the shah’s return to power, the iranian revolution, and the resulting fundamentalist dictatorship…..like, america literally dissolved iranian democracy and no one knows about it???
No. No we don’t know about it.
Americans aren’t told this shit.
The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.
Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.
The only reason I knew about it is because there’s a thirty second summary of the event in Persepolis. Those thirty seconds flipped my entire worldview.
“All the Shah’s Men” by Stephen Kinzer is a good, accessible text for people who want to know more about this.
!!!
I had to explain literally this to one of my co-workers, who is so fuckin racist against Middle Eastern people it’s insane.
She’s 60. She never heard of this.
As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.
He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods. Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.
And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”
And she just looked floored.
“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”
“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “
She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.
“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.
And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”
She lived through it.
American schools don’t teach you any of this sort of thing.
the straight up funniest thing i know is when people go “harry’s a dumbass and never noticed anything because he thought snape was evil in PS!!!” like so did you bitch…… finding out it was quirrell is literally a plot twist you fucking moron
The plot twists in Harry Potter are, for the most part, very Good Plot Twists.
A bad plot twist does one of two things. One, it comes totally out of left field, and makes much of what went before complete nonsense. Or two, it’s telegraphed way in advance and you totally see it coming.
A good plot twist is highly unexpected–or at least, unexpected if you aren’t genre-savvy and trying to predict plot twists–but once you know it, the entire narrative is viewed in a different light.
Philosopher’s Stone is an entirely different book when you read it knowing that Quirrell, not Snape, is Voldemort’s minion. It’s even more different when you reread it understanding the complexities of why Snape hates Harry but protects him anyway, or why Dumbledore won’t tell Harry the whole truth yet.
Chamber of Secrets is an entirely different book when you read it knowing who the Heir of Slytherin is. You thought it might, somehow, be Harry, too, the first time you read it. AND the whole thing takes on yet ANOTHER layer of meaning after the end of the series, knowing that Harry was also a Horcrux.
Prisoner of Azkaban is an entirely different book when you read it knowing that Sirius was framed. And yet again, when you reread it knowing the history of the Marauders–and especially if you reread it in light of all the fan-lore about the Marauders, if that’s your bag–it takes on a different character again.
Goblet of Fire is an entirely different book when you read it knowing about Barty Crouch Jr. You felt sorry for that boy in the pensive too!
Order of the Phoenix is a different book when you read it knowing what Voldemort wanted in the Department of Mysteries, and how he meant to get it.
Half-Blood Prince is a slightly different book when you read it knowing that, holy s***, Harry “0 for 5 on spotting the bad guy” Potter is actually right about Draco Malfoy being a death eater, but it’s vastly different when you read the Horcrux lesson and Harry and Dumbledore’s relationship in light of the Deathly Hallows. Snape’s departure at the end of Half-Blood Prince is an entirely different scene when you read it after having read The Prince’s Tale.
The reason people think that Harry was a dumb-a** for falling for all of this stuff is that you can only read that first book–the one you read without knowing the twist–one time. These twists are beautifully, wonderfully set up, so when you read them the second time (or the third, or the twenty-fifth), you absolutely see them coming, you see all the signs, you can’t imagine how anyone (for example, your past self) could have possibly missed it. But they are twists. You might see them coming if you’re genre-savvy, but you certainly wouldn’t see them coming if you were a person living the events.
“I once asked my friends if they’d ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don’t know anything about them, but you feel the other person’s there, one friend told me. It’s like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow.”
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