In other news today...
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@Benjamin-Hall For more examples of Jennifer Ouellette writing about explosive poo, check out all her positive movie reviews
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
Yes, here too. Courts will refuse to enforce a contract that violates the law (e.g., agreement to commit a crime in exchange for money). If one clause of a contract violates a law, that clause is unenforceable; whether it voids the entire contract, I suspect (but IANAL), depends on how central it is to the contract. Does the rest of the contract make sense without that clause?
That's also how I understand it. I remember a case about Twitter T&C a few years back where the clause where you granted them a perpetual license to do what they want with your tweets was ruled unlawful (I think the key point was that under French law you can't sign a perpetual license on non-specified, not yet existing, content). This invalidated this particular clause of the T&C, but not the rest of it. Similarly, in the recent decision of the Constitutional Court about the "24 h to remove contentious content" law, only that specific measure was ruled unlawful (well, unconstitutional) but since it was central to the whole law, almost everything else in that law became void as a result.
Those two are not labour-law examples, but I am almost certain that the same would apply to an employment contract.
I suspect it's very much a case of one party having much more leverage than the other,
I think that's true of most employment (or Uber-like freelance) agreements.
Without straying into garage territory about power imbalance and labour theory and what-not, I partly, but only partly, agree. I agree but I think that an employer has more leverage when they are hiring hundreds or thousands of employees through an automated process where you can't discuss employment terms (i.e. Uber -- assuming their drivers are employees and not contractors, but while the legal difference is significant, I think that morally most people would agree there is little difference in practice), than when you actually talk to an HR person and can (at least in theory) get a somewhat personalised employment contract.
There's one sort of clause that's very common in US contracts but is completely unenforceable (at least in some states; I'm only certain about two). A no-compete clause
There is a story of a friend, that I am almost sure I already wrote somewhere here (but searching etc.). He had a French contract and got posted for a few years in the Middle-East, which happened through a local contract. He got there before having signed it (it was internal mobility in a huge company, so it was just treated as one random paperwork he had to do at one point, no big deal), and when he got it there was a non-compete clause that he disagreed with (and that may possibly have been legal in the Middle-East shit hole where he was?). He refused to sign the contract (or rather, scrapped the clause and signed the rest, but of course HR refused to sign the same). Things stalled for a couple of years until he came back to Europe (so had to change contract again) and HR realised that for years he'd been working (and paid!) without having a contract signed, which was a huge issue for the company. So he got more and more pressing calls to sign the contract, but each time he scrapped the clause, and HR sent it back to him with the clause added back.
Unfortunately I don't know what the exact end resolution was, whether he or HR caved in first. But he kept working for that company for many years afterwards, so clearly it was solved one way or another in the end.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
Unfortunately I don't know what the exact end resolution was, whether he or HR caved in first. But he kept working for that company for many years afterwards, so clearly it was solved one way or another in the end.
If the company was paying him despite him refusing to accept the clause, at least in the UK that'd be interpreted as the company in practice accepting that the clause was unnecessary, no matter what HR says. Employment law can be a bit funny that way, as it tends to take strongly into account what actual working practices are present far more than with other types of contracts.
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@dkf I think the resolution would have been... interesting, had it come to a tribunal, given the multi-national aspect of things (he was initially on a European (French? I'm not sure, he has moved around quite a bit...) contract, then moved to the Middle-East where he was paid for by the local branch, before moving back to Europe, so if he had not signed any contract, would he have been judged to be under an implicit local contract (if that even exists in the local law of that Middle-East country), or an expat from his European contract? and under which country jurisdiction would he have been? and many other questions...).
But since he stayed there for years, there clearly was a peaceful resolution, with no courts involved, and even had he brought up some legal action, it's likely the company would have quickly settled with him out of courts. So we will never know what his actual status was during that time.
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I don't recall seeing anything about this back in 2019, weird.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
I don't recall seeing anything about this back in 2019, weird.
The guy's page is linked in TFA with a much better explanation not filtered through the knowledge scrambling technology known as a reporter's brain:
EDIT: And honestly, I'm not sure this is really easier than just plugging something into the quadratic equation, which really just requires memorizing the formula. This seems like you have to remember a couple of (smaller, to be fair) formulas but also do some thinking.
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Yeah, I linked the article because it had the links to his site and the original paper and 1 link is easier than two.
I agree, this doesn't seem easier to me than the quadratic formula, but maybe if that had not been drilled into me, this would be easier
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@Dragoon I'm pretty sure my teachers tried to get us to factor it as
(x+a)(x+b)
, but I just memorized the quadratic formula instead and used it whenever. I was told several times told the other way was more beautiful and simpler and whatnot.
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The first program I ever wrote was a program for my Ti-83Plus to provide exact answers rather than approximates for the quadratic formula.
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@Dragoon I was always more into numerics, so I was never overly concerned with exact answers (symbolic computations aside). It was only much later that I learned that getting good numerical results is actually an art in itself.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon I'm pretty sure my teachers tried to get us to factor it as
(x+a)(x+b)
, but I just memorized the quadratic formula instead and used it whenever. I was told several times told the other way was more beautiful and simpler and whatnot.I like the factoring method as a method because it's like solving a puzzle, not doing arithmetic. But I'm also one of those wacky math guys who likes that definition of beautiful.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
Yeah, I linked the article because it had the links to his site and the original paper and 1 link is easier than two.
I agree, this doesn't seem easier to me than the quadratic formula, but maybe if that had not been drilled into me, this would be easier
Well, it's just a fairly easy to understand derivation of the formula anyway. When you do the no-guessing method, you calculate the quadratic formula, it just does not look like it, because you substitute numbers midway through the derivation. Now being trained to do all derivations symbolically and only plug in numbers in the final form I'd probably end up writing the quadratic formula in the process anyway.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
Math Genius Has Come Up With a Wildly Simple New Way to Solve Quadratic Equations
Eh, quadratic equations are always simple anyway.
Now, solving cubic or quartic equations symbolically (i.e. not using iterative root solvers), that’s stupidly complicated.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon I'm pretty sure my teachers tried to get us to factor it as
(x+a)(x+b)
, but I just memorized the quadratic formula instead and used it whenever. I was told several times told the other way was more beautiful and simpler and whatnot.In college we were taught how to derive the quadratic formula, and while I'm fuzzy on the details, I'm pretty sure it involved solving x2 -Sx + P = (x -a)(x -b)
I know it went through solving a system of two equations though.The insight that the sum S is double the average of the two numbers is a cool trick.
Another way of looking at the average of the roots is thinking it sits right in the vertex of the parabola,. It's the point where the derivative is zero, so just solve for 2x-S = 0 ⇒ x = S/2
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I'm a physicist, not a mathematician. I just pull up my TI-85's POLY and punch in the coefficients. Efficiency is the name of the game.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
I was always more into numerics,
So that explains
@cvi said in In other news today...:
It was one of the first lessons that I should never trust mathematicians that use the word 'beautiful'.
You're just too corrupted by your evil ways to perceive the beauty of maths.
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https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/TIME/gjnvwwjegvw/
The only one I was totally off on was the cassette tape.
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@Dragoon I had no idea about cassette tapes, and left it at the initial year because it sounded about right. The rest I got bang-on. But also, I "failed" the first example in the opposite way from the "common" misperception: I saw the gap between objects as way longer. Maybe my browser just lagged (or my brain is broken)
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@hungrier said in In other news today...:
@Dragoon I had no idea about cassette tapes, and left it at the initial year because it sounded about right. The rest I got bang-on. But also, I "failed" the first example in the opposite way from the "common" misperception: I saw the gap between objects as way longer. Maybe my browser just lagged (or my brain is broken)
I was off on the Olympics one. I don't watch the Olympics. (This year, nobody watches the Olympics.) And I got the shrinking/expanding one wrong because they didn't offer the correct answer as an option.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
HR realised that for years he'd been working (and paid!) without having a contract signed, which was a huge issue for the company.
I'm still pretty certain that I don't have an actual contract with my current employment, despite (apparently) being paid like one. We'll see what's what when tax man comes around, I expect some frowny faces...
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
I don't recall seeing anything about this back in 2019, weird.
I read the explanation, and I don't think I follow why this is new math? It seems pretty obvious to me.
I don't do that type of problem often enough for it to matter though so maybe I'm just missing something...
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The way I understand it, it isn't so much new math, as math that nobody has ever written down as an approach before. He notes that in all of his research he can't find anywhere that someone wrote this down, they have various parts of it, but it always eventually goes back to the quadratic equation. So it isn't so much that the math is new, but that the technique has just never been formally written down/taught.
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@Dragoon said in In other news today...:
So it isn't so much that the math is new, but that the technique has just never been formally written down/taught.
I suppose. I just read it as "Well, you're being asked to un-expand. Just... do the needful, why are you asking?"
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And ten thousand influencers cried out at once...
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2016 called. They want their shit back.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
And ten thousand influencers cried out at once...
I don't really have a good impression of TikTok.
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Just throw in a comment about piracy on the increase and I can say I fucking called it.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
And ten thousand influencers cried out at once...
But did anyone hear? (when the tree in the forest crashed down on their heads and no one noticed...)
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Nice little tech who done it.
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@DogsB Paywall.
Did they find the cause?
Also, before you tell us the culprit, I'd like to put $20 on "price comparison site scraper done way too cheap". Anyone take a bet?
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Also, before you tell us the culprit, I'd like to put $20 on "price comparison site scraper done way too cheap".
Close, but not cheap.
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Whoah:
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@Dragoon accident or..."accident"
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@acrow said in In other news today...:
Did they find the cause?
Google has set up a bot that validated tax+shipping costs so they can display correct information in their search results.
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Sometimes I like to read sequential posts as if they're all related
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@hungrier The "Killed by Google" thread is
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The runner was already starting to think that it didn't feel like 200m:
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Tattoo stupid game images, win stupid record certificates:
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Careful where you park your trailer, and engage the brakes....
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@JBert said in In other news today...:
Tattoo stupid game images, win stupid record certificates:
Random thought: if you have a tattoo that is a copyright violation, does it count as fair use?
I clicked that link and somehow ended up with two tabs open, the latter having the line (emphasis mine):
He's now awaiting a response from Guinness World Records to try and confirm the feet.
Umm...
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