TNG has young fans and you can have enough old farts like me around to populate a TNG forum while the whole is still mostly younger.

It skews young, and young skews left.

Now if only young voted…

The larger the organization, the larger their resources, but also usually the greater their complexity and legacy burdens. Large organizations also move slowly. All of this can delay things long after we might think they ought to have happened.

While we’re making soup, let’s base the entire temperature scale on water, too.

Having witnessed and survived an actual coup attempt, I’d humbly ask you not to rob those words of all meaning.

Bush started actual wars.

I’m old enough to have heard all of this exact same shit about GW Bush.

I once plucked up my courage to ask a girl if she would like to go see a particular show with me the following night. She said “I would, but I am already doing something tomorrow.”

I was totally unprepared for this answer and just heard “no.” She was probably a little surprised to be asked out suddenly, and didn’t take the initiative to suggest another day.

We didn’t go out. That was that. Huge mistake by me. So my advice is: be open to complications in her answer. And listen closely. If she says “I have plans.” that’s a polite decline. If she literally says “I would like to go, but I have plans,” that’s quite different.

It’s hard to hear the differences and react smoothly if you’re nervous about asking, like I was. Best of luck!

I am highly expressive and have little filter. I think my upbringing allowed this or even encouraged it. The meta message in every movie I ever watched as a kid was “if you just look deep inside yourself and bring out the essence of what’s there, you can do / win / be anything!” I’m also male, and my family laughed a lot and yelled a lot and angered easily and forgave easily. As a result, I’m quite outspoken and some find me bombastic or overbearing.

It’s quite hard to put this genie back in the bottle once you’re an adult. If you’re like this and wondering how other people contain it, the likelihood is that they have been conditioned to contain it their entire lives. In some cases longer than that: In Chinese culture, for example, no one has is permitted to be emotionally demonstrative and this has been the norm for thousands of years. It might even have been selected for genetically over time: outspoken peasants executed, expressive daughters disowned…

I will say this though. As you grow older your vision and hearing get worse and your feelings become less sensitive. I can hold a hot object that my kids can’t even touch with one finger. Emotionally, it’s a bit the same. Reactions come slower, and are not as strong. And the muscles in the face don’t react as much, and the heart is less inclined to engage in a full flameout over something trivial. So it gets easier.

I think you’re talking to some people who, in bad faith, are demanding “proof” when they need to learn how to acknowledge “evidence.” Someone with a fixed attitude will keep moving goalposts and cherry picking outliers until the cows come home, and you need to be able to say: your bias is overwhelming in the gymnastics you perform to avoid the clear evidence. The process of science most often doesn’t produce black and white results. Anti-vaxxers are gonna anti-vax and you can’t “persuade” them.

That said, if you can’t provide 7-8 stories with female protagonists, which are very popular, you’re not even trying. His Dark Materials. Moana. The Fault in Our Stars. The Fablehaven series. Frozen. Labyrinth. Heathers. The Force Awakens. Silo. Mulan. Legend of Korra and the Kyoshi novels. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. 16 Candles. Star Trek Voyager. Anne of Green Gables. Watchmen (2019 series). Jane Eyre. Pippi Longstocking. Captain Marvel. Aliens. Amelie. Arrival. Gravity. Little House on the Prairie. Game of Thrones. Coraline. You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

If you’re really talking to someone who says “there are no stories with…” then here’s enough to easily force them to change their position to “there are far less stories with…” and at that point they would in fact be correct.

Did you even read the OP? A VPN that has real customers but is set up by a scammer can be doing anything on your computer. You install their client. It could be a key logger for all you know.

And not all services use end to end encryption so yes there is still the potential to listen to http traffic and extract data from it, especially as the VPN client.

Why is “governments” the boogeyman that comes to mind? Scammers and thieves would have much more interest in your everyday consumer internet usage.

When half of the country will

Y’all deserve

Wow that was a quick progression from “half” to “all.” I deserve this because Republicants are insane fucks? Gee thanks. Not that I care whether you care, particularly.

It’s actually pretty American not to believe in society. I’m not saying it’s good. But the right of an individual to march off into the wilderness and be left the fuck alone forever is a long-cherished American ideal (whether or not this ever existed).

I think it was just offered as an illustration of the concept, not as tax advice.

Where are the metrics that she’s failing to meet?

We can be confident that zero sales is not meeting any metric whatsoever. Of course her quota period and goals were all left out of this but salespeople don’t work without them. And the quota is never zero.

The salesperson was never informed that making sales was part of the job? Come on. I think you’re trying a little too hard. No, they don’t have a contract stipulating she just make a sale in the first month, nor did they have a contract saying her employment was guaranteed through her ramp. It’s clear she had the opportunity to make sales. She says she got close with 3 but they all fell through. They’re dicks for calling this bad performance but sadly she has no leg to stand on either.

Yes many extenuating circumstances. Sadly she’s still open to attack since she hasn’t put any points on the board.

I understand you’re saying that this performance crap is made up so they can save money, and I agree.

But a sales position that has never closed a sale doesn’t make a good poster child for this cause of fighting back against bad performance ratings. Fact is she has not created value.

If her employment included a contract that guaranteed she could complete her ramp period, she’d have some footing.

This is why severance gets offered. It’s a contract that you agree to and henceforth you can’t really fight. And employees would frankly rather take the pay than immediately lose income and then start investing time in a lawsuit against a much better resourced organization, which could take years and may not result in anything. Most companies know how to navigate the laws. Few ordinary people know how to sue over them and win.

It is actually such a shitty job and while good people may find themselves in it, only bad people stay in it for long. If you’re a great person and just spend your time bringing sunshine to employees then you were rolled in luck before you went into the fryer.

Yep HR actually stands for Human Risks.

My one question going in was whether this was a Sales role. It’s hard to overstate how volatile a career in sales can be. You are your numbers and your income can swing around wildly. Maybe you can control your own performance but the viability of the products is out of your control and the targets set for you to be evaluated against are outside your control too. Companies use Sales to grow, not to subsist, so the second budgets are tight and a company shifts into survival mode, you’re the first to go. Culture is also volatile and high pressure, competitive, etc. I know a sales guy who closed a multi hundred thousand dollar enterprise software deal and was missing just one signature for weeks and could not reach the guy. He travelled internationally and camped out in the building lobby for multiple days until he saw him and ran up and got him to sign.

It’s hard. You can do really well but it’s hard. She’s pretty vulnerable not having actually closed anything, ever, yet. No one actually cares at the end of the quarter if you “have great meetings.”