The Higgs results were reproduced because there are two independent detectors at CERN (Atlas and CMS). Both collaborations are run almost entirely independently, and the press are only called in to announce a scientific discovery if both find the same result.
Obviously the 'best' result would be to have a separate collider as well, but no one is going to fund a new collider just to reaffirm the result for a third time.
There are many things wrong with the TV license system, but I think saying it is 'mandatory' is a little misleading. As the Wikipedia article states, you need a TV license if you want to watch or record live broadcasted material (and iplayer). You can own a TV and not pay for a TV license and use it for Netflix, YouTube, gaming etc legally.
For my entire adult life I've never paid for a TV license, and I have never broken the law and watched live content. Many in my generation have no interest in TV anymore.
You see I totally agree with you, but I am not sure if grindr is solely to blame for this. It is a fair generalisation to say that men struggle far more with emotions and open communication. This is clearly demonstrable by looking at the male suicide rates: in my country (UK) they are roughly 3 times that of women. I have no doubt that is common across western countries.
So really to me the problem is that men, on average, struggle with expressing their emotions more. Asking those men to form healthy, loving relationships with other men is then a challenge. Not impossible, but certainly more difficult.
To me, Grindr is a symptom not the cause. If you are taught from a young age that men don't cry, toughen up and be a man etc, then sex is reduced to the physical act. Add in some emotional truama, which is again very common in the gay community, and the problem is exacerbated. Of course Grindr doesn't help and makes it all worse, but really they're just making money off the damage which is already done.
If by ahistorical you mean we do not conform to Greek and Roman era of homosexual activity, you have to keep in mind there were societal pressures at the time as well. I don't think you can take those eras as a gold standard of laissez-faire approach to sexuality.
For the record, I am gay guy and whilst I can identify an attractive woman, it is such a fleeting attraction I can't ever imagine mustering the activation energy to even try.
Exactly, I got into quite a heated discussion with a company that offered me a job with "unlimited PTO". They wanted me to sign in the contract with a clause along the lines of "you have unlimited PTO within reason". The whole point of contracts is that you have to explicitly define what is deemed "reasonable". I insisted they put a number to it and they refused.
Needless to say, I didn't accept the job in the end.
I don't know the lead time from when they apply, but the time it takes to go from CVs hitting my inbox to first interview is about a week.
I'm not sure that is really a valid excuse though. I understand if you're making a lot of applications it's hard to keep track, but all it takes is a 10 minutes refresher just before the interview. I do exactly the same with candidate's CVs prior to the interview too and I've never mixed up candidates up to date. 24 hours afterwards I'll have forgotten everything without my notes.
Also a top tip, even if you're in a mad panic in the interview and your mind has gone blank, wording is key. "Can you give some more details about the role and the company?" comes across a hell of a lot better than "Sorry I've forgotten what I applied for".
The analogies here to dating are striking to me. Sure you might have gone on 3 dates in that week, but if expect one to work out you better not get their name wrong.
I'm a hiring manager for UK based FTSE 100 company, hiring software engineers and data scientists. I wanted to give a perspective from 'the other side'.
I've been involved in hiring for a few companies since 2018 ish, and I've noticed a really sharp decline in the quality of candidates this year. Recently I have interviewed no end of candidates who have 5+ years experience, made redundant and seem to think they can walk into a job with zero effort.
Some recent examples that I am slightly changing for anonymity:-
- a candidate could not remember how to do a for loop in python
- a candidate told me they forgot what the job they applied for was and who we are
- the only question a candidate asked me at the end of the interview was 'can I work on my personal laptop?' We are a multi billion pound company, not a startup.
If these were graduates I can forgive some of the poor interviewing skills, but these were for mid/senior positions, sometimes leads!
I would like to stress, there are some fantastic candidates coming through too, and I am deeply sorry for anyone who has lost their job. The challenge though as a hiring manager right now is wading through the vast numbers of candidates who really put in zero effort, and there are a lot of them.
I can't help but feel there is a selection bias here. We could pretend that Netflix's recommendation algorithm is totally random with some reinforcement factor (e.g. positive reactions to LGBTQ content leads to more of the same) and it would lead to this outcome for some people. With a large viewership even very dumb algorithms would successfully 'predict' someone is LGBTQ for someone.
Since we are taking sample sizes of one, I'm gay and it is extremely rare I get recommended LGBTQ content on Netflix.
> You may be too deep in the community to appreciate, but younger teens have had family supervision for millennia and for good reason. Their brains are not fully formed yet.
Of course, I'm not claiming otherwise. Hell, I'm not even saying that legally children should be entitled to privacy from their parents, clearly that isn't feasible or desireable in any way.
However, morally and ethically it is not black or white. It is not a case of "lord of the flies" or parental prison as a binary choice.
Honestly, I'm not even disagreeing with the original poster I replied to. I don't think they were wrong for snooping on their child's internet history. I just wanted to start an open discussion on a legitmate concern caused by snooping which many families go through. It is something that heterosexual parents often do not consider or appreciate because it was not part of their experiences when they grew up. To use your terms, they are "too deep in their community" to appreciate it.
> His terms aren't universal or acceptable because it's my family not his. He's projecting his personal experience onto my kids, which I've clearly discussed prior is not the same generationally or ever personally.
I am doing nothing of the sort. In fact, I haven't made any comment towards which I disagree with your actions with regards to your example. I haven't really formulated any opinions on this, and certainly not towards your family. I was wanting an open discourse using a hypothetical scenario and received a rather personal defensive retort in return.
All I believe is LGBT children have a right to be protected, sometimes that is from their own parents. Yes, that is formulated through the lens of my experiences in the same way yours are through being a mother of a child in 2023. I am not trying to push a vision of family, culture or politics, I'm trying to make parents think about this that is all. My hypothetical scenario is not so hypothetical for many families.
Just to be clear, I am not a parent and I would not be so presumptuous to criticise someone's parenting skills when I have not gone through it. I wholeheartedly agree with you that the internet of 2023 is nothing like 2013 (or 2003 when I was growing up), and I don't think your reaction to the situation you described is wrong. Needless to say, parenting in this era is really, really hard and I don't envy you.
However, I want to exercise a hypothetical with you: what if you had discovered through access to her internet logs that she was a lesbian, or a trans man? How would you deal with that situation? Would you confront them, or would you pretend you didn't see it? Even if you have liberal views and are supportive*, that is a very deep and intimate piece of knowledge on your child that you hold now. Instead of them dictating the terms of their coming out, you effectively control that. That is quite a violation of trust.
Presumably your daughter knows you can see their internet logs, what if she does not feel like she isn't being her authentic self online because she knows you will find out? Even if you are supportive, discovering your sexual and/or gender identity takes time and takes having a safe space to feel comfortable to confide in someone.
This is all working under the assumption that you are comfortable with this, what about the many parents out there who are not? This becomes a weapon they can use to inflict psychological trauma on their child. Growing up as a LGBT kids is really hard for many of us, even today. Giving any more control or power to conservative parents is extremely dangerous.
You might think I'm exaggerating, or perhaps this is a niche point (it is far more likely your daughter is straight and cis-gendered) but the stakes are really high here. I came out to my parents when I was an adult, on my own terms when I moved out. I still got the 'it's just a phase' speech and all that sort of rubbish, but it was very clear to my parents that they had zero control over my life at that point. If they wanted to maintain a relationship with their son they had to change their viewpoints pretty quickly (and they did). Without hyperbole, if they had outed me when I was a child at best I would have been traumatised, at worst I would have killed myself.
I hope parents reading this really think about what I am saying here and take it seriously, because for some of you this will be something you'll have to deal with. How you do that will define everything about your relationship with your child.
* There is a whole separate discussion on what medical intervention for gender dysphoria is appropriate for children, but for the sake of this discussion I mean are you comfortable with the concept having a trans child more than specifics on medication.
I have always said that these sort of laws designed to protect children will do precisely the opposite. An LGBTQ child is effectively forcibly outed by this law, potentially before they've come to terms with their sexuality / gender themselves.
Whilst I don't doubt social media causes a lot of harm on children growing up, giving parents full access to your messages is not the solution. In my opinion, based off a scale of a child's age and maturity, children are entitled to some privacy. Clearly a 4 year old shouldn't be left alone with unfettered access to the Internet, but equally a 16 year old shouldn't have to feel like their parents are watching everything they do or say. Both can cause long term psychological harm to a child.
This is something that comes up time and time again with our recent string of conservative governments, going back to Cameron. At this point I'm pretty convinced that it is a dead cat strategy to avoid us talking about the lack of fruit and vegetables in the supermarkets.
There is a philosophical discussion to be had about whether 19 physical parameters is "a lot", and another discussion about fine tuning. However, I was primarily referring to the artifical parameters that arise from doing real calculations (renormalisation scale, mass factorisation scale, PDFs etc). These plague pretty much all perturbative QCD calculations, and then particle physicists play games like varying them by a factor of 1/2 and 2 to get something that looks like error bars...
The standard model is far from a 'theory of everything'. To name but a few problems:
* gravity
* massive neutrinos
* dark matter
* dark energy
It is also a highly parameterised model tuned to fit the data.
The biggest concern is whether we can realistically probe the failings of the standard model using a collider at ~TeV scale? If that is the case, then the standard model may be the best model of particle physics we will ever achieve.
I think you're sort of misinterpretting what I'm asking for, and I suspect our views actually align pretty well. I was not implying that we need more camp queens to represent gay men, I was referring more to presenting LGBTQ+ people in a heteronormative light which just comes across as totally unrealistic to those of us who are a member of the community.
Perhaps a concrete example would clarify my point. There is a character in Stranger Things who is a lesbian. Throughout the final series, she has a crush on another character. They have a scene at the end of the series where they are talking, the other character says they're lesbian/bisexual (I don't recall which now) and they hit it off.
The idea of your school crush happening to also have a same sex attraction, and also likes you, makes it such a vanishingly small probability that something like this could ever happen. It came across as a straight writer shoe-horning in a weak straight romance plot point, only replaced a man with a woman for LGBTQ+ brownie points.
If they wanted to cover this properly, why not show us how lesbians in the 80s really met? I assume though gay bars, being neither a lesbian nor around in the 80s I don't know and I am curious to find out. What I can say is that that scene was not a fair resprentation.
So my point is, be it dating, love, family or any other fact of LGBTQ+ life, there are statistically significant deviations from the average cis-gendered heterosexual experience. If you choose to cover LGBTQ+ life in your media of choice, do so authentically. Yes, I appreciate there is a fine line between this and stereotyping, but presenting gays as straights with one gender swapped is so unrealistic.
To use an analogy, representing all your female characters as good housewives who are subservient to men is enforcing a poor stereotype, analogous to the gay camp stereotype. Representing all your female characters as behaving precisely like men however is not the solution to the problem. You should represent women like women.
To me it seems like we have this paradoxical situation where the media want to simultaneously present inclusivity and diversity, but don't dare present any of the real diversity for fear of stereotyping. The end result is some token LGBTQ+ characters who are heteronormative, which is disingenuous.
If it is a choice between no gay character and some gay character who is essentially 'straight acting', I'd choose the former every time.
A computer scientist would see all that as technical debt that needs to be resolved to streamline due process. PPE graduates see it as a grandiose theatre which adds gravitas to the process.
I think my point still stands, the whole system could be transformed if some real problem solvers involved. Alas, I don't see it happening any time soon.
I've been interviewing graduates in the UK for many years now from a very broad range of universities, all focused on CS or stem degrees.
In my experience, I've yet to interview an oxbridge graduate who wasn't at least great academically, and this is speaking as someone who went to a lesser university. Clearly whatever standards they have for teaching and entry selection criteria really work.
That said, graduates from other universities are easily on par with oxbridge, just that there were some total morons amongst their peers as well.
In my opinion, the problem is not that the UK fetishes oxbridge candidates, the problem is politics is dominated by arts and ppe graduates which does not offer the problem solving skills stem degrees do. I genuinely think we'd be in a much better place if our leaders weren't trained just in communication, but instead on actually logically thinking through problems and resolving them.
> As another gay man, I used to be radically skeptical of monogamy. Like in my 20s I was spouting the line that it's a heterosexual construct falsely imposed on us for moralistic reasons. But both personal experience, and a widened social group, has led me to believe that, for a significant number of gay men a monogamous relationship is ideal. They're happiest in them, and seem to be able to make them work. Perhaps with some compromises and perhaps not entirely happy, but for what it's worth, I'm not sure I've met any couple that was perfectly happy.
Funnily enough I am precisely the opposite. I spent my 20s trying to hunt for "the one" and had a series of short, failed relationships. Now I'm in my 30s I am in a 9 year long successful (I think?) open/polyamorous relationship.
Really I think gay men (and men in general) struggle with communication skills and emotional maturity. Gaining those skills are key to maintaining long, healthy relationships. Non-monogamy is an avenue towards working towards achieving those skills because maintaining a healthy, open relationship means a lot of communication is required. In my opinion, it is a high risk, high reward strategy to a maintaining a relationship.
> but for what it's worth, I'm not sure I've met any couple that was perfectly happy.
I think we have to distinguish minor annoyances from major communication issues due to sex. Like it or not, sex is a big part of being human and sex drive is something can be wildly different between people. Non-monogamy can be an outlet for this.
Obviously the 'best' result would be to have a separate collider as well, but no one is going to fund a new collider just to reaffirm the result for a third time.