12,049 karma · joined January 21, 2010
Of course they are. If you cycle on them in the Netherlands, you'll get yelled at very fast. I don't think anyone anywhere claims that people should cycle on sidewalks. Still, in many bicycle-hostile areas, cyclists choose to do that over, you know, dying - but that doesn't take away from the fact that it's dangerous to cycle on sidewalks.
Furthermore, sometimes people are classified as such and so without them realizing, or at least without them realizing to what extent this happens, or what effects it has. Which I suspect is happening here, and which is why I posted. For a small business that offers a critical service, the personal branding of the principals (and public facing employees) matters. And for most people, that brand should (for better or for worse) be on the bland side, for maximum profitability.
Story time: I used to have a friend with long hair who worked as a consultant for a company with lots of customers in banking. He was repeatedly told (in indirect ways) that his performance was great, but that his career prospects would be better if he has a more, let's say, approachable appearance. He complained to us (his friends) about it for a few years, how it was unfair, how it shouldn't matter, etc. And of course it's his right to wear his hair however he wanted. Then when he got married, his wife asked him to cut his hair for the wedding. He agreed (didn't feel slighted about it, wasn't bullied into it, just did it for her). Afterwards he liked his new haircut and decided to keep it short for some time more. Lo and behold, some time later, after he'd been at a new client, he got assigned to a more high profile project in a more prominent role. Coincidence? Maybe. My point is - maybe he should have asked himself sooner where his priorities were: to make a career in a conservative sector (which he himself stated as a goal), or his idea of 'sticking it to the man'.
Again, not saying you should do one thing or another. Maybe you're not actually losing customers, or maybe you don't care about losing some, or whatever. You know your business better than I do, obviously. Good luck, I hope your business will be a success.
A licensing back end is a major part of a software product, and outsourcing that is a major leap of faith. The developers using your product need to trust you, and if they know you're a small operation, they'll look into things like your personal online presence. People do pick up on these things.
It was right up HN's alley, they should throw some subtitles on it and put it on Youtube. So many engineers who love to build stuff for causes like this.
Realtor associations at least in the Netherlands have guidelines (e.g. on what distances amounts to 'walkable') that prevent this sort of thing, I see no reaons our country would be unique; that said, do you have any specific examples of ads like this? It's not that I'm that fond of realtors, but some of the over the top claims in this thread are really exaggerations. Will you find examples of exaggerated claims? Of course. The question is, is it 'common'? I'd say no.
I mean, you can see conspiracies everywhere if you look for them, but the examples you're showing don't convince me in the least.
C'mon, that's 3 straight days, i.e. skipping 2 nights. How can that be 'the norm' anywhere? Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence - or in this case, just any evidence.
GTD has a lot of solutions for various types of todo list problems, but then again, you have to be a quite conscientious person to follow through on all of the details of it. At which point you probably have no problem with plain scribbles on some loose paper. My wife makes todo lists all the time (like, she's taking to someone and while she's talking she'll pull out some paper and write things down completely unrelated to the conversation, without skipping a beat) but she's very conscientious about actually doing those tasks, so she doesn't have a need for more complicated systems than small piles of papers with things that need to be done.
Whereas I make lists with breakdowns and several dimensions of categories and preferably according to a clearly defined, all-encompassing system, and it needs to work on all devices and include everything from what I need to buy for dinner tonight to my life goals, and then those notes become a job in themselves and I say fuck this and throw them all out and try the same thing again 6 months later. I'd much rather be like my wife.
Maybe another factor is that people who are not first time buyers now have a lot more money from the sale of their previous house. We always focus on the first time buyers, but those are only a small part of the market, and for couples with two high incomes, houses are affordable still. So maybe higher assortative mating leads to higher spending potential in first time buyers, and the rest of the money just comes from people selling their first houses and upgrading. It's quite hard to model though, I don't really see a way to test this hypothesis in a few spare minutes here or there like many simpler theories are.
My point is: it's easy to find flaws in the reasoning of extremists, and use that to show how "crazy" and "illogical" and "insane" they are, and thereby distance ourselves (mentally) far from them. What we need to do however is face the much more scary truth that even the people who commit atrocities are for the most part reasonable and (somewhat) intelligent people, with some sort of roots in "normal" society, who for some reason just get one idea in their head very strongly (and act on it), and this can happen to many (I won't say "all", but I would say "most") people.
This sort of cases is not about isolated loners that we cannot possibly understand; freaks of nature who are not like the rest of us "normal" people. They can show up anywhere for reasons and through processes we just don't quite understand. But we have to not delude ourselves and see them as an "out group" - radicalization can happen to many people you would bump into in your street, every day.
Same with aikido - it's fine when people do it as a form of exercise, like lots of Chinese do tai chi, but let's not kid ourselves on the efficacy. I used to train at a place where there was an aikido group before us, and the teacher would always be talking about "do this or that because of this specific thing the samurai did on the battlefield". I wasn't going to be That Guy challenging him in front of his students, but please - you're literally standing there in what actual samurai wore as underwear under their plate armor when going to war, and now you're going to claim that they used some hand-wavy wrist lock to disarm another guy in full armor charging them with a 3 foot sword? To each their own, but at least be honest to yourself and your students. And it's usually these people who have the most self-aggrandazing ideas about "bushido" and how their hocus pocus is somehow morally superior. How are straight up lies and deceit morally superior?
(I know you weren't claiming my last point, I'm just saying that those promoting their fight-like dance choreographies as "martial arts" need to be honest to be able to claim the moral high ground.)