Eh, I like our open office workspace. Our desks are large, we each get drawers, and if anyone needs to make a call, they go to a breakout room. Navigating cubicles sucks, and separate offices aren’t great either.

That said, I’m a developer, so inviting someone over to my desk to look at something is quite common. We also frequently have impromptu 5-min meetings between rows, and we arrange people so those who will likely need those quick meetings are near each other.

It certainly wouldn’t make sense for a call center or something, but it definitely makes sense for a creative, collaborative environment.

Wow, that’s terrible. If I’m not there 5 min early to perform your interview, I’ll apologize. Being on-time to something like that just invites time-wasting things like kicking the previous group out of the interview room or whatever.

An interview should be a 2-way deal, I’m representing the company and trying to find a good fit for the role, and you’re trying to decide whether the company is a good fit for you. If I’m late to an interview, I expect any self-respecting candidate to leave after 15 min, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they left after 5. I’m the one looking to fill a role, you’re just here to see if it suits you, so it’s on me to give the good impression IMO.

Eh, I disagree. Slavery being banned is obviously a good thing, but that’s because it’s immoral to own someone else, so it’s essentially just kidnapping. Gambling, on the other hand, shouldn’t be banned for the simple reason that consenting adults should be able to do it if they choose.

Basically, I believe there are two types of rights:

• negative rights - restricts others from preventing individuals from doing things to you (e.g. freedom from slavery, freedom to gamble, etc)
• positive rights - forces others to provide goods or services to you (e.g. free healthcare, right to counsel, etc)

I believe nobody should gamble because it’s a poor financial decision and very addictive (and I choose to avoid gambling), but I also believe you should be allowed to gamble, and the government should ensure that companies that provide gambling services do so fairly (i.e. advertisements about win-rates and whatnot are accurate).

So yes, if gambling wasn’t allowed, people w/ addictions would be better off, but those who aren’t at risk of gambling addiction would be harmed due to restrictions on their freedom. So the question is, do we want government to protect us from ourselves, or merely provide a safety net for when we screw up? I’m absolutely in the latter camp, and I think we should use taxes to fund recovery programs for addictive behaviors in lieu of banning them. In general, I think a tax is way more rights-respecting than a ban.

Eh, not revisionist, just overly simplified. Prohibition massively increased their power and relevance.

Yup, and that’s how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.

All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.

Just a friendly reminder that IQ is BS.

Yeah, just give me actual temp and wind speed, and I’ll get a feel for what’s cold by going outside.

I do my own bicycle and auto repair, and the bicycle is way easier. Maintenance is:

• clean chain every so often (500 miles or start of the season) - get a chain cleaner tool thing ($10-20) and 50/50 Simple Green ($10 will last many years) and water, and then rinse, dry, and lube ($10 lasts years) - total process, 10 min?
• replace chain - $20 or so, plus a tool for $10 or so; do every 2k miles or so
• replace brake pads - $10-20
• tires ($50 for a fancy fire) and tubes ($10) - replace tires when bald, tubes when flat (or patch them), and get some tire levers ($5-10) to make it easier

For tools, you need a wrench set, and probably only like 2-3 sizes.

My yearly maintenance costs for all of our bikes (1 adult, two kids) combined is about $50. If that. You could also go to your local bike shop instead for about double that.

My point is that kids can provide meaning to an otherwise bland life. That’s it.

I didn’t say that. Read my second sentence again.

Bland life without kids?

I didn’t say not having kids makes life bland, I said if your life is bland, having kids can help. It can also make it worse, so you need to figure out for yourself if having kids would bring fulfillment.

Believe it or not, kids bring joy to an otherwise bland life. As for the kids’ future, you can do a lot with a little, just spending what little time you have at the end of the day w/ your kids can help them surpass where you were able to get to.

Source: all of my siblings have better jobs than my parents did, and that’s because they prioritized education and spending time w/ us.

I honestly don’t think making a statement on slavery was the point. I think she wanted Hermoine to assert herself and become a bit more than a supporting character, and the elf thing was low-hanging fruit. So I think we’re supposed to cheer for Hermoine asserting herself, and whether we think she should succeed is kind of irrelevant.

So I think both sides of the argument are reading too much into it.

racist caricatures of Jewish People represented by the Goblin Bankers

Projecting much? She doesn’t make any ties to Jewish people in her portrayal of goblins. I honestly don’t see how anyone could get this impression w/o actively looking for reasons to dislike JK Rowling.

Rowling’s goblins come from European folklore. Here’s a Reddit post about it, or you can feel free to go down a rabbit hole about European folklore and find a bunch of similarly depicted creatures (brownies, leprechauns, etc) and see how Rowling likely constructed her view of these creatures.

I honestly don’t see any overlap between goblins and Jewish people, any overlap is a stretch by critics IMO.

Hermoine/Elf revolt

I don’t see how it’s odd.

Elves were enslaved by exploiting their innate sense of loyalty. Think of something like a dog, who will defend its master even if the master is terrible to it. Or look at humans, where once we’re part of a tribe (however you define that), we’ll overlook issues with that tribe and defend it anyway (see: cults, political divide, racial divide, etc).

Rowling is a feminist (at least how she defines it), but her book uses a male protagonist (perhaps for broader appeal?), so she develops Hermoine into a strong, female character. That’s why she puts this “odd” piece of character development into the story, she wants girls to look up to Hermoine, so she can’t just stay in the background for the whole series. As an outsider, it makes sense for her to attack “insider” things, like acceptance of elvish slavery. She could easily have used another opportunity, but HP had already freed one elf two books prior, so Hermoine trying to free more is just an easy way to develop Hermoine’s character using information already presented (she needs a way to stand apart from HP) and fits with the whole “outsider” thing her character is going for.

I see Harry Potter as having very little social commentary, other than a criticism of government (total ineptness of Ministry of Magic, which I think is a caricature of UK gov’t) and a general theme of combating intolerance (Voldemort is bad because he’s intolerant, not because he’s a murderer). Both of these are great themes for kids, since “adults dumb” and “bullies suck” really resonate with kids.

She uses caricatures as plot devices, not social commentary. Gringotts getting broken into is powerful because it’s guarded by a race that’s uniquely positioned to defend gold. Dobby being freed is powerful because it’s a complete affront to wizarding world norms and an “outsider” solution to a stalemate (elves are intensely loyal, humans are exploitative). Any of her views that make it into the book are more accidental than anything, if not completely fabricated by critics of Rowling.

HP is just a children’s book, not a social commentary.

The idea of a comfy, cozy british castle where you could fulfill your magical dreams and get sorted into a house is an incredibly fun self-insert universe, just like Pokemon, Star Trek, etc.

Which makes her a great children’s book author. Her world building did exactly what it was supposed to do: encourage imagination.

Her political/social views and appeal to adult audiences are irrelevant. I think she’s a fantastic children’s book author because she did the thing that’s most important: get kids to read.

It’s not cropped, the original source didn’t have the text in the image. I downloaded the image, uploaded to lemmy, then copy/pasted the text as the body of the post. Otherwise I would’ve needed to screenshot each one, and that would just cause image degradation.