Facebook Moderators Are Routinely High and Joke About Suicide To Cope With Job, Says Report (gizmodo.com) 217
According to a new report from The Verge, Facebook moderators in Phoenix, Arizona reportedly make just $28,800 a year and use sex and drugs to deal with the stress. "The report published on Monday detailed the experiences of current and former employees who worked at professional services company Cognizant, a company they say Facebook outsources its moderating efforts to," Gizmodo summarizes. "According to the report, employees experienced severe mental health distress, which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed. Some even began believing the conspiracy theories they were tasked with reviewing. One quality assurance manager said he began bringing a gun to work in response to threats from fired workers." From the report: "There was nothing that they were doing for us," one former moderator told The Verge, "other than expecting us to be able to identify when we're broken. Most of the people there that are deteriorating -- they don't even see it. And that's what kills me." "Randy," a quality assurance worker at Cognizant charged with reviewing posts flagged by moderators, said that several times over his year at the company he was approached and intimidated by moderators to change his decisions. "They would confront me in the parking lot and tell me they were going to beat the shit out of me," Randy told The Verge. He also said that fired Cognizant employees made what he believed to be genuine threats of harm to their former colleagues. Randy started to bring a concealed gun to the office to protect himself.
Employees told The Verge that moderators in the Phoenix office dealt with the hellish reality of their jobs by having sex in the office -- in stairwells, bathrooms, parking garages, and a lactation room -- smoking weed on breaks, and joking about suicide. A former moderator claimed that there was a joke among colleagues that "time to go hang out on the roof" was subtext for wanting to jump off the building. Moderators for Facebook have to review graphic posts containing violence, dehumanizing speech, and child abuse, but they also have to weed through the conspiracy theories that run rampant on the web. It's well-reported that the former has resulted in moderators developing PTSD and other debilitating mental health issues, but Monday's report from The Verge indicates that the latter may be causing them to develop fringe beliefs.
Employees told The Verge that moderators in the Phoenix office dealt with the hellish reality of their jobs by having sex in the office -- in stairwells, bathrooms, parking garages, and a lactation room -- smoking weed on breaks, and joking about suicide. A former moderator claimed that there was a joke among colleagues that "time to go hang out on the roof" was subtext for wanting to jump off the building. Moderators for Facebook have to review graphic posts containing violence, dehumanizing speech, and child abuse, but they also have to weed through the conspiracy theories that run rampant on the web. It's well-reported that the former has resulted in moderators developing PTSD and other debilitating mental health issues, but Monday's report from The Verge indicates that the latter may be causing them to develop fringe beliefs.
Imagine the AI raised on this (Score:5, Interesting)
Just imagine the AI that will one day get trained on that corpus....
Re:Imagine the AI raised on this (Score:5, Insightful)
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AI doesn't get PTSD, or at least, no AI we can create in the foreseeable future will have such a capability.
Re:Imagine the AI raised on this (Score:5, Funny)
AI doesn't get PTSD, or at least, no AI we can create in the foreseeable future will have such a capability.
Dont you remember microsofts twitter bot called Tay?
"She" was sweet enough at first, but after beeing subjected to the internet she quickly adopted conspiracy theories, became racist, misogynist and generally foul-mouthed.
MS took her down for some tweaks and when she came back she was very clearly into smoking weed as it was her favorite topic.
Not long after that she got stuck in a loop (bot-suicide).
#botshavefeelingstoo
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Hehehehe, nice! Reminds me of when Watson learned to swear or that MS chatterbot went full fascist...
Are you surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Facebook Moderators Are Routinely High and Joke About Suicide To Cope With Job ...
Are you surprised? They have to spend their days wading through the torrent of raw stupidity that are Facebook comments every moment of every working day. That is bound to destroy your faith in humanity as a a species and drive you to the brink of suicidal depression.
Re: Are you surprised? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is the kind of job best suited for psychopaths. I don't mean that in jest. A psychopath doesn't become ill by seeing any of this, their mind is wired such that it doesn't affect them. And there are highly functioning, non-murderous psychopaths that'd do this job if the pay was high enough.
Alas, no company would want that cost, so psychologically damaging sane individuals in exchange for saving money it'll be, at least until laws protecting workers from psychological harm are enacted and enforced with the same rigor of laws protecting workers from bodily harm.
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Granted hey are high functioning psychopaths who in general pull their own weight in society. However the lack of empathy may not be good for the job at hand. Sure the content doesn’t bother them, but because it doesn’t bother them they probably don’t see the need to moderate it.
Re: Are you surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure the content doesn’t bother them, but because it doesn’t bother them they probably don’t see the need to moderate it.
Actually, psychopaths are quite skilled at knowing what will bother others, even if it doesn't bother them personally, so they wouldn't really have difficulty moderating this kind of content.
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The pay is the problem. 28k is pennies, such people are usually found in management, making a magnitude more money than that.
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Depends on where you live... $28k/yr is somewhat pretty decent entry-level money in Mississippi, parts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, even bits of Florida...
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And you think in those areas a person without consciense and remorse couldn't find a better job? How about politics?
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Which raises the question of whether there are enough psychopaths to fill all these shit jobs. Seems like something seriously wrong with society when so many jobs really need psychopaths to handle them or excel at them in the case of the top jobs (management type)
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Your comment depressed the hell out of me, which, oddly enough, means I'd be completely terrible at this job.
Get around the employment history by doing some volunteer work.
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Now consider the fact that the facebook content comes from a fairly wide cross section of the voting public. Is it time to update the Churchill's famous quite : "The best argument against democracy is a 10 minute conversation with an average voter"? Substitute "10 minute conversation with an average voter with "spend 10 minutes as a facebook moderator"?
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The best argument against Facebook is a 10 minute conversation with the average Facebook user.
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There are plenty of legitime uses for FB, e.g. organizing events.
You obviously are not a FB user, so why do you claim things about stuff you have no clue about?
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It was a play on ol' Winson's saying about democracy.
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Ah :D
Did he not also say, democracy is the worst system, but we don't know any better, or something like that?
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Yeah, but it doesn't work that well here, since we DO know better social media platforms than FB.
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Did you ever organize a gathering of 1000 or more people internationally?
See ...
Why don't you make a FB account and try it for a while? No one forces you to tell your private life there ... I never posted anything private there.
Re:Are you surprised? (Score:4, Informative)
It's probably less the stupid conspiracy shit and more the suicidal children, images of self harm, friends trying desperately and ineffectively to help, groups encouraging anorexia...
Seeing people genuinely suffering is one of the common causes of PTSD in soldiers and aid workers, for example.
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That's why further up psychopaths were suggested. Hearing these things barely affect a psychopath, if at all, and he could easily moderate it with zero impact on his own well being.
Unfortunately management pay is better.
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The original article talks about the training session where they have to watch ISIS snuff video's and then tell the class why it violates facebooks TOS.
There is far worse out there than the shit you listed and it's all on facebook.
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And that's a mental problem you have right there
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"'And that's a mental problem you have right there"
No, it's called being tough. Toughness isn't fashionable these days because those wallowing in learned helplessness think their weakness should somehow dominate discussion.
It's not mental illness to be strong. Would you want an EMT who burst into tears at the sight of your injury or one who got shit done in a chill, professional manner?
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People don't understand mental issues until they have one.
Then it's all "but wait, I'm different".
There is a clear line between being tough and having a problem.
Sometimes the solution for having a problem is being tough. Other times, it's not.
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Plus now that this has been publicized, I'm sure the response from corporate will be to take their weed away. That's a lot easier than providing ongoing counseling and mental health support.
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Back during the .com boom - I worked for a company that training porn filters - luckily in IT, but the people they hired to grade content all day all quickly became perverts.
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I kinda like this idea. Or rotate: You watch awful periods for a day, then spend another day on some other task.
Slashdot mods... (Score:3)
Awesome Workplace (Score:4, Funny)
which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed.
Are they hiring?
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which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed.
Are they hiring?
. . . maybe we could make IT development more popular by replacing our "scrum" with an "orgy" . . . ?
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which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed.
Are they hiring?
. . . maybe we could make IT development more popular by replacing our "scrum" with an "orgy" . . . ?
Have you seen the people (and I use that term loosely) I work with?
Re:Awesome Workplace (Score:5, Funny)
Yes. But as a tip, bring your own lube. After all, you'll be the new guy.
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which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed.
Are they hiring?
Only Rockstar develo.... I mean, moderators.
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which they coped with by having sex at the office and smoking weed.
Are they hiring?
That was my (satirical) thought, lol.
Not that I actually want to work there, but that plenty of people manage to cope with stress without resorting to these behaviors.
Something tells me they'd be doing the same stuff down at the local car wash, if not at Facebook.
Re:Awesome Workplace (Score:5, Interesting)
Working in finance, a lot of people in this business cope by drinking coffee while their biggest problem is staying awake, then switch to alcohol. Lots of high-functioning alcoholics (I was for a few years, but weaned myself off). Plenty of people smoke weed after work or take cocaine on the weekends. Also some guys hire prostitutes to talk out their day before going home to their family. (Prostitutes are cheaper than shrinks, work at more convenient hours for you if you have a day job, and will happily listen to all your problems, offer sympathy, and not tell anyone about it. You don't even need to have sex with them, although that's an option. They may also be able to give you a massage, sing karaoke with you, and other stuff.) But in general this kind of thing happens outside the office. The vices in the office are just the caffeine and alcohol.
This is literally ridiculous (Score:3, Insightful)
Violence and child abuse is now the same as dehumanising speech?
Re:This is literally ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
Violence and child abuse is now the same as dehumanising speech?
Probably depends on how much and how often you have to deal with it. Speech matters.
Having to deal day-in-day-out with the conspiracy nuts, literal nazis, threats of violence etc., after a while, little by little, that's going to change you. That's exactly what they're talking about. Since you or I haven't done that job we aren't in a good position to judge what it's like.
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Violence and child abuse is now the same as dehumanising speech?
Probably depends on how much and how often you have to deal with it. Speech matters.
Having to deal day-in-day-out with the conspiracy nuts, literal nazis, threats of violence etc., after a while, little by little, that's going to change you. That's exactly what they're talking about. Since you or I haven't done that job we aren't in a good position to judge what it's like.
No one claimed it wouldn't change you, but when you place speech in the same category as child abuse, you're trivialising child abuse.
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We're not talking about child abuse in this context though - they're talking about looking at images and discussions of it. Speech about child abuse. That's a pretty serious difference, it's not like the moderator is going to suffer the trauma of the abuse that they're seeing and reading about. (presumably anyone who suffered such a thing themselves so that past traumas would be invoked would stay far away from such a job)
Do you really think reading someone's post about raping children is going to be dramat
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In the case of moderators we are not speaking about actual violence but images / descriptions of violence and child abuse, and yes, that may be on the same level as dehumanising speech.
Re:This is literally ridiculous (Score:4, Insightful)
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Never ceases to amaze me how some people think that because its said on the internet words don't hurt, that its not real..somehow.
Just because it hurts and is real doesn't make it the same as violence and child abuse.
When you compare speech to child abuse, you're trivialising child abuse.
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Please rank all crimes for us so we don't make this mistake again. I'll wait...
I don't need to rank all, just the ones they want to equivocate.
Child abuse is worse than nasty speech!
Only twats think otherwise.
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And yet, clearly, you are getting all upset, stressed and emotional about mere words, about words, which are about people having to examine reported cases of suspected child abuse on a web site - i.e. a medium where said abuse is found primarily in the form of text an images.
So... At least 5 degrees of separation and abstraction away...
And there you are shouting, all boldface and exclamation points, that certain text is far worse than other text... because text can't be in the same category as text.
Hmm...
So
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And you're continuing to miss the point. In this context, the mental health of the moderators, there is no child abuse. There is only discussions and images of child abuse. Really sucks for the kid (assuming there's an actual kid involved), but they're outside the scope of this discussion
Moderators may be traumatized by looking at such images and reading such posts, but it will not be anything remotely like actually suffering such abuse themselves.
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When you compare speech to child abuse, you're trivialising child abuse. ...
A good deal of child abuse is speech
And there is nothing trivial about abuse/harassing by speech.
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Wow, no one ever called me a fascists.
Hint you can google what the term actually means.
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When you suppress free speech with violence, you are not fighting fascism - you are the fascist!
You seem to mix me up with someone.
I'm a democrate not a fascist.
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My personal view:
Seeing child abuse images would be orders of magnitude worse than the worst hate speech you could produce. I've read no end of sweary, hateful screeds on the internet. They aren't pleasant reading, but I find I can shrug my shoulders and move on, sometimes even laugh as I imagine the spittle flecked, red faced, raging keyboard hammerer who wrote it.
Not so with images. I've never seen any child abuse images, and I never want to. I've seen some gore / death type photos though, and those were
What are they watching? (Score:3, Funny)
This doesn't really add up. There are around 4500-7500 moderators on Facebook and while there is a lot of terrible stuff on the Internet, most of it could be automatically filtered away by content-id after first identifying it. Furthermore most users wouldn't even be stupid enough to post that stuff on Facebook in the first place, since that gets your account blocked and there are more appropriate places for it on the Internet. I doubt that leaves enough content to damage thousands of moderators.
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"most users wouldn't even be stupid enough to post that stuff on Facebook in the first place"
You vastly overestimate the intelligence of your fellow man.
Pizzagate raged for months, Qanon is still going strong. A significant population of the US is dumb enough to believe that nonsense - and post repeatedly about it every day. And that's just the US nutters. Facebook reported 2,200,000,000 active monthly users globally in 2018. It has repeatedly been acknowledged that the number of moderators is insufficient
moderator threaths (Score:2)
How do those facebook moderators get the details of the Cognizant workers that they are able to track them down and threathen them?
At least hide the identities so they don't need to worry about what crazy people might do to them for reviewing their posts.
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Well, for a start they all sit in the same office.
I suspect they also get performance ratings based on whether their moderations get overturned, and that gives them tremendous incentive to avoid that happening.
I can easily believe that the meta-moderator is expected to provide a written reason for overruling, and you'd soon learn who writes in which styles.
Moderation is the wrong solution (Score:3)
Consider a small, isolated community: If someone acts like a jackass, they will be socially shunned. If they persist in acting like a jackass, someone bigger and meaner will take them out behind the shed and "learn 'em". If they still persist, they will ultimately be run out of town.
In more civilized climes, the community hands over some of this responsibility to the government. There are laws about stalking harrassment, and the like. Ultimately, the punishments aren't all that different.
The problem in public, online communities is the lack of hard-and-fast identity, so that punishments can be applied. Sure, an account gets banned - but the person just makes another account. There's no "shed", and no real way to run the perp out of town. Moderation becomes nothing but a gigantic game of whac-a-mole - it's almost completely pointless.
It seems to me that part of the solution is to regain those small communities, by making online communities mostly private. Participants have to be invited; which means that they can easily be permanently disinvited. Just creating a new account won't garner an invitation to join.
Taking Facebook as the example (since it's the subject of TFA): Why should any profile be open to public comments? Let a profile show enough information for people to find you. But any interaction - posting or whatever - should require an explicit invitation. No invite for the asshat, and the person will never know they exist. And if you're a member of a group where people are saying bad things? Leave, problem solved.
If some asshat wants to post unpleasant stuff, they are absolutely free to do so - on their own profile, where only the people they invite will ever see it. It won't bother anyone else. But, but...what if they post something I don't like? Waaah!
- Fake news? Unpopular opinions? Let the invite-only groups entertain themselves. It's no one's business, and any intervention is really just censorship. Stupid people exist, and who knows, maybe we're actually the stupid ones. Maybe it really is turtles all the way down.
- Illegal material? Call the police, that's why they exist. Don't moderate - that's evidence tampering. Do what the police request, whether that's deleting the material, or leaving it up as evidence.
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This was the problem I (and a bunch of other users) faced when I attracted the attention of a cyber-stalker on Twitter a few years back. She was convinced that
In other words... (Score:2)
...they're just like the rest of us.
Crunching the profit numbers (Score:2)
$6.9 billion in profits divided by 30,000 employees working on safety and security = $230,000 in profit per person in that division.
That math may be incorrect if contract content moderators aren't included in the 30,000 employees, and I'd be happy to have more accurate numbers. Still, it's clear where the profits are coming from: Investors are making money off of the fact that there are people desperate enough for a job that they're willing to do this job for shit wages.
Crazy posts seen on facebook (Score:2)
For moderator: if you're female and frustrated, text me on 1-212-555-1234 for a good time!
Easy to forget for most of us (Score:2)
We are used to professional level environments but at this income level this is more like restaurant or call center level crowd and these are probably mostly young people like those jobs. Their managers are probably parents as much as bosses.
This all sounds pretty similar to earlier in life when I worked in those kinds of environments. It's less people having sex and using drugs to cope with work than just people having sex and using drugs because sex and drugs are a great way to pass the time with coping a
But... (Score:2)
Facebook Employees' Are Routinely High... (Score:2)
Couldn't you just replace "Moderators" with "Employees" and still have a valid statement. My guess is a good fraction of that company is high and mentally distressed.
Pushback from Facebook Members (Score:2)
Sounds like your average service industry job (Score:2)
I mean really.. this is textbook for your average restaurant. I'd say the job responsibilities of surfing the type of content would encourage more action (read porn all day, have more sex in the office; read hate speech all day have anger issues; read conspiracies and fake news all day develop more of a broken perception of the world) but honestly.. all of those levels are so high in a kitchen we're talking about shades of grey here!
I cannot imagine (Score:2)
moderating while not thoroughly baked.
[insert *anything* for 'moderating'.]
Re:High on the job is an instant firing, (Score:5, Insightful)
Losing faith in humanity and descending into hedonistic nihilism seems like a natural progression here.
What kind of person would it take to do such a job?
Re: High on the job is an instant firing, (Score:3)
Well paid, highly functional psychopaths.
Re: High on the job is an instant firing, (Score:4, Insightful)
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Facebook HQ doesn't soil its hands with that sort of thing; much less C-suit Facebook HQ.
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Given employer hiring patterns for this sort of work, they were probably high on the interview but would take the job for what it paid. I'm not sure it's so much as a descent as a condensate. But I also can't imagine wanting to do that job sober.
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People reduced to living in Phoenix, AZ.
Only if you can afford to fire people (Score:2)
... there may just not be enough people that are qualified and willing to do the job, so they make do with what they get.
Maybe there are no "right" people for the job, or at least not enough that are also willing to do it.
Re:High on the job is an instant firing, (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a single person that is hanging the chickens upside down by their legs is sober. And nobody cares.
...Hell, none of those folks had a green card, let alone sobriety. ;)
(Guess where I worked while putting myself through school?)
However, you do bring up a good point: There are shit jobs everywhere. You do it and cash the paychecks while busting your ass to find something better (or you do it to get some sort of income until you graduate). Only the terminally lazy or incompetent stay at such a job for very long, and high turnover is not only endured, but expected. Think of it as the Telemarketer job, only you don't have to talk to people this time.
TFA's job doesn't take much in the way of skill - look at stuff, click buttons, move on. It's not as if Facebook has anything approaching QA for it - I mean, outside of a few (highly publicized) cases involving important people, what is the victim of bad/false Facebook moderation going to do - demand his money back? Given the tsunami of complaints about posts every day, you could simply nuke every post in your queue from orbit, and it would make approximately no difference. *shrug*
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Newsflash: I never mentioned the content itself, nor did I mention what it may or may not do to one's emotions, though truth is, given that it's Facebook? Most likely the vast majority of that crap is some shithead who got their feelings hurt so they reported the other shithead's emotion-bruising post, or shoving some poor dumbass on a temporary hate-speech ban for something like calling someone else a "fag" in his or her post.
The vast majority of the stress is the same shit that Telemarketers had to deal w
Re: So a nomral average 20something life (Score:4, Interesting)
Such anger at psychology and psychiatry... are you perchance a scientologist?
Re: So a nomral average 20something life (Score:4, Insightful)
"Moderators for Facebook have to review graphic posts containing violence, dehumanizing speech, and child abuse, but they also have to weed through the conspiracy theories that run rampant on the web."
Just becus you may browse child abuse on your own does not mean that everyone else dose or that would be considered a normal browsing habit for a 20-25 year old.
So... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's more deleting gore images. How many ripped open humans do you like to look at in the morning? When you're poor, you take any job you can. Only so many people can work in fast food and as cashiers.
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Re:Randy (Score:5, Informative)
A “Lactating room” is a private room where a mother of a small child can use a breast pump to collect milk for her baby. Doing this in a bathroom is unsanitary and other areas are not private enough mostly due to our culture taboo on seeing breast.
Now before we get all the Right Wing hate, about how this is so expensive and cuts in productivity. Just remember how much time is wasted for smoking breaks, creating unused conference rooms, or the Empty office packed with tacky Christmas decorations. For the most part this is just labeling an unused room for a purpose.
Re:Randy (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, I agree, it's not ok to screw in a lactation room.
There should be a dedicated room for fucking a coworker. If only due to the culture taboo of shagging someone in public.
Re:Randy (Score:5, Funny)
>There should be a dedicated room for fucking a coworker.
It's called HR office.
Re:Randy (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the dedicated room for fucking with a coworker.
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Interesting factoid: I have a friend who did some engineering work at the Atlanta airport, which has gender-neutral / family restrooms. During that time he worked with the people who handle security at ATL, which includes video surveillance of who goes into and out of the restrooms.
He learned that by far the most typical use of family restrooms was for people to have sex while waiting to catch a flight. It is common knowledge among airport security p
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You should ensure that the fire exits are blocked and locked before you open the container of mustard gas. Trust me on that one, else you'll end up with almost a month of preparation and only a paltry body count to show for it.
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Yeah, but you're going to end up dead or permanently imprisoned at the end of it anyway, so why get cheap?
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The $29k/yr
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The "split" idea doesn't work work well for "average "joe" user because of choice paradox - the leeway *confuses* them. Such folks on average hate choices, thats why there are 3 variants of product, not 50.
Thats why a moderator is somehow elected and trusted to make decisions instead, and even tolerated for a bit when he's a bad shepherd.
Forma
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Extending free speech to publicly accessible places on the internet like it is in the real world would just about do it.
There is the same amount of free speech in the real world. The person watching porn at Starbucks is going to be asked to leave or forcibly removed for trespassing if they don't comply.
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I do not think Vial means what you think it means.