The paper literally says that "...the species effectively has four sexes..." I don't know if that's true or not, but Helmuth was just reporting a claim made in a peer-reviewed journal article.
Yes, it literally states "effectively has", and later states: "Indeed, because of disassortative mating based on both chromosomes 2 and 2m and the W and Z sex chromosomes, the species operates as though there are four sexes."
Only two sex chromosomes, and acts "as though" there are four sexes, which means there aren't four sexes.
The paper does not make the claim that there are four independent sexes. Helmuth incorrectly reported a claim that the paper does not make.
"Squirrels fly through the air as though they are birds" Squirrels are not birds and the previous statement does not support that claim.
I looked up Helmuth’s original tweet and it seems like a reasonable one sentence summary of the paper to me. I think the problems here are (i) twitter being twitter (not a great venue for detail and nuance) and (ii) a paper reporting its results in an overly sensational way. If there absolutely definitely aren’t more than two sexes in a given species, don’t say that there “effectively” are.
It's how she reacted to scientists who responded to her tweet politely challenging her assertion that this species has four sexes that is more the issue: doubling down, blocking anyone who disagreed.
An editor of a science magazine should be willing and open to discuss science with scientists. Particularly if they're trying to help correct a misconception.
That doesn't sound good, but I haven't managed to find the record of those interactions, as I think the original tweet has been deleted. I don't tend to trust second-hand summaries in this sort of case.
Her body has both male and female characteristics. If she'd been raised as a man, you could make an equally meanspirited comment about her body with reference to one of its female characteristics.
The fact that she was raised as a woman in Algeria (a notorious hotbed of wokeness) should tell you something.
Also, while it is gross to pick over people's bodies like this, I have to point out that you omit to note that her testicles are internal.
You made your account 51 days ago and literally the only thing you've commented on since then is the anatomical details of this woman's body. What a strange and distasteful obsession. She has always been a woman and meets the criteria to compete as one under current rules (which long predate any changes made in relation to trans people).
Still a male pummelling female competitors though. Who is being excused in this through the spread of a considerable amount of misinformation, your earlier comment being an example of such.
That's a potential option, but a lot of anti-trans folks wouldn't be happy with that either. It also doesn't solve the theoretical problem of fairness, since trans men on testosterone (who presumably compete in the 'open' category in your model?) might have significant physical advantages over cis women in some sports. I don't think there are any glib solutions to the issue of gender in sport. The current moral panic about trans people certainly won't go any way to help with solving it.
Another layer of complexity to consider. Some of those rules may need to change to enable full participation of trans athletes. I do not have a fixed view on what the rules should be. I'm just saying it's complicated.
Or maybe those that take performance-enhancing drugs will just have to accept that their body modification choices preclude participation in competitive sport.
There are trans-identifying female athletes who don't take testosterone and compete in women's sports, recent example in the last Olympics being Hergie Bacyadan in women's boxing. There's no exclusion on participation as long as the same rules as for everyone else are followed.
Again, you’re just highlighting the fact that trans people’s bodies are very variable and that this is a complex issue. There isn’t a simple, obvious solution that everyone (currently) agrees is fair. The current rules around trans athletes receiving testosterone as part of gender affirming care are quite complex and variable. I don’t have a take on exactly what the rules should be. I’m just making the point that there are no easy solutions.
The report basically said that there wasn't a lot of evidence that the treatments in question make people happy in the long run, which is an unusual standard to apply. Usually we look for evidence that medical treatments achieve their medical goals, and leave judgments about what will or won't make someone happy to doctors or patients. (For example, it's questionable whether certain cancer treatments that extend life by only a few months will be a net benefit for patients, but we generally let patients and doctors decide for themselves whether or not to go ahead with them.)
Given that the treatments are meant to address gender dysphoria which is unhappiness caused by a sense of misalignment with one's sexual characteristics I struggle to think of a better measure of success than long-term happiness.
It's a good measure of success, but if we applied the same standard consistently, then all kinds of treatments for all kinds of partially psychological conditions would have to be thrown out.
Also, it's taking a particular position to characterise gender dysphoria as merely a subjective feeling of unhappiness. I do not have any fixed position on what exactly gender dysphoria is, but I believe many trans people see it as far more than just that.
The US having significantly higher productivity than Europe as a whole is a relatively recent phenomenon (since around 2005), and there are a number of individual European countries (e.g. France and Germany) that have similar productivity to the US. So I don't think it can be that simple. If having governments that are left of center (by US standards) killed productivity, then we'd see a different historical and present day picture.
This is true, but humans are much better at including specified elements in an image with specified spatial relationships. A description like a "A porpoise seated at a desk writing a letter" will reliably produce (terrible) drawings consisting of parts corresponding to the porpoise, parts corresponding to the desk, and parts corresponding to the letter, with the arrangement of the parts roughly corresponding to the description.
Humans being better at one specific aspect of a task is not equivalent to humans being overall better at the task.
I just entered your prompt into an AI image generator and in under a second it gave me an image[0] of what looks to me like an anthropomorphic dolphin sitting at a desk writing a letter in a little study. I then had to google what the difference between a porpoise and a dolphin was because I genuinely thought porpoises looked much more like manatees. While I could nitpick the AI's work for making the porpoise's snout a little too long, had I drawn it the porpoise would have been a vaguely marine looking blob with no anatomy detailed enough to recognize let alone criticize. I am quite confident that if you asked for a large number of images based on that prompt from humans, it would easily rank among the best, and it's unlikely you'd get any which were markedly better. The fact it can generate this image nearly instantaneously though is astounding. If your goal was to get one masterpiece hanging in the Louvre, this particular tool would not suffice, but if your goal was to illustrate children's books, this tool could do in hours what would have taken a team of humans months. That is superhuman performance.
An AI image generator will sometimes do a good job on this sort of prompt, but it fails in different ways to the ways that humans fail.
Whether humans or AI are better at the task overall is probably too vague a question to answer, depending a lot on how you weight different desirables.
This isn't as true as it used to be, now that Apple is getting increased revenue from subscriptions. If your old iPhone continues to work well, then Apple has a better chance of selling you Apple Music, Apple TV, etc. etc.
This doesn't necessarily mean that your workload would perform unacceptably on an 8GB model. It just means that fewer optional things would be cached in RAM, more RAM pages would be compressed, and there'd be more swap usage.
It's perfectly possible to fire people for poor performance in the UK (which is in Europe, if not the EU). It's especially easy if the employee is within their probationary period, which could be around 6 months. You'd generally want to CYA by documenting some evidence of the poor performance, but that's something you should be doing anyway.
In Germany it's perfect possible to fire an employee without telling a reason, if the company has all-in-all < 10 employees.
If the company is bigger than that, then everything is based on decisions and considerations. Which is a good thing. You can't be fired like, "go now, no money more" within small or big companies, if you didn't steal, break things on purpose or misbehave strongly.
But you can be regularly fired with a 3 months upfront, or, if you're employed longer than 5y, then the upfront time is prolonged automatically an additional month for each year of being employed.
So, we're taking care of the people living and working here. Which is a good thing for the people. The people are more worth than a company, aren't they?
Within the probationary period of 3-6 months (contract defined) you can be fired or just stop working by yourself without needing to tell a reason within minutes.
I think that's right. Probation periods themselves are required to be 'reasonable', and I think 6 months is usually given as a figure that's definitely reasonable. But indeed, you don't have full rights until two years have passed.
Isn't a probation period a contractual thing? I don't think there is any legislation defining it? I've certainly had employment contracts (a long time ago) that didn't include it.
Indeed, I should know about the "not enforceable" bit as I had a dispute with a former employer on that very point - just because its in an employment contract doesn't make it enforceable.
The cherry on the cake was the need for my former employer to pay my lawyer bill!
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