From: forda@gtephx.UUCP (Andrew Ford @ AGCS, Phoenix, Arizona)
Subject: Re: Why do Americans get so little vacation time?
Organization: gte
Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 17:27:04 GMT

In article <1992Aug28.142423.17645@Princeton.EDU>, egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges) writes:
[...]
> Thank you.  When I proofread the paragraph in which I called poor
> Orville a "dull chap" I thought of withdrawing what is a rather harsh
> evaluation, but "chap" lightens the judgemental tone to some degree.
> More importantly, some time ago Orville and I had a rather sharp
> exchange on the notion of reverse racism (I don't think it exists, or at
> least that it is a very different thing from racism per se) in which
> Orville was rather abusive, so I decided to leave it in as consonant
> with my judgement, overall, of Orville.

Let me assure that racism against majorities does exist.
(reverse racism is too PC for me -- besides that it is meaningless, 
racism means discrimination on the basis of race -- its opposite is 
equal treatment of races, not discrimination against a majority.)

I worked in the mailroom of the Great Western Bank operations 
center in Phoenix while in college.  We had a black person who
knew he was part of the "qouta" and couldn't be fired.  This person
was arrogant, rude, lazy, and worse than useless (ie: he not only
did little if any work, he intefered with the work of others).

The bank had to downsize due to a lack of profits: a white person
who had been there longer, was more cooperative, and actually did
work was laid of and the black guy was retained.  The above opinion
of this particular black person is not mine alone: nobody at the 
office disagreed with my opinion.  Even the supervisor told us
(off the record) that he was kept because of quotas.

This is pure and simple racial discrimination: a white man lost
his job because he wasn't black.

[Please note that I'm not accusing all blacks of being lazy, rude,
and useless in the workforce: there are about as many whites that
fit this description as there are blacks -- the difference is that
the whites are unemployed more often and for longer periods.
This situtation does seem to be correcting itself -- at least from
my perspective.]

[...]
> People who are overworked tend to react this way.  I ascribe some
> network flamage to the fact that the typical network user is a highly
> talented professional who is unrecognized as such by society at large.
> Programmers and other computer professionals know intimately the real
> challenge of their work, but society's pundits, opinion-setters and
> executives regard this tribe, when they do not treat it as completely
> invisible, as a collection of geeks who make far too many mistakes.
> Since it is unsafe for the computing tribe to "bite the hand that feeds
> it", they tend to turn upon each other.                       

Likewise for the hardware engineers who design the systems that programmers
write code for!
-- 
"25 States allow anyone to buy a gun, strap it on, and walk down the street with
no permit of any kind: some say it's crazy.  However, 4 out of 5 US murders are 
committed in the other half of the country: so who is crazy?"   -  Andrew Ford
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