BertramDitore

Exactly. I wish more people had this view of interns. Unpaid ones, at the very least. I worked with a few, and my colleagues would often throw spreadsheets at them and have them do meaningless cleanup work that no one would ever look at. Whenever it was my turn to 'find work' for the interns, I would just have them fully shadow me, and do the work I was doing, as I was doing it. Essentially duplicating the work, but with my products being the ones held to final submissions standards. They had some great ideas, which I incorporated into the final versions, and they could see what the role was actually like by doing the work without worrying about messing anything up or bearing any actual responsibility. Interns are supposed to benefit from having the internship. The employer, by accepting the responsibility of having interns, shouldn't expect to get anything out of it other than the satisfaction of helping someone gain experience. Maybe a future employee, if you treat them well.

Yeah totally, that’s an important distinction. Paid interns are definitely different than unpaid interns, and can legally do essentially the same work as a paid employee.

The way the distinction was explained to me is that an unpaid intern is essentially a student of the company, they are there to learn. They often get university credit for the internship. A paid internship is essentially an entry-level job with the expectation that you might get more on-the-job training than a ‘normal’ employee.

This article doesn’t say if the intern was paid, but it does say the company reported the behavior to the intern’s university, so I’d guess it was unpaid.

I work at a small tech company, by no means big tech. I know it’s common for interns to be treated as employees, but it’s usually in violation of labor law. It’s one of those things that is extremely common, but no less illegal.

The US Department of Labor has a 7 part test to help determine if an intern is classified properly. #6 is particularly relevant to this.

Precisely.

Let me fix that for you: a politician’s attempt to court disengaged voters by presenting a popular proposal. AKA democracy.

There’s very little detail in the article. I’d be curious to find out exactly what the intern’s responsibilities were, because based on the description in the article it seems like this was a failure of management, not the intern. Interns should never have direct access to production systems. In fact, in most parts of the world (though probably not China, I don’t know) interns are there to learn. They’re not supposed to do work that would otherwise be assigned to a paid employee, because that would make them an employee not an intern. Interns can shadow the paid employee to learn from them on the job, but interns are really not supposed to have any actual responsibilities beyond gaining experience for when they go on the job market.

Blaming the intern seems like a serious shift of responsibility. The fact that the intern was able to do this at all is the fault of management for not supervising their intern.

Good, thank you for addressing this! I think the temporary ban is a perfect solution. I only care about this because of how close we are to the election, and this solves that problem.

Think about it this way: remember those upside-down answer keys in the back of your grade school math textbook? Now imagine if those answer keys included just as many incorrect answers as correct ones. How would you know if you were right or wrong without asking your teacher? Until a LLM can guarantee a right answer, and back it up with real citations, it will continue to do more harm than good.

I usually start with Calmatters. They tend to have good writeups for CA ballots when I’m looking for how candidates feel about specific policies.

Then I go to my local independent newspaper, which runs interviews with all major local candidates. I usually have a pretty good idea of who I’m going for by the time I read the interviews, but they’ll often put me the over the edge for a particular candidate and help me finalize my decision.

These reporters jump at any opportunity to say the court or Barrett are ‘moderating’ or making rulings based on logic or common sense. It’s just not true. A couple of decisions that seem reasonable, against all the other ahistorical and politically-motivated rulings does not make the court reasonable or legitimate. Many of these ‘reasonable’ decisions are on cases that never should have been heard in the first place, or are just placeholders while the cases wind back through the courts and ultimately end up back at SCOTUS for their final judicially reprehensible decision that Barrett will inevitably join.

Stop falling for this bullshit. The Supreme Court is made up of a majority of extremist partisan politicians. Even the ‘institution-loving balls and strikes’ Chief Justice Roberts has been exposed as a partisan hack in the bag for Trump.

Barrett sounds reasonable, and might be slightly less insane than the other Republicans, but the bar is already so low that she should not get points for any of this. She still votes with the Republican majority on nearly all of their right-wing judicial activism.

It does:

…the paper was reviewed, and its appropriateness for the journal's publishing criteria was rated as "excellent" by the journal's peer-review process. It was accepted for publication with minor editorial changes. The paper was not actually published, as Vamplew declined to pay the required US$150 article processing charge. This case has led commenters to question the legitimacy of the journal as an authentic scholarly undertaking.

I’ve started reporting their posts for spamming/trolling. Not sure if it’ll do any good, but at least the mods might see our frustration. If the account engaged in good faith conversations it’d be a different story, I’ve really tried, but they’re clearly a troll.