The New Prejudice
Yesterday was an interesting news day. There was a proposal in Massachusetts to add height and weight to the list of things a person cannot be discriminated against in housing, employment, etc…
If this goes through, we’d be only the second state in the country to include those items along with the more traditional race, gender, religion, or disability (Massachusetts also has sexual orientation protections, which most states don’t).
My initial reaction to this was that the Daily Show will have a field day with this news and that this was just political correctness gone amok. But the article further interviewed two people. One was a woman of short stature (4′-8″) who said that she would routinely get picked up at work because it was ‘so cute” how small she was. That would annoy the piss out of me if I was her so I could understand where she was coming from. That’s definitely inappropriate behavior.
The other woman was a woman of wide stature who said that she’d been denied jobs/promotions as a result of her weight. Ok, the skeptic in me came out and wondered how she could know for sure that weight was the reason for not getting the job unless the employer said “you’re not getting hired because you’re fat” (which I doubt happened). That said, she then went on to discuss how she’ tried dieting all her life and had always been large. In fact, the unhealthy on-again/off-again dieting caused her to gain more weight in the long run. Then I thought that, like being gay, perhaps it isn’t something you can necessarily “change” (barring risky gastric bypass surgery, I suppose).
So then I realized that perhaps it makes sense to add those things. Though, to be honest, I find it silly that we need laws in the first place that say that you can’t discriminate based on physical/mental traits. I mean, shouldn’t laws just read “you can not discriminate?” Period. Any example of discrimination should be wrong, no? Otherwise, these anti-discrimination laws are going to have endless lists of things ANYTHING/ANYBODY could be discriminated for: red hair, albinos, freckles, eye color, shoe size, breast size, dwarves, bald people, penis size, body hair, corrective lenses….the list could go on and on.
Oh, in unrelated news (and don’t discriminate against me because of my techno-stupidity) but I’m having another iPod problem. For some reason, certain artists are appearing multiple times on my iPod (but not on my iTunes screen). It appears to be artists who have multiple albums. Instead of showing the artist once (and then clicking on the artist to see list of albums), it lists the artists multiple times. And with artists with whom I have 6 or 7 albums, the artist appears 6 or 7 times on my iPod. Oddly enough, each artist entry is identical (each one shows all albums) so there is no point in it appearing 6 or 7 times.
It’s bad enough that I have to scroll for 12 years to get to the artists beginning with the letter “T”…but all of these repetetive entries are just making it tale that much longer to get there. How do I stop this?
Don’t judge me.
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PLEASE PLEASE someone have the answer to this problem. I, too, find it annoying (esp when driving) to have to remember which entry of “Artist” has which of the albums (mine doesnt seem to have the same lists like you Karl).
This is why i create a playlist for every CD I rip. I never go in by artists, but only directly to the playlist for the CD. Then again, I’m pretty much either a “whole CD listener” or completely random-shuffle kinda guy.
Well, back to the discrimination issue, I’m one of those cranks who still believes the word itself is given an unfair rap – what’s wrong, and what these laws seek to correct is inappropriate, illogical, and unfair discrimination over traits unrelated to job performance, ability to pay, etc. – discrimination, like discernment, is a neutral word in and of itself, and there are good forms – as in the ability to discriminate right from wrong, etc.. I’m enough of a libertarian conservative type to say that employers need to at LEAST have the latitude to hire (or refuse to hire) based on competence, intelligence, basic sanity, etc., at a level appropriate to the position in question. I fully agree (and am scared to death of what, say, big insurance companies could start trying to not cover people over, etc.) that the protected classes are valid – not arguing there, but if you want to see the opposite ridiculous extreme, check out Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant short story “Harrison Bergeron.” Equality (and/or basic fairness) of opportunity is at issue, but utter actual equality is an impossibility, and forcing government to guarantee it could have ghastly consequences. Jes’ a thought from a linguistic crank…hey, happy travels, btw!
The multiple artist in a iPod glitch is a pain in the ass. Here’s what I figured it out a few months ago.
During an iTunes upgrade (I believe from 6.x to 7.x) there was a major change in how your library was sorted. If you right-click on an individual track and “Get Info”, you’ll now notice a tab that wasn’t there before – “Sorting”. This is now how your iPod now sorts it’s artists: no longer by Artist Name, but Sort Artist Name.
The point of this was now, I can file “50 Foot Wave” under “F” and have it still read as “50” on the iPod. It can read as “David Bowie”, but be filed under “Bowie, David” like a record store.
During the upgrade, iTunes “re-indexed” all of your artist tags, filing things in multiple places (Chet Baker under both “C” and “B”, indefinite articles like “A” and “The”). The way that I’ve found to fix this is to select all of an artist’s songs in iTunes, right-click and select “Apply Sort Field –> Same Artist”.
This fixes it for me, but there’s probably an easier way, or at least some sort of automated hack that can be plugged in to do it for you…
I like that last reply. But one other approach is to use a program called, “Ipod-to-PC” and remove all songs from the Pod. Then edit them in iTunes and reload them to the Pod. iTunes can automatically remove the duplicates–something the iPod can do.