Amazon? Hachette?

Who fucking cares. Both are evil. Both should be nuked from orbit, just to be sure.

This is good, and good advice.

Taking the initiative in such situations as Gia faced is almost always the right answer – punching first. Because I don’t have the luxury of using my size (I’m small but fast), I do the same thing.

Taking real self-defense classes is one of the best things I’ve ever done. And it also makes you less likely to be attacked as it changes how you walk, how you speak, your entire appearance. In other words, you look like someone a criminal would not want to fuck with.

No, it’s not a superpower, and no, it doesn’t insulate you from all attacks. But just like anything, it’s another tool that is useful. And I think it’s particularly useful for women.

About real fighting, though: most people, even those who spar, have never really been punched or kicked. It’s a whole different experience from sparring.

If you have a sparring partner you trust, I recommend you at least once go beyond sparring and feel what a real, unrestrained punch feels like. It’s a whole different thing altogether.

In a real fight, yelling also helps. Not screaming. More bellowing. It freaks people out. Anything to get an advantage, and that will give you one.

And any faux-feminist who says that teaching women self-defense is victim blaming doesn’t even deserve to fucking be in the conversation.

I’ve noticed more tech jobs using these TrueAbility tests to “determine” if you have the technical skills that you say you do for a job.

And I put “determine” in quotes because they don’t really determine any such thing at all. I’ve taken a few of the tests and I did ok, but they actually don’t have anything to do (at all, at all) with how well anyone will do in a tech job.

In most real tech jobs, most of your time is spent researching and troubleshooting, and the vast majority of that time in any job above Level II helpdesk tech or so, you are almost always doing something completely new or at least something that has no set script to follow.

Yeah, you do need a basic understanding of how routers work, how networks work, operating systems, computer science, etc., but that’s all. You don’t need to know the exact command to set up a VLAN on Juniper router to know something useful. That sort of stuff, any idiot can look up in a second or two.

All of the TrueAbility tests will to do is to help hire the people who have rote memorized certain things, and will actually weed out the people who are generalists but can do anything in IT quickly and with deep understanding.

It’d be like hiring someone for an Ancient Greek professorship who can quote the 437th stanza of Virgil’s Aeneid, but who has never even heard of Homer or the word “hellenic.”

Only an MBA could design such a monstrosity, one that’s so counterproductive and that will only hire the worst and least creative and knowledgeable candidates.

But hey, they did it in a quantifiable way, and that’s all that matters to an MBA. It may be shit, but it’s shit we can measure.