Omphaloskepsis, while certainly an amusing sort of behavior by which to characterize the sort of mental masturbation of which k5 is so frequently guilty, is in fact a legitimate religious practice. Indeed, it far outdates most of the common western traditions with which most/. readers are likely to be familar.
I had a point when I started typing. Not sure where it went. Yeah, it's funny, and yeah, it applies (strikingly) to a lot of the morons with whom I've had the displeasure of working, but at least be mindful of the possibility that it is in fact a sacred practice (depending on who you ask) when you crack jokes about it.
Stupid enter button...
What I meant to ask before I had a moron moment was this:
What do you do and how did you get the right to work in the UK? Did you marry a citizen?
As an aspiring expatriate hoping to relocate to the UK, the complexity of getting the right to work there and of getting a job there leave me wondering how anyone has managed to do it at all.
TIA
phatlip
Then there are places like Oregon where all votes are of the mail in variety (which obviously discriminates against the homeless & disorginisedJ ).
This is simply false, which you would know had you been anywhere near Oregon during election season. The fact of the matter is that there are still polling places (marked by large, ugly "VOTE HERE" signs) in each Oregon district for those who have no mailing address or simply like the feeling of dropping their ballots into the box or were simply to lazy or disorganized to mail the ballots on time. Furthermore, Oregon's ballot this year was very simple: each candidate had their name to the left of a bubble on the ballot, to be filled in by #2 pencil.
Big Tobacco bids: $0.02
Budist Munk bids: $0.03
Big Oil bids: $0.04
Chineese National bids: $0.05
Hmmm even with all of Algores biggest supporters, he's worthless.
Say what you will, but I bet Al Gore can spell Buddhist, monks, andChinese.
Very cleverly taken out of context. This is precisely the reason why nobody trusts libertarians. Even libertarians don't trust each other. Why? Because your entire political philosophy is based upon the principle that you ought to be allowed to be as exploitive as you want to be.
Oh, and FYI, the red scare ended years ago, bro. Mis-labeling someone a socialist or a communist has really fallen out of vogue.
And now, the entire quotation that mr. java.bean so cleverly eviscerated:
I'd really put meat in the process of progressive taxation. The richer people are, the more the percentage you pay. After all, it's their influence that rigged the system to get them that rich to begin with. And, second, we should tax things we don't like. We should tax stock market speculation. We should tax pollution. We should tax activities that we don't like, like sprawl, in order to get a better planning system and better zoning system. And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest labor, like food. It's really interesting. In some places in this country, you go and you pay taxes on food and on books, but you don't pay taxes on what you buy on the Internet. Even though the small businesses in this country are the ones that support the charity and fiber of the community. It's really not fair.
This discussion of substituting technology for knowlege interest me a great deal. I remember when they changed the SAT to SAT1, allowing for use of calculators. Many people I know went berzerk when they heard about it, but I wonder why. I mean, when was the last time you ground your own flour with a mortar and pestle? Would you even know how? Do you know how to plow a field with only an ox, a length of leather and a sharp piece of bronze? Can you operate an abacus? Can you make fire out of two tinder, flint and steel? Would you even be able to identify flint or steel if you saw them lying on the ground? Can you determine which berries are safe to eat and which are poisonous? The list of 'essential' skills that most of us know longer know how to do is gargantuan. Eventually, a technology becomes stable enough that we can more or less rely on it to do the basics for us, freeing us to extrapolate advances in a field. I've got a solar calculator that will be doing my simple arithmetic for me for some time. I rely on it, but more importantly, I can rely on it.
The capacity of my fellow geeks to think that they are the only smart people in the world never ceases to amaze me. In this month's (last month's? I get confused so easily these days) Wired, there is a brief mention of some fifteen-year-old kid who is making money off of a couple websites, and who takes programming classes at the local college because he aced all the computer classes at his high school. In the three sentences (maybe less, I don't have it in front of me) that they quote from this kid, he manages to say that "until recently, [he'd] never met a smart 40-year-old." I think this perspective is pretty typical of computer-wiz-types, especially the young ones--lord knows you see it daily in Slashdot and the various 'net resources that serve open source communities (though I'm beginning to digress). Rather than imagine the possibility that someone might be smart about something other than C++, or consider that maybe he's too young to understand what goes on in a 40-year-old's head, he assumes that any 40-year old who has not dedicated his/her soul to IT/CS is of sub-par intellect.
This is exactly the attitude that is displayed in this article. How DARE any of us think that we are the only smart people out there? The fact is, geekdom is a very insular world, and we are not in much of a position to speculate on the woes of other industries, or the potential impact we would have upon said industries if we weren't so busy getting a woody from Quake3.
The fact is that IT/CS has grown at the rate it has grown because that is the rate at which it had the potential to grow. It is a field that a number of people who are smart (and vast multitudes of those who fantasize that they are smart) have cared about enough to dedicate their time to coming up with weird and ground-breaking ideas. I don't know enough about running for president or the efforts to curb the world's hunger problems to say, but I would bet that those involved are not simply a bunch of morons who didn't have the brains to work in computers. Our President, for instance, who most people (at least the vocal ones) seem to think is an idiot, was a Rhodes scholar from Georgetown. I know more than one arrogant IT geek who couldn't have gotten into Georgetown. Ever.
The point I am belaboring so badly here is that TCP/IP and Java are not the only things in the world about which one can be smart, and encyclopedic knowlege of such does not indicate that one is smart about ANYTHING else. What the IT/CS community needs most, IMNSHO, is a concerted effort to get over itself.
Slashdot Mirror
This insightful comment on the inferiority of American media and culture was brought to you by 'penthouseplayah'.
That is all.
http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/programs/pcs/.
I had a point when I started typing. Not sure where it went.
Yeah, it's funny, and yeah, it applies (strikingly) to a lot of the morons with whom I've had the displeasure of working, but at least be mindful of the possibility that it is in fact a sacred practice (depending on who you ask) when you crack jokes about it.
phatman
Stupid enter button...
What I meant to ask before I had a moron moment was this: What do you do and how did you get the right to work in the UK? Did you marry a citizen?
As an aspiring expatriate hoping to relocate to the UK, the complexity of getting the right to work there and of getting a job there leave me wondering how anyone has managed to do it at all.
TIA
phatlip
Odd, then, that you insist upon calling it "common" sense.
-Phatty two-by-four
This is simply false, which you would know had you been anywhere near Oregon during election season. The fact of the matter is that there are still polling places (marked by large, ugly "VOTE HERE" signs) in each Oregon district for those who have no mailing address or simply like the feeling of dropping their ballots into the box or were simply to lazy or disorganized to mail the ballots on time. Furthermore, Oregon's ballot this year was very simple: each candidate had their name to the left of a bubble on the ballot, to be filled in by #2 pencil.
Budist Munk bids: $0.03
Big Oil bids: $0.04
Chineese National bids: $0.05
Hmmm even with all of Algores biggest supporters, he's worthless.
Say what you will, but I bet Al Gore can spell Buddhist, monks, andChinese.
Oh, and FYI, the red scare ended years ago, bro. Mis-labeling someone a socialist or a communist has really fallen out of vogue.
And now, the entire quotation that mr. java.bean so cleverly eviscerated:
I'd really put meat in the process of progressive taxation. The richer people are, the more the percentage you pay. After all, it's their influence that rigged the system to get them that rich to begin with. And, second, we should tax things we don't like. We should tax stock market speculation. We should tax pollution. We should tax activities that we don't like, like sprawl, in order to get a better planning system and better zoning system. And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest labor, like food. It's really interesting. In some places in this country, you go and you pay taxes on food and on books, but you don't pay taxes on what you buy on the Internet. Even though the small businesses in this country are the ones that support the charity and fiber of the community. It's really not fair.
-phatman
This is exactly the attitude that is displayed in this article. How DARE any of us think that we are the only smart people out there? The fact is, geekdom is a very insular world, and we are not in much of a position to speculate on the woes of other industries, or the potential impact we would have upon said industries if we weren't so busy getting a woody from Quake3.
The fact is that IT/CS has grown at the rate it has grown because that is the rate at which it had the potential to grow. It is a field that a number of people who are smart (and vast multitudes of those who fantasize that they are smart) have cared about enough to dedicate their time to coming up with weird and ground-breaking ideas. I don't know enough about running for president or the efforts to curb the world's hunger problems to say, but I would bet that those involved are not simply a bunch of morons who didn't have the brains to work in computers. Our President, for instance, who most people (at least the vocal ones) seem to think is an idiot, was a Rhodes scholar from Georgetown. I know more than one arrogant IT geek who couldn't have gotten into Georgetown. Ever.
The point I am belaboring so badly here is that TCP/IP and Java are not the only things in the world about which one can be smart, and encyclopedic knowlege of such does not indicate that one is smart about ANYTHING else. What the IT/CS community needs most, IMNSHO, is a concerted effort to get over itself.
-phatman