Do you really think that asking for a reasonable salary is the same thing as a communist revolution? Really?
I love these little flashes of insight into the right-wing mind. It's fascinating, like microscopic close-ups of insect faces: here's this creature which is biochemically and genetically more or less like you, and yet completely alien.
Sorry for overreacting. It's a hot button for me, I guess; I do so loathe any manifestation of the pervasive Two Cultures bullshit that I often have a hard time telling when people are joking about it.
Do you have a better suggestion for the name of that particular field?
BTW, I know you're at least partly exaggerating for humorous effect, but I have to point out that lines like "It's partly due to a disease which causes people who are expert in one area to spontaneously believe they are expert in any area that they choose, and partly due to post-docs yearning to be special" and "geeks with lab coats and large pores want to clip a form in the back of a journal and send in a money order for $15" don't do a whole lot to dispel the stereotype -- regrettably popular here on Slashdot -- of the clueless liberal arts prof yammering about science. The simple fact is that every technical field has specialized concepts that can't easily be expressed using existing vocabulary, at least not without a whole lot of excess verbiage, so people in those fields either invent new words or alter the meanings of old ones to make expressing those concepts less tedious. And please, don't even try to tell me that literary criticism is any less guilty of language abuse than science is; I've read my grandfather's work.
Using business and other organizational names as collective rather than singular nouns is more common in British than in American English, but both usages are increasingly acceptable on both sides of the Atlantic. Your objection is silly, unless of course you're complaining about the use of the stock ticker symbol in place of the company name, which I agree is an abomination.
I'm assuming that most will agree that there are a lot of "feelgood, will pay" degrees given to otherwise unemployable individuals.
BSs, sure. MSs, sometimes. Not PhDs, if for no other reason than that, at least in the sciences, it's almost universally the case that the school pays you to get the degree, not the other way around. And while it's true that the money for a lot of grad student stipends come from external sources (NIH and NSF particularly, in the US) so there's some incentive for schools to get and graduate as many students as possible, it's also true that the granting agencies look at what happens to students down the road as one of their major criteria for renewal. Any training-grant-funded program that produces a lot of unemployable graduates is in big trouble.
In the same way we didn't win Vietnam, and probably won't win Afghanistan. When you pull your force out of a territory where you've been fighting, and the people you were fighting are still active there, you can't reasonably call that a "win" by any except face-saving standards.
Way to miss the point. "Enemy" is not a status assigned at birth. The world is full of people who really don't care about us one way or another, who in fact have never given a thought to the US in their lives... until an American drone appears in the sky over their homes. Drones are fine tools for finding and killing the enemies we already have, but this isn't particularly useful if we also create more of them with every use.
but it's not cowardly to dress as a civilian, snipe at the enemy clearly outfitted as non-civilians, then when the enemy comes after them, hide their weapon and claim to just be a regular civilian?
Indeed. Those Colonists have no sense of honor, sir, none at all. We ought to hire more Hessians to go over there and burn them all out. That will surely bring this absurd rebellion of theirs to its knees.
There's a school of thought that says "rules of war" are inherently stupid, that whenever we go to war we should kill as many people as possible by whatever means we have available, that prisoners should be treated harshly and civilians as disposable. When used in reference to our current wars, this usually goes along with some Internet Tough Guy posturing about how wimpy liberals don't understand that the world is full of bad guys who want to kill us, blah blah blah.
But the Iraqis who surrendered en masse in Desert Storm (you know, the Iraq war we actually won) did so in large part because they knew they'd be treated well when they did so. Yes, they were shell-shocked, but remember that the Iraqi army of the day was hardened by years of grueling WW1-style combat against Iran -- they could have kept fighting, and would have done so if they'd believed there was anything to be gained by doing so. I know; as a medic I had a good perspective on the guys on the other side (there were far more Iraqi wounded to treat than American or other Allied soldiers.) And in the more recent war, the insurgency picked up steam with every atrocity. A similar pattern was seen in Vietnam, and probably in every guerilla war in history. Big, technologically advanced occupying powers always think that they can use a steamroller to intimidate the populace into submission, and they're always wrong. Inevitably, they end up creating more enemies than they kill, until their only choice is either to go home or "make a desert and call it peace."
It's worth noting that Sherman, who popularized the phrase "war is hell" (and earlier made the more precise statement "war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it") and who is largely remembered today as the boogeyman who burned his way across the South, actually took care to minimize civilian casualties, made sure that displaced populations had the means to feed themselves, and was punctilious about the care of prisoners. Had the technology been available to him, I'm sure he would have been happy to use drones to find and destroy Johnston's army, but I'm equally sure he would have rejected out of hand the idea of using them against civilians. Smart guy, he was.
And I don't know why it called "Liberal". On any hot topic, they make an effort to get both sides - and they don't have crackpots representing the other side either.
The second sentence answers the implied question in the first. To the right-wing nutballs, accurate reporting always has a "liberal bias."
I also don't want my coworkers knowing what I make because they will likely try demanding more than they are making when they don't deserve it. They aren't nearly as good... People have an incorrect valuation of their own skills and contribution the vast majority of the time.
The phrase "a product of his time" doesn't literally mean "he was born on the year he was born"; it means he also shared the generally accepted values of his time. Did he really? I don't know much about him, but you provide no good arguments. You cannot "epitomize" a generation just by being literally part of it.
Fair enough. Let's say that the social attitudes in his stories seem typical for members of his generation, and that it was precisely those attitudes against which the rebellion of the 60s took place.
Apparently the answer is 'yes'; but are you really allowed to pout like a spoiled child who just lost a little-league game when you are on the board of a multibillion dollar multinational corporation?
Not just allowed, but encouraged. The sense of entitlement that oozes from the CEO/BOD class is palpable. They are spoiled whiny children playing with enormously powerful toys, and best understood and treated as such. Expect them to do and say the most thoughtless, self-centered, and occasionally reprehensible things possible with no understanding of the consequences of their words and actions, and you won't be disappointed.
And my grandfather recently died at the age of 103, after a lifetime of smoking, drinking, getting hardly any exercise, and eating crappy food. None of which means that these are recommended practices for extending your lifespan. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
I find it funny that the term "security-minded" is used when describing the scientists upset by Feynman's lock picking, when the impression I got from reading his memoirs and biography was that he was not concealing it and was indeed pointing out security vulnerabilities at Los Alamos.
"Security-minded" people always hate it when holes in their security systems are pointed out. It's practically a law of nature.
As a fan of the hard stuff (Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke et. al. - I prefer SF that requires a working knowledge of vector calculus and differential equations to really appreciate) his stuff always seemd pretty fluffy fare. I always summed it up as the science fiction beloved by English teachers everywhere
Heh, you've got a point, and I too got tired of seeing him presented as pretty much the only science fiction author admitted into the literary canon. But SF from the 1970s on, which at its best combines "the hard stuff" with a humanistic approach to characterization, owes Bradbury equally along with Clarke et al. I've never understood the idea that scientific rigor should require the characters to be one-dimensional; both are important to telling a good story to which both the words "science" and "fiction" apply. (To be fair, Clarke did pretty well with this sometimes; I defy anyone to read The City and the Stars or The Fountains of Paradise and say he couldn't create interesting, complex characters! But he wasn't particularly consistent about it, and Heinlein and Anderson were even less so.)
I'm from the generation that had schoolteachers who couldn't stop talking about how great the 60s were. So, Bradbury epitomized the 60s SF writers who thought that computer technology would "oppress" us, and women in the future were supposed to behave just as submissively as 1950s women.
"The 60s" your teachers were extolling wasn't the same as "the 60s" during which Bradbury was writing -- chronologically the same, but culturally worlds apart. Bradbury epitomized the generation against which people who were in their 20s in the 1960s were rebelling. He was born in 1920. He was 45 when the first big Vietnam protests started, 47 during the "Summer of Love," 49 at the time of Woodstock: more than old enough to be "The Man." A great writer to be sure, but also very much a product of his time.
... the Democratic administration wants to encourage free market competition, and the Republicans in Congress want to limit it. This should not be a shock to anyone who pays attention to reality rather than party rhetoric.
I've obviously touched a nerve with the amount and content of the replies to this post. People are passionate about what they believe, and want to make sure that there is significant discussion around this topic. Yet, the post was modded down to -1. Why? Because it challenges the status quo?
Protip: when you make a post that gets a bunch of angry responses and downmods, it's possible that this means you've "touched a nerve," that you're a bold iconoclast "challeng[ing] the status quo" and speaking truth to power... but honestly, that's not the way to bet. Usually, it just means you're being a schmuck.
I agree in general. I just have a strong negative reaction to casual dismissal of the immensely hard work necessary to become an expert in... well, anything, really... and the idea that a lot of people seem to have that because they read some pop-sci article on something last week, they know more about it than do people who have spent years earning advanced degrees in the subject.
Ah yes, that stuffy, hidebound world of academia, where smart people have to think really hard for a long time to understand complicated subjects, instead of getting their information in easily digestible "infographics" and becoming instant experts.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you really think that asking for a reasonable salary is the same thing as a communist revolution? Really?
I love these little flashes of insight into the right-wing mind. It's fascinating, like microscopic close-ups of insect faces: here's this creature which is biochemically and genetically more or less like you, and yet completely alien.
Sorry for overreacting. It's a hot button for me, I guess; I do so loathe any manifestation of the pervasive Two Cultures bullshit that I often have a hard time telling when people are joking about it.
Now don't get me started on "combinatorics".
Do you have a better suggestion for the name of that particular field?
BTW, I know you're at least partly exaggerating for humorous effect, but I have to point out that lines like "It's partly due to a disease which causes people who are expert in one area to spontaneously believe they are expert in any area that they choose, and partly due to post-docs yearning to be special" and "geeks with lab coats and large pores want to clip a form in the back of a journal and send in a money order for $15" don't do a whole lot to dispel the stereotype -- regrettably popular here on Slashdot -- of the clueless liberal arts prof yammering about science. The simple fact is that every technical field has specialized concepts that can't easily be expressed using existing vocabulary, at least not without a whole lot of excess verbiage, so people in those fields either invent new words or alter the meanings of old ones to make expressing those concepts less tedious. And please, don't even try to tell me that literary criticism is any less guilty of language abuse than science is; I've read my grandfather's work.
"MSFT choose"? Seriously?
Using business and other organizational names as collective rather than singular nouns is more common in British than in American English, but both usages are increasingly acceptable on both sides of the Atlantic. Your objection is silly, unless of course you're complaining about the use of the stock ticker symbol in place of the company name, which I agree is an abomination.
I'm assuming that most will agree that there are a lot of "feelgood, will pay" degrees given to otherwise unemployable individuals.
BSs, sure. MSs, sometimes. Not PhDs, if for no other reason than that, at least in the sciences, it's almost universally the case that the school pays you to get the degree, not the other way around. And while it's true that the money for a lot of grad student stipends come from external sources (NIH and NSF particularly, in the US) so there's some incentive for schools to get and graduate as many students as possible, it's also true that the granting agencies look at what happens to students down the road as one of their major criteria for renewal. Any training-grant-funded program that produces a lot of unemployable graduates is in big trouble.
Too many people are arguing pro-Finish type of socialism, but that's why Finland is going to lose more and more jobs.
This argument would be a lot more convincing if the economies of more capitalist countries were booming. In case you hadn't noticed, they're not.
How the fuck did we not win the second Iraq war?
In the same way we didn't win Vietnam, and probably won't win Afghanistan. When you pull your force out of a territory where you've been fighting, and the people you were fighting are still active there, you can't reasonably call that a "win" by any except face-saving standards.
Fuck our enemies feelings about our weaponry.
Way to miss the point. "Enemy" is not a status assigned at birth. The world is full of people who really don't care about us one way or another, who in fact have never given a thought to the US in their lives ... until an American drone appears in the sky over their homes. Drones are fine tools for finding and killing the enemies we already have, but this isn't particularly useful if we also create more of them with every use.
but it's not cowardly to dress as a civilian, snipe at the enemy clearly outfitted as non-civilians, then when the enemy comes after them, hide their weapon and claim to just be a regular civilian?
Indeed. Those Colonists have no sense of honor, sir, none at all. We ought to hire more Hessians to go over there and burn them all out. That will surely bring this absurd rebellion of theirs to its knees.
There's a school of thought that says "rules of war" are inherently stupid, that whenever we go to war we should kill as many people as possible by whatever means we have available, that prisoners should be treated harshly and civilians as disposable. When used in reference to our current wars, this usually goes along with some Internet Tough Guy posturing about how wimpy liberals don't understand that the world is full of bad guys who want to kill us, blah blah blah.
But the Iraqis who surrendered en masse in Desert Storm (you know, the Iraq war we actually won) did so in large part because they knew they'd be treated well when they did so. Yes, they were shell-shocked, but remember that the Iraqi army of the day was hardened by years of grueling WW1-style combat against Iran -- they could have kept fighting, and would have done so if they'd believed there was anything to be gained by doing so. I know; as a medic I had a good perspective on the guys on the other side (there were far more Iraqi wounded to treat than American or other Allied soldiers.) And in the more recent war, the insurgency picked up steam with every atrocity. A similar pattern was seen in Vietnam, and probably in every guerilla war in history. Big, technologically advanced occupying powers always think that they can use a steamroller to intimidate the populace into submission, and they're always wrong. Inevitably, they end up creating more enemies than they kill, until their only choice is either to go home or "make a desert and call it peace."
It's worth noting that Sherman, who popularized the phrase "war is hell" (and earlier made the more precise statement "war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it") and who is largely remembered today as the boogeyman who burned his way across the South, actually took care to minimize civilian casualties, made sure that displaced populations had the means to feed themselves, and was punctilious about the care of prisoners. Had the technology been available to him, I'm sure he would have been happy to use drones to find and destroy Johnston's army, but I'm equally sure he would have rejected out of hand the idea of using them against civilians. Smart guy, he was.
And I don't know why it called "Liberal". On any hot topic, they make an effort to get both sides - and they don't have crackpots representing the other side either.
The second sentence answers the implied question in the first. To the right-wing nutballs, accurate reporting always has a "liberal bias."
Making a "mathematical error vs. magical substance" dichotomy is so oversimplified it would be better for you to simply be quiet on this topic.
This ... is ... SLASHDOT!
I also don't want my coworkers knowing what I make because they will likely try demanding more than they are making when they don't deserve it. They aren't nearly as good ... People have an incorrect valuation of their own skills and contribution the vast majority of the time.
Indeed.
The phrase "a product of his time" doesn't literally mean "he was born on the year he was born"; it means he also shared the generally accepted values of his time. Did he really? I don't know much about him, but you provide no good arguments. You cannot "epitomize" a generation just by being literally part of it.
Fair enough. Let's say that the social attitudes in his stories seem typical for members of his generation, and that it was precisely those attitudes against which the rebellion of the 60s took place.
Apparently the answer is 'yes'; but are you really allowed to pout like a spoiled child who just lost a little-league game when you are on the board of a multibillion dollar multinational corporation?
Not just allowed, but encouraged. The sense of entitlement that oozes from the CEO/BOD class is palpable. They are spoiled whiny children playing with enormously powerful toys, and best understood and treated as such. Expect them to do and say the most thoughtless, self-centered, and occasionally reprehensible things possible with no understanding of the consequences of their words and actions, and you won't be disappointed.
And my grandfather recently died at the age of 103, after a lifetime of smoking, drinking, getting hardly any exercise, and eating crappy food. None of which means that these are recommended practices for extending your lifespan. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data."
I find it funny that the term "security-minded" is used when describing the scientists upset by Feynman's lock picking, when the impression I got from reading his memoirs and biography was that he was not concealing it and was indeed pointing out security vulnerabilities at Los Alamos.
"Security-minded" people always hate it when holes in their security systems are pointed out. It's practically a law of nature.
As a fan of the hard stuff (Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke et. al. - I prefer SF that requires a working knowledge of vector calculus and differential equations to really appreciate) his stuff always seemd pretty fluffy fare. I always summed it up as the science fiction beloved by English teachers everywhere
Heh, you've got a point, and I too got tired of seeing him presented as pretty much the only science fiction author admitted into the literary canon. But SF from the 1970s on, which at its best combines "the hard stuff" with a humanistic approach to characterization, owes Bradbury equally along with Clarke et al. I've never understood the idea that scientific rigor should require the characters to be one-dimensional; both are important to telling a good story to which both the words "science" and "fiction" apply. (To be fair, Clarke did pretty well with this sometimes; I defy anyone to read The City and the Stars or The Fountains of Paradise and say he couldn't create interesting, complex characters! But he wasn't particularly consistent about it, and Heinlein and Anderson were even less so.)
I'm from the generation that had schoolteachers who couldn't stop talking about how great the 60s were. So, Bradbury epitomized the 60s SF writers who thought that computer technology would "oppress" us, and women in the future were supposed to behave just as submissively as 1950s women.
"The 60s" your teachers were extolling wasn't the same as "the 60s" during which Bradbury was writing -- chronologically the same, but culturally worlds apart. Bradbury epitomized the generation against which people who were in their 20s in the 1960s were rebelling. He was born in 1920. He was 45 when the first big Vietnam protests started, 47 during the "Summer of Love," 49 at the time of Woodstock: more than old enough to be "The Man." A great writer to be sure, but also very much a product of his time.
... the Democratic administration wants to encourage free market competition, and the Republicans in Congress want to limit it. This should not be a shock to anyone who pays attention to reality rather than party rhetoric.
I've obviously touched a nerve with the amount and content of the replies to this post. People are passionate about what they believe, and want to make sure that there is significant discussion around this topic. Yet, the post was modded down to -1. Why? Because it challenges the status quo?
Protip: when you make a post that gets a bunch of angry responses and downmods, it's possible that this means you've "touched a nerve," that you're a bold iconoclast "challeng[ing] the status quo" and speaking truth to power ... but honestly, that's not the way to bet. Usually, it just means you're being a schmuck.
Yes, laws are only named after scientists from the 19th century and before. It's a simple distinction, really.
I agree in general. I just have a strong negative reaction to casual dismissal of the immensely hard work necessary to become an expert in ... well, anything, really ... and the idea that a lot of people seem to have that because they read some pop-sci article on something last week, they know more about it than do people who have spent years earning advanced degrees in the subject.
Perhaps someone stuck in traditional Academia.
Ah yes, that stuffy, hidebound world of academia, where smart people have to think really hard for a long time to understand complicated subjects, instead of getting their information in easily digestible "infographics" and becoming instant experts.
Most math is symbolic, not graphical. So the answer to your specific question is "nothing at all, really," but I think you may have missed OP's point.