Oh, and how did it become a "generic pejorative"? From bigoted thugs, calling out details of one's personal appearance as evidence that they were gay, and therefore should be beaten.
That's my memory of high school in the late 80s. And college in the 90s. And, come to think of it, some incidents I've seen in the last month.
I was puzzled by the image, the first time I saw the regular XKCD page -- I didn't see the point. So I looked at Explain XKCD, and found out it that the image was being updated periodically. I checked in again later, and saw that it was basically an animated movie, which is easily missed if you look at just one static image. The thing is, there's no point to watching an animation going up, one frame at a time, over months. You're not going to get any special insights that way that you can't get when it's completed, by watching the whole thing. You could presumably go back over individual frames at that point if you want to do a close analysis of it. But there's not enough to go on yet to make sense of it.
From what I've seen of this series so far, I'm guessing it will turn out to have some meaning that can be fully explained in a sentence or two.
There's a trend in entertainment of measuring out some serial narrative, one tiny fragment at a time, and encouraging the development of a fanbase that will analyze each succeeding fragment. This happens with Webcomics, and augmented reality games, as well as with series of computer games, series of novels, and television series. While there's no shortage of bunk that appears in the fanbase's theorizing, you'll inevitably see theories emerge that are far more interesting than what the writer originally had in mind. Inevitably, the fanbase will end up burned out and disappointed.
At some point, people need to learn to develop the self-respect to just stop hitting refresh to find out what the answer is to the enigma. Just check in again in a few months, when it's all over. It'll probably seem quite clever or interesting for the minute or two it takes to watch the whole thing.
In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis analyzes this at length: that in most of the world, the rich live in urban centers, and the poor have great difficulty affording housing in urban centers. The trouble is, of course, the urban centers are where all the jobs are. So, there are all sorts of messy, quasi-legal and illegal housing arrangements. It's quite common for people to have to pay rent to sleep on sidewalks, for example.
It's relatively recently that housing patterns in the US have started shifting to match those of the rest of the world.
Of course, many forms of work can be performed from anywhere, provided there's access to high-bandwidth communication, which would significantly ease the burden on many people to find affordable housing. But that rather brings us back to the problem illustrated in the original article.
Conservatives used to occasionally kick up a fuss about "unfunded mandates". Poor people have to deal with those all the time. One unfunded mandate is that Internet access is a practical requirement for participation in contemporary society. If you don't have Web access, you can't search for jobs or apply for them, or fill out legally mandatory paperwork, or do your homework.
As we all know, web-enabled devices are bargains, because they enable access to many different forms of communication and entertainment. I remember a furor erupting when a local newspaper, for an article about long-term unemployment showed a photo of a family in a one-room apartment. There was a table, with a smartphone on it. There were a few chairs, and some blankets and pillows on the floor, and no other furniture; no television, no other telephone, nothing. Yet people complained they couldn't really be poor, because they had a smartphone.
And yes, McDonalds is bad food, and overpriced. Try visiting a poor urban neighborhood sometime. It's a major problem that low-income neighborhoods frequently lack grocery stores, that the only food sources within a few miles are corner stores with overpriced convenience foods and fast food restaurants.
The ASUS RT-N66U's stock firmware prominently features this as an option (though I'd recommend replacing the stock firmware with RMerlin's customized version that includes OpenVPN).
I have a router that allows for setting multiple SSIDs and for setting the access rules, so I set up an SSID of openwireless.org a few months ago, with no access to my LAN but otherwise unrestricted access. I live in a dense urban area, near a heavily-trafficked shopping and dining area. I get a dozen or so unique MACs connecting to the open WiFi a day. They usually just connect for a minute or two. The increase in bandwidth usage has been negligible: less than 1%.
I haven't checked exactly what they're connecting to, but it looks a lot to me like they're just checking Google Maps, and no one is downloading porn.
Science has fed the world with an unbelievable array of giant, hearty and delicious foods. It's called agriculture, and it was invented 10,000 years ago.
Look at a globe that shows elevations, and notice how there's a nearly continuous belt of plains around the northern hemisphere, that generally coincides with the range of latitudes with a range of temperatures optimal for growing grains. That's where the large-scale industrialized agriculture that feeds most of the human race occurs.
A global warming trend would shift that range of latitudes with optimal temperatures northward, where there is significantly less terrain suitable for industrialized agriculture. This would mean a significant reduction in agricultural production, and thus to famine and violent conflicts for control of food supplies. Humans probably wouldn't go extinct, but it would certainly be a tremendous disaster.
It depends upon how you define AI, I suppose. If you look at armed robots, Predator drones, and the interest in increasing the automation of these machines, I think you can see something that could become increasingly dangerous.
I suppose my response wasn't as direct as I thought it was. I do think I am basically agreeing with your point.
I was objecting to the common, "This will teach you to be tough, which is good for you in the long run", which I thought I read implied in tbird81's comment. Though that may be a misreading of tbird81's comment, on reflection.
Not mine. One good punch to the bully, and they'll call out to their pack, and they'll all beat you until you're bleeding and can't cry out anymore.
Right. If you want a fighting chance, you've got to put the bully down and out before he gets any help.
The first stage of the bully's attack was encircling the victim with his pack. So, no, putting the bully down was never a possibility.
It's far more effective if an adult simply walks over and tells the bully to knock it off.
The bully will then knock it off... around that adult.
That's already a significant improvement.
Furthermore, in my experience of bullying, the bullies counted on the indifference of adults, and occasionally, tacit encouragement. On most occasions when I asked for help from an adult, the response was, "Shut up, you little faggot." (Incidentally, I don't believe I'd worked out my sexual orientation when I was eight.) I seriously doubt the bullies would have been so confident had adults intervened with any consistency. Of course, it's classic for bullies to threaten retaliation if the victim complains and a parent is informed, but that actually was relatively effective, at least in the case of parents who disapproved of bullying.
My experience of early elementary school was that the bullies were actually encouraged by many of the teachers and administrators, and I was explicitly blamed for "inciting" them.
We live in a cruelly hierarchical society, in which victim-blaming is extremely common.
I keep thinking that one of the conceptual errors people frequently make is to confuse what makes a species tougher, in the sense of natural selection, with what makes an individual stronger. If you see a tree growing from a crevice on a sheer cliff, you know that's a pretty tough species of tree. But that's not a strong tree. It would have been a much stronger tree if it had grown in ideal conditions.
We're not getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers anymore. We need people who are strong -- as in, creative, empathetic, mutually supportive -- far more than we need people who are tough.
We're homeschooling my younger stepson. It was becoming clear that elementary school was simply a waste of his time, even when he was attending a progressive private school (with a generous tuition assistance program). He learns more efficiently on his own initiative. We live in an urban area, one in which there's a fairly substantial community of homeschoolers who coordinate activity, and of course there's the Internet. I'd say he has far more social interaction than I did at his age, both with other children and with adults.
From everything I've heard about modern educational theory, elementary school is pretty much pointless, and I'm increasingly dubious about the structure of later stages of formal education. I took classes on programming and system administration, and that prompted me to study specific topics that I wouldn't have, otherwise -- but, most of what I know about those subjects, I knew from tinkering with Linux on my own desktop, and most of the topics I studied that I wouldn't have on my own initiative, have proven to be obsolete or irrelevant to both my personal and my professional work. Meanwhile, I'm watching my ten-year-old, rapidly learning the ins and outs of package management and system administration, because of his interest in Minecraft.
The main problem with homeschooling, in general, is that I think it's relatively unusual for most people families to be able to ensure there's an adult at home to supervise a younger child. Fortunately, my wife is in graduate school, and my work schedule gives me several weekdays off, so there's always an adult around in our household; we also have adult relatives nearby, as backup. But, I think more broadly yet, our social and economic organization is grossly irrational. We work far more hours than we ought to -- real wages have been static in the US for forty years, even as productivity has more than doubled, so I think we'd all be better off in many ways if our wages were increased, we worked fewer hours, and we did less useless crap that just wastes resources to prop up an irrational economic system based on perpetual expansion.
In elementary school, the routine was that the bullies would stand in a circle around their victim, and the leader would start hitting the victim. If the victim just curled up in a fetal position and hid his face, then only one bully would hit him. If the victim tried to resist -- say, by pushing the bully away -- then the entire pack would close in, and together beat up the victim, to "teach him a lesson". The yard duty teachers would ignore this, usually, despite the fact it usually happened in the middle of the playground, in plain sight. A few times I was called in to talk to teachers or administrators, who asked me what I was doing to provoke bullies and how I thought I could change my behavior to stop provoking them. My mother insisted I was effeminate and disgusting and deserved to be bullied; my father was more sympathetic.
That was my experience at two elementary schools in wealthy suburbs. Later, we moved to a poor rural area, where there was considerably less bullying. At that school, teachers tended to respond promptly and intervene in bullying and fights to break them up. Zero tolerance for violence? Please, more of that.
I've long wondered if the behavior of kids in wealthy suburbs was the result of their being trained to be sociopaths, to suit their future social roles as managers and professionals.
People can't be blamed for failing to read the full text of the proposition. For one thing, a recurring tactic in the California ballot initiative system is for opponents of one proposition to push their own proposition, with wording that is difficult for a lay person to distinguish from the other proposition, but with some clause that causes it to override the other proposition and nullify its intended effects. What typically happens is that voters will see two propositions that seem to have the same laudable purpose, and will vote for both of them; the deceptive proposition passes as well as the genuine proposition, and nullifies the genuine proposition.
I remember on one occasion in the 1990s, when there was a suite of propositions sponsored by environmental groups, and an opposing suite of propositions sponsored by industry groups. I felt that, as a good activist, I really ought to read through the propositions themselves. For one thing, I'm not a lawyer, and it's a rare person who enjoys spending an entire day reading through dense legalese. More importantly, however, even having done that, I still couldn't tell which proposition was which, except by checking what political groups supported which proposition.
In this case, it was more a matter of pushing a proposition that sounded good from the ballot summary. If someone had a proposition for providing free milk to orphans, it would pass, without most people noticing that on page 35 of the text of the proposition, it called for the purchase of milk contaminated with depleted uranium.
Most people headed to the polls, I expect, with a firm decision about which candidate for president they would support, but little idea of any other issues that would see on the ballot. This is a problem with how our elections work: I doubt any media outlet spent five seconds discussing who was running for the community college board, but that sort of local issue is one in which an individual vote is much more meaningful than a vote for president.
In the last few years, some major social media service providers have been pushing for "real names" policies. Most notably, Google has been doing this. This has been a big controversy with Google+. Google's plan with Google+ was to use it as the basis for an identity authentication system. Part of the privacy threat I see with Prop 35 is that social media services will use it as an excuse to enforce "real names" policies, claiming that it's just too difficult to check whether a pseudonym is a new alias for a registered sex offender, so no one should be allowed to use pseudonyms. That would be a significant blow to free speech on the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not even a plausible lie. It doesn't take billions of dollars and years of work to grep the phone book for a short list of numbers.
You're clearly not following the same people I follow on Twitter.
Oh, and how did it become a "generic pejorative"? From bigoted thugs, calling out details of one's personal appearance as evidence that they were gay, and therefore should be beaten.
That's my memory of high school in the late 80s. And college in the 90s. And, come to think of it, some incidents I've seen in the last month.
Yes, it will stop working. It's only because Google Talk is based on XMPP that third-party chat clients can work with it.
I was puzzled by the image, the first time I saw the regular XKCD page -- I didn't see the point. So I looked at Explain XKCD, and found out it that the image was being updated periodically. I checked in again later, and saw that it was basically an animated movie, which is easily missed if you look at just one static image. The thing is, there's no point to watching an animation going up, one frame at a time, over months. You're not going to get any special insights that way that you can't get when it's completed, by watching the whole thing. You could presumably go back over individual frames at that point if you want to do a close analysis of it. But there's not enough to go on yet to make sense of it.
From what I've seen of this series so far, I'm guessing it will turn out to have some meaning that can be fully explained in a sentence or two.
There's a trend in entertainment of measuring out some serial narrative, one tiny fragment at a time, and encouraging the development of a fanbase that will analyze each succeeding fragment. This happens with Webcomics, and augmented reality games, as well as with series of computer games, series of novels, and television series. While there's no shortage of bunk that appears in the fanbase's theorizing, you'll inevitably see theories emerge that are far more interesting than what the writer originally had in mind. Inevitably, the fanbase will end up burned out and disappointed.
At some point, people need to learn to develop the self-respect to just stop hitting refresh to find out what the answer is to the enigma. Just check in again in a few months, when it's all over. It'll probably seem quite clever or interesting for the minute or two it takes to watch the whole thing.
Windows phones are no simpler than iPhones or Android phones.
Good to know.
Well said. I tried to make similar points, but you explained them much more thoroughly and clearly.
In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis analyzes this at length: that in most of the world, the rich live in urban centers, and the poor have great difficulty affording housing in urban centers. The trouble is, of course, the urban centers are where all the jobs are. So, there are all sorts of messy, quasi-legal and illegal housing arrangements. It's quite common for people to have to pay rent to sleep on sidewalks, for example.
It's relatively recently that housing patterns in the US have started shifting to match those of the rest of the world.
Of course, many forms of work can be performed from anywhere, provided there's access to high-bandwidth communication, which would significantly ease the burden on many people to find affordable housing. But that rather brings us back to the problem illustrated in the original article.
Then you don't understand poverty.
Conservatives used to occasionally kick up a fuss about "unfunded mandates". Poor people have to deal with those all the time. One unfunded mandate is that Internet access is a practical requirement for participation in contemporary society. If you don't have Web access, you can't search for jobs or apply for them, or fill out legally mandatory paperwork, or do your homework.
As we all know, web-enabled devices are bargains, because they enable access to many different forms of communication and entertainment. I remember a furor erupting when a local newspaper, for an article about long-term unemployment showed a photo of a family in a one-room apartment. There was a table, with a smartphone on it. There were a few chairs, and some blankets and pillows on the floor, and no other furniture; no television, no other telephone, nothing. Yet people complained they couldn't really be poor, because they had a smartphone.
And yes, McDonalds is bad food, and overpriced. Try visiting a poor urban neighborhood sometime. It's a major problem that low-income neighborhoods frequently lack grocery stores, that the only food sources within a few miles are corner stores with overpriced convenience foods and fast food restaurants.
The ASUS RT-N66U's stock firmware prominently features this as an option (though I'd recommend replacing the stock firmware with RMerlin's customized version that includes OpenVPN).
I have a router that allows for setting multiple SSIDs and for setting the access rules, so I set up an SSID of openwireless.org a few months ago, with no access to my LAN but otherwise unrestricted access. I live in a dense urban area, near a heavily-trafficked shopping and dining area. I get a dozen or so unique MACs connecting to the open WiFi a day. They usually just connect for a minute or two. The increase in bandwidth usage has been negligible: less than 1%.
I haven't checked exactly what they're connecting to, but it looks a lot to me like they're just checking Google Maps, and no one is downloading porn.
Hear, hear.
The degree of cowardice in this thread is astonishing.
Science has fed the world with an unbelievable array of giant, hearty and delicious foods. It's called agriculture, and it was invented 10,000 years ago.
Hunger and poverty are political weapons.
Look at a globe that shows elevations, and notice how there's a nearly continuous belt of plains around the northern hemisphere, that generally coincides with the range of latitudes with a range of temperatures optimal for growing grains. That's where the large-scale industrialized agriculture that feeds most of the human race occurs.
A global warming trend would shift that range of latitudes with optimal temperatures northward, where there is significantly less terrain suitable for industrialized agriculture. This would mean a significant reduction in agricultural production, and thus to famine and violent conflicts for control of food supplies. Humans probably wouldn't go extinct, but it would certainly be a tremendous disaster.
It depends upon how you define AI, I suppose. If you look at armed robots, Predator drones, and the interest in increasing the automation of these machines, I think you can see something that could become increasingly dangerous.
I suppose my response wasn't as direct as I thought it was. I do think I am basically agreeing with your point.
I was objecting to the common, "This will teach you to be tough, which is good for you in the long run", which I thought I read implied in tbird81's comment. Though that may be a misreading of tbird81's comment, on reflection.
Right. If you want a fighting chance, you've got to put the bully down and out before he gets any help.
The first stage of the bully's attack was encircling the victim with his pack. So, no, putting the bully down was never a possibility.
The bully will then knock it off... around that adult.
That's already a significant improvement.
Furthermore, in my experience of bullying, the bullies counted on the indifference of adults, and occasionally, tacit encouragement. On most occasions when I asked for help from an adult, the response was, "Shut up, you little faggot." (Incidentally, I don't believe I'd worked out my sexual orientation when I was eight.) I seriously doubt the bullies would have been so confident had adults intervened with any consistency. Of course, it's classic for bullies to threaten retaliation if the victim complains and a parent is informed, but that actually was relatively effective, at least in the case of parents who disapproved of bullying.
I totally agree.
My experience of early elementary school was that the bullies were actually encouraged by many of the teachers and administrators, and I was explicitly blamed for "inciting" them.
We live in a cruelly hierarchical society, in which victim-blaming is extremely common.
Not mine. One good punch to the bully, and they'll call out to their pack, and they'll all beat you until you're bleeding and can't cry out anymore.
It's far more effective if an adult simply walks over and tells the bully to knock it off.
I keep thinking that one of the conceptual errors people frequently make is to confuse what makes a species tougher, in the sense of natural selection, with what makes an individual stronger. If you see a tree growing from a crevice on a sheer cliff, you know that's a pretty tough species of tree. But that's not a strong tree. It would have been a much stronger tree if it had grown in ideal conditions.
We're not getting eaten by sabre-toothed tigers anymore. We need people who are strong -- as in, creative, empathetic, mutually supportive -- far more than we need people who are tough.
We're homeschooling my younger stepson. It was becoming clear that elementary school was simply a waste of his time, even when he was attending a progressive private school (with a generous tuition assistance program). He learns more efficiently on his own initiative. We live in an urban area, one in which there's a fairly substantial community of homeschoolers who coordinate activity, and of course there's the Internet. I'd say he has far more social interaction than I did at his age, both with other children and with adults.
From everything I've heard about modern educational theory, elementary school is pretty much pointless, and I'm increasingly dubious about the structure of later stages of formal education. I took classes on programming and system administration, and that prompted me to study specific topics that I wouldn't have, otherwise -- but, most of what I know about those subjects, I knew from tinkering with Linux on my own desktop, and most of the topics I studied that I wouldn't have on my own initiative, have proven to be obsolete or irrelevant to both my personal and my professional work. Meanwhile, I'm watching my ten-year-old, rapidly learning the ins and outs of package management and system administration, because of his interest in Minecraft.
The main problem with homeschooling, in general, is that I think it's relatively unusual for most people families to be able to ensure there's an adult at home to supervise a younger child. Fortunately, my wife is in graduate school, and my work schedule gives me several weekdays off, so there's always an adult around in our household; we also have adult relatives nearby, as backup. But, I think more broadly yet, our social and economic organization is grossly irrational. We work far more hours than we ought to -- real wages have been static in the US for forty years, even as productivity has more than doubled, so I think we'd all be better off in many ways if our wages were increased, we worked fewer hours, and we did less useless crap that just wastes resources to prop up an irrational economic system based on perpetual expansion.
I hate hearing that bullshit.
In elementary school, the routine was that the bullies would stand in a circle around their victim, and the leader would start hitting the victim. If the victim just curled up in a fetal position and hid his face, then only one bully would hit him. If the victim tried to resist -- say, by pushing the bully away -- then the entire pack would close in, and together beat up the victim, to "teach him a lesson". The yard duty teachers would ignore this, usually, despite the fact it usually happened in the middle of the playground, in plain sight. A few times I was called in to talk to teachers or administrators, who asked me what I was doing to provoke bullies and how I thought I could change my behavior to stop provoking them. My mother insisted I was effeminate and disgusting and deserved to be bullied; my father was more sympathetic.
That was my experience at two elementary schools in wealthy suburbs. Later, we moved to a poor rural area, where there was considerably less bullying. At that school, teachers tended to respond promptly and intervene in bullying and fights to break them up. Zero tolerance for violence? Please, more of that.
I've long wondered if the behavior of kids in wealthy suburbs was the result of their being trained to be sociopaths, to suit their future social roles as managers and professionals.
People can't be blamed for failing to read the full text of the proposition. For one thing, a recurring tactic in the California ballot initiative system is for opponents of one proposition to push their own proposition, with wording that is difficult for a lay person to distinguish from the other proposition, but with some clause that causes it to override the other proposition and nullify its intended effects. What typically happens is that voters will see two propositions that seem to have the same laudable purpose, and will vote for both of them; the deceptive proposition passes as well as the genuine proposition, and nullifies the genuine proposition.
I remember on one occasion in the 1990s, when there was a suite of propositions sponsored by environmental groups, and an opposing suite of propositions sponsored by industry groups. I felt that, as a good activist, I really ought to read through the propositions themselves. For one thing, I'm not a lawyer, and it's a rare person who enjoys spending an entire day reading through dense legalese. More importantly, however, even having done that, I still couldn't tell which proposition was which, except by checking what political groups supported which proposition.
In this case, it was more a matter of pushing a proposition that sounded good from the ballot summary. If someone had a proposition for providing free milk to orphans, it would pass, without most people noticing that on page 35 of the text of the proposition, it called for the purchase of milk contaminated with depleted uranium.
Most people headed to the polls, I expect, with a firm decision about which candidate for president they would support, but little idea of any other issues that would see on the ballot. This is a problem with how our elections work: I doubt any media outlet spent five seconds discussing who was running for the community college board, but that sort of local issue is one in which an individual vote is much more meaningful than a vote for president.
In the last few years, some major social media service providers have been pushing for "real names" policies. Most notably, Google has been doing this. This has been a big controversy with Google+. Google's plan with Google+ was to use it as the basis for an identity authentication system. Part of the privacy threat I see with Prop 35 is that social media services will use it as an excuse to enforce "real names" policies, claiming that it's just too difficult to check whether a pseudonym is a new alias for a registered sex offender, so no one should be allowed to use pseudonyms. That would be a significant blow to free speech on the Internet.