Keep in mind: - He's over the age of 20 and has never tried to or had a chance to learn a language other than his mother tongue. - He's American (OK...that was redundant).
While I appreciate and admire your linguistic prowess, it would be nice (and make you look less of an arrogant ass) if you actually talked about why you had a problem with my time estimate instead of just listing your language skills off of your CV.
Remember, you can speak Finnish. That is not an easy language to learn! Other Romance languages would be simplistic by comparison.
And for everyone else who said that you can read academic papers after immersing in the local language in just 3-6 months: Anyone can do that - it takes a trivial amount of time to learn grammatical structures and rules of most languages. But can you read it without consulting a dictionary for every 3 words?
Most people who replied obviously has an above-average ability to learn and speak new languages. I may come as a surprise to most of you that this is not the case for most people - even science-minded individuals. I work with many native-born Americans (and one Brit) in the engineering field who have trouble forming complete and correct sentences in English.
To attain the fluency required to read academic papers in their respective native languages, you're looking at going to said country and going native for 10 years. 5 at the very minimum.
Wow. Warsaw has definitely changed since I visited over 10 years ago.
Costs in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. (Seattle / Portland) in comparison:
Average grocery basket for a family of four: 500 PLN (~150 USD) - for my family of 4, I pay about $100USD, but I bet your food tastes better.
Average home price in a quiet neighborhood not far from downtown: 8000 PLN/sq m (~230 USD/sq ft) - Comparable to Portland & Seattle, except we'll have to travel probably at least 20 minutes to downtown.
Meal at KFC: 30 PLN (~10 USD) - I've eaten there for about $6.
Meal at a good restaurant: 100 PLN (~30 USD) - Comparable to Portland & Seattle.
Comprehensive health insurance: 100 PLN/month (~30 USD/month) - For one person, comprehensive would cost $800-$1000 / month if your employer doesn't subsidize it. And I'm a healthy young man with no health issues.
Cable + high speed internet: 120 PLN/month (~38 USD/month) - I pay about $56USD/month.
Gasoline: 5 PLN/liter (~6 USD/gallon) - I paid $4.35/gallon this morning. Of course, there are hidden political and military costs which are not taken into account.
I'm sure his imagination and labor has single-handedly contributed at least several percentage points to the GDP of the United States from Hollywood exports.
In a previous aerospace job (we did C/C++, assembly), my technical manager, my supervisor, my lead, and my tester were all women. No, they were not from India or China either. They were just as good as anybody else there. But one important thing to note is that they were all near retirement age - this shows how software engineering was at one time more attractive to females as a career opportunity, but not so much today.
Although in all my other jobs since that one (early 2000's), all my coworkers have been overwhelmingly male.
I don't know who modded this funny. I don't know about eastern Washington, but Seattle's (that's in western Washington) gone through a cold snap lately. Today (6/12) is the first day the temperature went above 65 degrees. So far in June, I was told we're colder than Fairbanks and parts of Siberia.
I can't produce the source now, but I'm pretty sure I've heard testimony about how the administrators at Dachau told people in the town that they were burning bodies of dead German soldiers from the war (construction of the camp completed shortly before the time Germany invaded Poland).
Just like some Germans can willfully deny their active complicity in war atrocities, the camp administrators can just as well lie about the camps to an unknowing population.
So it sounds to me that the Nazis were not actively publicizing their work to the mass public, unlike the Japanese military.
Re:Whatever happened to actual economy cars?
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 1
Vast improvements have been made in fuel economy technologies. The Corolla is a Rolls Royce compared to the CRX in feature, safety, and ride comfort. This all of course means more weight - but still a very good balance with the close-to-40MPG metric.
It's widely known that Germans knew about the camps, and a significant number of everyday Germans were even instrumental in sending people to these camps. However, most assumed it was a hard labor camp, and had no idea about disposal mechanisms and such. There was no TV or Internet back then, so even if 10%-20% of Germans had known the whole truth, the rest of Germany would either not know or not believe it if they had heard it.
With the Japanese, it was different. Active reporting of killings and such were commonplace in the Japanese media. (the famous article of the contest to reach 100 beheadings between 2 soldiers in Nanking comes to mind). Also, for about 50 years prior to the war, hundreds of thousands of Korean (and some Chinese) laborers were forcefully brought to Japan as cheap labor during the Korean peninsula occupation, so all the knowledge of Japanese atrocities in their former colonial holdings were not kept secret - the Japanese general public just mostly believed that they were above that.
You make very good observations and arguments, but then I hope you realize that the statistics you quote do not help your arguments at all - that the Japanese have enshrined over 1,000 convicted war criminals at one location alone. Or that 30% of Filipinos (that's about 30 million Filipinos) do not see Japanese influence in the world as favorable.
I've had somebody tell me that over 40% of Japanese oppose prime minister Koizumi's visit to the shrine, but that leaves over 50% that does support it. Granted, their educational system is as propagandistic as most other nations', so I'll write that off to mere ignorance on their people's part. There is nothing wrong with visiting the war dead in the shrine, but they have rejected suggestions to move the questionable individuals (the war criminals) to another location which is really the core of this can of worms. Actions speak much louder than words, in this case.
An interesting aspect of the Japanese surrender to the Americans is that MacArthur prevented Hirohito from being tried in a war criminals tribunal. This meant more to the Japanese people at the time than many realize - historians have speculated that the number of mass suicides from the grief of the emperor's "face loss" amongst the Japanese populace would have been significant. Especially during that era, the emperor is revered by the general public in the same, if not higher, status as the king in Thailand. In other words, Americans had already bought themselves many a brownie points with the Japanese people by just sparing their emperor from any tragic embarrassment (as well as let Hirohito keep his traditional claim of divinity, which is really what counts). They had never expected the white devils to be so lenient and accommodating to them, especially after what they had been taught (of course, now we know there are strategic motives to befriending Japan in such a manner).
But in the end - I mostly agree with your point that governments take advantage of raw nerves and channel anger away from their errors and incompetencies.
If you think SE Asians are not still pissed at the Japanese, talk to older Filipinos sometime. You'll get an earful. Of course people in SE Asia are not as emotional about the Japanese in WW2 - other than the Philippines, SE Asia was relatively untouched compared to northeast Asia. Taiwan had already been fully occupied by Japan for 50 years prior to the war, so most of the populace had been pacified and assimilated by then (my Taiwanese in-laws can speak Japanese much better than Taiwanese).
Japan is not just culturally popular in Taiwan. Its culture is a main driving force all over East Asia, without exception. Japan's plan to wait it out has worked the way it was supposed to - the older people who lived through or have heard about the war are dead or are very old. Young people today hold no such grudges, and slurp up Totoro stuffed animals just as well.
I don't see why it's surprising that Chinese and Koreans are still sore about Japan. To this day, Japan's high-ranking officials have paid both personal and state visits to shrines containing memorials to convicted WW2 war criminals. If a German chancellor was to humbly visit Hitler's birthplace, that would certainly be seen as an unspeakable act. If Nazi Germany was in power today, would you also suggest the Jews of the world to "forgive" them as well?
The interesting thing is - the latest round of negative feelings toward Japan was not instigated by the Chinese government (although they certainly didn't work very hard to calm their citizens). Conversely, the Chinese government would rather not stir up any raw feelings because Japan is now a much more integral trading partner. Ironically, it was the freedom of information which let the average Chinese read about these war criminal shrine visits in Japan, or when naive Westerners shoot their mouths off about China.
It would certainly suck if you were hypothetically an individual who lived in a community where charitable foundations were unfunded or underfunded (Points #1 and #2), was injured to the point where you are no longer able to produce income (Point #3), and has no family or friends (Point #4).
I certainly hope there's an option #5 out there...
Re:Whatever happened to actual economy cars?
on
The SUV Is Dethroned
·
· Score: 1
My wife's 2005 Corolla gets 40MPG. It's auto, with AC, and it's very comfortable on long drives (more than the Yaris, I'd imagine). It's $15k when we got it. Last I looked, the 2009 has 0% financing and it's not too much more than $15k.
Unless I was super rich, I wouldn't drive a nice car in Europe. Especially in southern France, Spain, and Italy, they park so closely together that when people back out of their spaces, they will literally bump into cars in front and behind them in an effort to slightly move them away. Every car has a scratched-up bumper over there.
I just sold 2 cars recently on Craigslist. One '98 Jeep Grand Cherokee w/ only 40k miles (it was driven by an old old lady in a small town) and a '99 Camry with 90k miles. The Cherokee cost $38,000 (very fully loaded) and the Camry cost $9,000 (used).
Guess which one was sold for $1k above Blue Book and which one sold for $1k below.
And we wonder why everything's going over to India...
I mean...there's a reason why Indians eat only with their right hand...
I kid. I kid. I have some friends in the backpacking community and they've had to...improvise during shortages of toilet paper. Some of them even began to prefer the non-abrasive feel of not using toilet paper.
Lawyers work even more insane hours than engineers - at least the ones that you're referring to that make the big bucks. Your average humble straight-out-of-school variety starts at maybe $40-$50k. Big salaries exist only if you make it into a big firm or a big corp. Ditto crazy hours for the accountants that make the big salaries.
I second the other replier's call for pharmacy school. Two years of undergrad, 3-4 years of Pharm.D. program (6 years total after high school). I have 5 cousins who just finished the program. 35 hours a week. $20k-50k sign on bonus (one even was given a 5-series BMW). Frequent dinners at Ruth's Chris while you're an undergrad, courtesy of pushy pharm salesmen. $110,000 starting salary for essentially doing two things - looking up drug interactions on a computer screen and verifying with the insurance company on the phone (if you work retail like Walgreens). You don't even need to count pills anymore - some other schmuck does it for you (and they get paid $28/hr to do it - and we wonder why American health care costs so much?)
Slashdot Mirror
Just go to any home owners' association meeting in any American suburb, and you'll see them in droves.
Keep in mind:
- He's over the age of 20 and has never tried to or had a chance to learn a language other than his mother tongue.
- He's American (OK...that was redundant).
While I appreciate and admire your linguistic prowess, it would be nice (and make you look less of an arrogant ass) if you actually talked about why you had a problem with my time estimate instead of just listing your language skills off of your CV.
Remember, you can speak Finnish. That is not an easy language to learn! Other Romance languages would be simplistic by comparison.
And for everyone else who said that you can read academic papers after immersing in the local language in just 3-6 months: Anyone can do that - it takes a trivial amount of time to learn grammatical structures and rules of most languages. But can you read it without consulting a dictionary for every 3 words?
Most people who replied obviously has an above-average ability to learn and speak new languages. I may come as a surprise to most of you that this is not the case for most people - even science-minded individuals. I work with many native-born Americans (and one Brit) in the engineering field who have trouble forming complete and correct sentences in English.
(Golf clap)
To attain the fluency required to read academic papers in their respective native languages, you're looking at going to said country and going native for 10 years. 5 at the very minimum.
I see them everyday on the Microsoft campus during lunch rush. They're usually surrounded by 12 male MS employees.
A couple years back, 2 of them got into a knife fight in a restaurant over a girl.
I'm sure his imagination and labor has single-handedly contributed at least several percentage points to the GDP of the United States from Hollywood exports.
In a previous aerospace job (we did C/C++, assembly), my technical manager, my supervisor, my lead, and my tester were all women. No, they were not from India or China either. They were just as good as anybody else there. But one important thing to note is that they were all near retirement age - this shows how software engineering was at one time more attractive to females as a career opportunity, but not so much today.
Although in all my other jobs since that one (early 2000's), all my coworkers have been overwhelmingly male.
I don't know who modded this funny. I don't know about eastern Washington, but Seattle's (that's in western Washington) gone through a cold snap lately. Today (6/12) is the first day the temperature went above 65 degrees. So far in June, I was told we're colder than Fairbanks and parts of Siberia.
Well, McCain did get his driver's license before his wife was born...
I can't produce the source now, but I'm pretty sure I've heard testimony about how the administrators at Dachau told people in the town that they were burning bodies of dead German soldiers from the war (construction of the camp completed shortly before the time Germany invaded Poland).
Just like some Germans can willfully deny their active complicity in war atrocities, the camp administrators can just as well lie about the camps to an unknowing population.
So it sounds to me that the Nazis were not actively publicizing their work to the mass public, unlike the Japanese military.
Vast improvements have been made in fuel economy technologies. The Corolla is a Rolls Royce compared to the CRX in feature, safety, and ride comfort. This all of course means more weight - but still a very good balance with the close-to-40MPG metric.
I would have to disagree with you on this one.
It's widely known that Germans knew about the camps, and a significant number of everyday Germans were even instrumental in sending people to these camps. However, most assumed it was a hard labor camp, and had no idea about disposal mechanisms and such. There was no TV or Internet back then, so even if 10%-20% of Germans had known the whole truth, the rest of Germany would either not know or not believe it if they had heard it.
With the Japanese, it was different. Active reporting of killings and such were commonplace in the Japanese media. (the famous article of the contest to reach 100 beheadings between 2 soldiers in Nanking comes to mind). Also, for about 50 years prior to the war, hundreds of thousands of Korean (and some Chinese) laborers were forcefully brought to Japan as cheap labor during the Korean peninsula occupation, so all the knowledge of Japanese atrocities in their former colonial holdings were not kept secret - the Japanese general public just mostly believed that they were above that.
You make very good observations and arguments, but then I hope you realize that the statistics you quote do not help your arguments at all - that the Japanese have enshrined over 1,000 convicted war criminals at one location alone. Or that 30% of Filipinos (that's about 30 million Filipinos) do not see Japanese influence in the world as favorable.
I've had somebody tell me that over 40% of Japanese oppose prime minister Koizumi's visit to the shrine, but that leaves over 50% that does support it. Granted, their educational system is as propagandistic as most other nations', so I'll write that off to mere ignorance on their people's part. There is nothing wrong with visiting the war dead in the shrine, but they have rejected suggestions to move the questionable individuals (the war criminals) to another location which is really the core of this can of worms. Actions speak much louder than words, in this case.
An interesting aspect of the Japanese surrender to the Americans is that MacArthur prevented Hirohito from being tried in a war criminals tribunal. This meant more to the Japanese people at the time than many realize - historians have speculated that the number of mass suicides from the grief of the emperor's "face loss" amongst the Japanese populace would have been significant. Especially during that era, the emperor is revered by the general public in the same, if not higher, status as the king in Thailand. In other words, Americans had already bought themselves many a brownie points with the Japanese people by just sparing their emperor from any tragic embarrassment (as well as let Hirohito keep his traditional claim of divinity, which is really what counts). They had never expected the white devils to be so lenient and accommodating to them, especially after what they had been taught (of course, now we know there are strategic motives to befriending Japan in such a manner).
But in the end - I mostly agree with your point that governments take advantage of raw nerves and channel anger away from their errors and incompetencies.
If you think SE Asians are not still pissed at the Japanese, talk to older Filipinos sometime. You'll get an earful. Of course people in SE Asia are not as emotional about the Japanese in WW2 - other than the Philippines, SE Asia was relatively untouched compared to northeast Asia. Taiwan had already been fully occupied by Japan for 50 years prior to the war, so most of the populace had been pacified and assimilated by then (my Taiwanese in-laws can speak Japanese much better than Taiwanese).
Japan is not just culturally popular in Taiwan. Its culture is a main driving force all over East Asia, without exception. Japan's plan to wait it out has worked the way it was supposed to - the older people who lived through or have heard about the war are dead or are very old. Young people today hold no such grudges, and slurp up Totoro stuffed animals just as well.
I don't see why it's surprising that Chinese and Koreans are still sore about Japan. To this day, Japan's high-ranking officials have paid both personal and state visits to shrines containing memorials to convicted WW2 war criminals. If a German chancellor was to humbly visit Hitler's birthplace, that would certainly be seen as an unspeakable act. If Nazi Germany was in power today, would you also suggest the Jews of the world to "forgive" them as well?
The interesting thing is - the latest round of negative feelings toward Japan was not instigated by the Chinese government (although they certainly didn't work very hard to calm their citizens). Conversely, the Chinese government would rather not stir up any raw feelings because Japan is now a much more integral trading partner. Ironically, it was the freedom of information which let the average Chinese read about these war criminal shrine visits in Japan, or when naive Westerners shoot their mouths off about China.
It would certainly suck if you were hypothetically an individual who lived in a community where charitable foundations were unfunded or underfunded (Points #1 and #2), was injured to the point where you are no longer able to produce income (Point #3), and has no family or friends (Point #4).
I certainly hope there's an option #5 out there...
My wife's 2005 Corolla gets 40MPG. It's auto, with AC, and it's very comfortable on long drives (more than the Yaris, I'd imagine). It's $15k when we got it. Last I looked, the 2009 has 0% financing and it's not too much more than $15k.
I learned the drive when gas was $0.89USD per gallon. Even then, the teacher told me to always drive like there's an egg sitting under the gas pedal.
Unless I was super rich, I wouldn't drive a nice car in Europe. Especially in southern France, Spain, and Italy, they park so closely together that when people back out of their spaces, they will literally bump into cars in front and behind them in an effort to slightly move them away. Every car has a scratched-up bumper over there.
I just sold 2 cars recently on Craigslist. One '98 Jeep Grand Cherokee w/ only 40k miles (it was driven by an old old lady in a small town) and a '99 Camry with 90k miles. The Cherokee cost $38,000 (very fully loaded) and the Camry cost $9,000 (used).
Guess which one was sold for $1k above Blue Book and which one sold for $1k below.
They didn't call it Arizona back in McCain's time. It was known as New Mexico Territory back in those days.
And we wonder why everything's going over to India...
I mean...there's a reason why Indians eat only with their right hand...
I kid. I kid. I have some friends in the backpacking community and they've had to...improvise during shortages of toilet paper. Some of them even began to prefer the non-abrasive feel of not using toilet paper.
...wives are also getting fatter. Scientists have attributed this swelling to an unexplained allergic reaction to gold and diamonds.
Look at the top of your window:
"The Most Annoying Software Out There - Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5"
I didn't say it - the browser did!
Lawyers work even more insane hours than engineers - at least the ones that you're referring to that make the big bucks. Your average humble straight-out-of-school variety starts at maybe $40-$50k. Big salaries exist only if you make it into a big firm or a big corp. Ditto crazy hours for the accountants that make the big salaries.
I second the other replier's call for pharmacy school. Two years of undergrad, 3-4 years of Pharm.D. program (6 years total after high school). I have 5 cousins who just finished the program. 35 hours a week. $20k-50k sign on bonus (one even was given a 5-series BMW). Frequent dinners at Ruth's Chris while you're an undergrad, courtesy of pushy pharm salesmen. $110,000 starting salary for essentially doing two things - looking up drug interactions on a computer screen and verifying with the insurance company on the phone (if you work retail like Walgreens). You don't even need to count pills anymore - some other schmuck does it for you (and they get paid $28/hr to do it - and we wonder why American health care costs so much?)