This is a very common assertion and belief of Americans, and is highly related to our general denigration of minority languages in our area.
This isn't a refutation. Also the "denigration of minority languages" doesn't imply a bad thing, and if it does it needs some backing facts as to why this could be bad.
Correlation does not indicate causation. We always had a common language, because the people moving here had a consistent language. We also were colonized in a time when history had words and the advancement of language was stayed somewhat by people being exposed to not just their parents' and grandparents' speech, but also those of older generations.
Correlation CAN indicate causation, it just doesn't necessarily always do so. There is a correlation between how many Cheetos I eat and my waistline, this correlation implies causation, and indeed shows it.
We really didn't have a single linguistic heritage. The US is formed of many different cultural territories (with individual linguistic traditions) that were gobbled up. The area in which I live was mainly Spanish speaking (and various native dialects) before the US gobbled it up. These areas could have, as in other cases, remained linguistically distinct.
There may a historical reason for our love of a single language (decreasingly so, now that about half of all official communications are in Spanish here), but this doesn't disprove that this tradition has remained in play for so long because of the ease of using a single language over multiple languages.
The origin can be caused by one thing, and the impetus by another.
This is why I quit playing pen and paper RPGs. I had a series of awesome groups (meaning inventive, and somewhat strange), and then we all got old, moved, and generally have very rare opportunities to see each other in person, much less have a decent game. Later I tried some other groups, and they were generally completely serious about it, and never went for strange solutions just to see what happens and/or piss of the DM. It was very much like playing WoW, more of a fantasy combat simulator than a role playing game.
But then again when I was a kid, our neighbor used to work for TSR and was close friends with Gary Gygax. He owned every single book (up until 2E, being that this was the 80s), he was the best DM I'm ever had, which, I suppose, is justifiable. I'm actually still shocked that the other parents in our group let a bunch of 8-14 year olds play DND all day. Oddly we also had someone on our block who, at one time, worked for Steve Jackson Games, and was selling pretty the whole company catalog at a yard sale. Why the same silly Phoenix suburb would attract so many RPG nerds, I have no clue.
I tried to get back into it in college (I went late, well into my 20s), but it was a terrible flop. The only people we could get to play were drug addled goths/punks/subculture-of-the-day (who had no concept of the game: "I shoot it with atomic FIRE!" "Dude, your a level one fighter" "this sucks, I like pot") and semi-autistic engineering students who really didn't quite excel at the creativity bit of the game that makes it fun. Most random gaming store match-ups aren't much better.
Should we automatically benefit people like me, who didn't even have to exert talent or effort to acquire a particular dialect, accent, or register just because of the circumstances of my birth and upbringing?
Complicated question. My instant reaction is "of course not!", but with some thought I realize that the answer is more along the lines of "yes."
Of every society that ever existed there has been a group of people who gets default privilege. This might be a nasty fact, but I think it is an inevitable and necessary feature of a functioning society, which is why this particular mode is universal. A functioning society cannot accommodate everyone's unique social characteristics. A functioning society depends on communications. Communications and diversity (linguistic, mainly) are inversely correlated. Thus we must draw a line between the ability to easily communicate, and what level of diversity we want (which is also necessary to a healthy society). Thus there is going to be a balance, we must sacrifice a bit of public diversity for communications.
A single language of communications is VASTLY superior to multiple languages when looking at society as a functioning entity. As a result we have a single common language which gets preference. This isn't as bad as it sounds though, since basically all other groups have the ability to learn this language in order to better participate in society. So while you may have an initial advantage, the disadvantage of others is optional and a matter of choice.
This isn't tyrannical, since we're not talking of BANNING the language of others, but merely having a single language for public business.
Pfff... I could be the laziest most worthless piece of shit in the world, but I would still speak the dialect of power used in the United States... because I was born and raised with an advantage.
Advantage doesn't mean much in this context. Pretty much all of the people I know where were born here, regardless of their income bracket or original ethnicity speak Standard English well. I grew up in a very poor, mostly Hispanic, neighborhood, and pretty much all of the friends I had (from the demographics a good mix of white, black, and Hispanic) spoke compliant standard English. The only people who didn't speak it well were the (mostly Mexican) illegal, and very recent (mostly Eastern European) immigrants legal immigrants. Their children, on the other hand, mostly spoke good standard English (often better than most of the established people, since they took it more serious).
Also, AAVE isn't like Spanish, or Italian, or a real traditional language. Often parents of people who speak AAVE DON'T speak it, or anything resembling it. As I recounted earlier, and further down, in the suburb that my dad lived in, there was a black guy from the south who lacked even a high school diploma, who spoke very good English. He used to yell at his children for speaking AAVE, since they were trying to sound uneducated in spite of going to one of the best high schools in the area, and being solidly middle class. He hated the fact that he worked so hard to elevate himself, and his children were willfully trying to act stupid, despite the opportunity not to.
AAVE is a choice, so we shouldn't treat it the same as a genuine linguistic "disadvantage" (for lack of a better term). The people I knew who spoke only Spanish didn't have a choice, they grew up in a country that spoke Spanish, and in households where it was the only language spoken. Then they moved to a country where it is frowned upon. Most AAVE don't have this story. Their parents spoke the language of the land, and they decided to rebel against it for purely sociological reasons. This is a choice, and choices have consequences.
Another problem, to continue to ramble; where do we draw the line? If I am now expected to understand AAVE, then am I also expected to know Spanish, German, Italian, Creole, French Canadian, 4Chan slang, anything that anyone may somed
In the neighborhood I used to live in, there was an older black guy down the road. He was a truck driver lacking even most of a high school education. He spoke standard English better than most of the other people on the block. His pre-teen children (just the boys, not the girl) spoke "AAVE", and you could hear him screaming at them from time to time to act educated, he hated the fact that he worked hard to get where he was (coming from a very poor southern background) and his children sounded like they strived to be an "underclass", or poor idiotic street thugs.
I have two points with this anecdote, not speaking AAVE isn't related to higher education or income. Second being that it isn't like standard English, where it is a language passed down generationally. Most speakers of AAVE don't have parents who speak AAVE. Its nothing more than a youth culture thing gone wrong, and now for some reason we're all supposed to ignore the fact that it is an invented language that has only existed for a generation, and is largely based on a single youth culture. If, in a generation, we decide that text-speak (ami rite?), and LOLcat are valid languages, and we're discriminatory for not speaking it. I for one welcome the future language of the upcoming 4Chan-Americans.
I wish I could take credit for it, but the linguistic term is "language of power" or "dialect of power".
For some strange reason, every time I hear terms like this I picture some silly Sociology class and a bunch of random "radical" students pointing their fingers and telling me that I, a white American guy, am the cause of all their problems (and conveniently ignoring the fact that my background is probably more wretched than theirs).
Poking around on Google proves this further, since I can't actually find a academic, operational, definition of these terms. The ony credible reference is a footnote on Wikipedia, quoting Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. II: A Thousand Plateaus., which is a book I wouldn't take to be an objective critique of much of anything. Granted I only read portions, but my previous experience with Deleuze and Guattari (I somehow manged to choke down Anti-oedipus, to zero effect except realizing that they try to hard to write like Heidegger, sans the intellectual backing, as if mere obscurity makes them relevant).
Clearly individuals are better off learning the language of power, but that should never justify the connotation that the language of power is "better". "More useful" perhaps, but I would categorically reject any depictions of an ethically or aesthetically superior position.
Ahh.. cultural relativism... I would say that "more useful" equals "better" in most circumstances. If you decided to wander around speaking only pig-latin, am I really expected to weigh that equally with someone who actually decided to work for some competence in communications?
Language is only about communications. A language that fails at this task (in the context in which it is used), is worse than a language that is more efficient at this task. Thus a language that communicates better is... well... better. Utility is all that really matters when it comes to language.
Demanding that a subculture learn SAE, is the same as demanding that every subculture of America be, or at least practice Christianity.
This may be true. But the subcultures who refuse to learn SAE shouldn't be allowed to complain about the consequences either. They refuse to learn to speak the language of the land, and thus the consequences are all theirs. It isn't my job (or anyones) to be required to learn every language spoken by every obscure social group either.
I live in a state with two languages (Arizona), and I don't speak a bit of Spanish, and have no desire to learn it. Do I get the right to feel outrage when I can't get decent service in establishments in the deeply Hispanic areas of my city because of my choice to take Latin and German instead of Spanish?
Well that's what you get from English majors over analyzing everything. They want to find meaning where there isn't.
As a past philosophy major (we make English majors look downright practical): where is there any innate meaning that exists previous to analysis? Meaning is largely a cultural thing, and a deep a priori property of things (like, say, mass, or charge).
Portal, of course, was never created to be some deep statement.
A lot of things we take as "deep" weren't created as such. Often the meaning we ascribe to things exist completely independent of its creator's wishes. This isn't an "English major" thing, this is a general attribute of humanity. Its something we do naturally, and constantly.
They read in to everything, even when there's nothing there.
Actually the whole "deconstruction" thing has a some validity (not as much as English majors and sociologists think, but still some). Authors, for example, don't write in a vacuum, they are informed by the society they exist in. Some social context is bound to be fossilized in the work, whether the author intended it or not. We read Homer to understand Greek culture, even if Homer (probably) never intended this. Why not play Portal to understand modern culture, then?
Mind, I picked up most of this out of osmosis, I was doing the "harder" bits of philosophy, philosophy of science and epistemology, most of this "post-modern" brouhaha strikes me as silly, but that isn't saying that there isn't a little, tiny, bit to it.
Oddly, I've never had a professor require the online, registration required, stuff. Granted a major part of my major didn't involve actual textbooks (philosophy, so around 50 little overpriced books as opposed to 5 giant overpriced books), but still never actually had to use the registration or CDROM, or whatnot. Professors are often pretty forgiving of budgets.
For my research methodology class (dual majored psychology) the professor learned that text cost around $250+, and was a new edition so there was no used market (with an obligatory $50 "online content" addon), so she first got the class to pool funds to buy one book, so she could copy all the chapters she needed (around 25% of the book, and none of the online bits), learned from the legal department that her plan was evil, and just ditched the book completely. She made us read, and critique, twice as many actual research papers as before, and just used 100+ pages of old class notes and overheads. It was amusing, she asked why one student didn't get a book, learned the price, and actually said "fuck that".
She got in trouble with the administration several times that semester (especially for telling people to drop her class, because they were too stupid), and the fact that she didn't condone our using the copies of the previous book, as long as we did it at home, and were hush hush. I think she also kind of recommended piracy, she told us, very subtly, that SPSS has a trial for students, but there are unsubstantiated rumors of cracks that we would be very bad people for pursuing.
A slim chance in hell to up upgrade your GPU is better than no chance whatsoever, I suppose.
The lack of expandability is part of why I stopped buying macs. Upgrading a MacMini is one of the most annoying experiences I've suffered through (and I'm about to stick a new HDD in it next). I switched back to a PC about 4 years ago (after being Mac only for 5), and I've pretty much upgraded my whole machine, piece by piece, depending on what deals there are, and how ambitious I'm feeling.
To paraphrase something somebody wisely said in the previous thread about this topic, you don't need to model the electrons in the circuit of a machine to emulate an NES.
Except the NES is a mishmash of seemingly random bits and junky non-logical software. You might not need a model of the electrons, but you need the software too. I'm sure someone could, eventually, built a rough facsimile of the human brain, but lacking software you've built nothing but a pile of quivering Jello. Think of it as building an NES in hopes of playing some Duck Hunt, but being completely oblivious to how the cartridge works or interests with the rest of the hardware. Sure, you have an NES, but what good is it?
I don't think trial and error quite grabs it. How many connections, neurons, states, interactions does the human brain have? Cracking this by trial and error is analogous to cracking 1024bit encryption by running it through a random number generator. Barring finding an actual key to human-like functioning, we're going to be stuck.
This is the core of Meyers argument.
Someday this may be possible (barring anything other developments saying other wise), but not in 20 years. Probably not in our life times. Definitely not in Ray "The Singularity" Kurzweil's lifetime, dashing his depressingly desperate wish for personal immortality (and his terribly transparent wishful thinking).
Also, naive materialism is just that, naive. Saying that the "mind != the brain" does not mean one believes in some silly form of Cartesian dualism, or mysticism, or whatnot. Me saying the "brain != mind" is analogous to me saying "my computer != its applications". Mind is a sum of many parts, none of them particularly mystical, the innate, unmodified, brain being but one factor.
I have been guilty of that. But only for books I already own, and are sitting my giant "to read" pile. This to me is as great a sin as downloading MP3s from an album you already own. Meaning not one at all.
And, just like with music sharing, the industry has to actually favor authors over mere publishers before I start taking the "think of the content producers!" argument seriously. Direct your starving author/musician rant at the industry, they screw content producers FAR more than a bunch of kids who may never have actually given any money at all.
On the other hand, I also see book piracy just like music piracy, if you enjoy it you should go out of your way to ensure it continues.
Though if they start putting ads in ebooks, I will pirate every single one of them with no problem whatsoever. You try to screw me, I will try to screw you.
Go for Chromium instead. It's Chrome, but missing the Google tracking and branding, but other than that it is just as functional as Chrome. Perhaps more so at time, since its a nightly.
If you look at any article that mentions negative effects of ritalin there's a good chance that it is either presented by or at least funded by the church of scientology. You might have to dig a bit to find the link though.
Either that or, like all drugs, it has a down side.
I'll go for the simpler explanation, personally.
I'm deeply skeptical of most of modern clinical psychiatry, and diagnostics, and am not a Scientologist.
ne of my great regrets in life is that I was not diagnoses as a child. If I could have started treatment before high school my life would have turned out so much differently. I don't regret where I have ended up, but I can recognize all the potential I once had to go so much further that my behavior sabotaged.
One of my greatest regrets in life is that was mis-diagnosed with ADHD has a child. I got to spend around 5 years of school in decelerated classes, basically learning 4th grade reading, and 5th grade math over and over (despite being recommended for AP classes before the diagnosis) for around 4 years. Yes, I misbehaved ("acted out"), yes I was a pain in the ass, but this doesn't make a kid an ADD sufferer, or suffer from ANY mental illness. My neighbor had the same issues (he was two years older), and they stuck him in accelerated classes, he did fine. I had the same behaviors (and the same high IQ test scores), and got held back for years. Its arbitrary.
As for adult ADD, I'm skeptical. If you have a boring job, and a boring life, lacking in novelty and challenge your going to act... BORED. When I was a kid, I could sit around and read for 24 straight hours, completely dead to the world, same with drawing, etc... But classes made me climb up a wall, being forced to learn at the pace of the slowest children, and being penalized for having any slight sign of individuality and initiative, much less intellect. Why would the situation in adult life be any different?
Sitting in a cubicle for six hours a day is unnatural, its amazing we tolerate it at all.
Most modern emerging illnesses are nothing but a sign that something has switched, we are supposed to fit to society, and not visa versa as it should be. We subjugate the human condition to arbitrary social structures, this obviously causes tons of stress since our brain has not has the 100,000 to a million years needed to adapt to such hostile environments.
Instead of drugging ourselves and trying our damnest to fit in, perhaps we should take these "illnesses" as a sign that there is something wrong with our actual environment, and not us.
I kind of miss the unicorn vomit pages. It allows you to quickly judge the content as being completely worthless without having to actually spend any amount of time on the page.
Putting a SSD in place of a rotating hard drive in a laptop will make a huge difference in how you view your laptop
But is the improvement worth a 300% price increase? Thats my point, not that they are worthless, just that the amount of improvement isn't quite right for the price point yet.
Instead of sitting and waiting, and then waiting some more for things to happen or load in off of disk, it's basically instant.
On my Linux laptop, I haven't actually noticed much waiting. It isn't an issue. On my PC I've noticed a bit of churn on applications like Photoshop and Itunes. But SSD's haven't even got close to big/cheap enough to replace my primary drive (with 111GB of Windows, applications and games, all the media is on a separate drive already). I could by a 120GB SSD for $300 (as opposed to my $100 1TB drive), but I can't warrant the price, and in real life it would cost even more since I would want at least 200GB for growth room.
Sorry, perhaps not "chi", but "qi" (which I think is actually the same thing), from Wikipedia:
Health is explained as a state of balance between the yin and yang, with disease ascribed to either of these forces being unbalanced, blocked or stagnant. The yang force is the immaterial qi, a concept that is roughly translated as "vital energy". The yin counterpart is Blood, which is linked to but not identical with physical blood, and capitalized to distinguish the two. [emphasis mine]
This sounds a lot like woo.
It may have non-woo effects, and perhaps some practitioners have chopped out the woo, but there still is a bit of woo hiding in the corners.
Fellow Arizonan here... No surprise, I suppose it is almost impossible to not have illegal immigration on the mind living in this state. It seems EVERYTHING is about it these days. I found myself arguing with a gas station cashier about it the other day.
I would say a large part of the Republican turn around (to be cynical) is based off of grabbing the tea party votes. That and actually signing SB1070 suddenly turned Brewer into the most popular person in Arizona, and perhaps the nation, she went from a "meh" candidate to a guaranteed win.
McCain is still pretty much against any real reform. He's on the "close the border first, then worry about anything of consequence later" side of the debate. He doesn't say amnesty, but he has no plans to do anything about the illegal immigrants who are already here, which in my opinion amounts to the same thing.
Kucinich winning the White House would be awesome, but that will never happen. Look at the "socialism" FUD being shoveled at Obama, imagine if we had an actual liberal/progressive with socialist tendencies in office? The Tea party crowd might actually try for their anti-democratic (as in democracy) revolution. I was personally hoping that something strange would happen and we could have Kucinich and Ron Paul win. So they get to alternate being president and vice every year.
Spot on, but I generally try to be a bit less cynical. I think at least some of our politicos are genuinely convinced that they are doing the right thing. This doesn't make anything that they are doing right, obviously, but makes it a bit less depressing.
immigration
Oddly, I think this is one of the places where representing corporate interests above individual interests is strongest. The right (both politically, and individualistically) largely supports it keeps wages down and breaks unions. The left, politically, love it for the same reason, and for the ever-forthcoming, but never evident, wave of latino voters who will eventually lead them to comfortably safe power. Where the individuals on the left love it for naive ideological reasons ("woah man, imagine, like, a country without borders. Deep!").
The gay thing is just an ideological fog, like abortion, the 10 commandments, etc... though.
can't stand his music, but obviously I'm not his market;
From what I understand, he shares a market with Twilight; 13 year old girls and really creepy older women, mostly the latter.
There is something really pathetic about a 45 year old woman swooning over a boy younger than their own children. Or my girlfriends co-worker, a 50 year old woman with a twilight calender filled with the greasy haired guy (who did refer to him as "dreamy" when asked about it). I think this is the same class of women who obsess over Disney still. Spooky, spooky, social phenomena that.
And then, all you need is another $500,000 on promotion to differentiate yourself from the flood of other crappy garage band recordings. Creating music is and always was easy. Distributing music used to be difficult, but now it's easy. Advertising, making a name for yourself, and actually seeing any returns (financial or otherwise) from your distribution is still very difficult.
Not necessarily true. Well, it might be true if you really want to be a massively famous, rich, pop star; but it is completely false if you just want a decent fan base and a bit of respect.
Of the last 10 albums I purchased, not a single one of them was discovered via the radio (I don't listen/own one), nor through TV, nor through banner ads, etc... They were all discovered on Last.fm and MySpace. My favorite band (Giant Squid) hasn't even ever played where I live, but I still bought all of their albums after finding them on Last.fm, and pirating an album to see if I liked it.
Actually there is only one album I have bought in the last 5 or so years that is from an RIAA label (and I'm not intentionally boycotting), or other major label.
I doubt any of the bands I listen to are going to ascend into the next New Kids On The Block, or U2, but I also doubt that this is their aspiration.
Of my serious musician friends, they've all managed to gather a decent following from using nothing more than a busy live schedule, some rubber on the pavement, and MySpace. granted none of them have quit their day jobs, but this has never been the primary goal of music.
It isn't infinitely complex, it is just very complex. Its like people saying the Universe is infinitely large: it isn't, it just is bigger than you can easily imagine. Same with the brain, it isn't infinitely complex, just more complex than we can currently grasp.
Every psychic, futurist, and general prognosticator has some accurate predictions under their belts. But they have a far, far, greater body of failed predictions. We humans choose to look at the positive evidence while completely ignore the negative evidence.
Kurtzwell is the technologist's Edgar Cayce, worse, his motivations are almost completely apparent (and somewhat pathetic); he is scared of dying, scared to the point where he renders his own life into a hellish ritual of attempting futile immortality. His predictions are generally nothing more than wishful thinking, if they come true he can avoid death. That is the only motivation he has. But somehow the gullible among the tech crowd has latched on, and formed a quasi-cult around his "singularity" (which sounds like a living hell to me).
His singularity pretty much lines up with every eschatology in history.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a very common assertion and belief of Americans, and is highly related to our general denigration of minority languages in our area.
This isn't a refutation. Also the "denigration of minority languages" doesn't imply a bad thing, and if it does it needs some backing facts as to why this could be bad.
Correlation does not indicate causation. We always had a common language, because the people moving here had a consistent language. We also were colonized in a time when history had words and the advancement of language was stayed somewhat by people being exposed to not just their parents' and grandparents' speech, but also those of older generations.
Correlation CAN indicate causation, it just doesn't necessarily always do so. There is a correlation between how many Cheetos I eat and my waistline, this correlation implies causation, and indeed shows it.
We really didn't have a single linguistic heritage. The US is formed of many different cultural territories (with individual linguistic traditions) that were gobbled up. The area in which I live was mainly Spanish speaking (and various native dialects) before the US gobbled it up. These areas could have, as in other cases, remained linguistically distinct.
There may a historical reason for our love of a single language (decreasingly so, now that about half of all official communications are in Spanish here), but this doesn't disprove that this tradition has remained in play for so long because of the ease of using a single language over multiple languages.
The origin can be caused by one thing, and the impetus by another.
This is why I quit playing pen and paper RPGs. I had a series of awesome groups (meaning inventive, and somewhat strange), and then we all got old, moved, and generally have very rare opportunities to see each other in person, much less have a decent game. Later I tried some other groups, and they were generally completely serious about it, and never went for strange solutions just to see what happens and/or piss of the DM. It was very much like playing WoW, more of a fantasy combat simulator than a role playing game.
But then again when I was a kid, our neighbor used to work for TSR and was close friends with Gary Gygax. He owned every single book (up until 2E, being that this was the 80s), he was the best DM I'm ever had, which, I suppose, is justifiable. I'm actually still shocked that the other parents in our group let a bunch of 8-14 year olds play DND all day. Oddly we also had someone on our block who, at one time, worked for Steve Jackson Games, and was selling pretty the whole company catalog at a yard sale. Why the same silly Phoenix suburb would attract so many RPG nerds, I have no clue.
I tried to get back into it in college (I went late, well into my 20s), but it was a terrible flop. The only people we could get to play were drug addled goths/punks/subculture-of-the-day (who had no concept of the game: "I shoot it with atomic FIRE!" "Dude, your a level one fighter" "this sucks, I like pot") and semi-autistic engineering students who really didn't quite excel at the creativity bit of the game that makes it fun. Most random gaming store match-ups aren't much better.
Should we automatically benefit people like me, who didn't even have to exert talent or effort to acquire a particular dialect, accent, or register just because of the circumstances of my birth and upbringing?
Complicated question. My instant reaction is "of course not!", but with some thought I realize that the answer is more along the lines of "yes."
Of every society that ever existed there has been a group of people who gets default privilege. This might be a nasty fact, but I think it is an inevitable and necessary feature of a functioning society, which is why this particular mode is universal. A functioning society cannot accommodate everyone's unique social characteristics. A functioning society depends on communications. Communications and diversity (linguistic, mainly) are inversely correlated. Thus we must draw a line between the ability to easily communicate, and what level of diversity we want (which is also necessary to a healthy society). Thus there is going to be a balance, we must sacrifice a bit of public diversity for communications.
A single language of communications is VASTLY superior to multiple languages when looking at society as a functioning entity. As a result we have a single common language which gets preference. This isn't as bad as it sounds though, since basically all other groups have the ability to learn this language in order to better participate in society. So while you may have an initial advantage, the disadvantage of others is optional and a matter of choice.
This isn't tyrannical, since we're not talking of BANNING the language of others, but merely having a single language for public business.
Pfff... I could be the laziest most worthless piece of shit in the world, but I would still speak the dialect of power used in the United States... because I was born and raised with an advantage.
Advantage doesn't mean much in this context. Pretty much all of the people I know where were born here, regardless of their income bracket or original ethnicity speak Standard English well. I grew up in a very poor, mostly Hispanic, neighborhood, and pretty much all of the friends I had (from the demographics a good mix of white, black, and Hispanic) spoke compliant standard English. The only people who didn't speak it well were the (mostly Mexican) illegal, and very recent (mostly Eastern European) immigrants legal immigrants. Their children, on the other hand, mostly spoke good standard English (often better than most of the established people, since they took it more serious).
Also, AAVE isn't like Spanish, or Italian, or a real traditional language. Often parents of people who speak AAVE DON'T speak it, or anything resembling it. As I recounted earlier, and further down, in the suburb that my dad lived in, there was a black guy from the south who lacked even a high school diploma, who spoke very good English. He used to yell at his children for speaking AAVE, since they were trying to sound uneducated in spite of going to one of the best high schools in the area, and being solidly middle class. He hated the fact that he worked so hard to elevate himself, and his children were willfully trying to act stupid, despite the opportunity not to.
AAVE is a choice, so we shouldn't treat it the same as a genuine linguistic "disadvantage" (for lack of a better term). The people I knew who spoke only Spanish didn't have a choice, they grew up in a country that spoke Spanish, and in households where it was the only language spoken. Then they moved to a country where it is frowned upon. Most AAVE don't have this story. Their parents spoke the language of the land, and they decided to rebel against it for purely sociological reasons. This is a choice, and choices have consequences.
Another problem, to continue to ramble; where do we draw the line? If I am now expected to understand AAVE, then am I also expected to know Spanish, German, Italian, Creole, French Canadian, 4Chan slang, anything that anyone may somed
Fhtagn?
In the neighborhood I used to live in, there was an older black guy down the road. He was a truck driver lacking even most of a high school education. He spoke standard English better than most of the other people on the block. His pre-teen children (just the boys, not the girl) spoke "AAVE", and you could hear him screaming at them from time to time to act educated, he hated the fact that he worked hard to get where he was (coming from a very poor southern background) and his children sounded like they strived to be an "underclass", or poor idiotic street thugs.
I have two points with this anecdote, not speaking AAVE isn't related to higher education or income. Second being that it isn't like standard English, where it is a language passed down generationally. Most speakers of AAVE don't have parents who speak AAVE. Its nothing more than a youth culture thing gone wrong, and now for some reason we're all supposed to ignore the fact that it is an invented language that has only existed for a generation, and is largely based on a single youth culture. If, in a generation, we decide that text-speak (ami rite?), and LOLcat are valid languages, and we're discriminatory for not speaking it. I for one welcome the future language of the upcoming 4Chan-Americans.
I wish I could take credit for it, but the linguistic term is "language of power" or "dialect of power".
For some strange reason, every time I hear terms like this I picture some silly Sociology class and a bunch of random "radical" students pointing their fingers and telling me that I, a white American guy, am the cause of all their problems (and conveniently ignoring the fact that my background is probably more wretched than theirs).
Poking around on Google proves this further, since I can't actually find a academic, operational, definition of these terms. The ony credible reference is a footnote on Wikipedia, quoting Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari's Capitalism and Schizophrenia, vol. II: A Thousand Plateaus., which is a book I wouldn't take to be an objective critique of much of anything. Granted I only read portions, but my previous experience with Deleuze and Guattari (I somehow manged to choke down Anti-oedipus, to zero effect except realizing that they try to hard to write like Heidegger, sans the intellectual backing, as if mere obscurity makes them relevant).
Clearly individuals are better off learning the language of power, but that should never justify the connotation that the language of power is "better". "More useful" perhaps, but I would categorically reject any depictions of an ethically or aesthetically superior position.
Ahh.. cultural relativism... I would say that "more useful" equals "better" in most circumstances. If you decided to wander around speaking only pig-latin, am I really expected to weigh that equally with someone who actually decided to work for some competence in communications?
Language is only about communications. A language that fails at this task (in the context in which it is used), is worse than a language that is more efficient at this task. Thus a language that communicates better is... well... better. Utility is all that really matters when it comes to language.
Demanding that a subculture learn SAE, is the same as demanding that every subculture of America be, or at least practice Christianity.
This may be true. But the subcultures who refuse to learn SAE shouldn't be allowed to complain about the consequences either. They refuse to learn to speak the language of the land, and thus the consequences are all theirs. It isn't my job (or anyones) to be required to learn every language spoken by every obscure social group either.
I live in a state with two languages (Arizona), and I don't speak a bit of Spanish, and have no desire to learn it. Do I get the right to feel outrage when I can't get decent service in establishments in the deeply Hispanic areas of my city because of my choice to take Latin and German instead of Spanish?
Well that's what you get from English majors over analyzing everything. They want to find meaning where there isn't.
As a past philosophy major (we make English majors look downright practical): where is there any innate meaning that exists previous to analysis? Meaning is largely a cultural thing, and a deep a priori property of things (like, say, mass, or charge).
Portal, of course, was never created to be some deep statement.
A lot of things we take as "deep" weren't created as such. Often the meaning we ascribe to things exist completely independent of its creator's wishes. This isn't an "English major" thing, this is a general attribute of humanity. Its something we do naturally, and constantly.
They read in to everything, even when there's nothing there.
Actually the whole "deconstruction" thing has a some validity (not as much as English majors and sociologists think, but still some). Authors, for example, don't write in a vacuum, they are informed by the society they exist in. Some social context is bound to be fossilized in the work, whether the author intended it or not. We read Homer to understand Greek culture, even if Homer (probably) never intended this. Why not play Portal to understand modern culture, then?
Mind, I picked up most of this out of osmosis, I was doing the "harder" bits of philosophy, philosophy of science and epistemology, most of this "post-modern" brouhaha strikes me as silly, but that isn't saying that there isn't a little, tiny, bit to it.
Oddly, I've never had a professor require the online, registration required, stuff. Granted a major part of my major didn't involve actual textbooks (philosophy, so around 50 little overpriced books as opposed to 5 giant overpriced books), but still never actually had to use the registration or CDROM, or whatnot. Professors are often pretty forgiving of budgets.
For my research methodology class (dual majored psychology) the professor learned that text cost around $250+, and was a new edition so there was no used market (with an obligatory $50 "online content" addon), so she first got the class to pool funds to buy one book, so she could copy all the chapters she needed (around 25% of the book, and none of the online bits), learned from the legal department that her plan was evil, and just ditched the book completely. She made us read, and critique, twice as many actual research papers as before, and just used 100+ pages of old class notes and overheads. It was amusing, she asked why one student didn't get a book, learned the price, and actually said "fuck that".
She got in trouble with the administration several times that semester (especially for telling people to drop her class, because they were too stupid), and the fact that she didn't condone our using the copies of the previous book, as long as we did it at home, and were hush hush. I think she also kind of recommended piracy, she told us, very subtly, that SPSS has a trial for students, but there are unsubstantiated rumors of cracks that we would be very bad people for pursuing.
Awesome class.
A slim chance in hell to up upgrade your GPU is better than no chance whatsoever, I suppose.
The lack of expandability is part of why I stopped buying macs. Upgrading a MacMini is one of the most annoying experiences I've suffered through (and I'm about to stick a new HDD in it next). I switched back to a PC about 4 years ago (after being Mac only for 5), and I've pretty much upgraded my whole machine, piece by piece, depending on what deals there are, and how ambitious I'm feeling.
To paraphrase something somebody wisely said in the previous thread about this topic, you don't need to model the electrons in the circuit of a machine to emulate an NES.
Except the NES is a mishmash of seemingly random bits and junky non-logical software. You might not need a model of the electrons, but you need the software too. I'm sure someone could, eventually, built a rough facsimile of the human brain, but lacking software you've built nothing but a pile of quivering Jello. Think of it as building an NES in hopes of playing some Duck Hunt, but being completely oblivious to how the cartridge works or interests with the rest of the hardware. Sure, you have an NES, but what good is it?
I don't think trial and error quite grabs it. How many connections, neurons, states, interactions does the human brain have? Cracking this by trial and error is analogous to cracking 1024bit encryption by running it through a random number generator. Barring finding an actual key to human-like functioning, we're going to be stuck.
This is the core of Meyers argument.
Someday this may be possible (barring anything other developments saying other wise), but not in 20 years. Probably not in our life times. Definitely not in Ray "The Singularity" Kurzweil's lifetime, dashing his depressingly desperate wish for personal immortality (and his terribly transparent wishful thinking).
Also, naive materialism is just that, naive. Saying that the "mind != the brain" does not mean one believes in some silly form of Cartesian dualism, or mysticism, or whatnot. Me saying the "brain != mind" is analogous to me saying "my computer != its applications". Mind is a sum of many parts, none of them particularly mystical, the innate, unmodified, brain being but one factor.
Killing some mod points here...
I have been guilty of that. But only for books I already own, and are sitting my giant "to read" pile. This to me is as great a sin as downloading MP3s from an album you already own. Meaning not one at all.
And, just like with music sharing, the industry has to actually favor authors over mere publishers before I start taking the "think of the content producers!" argument seriously. Direct your starving author/musician rant at the industry, they screw content producers FAR more than a bunch of kids who may never have actually given any money at all.
On the other hand, I also see book piracy just like music piracy, if you enjoy it you should go out of your way to ensure it continues.
Though if they start putting ads in ebooks, I will pirate every single one of them with no problem whatsoever. You try to screw me, I will try to screw you.
I keep expecting it to have been directed by Christopher Guest, personally.
Go for Chromium instead. It's Chrome, but missing the Google tracking and branding, but other than that it is just as functional as Chrome. Perhaps more so at time, since its a nightly.
If your using Ubuntu it's already in your repos.
If you look at any article that mentions negative effects of ritalin there's a good chance that it is either presented by or at least funded by the church of scientology. You might have to dig a bit to find the link though.
Either that or, like all drugs, it has a down side.
I'll go for the simpler explanation, personally.
I'm deeply skeptical of most of modern clinical psychiatry, and diagnostics, and am not a Scientologist.
ne of my great regrets in life is that I was not diagnoses as a child. If I could have started treatment before high school my life would have turned out so much differently. I don't regret where I have ended up, but I can recognize all the potential I once had to go so much further that my behavior sabotaged.
One of my greatest regrets in life is that was mis-diagnosed with ADHD has a child. I got to spend around 5 years of school in decelerated classes, basically learning 4th grade reading, and 5th grade math over and over (despite being recommended for AP classes before the diagnosis) for around 4 years. Yes, I misbehaved ("acted out"), yes I was a pain in the ass, but this doesn't make a kid an ADD sufferer, or suffer from ANY mental illness. My neighbor had the same issues (he was two years older), and they stuck him in accelerated classes, he did fine. I had the same behaviors (and the same high IQ test scores), and got held back for years. Its arbitrary.
As for adult ADD, I'm skeptical. If you have a boring job, and a boring life, lacking in novelty and challenge your going to act... BORED. When I was a kid, I could sit around and read for 24 straight hours, completely dead to the world, same with drawing, etc... But classes made me climb up a wall, being forced to learn at the pace of the slowest children, and being penalized for having any slight sign of individuality and initiative, much less intellect. Why would the situation in adult life be any different?
Sitting in a cubicle for six hours a day is unnatural, its amazing we tolerate it at all.
Most modern emerging illnesses are nothing but a sign that something has switched, we are supposed to fit to society, and not visa versa as it should be. We subjugate the human condition to arbitrary social structures, this obviously causes tons of stress since our brain has not has the 100,000 to a million years needed to adapt to such hostile environments.
Instead of drugging ourselves and trying our damnest to fit in, perhaps we should take these "illnesses" as a sign that there is something wrong with our actual environment, and not us.
I kind of miss the unicorn vomit pages. It allows you to quickly judge the content as being completely worthless without having to actually spend any amount of time on the page.
Putting a SSD in place of a rotating hard drive in a laptop will make a huge difference in how you view your laptop
But is the improvement worth a 300% price increase? Thats my point, not that they are worthless, just that the amount of improvement isn't quite right for the price point yet.
Instead of sitting and waiting, and then waiting some more for things to happen or load in off of disk, it's basically instant.
On my Linux laptop, I haven't actually noticed much waiting. It isn't an issue. On my PC I've noticed a bit of churn on applications like Photoshop and Itunes. But SSD's haven't even got close to big/cheap enough to replace my primary drive (with 111GB of Windows, applications and games, all the media is on a separate drive already). I could by a 120GB SSD for $300 (as opposed to my $100 1TB drive), but I can't warrant the price, and in real life it would cost even more since I would want at least 200GB for growth room.
Sorry, perhaps not "chi", but "qi" (which I think is actually the same thing), from Wikipedia:
Health is explained as a state of balance between the yin and yang, with disease ascribed to either of these forces being unbalanced, blocked or stagnant. The yang force is the immaterial qi, a concept that is roughly translated as "vital energy". The yin counterpart is Blood, which is linked to but not identical with physical blood, and capitalized to distinguish the two. [emphasis mine]
This sounds a lot like woo.
It may have non-woo effects, and perhaps some practitioners have chopped out the woo, but there still is a bit of woo hiding in the corners.
Fellow Arizonan here... No surprise, I suppose it is almost impossible to not have illegal immigration on the mind living in this state. It seems EVERYTHING is about it these days. I found myself arguing with a gas station cashier about it the other day.
I would say a large part of the Republican turn around (to be cynical) is based off of grabbing the tea party votes. That and actually signing SB1070 suddenly turned Brewer into the most popular person in Arizona, and perhaps the nation, she went from a "meh" candidate to a guaranteed win.
McCain is still pretty much against any real reform. He's on the "close the border first, then worry about anything of consequence later" side of the debate. He doesn't say amnesty, but he has no plans to do anything about the illegal immigrants who are already here, which in my opinion amounts to the same thing.
Kucinich winning the White House would be awesome, but that will never happen. Look at the "socialism" FUD being shoveled at Obama, imagine if we had an actual liberal/progressive with socialist tendencies in office? The Tea party crowd might actually try for their anti-democratic (as in democracy) revolution. I was personally hoping that something strange would happen and we could have Kucinich and Ron Paul win. So they get to alternate being president and vice every year.
Spot on, but I generally try to be a bit less cynical. I think at least some of our politicos are genuinely convinced that they are doing the right thing. This doesn't make anything that they are doing right, obviously, but makes it a bit less depressing.
immigration
Oddly, I think this is one of the places where representing corporate interests above individual interests is strongest. The right (both politically, and individualistically) largely supports it keeps wages down and breaks unions. The left, politically, love it for the same reason, and for the ever-forthcoming, but never evident, wave of latino voters who will eventually lead them to comfortably safe power. Where the individuals on the left love it for naive ideological reasons ("woah man, imagine, like, a country without borders. Deep!").
The gay thing is just an ideological fog, like abortion, the 10 commandments, etc... though.
can't stand his music, but obviously I'm not his market;
From what I understand, he shares a market with Twilight; 13 year old girls and really creepy older women, mostly the latter.
There is something really pathetic about a 45 year old woman swooning over a boy younger than their own children. Or my girlfriends co-worker, a 50 year old woman with a twilight calender filled with the greasy haired guy (who did refer to him as "dreamy" when asked about it). I think this is the same class of women who obsess over Disney still. Spooky, spooky, social phenomena that.
The right is generally in favor of selling us all to corporations, more so than the left.
Actually, there isn't much of a difference anymore.
And then, all you need is another $500,000 on promotion to differentiate yourself from the flood of other crappy garage band recordings. Creating music is and always was easy. Distributing music used to be difficult, but now it's easy. Advertising, making a name for yourself, and actually seeing any returns (financial or otherwise) from your distribution is still very difficult.
Not necessarily true. Well, it might be true if you really want to be a massively famous, rich, pop star; but it is completely false if you just want a decent fan base and a bit of respect.
Of the last 10 albums I purchased, not a single one of them was discovered via the radio (I don't listen/own one), nor through TV, nor through banner ads, etc... They were all discovered on Last.fm and MySpace. My favorite band (Giant Squid) hasn't even ever played where I live, but I still bought all of their albums after finding them on Last.fm, and pirating an album to see if I liked it.
Actually there is only one album I have bought in the last 5 or so years that is from an RIAA label (and I'm not intentionally boycotting), or other major label.
I doubt any of the bands I listen to are going to ascend into the next New Kids On The Block, or U2, but I also doubt that this is their aspiration.
Of my serious musician friends, they've all managed to gather a decent following from using nothing more than a busy live schedule, some rubber on the pavement, and MySpace. granted none of them have quit their day jobs, but this has never been the primary goal of music.
infinite complexity of the human brain
It isn't infinitely complex, it is just very complex. Its like people saying the Universe is infinitely large: it isn't, it just is bigger than you can easily imagine. Same with the brain, it isn't infinitely complex, just more complex than we can currently grasp.
Don't confuse infinity for a lack of knowledge.
Every psychic, futurist, and general prognosticator has some accurate predictions under their belts. But they have a far, far, greater body of failed predictions. We humans choose to look at the positive evidence while completely ignore the negative evidence.
Kurtzwell is the technologist's Edgar Cayce, worse, his motivations are almost completely apparent (and somewhat pathetic); he is scared of dying, scared to the point where he renders his own life into a hellish ritual of attempting futile immortality. His predictions are generally nothing more than wishful thinking, if they come true he can avoid death. That is the only motivation he has. But somehow the gullible among the tech crowd has latched on, and formed a quasi-cult around his "singularity" (which sounds like a living hell to me).
His singularity pretty much lines up with every eschatology in history.