Despite the fact that there are instances of game-play in real life that are as stringent, overall, these non-MMO forms of recreation are more inclusive and do not fall apart if someone has to use the bathroom or deal with a sudden emergency. Conversely, with WoW, you eventually get to the point where nothing meaningful can be done for your character without 9, 24 or 39 other good players, despite a few tasks here and there that can be completed on your own, or the option of raising another character in ghost town that is now Azeroth. I know the comparison is a little vague, but I don't have the luxury to fully flesh it out right now.
You mention gaming. The key problem with some online gaming (World of Warcraft, Everquest and its ilk) isn't what they lack versus normal human interaction, but the rigid structures they impose upon human interaction. Specifically, I'm talking about the fact that certain people must be present in certain combinations in order for anyone to have a good time. These requisites, while sometimes facilitating interaction between people who wouldn't otherwise get along, ultimately work to the detriment of the experience.
People who are needed (either for skill or simply because they play an unpopular class) but unpleasant are frequently given allowances, the superfluous are marginalized, tons of managerial work is required from the leaders, canceling at the last moment is problematic on the point of painful, and the dominant social structure (guilds) mean that in order to participate with some, you must exclude all others. These restrictions are arbitrary and are difficult to map onto most people's social lives: if Joe doesn't show up, does that prevent you from playing basketball? Even if it's a local league, can you not just play an exhibition game? Does Danielle watching a movie with her other friends mean she can't watch a movie with you until Tuesday at 5:00am? Can you only interact with your coworkers? Is calling up a few friends at the last moment and getting coffee a feat of industrial-grade logistics? Of course not. It's for these reasons that I stopped playing these games. I made a some friends, but the structure of the game just kept hurting those friendships. Arbitrary design decisions created hard feelings, and I think that's absurd.
Apple structures their prices in this manner so that people do not wait to they purchase products. This is also the reason they do not engage in price trickery (different prices for different verticals for no reason, arbitrary, limited-time rebates).
In practice, as long as I've been following these things, I have not seen the actual prices change muchh. The units get upgraded and the prices stay the same. Therefore, while it is true to say that your unit is worth less, it is difficult to make a direct dollar comparison. You just get more for your money - sometimes incrementally, sometimes radically. In this case, well, they probably weren't selling as many units as they wanted, or figured they were losing points with the demographic that made the iPod famous because of the outrageous prices.
The only other area I've noticed with radical price drops was the monitors. There are good reasons to lower their prices. For one, they have price competition from other companies who are making very similar or identical products, and it's harder to push the idea that a monitor worth just more for being Apple. Secondly, the iMacs are so cheap, and the desktops so expensive, that the potential market for the monitors is much smaller.
There's a difference between a game which is merely mass-produced, formulaic or derivative and a game that is truly bad. I have to say, even though I think that the whole EA Sports franchise is banal bordering on pedestrian, if I were calling the shots I'd still keep pumping them out because, apparently, a sizable number of meatheads keep buying them. It's a good business move. You don't like those games? Well, they're not made for you, they're made for stereotypical jocks in the 14-24 bracket. Go play something with integrity like Bioshock.
Also, not every American and European game studio releases these derivative games (Irrational, Valve, Gas Powered Games and Epic to name a few of my favorites), and some Eastern game companies are guilty of over-serialization (I'm looking at you, Square/Enix), but that's offtopic. You might at this point criticize me for endorsing sequels/spiritual successors, but Bioshock's story, art, gameplay and accessibility are enough to set it apart from its parents, though its overall design is obviously descended from System Shock, and its interface is, in many ways, a simplification of System Shock's.
It's a little stickier than that, I'm afraid. You could certainly host hate speech on your servers, but if this is any indication of a common set of policies, your ISP could very well pull the plug and you'd just be available on your house and to whomever is wardriving in the vicinity. Excerpt:
You may not engage in any of the following while using TIERZERO networks and/or services: . .. * Using TIERZERO networks to transmit material that TIERZERO, in its sole discretion, believes to be illegal, obscene, offensive, objectionable or inappropriate;
Better yet, it's only a violation of the 1st amendment if Congress does it. The founding fathers never anticipated that eventually the President and the Supreme Court would be able to make laws as well.
It sounds like you are a micro-manager who just wants people to look busy. My thinking on the subject couldn't be more different.
Ideally, their work translates into your money. If Alice completed the same amount of work as Bob at the end of the day, and they have the same job, with the same pay, what does it matter that Alice shopped for shoes because she finished early? As long as Alice is discreet about it, her slacking has no effect on your bottom line. Efficiency should be rewarded, not punished. Either give her more work and a raise or simply turn a blind eye to it and hope Bob learns a thing or two.
The exception, of course, is if one has no way to evaluate their productivity in an objective sense. Then, in my opinion, one is are unqualified to manage them. Yes, it's an art; not all business is reducible to some integer quantity of work done. But subjectively evaluating workers is pointless, because you are not paying them to look busy.
I think you're misunderstanding the original post (which is easy; it's not very clearly written). Rephrasing:
Most tech nerds I know are libertarians. Most of my fellow socialists/communists whom I know are hipsters and artists and hippies and drama dorks, and have no technical background. Why is this the case?
To respond to the original article, I don't think it's necessarily related to money either. Regardless of politics, all of the engineers I knew in college were pretty hard-nosed and independent. You're going to wash out if you're not. And if you're an independent, hard worker, you're more likely to think that others should be too.
Some percentage of users are probably experiencing show-stopper bugs. Let's take the forum rants with a grain of salt, though: users with a chip on their shoulder are a thousand times louder than satisfied customers. Myself, I have encountered two obvious bugs, both of them AI pathing problems - no crashes. It seems to me that Irrational shipped a product which was QAed to satisfaction on some platforms, they just didn't QA for as many platforms as they should've - strange, cheap cards, MB's, RAM, bloated anti-spyware progs, etc.
I have two things to say about the little sisters.
One, if you say "You free children from their existence as vampiric, indestructible monsters with no free will forced to drain and ingest vital fluids from corpses in a post-apocalyptic watery tomb at the bottom of the Atlantic," then, the option of death surely doesn't sound so bad. It's a pretty common theme in vampire pulp, actually: you promise to save your love from their curse, and you do so with a stake through the heart.
Two, not a single child has to die in Bioshock if you don't do it. Most people, whether they know it or not, decide to reject horrible, heinous, evil crimes which they could in fact perpetrate in their daily life, again, whether they know it or not. I think some people would rather imagine that we didn't make these choices, for whatever reason. That's why they're decrying a game which illustrates that very basic choice: mercy or murder; to be a human being or to be a monster. Then, should not the headline read: "Some People Press H When Confronting Little Sisters - Could One Be In Your Neighborhood?"
I don't know what's more disgusting: how clumsy and obviously marketeering the comparison is, or that some people might actually swallow it. I feel like I'm being sold something by a fast-talking Australian on a shopping channel.
I disagree. Teaching a student so that they perform well in a test and teaching a student so they will eventually perform well in college and life are very different things. I have heard reports of colleges who complain that students are increasingly ill-prepared in terms of reasoning, thinking, researching, and persuasive writing, because these things are hard to test in the standardized testing environment. From what I have heard first-hand from people in teaching credential programs, many kids in charter schools are barely being taught to write. They are being taught to take standardized tests.
I don't mean "Teach this fact, which will be on the test, and not this other fact." I mean teaching only to parrot facts without achieving a depth of understanding. Teaching to bubble in responses rather than write a clear and convincing argument or extracting knowledge from a book unaided.
I know there are a lot of holes in that. I don't have time to really back up my position. However, if you want empirical evidence, testing is not the only way to get it. Testing is just pretty cheap and fast. A far more effective way to get a real sense of the problems in schools would just be to send actually human beings to them to write reports, but it would be very costly and subject to variance and human eccentricity. In fact, I think that our aversion to any type of evidence that doesn't fit in a spreadsheet is part of the problem.
True education has been replaced by the ersatz education of testing and scoring, which is one big, complex game which has little to do with the true advancement of knowledge.
It helps to think about this in economic terms (by the way, feel free to shoot me down here, I'm not that good with economics). With fewer new schools being built and more students wanting to go to college because it is increasingly a factor in one's success, there is a lot of competition to get into college. One would think that more competition would result in brighter kids in college overall. However, colleges are increasingly complaining that incoming freshmen are not prepared for work at the college level.
However, we do not select freshmen based on factors which will lead them to success in college, such as reasoning, curiosity, or perseverance. We select them mostly based on grades and test scores. The tests test the student's ability to solve brain teasers. They are easily subverted, and there are myriad non-cheating ways to game the system in order to inflate your score. Also, classes are increasingly being taught to the tests, because that's what the parents want.
Therefore, there is increased competition, but due to highly imperfect information on the part of the colleges about which kids will perform best, they make worse choices as to who gets in. Furthermore, because the kids are less prepared, and there's nothing to do about it, they must make the courses more remedial. And then, everyone in the educational system gets stupider.
The mistake you're making is looking at this from the perspective of the student. They're not talking about boosting the students, they're talking about boosting the school's ratings. I don't have the full story on Australian/UK educational policy, but the climate sounds like the US's "No Child Left Behind Act" policy, which diverts teaching resources away from actual teaching and focuses on teaching students to perform well on yearly standardized tests.
The net result is overwhelmingly bad. Just as the article describes, by attempting to make your kids appear better statistically, you make them less educated in actuality.
And a lot of people, on the other hand, love laptop keyboards in general for the very reasons you listed. Furthermore, a lot of people spend much of their young life with a laptop as their primary rig, so they're actually more used to it than a traditional keyboard. It's kind of a moot point. Some people will be excited by the keyboards. Some people will hate them. And for many, the keyboard will not have a large net effect on their purchasing decisions.
I do give them props for doing something different (or, if it's been done already, making it standard). I just wish they'd also have an option which brings ergonomics into play, even if it might end up looking like Gaudi made it.
As I said, I think the post is being ironic. The questions he presented are so hyperbolically stereotypical that they belong on Happy Days, not in a modern women's book, and certainly not in a modern teenage women's book. Go back and look at it. It's like watching the Stepford Wives. There's no way it could be actual excerpt.
We should be having a good guffaw over how absurd this strikes almost anyone of modern sensibilities. And I'm saying, "You know, this here is a joke. But seriously, being a homemaker isn't bad, but if every book read like this, people would think that was the only valid way to be." I don't even necessarily disagree with what you said, I just don't think you understood the context of the discussion. Therefore, you didn't actually respond to what I was saying, but rather what you thought I was saying, making your post an insightful non-sequitar. I realize that you just had something you wanted to say and were looking for an excuse to say it, but try to find a post to respond to where you can at least mold your ideas to some degree into a sensible discussion.
I detect a bit of irony in GP's post. One example assumes that a woman is a homemaker who should be cooking dinner for her man; two assumes that a woman should be wearing makeup; three assumes that women should, again, be cooking. That this is framed in the context of something which supposes to emancipate women from underachieving in math, science and engineering is what creates the irony.
Myself, I wouldn't say that being feminine in this highly traditional sense is an innately bad thing, but that other role options should be presented and accepted by people at a young age so they can decide for themselves how to identify.
1: Ideally, one should wait a half an hour to an hour after settling in to eat. Most people have rituals they go through upon getting home from work (petting the dog, sitting down and watching some television, having a martini), and after those are completed they will be amicable enough to properly enjoy dinner.
2: Surely this is an oversimplification of the problem. First, you need both day makeup and evening makeup (bolder colors to stand out more in lower light conditions), and you might only wear your evening makeup three or four times a week. Also, not all makeup goes with all outfits, or all occasions. But then again, I suppose it's like those spherical frictionless cows falling from the sky.
3: One must also account for the fact that some ovens have different characteristics than others. Oftentimes you need to adjust the actual temperature a bit to get the proper effect. I'm not sure of the physics behind it, but my oven needs to be turned down about 25 degrees from whatever the recipe says.
Just explain your reasoning, that's all I'm asking. Or, alternately, just say that either are incapable of backing up your reasoning or can't be bothered to. My main point is that people seem reluctant to have any kind of rational discussion on the subject of pedophilia that is not laden with emotional appeals and baseless rhetoric, which, hereto, is all you have provided.
This is how witch hunts start. People start making emotional appeals and succumbing to rhetoric, then one someone says, "Hey, let's be reasonable about this and have an objective discussion," people cry, "Why are you trying to defend them? You must be a witch too!" Furthermore, I am not trying to minimize the crime. As you can see a few posts up, I implied that shipping violent criminals and drug addicts off to an island in the North Atlantic would be acceptable.
Why is sexual desire so much stronger? Are there not people who deny their own sexual impulses? I mean, I'm just wild for brunettes, but my fiancee is blonde. She knows I've got that little fetish, too. I sometimes jokingly bug her to dye her hair, but I'm not going to cheat on her because of it. People throughout history have repressed urges much stronger than that. Is pedophilia fundamentally different from other "fetishes," or from sexual orientation? If so, why? Do you have any evidence to support your claims, or even an unsourced but well-thought-out argument?
That's what I'm talking about with witch hunts. People just come out with wild assertions as if they're the truth without batting an eyelash to reason, let alone supporting evidence. Here's why I think what I do:
Drug addicts, specifically people who are addicted to heroin, feel no pleasure when they do not have their fix. Heroin withdrawal has been described to me like this: "Imagine the worst flu you've ever had. That's what not having heroin feels like every single day." Surely constant physical anguish is a compelling driver of behavior. Career criminals do not have the tools to survive without committing crimes. For them, the choices that lie before them are degradation, starvation, or crime.
You want large crimes? Talk to anybody who lost their savings six or seven years ago. And more permanent, you say? Surely nothing is as permanent as death. An abuse victim at least as a chance of leading a happy life. Murder victims have no such option, and, well, murder an undesirable but often inevitable part of life of a career thug.
Edit: White collar criminals are probably worst of all, because many of them have been cheating since primary school, the damage they do can be staggering as the money they make, and they almost never receive any form of punishment, certainly nothing which chips into their so-called earnings.
personally, i'm all for permanent exile. mainly because once a pedophile, always a pedophile. there is no cure. recidivism is guaranteed. society has a duty to protect future children from future victimhood by a confirmed pedophile
In my observation, recidivism rates for other types of crime are equally high. Drug addicts often have a biological compulsion to get their fix so strong they hurt their closest friends, lovers and family members. Many career criminals recruited at an early age do not know how to get by, down to not knowing how to write a letter, a check, a thank-you card, do their taxes or fill out a job application, and so they simply go out and commit more crimes. White collar criminals are probably worst of all, because many of them have been cheating since primary school.
If we are to execute or banish pedophiles, surely we must banish or execute the above listed persons as well, all of whom can ruin or end life just as surely as a pedophile. And I'm not saying that ironically. However, a legal system should aim to be at least somewhat consistent with respect to punishment, and hysteria should never be passed off as ersatz reason. That's called a witch hunt. It's great rhetoric to say we should lock all those perverts up, but it's an emotional appeal, and rests on faulty logic.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite the fact that there are instances of game-play in real life that are as stringent, overall, these non-MMO forms of recreation are more inclusive and do not fall apart if someone has to use the bathroom or deal with a sudden emergency. Conversely, with WoW, you eventually get to the point where nothing meaningful can be done for your character without 9, 24 or 39 other good players, despite a few tasks here and there that can be completed on your own, or the option of raising another character in ghost town that is now Azeroth. I know the comparison is a little vague, but I don't have the luxury to fully flesh it out right now.
You're spot on about office work, though.
You mention gaming. The key problem with some online gaming (World of Warcraft, Everquest and its ilk) isn't what they lack versus normal human interaction, but the rigid structures they impose upon human interaction. Specifically, I'm talking about the fact that certain people must be present in certain combinations in order for anyone to have a good time. These requisites, while sometimes facilitating interaction between people who wouldn't otherwise get along, ultimately work to the detriment of the experience.
People who are needed (either for skill or simply because they play an unpopular class) but unpleasant are frequently given allowances, the superfluous are marginalized, tons of managerial work is required from the leaders, canceling at the last moment is problematic on the point of painful, and the dominant social structure (guilds) mean that in order to participate with some, you must exclude all others. These restrictions are arbitrary and are difficult to map onto most people's social lives: if Joe doesn't show up, does that prevent you from playing basketball? Even if it's a local league, can you not just play an exhibition game? Does Danielle watching a movie with her other friends mean she can't watch a movie with you until Tuesday at 5:00am? Can you only interact with your coworkers? Is calling up a few friends at the last moment and getting coffee a feat of industrial-grade logistics? Of course not. It's for these reasons that I stopped playing these games. I made a some friends, but the structure of the game just kept hurting those friendships. Arbitrary design decisions created hard feelings, and I think that's absurd.
Good point. I have a bit of irrational prejudice against sports and sports fans.
Apple structures their prices in this manner so that people do not wait to they purchase products. This is also the reason they do not engage in price trickery (different prices for different verticals for no reason, arbitrary, limited-time rebates).
In practice, as long as I've been following these things, I have not seen the actual prices change muchh. The units get upgraded and the prices stay the same. Therefore, while it is true to say that your unit is worth less, it is difficult to make a direct dollar comparison. You just get more for your money - sometimes incrementally, sometimes radically. In this case, well, they probably weren't selling as many units as they wanted, or figured they were losing points with the demographic that made the iPod famous because of the outrageous prices.
The only other area I've noticed with radical price drops was the monitors. There are good reasons to lower their prices. For one, they have price competition from other companies who are making very similar or identical products, and it's harder to push the idea that a monitor worth just more for being Apple. Secondly, the iMacs are so cheap, and the desktops so expensive, that the potential market for the monitors is much smaller.
There's a difference between a game which is merely mass-produced, formulaic or derivative and a game that is truly bad. I have to say, even though I think that the whole EA Sports franchise is banal bordering on pedestrian, if I were calling the shots I'd still keep pumping them out because, apparently, a sizable number of meatheads keep buying them. It's a good business move. You don't like those games? Well, they're not made for you, they're made for stereotypical jocks in the 14-24 bracket. Go play something with integrity like Bioshock.
Also, not every American and European game studio releases these derivative games (Irrational, Valve, Gas Powered Games and Epic to name a few of my favorites), and some Eastern game companies are guilty of over-serialization (I'm looking at you, Square/Enix), but that's offtopic. You might at this point criticize me for endorsing sequels/spiritual successors, but Bioshock's story, art, gameplay and accessibility are enough to set it apart from its parents, though its overall design is obviously descended from System Shock, and its interface is, in many ways, a simplification of System Shock's.
I should listen to my logic professor. Every time I use the world "only." I get egg in my face.
It's a little stickier than that, I'm afraid. You could certainly host hate speech on your servers, but if this is any indication of a common set of policies, your ISP could very well pull the plug and you'd just be available on your house and to whomever is wardriving in the vicinity. Excerpt:
You may not engage in any of the following while using TIERZERO networks and/or services:. .
* Using TIERZERO networks to transmit material that TIERZERO, in its sole discretion, believes to be illegal, obscene, offensive, objectionable or inappropriate;
Better yet, it's only a violation of the 1st amendment if Congress does it. The founding fathers never anticipated that eventually the President and the Supreme Court would be able to make laws as well.
It sounds like you are a micro-manager who just wants people to look busy. My thinking on the subject couldn't be more different.
Ideally, their work translates into your money. If Alice completed the same amount of work as Bob at the end of the day, and they have the same job, with the same pay, what does it matter that Alice shopped for shoes because she finished early? As long as Alice is discreet about it, her slacking has no effect on your bottom line. Efficiency should be rewarded, not punished. Either give her more work and a raise or simply turn a blind eye to it and hope Bob learns a thing or two.
The exception, of course, is if one has no way to evaluate their productivity in an objective sense. Then, in my opinion, one is are unqualified to manage them. Yes, it's an art; not all business is reducible to some integer quantity of work done. But subjectively evaluating workers is pointless, because you are not paying them to look busy.
I prefer blue because I can see it. Like 10% of the male population, I'm red-green colorblind.
I think you're misunderstanding the original post (which is easy; it's not very clearly written). Rephrasing:
Most tech nerds I know are libertarians. Most of my fellow socialists/communists whom I know are hipsters and artists and hippies and drama dorks, and have no technical background. Why is this the case?To respond to the original article, I don't think it's necessarily related to money either. Regardless of politics, all of the engineers I knew in college were pretty hard-nosed and independent. You're going to wash out if you're not. And if you're an independent, hard worker, you're more likely to think that others should be too.
My last cell phone did not have the ability to sync its clock with the network. It was a royal pain in the ass.
Some percentage of users are probably experiencing show-stopper bugs. Let's take the forum rants with a grain of salt, though: users with a chip on their shoulder are a thousand times louder than satisfied customers. Myself, I have encountered two obvious bugs, both of them AI pathing problems - no crashes. It seems to me that Irrational shipped a product which was QAed to satisfaction on some platforms, they just didn't QA for as many platforms as they should've - strange, cheap cards, MB's, RAM, bloated anti-spyware progs, etc.
I have two things to say about the little sisters.
One, if you say "You free children from their existence as vampiric, indestructible monsters with no free will forced to drain and ingest vital fluids from corpses in a post-apocalyptic watery tomb at the bottom of the Atlantic," then, the option of death surely doesn't sound so bad. It's a pretty common theme in vampire pulp, actually: you promise to save your love from their curse, and you do so with a stake through the heart.
Two, not a single child has to die in Bioshock if you don't do it. Most people, whether they know it or not, decide to reject horrible, heinous, evil crimes which they could in fact perpetrate in their daily life, again, whether they know it or not. I think some people would rather imagine that we didn't make these choices, for whatever reason. That's why they're decrying a game which illustrates that very basic choice: mercy or murder; to be a human being or to be a monster. Then, should not the headline read: "Some People Press H When Confronting Little Sisters - Could One Be In Your Neighborhood?"
I don't know what's more disgusting: how clumsy and obviously marketeering the comparison is, or that some people might actually swallow it. I feel like I'm being sold something by a fast-talking Australian on a shopping channel.
I disagree. Teaching a student so that they perform well in a test and teaching a student so they will eventually perform well in college and life are very different things. I have heard reports of colleges who complain that students are increasingly ill-prepared in terms of reasoning, thinking, researching, and persuasive writing, because these things are hard to test in the standardized testing environment. From what I have heard first-hand from people in teaching credential programs, many kids in charter schools are barely being taught to write. They are being taught to take standardized tests.
I don't mean "Teach this fact, which will be on the test, and not this other fact." I mean teaching only to parrot facts without achieving a depth of understanding. Teaching to bubble in responses rather than write a clear and convincing argument or extracting knowledge from a book unaided.
I know there are a lot of holes in that. I don't have time to really back up my position. However, if you want empirical evidence, testing is not the only way to get it. Testing is just pretty cheap and fast. A far more effective way to get a real sense of the problems in schools would just be to send actually human beings to them to write reports, but it would be very costly and subject to variance and human eccentricity. In fact, I think that our aversion to any type of evidence that doesn't fit in a spreadsheet is part of the problem.
True education has been replaced by the ersatz education of testing and scoring, which is one big, complex game which has little to do with the true advancement of knowledge.
It helps to think about this in economic terms (by the way, feel free to shoot me down here, I'm not that good with economics). With fewer new schools being built and more students wanting to go to college because it is increasingly a factor in one's success, there is a lot of competition to get into college. One would think that more competition would result in brighter kids in college overall. However, colleges are increasingly complaining that incoming freshmen are not prepared for work at the college level.
However, we do not select freshmen based on factors which will lead them to success in college, such as reasoning, curiosity, or perseverance. We select them mostly based on grades and test scores. The tests test the student's ability to solve brain teasers. They are easily subverted, and there are myriad non-cheating ways to game the system in order to inflate your score. Also, classes are increasingly being taught to the tests, because that's what the parents want.
Therefore, there is increased competition, but due to highly imperfect information on the part of the colleges about which kids will perform best, they make worse choices as to who gets in. Furthermore, because the kids are less prepared, and there's nothing to do about it, they must make the courses more remedial. And then, everyone in the educational system gets stupider.
The mistake you're making is looking at this from the perspective of the student. They're not talking about boosting the students, they're talking about boosting the school's ratings. I don't have the full story on Australian/UK educational policy, but the climate sounds like the US's "No Child Left Behind Act" policy, which diverts teaching resources away from actual teaching and focuses on teaching students to perform well on yearly standardized tests.
The net result is overwhelmingly bad. Just as the article describes, by attempting to make your kids appear better statistically, you make them less educated in actuality.
And a lot of people, on the other hand, love laptop keyboards in general for the very reasons you listed. Furthermore, a lot of people spend much of their young life with a laptop as their primary rig, so they're actually more used to it than a traditional keyboard. It's kind of a moot point. Some people will be excited by the keyboards. Some people will hate them. And for many, the keyboard will not have a large net effect on their purchasing decisions.
I do give them props for doing something different (or, if it's been done already, making it standard). I just wish they'd also have an option which brings ergonomics into play, even if it might end up looking like Gaudi made it.
As I said, I think the post is being ironic. The questions he presented are so hyperbolically stereotypical that they belong on Happy Days, not in a modern women's book, and certainly not in a modern teenage women's book. Go back and look at it. It's like watching the Stepford Wives. There's no way it could be actual excerpt.
We should be having a good guffaw over how absurd this strikes almost anyone of modern sensibilities. And I'm saying, "You know, this here is a joke. But seriously, being a homemaker isn't bad, but if every book read like this, people would think that was the only valid way to be." I don't even necessarily disagree with what you said, I just don't think you understood the context of the discussion. Therefore, you didn't actually respond to what I was saying, but rather what you thought I was saying, making your post an insightful non-sequitar. I realize that you just had something you wanted to say and were looking for an excuse to say it, but try to find a post to respond to where you can at least mold your ideas to some degree into a sensible discussion.
I detect a bit of irony in GP's post. One example assumes that a woman is a homemaker who should be cooking dinner for her man; two assumes that a woman should be wearing makeup; three assumes that women should, again, be cooking. That this is framed in the context of something which supposes to emancipate women from underachieving in math, science and engineering is what creates the irony.
Myself, I wouldn't say that being feminine in this highly traditional sense is an innately bad thing, but that other role options should be presented and accepted by people at a young age so they can decide for themselves how to identify.
1: Ideally, one should wait a half an hour to an hour after settling in to eat. Most people have rituals they go through upon getting home from work (petting the dog, sitting down and watching some television, having a martini), and after those are completed they will be amicable enough to properly enjoy dinner.
2: Surely this is an oversimplification of the problem. First, you need both day makeup and evening makeup (bolder colors to stand out more in lower light conditions), and you might only wear your evening makeup three or four times a week. Also, not all makeup goes with all outfits, or all occasions. But then again, I suppose it's like those spherical frictionless cows falling from the sky.
3: One must also account for the fact that some ovens have different characteristics than others. Oftentimes you need to adjust the actual temperature a bit to get the proper effect. I'm not sure of the physics behind it, but my oven needs to be turned down about 25 degrees from whatever the recipe says.
Just explain your reasoning, that's all I'm asking. Or, alternately, just say that either are incapable of backing up your reasoning or can't be bothered to. My main point is that people seem reluctant to have any kind of rational discussion on the subject of pedophilia that is not laden with emotional appeals and baseless rhetoric, which, hereto, is all you have provided.
This is how witch hunts start. People start making emotional appeals and succumbing to rhetoric, then one someone says, "Hey, let's be reasonable about this and have an objective discussion," people cry, "Why are you trying to defend them? You must be a witch too!" Furthermore, I am not trying to minimize the crime. As you can see a few posts up, I implied that shipping violent criminals and drug addicts off to an island in the North Atlantic would be acceptable.
Why is sexual desire so much stronger? Are there not people who deny their own sexual impulses? I mean, I'm just wild for brunettes, but my fiancee is blonde. She knows I've got that little fetish, too. I sometimes jokingly bug her to dye her hair, but I'm not going to cheat on her because of it. People throughout history have repressed urges much stronger than that. Is pedophilia fundamentally different from other "fetishes," or from sexual orientation? If so, why? Do you have any evidence to support your claims, or even an unsourced but well-thought-out argument?
That's what I'm talking about with witch hunts. People just come out with wild assertions as if they're the truth without batting an eyelash to reason, let alone supporting evidence. Here's why I think what I do:
Drug addicts, specifically people who are addicted to heroin, feel no pleasure when they do not have their fix. Heroin withdrawal has been described to me like this: "Imagine the worst flu you've ever had. That's what not having heroin feels like every single day." Surely constant physical anguish is a compelling driver of behavior. Career criminals do not have the tools to survive without committing crimes. For them, the choices that lie before them are degradation, starvation, or crime.
You want large crimes? Talk to anybody who lost their savings six or seven years ago. And more permanent, you say? Surely nothing is as permanent as death. An abuse victim at least as a chance of leading a happy life. Murder victims have no such option, and, well, murder an undesirable but often inevitable part of life of a career thug.
Edit: White collar criminals are probably worst of all, because many of them have been cheating since primary school, the damage they do can be staggering as the money they make, and they almost never receive any form of punishment, certainly nothing which chips into their so-called earnings.
In my observation, recidivism rates for other types of crime are equally high. Drug addicts often have a biological compulsion to get their fix so strong they hurt their closest friends, lovers and family members. Many career criminals recruited at an early age do not know how to get by, down to not knowing how to write a letter, a check, a thank-you card, do their taxes or fill out a job application, and so they simply go out and commit more crimes. White collar criminals are probably worst of all, because many of them have been cheating since primary school.
If we are to execute or banish pedophiles, surely we must banish or execute the above listed persons as well, all of whom can ruin or end life just as surely as a pedophile. And I'm not saying that ironically. However, a legal system should aim to be at least somewhat consistent with respect to punishment, and hysteria should never be passed off as ersatz reason. That's called a witch hunt. It's great rhetoric to say we should lock all those perverts up, but it's an emotional appeal, and rests on faulty logic.