Note that in the case of Brazilian kids learning English from American old people, it is the young people learning a language. The old people are only getting social contact from this, not learning Portuguese. While there will always be unusually motivated people who manage to take up a foreign language in old age, in the main one cannot expect elderly Americans to start doing so. Sign language is challenging even for younger generations who have already passed the age at which languages can be acquired natively.
How about a scheme for those of us who want to learn some other, relatively minor language, where it is difficult to even find basic texts outside its native country
There are thousands of languages in the world, many not committed to writing, so there are a lot of "minor" languages for which one would have trouble finding texts. But what is the likelihood of you being interested in languages so "minor"? For languages large enough for people in other countries to hear of them, there's a good change that you can find texts on the internet if you simply look harder.
For example, I am a linguist working with minority languages of Russia, namely Mari, Chuvash, Tatar and Udmurt, and even when I started learning these languages a decade ago, there were already abundant internet resources: lots of bloggers, provincial newspapers, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has a Tatar service with long articles on their website. Text has always been easy to get, but the last five years have seen a rise in the availability of audio/video materials. State television is now regularly uploading broadcasts to YouTube, and independent media occasionally posts videos.
Plus, linguists have been one of the scholarly communities most dedicated to supporting pirate ebook sites. If you know where to look, you can find scanned and uploaded readers for nearly any documented language.
No person in their right mind would walk around with these things just to not be recorded.
Under underestimate the power of fashion. People walk around "in their right minds" with bits of metal or ink in their skin, or (just to show it's not just those crazy kids today) codpieces or monocles. Who knows what the future may hold, perhaps it will come to be considered stylish to stick it to the surveillance state.
You want everyone reading this to have to download a Flash player (or HTML5 video that consumes just as much data) just to watch your crank video? Take your embedding and stick it up your ass.
Thank goodness Dice hasn't fucked up Slashdot enough yet that your embedding would have worked.
Obligatory military service has been abandoned across nearly all developed countries, and besides, isn't one of the motivations for Japan's investment in robotics R&D being able to take care of the elderly even with a considerably smaller labour force?
I would imagine that Japan's cities will stay as crowded as ever for a long time. As the population in the countryside thins out and becomes greyer, what young people there are will flock to the cities for better opportunities. So, you'll have densely populated cities and an increasingly empty rest of the country.
Look at Russia where the population has fallen significantly, but Moscow just keeps growing. If you visit the hopeless backwaters, all the young people there dream of leaving their collapsing communities for the big city.
In many developed countries now, road and petrol taxes are essentially punitive taxes: the state wants to make driving more expensive so that more people choose to use public transportation (or cycle) instead. As cyclists are not harming the environment or contributing to gridlock on city roads, then there is no reason they should be expected to pay the tax. Maintenance of roads is out of the general state budget anyway, not just paid from the taxes extracted from drivers.
I always assumed that, in making a studio monitor-looking headphone, Beats was using Dr. Dre's name not for his artist reputation, but for his producer reputation. In recent years, Dr. Dre has produced a number of records even if his own hip-hop albums have slacked off. So, Dr. Dre is to Beats what Quincy Jones is to AKG.
It's kind of what happens when the guy with a masters degree in recording and mastering is replaced by DJ Fuzzy Fucktard and his sidekick, Autotoon, rollin' in to master mix the shizit outta anythang...
There are a lot of well-trained veteran engineers with good ears who have stated that they feel forced to jack the levels up, because that is what the record label demands, and if you go with your audiophile instincts instead of what the label demands, you find yourself out of work.
For home audiophile headphones at an affordable price, I've been pretty happy with my AKG K701. Maybe it's just prejudice, but I'd much rather go with a company that has a reputation for doing one thing (decent headphones) and doing it well, as opposed to Sony whose headphone offerings include plenty of bottom-end Chinese-contracted crap.
However, while reference headphones are good for listening at home in a quiet environment, they aren't so good for walking around, when is when a lot of people consume their music these days. I couldn't walk down the street wearing my AKG K701 headphones, it would look bloody ridiculous, as they are very bulky, and besides they offer no protection against ambient noise. Beats may have comparatively bad sound quality, but they have a form factor that makes them fashionable when you are on the go, and they protect from ambient noise somewhat more. (You can also get those same mobile advantages with better sound quality with some cheaper entries in the AKG and Sennheiser catalogues.)
When Google Fiber comes to a city and gigabit internet is finally advertised, is it truly gigabit internet or is there massive throttling involved? I've had fiber to my door in Romania (for a little over 10€/month) for many years now, and while upload speeds are somewhat slower than download speeds, you can torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month and no one at the ISP bats an eye. Do Americans get the same goodness, or do the advertised specs come with a boatload of catches?
Schools teach about voyages of discovery. They forget to teach that it wasn't about discovery it was about imperialism
If one defines "imperialism" as subjugation of peoples, then the case of the Galapagos Island was not imperialism: while Native Americans may have visited the island in prehistory, there was no human population on the islands when Europeans visited, and the endemic nature was the sole attraction. For Dawin, it really was a voyage of discovery.
Nope. I've lived in Chicago and found the classical music and literary scenes very disappointing compared to NYC.
Of course, not everyone in NYC is interested in those two things specifically, but the choice of whether to live there often comes down to an interest in some subculture or another better represented in that megalopolis than in other US cities.
Not really. Not all large American cities have even one orchestra or opera, let alone the multiple orchestras in NYC (including multiple new-music ensembles). The same goes for theatre. Some people just want that much choice.
Why do you think public transportation is a European thing? In Hong Kong or Tokyo even relatively wealthy people take the train to work just like everyone else.
Some people are willing to pay the extra costs of living in order to have access to an immense amount of culture. NYC has several orchestras, a world-class opera and theatre scene, and readings by prominent literary figures nearly every night of the week. If you like fine dining, you have a vaster range of choices there than elsewhere.
Free ridesharing is surely here to stay. However, considering that a lot of countries are slowly transitioning to a cashless economy, having more and more transactions proceed through electronic payments that can be easily tracked, I suspect it will be increasingly difficult for drivers to make any significant amount of money without at least declaring it in taxes. And if the tax office finds out about your work, so can other government regulatory agencies.
This is an interesting idea. It creates a possibility of earning a living simply by being a douchebag, driving around, taking spots and auctioning them off.
High-speed parkers provide liquidity, you insensitive clod!
While the status of hitchhiking in Victoria is disputed (the wording of the law is no different from many countries where hitchhiking is considered legal, and the police don't enforce it anyway as hordes of foreign travellers in Oz can tell you), the OP may have been referring to rideshare websites or bulletin boards where people exchange free lifts, not actually standing along the road.
While the mainstream, monetary payment-driven sharing economy is indeed riddled with problems, for every exploitive service like this there are community-driven, freely usable services that work more according to a gift economy. You cite Airbnb, but well before that site arose people were offering each other hospitality through Couchsurfing* with no money exchanged, just a desire to help fellow travellers and pay the hospitality one received earlier forward. Analogous to Uber are free ride-sharing services, or if you like to hitchhike you can share your tips with your fellow hitchhikers on Hitchwiki. Even food-sharing has been facilitated through internet projects coordinating "Food Not Bombs"-style community dinners or sites like Trashwiki which allow dumpster-divers to pool their knowledge. And is Wikipedia not the best example of succesful and non-exploitive sharing? Its profit-driven competitors have all fallen by the wayside.
(* The Couchsurfing management did sell out its user base after a few years, and I mention it here only because it is the most well-known such service, but there are other, more idealistic hospex communities with the same basis.)
It seems to have worked quite well in tandem with other measures such as punitive taxes and places like New York City outlawing smoking in any public areas, even parks. As a pipe and cigar smoker, I've witnessed firsthand the decline in smoking and the social acceptability of smoking.
Actually, to do things "my" way, you'd have to stop before Robots and Empire, which after all was meant to tie two of the formerly independent series together.
The US has never prohibited work visas outright. There have always been visa categories for certain highly-skilled people to come to the US, even if quotas were not as generous as they are for H1Bs now.
H1B visas are usually given to educated IT workers from such countries as India or Eastern Europe. I doubt there is very much overlap between these immigrants and the Mexican narco-immigrants you are concerned about.
The United States gets legal immigrants from virtually every country and every status from rich investors to highly educated worker to unskilled refugee. You are looking only one part of the story, and a part that is off-topic for this Slashdot discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that in the case of Brazilian kids learning English from American old people, it is the young people learning a language. The old people are only getting social contact from this, not learning Portuguese. While there will always be unusually motivated people who manage to take up a foreign language in old age, in the main one cannot expect elderly Americans to start doing so. Sign language is challenging even for younger generations who have already passed the age at which languages can be acquired natively.
There are thousands of languages in the world, many not committed to writing, so there are a lot of "minor" languages for which one would have trouble finding texts. But what is the likelihood of you being interested in languages so "minor"? For languages large enough for people in other countries to hear of them, there's a good change that you can find texts on the internet if you simply look harder.
For example, I am a linguist working with minority languages of Russia, namely Mari, Chuvash, Tatar and Udmurt, and even when I started learning these languages a decade ago, there were already abundant internet resources: lots of bloggers, provincial newspapers, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has a Tatar service with long articles on their website. Text has always been easy to get, but the last five years have seen a rise in the availability of audio/video materials. State television is now regularly uploading broadcasts to YouTube, and independent media occasionally posts videos.
Plus, linguists have been one of the scholarly communities most dedicated to supporting pirate ebook sites. If you know where to look, you can find scanned and uploaded readers for nearly any documented language.
Under underestimate the power of fashion. People walk around "in their right minds" with bits of metal or ink in their skin, or (just to show it's not just those crazy kids today) codpieces or monocles. Who knows what the future may hold, perhaps it will come to be considered stylish to stick it to the surveillance state.
You want everyone reading this to have to download a Flash player (or HTML5 video that consumes just as much data) just to watch your crank video? Take your embedding and stick it up your ass.
Thank goodness Dice hasn't fucked up Slashdot enough yet that your embedding would have worked.
Obligatory military service has been abandoned across nearly all developed countries, and besides, isn't one of the motivations for Japan's investment in robotics R&D being able to take care of the elderly even with a considerably smaller labour force?
I would imagine that Japan's cities will stay as crowded as ever for a long time. As the population in the countryside thins out and becomes greyer, what young people there are will flock to the cities for better opportunities. So, you'll have densely populated cities and an increasingly empty rest of the country.
Look at Russia where the population has fallen significantly, but Moscow just keeps growing. If you visit the hopeless backwaters, all the young people there dream of leaving their collapsing communities for the big city.
In many developed countries now, road and petrol taxes are essentially punitive taxes: the state wants to make driving more expensive so that more people choose to use public transportation (or cycle) instead. As cyclists are not harming the environment or contributing to gridlock on city roads, then there is no reason they should be expected to pay the tax. Maintenance of roads is out of the general state budget anyway, not just paid from the taxes extracted from drivers.
I always assumed that, in making a studio monitor-looking headphone, Beats was using Dr. Dre's name not for his artist reputation, but for his producer reputation. In recent years, Dr. Dre has produced a number of records even if his own hip-hop albums have slacked off. So, Dr. Dre is to Beats what Quincy Jones is to AKG.
There are a lot of well-trained veteran engineers with good ears who have stated that they feel forced to jack the levels up, because that is what the record label demands, and if you go with your audiophile instincts instead of what the label demands, you find yourself out of work.
For home audiophile headphones at an affordable price, I've been pretty happy with my AKG K701. Maybe it's just prejudice, but I'd much rather go with a company that has a reputation for doing one thing (decent headphones) and doing it well, as opposed to Sony whose headphone offerings include plenty of bottom-end Chinese-contracted crap.
However, while reference headphones are good for listening at home in a quiet environment, they aren't so good for walking around, when is when a lot of people consume their music these days. I couldn't walk down the street wearing my AKG K701 headphones, it would look bloody ridiculous, as they are very bulky, and besides they offer no protection against ambient noise. Beats may have comparatively bad sound quality, but they have a form factor that makes them fashionable when you are on the go, and they protect from ambient noise somewhat more. (You can also get those same mobile advantages with better sound quality with some cheaper entries in the AKG and Sennheiser catalogues.)
When Google Fiber comes to a city and gigabit internet is finally advertised, is it truly gigabit internet or is there massive throttling involved? I've had fiber to my door in Romania (for a little over 10€/month) for many years now, and while upload speeds are somewhat slower than download speeds, you can torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month and no one at the ISP bats an eye. Do Americans get the same goodness, or do the advertised specs come with a boatload of catches?
If one defines "imperialism" as subjugation of peoples, then the case of the Galapagos Island was not imperialism: while Native Americans may have visited the island in prehistory, there was no human population on the islands when Europeans visited, and the endemic nature was the sole attraction. For Dawin, it really was a voyage of discovery.
Nope. I've lived in Chicago and found the classical music and literary scenes very disappointing compared to NYC.
Of course, not everyone in NYC is interested in those two things specifically, but the choice of whether to live there often comes down to an interest in some subculture or another better represented in that megalopolis than in other US cities.
Not really. Not all large American cities have even one orchestra or opera, let alone the multiple orchestras in NYC (including multiple new-music ensembles). The same goes for theatre. Some people just want that much choice.
Why do you think public transportation is a European thing? In Hong Kong or Tokyo even relatively wealthy people take the train to work just like everyone else.
Some people are willing to pay the extra costs of living in order to have access to an immense amount of culture. NYC has several orchestras, a world-class opera and theatre scene, and readings by prominent literary figures nearly every night of the week. If you like fine dining, you have a vaster range of choices there than elsewhere.
Free ridesharing is surely here to stay. However, considering that a lot of countries are slowly transitioning to a cashless economy, having more and more transactions proceed through electronic payments that can be easily tracked, I suspect it will be increasingly difficult for drivers to make any significant amount of money without at least declaring it in taxes. And if the tax office finds out about your work, so can other government regulatory agencies.
High-speed parkers provide liquidity, you insensitive clod!
Don't most American libertarians want the government to privatize all roads, or at least all highways?
While the status of hitchhiking in Victoria is disputed (the wording of the law is no different from many countries where hitchhiking is considered legal, and the police don't enforce it anyway as hordes of foreign travellers in Oz can tell you), the OP may have been referring to rideshare websites or bulletin boards where people exchange free lifts, not actually standing along the road.
While the mainstream, monetary payment-driven sharing economy is indeed riddled with problems, for every exploitive service like this there are community-driven, freely usable services that work more according to a gift economy. You cite Airbnb, but well before that site arose people were offering each other hospitality through Couchsurfing* with no money exchanged, just a desire to help fellow travellers and pay the hospitality one received earlier forward. Analogous to Uber are free ride-sharing services, or if you like to hitchhike you can share your tips with your fellow hitchhikers on Hitchwiki. Even food-sharing has been facilitated through internet projects coordinating "Food Not Bombs"-style community dinners or sites like Trashwiki which allow dumpster-divers to pool their knowledge. And is Wikipedia not the best example of succesful and non-exploitive sharing? Its profit-driven competitors have all fallen by the wayside.
(* The Couchsurfing management did sell out its user base after a few years, and I mention it here only because it is the most well-known such service, but there are other, more idealistic hospex communities with the same basis.)
It seems to have worked quite well in tandem with other measures such as punitive taxes and places like New York City outlawing smoking in any public areas, even parks. As a pipe and cigar smoker, I've witnessed firsthand the decline in smoking and the social acceptability of smoking.
Actually, to do things "my" way, you'd have to stop before Robots and Empire, which after all was meant to tie two of the formerly independent series together.
The US has never prohibited work visas outright. There have always been visa categories for certain highly-skilled people to come to the US, even if quotas were not as generous as they are for H1Bs now.
H1B visas are usually given to educated IT workers from such countries as India or Eastern Europe. I doubt there is very much overlap between these immigrants and the Mexican narco-immigrants you are concerned about.
The United States gets legal immigrants from virtually every country and every status from rich investors to highly educated worker to unskilled refugee. You are looking only one part of the story, and a part that is off-topic for this Slashdot discussion.