An Associate's Degree is 2 years, a Bachelor's is another 2 years. So I can get the first 2 years for about 1/3 the cost of the next 2 years. In other words, it's like I spend 2 years on an AA and 6 years on a BA... which, if I'm paying out-of-pocket instead of sending myself into debt hell, might actually happen in terms of actual time.
. Sure, the whole positive reinforcement vs. negative reinforcement idea sounds good in theory, but children really need to have active repercussions for talking back or screaming when they don't get what they want.
Oh fuck you, i can stand in the corner longer than you can stay mad bitch.
This is another reason why teaching young children (4 year olds are pretty good, oddly enough...) to play Go is a good idea. The learning process of Go is simple:
You make an underplay.
You get boxed in.
You lose.
You make an overplay.
You get cut.
You lose.
Go to 4; however, the overplay will be smaller.
You QUICKLY learn you can't do certain shit because bad things happen. Then the games get more complex because you play stronger players, less handicap, etc. You know you can't do certain shit, but you start examining the positions thinking, "Can I get away with this?" You start thinking it out, playing through in your head... it's called "reading." More and more... deeper, as deep as you can... until you know just exactly what you can get away with before you go into it, or what the consequences of your actions will be.
It starts happening in real life pretty fucking fast. You look at shit and go, "... wait................ no, screw that."
I've been learning Japanese lately but my Hiragana is undeveloped. Been lazy with it though, I've had the language course for like a year now and I've gone through about 30 hours of study, with only 14 lessons so far... on average, I've done each twice. I need to pick up the pace; I have no real exposure. Same with German... it's amazing I can still chitchat with the girl at the meat market and order my food in Deutsch. (Aside, I strangely associate the original language with shit when I learn a language... like I'll say English, Nihongo, Nihon, Deutsch, Deutschland, etc, reflexively once I start learning the language of the area... dunno why.)
I'd say that's cultural. I don't think the Japanese have such a thing, but I'm not sure their language allows that level of corruption. I mean there's stuff like anata becoming anta, etc, but that's used between close friends and is a standard language feature rather than an improper corruption. It's informal. From a young age, children learn to speak up to those unfamiliar or in a higher class (elders, teachers, employers) with deference, and to those unfamiliar (peers) with... less deference, yet still quite formal speaking... and to those extremely familiar in a more casual manner.
It's not like in English, where we go "uhwuzza wuzzat you wanna bana nana?" at kids and people go "what the fuck did you get a piece of rebar reamed into your skull lady?" Consequently, I'm rather certain this is "we saw this all over and this is normal so do it."
Maybe if we didn't teach kids to be retarded, they wouldn't be so shitty. I fucking hate children, but I find small asian kids unbelievably disturbing. Every child I meet is a retarded asshole... but the little chinese/japanese kids are like 3 years old, they're quiet, polite, they watch what they do, they get the fuck out of your way, and they don't touch your shit because it's there and they wanna get their grabby hands on it. WTF? It's unbelievably creepy. These are not the kids I'm used to.
In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences.
As a father of three I can tell you that this behavior isn't "unconscious.". When your kids start to say words you will spend hours and then days saying them back to your children, to confirm what they said, to model better enunciation and to just to keep them engaged in a conversation with you. The words "by itself" bit is obvious - "affel" means either "I see an apple" or "I want a piece of your apple";
In my experience this behavior is stupidity. "Affel? Did woo zay affel? Yes you did, yes you did! Heeeeee~"
In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously become retarded.
Just responding to people trying to talk about motivations and profit and angels in the hearts of men and whatever. Questions like "who do you trust" or "should I trust the guy after money or the guy with unknown motives" are very base, expecting simple answers where only complex answers exist.
I'm sorry that apparently you've not been to a good university.
I went to a community college. I'm talking about stuff I hear from educators (i.e. teachers, counselors, administration) that I know, that I chat with, who are active in the education community. People who are going out and saying, "You know, I work with the work force a lot, I like to be well-rounded and know what's happening so I can prepare my students for the world, and what I'm seeing is...." And what they get back is, "Well, that's cute, but we just wanna educate them! ^_^" It's not just that the college administration lives in its own little bubble; they know what's going on outside, they just don't care.
Every college has its own administration; this isn't a cartel. But a lot of them are like this. Education, not vocation. It's called education. It means you know shit, you are educated, you can talk like you're smart. Vocation means you're useful.
Hey, trailers are awesome. They only cost as much as a high-end sports car ($50k, $60k for a good double-wide that you can have insulated easily) and you can still get a 15-20 year loan on them. If you want a house, around here it's like $200k... I saw one that was $250k being foreclosed for $170k, and it had 4 bedrooms and a tiny kitchen and a basement... nice, but sans-basement, the trailer my parents got for $35k (it's $60k market now, with the land!) is bigger, with 3 bedrooms, a large living room, and a full size kitchen/dining room, plus another room on the side (kitchen + living room, make up most of the width at that end; there's another room next to that that is big enough for a dining room for large family gatherings!). The bedrooms aren't as small as that $250k Cape Cod's either, and the yard is about 20% smaller than the Cape Cod's back yard.
If I buy a place in this country, it'll be a double-wide trailer for the cost of a decent BMW brand new. I'll pay a tad more than I pay now for rent, and I'll pay it off inside of 5 years. Keep it clean and maintained well and you can resell it.
Are we really arguing philosophy here? I suggest you people stop bitching about these things and start understanding them.
I find it a great truth that meditation helps understanding these things. People seek answers too hard, and they are blinded; meditation trains the mind to stop seeking those answers and start seeing them. This is also an important skill in Go: the greatest flaw in your play is searching instead of seeing. Take some time to understand exactly what that means. (I am hesitant to say that the same issue is why many people reject meditation: they can't possibly ascribe anything sensible to it within their understanding, so they discard it. I'm a cause-and-effect guy; I know what works, I don't care how, or sometimes I "understand" but can't exactly ascribe something I can put into words to it... language is so bulky and cumbersome.)
To put it to words, merchants and accountants have a preoccupation with numbers. It is a very personal thing, and as long as it is personally acceptable in the near term it is good. If it causes harm to everyone, this is no matter: by the time it harms them too much, they will be dead or so well-off they can buy out of the destruction. Any such damage is too fuzzy and imprecise to matter, though; after all, how exactly would society be better off if McGraw Hill didn't put out brand new editions of $150 textbooks every few months, effectively worthless, but force college students to buy them? This is a triviality, and the merchant sees it as a silly and pointless concern; it makes no real difference, it is no real crime, and the money comes to them so it is a good thing.
They think small. Only small. The above paragraph is also very small: to truly understand, you must spend a lot of time thinking, slowly, clearly, and grandly; and when you do understand, you will also understand why the greatest philosophers sought their own personal truths and kept their understanding to themselves, offering hints and enlightenment when they could but never taking a political podium to explain all the intricacies of the universe to the masses. You will understand when you realize one day that you "get it," but you can't explain it, even to yourself. You will realize that you can write hundreds or thousands of pages, and it will be crude, imprecise, and often entirely wrong.
A community college degree is $9000 for a 2 year AA, plus about half as much in textbooks (fuck McGraw Hill). Text books average $100-$150 at that level. The next 2 years in a university cost about $13500/year plus $250-$300 textbooks per course (9 per year == $2250), making $27000 plus textbooks. "Too much debt"? You're best off with a community college AA degree.
So you're saying his degree was worthless and he got $5k-$10k a year pre-tax for it? Man the last 2 years of a 4 year degree costs me as much as a decent sports car, and my salary hike after cutting taxes off for it would be... enough to pay it off in a decade. By then, the sheer volume of experience I have makes up for the gap, and my degree is so old it's worthless in the job market. Not to mention the quality of living drop; the cost is too high, I can't live like that without the ability to actually have a life and afford things (I live alone, no room mates, in a small 1br; a 2br costs twice as much, plus the heating bill, never mind a house). Buying a used car off a dealer lot was a mistake enough.
I know a lot of educators, and some of them said they are routinely shocked by college administration because they've heard some form of the phrase, "We don't train them for work; we just want to educate them," too many times.
Here is the point: You go to college, you get educated.
You are not useful.
You are educated.
I know a lot about meditation, and about Go, and about philosophy. That... would be useful if all of society knew about that kind of thing, because society is a mess. As a job skill, though, it's worthless. That I can talk about all kinds of shit is not money-making.
A degree in IT doesn't make you an awesome programmer or sysadmin or security professional. That only comes with experience-- and getting the experience first makes cherry picking your education a hell of a lot more effective than ever getting a degree. Getting a degree is a waste of time; the only ones worthwhile are the ones that earn their knowledge.
It is said that knowledge given freely is worthless. When you pay someone for knowledge, that knowledge is given freely. I pay for Go books, I read them, I buy more, read them, I get no better; if I want to improve in Go, I have to play a lot of games and learn by losing a lot to stronger players. That I paid good money for books doesn't change the fact that the knowledge was dumped in my head with no effort on my part. Knowledge must be earned; the books give me guidance along the way, but I won't get any good until I encounter my own struggles and come to understand said guidance.
In college, you pay money to have someone read to you from a book, tell you to read from a book, and give you a paper test asking you if you recognize this shit you read from a book. Math is an exception, since math is math; any application of math is not an exception, you must solve real problems to get good at solving real problems. Anything with a real school (medical school, law school, etc) tends to be an exception (especially with internships being required for law school, and especially since law is academic anyway-- a court case is just Ph.D. research and a dissertation to an audience that WILL challenge you on it). The key here is the real world is often based on solving problems you haven't seen before, not solving problems of structure repeated throughout the book.
I'm not that skilled in Go either; I mostly reached 10kyu because I can outread everyone below 8kyu and most people below 6kyu. That is to say, I can play 12+ moves in my head and go, "... shit, that doesn't work." A lot of brilliant tesuji and joseki I play are things I've never seen; I discover them myself because they give the best result.
Chess is the same way. I want the knight and the bishop out, keep the queen back (I'm leery of using the queen as a primary attacker; it's too powerful to lose in a trivial scuff, it must be a highly strategic piece, like a bishop and a rook combined, which of course usurps the power of the king as well, which also has the attacking and movement power of the pawn). My first move is typically to move a pawn to free a bishop; once the opponent moves a piece (last time, last year, this was jumping a knight out rather than advancing a pawn), I start considering defense against all his mobile pieces.
I'm nasty. I identified anything troublesome and killed it. Rook/knight looks like an issue, can I get in its way and line it with the bishop? Kill the knight, the rook can't move that way; knight moves to avoid the threat, capture rook. Either way, the other piece just lost its protection. If I move here, how can he stop me?... by that, ok let's not do that.
In 9th grade there is a large difference between people who have played a lot of chess and recognize positions and strategies on the board and people who have not played a lot of chess but have played the game you're playing halfway through already. The difference is 9th grade chess club kids have seen stuff like this before and remember they can make this attack; I haven't, so I make the attack in my head, and then find the best response, and if it's bad for me I don't do that. These aren't world champion chess grandmasters, they don't go 30 levels in.
Absolutely no strategy involved, just brute force game tree search.
I've always found chess egregiously boring. The first time I played was when I was like 5, against my dad. The second time I was 15, against the top player in my chess club, who nearly cried because he lost. I really had no idea what I was doing, it was like here and checkmate. I always considered it a child's game, where the loser is the idiot schoolyard bully who stands up, punches the nerd in the face, and wins.
Heh, I keep getting told the same thing: I want to move to Japan, and people keep telling me "Japanese girls hate Americans." I don't really care; I want to get away from this city, and from Tokyo, and this... mess. Find somewhere quiet, rolling hills, have a nice garden with a sakura tree and some flowers planted around... maybe teach English or Go, spend time in an Izakaya and at an Aikido dojo (and possibly Judo; Judo has always interested me, but it's inaccessible here), learn to cook some....
I like Japanese culture. Not bullshit like Tokyo, with millions of flashing lights and funny dressed people and screaming and puchinko machines and whatnot... people are polite, introspective, and proud of their work. Americans aren't proud of their work; they're proud of their paychecks.
In Chess, there is only one metric: did you win? In Go, you have to build your position from the start; you can lose by a half a point, or you can lose by a half a dozen struggles for life as you get smashed into corners and crushed down to insignificance. Your playing can be completely incompetent, or it can be skillful and brilliant-- and you still lose, but the person who beats you is still thoroughly impressed. And here we have only one metric: did it get done? If it's in place, that's good enough; no matter if it's right, if it actually works correctly or just barely works, or if it's at all durable (if something changes, do we tear it out and make a new one, or just modify what we have?). I like people who have a sense of pride in their work, and who seek understanding and improvement at any chance, even if they have to admit fault.
I don't think I'll have a problem with "Japanese people really don't like Americans." It's more a matter of if I like them or not; we can go from there. Of course I have much to learn about their culture, much I can't get out of a book, much regional adjustment even: living on the US East Coast in Baltimore is different than New York or Virginia, and far different than the US Midwest; living in different parts of Japan will of course demand adjustment to different cultures. I'm sure I can learn from those around me.
Slashdot Mirror
An Associate's Degree is 2 years, a Bachelor's is another 2 years. So I can get the first 2 years for about 1/3 the cost of the next 2 years. In other words, it's like I spend 2 years on an AA and 6 years on a BA ... which, if I'm paying out-of-pocket instead of sending myself into debt hell, might actually happen in terms of actual time.
. Sure, the whole positive reinforcement vs. negative reinforcement idea sounds good in theory, but children really need to have active repercussions for talking back or screaming when they don't get what they want.
Oh fuck you, i can stand in the corner longer than you can stay mad bitch.
Why? These things have aluminum siding and nice roofs and everything. They look good.
This is another reason why teaching young children (4 year olds are pretty good, oddly enough...) to play Go is a good idea. The learning process of Go is simple:
You QUICKLY learn you can't do certain shit because bad things happen. Then the games get more complex because you play stronger players, less handicap, etc. You know you can't do certain shit, but you start examining the positions thinking, "Can I get away with this?" You start thinking it out, playing through in your head... it's called "reading." More and more... deeper, as deep as you can... until you know just exactly what you can get away with before you go into it, or what the consequences of your actions will be.
It starts happening in real life pretty fucking fast. You look at shit and go, "... wait. ............... no, screw that."
Freud, I heard about that guy's book... it's about penises, isn't it?!
I've been learning Japanese lately but my Hiragana is undeveloped. Been lazy with it though, I've had the language course for like a year now and I've gone through about 30 hours of study, with only 14 lessons so far... on average, I've done each twice. I need to pick up the pace; I have no real exposure. Same with German... it's amazing I can still chitchat with the girl at the meat market and order my food in Deutsch. (Aside, I strangely associate the original language with shit when I learn a language... like I'll say English, Nihongo, Nihon, Deutsch, Deutschland, etc, reflexively once I start learning the language of the area... dunno why.)
I'd say that's cultural. I don't think the Japanese have such a thing, but I'm not sure their language allows that level of corruption. I mean there's stuff like anata becoming anta, etc, but that's used between close friends and is a standard language feature rather than an improper corruption. It's informal. From a young age, children learn to speak up to those unfamiliar or in a higher class (elders, teachers, employers) with deference, and to those unfamiliar (peers) with ... less deference, yet still quite formal speaking ... and to those extremely familiar in a more casual manner.
It's not like in English, where we go "uhwuzza wuzzat you wanna bana nana?" at kids and people go "what the fuck did you get a piece of rebar reamed into your skull lady?" Consequently, I'm rather certain this is "we saw this all over and this is normal so do it."
Maybe if we didn't teach kids to be retarded, they wouldn't be so shitty. I fucking hate children, but I find small asian kids unbelievably disturbing. Every child I meet is a retarded asshole... but the little chinese/japanese kids are like 3 years old, they're quiet, polite, they watch what they do, they get the fuck out of your way, and they don't touch your shit because it's there and they wanna get their grabby hands on it. WTF? It's unbelievably creepy. These are not the kids I'm used to.
We're doing something wrong. Seriously.
In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences.
As a father of three I can tell you that this behavior isn't "unconscious.". When your kids start to say words you will spend hours and then days saying them back to your children, to confirm what they said, to model better enunciation and to just to keep them engaged in a conversation with you. The words "by itself" bit is obvious - "affel" means either "I see an apple" or "I want a piece of your apple";
In my experience this behavior is stupidity. "Affel? Did woo zay affel? Yes you did, yes you did! Heeeeee~"
In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously become retarded.
Who the fuck wrote this anyway?
solid-state drives promise greater power efficiency, performance, and resistance to physical shock; and run more quietly
solid-state drives promise greater power efficiency, performance, and resistance to physical shock, while providing more quiet operation
solid-state drives promise to provide more quiet operation while delivering greater power efficiency, performance, and resistance to physical shock
Just responding to people trying to talk about motivations and profit and angels in the hearts of men and whatever. Questions like "who do you trust" or "should I trust the guy after money or the guy with unknown motives" are very base, expecting simple answers where only complex answers exist.
I'm sorry that apparently you've not been to a good university.
I went to a community college. I'm talking about stuff I hear from educators (i.e. teachers, counselors, administration) that I know, that I chat with, who are active in the education community. People who are going out and saying, "You know, I work with the work force a lot, I like to be well-rounded and know what's happening so I can prepare my students for the world, and what I'm seeing is ...." And what they get back is, "Well, that's cute, but we just wanna educate them! ^_^" It's not just that the college administration lives in its own little bubble; they know what's going on outside, they just don't care.
Every college has its own administration; this isn't a cartel. But a lot of them are like this. Education, not vocation. It's called education. It means you know shit, you are educated, you can talk like you're smart. Vocation means you're useful.
Hey, trailers are awesome. They only cost as much as a high-end sports car ($50k, $60k for a good double-wide that you can have insulated easily) and you can still get a 15-20 year loan on them. If you want a house, around here it's like $200k... I saw one that was $250k being foreclosed for $170k, and it had 4 bedrooms and a tiny kitchen and a basement ... nice, but sans-basement, the trailer my parents got for $35k (it's $60k market now, with the land!) is bigger, with 3 bedrooms, a large living room, and a full size kitchen/dining room, plus another room on the side (kitchen + living room, make up most of the width at that end; there's another room next to that that is big enough for a dining room for large family gatherings!). The bedrooms aren't as small as that $250k Cape Cod's either, and the yard is about 20% smaller than the Cape Cod's back yard.
If I buy a place in this country, it'll be a double-wide trailer for the cost of a decent BMW brand new. I'll pay a tad more than I pay now for rent, and I'll pay it off inside of 5 years. Keep it clean and maintained well and you can resell it.
Are we really arguing philosophy here? I suggest you people stop bitching about these things and start understanding them.
I find it a great truth that meditation helps understanding these things. People seek answers too hard, and they are blinded; meditation trains the mind to stop seeking those answers and start seeing them. This is also an important skill in Go: the greatest flaw in your play is searching instead of seeing. Take some time to understand exactly what that means. (I am hesitant to say that the same issue is why many people reject meditation: they can't possibly ascribe anything sensible to it within their understanding, so they discard it. I'm a cause-and-effect guy; I know what works, I don't care how, or sometimes I "understand" but can't exactly ascribe something I can put into words to it... language is so bulky and cumbersome.)
To put it to words, merchants and accountants have a preoccupation with numbers. It is a very personal thing, and as long as it is personally acceptable in the near term it is good. If it causes harm to everyone, this is no matter: by the time it harms them too much, they will be dead or so well-off they can buy out of the destruction. Any such damage is too fuzzy and imprecise to matter, though; after all, how exactly would society be better off if McGraw Hill didn't put out brand new editions of $150 textbooks every few months, effectively worthless, but force college students to buy them? This is a triviality, and the merchant sees it as a silly and pointless concern; it makes no real difference, it is no real crime, and the money comes to them so it is a good thing.
They think small. Only small. The above paragraph is also very small: to truly understand, you must spend a lot of time thinking, slowly, clearly, and grandly; and when you do understand, you will also understand why the greatest philosophers sought their own personal truths and kept their understanding to themselves, offering hints and enlightenment when they could but never taking a political podium to explain all the intricacies of the universe to the masses. You will understand when you realize one day that you "get it," but you can't explain it, even to yourself. You will realize that you can write hundreds or thousands of pages, and it will be crude, imprecise, and often entirely wrong.
A community college degree is $9000 for a 2 year AA, plus about half as much in textbooks (fuck McGraw Hill). Text books average $100-$150 at that level. The next 2 years in a university cost about $13500/year plus $250-$300 textbooks per course (9 per year == $2250), making $27000 plus textbooks. "Too much debt"? You're best off with a community college AA degree.
So you're saying his degree was worthless and he got $5k-$10k a year pre-tax for it? Man the last 2 years of a 4 year degree costs me as much as a decent sports car, and my salary hike after cutting taxes off for it would be... enough to pay it off in a decade. By then, the sheer volume of experience I have makes up for the gap, and my degree is so old it's worthless in the job market. Not to mention the quality of living drop; the cost is too high, I can't live like that without the ability to actually have a life and afford things (I live alone, no room mates, in a small 1br; a 2br costs twice as much, plus the heating bill, never mind a house). Buying a used car off a dealer lot was a mistake enough.
I know a lot of educators, and some of them said they are routinely shocked by college administration because they've heard some form of the phrase, "We don't train them for work; we just want to educate them," too many times.
Here is the point: You go to college, you get educated.
You are not useful.
You are educated.
I know a lot about meditation, and about Go, and about philosophy. That... would be useful if all of society knew about that kind of thing, because society is a mess. As a job skill, though, it's worthless. That I can talk about all kinds of shit is not money-making.
A degree in IT doesn't make you an awesome programmer or sysadmin or security professional. That only comes with experience-- and getting the experience first makes cherry picking your education a hell of a lot more effective than ever getting a degree. Getting a degree is a waste of time; the only ones worthwhile are the ones that earn their knowledge.
It is said that knowledge given freely is worthless. When you pay someone for knowledge, that knowledge is given freely. I pay for Go books, I read them, I buy more, read them, I get no better; if I want to improve in Go, I have to play a lot of games and learn by losing a lot to stronger players. That I paid good money for books doesn't change the fact that the knowledge was dumped in my head with no effort on my part. Knowledge must be earned; the books give me guidance along the way, but I won't get any good until I encounter my own struggles and come to understand said guidance.
In college, you pay money to have someone read to you from a book, tell you to read from a book, and give you a paper test asking you if you recognize this shit you read from a book. Math is an exception, since math is math; any application of math is not an exception, you must solve real problems to get good at solving real problems. Anything with a real school (medical school, law school, etc) tends to be an exception (especially with internships being required for law school, and especially since law is academic anyway-- a court case is just Ph.D. research and a dissertation to an audience that WILL challenge you on it). The key here is the real world is often based on solving problems you haven't seen before, not solving problems of structure repeated throughout the book.
I'm not that skilled in Go either; I mostly reached 10kyu because I can outread everyone below 8kyu and most people below 6kyu. That is to say, I can play 12+ moves in my head and go, "... shit, that doesn't work." A lot of brilliant tesuji and joseki I play are things I've never seen; I discover them myself because they give the best result.
Chess is the same way. I want the knight and the bishop out, keep the queen back (I'm leery of using the queen as a primary attacker; it's too powerful to lose in a trivial scuff, it must be a highly strategic piece, like a bishop and a rook combined, which of course usurps the power of the king as well, which also has the attacking and movement power of the pawn). My first move is typically to move a pawn to free a bishop; once the opponent moves a piece (last time, last year, this was jumping a knight out rather than advancing a pawn), I start considering defense against all his mobile pieces.
I'm nasty. I identified anything troublesome and killed it. Rook/knight looks like an issue, can I get in its way and line it with the bishop? Kill the knight, the rook can't move that way; knight moves to avoid the threat, capture rook. Either way, the other piece just lost its protection. If I move here, how can he stop me? ... by that, ok let's not do that.
In 9th grade there is a large difference between people who have played a lot of chess and recognize positions and strategies on the board and people who have not played a lot of chess but have played the game you're playing halfway through already. The difference is 9th grade chess club kids have seen stuff like this before and remember they can make this attack; I haven't, so I make the attack in my head, and then find the best response, and if it's bad for me I don't do that. These aren't world champion chess grandmasters, they don't go 30 levels in.
Absolutely no strategy involved, just brute force game tree search.
hellitsabouttime
I've always found chess egregiously boring. The first time I played was when I was like 5, against my dad. The second time I was 15, against the top player in my chess club, who nearly cried because he lost. I really had no idea what I was doing, it was like here and checkmate. I always considered it a child's game, where the loser is the idiot schoolyard bully who stands up, punches the nerd in the face, and wins.
No it doesn't; when crazy people talk to dolls, the dolls don't talk back.
No-Pan Kissa sounds like something Americans would have done first if it was somehow legal or economically favorable.
Heh, I keep getting told the same thing: I want to move to Japan, and people keep telling me "Japanese girls hate Americans." I don't really care; I want to get away from this city, and from Tokyo, and this ... mess. Find somewhere quiet, rolling hills, have a nice garden with a sakura tree and some flowers planted around... maybe teach English or Go, spend time in an Izakaya and at an Aikido dojo (and possibly Judo; Judo has always interested me, but it's inaccessible here), learn to cook some....
I like Japanese culture. Not bullshit like Tokyo, with millions of flashing lights and funny dressed people and screaming and puchinko machines and whatnot... people are polite, introspective, and proud of their work. Americans aren't proud of their work; they're proud of their paychecks.
In Chess, there is only one metric: did you win? In Go, you have to build your position from the start; you can lose by a half a point, or you can lose by a half a dozen struggles for life as you get smashed into corners and crushed down to insignificance. Your playing can be completely incompetent, or it can be skillful and brilliant-- and you still lose, but the person who beats you is still thoroughly impressed. And here we have only one metric: did it get done? If it's in place, that's good enough; no matter if it's right, if it actually works correctly or just barely works, or if it's at all durable (if something changes, do we tear it out and make a new one, or just modify what we have?). I like people who have a sense of pride in their work, and who seek understanding and improvement at any chance, even if they have to admit fault.
I don't think I'll have a problem with "Japanese people really don't like Americans." It's more a matter of if I like them or not; we can go from there. Of course I have much to learn about their culture, much I can't get out of a book, much regional adjustment even: living on the US East Coast in Baltimore is different than New York or Virginia, and far different than the US Midwest; living in different parts of Japan will of course demand adjustment to different cultures. I'm sure I can learn from those around me.
Too much time talking to Pintsize.
Can't mod down for disagreeing, so you're just going to point out that he's a moron?