I think a large part of it is simply that the ones that study science at university are very intelligent - so intelligent that they have breezed through school and high-school without having to make an effort. I mean, I turned up to my high-school exams without ever having opened the books or handed in my home work - and I passed with good enough grades to get into university, where I failed everything for the first three years. It would have helped me immensely, if there had been a lot more focus on making me work steadily in school, but as it was, I simply didn't understand the necessity of it.
I had similar issues. I never learned to take notes (never needed them). I never learned how to go talk to the teacher. I never bothered to memorized math formulas, laws and such because I could re-derive them during the test if I needed them (but I didn't have time for that when I needed all these formulas for advanced physics, or worse, I had forgotten they even existed).
I can't claim to have been treated unfairly, since I had been told that being lazy was bad and since I was the one being lazy. But I often wonder how my life would be different and likely better if grade school had been more challenging, if grades were open announced like sports results to bring out my competitive side, and if there had been tangible penalties for getting a B instead of an A on report, test, and especially homework.
hard is merely the fact that often, the theories and equations taught are quite abstract. It is very important to have a solid grasp of concepts, but in the end, the material could be improved with visual and/or tangible results which have some values and/or association to the abstract concepts.
I found advanced physics hard. How does one make the twin paradox tangible? I think in some cases the material is hard because it isn't tangible or visible. That Slower Speed of Light project Slashdot reported on is a good start, but in my case (going to college years and years ago) the technology simple wasn't available for such a simulation.
At what point in your lifetime has America not had jobs? I'm only in my mid 30s, but at no point in my life has America not had jobs.
In the past few years there were plenty of lazy fucks who were unwilling to work a job that was 'beneath' them.
The people 'taking our jobs' are taking jobs the complainers are unwilling to work for pay they are unwilling to accept.
Foreigners don't take American jobs, American's are too fucking lazy to do them in the first place.
"...jobs, Mexicans are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Africans are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Chinese are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Arabs are too fucking lazy to do them..."
It sure sounds racist if you say that for any other nationality. For Americans it's ok?
False dichotomy. Can't you think of any alternatives?
In Canada (not sure about other places) they often contrast the tossed salad with the melting pot. In a tossed salad, there is distinction without separation (no ghettos yet no assimilation).
Of course these are both metaphors and we can argue about reality, but surely you can at least conceptualize two distinct cultures living together without race riots.
If I naively assume the best about people, or assume they're all just like me, then sure I can conceptualize that. But people aren't like that. Can you give an example of a society that has long endured and prospered as a salad bowl? (America is not an example, while there are salad bowl sections most have historically melted together and the most salad bowl like relation-between blacks and whites-nearly destroyed the country).
Realistically, swathes of the US are like that, regardless of the melting pot metaphor.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot.
Yes - I've always found it amusing that the US is so proud of being a "melting pot". This suggests that all cultural distinctiveness will be lost and you have to become just like everyone else - it's the Borg approach to immigration. Not sure why you would want to be so proud of that but, having once been a US resident, I'll grant that it is an accurate metaphor.
Although the metaphor isn't perfect, part of the idea of the melting pot is that you take the best parts from every culture. As for the cultural distinctiveness, the original cultures remain in whatever land they came from - where they still fight with their neighbors over those differences.
If you're born here, you're not losing your culture - you're living the culture you were born to. If you came here, well, why did you come if you didn't think the culture had a lot to offer? If you want to come here and embrace American culture while keeping a few of your own things that you honestly think are better, great! But if you want to come here and make is just like the place that was so much worse that you wanted to leave, then WTF?
It wasn't where I grew up in the Midwest. We had two ingredients that could be considered separated like the ingredients in a tossed salad - there were blacks and whites. Have ingredients act like a tossed salad wasn't working out so well.
On the other hand, the people from all over Europe, as well as native Americans and people from other places too, were pretty thoroughly mixed and there were no other ethnic tensions to speak of. It was very common for people to have a little bit of Cherokee in them (a result of the trail of tears). People had German, French, English, Polish, Irish, Welsh, Mexican, Swedish, whatever ancestry and nobody cared much. It might occasionally be a fun parlor game to discuss ancestry - which usually meant guessing based on last names of grandparents, but other than that we didn't have people whose families had been in America for generations making absurd statements like "I'm Italian" the way I hear people do on the East Cost. The melting pot works. I've seen it.
Whether or not the melting of metals together creates a something stronger than the original metals may be chance. But certainly an alloy is better than blade composed of various chunks of unalloyed metals barely attached to each other.
The alternative to the melting pot isn't the salad bowl, it's the Balkans. Or pick your favorite salad bowl. Pretty much anywhere in the world where various cultures and peoples have become mixed they've either assimilated to the point of no longer being able to easily distinguish, or they've maintained tense relations centuries occasionally flaring into wars and massecres.
I grew up in the midwest and really liked he model there. Unlike the east coast where I hear Americans whose families have been in America for generations utter nonsense like "I'm Italian" or "I'm Polish", where I grew up everyone was just American. There was tension whenever blacks and whites interacted, but embracing mutual assimilation can even erase that even as it erased the differences between the Germans, French, English and others who settled the area. Instead we have America-haters saying we should exclude blacks from being full Americans - we have to treat them like some alien hybrid of African and American (thus the term "African American" even though most of their families have been in America longer than the families of most white people.
So by all means let's have a melting pot. Even if melting two metals together forms a blade weaker than either of the two metals, that blade will still be stronger than a blade made of two separate pieces of metal or a blade made from metals that have not thoroughly blended.
And if we try to explain to young women that they ought to be thinking long-term and being careful about hooking up, that they ought to save themselves for marriage because many of those engineers aren't going to want women who are a bit threadbare, we're called prudish sexist pigs.
It's more much politically correct to ignore reality and let the women suffer when they outgrow the party boys and realize they want more out of life.
So here's the life:
1. Spend your high school, college years and early 20s hooking up with good-looking party hunks who are getting laid by multiple women and have no incentive to get married.
2. In your late 20s and early 30s, realize that your looks are going, the hunks are looking for younger women. Start looking for those engineers who by now are disgusted with women who ignored them when they were young and pretty. Also start to realize that "every many wants to be a woman's first, and every woman wants to be a man's last" has some truth to it and since you've already experimented with the hunks those engineers have no reason to let you be their last since you can't let them be their first - for anything.
3. In your mid-30s continue lower your expectations and trying to cover by focusing on career.
4. In your late-30s start to get desperate about finding that right person because you've realized that you really do want to have a baby and be a mother.
5. Watch your fertility disappear.
6. ?
7. Profit!
It doesn't matter how much or who monitors you.
What matters is what actions are taken from the monitoring - if any.
What matters is what actions could be taken from the monitoring, because eventually some government somewhere will try to step over the line and take those actions.
The actions that they could take also matter because behavior is affected anyway just by knowing about the monitoring. The implied threat is always there.
The US is the only country I know of with complete "freedom of speech" and over the last couple of years we have seen that even here it is suppresed to cheers (talking about people here cheering the IRS suppressing conservatives). I don't see any way of punishing other than the people outright fighting those in charge, and using the ballot box no longer works because they made sure to suppress support of opposition.
Unless by "punishment" you mean promoted or hired by Apple to top level positions.
So, let me know how that works out for you.
Don't forget the big push for campaign finance laws that put the government in the business of deciding what is and is not political speech in the first place.
Like every form of government, it's not all bad or good, but just what we have.
The U.N. isn't a form of government, it is a club of governments. The behavior of a club is largely determined by what kind of members it has. Most members of the U.N. are autocratic oppressive government and U.N. behavior reflects that.
It will depend on the nature of the offense. Now someone who smoked illegal drugs is unlikely to face many problems getting hired or even getting elected President of the United States. On the other hand, suppose as a teenager you got into a heated internet discussion and called your opponent a *igger. (That's right, I'm too chicken to say it). In today's world of racial hyper-sensitivity and workplace zero-tolerance, who's going to hire such a person? What if he says the word again and creates a lawsuit? The plaintiff will be able to use the internet history as evidence that the employer should have known better than to higher the guy. What if your internet history reveals you to be a long-time smoker (before you quite ten years ago)?
There are thousands of jobs with no need for algebra skills. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of biology. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of great works of literature. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of art. There are thousands of jobs with no need for an understanding of evolution, history, or geography.
Yet we require these classes for pretty much everyone who goes to college.
Computers are such an integral part of life today that everyone should really have a basic understanding of how they work and what they're capable of. Learning a programming language teaches you that.
Requiring two programming languages for an ad agency is nutty, but requiring one programming language for all college graduates is very reasonable.
I've been doing Java for quite a few years and would like to do something different. I'm finding that employers are looking for specific languages and I'm having trouble getting considered for any job that isn't Java. The differences between object-oriented procedural languages aren't that great and my resume shows that I've learned quite a few different languages. It's pretty frustrating not being considered for jobs that look interesting just because they use a different language.
I remember a few months ago the Republicans were offering a bill to make it easy for foreigners to earn PhDs from American universities to stay. To keep it from affecting overall immigration levels the bill would have cut the number of other people allowed in by the same number.
Good point. The tell us that we have to import workers to fix the wage disparity, but that we can't bring in cheaper products to deal with the price disparity of, for example, DVDs.
What we need to understand is that some jobs can be exported and some can't. If the job can be exported, it makes sense to bring the foreign worker here where he'll earn an American wage and compete with Americans on an equal footing. It will lower the wage here of course, but not as much as exporting the job to the foreign country would do. Anyone know how much it costs to ship a piece of software from a factory in Poland to America?
If the job can't be exported, like cleaning hotel rooms, gardening, picking vegetables, etc. then it makes sense to keep the competition out and reserve the jobs for Americans so that the wages can go up. (and don't say Americans won't do the work - offer them the right pay and working conditions and they will)
So basically, bring the skilled IT workers here and keep the unskilled migrant workers out.
Since I'm not wealthy enough to employ such cheap workers they don't help me that much. They're great to have around if you're rich enough to own a factory and can use them to replace your American workers. They're also great to have around if you're rich enough to use them as gardeners and domestic servants.
But for the rest of us they're a strain on government services and competition for jobs.
This is why the 1% of both political parties support illegal immigration.
It would also be interesting to try the experiment with some other unpopular and/or demonized things like
KKK
Nazi
Moral Majority
Democrat
Republican
Lobbyist
Pro-Life
Focus on the Family
(wow, are "Pro-Life" and "Focus on the Family" the best I can do for modern conservative positions/organizations (Moral Majority is old)? I can't think of any that have the name recognition of liberal organizations like "NOW", "NAACP", "Planned Parenthood", etc.. Is that because conservative groups aren't called on as "experts" or as spokesmen for various groups when news organizations are covering stories the way the news organizations use liberal groups as supposed experts/representatives, or is it because of the rule that organizations tend to drift toward being liberal?)
Slashdot Mirror
I think a large part of it is simply that the ones that study science at university are very intelligent - so intelligent that they have breezed through school and high-school without having to make an effort. I mean, I turned up to my high-school exams without ever having opened the books or handed in my home work - and I passed with good enough grades to get into university, where I failed everything for the first three years. It would have helped me immensely, if there had been a lot more focus on making me work steadily in school, but as it was, I simply didn't understand the necessity of it.
I had similar issues. I never learned to take notes (never needed them). I never learned how to go talk to the teacher. I never bothered to memorized math formulas, laws and such because I could re-derive them during the test if I needed them (but I didn't have time for that when I needed all these formulas for advanced physics, or worse, I had forgotten they even existed).
I can't claim to have been treated unfairly, since I had been told that being lazy was bad and since I was the one being lazy. But I often wonder how my life would be different and likely better if grade school had been more challenging, if grades were open announced like sports results to bring out my competitive side, and if there had been tangible penalties for getting a B instead of an A on report, test, and especially homework.
hard is merely the fact that often, the theories and equations taught are quite abstract. It is very important to have a solid grasp of concepts, but in the end, the material could be improved with visual and/or tangible results which have some values and/or association to the abstract concepts.
I found advanced physics hard. How does one make the twin paradox tangible? I think in some cases the material is hard because it isn't tangible or visible. That Slower Speed of Light project Slashdot reported on is a good start, but in my case (going to college years and years ago) the technology simple wasn't available for such a simulation.
At what point in your lifetime has America not had jobs? I'm only in my mid 30s, but at no point in my life has America not had jobs.
In the past few years there were plenty of lazy fucks who were unwilling to work a job that was 'beneath' them.
The people 'taking our jobs' are taking jobs the complainers are unwilling to work for pay they are unwilling to accept.
Foreigners don't take American jobs, American's are too fucking lazy to do them in the first place.
"...jobs, Mexicans are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Africans are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Chinese are too fucking lazy to do them..."
"...jobs, Arabs are too fucking lazy to do them..."
It sure sounds racist if you say that for any other nationality. For Americans it's ok?
False dichotomy. Can't you think of any alternatives?
In Canada (not sure about other places) they often contrast the tossed salad with the melting pot. In a tossed salad, there is distinction without separation (no ghettos yet no assimilation).
Of course these are both metaphors and we can argue about reality, but surely you can at least conceptualize two distinct cultures living together without race riots.
If I naively assume the best about people, or assume they're all just like me, then sure I can conceptualize that. But people aren't like that. Can you give an example of a society that has long endured and prospered as a salad bowl? (America is not an example, while there are salad bowl sections most have historically melted together and the most salad bowl like relation-between blacks and whites-nearly destroyed the country).
Realistically, swathes of the US are like that, regardless of the melting pot metaphor.
And realistically it often causes problems.
When I was a schoolboy we were taught to take pride in the fact that we were and always had been a melting pot.
Yes - I've always found it amusing that the US is so proud of being a "melting pot". This suggests that all cultural distinctiveness will be lost and you have to become just like everyone else - it's the Borg approach to immigration. Not sure why you would want to be so proud of that but, having once been a US resident, I'll grant that it is an accurate metaphor.
Although the metaphor isn't perfect, part of the idea of the melting pot is that you take the best parts from every culture. As for the cultural distinctiveness, the original cultures remain in whatever land they came from - where they still fight with their neighbors over those differences.
If you're born here, you're not losing your culture - you're living the culture you were born to. If you came here, well, why did you come if you didn't think the culture had a lot to offer? If you want to come here and embrace American culture while keeping a few of your own things that you honestly think are better, great! But if you want to come here and make is just like the place that was so much worse that you wanted to leave, then WTF?
Walls are a sign of a society in decline: Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall
The "Chinese" starting building those walls several centuries BC, before there even was a China.
Would there even have been a China without those walls?
I dream of someday being rich enough to support more immigration and even illegal immigration like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
It wasn't where I grew up in the Midwest. We had two ingredients that could be considered separated like the ingredients in a tossed salad - there were blacks and whites. Have ingredients act like a tossed salad wasn't working out so well.
On the other hand, the people from all over Europe, as well as native Americans and people from other places too, were pretty thoroughly mixed and there were no other ethnic tensions to speak of. It was very common for people to have a little bit of Cherokee in them (a result of the trail of tears). People had German, French, English, Polish, Irish, Welsh, Mexican, Swedish, whatever ancestry and nobody cared much. It might occasionally be a fun parlor game to discuss ancestry - which usually meant guessing based on last names of grandparents, but other than that we didn't have people whose families had been in America for generations making absurd statements like "I'm Italian" the way I hear people do on the East Cost. The melting pot works. I've seen it.
Whether or not the melting of metals together creates a something stronger than the original metals may be chance. But certainly an alloy is better than blade composed of various chunks of unalloyed metals barely attached to each other.
The alternative to the melting pot isn't the salad bowl, it's the Balkans. Or pick your favorite salad bowl. Pretty much anywhere in the world where various cultures and peoples have become mixed they've either assimilated to the point of no longer being able to easily distinguish, or they've maintained tense relations centuries occasionally flaring into wars and massecres.
I grew up in the midwest and really liked he model there. Unlike the east coast where I hear Americans whose families have been in America for generations utter nonsense like "I'm Italian" or "I'm Polish", where I grew up everyone was just American. There was tension whenever blacks and whites interacted, but embracing mutual assimilation can even erase that even as it erased the differences between the Germans, French, English and others who settled the area. Instead we have America-haters saying we should exclude blacks from being full Americans - we have to treat them like some alien hybrid of African and American (thus the term "African American" even though most of their families have been in America longer than the families of most white people.
So by all means let's have a melting pot. Even if melting two metals together forms a blade weaker than either of the two metals, that blade will still be stronger than a blade made of two separate pieces of metal or a blade made from metals that have not thoroughly blended.
And if we try to explain to young women that they ought to be thinking long-term and being careful about hooking up, that they ought to save themselves for marriage because many of those engineers aren't going to want women who are a bit threadbare, we're called prudish sexist pigs.
It's more much politically correct to ignore reality and let the women suffer when they outgrow the party boys and realize they want more out of life.
So here's the life:
1. Spend your high school, college years and early 20s hooking up with good-looking party hunks who are getting laid by multiple women and have no incentive to get married.
2. In your late 20s and early 30s, realize that your looks are going, the hunks are looking for younger women. Start looking for those engineers who by now are disgusted with women who ignored them when they were young and pretty. Also start to realize that "every many wants to be a woman's first, and every woman wants to be a man's last" has some truth to it and since you've already experimented with the hunks those engineers have no reason to let you be their last since you can't let them be their first - for anything.
3. In your mid-30s continue lower your expectations and trying to cover by focusing on career.
4. In your late-30s start to get desperate about finding that right person because you've realized that you really do want to have a baby and be a mother.
5. Watch your fertility disappear.
6. ?
7. Profit!
It doesn't matter how much or who monitors you. What matters is what actions are taken from the monitoring - if any.
What matters is what actions could be taken from the monitoring, because eventually some government somewhere will try to step over the line and take those actions.
The actions that they could take also matter because behavior is affected anyway just by knowing about the monitoring. The implied threat is always there.
The US is the only country I know of with complete "freedom of speech" and over the last couple of years we have seen that even here it is suppresed to cheers (talking about people here cheering the IRS suppressing conservatives). I don't see any way of punishing other than the people outright fighting those in charge, and using the ballot box no longer works because they made sure to suppress support of opposition.
Unless by "punishment" you mean promoted or hired by Apple to top level positions.
So, let me know how that works out for you.
Don't forget the big push for campaign finance laws that put the government in the business of deciding what is and is not political speech in the first place.
The UN vs World Wars, hmm, let's stick with the UN.
You think the U.N. has prevented world wars or could prevent world wars? How so?
Like every form of government, it's not all bad or good, but just what we have.
The U.N. isn't a form of government, it is a club of governments. The behavior of a club is largely determined by what kind of members it has. Most members of the U.N. are autocratic oppressive government and U.N. behavior reflects that.
It will depend on the nature of the offense. Now someone who smoked illegal drugs is unlikely to face many problems getting hired or even getting elected President of the United States. On the other hand, suppose as a teenager you got into a heated internet discussion and called your opponent a *igger. (That's right, I'm too chicken to say it). In today's world of racial hyper-sensitivity and workplace zero-tolerance, who's going to hire such a person? What if he says the word again and creates a lawsuit? The plaintiff will be able to use the internet history as evidence that the employer should have known better than to higher the guy. What if your internet history reveals you to be a long-time smoker (before you quite ten years ago)?
I wish I had mod points.
There are thousands of jobs with no need for algebra skills. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of biology. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of great works of literature. There are thousands of jobs with no need for knowledge of art. There are thousands of jobs with no need for an understanding of evolution, history, or geography.
Yet we require these classes for pretty much everyone who goes to college.
Computers are such an integral part of life today that everyone should really have a basic understanding of how they work and what they're capable of. Learning a programming language teaches you that.
Requiring two programming languages for an ad agency is nutty, but requiring one programming language for all college graduates is very reasonable.
I've been doing Java for quite a few years and would like to do something different. I'm finding that employers are looking for specific languages and I'm having trouble getting considered for any job that isn't Java. The differences between object-oriented procedural languages aren't that great and my resume shows that I've learned quite a few different languages. It's pretty frustrating not being considered for jobs that look interesting just because they use a different language.
I remember a few months ago the Republicans were offering a bill to make it easy for foreigners to earn PhDs from American universities to stay. To keep it from affecting overall immigration levels the bill would have cut the number of other people allowed in by the same number.
The Democrats killed it.
Good point. The tell us that we have to import workers to fix the wage disparity, but that we can't bring in cheaper products to deal with the price disparity of, for example, DVDs.
What we need to understand is that some jobs can be exported and some can't. If the job can be exported, it makes sense to bring the foreign worker here where he'll earn an American wage and compete with Americans on an equal footing. It will lower the wage here of course, but not as much as exporting the job to the foreign country would do. Anyone know how much it costs to ship a piece of software from a factory in Poland to America?
If the job can't be exported, like cleaning hotel rooms, gardening, picking vegetables, etc. then it makes sense to keep the competition out and reserve the jobs for Americans so that the wages can go up. (and don't say Americans won't do the work - offer them the right pay and working conditions and they will)
So basically, bring the skilled IT workers here and keep the unskilled migrant workers out.
Since I'm not wealthy enough to employ such cheap workers they don't help me that much. They're great to have around if you're rich enough to own a factory and can use them to replace your American workers. They're also great to have around if you're rich enough to use them as gardeners and domestic servants.
But for the rest of us they're a strain on government services and competition for jobs.
This is why the 1% of both political parties support illegal immigration.
If the ebook is to be used on a internet browser, it could be that the parents had to purchas a hardcopy of the book due to a poorly designed website.
It would also be interesting to try the experiment with some other unpopular and/or demonized things like
KKK
Nazi
Moral Majority
Democrat
Republican
Lobbyist
Pro-Life
Focus on the Family
(wow, are "Pro-Life" and "Focus on the Family" the best I can do for modern conservative positions/organizations (Moral Majority is old)? I can't think of any that have the name recognition of liberal organizations like "NOW", "NAACP", "Planned Parenthood", etc.. Is that because conservative groups aren't called on as "experts" or as spokesmen for various groups when news organizations are covering stories the way the news organizations use liberal groups as supposed experts/representatives, or is it because of the rule that organizations tend to drift toward being liberal?)
It depends on who you mean by "them".