I suspect PsyStar would have been fine if they had sold "OSX-ready" PCs that you could install Leopard on, as you suggested. That's not what they did. They sold unlicensed clones.
As for Apple being dead if it lost its image... That's just the normal Slashdot line that basically indicates that the Slashdot demographic is nothing like most of the world. People may walk into the store for the image, but they buy and continue to buy because they are solid products that work really, really well. I don't feel cool when I use my Mac. I feel productive. I feel like, "hey, this thing hasn't been rebooted in months and still works right," and "hey, this thing doesn't bother me with any obtrusive messages telling me this and that" and "hey, this thing ships with software accessories that I actually use, because they do something for real." I think most people 'round here anyway don't have any illusions about Apple's benevolence. They are ruthless. But they also make a great product. MS is ruthless, and then somehow manages to make crap.
Bah, this isn't going anywhere. I understand your points, but I think a common-sense reading of this situation can only come down on Apple's side. This company was making unlicensed clones by circumventing code. It's illegal.
You raise a very good point. Obviously, MS includes the code to do slipstreaming (and thank the gods for that) and Apple does not, but it is a fair point, to be sure.
Still I think it's going to come down to the fact that they are are a company deliberately circumventing software restrictions on what can be installed on what, and doing it for a profit. This could be a DMCA issue (ugh... Am I actually arguing FOR a DMCA case? What's wrong with me?).
I don't have any doubt that Apple will win this handily, and I think it's actually better for everyone if they do. But if PsyStar can raise an interesting enough case to get something down in black and white about the enforceability of EULAs, that would be a good thing, too.
It's an interesting case, but I also don't think it has that much to do with freedom (man). Apple doesn't care if you hack their software to work on unsupported hardware; they just don't want you making a buck doing it.
PsyStar is not in trouble for making OSX-compatible PCs. They are not in trouble for selling Leopard. They are in trouble for the following:
Using a software hack to install OSX on non-Apple hardware, and then selling said hardware, in gross violation of the license.
Downloading Apple software updates and cracking them for re-distribution, in gross violation of copyright law
Being brazen and unapologetic morons in the face of one of the most litigious companies on Earth and being smug about it
This isn't about whether you're allowed to buy a copy of Leopard and install it on your Hackintosh. Apple doesn't care about the x86 project. It generates interest in the platform and hurts no one and costs nothing because they don't have to support it and the onus of making anything work lies solely with the hobbyists doing it for the fun and coolness of it.
This is about whether another company can make unlicensed Mac clones and sell them and support them in violation of all sorts of laws and licenses. It's not about out-selling them. It's about violating their licenses and copyrights with no benefit to them at all.
Apple can charge very little for its OS, because it knows it's making money on the hardware it's going to be installed on. This is a good deal for everyone. Apple hardware isn't much more than other OEM builders for what you get (and that's just on specs--that doesn't include the best-designed OEM case I've ever seen on my Mac Pro or the remarkable attention to detail I've found in every nook and cranny of that thing), and then your OS costs a third of what a copy of Vista does, and doesn't do a bunch of bullshit to make sure you're not a filthy pirate (even though I own two licenses of XP, I install cracked corporate versions because they don't whine at me all the time and make me call MS when I upgrade hardware). It's a whole package that provides value to the customer and keeps money coming into the company. It's just plain old economics.
I am planning on making my next Mac a Hackintosh. That looks fun and interesting and cool, from a hobbyist standpoint. But I also hope Apple succeeds in suing PsyStar into the stone age. People like that are going to make it necessary for OSX to incorporate bullshit hardware authentication schemes like Windows, which is going to kill off the Hackintosh community entirely. Apple doesn't want to piss off the geeks (like me) who are really starting to get into OSX. PsyStar having its ass handed to them is good for everyone.
I finally bit the bullet and bought the cheapest Mac Pro they make (the quad core). It is an awesome machine, but way more than I really needed. On the plus side, however, I won't be replacing it anytime soon. It replaced a perfectly-good, 2-year old AMD-based Windows machine. I just wanted to be on the Mac full-time, after buying a MacBook mostly out of curiosity, expecting to boot it to Windows mostly--and finding that I never needed to, and rather than replace my PC's guts with an Intel option (costing around $1k when all was said and done) to see about going with a Hackintosh (which sounds fun), I decided to just shell out the dough for one I knew would work. I didn't see the point in spending any extra money for a system that would probably work.
As I was fussing about this very issue (the lack of a "prosumer" product), an animation person online put it to me this way, and I think she's right:
Apple's longtime and long-term user base has always been graphics pros. If they offered a "prosumer" tower, that would eat significantly into the Mac Pro market. Sales of those high end, monster systems would no longer be profitable, and they may have to be discontinued. This would kill their dominance in the super-high-end graphics workstation market. So they offer a few lower-end workstations based on the same hardware and force the prosumer people to choose: iMac (toy) or Mac Pro (pro). It's not that they don't think they could sell a machine in the middle. It's that they would sell so many of them that they wouldn't be able to make money at the high end anymore.
I have to say, however, that even though I had to cover my eyes as I clicked "submit" on that order, I have loved this machine. It is pretty quiet (but not as quiet as my old PC--but I'd spent a lot of time and money absolutely silencing it), easy to open/work on, easy to find parts for, and pretty damned easy on the eyes. It does, however, weigh about 4000 pounds, something I'm not looking forward to dealing with when I move back to the US here in a year or so.
Anyway, the point of the story is that you are far from alone in your desire for a product as you describe. It's just that Apple has some pretty logical reasons to avoid offering it.
If the market share continues to rise, and it might--I know a lot of people who have gotten off of Windows in the last year, and most went to the Mac--then I would imagine they would feel safe putting something in the middle. Right now, though, it could be disastrous to their lifeblood demographic.
Two tests: Give the Amazon natives sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in lands where English is spoken.
Then give native English speakers sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in the Amazon region.
What would that prove? I can't even figure out what you were going for there...
There is no culture that would not benefit from having words for numbers. That doesn't at all mean that they were necessary. Of course they have eyes and understand the concept of values and quantities, but for whatever reason, they never felt it necessary to attach specific forms to them.
However, in the case of edible bugs (is that what you meant?), the problem isn't that we don't have words for them; it's that we don't have concepts for them. We have the concepts for bugs and for edible bugs (concepts we got from other cultures--ours has never really been big into eating bugs), but expecting us to have concepts for specific species of insects is just silly.
The key difference between these two things, however, is that we lack the specific concepts for species of bugs because we have never encountered them. Once we do, affixing a form (i.e. a name) is trivial. In the case of the Piraha, they are surrounded by things that could be represented by a numeric system, but have been delinquent (yes, delinquent) in recognizing them and affixing forms to them. I tried to think of an analogy for this... But there just isn't any. It is unfathomable.
I think that was you were going for was a kind of "multiple intelligences" thing. Like somehow not having a name for a certain bug is no different from lacking the words to express values in a higher resolution than 3-4 integers, and values over SIX. It is not.
To go back to your (or maybe "my," if I misunderstood) bug analogy, perhaps if they could express quantities over 6, they wouldn't have to know which bugs they can eat. --Because they'd have massive fields of grain and support a population of hundreds of millions, instead of just hundreds.
Looking at their living conditions, and their numbers, tells you all you really need to know about whether having a language without a numbers system is a good idea or not.
But please do not misinterpret. I am not saying "Rah Rah the Anglo culture is supreme!" because Anglos were not much better than these folks when the Romans found them. "We," too, had to be taught advanced technological concepts like having a proper working writing system, etc. And then came the Arabs with their improved number system, with the major technological breakthrough of the concept of 0 as a number, allowing negatives (I have to add this, though--they got it from the Indians, along with most of what they are given credit for in Europe--they were just like the Romans, gobbling up cultures and assimilating and spreading their ideas and technology--where the Romans had Greece, the Arabs had India).
The point of the story is that what we have here is a pointless, dead-end culture, and there is no reason for it to survive. The people will learn numbers and a billion other concepts we in the culturally interconnected have come to take for granted, and their ridiculous, backward culture will disappear by choice. They might know a few handy bug tricks that might turn into proper medicines--all cultures have things to offer to the rest of the world--but that's probably it.
At the heart of Western imperial guilt is an arrogance--an arrogance that we are the dominant and most developed culture and therefore must be benevolent and tolerant and held to some sort of higher standard that we, in our benevolence, have crafted. We are not that great. We learned everything we know from those who conquered us. And if we hadn't been conquered, we'd be rooting around in shit and living in huts in the rain and
Yeah, I've never actually figured out why Linksys was supposedly so good. The Linksys WAP I had died and the router... Well, it somehow got under my boot repeatedly, a few days after randomly bricking and never coming back from any kind of reset. It worked for about one year.
I use high-end Netgears, which seem to be rather unpopular, but I swear by them and I have my small-business clients on them as well. I love 'em. I don't think this one I have now has ever been rebooted.
A language is a set of rules, unconsciously present in the mind, that enables human beings to communicate meanings by producing audible or visible symbols that are related systematically to those meanings.
That's what a language is. Or, at least, what the guys who taught me linguistics claim it to be. And I agree. Some people in those classes didn't.
Yeah! And while we're at it, these membrane keyboards are never going to catch on either. People like the satisfying 1-inch key depth of their manual typewriters, the resistance on the key, and the way you have to type just right to avoid having the letter arms collide and get stuck. It's how they feel that counts, not whether they allow you to do your things faster and easier (and quieter)!
Expect insanely fast electric cars to end up in the same technological ghetto as computer keyboards--An interesting toy, perhaps, but they just don't deliver the experience people are looking for.
It's not that fast (different laws about advertising), and throttled as... I dunno. Pick your favorite bad word.
My user experience of speed was better with Comcast in Colorado at about 4MB. Only a few things seem to run fast here in Japan, and the rest are much slower. It's all traffic shaping.
Please, I'm so tired of that sentiment on Slashdot.
The point of psych research is to quantify. It is rare that you find something that isn't obvious... in hindsight. The real point is to get it down, on paper, with a quantitative measure. This narrows and guides the discussion, allowing for alternative hypotheses to be created and tested.
Furthermore, statistics doesn't "prove" anything--it just says how likely it is that something is not random. This is useful. It is useful to know that what we think is happening is indeed what's happening.
You know what you would have said if this study had found massive correlations between rater and writer?
"Well, of course! The people put down what they were like, and then people knew what they were like! Ahhhh psych studies. Using statistics to prove the bleeding obvious, and earning a living at it. Where do I sign up?"
--The thing about psych findings is that they should wash with our experience of the world. They should predict individual data points in our lives. If they don't, either the study was flawed, or our understanding is flawed (fairly unlikely).
In the case of the Slashdot title, I felt that the findings reported didn't wash. So I looked at the study, and found that, as expected, the findings were not robust enough for me to be convinced to reject my hypothesis that online profiles tell one little about the person writing them. In fact, I'd say that the findings confirm this hypothesis, in the real world. The researcher has shown that the effect is not random, but I pointed out that, in real-world terms, that doesn't cut it.
This is psychology. Making hypotheses about the human experience, testing them, and then arguing about which seemingly equally plausible hypothesis is closer to the truth. Then figuring out how to test it, then testing it.
You know, the scientific method.
Psych is a mixed-class field. We pull from biology, sociology, neurology, and lots of mathematics. This is what irritates pure-class scientists, and what irritates pure-class humanities people. We actually try to apply the scientific method to the human condition.
None of us would argue that what we're doing is akin to curing cancer. None of us would argue that it was akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. But what we are at least trying to do is unlock the mysteries of our experience of the universe. To quantify it and make it align with the findings in the harder sciences.
It's not easy, and most studies find nothing. But as I always tell my students and my colleagues who come for research design help: Even finding nothing is finding something.
The real trouble is that it's hard to get "nothing" published, even though it is often more interesting, than finding "something," so there is intense career pressure to, as I think this study is an example of, convince yourself that you found something when you actually found nothing.
I see where you're going with that, but doesn't it bother you that the r for married couples is only 0.50? I would argue that online profiles are such bad indicators of (people's self-assessment of their own) personality that they render even the person you know best virtually unrecognizable!
So yeah, a complete stranger doesn't fare much worse than your husband or wife, but, to me, that's not a good thing!
I suspect some major problems with the self-report data and/or the information selected to represent themselves, to be honest.
It's like this: When people ask me what kind of music I like, I say industrial. And it's true. I have lots and lots of industrial, from the 70s until now. I love it. But you know what the last music I played on my iPod was? Amy Winehouse. Before that? Jimmie Dale Gilmore (country!). Okay, so a few days ago I listened to NIN, but Trent's not really that industrial anymore.
So why do I say "industrial?" Because it sets me apart and I like to think it makes me look cool. It hints at my industrial goth past, before the ties and statistics.
But does it have anything to do with who I am today? No. I present what I want you to think about me; not what I am. And I think this behavior probably accounts for the giant pink elephant of error in this study.
I teach the odd workshop on using survey data in (language acquisition) research, and I always begin and end the thing with "remember that people lie, so if there's a better way of getting the data, do it." This is why!
Finally got the paper to download. It's interesting, and was obviously a very serious study that required a lot of work. Good on them for that.
But the mean interrater correlation is 0.41, meaning that it only explains about 17% of the shared variance. This looks to me like another psych study that mistakes statistical significance for practical significance.
To put it another way, there was really only an average of 17% agreement between rater and writer in their assessments. What this study finds is that judging people based on their profile, while not completely useless, isn't very useful.
To put it another way... It's basically just as you would assume: You can get an idea of what someone is like based on what they present about themselves, but the picture is going to be far from complete.
So, let's rename this Slashdot article correctly: "Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Little About You!"
This paper is not about Facebook. It's about a Facebook personality-assessment app ("YouJustGetMe") that allows people to do a personality self-assessment, then create a profile with the app based on likes and dislikes. This "YouJustGetMe" profile would then appear on the user's Facebook profile.
So the research question is not "Can people assess others' personalities based on their Facebook profiles," but, rather, "Can people assess others' personalities based on their own assessments of their own personalities," a very different thing. It then looked for interrater agreement between the writer of the profile and the viewer of the profile.
This is a salient point because what is revealed in a real Facebook profile is very little, and can actually be nothing (like mine--I just use it to keep tabs on my friends strewn around the world who use it). It's totally uncontrolled. The researchers addressed this by placing much tighter controls on the profile creation, limiting it to personality-specific items.
The research is still interesting, but not as interesting as the Slashdot summary makes it sound. It does, however, seem to have some major selection flaws (not a random sample), but I can't seem to load the paper to check on that.
I was against the Iraq War from day one because it was not a war where we could win AND be the good guys.
Here's the thing about war:
It's not like in the movies. It's not a heroic clash of noble men. It is crawling in the bloody filth and tearing each other's eyes out. That's war.
How do you win a war?
Kill. Kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. Kill until there is no more fight left in the enemy. Kill until their sense of community is destroyed. Kill until they have no reason to go on. Kill until they break.
How do you wage a war on a country, while trying to save the country? In order to win a war, you have to kill a lot of people. But what if those are the people you are (ostensibly) trying to save? Even if they want to be saved, they aren't going to take kindly to being killed, and the people you are trying to save will become the people you are fighting.
Since we weren't interested in a war with the Iraqi people, it was an impossible war. If we really had wanted to defeat Iraq, you're right, we had to be a lot more aggressive. We needed a lot more people. We needed to have 2 GIs on every street corner of every burg in the nation, just making sure nothing happens.
Japan (where I live) is better off now than it was living under the Emperor cult. Germany is better off now than it was under Hitler. But in both of these cases, we had to wage war on the people. No government can stand without the people. If you have a problem with a government, you have a problem with the people. And the way to solve people problems, when push comes to shove, is to get rid of the people (i.e. Stalin was right). If you can't or don't want to do that, you shouldn't go to war. You will never win.
This is what happened in Vietnam; this is what has happened in Iraq.
A lot of Japanese people were sick of the war. A lot of people knew the government was off its rocker. A lot of the people in the government tried to stop the military (and found themselves dead). But no one greeted the Yanks as liberators after they melted two cities of civilians. They just realized that it was surrender or lose their homeland forever.
There's another huge difference between Germany/Japan and Iraq, though: Germany and Japan were civilized countries with a sense of national identity. After the war, no one had to convince them that they were all Germans or all Japanese. Not true in Iraq. They have no national identity; they have religious identity. Sunni, Shi'ite, or Christian. That's their identity. And they don't like living together.
So when you take the psychotic tyrant out of the picture, you find that he was the only thing holding the country together. And pretty soon, you have to become the psychotic tyrant, or these people will kill each other and you. But to do so is to violate everything you stand for and does irreparable damage to your reputation and your soul. So what do you do? It's too late to go back.
I suggest you just let them kill each other. Let them kill and kill and kill. Kill each other until a "winner" emerges. Then maybe they can get along with each other.
Terrorism is the weapon of an enemy who can't kill and kill and kill, so they look for other ways of breaking the enemy. I submit to you that 9/11 broke us. 3000 people and the USA and Britain imploded. Confused as to whom to fight, they have decided to fight their own people. We lost.
The Israelis deal with terrorism properly: They go on with their lives. They rebuild; they go back to work. They don't torture. They don't let go of their ideals. As you say, the body count isn't what a terrorist goes for. It's the demoralization. But the weakness of that kind of attack is that you have the ability to control your own demoralization.
The correct response to 9/11 (after the utter destruction of the Bin Laden training camps no later than 9/12--why did we wait months?), I think, was voiced by Jer
Pardon me while I cobble together some straw men from the comments and then demolish them:
I'M disabled, you insensitive clod!
Well, that probably sucks, but we're not even talking about you. We're not, in fact, talking about anyone. We're talking about embryos.
I recently saw Mike Huckabee talk. He trotted out this bit about human embryo stem cell research with this picture in his wallet that he claimed was of a 4-year-old girl whose mother got her from a grab bag of frozen embryos at the baby store or whatever, and he was like, "Why would we ever want to do something that might take this little girl away from her mother???"
Well, Mike, and made-up straw man, we simply wouldn't. The decision is about whether individual embryos develop into people or don't; not who lives or dies. Parents are going to love and care for any baby you hand them. Once you're at that stage, you are no longer concerned about whether this child should be harvested for stem cells or whether it should be allowed to grow into a baby. It's already a baby at that point and no one is suggesting it be destroyed.
Talking about Beethoven or Stephen Hawking is pointless. They are/were unique, but they aren't special. Instead of thinking "what would the world do without Beethoven or Stephen Hawking," think, "what would the world do with fully-healthy and able-bodied Beethoven and Stephen Hawking?" You're still going to get those people. They're just going to be healthier.
Haven't you seen Gattaca???
Yes, I have. It's a really underrated movie, I think. It's one of the best SF movies of the 90s, because it does what speculative fiction is supposed to do: ask the big questions. --Not blow up aliens.
BUT...
If anything Gattaca should show you why we need to take care of all people, regardless of their innate health or abilities, and why medical information belongs with doctors, not employers. It stresses the importance of universal health care. Because once these embryos become people, they have rights. It is here, in the real world with real humans who actually exist, that we must never forget Beethoven or Hawking.
Every single one of us is probably walking around with some nasty shit lurking in our genes. Some of it science understands now, some of it will be understood later. We can't always predict what will happen to an organism, but if we can avoid known problems, then that's a good thing.
OMG THERE WILL ONLY BE PRETTY PEOPLE!!!! OH THE HUMANITY!!!
And here's one I just plain can't get my head around. Who cares? Pretty people, on average, do better in life. What is wrong with that?
In my experience, people who worry about an influx of pretty people are usually people with chicken wing stains on their tattered and over-stretched Akira T-shirts. Attractiveness is partially genetic, to be sure, but most people are just average and the difference in attractiveness is explained by "giving a shit what you look like." Looking presentable does not imply superficiality. Looking like crap does seem to imply, however, social retardation which makes working together awful.
Don't be afraid of the pretty, healthy children. They're not going to eat you. They will just want to call you Mommy or Daddy.
I do a fair bit of survey-based research and here's the thing: You always put your instrument in the appendix. If you're going to be making claims about what you found in your research, you need to show the goods and let people decide if they are founded or not.
This is my irritation with all reporting of all statistics to the general population. People are told useless things like "10% increase" or "higher average," etc., but without knowing the design of the experiment and at least the rest of the descriptive statistics, you actually have nothing.
There's the old saying "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital," but it's not really true in professional practice. Those of use in stats-heavy fields do our best to be honest so that others can see what exactly we did and what we found. The whole field of statistics is designed around the idea of trying to eliminate human cognitive error--seeing patterns that don't actually exist--but all of us are susceptible to that, even when we're using stats. And that's why we provide tables with all of our pertinent values. If we're making some mistake, we hope that the peer reviewers or readers will catch it. If our construct is poor, we hope someone will propose an alternate hypothesis and try it out.
In the media, this lively, human exchange--this active conversation through the medium of numbers--is reduced to "86% of people believe in God," which is not likely what the real construct was.
Furthermore, from a questionnaire design standpoint, you can't measure a construct with a single item. Well, you can, but the linear estimations of that construct will be highly unreliable. Ideally you want a bunch of items measuring that same construct in subtly different ways, then you want to do exploratory factor analysis to see if those items load on the same factor, at least, or perhaps jump straight to some kind of item response theory analysis and see what your fit stats look like...
The point I'm making is that there is an entire, lively field of research methodology and very smart people behind these numbers, but when you just throw the numbers out, it is totally misleading, and causes people to dismiss the field because they honestly think that these crappy numbers are what we make.
They're what the crappy reporters or marketing droids throw out. Don't blame us.
I haven't read the book, but your explanation is how I understand the theory.
In the case of Amazon, I think your second conclusion, that Amazon does well on the long tail because they're the only ones there, is what is actually happening.
I buy a lot of esoteric testing, stats, and linguistics texts. That, in fact, is all I buy, and I buy a lot of them. And Amazon is the only place that carries them.
Same thing goes for CDs. If I want, say, the new NIN (ignoring for the time being that the last couple NIN releases I've actually gotten from his website), I go down to Tower Records (still alive here in Japan). If I want Freezepop, I need to go to Amazon.
Actually, in both of these cases, as long as I'm going to Amazon for the relatively unpopular thing, I might as well pick up the popular thing there while I'm at it.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think the long tail is necessarily a model for everyone, because if everyone did it, they'd see no returns. But for any particular market, a single long-tail retailer can make a bundle. Everyone jumps in and everyone loses money. It's a function of how big you are, not what you carry. Amazon basically has no competition on the "long tail" products, so they get 100% of that business. They have the luxury of doing that because they are frickin' huge.
So, all told, it just doesn't seem to me that the long tail is something just anyone can use, which is pretty much exactly what the study found.
Yes, you're right. I was uncomfortable with that implication in my post even as I wrote it, but I was trying to show a common thematic thread to the one I was replying to.
I would never date a Chinese woman. I've never seen that to result in anything but trouble.
And the point I was making with my story about being dumped was kind of trying to illustrate that--just because a girl from a "male first" culture is nice to you doesn't mean she likes you. It's just nice if she does.
The point I was making was about culture and gender roles. Then I got slammed with a million posts about stereotyping... When I majored in Asian Studies (history mostly), studied in Japan, have traveled all over East Asia, speak Japanese, wrote my undergraduate thesis in Japanese on gender equality law in Japan, have lived in Japan for the better part of 10 years, have lots of Japanese friends, and have married into a Japanese family... If, after all of that, I'm not allowed to put together observations on what has been my world since 1998... Wow.
How about extrapolating from knowing hundreds of people? Is that stereotyping? No, that's generalizing.
Have you ever lived outside of your home nation? Do you know what it's like to live in another culture?
The reason I'm asking is it's usually people with the cultural education of a glass of water who get all high and mighty about the observations of people who have. But I guess that's a bit of a stereotype.
Look into current research into matriarchies. They never existed. They were made up by second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem.
Seriously, look it up.
Oh, and I'm sorry that I didn't include my entire sexual resume to prove I was qualified to have an opinion on cultural gender roles. I guess I just thought it was none of your fucking business.
Thank you. My wife is anything but submissive. In fact, I mostly do what she says; she's better at a lot of things than I, and I trust her.
I get really tired of people insulting her all the time, with their racist assumptions that she's a little weak blossom. You don't want to get her angry; believe me.
Let's just say this: Japan is not a happy society. People are not happy. You walk around and look at people. They aren't happy. Not everyone, of course, but most people are just plain miserable. They believe that's normal and it proves that they care about others or something. But really, they just make other people miserable too.
Miyazaki is a national and human treasure. He has such a wonderful, optimistic, and romantic vision of life. He notices the small things. He's very Japanese in that, I think. But look at even some of the older Japanese movies, like Tokyo Story or Ikiru and you will see the Japan that most people live in: pointless toil, strained familial relationships, and then you die.
When I used to teach high school, I routinely saw the best minds in the class basically pushed out and given up on. Yes, that happens in the US as well (and increasingly, I think, as we copy the terrible Japanese system), but this was, like, systemic.
The most successful guy I know was one of these kids. He is brilliant. Not very educated, because he was marginalized and finally quit, but you talk to him and you realize you might not have ever talked to someone this quick in your life. He is now building up a chain of restaurants and sits on the Chamber of Commerce. Last time I was hanging out with him, we were talking about education, and he said he would have loved to stay in school, but school just didn't seem to want him. He was a free spirit in a culture that hates freedom.
But he's proof that freedom still wins.
I make fun of Japanese companies all the time, yes, but it's also important to remember that at one time most of these were just one free thinker with a great idea. The problem is that at some point this all has to be organized, and the only organizational model Japanese people seem to get is the soul-crushing kind. It's just the way things are done.
Anyhoo, living here as a foreigner is pretty nice, as long as you speak Japanese (and I do). People are nice, food is great (though environmentally unsustainable!), air is clean. Lots of annoyances, but no more than anywhere else. The things I can never seem to get over, however, are these cultural things that just go against everything my culture stands for. The idea that the company would have any business telling me--or even worse, my wife and kids--I had to lose weight makes me retch. How dare they???
The summary poses a bunch of stupid questions about universal health care. Japan doesn't have universal health care. It has a requirement that employers have a health plan. You still pay an insurance company, just like in the US. It's just that you are given the benefits package from day one. In the long run, with everyone paying in, however, costs go down. It works fine.
So what the government is doing about the almost non-existent obesity problem is trying to solve it the way they did health insurance: sloughing the job off onto the private sector.
I actually will be very surprised if this goes over. This might just be too much for companies or people to "stomach!"
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Nice post.
I suspect PsyStar would have been fine if they had sold "OSX-ready" PCs that you could install Leopard on, as you suggested. That's not what they did. They sold unlicensed clones.
As for Apple being dead if it lost its image... That's just the normal Slashdot line that basically indicates that the Slashdot demographic is nothing like most of the world. People may walk into the store for the image, but they buy and continue to buy because they are solid products that work really, really well. I don't feel cool when I use my Mac. I feel productive. I feel like, "hey, this thing hasn't been rebooted in months and still works right," and "hey, this thing doesn't bother me with any obtrusive messages telling me this and that" and "hey, this thing ships with software accessories that I actually use, because they do something for real." I think most people 'round here anyway don't have any illusions about Apple's benevolence. They are ruthless. But they also make a great product. MS is ruthless, and then somehow manages to make crap.
Bah, this isn't going anywhere. I understand your points, but I think a common-sense reading of this situation can only come down on Apple's side. This company was making unlicensed clones by circumventing code. It's illegal.
I just hope you're wrong about the rest. ;-)
You raise a very good point. Obviously, MS includes the code to do slipstreaming (and thank the gods for that) and Apple does not, but it is a fair point, to be sure.
Still I think it's going to come down to the fact that they are are a company deliberately circumventing software restrictions on what can be installed on what, and doing it for a profit. This could be a DMCA issue (ugh... Am I actually arguing FOR a DMCA case? What's wrong with me?).
I don't have any doubt that Apple will win this handily, and I think it's actually better for everyone if they do. But if PsyStar can raise an interesting enough case to get something down in black and white about the enforceability of EULAs, that would be a good thing, too.
It's an interesting case, but I also don't think it has that much to do with freedom (man). Apple doesn't care if you hack their software to work on unsupported hardware; they just don't want you making a buck doing it.
...I hope.
PsyStar is not in trouble for making OSX-compatible PCs. They are not in trouble for selling Leopard. They are in trouble for the following:
This isn't about whether you're allowed to buy a copy of Leopard and install it on your Hackintosh. Apple doesn't care about the x86 project. It generates interest in the platform and hurts no one and costs nothing because they don't have to support it and the onus of making anything work lies solely with the hobbyists doing it for the fun and coolness of it.
This is about whether another company can make unlicensed Mac clones and sell them and support them in violation of all sorts of laws and licenses. It's not about out-selling them. It's about violating their licenses and copyrights with no benefit to them at all.
Apple can charge very little for its OS, because it knows it's making money on the hardware it's going to be installed on. This is a good deal for everyone. Apple hardware isn't much more than other OEM builders for what you get (and that's just on specs--that doesn't include the best-designed OEM case I've ever seen on my Mac Pro or the remarkable attention to detail I've found in every nook and cranny of that thing), and then your OS costs a third of what a copy of Vista does, and doesn't do a bunch of bullshit to make sure you're not a filthy pirate (even though I own two licenses of XP, I install cracked corporate versions because they don't whine at me all the time and make me call MS when I upgrade hardware). It's a whole package that provides value to the customer and keeps money coming into the company. It's just plain old economics.
I am planning on making my next Mac a Hackintosh. That looks fun and interesting and cool, from a hobbyist standpoint. But I also hope Apple succeeds in suing PsyStar into the stone age. People like that are going to make it necessary for OSX to incorporate bullshit hardware authentication schemes like Windows, which is going to kill off the Hackintosh community entirely. Apple doesn't want to piss off the geeks (like me) who are really starting to get into OSX. PsyStar having its ass handed to them is good for everyone.
I finally bit the bullet and bought the cheapest Mac Pro they make (the quad core). It is an awesome machine, but way more than I really needed. On the plus side, however, I won't be replacing it anytime soon. It replaced a perfectly-good, 2-year old AMD-based Windows machine. I just wanted to be on the Mac full-time, after buying a MacBook mostly out of curiosity, expecting to boot it to Windows mostly--and finding that I never needed to, and rather than replace my PC's guts with an Intel option (costing around $1k when all was said and done) to see about going with a Hackintosh (which sounds fun), I decided to just shell out the dough for one I knew would work. I didn't see the point in spending any extra money for a system that would probably work.
As I was fussing about this very issue (the lack of a "prosumer" product), an animation person online put it to me this way, and I think she's right:
Apple's longtime and long-term user base has always been graphics pros. If they offered a "prosumer" tower, that would eat significantly into the Mac Pro market. Sales of those high end, monster systems would no longer be profitable, and they may have to be discontinued. This would kill their dominance in the super-high-end graphics workstation market. So they offer a few lower-end workstations based on the same hardware and force the prosumer people to choose: iMac (toy) or Mac Pro (pro). It's not that they don't think they could sell a machine in the middle. It's that they would sell so many of them that they wouldn't be able to make money at the high end anymore.
I have to say, however, that even though I had to cover my eyes as I clicked "submit" on that order, I have loved this machine. It is pretty quiet (but not as quiet as my old PC--but I'd spent a lot of time and money absolutely silencing it), easy to open/work on, easy to find parts for, and pretty damned easy on the eyes. It does, however, weigh about 4000 pounds, something I'm not looking forward to dealing with when I move back to the US here in a year or so.
Anyway, the point of the story is that you are far from alone in your desire for a product as you describe. It's just that Apple has some pretty logical reasons to avoid offering it.
If the market share continues to rise, and it might--I know a lot of people who have gotten off of Windows in the last year, and most went to the Mac--then I would imagine they would feel safe putting something in the middle. Right now, though, it could be disastrous to their lifeblood demographic.
No, not terrorist. Just neo-Feudalist.
Two tests: Give the Amazon natives sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in lands where English is spoken.
Then give native English speakers sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in the Amazon region.
What would that prove? I can't even figure out what you were going for there...
There is no culture that would not benefit from having words for numbers. That doesn't at all mean that they were necessary. Of course they have eyes and understand the concept of values and quantities, but for whatever reason, they never felt it necessary to attach specific forms to them.
However, in the case of edible bugs (is that what you meant?), the problem isn't that we don't have words for them; it's that we don't have concepts for them. We have the concepts for bugs and for edible bugs (concepts we got from other cultures--ours has never really been big into eating bugs), but expecting us to have concepts for specific species of insects is just silly.
The key difference between these two things, however, is that we lack the specific concepts for species of bugs because we have never encountered them. Once we do, affixing a form (i.e. a name) is trivial. In the case of the Piraha, they are surrounded by things that could be represented by a numeric system, but have been delinquent (yes, delinquent) in recognizing them and affixing forms to them. I tried to think of an analogy for this... But there just isn't any. It is unfathomable.
I think that was you were going for was a kind of "multiple intelligences" thing. Like somehow not having a name for a certain bug is no different from lacking the words to express values in a higher resolution than 3-4 integers, and values over SIX. It is not.
To go back to your (or maybe "my," if I misunderstood) bug analogy, perhaps if they could express quantities over 6, they wouldn't have to know which bugs they can eat. --Because they'd have massive fields of grain and support a population of hundreds of millions, instead of just hundreds.
Looking at their living conditions, and their numbers, tells you all you really need to know about whether having a language without a numbers system is a good idea or not.
But please do not misinterpret. I am not saying "Rah Rah the Anglo culture is supreme!" because Anglos were not much better than these folks when the Romans found them. "We," too, had to be taught advanced technological concepts like having a proper working writing system, etc. And then came the Arabs with their improved number system, with the major technological breakthrough of the concept of 0 as a number, allowing negatives (I have to add this, though--they got it from the Indians, along with most of what they are given credit for in Europe--they were just like the Romans, gobbling up cultures and assimilating and spreading their ideas and technology--where the Romans had Greece, the Arabs had India).
The point of the story is that what we have here is a pointless, dead-end culture, and there is no reason for it to survive. The people will learn numbers and a billion other concepts we in the culturally interconnected have come to take for granted, and their ridiculous, backward culture will disappear by choice. They might know a few handy bug tricks that might turn into proper medicines--all cultures have things to offer to the rest of the world--but that's probably it.
At the heart of Western imperial guilt is an arrogance--an arrogance that we are the dominant and most developed culture and therefore must be benevolent and tolerant and held to some sort of higher standard that we, in our benevolence, have crafted. We are not that great. We learned everything we know from those who conquered us. And if we hadn't been conquered, we'd be rooting around in shit and living in huts in the rain and
Yeah, I've never actually figured out why Linksys was supposedly so good. The Linksys WAP I had died and the router... Well, it somehow got under my boot repeatedly, a few days after randomly bricking and never coming back from any kind of reset. It worked for about one year.
I use high-end Netgears, which seem to be rather unpopular, but I swear by them and I have my small-business clients on them as well. I love 'em. I don't think this one I have now has ever been rebooted.
From Delahunty and Garvey, 1994:
A language is a set of rules, unconsciously present in the mind, that enables human beings to communicate meanings by producing audible or visible symbols that are related systematically to those meanings.
That's what a language is. Or, at least, what the guys who taught me linguistics claim it to be. And I agree. Some people in those classes didn't.
But I do.
Yeah! And while we're at it, these membrane keyboards are never going to catch on either. People like the satisfying 1-inch key depth of their manual typewriters, the resistance on the key, and the way you have to type just right to avoid having the letter arms collide and get stuck. It's how they feel that counts, not whether they allow you to do your things faster and easier (and quieter)!
Expect insanely fast electric cars to end up in the same technological ghetto as computer keyboards--An interesting toy, perhaps, but they just don't deliver the experience people are looking for.
I live in Japan, just outside of Tokyo.
It's not that fast (different laws about advertising), and throttled as... I dunno. Pick your favorite bad word.
My user experience of speed was better with Comcast in Colorado at about 4MB. Only a few things seem to run fast here in Japan, and the rest are much slower. It's all traffic shaping.
Please, I'm so tired of that sentiment on Slashdot.
The point of psych research is to quantify. It is rare that you find something that isn't obvious... in hindsight. The real point is to get it down, on paper, with a quantitative measure. This narrows and guides the discussion, allowing for alternative hypotheses to be created and tested.
Furthermore, statistics doesn't "prove" anything--it just says how likely it is that something is not random. This is useful. It is useful to know that what we think is happening is indeed what's happening.
You know what you would have said if this study had found massive correlations between rater and writer?
"Well, of course! The people put down what they were like, and then people knew what they were like! Ahhhh psych studies. Using statistics to prove the bleeding obvious, and earning a living at it. Where do I sign up?"
--The thing about psych findings is that they should wash with our experience of the world. They should predict individual data points in our lives. If they don't, either the study was flawed, or our understanding is flawed (fairly unlikely).
In the case of the Slashdot title, I felt that the findings reported didn't wash. So I looked at the study, and found that, as expected, the findings were not robust enough for me to be convinced to reject my hypothesis that online profiles tell one little about the person writing them. In fact, I'd say that the findings confirm this hypothesis, in the real world. The researcher has shown that the effect is not random, but I pointed out that, in real-world terms, that doesn't cut it.
This is psychology. Making hypotheses about the human experience, testing them, and then arguing about which seemingly equally plausible hypothesis is closer to the truth. Then figuring out how to test it, then testing it.
You know, the scientific method.
Psych is a mixed-class field. We pull from biology, sociology, neurology, and lots of mathematics. This is what irritates pure-class scientists, and what irritates pure-class humanities people. We actually try to apply the scientific method to the human condition.
None of us would argue that what we're doing is akin to curing cancer. None of us would argue that it was akin to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. But what we are at least trying to do is unlock the mysteries of our experience of the universe. To quantify it and make it align with the findings in the harder sciences.
It's not easy, and most studies find nothing. But as I always tell my students and my colleagues who come for research design help: Even finding nothing is finding something.
The real trouble is that it's hard to get "nothing" published, even though it is often more interesting, than finding "something," so there is intense career pressure to, as I think this study is an example of, convince yourself that you found something when you actually found nothing.
Sorry, I don't see the table you're referring to.
I see where you're going with that, but doesn't it bother you that the r for married couples is only 0.50? I would argue that online profiles are such bad indicators of (people's self-assessment of their own) personality that they render even the person you know best virtually unrecognizable!
So yeah, a complete stranger doesn't fare much worse than your husband or wife, but, to me, that's not a good thing!
I suspect some major problems with the self-report data and/or the information selected to represent themselves, to be honest.
It's like this: When people ask me what kind of music I like, I say industrial. And it's true. I have lots and lots of industrial, from the 70s until now. I love it. But you know what the last music I played on my iPod was? Amy Winehouse. Before that? Jimmie Dale Gilmore (country!). Okay, so a few days ago I listened to NIN, but Trent's not really that industrial anymore.
So why do I say "industrial?" Because it sets me apart and I like to think it makes me look cool. It hints at my industrial goth past, before the ties and statistics.
But does it have anything to do with who I am today? No. I present what I want you to think about me; not what I am. And I think this behavior probably accounts for the giant pink elephant of error in this study.
I teach the odd workshop on using survey data in (language acquisition) research, and I always begin and end the thing with "remember that people lie, so if there's a better way of getting the data, do it." This is why!
Finally got the paper to download. It's interesting, and was obviously a very serious study that required a lot of work. Good on them for that.
But the mean interrater correlation is 0.41, meaning that it only explains about 17% of the shared variance. This looks to me like another psych study that mistakes statistical significance for practical significance.
To put it another way, there was really only an average of 17% agreement between rater and writer in their assessments. What this study finds is that judging people based on their profile, while not completely useless, isn't very useful.
To put it another way... It's basically just as you would assume: You can get an idea of what someone is like based on what they present about themselves, but the picture is going to be far from complete.
So, let's rename this Slashdot article correctly: "Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Little About You!"
This paper is not about Facebook. It's about a Facebook personality-assessment app ("YouJustGetMe") that allows people to do a personality self-assessment, then create a profile with the app based on likes and dislikes. This "YouJustGetMe" profile would then appear on the user's Facebook profile.
So the research question is not "Can people assess others' personalities based on their Facebook profiles," but, rather, "Can people assess others' personalities based on their own assessments of their own personalities," a very different thing. It then looked for interrater agreement between the writer of the profile and the viewer of the profile.
This is a salient point because what is revealed in a real Facebook profile is very little, and can actually be nothing (like mine--I just use it to keep tabs on my friends strewn around the world who use it). It's totally uncontrolled. The researchers addressed this by placing much tighter controls on the profile creation, limiting it to personality-specific items.
The research is still interesting, but not as interesting as the Slashdot summary makes it sound. It does, however, seem to have some major selection flaws (not a random sample), but I can't seem to load the paper to check on that.
Yes.
I was against the Iraq War from day one because it was not a war where we could win AND be the good guys.
Here's the thing about war:
It's not like in the movies. It's not a heroic clash of noble men. It is crawling in the bloody filth and tearing each other's eyes out. That's war.
How do you win a war?
Kill. Kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. Kill until there is no more fight left in the enemy. Kill until their sense of community is destroyed. Kill until they have no reason to go on. Kill until they break.
How do you wage a war on a country, while trying to save the country? In order to win a war, you have to kill a lot of people. But what if those are the people you are (ostensibly) trying to save? Even if they want to be saved, they aren't going to take kindly to being killed, and the people you are trying to save will become the people you are fighting.
Since we weren't interested in a war with the Iraqi people, it was an impossible war. If we really had wanted to defeat Iraq, you're right, we had to be a lot more aggressive. We needed a lot more people. We needed to have 2 GIs on every street corner of every burg in the nation, just making sure nothing happens.
Japan (where I live) is better off now than it was living under the Emperor cult. Germany is better off now than it was under Hitler. But in both of these cases, we had to wage war on the people. No government can stand without the people. If you have a problem with a government, you have a problem with the people. And the way to solve people problems, when push comes to shove, is to get rid of the people (i.e. Stalin was right). If you can't or don't want to do that, you shouldn't go to war. You will never win.
This is what happened in Vietnam; this is what has happened in Iraq.
A lot of Japanese people were sick of the war. A lot of people knew the government was off its rocker. A lot of the people in the government tried to stop the military (and found themselves dead). But no one greeted the Yanks as liberators after they melted two cities of civilians. They just realized that it was surrender or lose their homeland forever.
There's another huge difference between Germany/Japan and Iraq, though: Germany and Japan were civilized countries with a sense of national identity. After the war, no one had to convince them that they were all Germans or all Japanese. Not true in Iraq. They have no national identity; they have religious identity. Sunni, Shi'ite, or Christian. That's their identity. And they don't like living together.
So when you take the psychotic tyrant out of the picture, you find that he was the only thing holding the country together. And pretty soon, you have to become the psychotic tyrant, or these people will kill each other and you. But to do so is to violate everything you stand for and does irreparable damage to your reputation and your soul. So what do you do? It's too late to go back.
I suggest you just let them kill each other. Let them kill and kill and kill. Kill each other until a "winner" emerges. Then maybe they can get along with each other.
Terrorism is the weapon of an enemy who can't kill and kill and kill, so they look for other ways of breaking the enemy. I submit to you that 9/11 broke us. 3000 people and the USA and Britain imploded. Confused as to whom to fight, they have decided to fight their own people. We lost.
The Israelis deal with terrorism properly: They go on with their lives. They rebuild; they go back to work. They don't torture. They don't let go of their ideals. As you say, the body count isn't what a terrorist goes for. It's the demoralization. But the weakness of that kind of attack is that you have the ability to control your own demoralization.
The correct response to 9/11 (after the utter destruction of the Bin Laden training camps no later than 9/12--why did we wait months?), I think, was voiced by Jer
Don't you mean "BSoD-based"?
Pardon me while I cobble together some straw men from the comments and then demolish them:
I'M disabled, you insensitive clod!
Well, that probably sucks, but we're not even talking about you. We're not, in fact, talking about anyone. We're talking about embryos.
I recently saw Mike Huckabee talk. He trotted out this bit about human embryo stem cell research with this picture in his wallet that he claimed was of a 4-year-old girl whose mother got her from a grab bag of frozen embryos at the baby store or whatever, and he was like, "Why would we ever want to do something that might take this little girl away from her mother???"
Well, Mike, and made-up straw man, we simply wouldn't. The decision is about whether individual embryos develop into people or don't; not who lives or dies. Parents are going to love and care for any baby you hand them. Once you're at that stage, you are no longer concerned about whether this child should be harvested for stem cells or whether it should be allowed to grow into a baby. It's already a baby at that point and no one is suggesting it be destroyed.
Talking about Beethoven or Stephen Hawking is pointless. They are/were unique, but they aren't special. Instead of thinking "what would the world do without Beethoven or Stephen Hawking," think, "what would the world do with fully-healthy and able-bodied Beethoven and Stephen Hawking?" You're still going to get those people. They're just going to be healthier.
Haven't you seen Gattaca???
Yes, I have. It's a really underrated movie, I think. It's one of the best SF movies of the 90s, because it does what speculative fiction is supposed to do: ask the big questions. --Not blow up aliens.
BUT...
If anything Gattaca should show you why we need to take care of all people, regardless of their innate health or abilities, and why medical information belongs with doctors, not employers. It stresses the importance of universal health care. Because once these embryos become people, they have rights. It is here, in the real world with real humans who actually exist, that we must never forget Beethoven or Hawking.
Every single one of us is probably walking around with some nasty shit lurking in our genes. Some of it science understands now, some of it will be understood later. We can't always predict what will happen to an organism, but if we can avoid known problems, then that's a good thing.
OMG THERE WILL ONLY BE PRETTY PEOPLE!!!! OH THE HUMANITY!!!
And here's one I just plain can't get my head around. Who cares? Pretty people, on average, do better in life. What is wrong with that?
In my experience, people who worry about an influx of pretty people are usually people with chicken wing stains on their tattered and over-stretched Akira T-shirts. Attractiveness is partially genetic, to be sure, but most people are just average and the difference in attractiveness is explained by "giving a shit what you look like." Looking presentable does not imply superficiality. Looking like crap does seem to imply, however, social retardation which makes working together awful.
Don't be afraid of the pretty, healthy children. They're not going to eat you. They will just want to call you Mommy or Daddy.
Sheesh.
I do a fair bit of survey-based research and here's the thing: You always put your instrument in the appendix. If you're going to be making claims about what you found in your research, you need to show the goods and let people decide if they are founded or not.
This is my irritation with all reporting of all statistics to the general population. People are told useless things like "10% increase" or "higher average," etc., but without knowing the design of the experiment and at least the rest of the descriptive statistics, you actually have nothing.
There's the old saying "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital," but it's not really true in professional practice. Those of use in stats-heavy fields do our best to be honest so that others can see what exactly we did and what we found. The whole field of statistics is designed around the idea of trying to eliminate human cognitive error--seeing patterns that don't actually exist--but all of us are susceptible to that, even when we're using stats. And that's why we provide tables with all of our pertinent values. If we're making some mistake, we hope that the peer reviewers or readers will catch it. If our construct is poor, we hope someone will propose an alternate hypothesis and try it out.
In the media, this lively, human exchange--this active conversation through the medium of numbers--is reduced to "86% of people believe in God," which is not likely what the real construct was.
Furthermore, from a questionnaire design standpoint, you can't measure a construct with a single item. Well, you can, but the linear estimations of that construct will be highly unreliable. Ideally you want a bunch of items measuring that same construct in subtly different ways, then you want to do exploratory factor analysis to see if those items load on the same factor, at least, or perhaps jump straight to some kind of item response theory analysis and see what your fit stats look like...
The point I'm making is that there is an entire, lively field of research methodology and very smart people behind these numbers, but when you just throw the numbers out, it is totally misleading, and causes people to dismiss the field because they honestly think that these crappy numbers are what we make.
They're what the crappy reporters or marketing droids throw out. Don't blame us.
I haven't read the book, but your explanation is how I understand the theory.
In the case of Amazon, I think your second conclusion, that Amazon does well on the long tail because they're the only ones there, is what is actually happening.
I buy a lot of esoteric testing, stats, and linguistics texts. That, in fact, is all I buy, and I buy a lot of them. And Amazon is the only place that carries them.
Same thing goes for CDs. If I want, say, the new NIN (ignoring for the time being that the last couple NIN releases I've actually gotten from his website), I go down to Tower Records (still alive here in Japan). If I want Freezepop, I need to go to Amazon.
Actually, in both of these cases, as long as I'm going to Amazon for the relatively unpopular thing, I might as well pick up the popular thing there while I'm at it.
I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think the long tail is necessarily a model for everyone, because if everyone did it, they'd see no returns. But for any particular market, a single long-tail retailer can make a bundle. Everyone jumps in and everyone loses money. It's a function of how big you are, not what you carry. Amazon basically has no competition on the "long tail" products, so they get 100% of that business. They have the luxury of doing that because they are frickin' huge.
So, all told, it just doesn't seem to me that the long tail is something just anyone can use, which is pretty much exactly what the study found.
Yes, you're right. I was uncomfortable with that implication in my post even as I wrote it, but I was trying to show a common thematic thread to the one I was replying to.
I would never date a Chinese woman. I've never seen that to result in anything but trouble.
And the point I was making with my story about being dumped was kind of trying to illustrate that--just because a girl from a "male first" culture is nice to you doesn't mean she likes you. It's just nice if she does.
The point I was making was about culture and gender roles. Then I got slammed with a million posts about stereotyping... When I majored in Asian Studies (history mostly), studied in Japan, have traveled all over East Asia, speak Japanese, wrote my undergraduate thesis in Japanese on gender equality law in Japan, have lived in Japan for the better part of 10 years, have lots of Japanese friends, and have married into a Japanese family... If, after all of that, I'm not allowed to put together observations on what has been my world since 1998... Wow.
How about extrapolating from knowing hundreds of people? Is that stereotyping? No, that's generalizing.
Have you ever lived outside of your home nation? Do you know what it's like to live in another culture?
The reason I'm asking is it's usually people with the cultural education of a glass of water who get all high and mighty about the observations of people who have. But I guess that's a bit of a stereotype.
Look into current research into matriarchies. They never existed. They were made up by second-wave feminists like Gloria Steinem.
Seriously, look it up.
Oh, and I'm sorry that I didn't include my entire sexual resume to prove I was qualified to have an opinion on cultural gender roles. I guess I just thought it was none of your fucking business.
Thank you. My wife is anything but submissive. In fact, I mostly do what she says; she's better at a lot of things than I, and I trust her.
I get really tired of people insulting her all the time, with their racist assumptions that she's a little weak blossom. You don't want to get her angry; believe me.
You're reading it!
Let's just say this: Japan is not a happy society. People are not happy. You walk around and look at people. They aren't happy. Not everyone, of course, but most people are just plain miserable. They believe that's normal and it proves that they care about others or something. But really, they just make other people miserable too.
Miyazaki is a national and human treasure. He has such a wonderful, optimistic, and romantic vision of life. He notices the small things. He's very Japanese in that, I think. But look at even some of the older Japanese movies, like Tokyo Story or Ikiru and you will see the Japan that most people live in: pointless toil, strained familial relationships, and then you die.
When I used to teach high school, I routinely saw the best minds in the class basically pushed out and given up on. Yes, that happens in the US as well (and increasingly, I think, as we copy the terrible Japanese system), but this was, like, systemic.
The most successful guy I know was one of these kids. He is brilliant. Not very educated, because he was marginalized and finally quit, but you talk to him and you realize you might not have ever talked to someone this quick in your life. He is now building up a chain of restaurants and sits on the Chamber of Commerce. Last time I was hanging out with him, we were talking about education, and he said he would have loved to stay in school, but school just didn't seem to want him. He was a free spirit in a culture that hates freedom.
But he's proof that freedom still wins.
I make fun of Japanese companies all the time, yes, but it's also important to remember that at one time most of these were just one free thinker with a great idea. The problem is that at some point this all has to be organized, and the only organizational model Japanese people seem to get is the soul-crushing kind. It's just the way things are done.
Anyhoo, living here as a foreigner is pretty nice, as long as you speak Japanese (and I do). People are nice, food is great (though environmentally unsustainable!), air is clean. Lots of annoyances, but no more than anywhere else. The things I can never seem to get over, however, are these cultural things that just go against everything my culture stands for. The idea that the company would have any business telling me--or even worse, my wife and kids--I had to lose weight makes me retch. How dare they???
The summary poses a bunch of stupid questions about universal health care. Japan doesn't have universal health care. It has a requirement that employers have a health plan. You still pay an insurance company, just like in the US. It's just that you are given the benefits package from day one. In the long run, with everyone paying in, however, costs go down. It works fine.
So what the government is doing about the almost non-existent obesity problem is trying to solve it the way they did health insurance: sloughing the job off onto the private sector.
I actually will be very surprised if this goes over. This might just be too much for companies or people to "stomach!"