I am a white American living in Japan. I've been here about 10 years. People say racist things to me all the time. No, they don't mean any offense (usually), but that doesn't mean that I don't get offended. But I didn't used to.
When I first got here, little comments like "Oh! You can use chopsticks!" and "Wow, you can write kanji just like a Japanese person!" and "everyone move over; Klein needs space" (even though I am a very little guy), I thought it was quaint.
Now when those comments are made, it makes me feel excluded. As if I can never be treated normally, just because of my brown hair and blue eyes. The novelty has worn off.
A woman complemented me on my amazing Japanese a few months ago when I used a word I literally learned in my first semester of Japanese study. It bummed me out the rest of the day.
Then there's the "special" treatment you get from cops. And drunks.
Maybe at one point I thought minorities in the US were being oversensitive, but I think that after 10 years, I finally get it. Finding hateful racist people is getting harder every day, thank god, but when you're a minority, everything is just a little racist. You're treated differently, and it doesn't have anything to do with how you act or what you can or can't do. It just comes down to your physical attributes, and you can't change those. It just gets... tiring.
But I have it better than minorities in the US or Canada or wherever. This is not my home country. If I ever get totally sick of it (and I'll be honest, there are some things happening these days that are really making me question if it's worth being here--the cops' treatment is getting more special by the day), I can go home to the US where I'll be just another regular white guy. But a regular black guy in the US can't go anywhere. It's his home, and his life is one of being treated differently every single day. I understand why some people get touchy. I'm getting touchy, and I don't have it anywhere near as bad as black people in the US.
So there's the perspective of a white guy who has figured it out without any brainwashing.
Watch your mouth, people. It sucks when the main thing people remember about you is your race.
Thanks for clarifying that. I was growling for the last few page downs.
Everyone loves to hate on MS, and they certainly deserve it for a lot of things, but all of my friends have transitioned off the PC to the Xbox for gaming, because it actually is that good. I thought I'd never get off the PC (I still play tactical shooters on the PC, of course), but the Xbox 360, even considering its hardware problems (all of ours have RRoDed; all of them were replaced quickly and painlessly and for free), is a great little machine. It's taken over my living room.
Ultimately, on Slashdot I keep seeing this RRoD thing being talked about all wrong. This is actually proof that MS is acting responsibly. They found a problem, determined that it was widespread, and then owned up to it by replacing any machine with that problem, no questions asked. That's not the behavior of an evil corporate empire; that's the behavior of a responsible division in an otherwise evil corporate empire.
If something happened to my Xbox 360 that wasn't covered under warranty, yes, I would have a brand new one by that afternoon. I've been nothing but pleased with it, and I'd never, ever owned a console before (not even a Nintendo--I'm still bitter toward my parents over that). It's a good product, and that's why people like it!
What you are describing is what happens to every test anyone ever writes with the best of intentions. We make a test to, say, place students into the right level of language classes, and the department starts using their gain scores for their grades in those classes, muddling placement and outcome--two different testing situations that would need different methods.
Administration wants an instrument that matches the curriculum closer; you make it; they demand to know why it doesn't have X, Y, or Z. You point out that it isn't in the curriculum. They say "It should be!"
It happens every time. Even BMI, which was basically designed to find starving people, has been repurposed to define physical fitness--something it is not designed to do and cannot accurately assess.
People always misuse measures and then blame the person(s) who made them.
I think this is the story of how every nerd/good student learned about sex. My parents weren't being forthcoming, so I pulled out the World Book set they'd bought for my brother and I.
Then when my mom sat me down for the talk, I rolled my eyes and told her how it all worked. She was deflated. "Where... Where did you learn?" "The encyclopedia, Mom."
One of my missions in life is to convince people to stop underestimating children. They lack in experience and factual knowledge, but not in basic intelligence. They can find out whatever it is they want to know. You can't stop them. You shouldn't stop them!
I live in Japan. I have 100Mbit FTTH. Here is what my net connection is running at right now:
Down: 18.03Mbit
Up: 3.95Mbit
And torrents are ridiculously throttled. Gnutella-based P2P doesn't actually work.
Cost: $90/mo.
I could get a slower plan for a lot less, but do you see how I'm getting 18% of what I pay for? Well, I'd be getting 18% of what I was paying for no matter what. This is from the mouth of the network tech who came out when I complained. He was another nerd, so we bonded quickly and talked about realities. The lines just won't run that fast.
It depends on where you are. My last place ran at about 80.
What I'm saying is this:
Don't believe the marketing hype. No one gets 100Mbit. No one.
Anything you could think of to use that bandwidth? Throttled or blocked.
It's just a number. There's no particular meaning behind it.
this administration and Congress has redefined the meaning of tyranny!
Tell me about it! The chargeless, indefinite incarceration, the denial of fair trial, secret prisons, sanctioned torture, warrantless wiretaps, and a war of agression... Oh wait... That was Bush.
What are you talking about?
That's an honest question. Because if proposing regulations on the health insurance system so that people aren't just kicked off all the time and so that everyone can get basic coverage is tyranny... Um. You're wrong.
And while we're at it? Obama didn't try to take our ammo away. That was just a chain letter, which had its intended effects: More people hated Obama and ammo sales went through the roof.
YES. This is what people need to realize. Unless they actually have rolling hiring built into their budgets, they don't want to replace you. I'm not advocating slacking off or being a jerk, but it's people's responsibility to make a job work for them.
I am exempt, but I come and go as I please. I do a good job, and work hard when I'm in, but I did not go to school for 6 years to spend the rest of my life at work. I take my vacations.
What people need to realize is that their goals and the company's goals (again, unless you're shooting for CEO) are not the same. Yours is to put food on the table; theirs is to snort cocaine off of golden hookers. And they like their blow. So you represent a loss to them--an unavoidable loss. They won't be happy until you work 24/7 for free. Luckily, slavery isn't legal anymore, so you have the right (and duty) to dig in your heels and make the deal work for you. If you don't like the way things are going, they can fire you. But they won't.
It's very hard to be fired in the skill-based occupations (i.e. not sales). Do what you're hired to do; do the best job you can; be a nice person, but do not let them run you over. Because they will. And only you can stop them.
The death of the middle class in America is cause for real terror. You are either moving up, and therefore fodder for the future guillotine, or moving down, and looking at barely surviving.
What you are describing is what I mean when I refer to Libertarians as "neo-feudalists." An uncontrolled market leads to serfdom.
And every time we try to make the US a livable place like Europe has become, inbred morons (aka Libertarians) start shouting "commie!" Just look at the hassle we're having trying to set up a relatively simple health insurance reform to be something akin to what Japan has (I live in Japan--it works!).
Basically, the super-wealthy here have convinced the lower-middle class that they're on the same side, and that what is good for the new nobility is good for Joe the Plumber. This isn't too hard, because Joe the Plumber is a moron.
Europe and Japan are run by the middle class. It's better that way.
When I was younger, I really just kind of enjoyed working with a computer. Troubleshooting was fun. Eventually I got tired of always troubleshooting and just wanted to get to work already.
I've actually made "music" like this before. It is a hell of a lot easier than making actual music, where you have musicians and machines that all have to work together, and you need it to actually sound like something at the end. If your chain scrape sound comes in 500ms too late, no one will notice. Any instrument, though, and it is dicking around in editing or recording that again or whatever.
Music is hard work. Any fool with a Linux box can make "atmospheric" crap.
Thank you. That's what I noticed as well. Yes, anything can do that, because all you're really doing is the same crap that you used to do on rackmount samplers back in the 80s. If a modern computer--even a netbook--can't handle that, we have problems.
Thanks. I have been scrolling through pages of comments waiting for someone to just kind of say "bullshit." It's, um... It is wholly and completely and literally unbelievable. As in, I do not actually believe this story.
Not that there isn't some guy who is limping along in Linux and wants a medal, but that he's had no problem and that it all works comparably to a pro rig on the Mac or even on Windows (I have to say that having switched from Windows to Mac last year, that even though my Windows setup worked fine [I thought], it all works better on the Mac--but I use ProTools, and I think that Digidesign favors the Mac).
Android is the game changer, and both Google and Apple know it.
Yes, 18 new devices; 18 ways for them to suck differently. You don't really get why Apple products do well, do you? You're one of those people who think it's the aesthetics, right?
This is the only (yes, only--I've never understood the Word hate around here) problem I have with Word, but it is a big one. For short, one-off documents, I've actually moved to using Apple's Pages, which doesn't do this. When I'm making a handout for class (I'm a university lecturer), I have specific styles that I use every time. With Pages (or, for that matter, OO.o), I can just set the style and off I go. The menu arrow next to the style turns red if the text deviates from the style, but it doesn't make a new style.
I honestly cannot figure out why Word does that. It makes the style list a horrible jumble, and is probably the #1 reason that people don't use styles. It looks daunting, even though it should simplify document creation!
See, this is the thing. I love the idea of electric cars. I want that to be the norm. But right now I don't see how it would work.
Shai Agassi presented a good idea at TED, though, that I don't understand why we haven't heard more about:
Why do you need to own the battery pack? When you go to the gas station now, you're not "charging;" you're replacing the power source. Why can't EVs work like that? You drive up, a machine lifts your battery pack out of the car and moves it to a charging bay, and inserts a charged one into your car. Off you go. Like what we do with BBQ propane tanks now. I haven't actually refilled one of those for years; you just switch them out.
His model is more like the cellphone industry. You get the car cheap for a monthly fee; it's yours at the end of the contract. Or you buy it at the outset and only deal with the "service" (batteries in this case). I thought it was a head-slappingly great idea when I heard it.
And don't start me on replication. Open any journal on experimental psychology and show me articles that replicate a previous experiment *exactly*.
Preach it. When I got into this field (I'm in the much-cushier applied linguistics, but I hope to jump to psychometrics for my PhD), my advisor was always bemoaning the lack of replication studies, and I thought, "You know what? I'm going to change that, man!"
Turns out you can get funding for replications, and no one wants to publish them. That hasn't stopped me from doing them on small scales (i.e. not replicating exactly, unfortunately). You know what? You often don't find the same thing. Hrmmm.
We have a major publication problem in the human sciences. Personally, I'm just as interested in a study that shows no results as one that does. In fact, I just got done doing a presentation on my last study, which had no results. I was ecstatic, because that's what I wanted. But I don't think I'll be able to get it published anywhere good.
I have resigned as stat consultant on two people's projects because they literally asked me, "Isn't there something you can do to make this significant?" Um, yes, but I don't do that. If you want to cook your data, you will need to do that by yourself.
I would like to see--not only in the human sciences, but across the board--full sharing of data. Technologically speaking, that is no longer impossible. The journal can archive data files the same as PDFs. We should be "showing our work." Mistakes happen, other interpretations are possible, and some people lie. These things screw up the entire advancement of human knowledge, and are easy to work around now. Published research should be open.
Me too. I always play as female if there is a choice, both for the reason you mention, but also because I think female action heroes are cool. Ripley in the Alien movies, Starbuck in BSG, Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. These are cool, interesting characters.
My Shepard in Mass Effect was a black woman with a buzzcut. She was awesome. Also, BTW, the female voice actor for that game blows the male out of the water. The best voice acting I've ever heard in a game, ever.
So much ignorance in your post as to make my head linguist head spin, but this is the sentence I'm picking:
Seriously, by what rule of English grammar does "Groe" sound exactly like "Grey"??
Um, none, for a few reasons:
1) This is what "grammar" means. Clausal structure, etc.
2) The word you're actually looking for is orthography.
3) Finally, and this is a big one, English orthography wouldn't apply to a German name. One of the reasons spelling is so difficult in English is that it is a loanword slut. It hangs around at the linguistic docks, taking any wayfaring word spelled in roman characters home. It is the reason we have one of the largest vocabularies on the planet, but also the reason why spelling is difficult. I'll take it, though. It beats the socks off of the Academie francaise, which exists to keep foreign words out of French in favor of made-up French equivalents that no one uses. It also beats the Japanese system of ghettoization by the use of a different character set for foreign words. And it is simpler than the daunting task ahead of Chinese speakers, who have to find characters which have a similar sound, and whose meaning at least has something to do with the word in question. Overall, English's flexibility and open nature is a key to its strength.
Slashdot Mirror
A word of warning, from someone who knows: Some of them are real dicks.
Kinda like all people everywhere.
Um, no.
I am a white American living in Japan. I've been here about 10 years. People say racist things to me all the time. No, they don't mean any offense (usually), but that doesn't mean that I don't get offended. But I didn't used to.
When I first got here, little comments like "Oh! You can use chopsticks!" and "Wow, you can write kanji just like a Japanese person!" and "everyone move over; Klein needs space" (even though I am a very little guy), I thought it was quaint.
Now when those comments are made, it makes me feel excluded. As if I can never be treated normally, just because of my brown hair and blue eyes. The novelty has worn off.
A woman complemented me on my amazing Japanese a few months ago when I used a word I literally learned in my first semester of Japanese study. It bummed me out the rest of the day.
Then there's the "special" treatment you get from cops. And drunks.
Maybe at one point I thought minorities in the US were being oversensitive, but I think that after 10 years, I finally get it. Finding hateful racist people is getting harder every day, thank god, but when you're a minority, everything is just a little racist. You're treated differently, and it doesn't have anything to do with how you act or what you can or can't do. It just comes down to your physical attributes, and you can't change those. It just gets... tiring.
But I have it better than minorities in the US or Canada or wherever. This is not my home country. If I ever get totally sick of it (and I'll be honest, there are some things happening these days that are really making me question if it's worth being here--the cops' treatment is getting more special by the day), I can go home to the US where I'll be just another regular white guy. But a regular black guy in the US can't go anywhere. It's his home, and his life is one of being treated differently every single day. I understand why some people get touchy. I'm getting touchy, and I don't have it anywhere near as bad as black people in the US.
So there's the perspective of a white guy who has figured it out without any brainwashing.
Watch your mouth, people. It sucks when the main thing people remember about you is your race.
Thanks for clarifying that. I was growling for the last few page downs.
Everyone loves to hate on MS, and they certainly deserve it for a lot of things, but all of my friends have transitioned off the PC to the Xbox for gaming, because it actually is that good. I thought I'd never get off the PC (I still play tactical shooters on the PC, of course), but the Xbox 360, even considering its hardware problems (all of ours have RRoDed; all of them were replaced quickly and painlessly and for free), is a great little machine. It's taken over my living room.
Ultimately, on Slashdot I keep seeing this RRoD thing being talked about all wrong. This is actually proof that MS is acting responsibly. They found a problem, determined that it was widespread, and then owned up to it by replacing any machine with that problem, no questions asked. That's not the behavior of an evil corporate empire; that's the behavior of a responsible division in an otherwise evil corporate empire.
If something happened to my Xbox 360 that wasn't covered under warranty, yes, I would have a brand new one by that afternoon. I've been nothing but pleased with it, and I'd never, ever owned a console before (not even a Nintendo--I'm still bitter toward my parents over that). It's a good product, and that's why people like it!
Bravo.
Wow.
I understood about 50% of that. The rest was either terminology I just plain don't know, or things I could kinda guess.
I am a test designer.
What you are describing is what happens to every test anyone ever writes with the best of intentions. We make a test to, say, place students into the right level of language classes, and the department starts using their gain scores for their grades in those classes, muddling placement and outcome--two different testing situations that would need different methods.
Administration wants an instrument that matches the curriculum closer; you make it; they demand to know why it doesn't have X, Y, or Z. You point out that it isn't in the curriculum. They say "It should be!"
It happens every time. Even BMI, which was basically designed to find starving people, has been repurposed to define physical fitness--something it is not designed to do and cannot accurately assess.
People always misuse measures and then blame the person(s) who made them.
Welcome to my world.
I think this is the story of how every nerd/good student learned about sex. My parents weren't being forthcoming, so I pulled out the World Book set they'd bought for my brother and I.
Then when my mom sat me down for the talk, I rolled my eyes and told her how it all worked. She was deflated. "Where... Where did you learn?" "The encyclopedia, Mom."
One of my missions in life is to convince people to stop underestimating children. They lack in experience and factual knowledge, but not in basic intelligence. They can find out whatever it is they want to know. You can't stop them. You shouldn't stop them!
I live in Japan. I have 100Mbit FTTH. Here is what my net connection is running at right now:
Down: 18.03Mbit
Up: 3.95Mbit
And torrents are ridiculously throttled. Gnutella-based P2P doesn't actually work.
Cost: $90/mo.
I could get a slower plan for a lot less, but do you see how I'm getting 18% of what I pay for? Well, I'd be getting 18% of what I was paying for no matter what. This is from the mouth of the network tech who came out when I complained. He was another nerd, so we bonded quickly and talked about realities. The lines just won't run that fast.
It depends on where you are. My last place ran at about 80.
What I'm saying is this:
Don't believe the marketing hype. No one gets 100Mbit. No one.
Anything you could think of to use that bandwidth? Throttled or blocked.
It's just a number. There's no particular meaning behind it.
Marry me.
this administration and Congress has redefined the meaning of tyranny!
Tell me about it! The chargeless, indefinite incarceration, the denial of fair trial, secret prisons, sanctioned torture, warrantless wiretaps, and a war of agression... Oh wait... That was Bush.
What are you talking about?
That's an honest question. Because if proposing regulations on the health insurance system so that people aren't just kicked off all the time and so that everyone can get basic coverage is tyranny... Um. You're wrong.
And while we're at it? Obama didn't try to take our ammo away. That was just a chain letter, which had its intended effects: More people hated Obama and ammo sales went through the roof.
YES. This is what people need to realize. Unless they actually have rolling hiring built into their budgets, they don't want to replace you. I'm not advocating slacking off or being a jerk, but it's people's responsibility to make a job work for them.
This.
I am exempt, but I come and go as I please. I do a good job, and work hard when I'm in, but I did not go to school for 6 years to spend the rest of my life at work. I take my vacations.
What people need to realize is that their goals and the company's goals (again, unless you're shooting for CEO) are not the same. Yours is to put food on the table; theirs is to snort cocaine off of golden hookers. And they like their blow. So you represent a loss to them--an unavoidable loss. They won't be happy until you work 24/7 for free. Luckily, slavery isn't legal anymore, so you have the right (and duty) to dig in your heels and make the deal work for you. If you don't like the way things are going, they can fire you. But they won't.
It's very hard to be fired in the skill-based occupations (i.e. not sales). Do what you're hired to do; do the best job you can; be a nice person, but do not let them run you over. Because they will. And only you can stop them.
Wow! Out of the park.
The death of the middle class in America is cause for real terror. You are either moving up, and therefore fodder for the future guillotine, or moving down, and looking at barely surviving.
What you are describing is what I mean when I refer to Libertarians as "neo-feudalists." An uncontrolled market leads to serfdom.
We know. But the EU doesn't hire Americans.
And every time we try to make the US a livable place like Europe has become, inbred morons (aka Libertarians) start shouting "commie!" Just look at the hassle we're having trying to set up a relatively simple health insurance reform to be something akin to what Japan has (I live in Japan--it works!).
Basically, the super-wealthy here have convinced the lower-middle class that they're on the same side, and that what is good for the new nobility is good for Joe the Plumber. This isn't too hard, because Joe the Plumber is a moron.
Europe and Japan are run by the middle class. It's better that way.
Excellent post.
Thank you.
When I was younger, I really just kind of enjoyed working with a computer. Troubleshooting was fun. Eventually I got tired of always troubleshooting and just wanted to get to work already.
I, um. I got a Mac. It's been great.
(yes, I went there)
Someone had to.
I've actually made "music" like this before. It is a hell of a lot easier than making actual music, where you have musicians and machines that all have to work together, and you need it to actually sound like something at the end. If your chain scrape sound comes in 500ms too late, no one will notice. Any instrument, though, and it is dicking around in editing or recording that again or whatever.
Music is hard work. Any fool with a Linux box can make "atmospheric" crap.
Thank you. That's what I noticed as well. Yes, anything can do that, because all you're really doing is the same crap that you used to do on rackmount samplers back in the 80s. If a modern computer--even a netbook--can't handle that, we have problems.
Thanks. I have been scrolling through pages of comments waiting for someone to just kind of say "bullshit." It's, um... It is wholly and completely and literally unbelievable. As in, I do not actually believe this story.
Not that there isn't some guy who is limping along in Linux and wants a medal, but that he's had no problem and that it all works comparably to a pro rig on the Mac or even on Windows (I have to say that having switched from Windows to Mac last year, that even though my Windows setup worked fine [I thought], it all works better on the Mac--but I use ProTools, and I think that Digidesign favors the Mac).
This is clearly a fringe user experience.
Android is the game changer, and both Google and Apple know it.
Yes, 18 new devices; 18 ways for them to suck differently. You don't really get why Apple products do well, do you? You're one of those people who think it's the aesthetics, right?
YES.
This is the only (yes, only--I've never understood the Word hate around here) problem I have with Word, but it is a big one. For short, one-off documents, I've actually moved to using Apple's Pages, which doesn't do this. When I'm making a handout for class (I'm a university lecturer), I have specific styles that I use every time. With Pages (or, for that matter, OO.o), I can just set the style and off I go. The menu arrow next to the style turns red if the text deviates from the style, but it doesn't make a new style.
I honestly cannot figure out why Word does that. It makes the style list a horrible jumble, and is probably the #1 reason that people don't use styles. It looks daunting, even though it should simplify document creation!
See, this is the thing. I love the idea of electric cars. I want that to be the norm. But right now I don't see how it would work.
Shai Agassi presented a good idea at TED, though, that I don't understand why we haven't heard more about:
Why do you need to own the battery pack? When you go to the gas station now, you're not "charging;" you're replacing the power source. Why can't EVs work like that? You drive up, a machine lifts your battery pack out of the car and moves it to a charging bay, and inserts a charged one into your car. Off you go. Like what we do with BBQ propane tanks now. I haven't actually refilled one of those for years; you just switch them out.
His model is more like the cellphone industry. You get the car cheap for a monthly fee; it's yours at the end of the contract. Or you buy it at the outset and only deal with the "service" (batteries in this case). I thought it was a head-slappingly great idea when I heard it.
Here's the video.
And don't start me on replication. Open any journal on experimental psychology and show me articles that replicate a previous experiment *exactly*.
Preach it. When I got into this field (I'm in the much-cushier applied linguistics, but I hope to jump to psychometrics for my PhD), my advisor was always bemoaning the lack of replication studies, and I thought, "You know what? I'm going to change that, man!"
Turns out you can get funding for replications, and no one wants to publish them. That hasn't stopped me from doing them on small scales (i.e. not replicating exactly, unfortunately). You know what? You often don't find the same thing. Hrmmm.
We have a major publication problem in the human sciences. Personally, I'm just as interested in a study that shows no results as one that does. In fact, I just got done doing a presentation on my last study, which had no results. I was ecstatic, because that's what I wanted. But I don't think I'll be able to get it published anywhere good.
I have resigned as stat consultant on two people's projects because they literally asked me, "Isn't there something you can do to make this significant?" Um, yes, but I don't do that. If you want to cook your data, you will need to do that by yourself.
I would like to see--not only in the human sciences, but across the board--full sharing of data. Technologically speaking, that is no longer impossible. The journal can archive data files the same as PDFs. We should be "showing our work." Mistakes happen, other interpretations are possible, and some people lie. These things screw up the entire advancement of human knowledge, and are easy to work around now. Published research should be open.
Me too. I always play as female if there is a choice, both for the reason you mention, but also because I think female action heroes are cool. Ripley in the Alien movies, Starbuck in BSG, Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. These are cool, interesting characters.
My Shepard in Mass Effect was a black woman with a buzzcut. She was awesome. Also, BTW, the female voice actor for that game blows the male out of the water. The best voice acting I've ever heard in a game, ever.
So much ignorance in your post as to make my head linguist head spin, but this is the sentence I'm picking:
Seriously, by what rule of English grammar does "Groe" sound exactly like "Grey"??
Um, none, for a few reasons:
1) This is what "grammar" means. Clausal structure, etc.
2) The word you're actually looking for is orthography .
3) Finally, and this is a big one, English orthography wouldn't apply to a German name. One of the reasons spelling is so difficult in English is that it is a loanword slut. It hangs around at the linguistic docks, taking any wayfaring word spelled in roman characters home. It is the reason we have one of the largest vocabularies on the planet, but also the reason why spelling is difficult. I'll take it, though. It beats the socks off of the Academie francaise, which exists to keep foreign words out of French in favor of made-up French equivalents that no one uses. It also beats the Japanese system of ghettoization by the use of a different character set for foreign words. And it is simpler than the daunting task ahead of Chinese speakers, who have to find characters which have a similar sound, and whose meaning at least has something to do with the word in question. Overall, English's flexibility and open nature is a key to its strength.
So there's that.