The "college experience" has and should continue to include things like campus extracurricular activities, clubs, sports, informal contact with professors, research opportunities, and cultural and academic events. All that takes free time. But increasingly, now, we have students who are proud - actually BOASTING - of their workaholic schedules, which creepily mimics the serfdom gradually being accepted by the 90% or so of US citizens who aren't owners or inheritors. I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone in this discussion bragging about all the free internship time they've been giving away to build their budding All-American Success Story.
Guess what: in many civilized countries, and previously in this country, education isn't seen as a morally inferior alternative to work work work work work, nor have the citizens been so sadly brainwashed into accepting such a situation.
On the other hand, a lot of college kids are just lazy middle-classers (as distinguished from the much larger working class which you're talking about) too willing to go the loan route because a) that means they can put off thinking about it and b) they want the college "experience" and working doesn't fit into their vision of that.
You worked full-time and had high course loads simultaneously. That's the opposite of what's recommended by people in the know - college advisors, educators, etc. - for good performance and learning. My CS advisor recommends not taking more than 12 hours per quarter and 2 CS courses simultaneously.
The "college experience" I want is to learn, which means having plenty of time to digest ideas, and to practice using them. Reflection and quiet time are important aspects of learning and human existence, and those are both impossible in rush Rush RUSH get-to-the-job-get-back-to-campus lifestyles where every day is scheduling stress, and studying is just another thing student/work drones try to fit in.
The sad fact of life in the US in the 2010s now is that we are all being trained to be obedient and uncomplaining workers, and even to adjust our values so that we see overwork and stress as badges of honor, things we use as standards to hold ourselves up and look down on other people.
The solution is to not buy into this crap, to not play the owners' game of being pliant drones. Fight.
Oh yeah, let's add another layer of technocrat masturbation to the problem. How about we just stop killing and otherwise pissing off brown-skinned people?
It has been shown over the years, repeatedly, that tighter speed limits save lives, including 55 mph vs. 65 mph. And you're bellyaching for a "safe" 75 mph because Nevada is "empty" and it's roads are "flat" and "straight". Selfish idiocy, as usual, continues to rule in the US.
And also, we should lean out the window, gingerly unzip the blue police trousers, and apply gentle ministrations. Tip: they like it when the balls are massaged - not that I would know personally.
Moral: brown-nosing cops is nothing to be proud of, and law should be applied impartially - not based on whether the cop likes your car or how jolly good you can make the cop feel.
One of a bazillion examples: look up "restroom" in M-W. 1899, and the only definition is the euphemism everyone knows.
It may even be that, in the case of "gaming", the word didn't originally carry a purposely positive connotation in order to conceal a negative - maybe gambling wasn't even recognized as a vice 500 years ago (hard to believe) or maybe they didn't have a plainer word for "gambling" which "gaming" was euphemistic for (also I think hard to believe, though I see that "gambling" didn't enter until 18th century) or maybe a number of other etymological or historical things happened - and the word just stayed with us. There's not enough info to go on in the dictionary alone.
But what really matters are the word choices *now* and what their connotations are now. "Gaming" is so useful to gambling proponents because of it's multiple shades of meaning now, which usefully obscure the aspects of gambling they want obscured. Despite the quaint historical usage, as I've said many times already: there's a much plainer choice of words available now.
Consistent with *whose* modern and historical usage? And in 50 years, if not already, I bet Merriam-Webster will have a definition for "defense industry" something like "the economic sector which produces military armaments and technology". Euphemism becomes mainstream - it happens all the time, and dictionaries reflect this. That's not an excuse for imprecision or clouding of the issue, when more accurate, plain language is readily available.
Because that's what the word means, has meant for a very long time, and that is the word which is used most frequently by people who discuss it regularly.
Isn't it interesting that people who deal with the negative consequences of gambling talk about "gambling addiction" and "gambling treatment", not "gaming addiction" (which would be obviously Orwellian)? On the other hand, "gaming" tends to be used by proponents of gambling and by governments (who are often industry-friendly) who want to get in on the action in one way or another.
You are consistently missing my main point, which is that language is frequently used to manipulate, especially by powerful interests, and the speaker and the intended audience must be considered when evaluating why, and that "gambling" is the most objective, neutral, accurate term for this activity across all audiences, and in particular when considering public policy.
The most recent UK legislation around gambling is called the Gambling Act of 2005, and the UK now has the Gambling Commission, which supersedes the previous "Gaming"-named entities. They now attempt to draw a distinction between gambling that revolves around something like a traditional game (like poker), which they call "gaming", and other kinds of gambling not revolving around gamelike things, such as raw betting and lotteries. I'll grant that may be useful as a technical distinction, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the UK sees the wisdom in regulating all these activities under a "gambling" umbrella and plainly naming it.
It literally means, according to Merriam-Webster, "the practice of gambling."
Exactly, and since "gambling" is unambiguous and "gaming" is not (M-W has other, substantially different meanings for "gaming"), why not avoid the extra, unnecessary level of word substitution? Answer: in our society, the preference for the word "gaming" is an intentional tactic to increase gambling's acceptance, or perhaps reflects the level of our society's existing, unhealthy preoccupation with gambling.
The same phenomenon is at play with the euphemistic term "defense industry" instead of the completely accurate "war industry" or "military industry". Up until 1947 we had a "War Department" in the US. Guess why that suddenly disappeared?
Since we're appealing to authority, Wikipedia's disambiguation page for "Gaming" refers to it as a "euphemism for gambling"; its "Gambling" page says:
"The term gaming[1] in this context typically refers to instances in which the activity has been specifically permitted by law. The two words are not mutually exclusive; i.e., a "gaming" company offers (legal) "gambling" activities to the public.[2] This distinction is not universally observed in the English-speaking world, however. For instance, in the UK, the regulator of gambling activities is called the Gambling Commission (not the Gaming Commission).[3] Also, the word gaming is frequently used to describe activities that do not involve wagering, especially online."
Thus, the US' preoccupation with "gaming" is hardly universal, a reflection of our culture. And since the point at issue in the original Slashdot blog entry is the very appropriateness of taxing gambling and legalizing it, let's at least call the as-yet-unpermitted activity by its generic, most accurate term by these standards: "gambling".
Replacing the completely accurate "gambling" with the industry-friendly "gaming" helps limit the parameters of the discussion and influence perception. The fact that the use of "gaming" is pervasive in our culture speaks to the power of our marketing; news sources and blogs which purport to inform or provoke rational discussion over policy can certainly break these bonds by using objective, accurate terminology.
There's an extremely accurate alternative to "gaming" for the Nevada context - it's "gambling". The fact that they don't use that word and instead use the more innocuous, politically useful term "gaming", which has a broader range of meanings, is precisely an example of doublespeak.
What you're essentially saying, in a very roundabout way, is that poker has a sizable luck element and also a skill element, and experience at poker can weight skill somewhat over a novice playing poker. That's *not* an argument that being an experienced player while betting with money at poker magically transforms it into not-gambling, but merely that putting a lot of time into it can bend the curve somewhat.
There are a LOT of types of gambling which involve some element of skill, and almost every non-gambling game of chance is also like this....only the really boring games are *pure* chance. You're really not saying much.
In my opinion, the marketed poker fetishism which overtook American society in the 00's (all the stupid B-cable "championships", etc.) has made room for a lot of popular apologetics for the game, with devotees trying to lift it into some ethereal category of not-really-gambling. The fact that you're willing to spend thousands of hours at the game and justify losing money at it speaks very strongly to addiction, not intelligent choice.
Of course it has, because Nevada has every reason to sell gambling with an image of harmless fun, just like all gambling profiteers do. Just because a bulls**t locution has been around a long time doesn't make it less of a bulls**t locution.
Always use "gaming", not "gambling"! "Gaming", you see, is evocative of apple-pie harmless American fun around the kitchen table, and who could be against THAT??? Besides, your libertarian ideological masters are all about Free Enterprise, just like the Vegas corporations.
I've read a lot of ridiculous contortions on Slashdot, trying to depict realistic video game violence as pedestrian free speech, having no effect on society, even salutory for society. And I do realize that the intellectual giants behind a lot of this stuff are 24-year-old kids for whom video games and Taco Bell are still Very Important elements of their lives.
But when you get faced with more and more concrete examples of marketed, play-acted extreme violence, which keep trying to outdo each other, and which any mature, moral person apprehends as soul-deadening, and these kids still choose to stay wrapped in their simple ideologies and keep defending it....you really have to write the lot of them off completely.
Next up: game where the player tries to capture, rape, and torture the children and families of tech blog editors with adolescent ethical development.
"When approaching a game that realistically depicts a modern combat situation, one criticism that often arises is the subject of fun. Can a realistic military shooter be fun? According to Ian Bogost, that's the wrong question to ask. 'We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don't even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience,' he said. Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts. As Bogost explains, fun isn't the key word in this situation. 'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun -- but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'"
Sounds like the rationalizing in the torture memos.
I totally agree with you. And it's important to point out that webmasters who choose to host ads on their pages are just as important to keeping this sickening dynamic going in our culture.
I primarily read Slashdot for the summaries, and for the links they provide to current, interesting articles on other sites. I have a life, and Slashdot commenters usually irritate me, so with the obvious exception of this article, I almost always ignore reader commentary.
I'd be very surprised if a significant percentage of Slashdot site visitors don;t also use it in this same way.
"If it automatically played a theme song after every head shot, this would be the coolest rifle accessory ever."
What an asinine editorial comment which betrays this blog's slavish devotion to the cause of violence in video toys. The military and sniper rifles are all part of the big fragfest, right?
The root cause of the offense you take at society-wide public safety rules is probably multi-faceted, but almost certainly includes:
1. Failure to appreciate the complexity and impracticality of designing and enforcing individualized shades of law, tuned to the capabilities of each person, the measurement of those capabilities, etc.
2. Dislike of authority telling you what to do.
3. Exaggerated sense of your own capabilities.
4. Failure to appreciate the odds of an event over the long term.
We live in a society. Societies have laws. For many practical and moral reasons, those laws only discriminate to a limited level, and in general are broadly applied.
Your life could be lived very well without driving with the phone. Mine is.
The root cause of the offense you take at society-wide public safety rules is probably multi-faceted, but almost certainly includes:
1. Failure to appreciate the complexity and impracticality of designing and enforcing individualized shades of law, tuned to the capabilities of each person, the measurement of those capabilities, etc.
2. Dislike of authority telling you what to do.
3. Exaggerated sense of your own capabilities.
4. Failure to appreciate the odds of an event over the long term.
We live in a society. Societies have laws. For many practical and moral reasons, those laws only discriminate to a limited level, and in general are broadly applied.
Your life could be lived very well without driving with the effin phone. Mine is.
Slashdot Mirror
The "college experience" has and should continue to include things like campus extracurricular activities, clubs, sports, informal contact with professors, research opportunities, and cultural and academic events. All that takes free time. But increasingly, now, we have students who are proud - actually BOASTING - of their workaholic schedules, which creepily mimics the serfdom gradually being accepted by the 90% or so of US citizens who aren't owners or inheritors. I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone in this discussion bragging about all the free internship time they've been giving away to build their budding All-American Success Story.
Guess what: in many civilized countries, and previously in this country, education isn't seen as a morally inferior alternative to work work work work work, nor have the citizens been so sadly brainwashed into accepting such a situation.
On the other hand, a lot of college kids are just lazy middle-classers (as distinguished from the much larger working class which you're talking about) too willing to go the loan route because a) that means they can put off thinking about it and b) they want the college "experience" and working doesn't fit into their vision of that.
You worked full-time and had high course loads simultaneously. That's the opposite of what's recommended by people in the know - college advisors, educators, etc. - for good performance and learning. My CS advisor recommends not taking more than 12 hours per quarter and 2 CS courses simultaneously.
The "college experience" I want is to learn, which means having plenty of time to digest ideas, and to practice using them. Reflection and quiet time are important aspects of learning and human existence, and those are both impossible in rush Rush RUSH get-to-the-job-get-back-to-campus lifestyles where every day is scheduling stress, and studying is just another thing student/work drones try to fit in.
The sad fact of life in the US in the 2010s now is that we are all being trained to be obedient and uncomplaining workers, and even to adjust our values so that we see overwork and stress as badges of honor, things we use as standards to hold ourselves up and look down on other people.
The solution is to not buy into this crap, to not play the owners' game of being pliant drones. Fight.
Go for it, amoral developers of the world, willing to work for anyone that delivers your required amount of $$$.
They can afford this crap because of all the money that has been transferred upward into bankers' pockets.
Oh yeah, let's add another layer of technocrat masturbation to the problem. How about we just stop killing and otherwise pissing off brown-skinned people?
http://www.physorg.com/news166980974.html
It has been shown over the years, repeatedly, that tighter speed limits save lives, including 55 mph vs. 65 mph. And you're bellyaching for a "safe" 75 mph because Nevada is "empty" and it's roads are "flat" and "straight". Selfish idiocy, as usual, continues to rule in the US.
And also, we should lean out the window, gingerly unzip the blue police trousers, and apply gentle ministrations. Tip: they like it when the balls are massaged - not that I would know personally.
Moral: brown-nosing cops is nothing to be proud of, and law should be applied impartially - not based on whether the cop likes your car or how jolly good you can make the cop feel.
One of a bazillion examples: look up "restroom" in M-W. 1899, and the only definition is the euphemism everyone knows.
It may even be that, in the case of "gaming", the word didn't originally carry a purposely positive connotation in order to conceal a negative - maybe gambling wasn't even recognized as a vice 500 years ago (hard to believe) or maybe they didn't have a plainer word for "gambling" which "gaming" was euphemistic for (also I think hard to believe, though I see that "gambling" didn't enter until 18th century) or maybe a number of other etymological or historical things happened - and the word just stayed with us. There's not enough info to go on in the dictionary alone.
But what really matters are the word choices *now* and what their connotations are now. "Gaming" is so useful to gambling proponents because of it's multiple shades of meaning now, which usefully obscure the aspects of gambling they want obscured. Despite the quaint historical usage, as I've said many times already: there's a much plainer choice of words available now.
Consistent with *whose* modern and historical usage? And in 50 years, if not already, I bet Merriam-Webster will have a definition for "defense industry" something like "the economic sector which produces military armaments and technology". Euphemism becomes mainstream - it happens all the time, and dictionaries reflect this. That's not an excuse for imprecision or clouding of the issue, when more accurate, plain language is readily available.
Because that's what the word means, has meant for a very long time, and that is the word which is used most frequently by people who discuss it regularly.
Isn't it interesting that people who deal with the negative consequences of gambling talk about "gambling addiction" and "gambling treatment", not "gaming addiction" (which would be obviously Orwellian)? On the other hand, "gaming" tends to be used by proponents of gambling and by governments (who are often industry-friendly) who want to get in on the action in one way or another.
You are consistently missing my main point, which is that language is frequently used to manipulate, especially by powerful interests, and the speaker and the intended audience must be considered when evaluating why, and that "gambling" is the most objective, neutral, accurate term for this activity across all audiences, and in particular when considering public policy.
The most recent UK legislation around gambling is called the Gambling Act of 2005, and the UK now has the Gambling Commission, which supersedes the previous "Gaming"-named entities. They now attempt to draw a distinction between gambling that revolves around something like a traditional game (like poker), which they call "gaming", and other kinds of gambling not revolving around gamelike things, such as raw betting and lotteries. I'll grant that may be useful as a technical distinction, but that doesn't take away from the fact that the UK sees the wisdom in regulating all these activities under a "gambling" umbrella and plainly naming it.
It literally means, according to Merriam-Webster, "the practice of gambling."
Exactly, and since "gambling" is unambiguous and "gaming" is not (M-W has other, substantially different meanings for "gaming"), why not avoid the extra, unnecessary level of word substitution? Answer: in our society, the preference for the word "gaming" is an intentional tactic to increase gambling's acceptance, or perhaps reflects the level of our society's existing, unhealthy preoccupation with gambling.
The same phenomenon is at play with the euphemistic term "defense industry" instead of the completely accurate "war industry" or "military industry". Up until 1947 we had a "War Department" in the US. Guess why that suddenly disappeared?
Since we're appealing to authority, Wikipedia's disambiguation page for "Gaming" refers to it as a "euphemism for gambling"; its "Gambling" page says:
"The term gaming[1] in this context typically refers to instances in which the activity has been specifically permitted by law. The two words are not mutually exclusive; i.e., a "gaming" company offers (legal) "gambling" activities to the public.[2] This distinction is not universally observed in the English-speaking world, however. For instance, in the UK, the regulator of gambling activities is called the Gambling Commission (not the Gaming Commission).[3] Also, the word gaming is frequently used to describe activities that do not involve wagering, especially online."
Thus, the US' preoccupation with "gaming" is hardly universal, a reflection of our culture. And since the point at issue in the original Slashdot blog entry is the very appropriateness of taxing gambling and legalizing it, let's at least call the as-yet-unpermitted activity by its generic, most accurate term by these standards: "gambling".
Replacing the completely accurate "gambling" with the industry-friendly "gaming" helps limit the parameters of the discussion and influence perception. The fact that the use of "gaming" is pervasive in our culture speaks to the power of our marketing; news sources and blogs which purport to inform or provoke rational discussion over policy can certainly break these bonds by using objective, accurate terminology.
There's an extremely accurate alternative to "gaming" for the Nevada context - it's "gambling". The fact that they don't use that word and instead use the more innocuous, politically useful term "gaming", which has a broader range of meanings, is precisely an example of doublespeak.
What you're essentially saying, in a very roundabout way, is that poker has a sizable luck element and also a skill element, and experience at poker can weight skill somewhat over a novice playing poker. That's *not* an argument that being an experienced player while betting with money at poker magically transforms it into not-gambling, but merely that putting a lot of time into it can bend the curve somewhat.
There are a LOT of types of gambling which involve some element of skill, and almost every non-gambling game of chance is also like this....only the really boring games are *pure* chance. You're really not saying much.
In my opinion, the marketed poker fetishism which overtook American society in the 00's (all the stupid B-cable "championships", etc.) has made room for a lot of popular apologetics for the game, with devotees trying to lift it into some ethereal category of not-really-gambling. The fact that you're willing to spend thousands of hours at the game and justify losing money at it speaks very strongly to addiction, not intelligent choice.
Of course it has, because Nevada has every reason to sell gambling with an image of harmless fun, just like all gambling profiteers do. Just because a bulls**t locution has been around a long time doesn't make it less of a bulls**t locution.
Always use "gaming", not "gambling"! "Gaming", you see, is evocative of apple-pie harmless American fun around the kitchen table, and who could be against THAT??? Besides, your libertarian ideological masters are all about Free Enterprise, just like the Vegas corporations.
*rolls eyes*
I've read a lot of ridiculous contortions on Slashdot, trying to depict realistic video game violence as pedestrian free speech, having no effect on society, even salutory for society. And I do realize that the intellectual giants behind a lot of this stuff are 24-year-old kids for whom video games and Taco Bell are still Very Important elements of their lives.
But when you get faced with more and more concrete examples of marketed, play-acted extreme violence, which keep trying to outdo each other, and which any mature, moral person apprehends as soul-deadening, and these kids still choose to stay wrapped in their simple ideologies and keep defending it....you really have to write the lot of them off completely.
Next up: game where the player tries to capture, rape, and torture the children and families of tech blog editors with adolescent ethical development.
"When approaching a game that realistically depicts a modern combat situation, one criticism that often arises is the subject of fun. Can a realistic military shooter be fun? According to Ian Bogost, that's the wrong question to ask. 'We use the word fun as a placeholder, when we don't even really know what we mean when we look for some sort of enjoyment in a serious experience,' he said. Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts. As Bogost explains, fun isn't the key word in this situation. 'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun -- but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'"
Sounds like the rationalizing in the torture memos.
I totally agree with you. And it's important to point out that webmasters who choose to host ads on their pages are just as important to keeping this sickening dynamic going in our culture.
All this is why I block every ad I can.
I primarily read Slashdot for the summaries, and for the links they provide to current, interesting articles on other sites. I have a life, and Slashdot commenters usually irritate me, so with the obvious exception of this article, I almost always ignore reader commentary.
I'd be very surprised if a significant percentage of Slashdot site visitors don;t also use it in this same way.
Slashdot has ads?
"If it automatically played a theme song after every head shot, this would be the coolest rifle accessory ever."
What an asinine editorial comment which betrays this blog's slavish devotion to the cause of violence in video toys. The military and sniper rifles are all part of the big fragfest, right?
The root cause of the offense you take at society-wide public safety rules is probably multi-faceted, but almost certainly includes:
1. Failure to appreciate the complexity and impracticality of designing and enforcing individualized shades of law, tuned to the capabilities of each person, the measurement of those capabilities, etc.
2. Dislike of authority telling you what to do.
3. Exaggerated sense of your own capabilities.
4. Failure to appreciate the odds of an event over the long term.
We live in a society. Societies have laws. For many practical and moral reasons, those laws only discriminate to a limited level, and in general are broadly applied.
Your life could be lived very well without driving with the phone. Mine is.
The root cause of the offense you take at society-wide public safety rules is probably multi-faceted, but almost certainly includes:
1. Failure to appreciate the complexity and impracticality of designing and enforcing individualized shades of law, tuned to the capabilities of each person, the measurement of those capabilities, etc.
2. Dislike of authority telling you what to do.
3. Exaggerated sense of your own capabilities.
4. Failure to appreciate the odds of an event over the long term.
We live in a society. Societies have laws. For many practical and moral reasons, those laws only discriminate to a limited level, and in general are broadly applied.
Your life could be lived very well without driving with the effin phone. Mine is.
This has been known to logologists for years as the "best" answer to this puzzle. I believe it's from Webster's 2nd or 3rd Unabridged.