I teach freshman comp at a Big 10 university. Most freshmen cannot construct a productive database query. They have trouble using services like Ebscohost or Factiva because if their topic is underage drinking, to choose a typical one they'd like, they'll type in "underage drinking" and start wading through the hits. Students from wealthier schools do well at this, and when I ask them about it, they had a teacher who taught them. Of course, there are computer hobbyist types constructing useful boolean searches, but they are pretty thin on the ground.
When I teach courses in rooms with laptops for all the students, they know how to go to MyStupid or Fork.com or how to watch Homesar or pooTube, but they don't know how to insert headers in Word, create a hanging indent, much less use a stylesheet.
So I'm guessing that an intranet would be a great idea, one that relied upon a monthly or weekly distribution of data from a state, federal or some other entity's office. Then you gots your wikipedia or what-have-you. Think of the idea of popping up little clones of the Internet in remote locations for the volks using the OLPC doohicky. Don't put any fun stuff in it. I remember Oregon Trail was enough to distract me. Don't allow students go get outside the LAN. And a real plus of this for parents, politicos, and other traditional enemies of teachers is that each state could pick just how ignorant it wants to be simply by excluding information in much the same way that they currently cherry pick textbooks, cut passages out of texts, ban books, and so on.
But here's the sticking-point that means this won't happen: you need teachers with some minimal computer training that they take seriously and follow. You know, how to log out, for example. How to do stylesheets so they can pass it on. I think the current situation is like watching cavemen try to figure out what to do with an abacus. The folks at this woman's school were obviously scratching their bits with their abacus. And now even more cavemen are going to be running around afraid the abacus is a demon sent by god to test them.
As a former scholar of Early American lit and history, I can tell you that line is a load of hooey cooked up in the 1950s. The so-called Puritans (various Congregationalist groups) came to America in low numbers to specific northeaster locales. Other northeastern states -- Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York -- even had explicit religious affiliations that were not Puritan. Then you go down South, and you've got lots of Anglican types, but basically really not very religious at all. Of course we should also remember all those Catholics and irreligious down in Louisiana and west of there to the coast. That's some geographical history. But the dates are important too. By the 18th century, the Puritan influence was negligible. And then in the 19th century romanticism hit the states with full force. People like Emerson were shocking people; there was a Hegelian society in St. Louis, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson -- those may be outliers, but they do represent a major shift in American attitudes. Not a shift away from the Puritans because that had been done by then for close to 200 years by the Englightenment rationalism that spawned hedging deism and Revolutionary rhetoric.
Now, the Puritans were not puritannical quite like we use the word these days. A few guys like Revend Michael Wigglesworth were truly odd uptight (check out his poem "I Erect a Pillar Unto God" (it's not a cigar, I tell you!) or his secret encoded diaries documenting his pedophilia). But most Puritans got married while knocked-up. But the Puritans, uptight or not, were a minority. A minority up there in the cold Northeast because even tho they weren't quite who we think they were, they were still too uptight for the rest of the folks. Go read "The Maypole at Merrymount" by Thomas Morton. It should be free somewhere; it's older than dirt. Also Jehlen and Warner's anthology of early American lit is a good book to give you a feel for the real uh deal.
The Puritan hoo-ha started showing up during the cold war and was given a big push by guys like Perry Miller who were all indebted to the Ivy League (in his case Harvard) institutions for which they worked and who were also responding with a backlash against libertine WW2 vets. Um, but I'm getting out of hand here. Basically the Puritan-America story gained credibility at the same time Thanksgiving was cooked-up and the flag pledge (written for kids by a socialist) gained the words "under god" from right Catholics. It was a load of crap intended to justify the presence of sticks up certain butts.
So where are we going to get new researchers? And do you really think you can buy dissertation-quality research online? It would be so great if posts here had to have an age affixed, at least until there's some way to more accurately quantify maturity vs. idiocy.
The point of these "pointless" essays is to teach you how to write and to insure you've mastered the material. If you don't need to learn that, great, enjoy the coast to your bachelor's degree. Or even better, drop out of school so that you don't discourage students who do want to learn.
I'm pretty sure the assignment wasn't to "write a general bullshit essay," yet you blame someone else for that. Maybe it's bullshit because you don't give a damn about it?
Finally, 6,000 words, oh how my little heart breaks for you! That's substantially less than thirty pages, more like 20. What a heart-breaker. Drop your lazy butt out of school, get a job carrying heavy things, then come back and report to us. I think just 60 words will do.
I am a college teacher. I've seen those essays. Students send me CDs of essay collections. From what I've seen, they are only going to change the "curve," if there is such thing in your class as a weighted grade distribution, to your benefit. Most of the essays I've seen would earn nothing better than a C in my classes because they are so awful. Maybe there are better products out there, but probably not for $20
I don't care if they're good at their job. If they lie about credentials, research, or anything else that matters, they should be canned. This is quite simply so that people with qualifications who aren't liars can get the job. There are people beating the doors down for these jobs. And such lying might well be the tip of the iceberg. At any rate, such a lack of integrity should be punished, not winked at, especially given the cynicism in industry, politics, the media, you name the spot, about lying.
Those degrees are worth something. I dont' think it's right for someone to lie about their work and have the lie accepted, effectively peeing in the face of everyone who actually DID the work.
I also think hysterics like Gilcrhist here the UI should be canned. I think faculty who abuse grad students should be canned. The list goes on. I'll summarize it: there are a lot of incompetent, lazy, cruel, idiotic, arrogant, dishonest, or greedy faculty who should be canned. There are simply too many good young people in these fields. Good lord, tenure is great for protecting Frankenstein from the torch-bearing mob, but I wish there were a way to clean up all the dead wood in our universities.
But A) Cremo is full of crap; you don't need peer review to rule out a guy who starts out blithering about his past lives; B) Chip Morninstar doesn't know enough about litcrit to damn a whole field by the sample of twits who hang out at any event called cyber-something; and finally, C) There are a lot of idiots on Slashdot blowing smoke about things of which they have little more than a single clue. YMMV, Ciao!
Yes indeed, there's this thing called
on
From Bess to Worse
·
· Score: 1
brain development that's going on. Recent research suggests that people don't have their full cognitive hardware until early 20s. ethos appeal: another educator here; gf and I are working on the baby.
I am finishing my dissertation this spring. I have won two teaching awards and have been teaching since 91 (went back for PhD in my field). My question to you is why should students bother to come sit in uncomfortable chairs to be one of a couple of hundred listening to a lecture when they can listen to it or watch it at their convenvience when they feel alert and ready to learn? Why put restrictions on a file so that it can't be accessed by someone who was sick or someone from another area in the university? Your post said nothing about learning the material of the class and everything about learning blind obedience to your standards. If you have been tasked with making those restrictions, I feel sorry for you. If you came up with them yourself, I feel even sorrier for you. I take teaching very seriously, and the number one thing I've learned is that you need willing students, or "You can lead a horse to water...."
Well, this is friendly advice. But it might go down wrong. I was a lot like you. I grew up in the rural South, and I'm not the nerd so much as the poet type. Smart, skinny, sensitive. Don't get me wrong, I was still a little redneck. But my folks beat me a lot, and that marks you in a way. So I got beat up a lot until I got really mean. I don't advise that. I'm lucky I'm not in jail. I chose violence as a path out of being bullied. But I got the violence under control by working my butt off learning to respect myself. That meant, for me, working out and being conscious of how I thought about myself and the world. It's this way: if you're really a smart guy, maybe you know things those other people don't; maybe they're just dumb knuckle-draggers. Whatever. YOU have to find a way to deal with it without feeling like a victim. That's not "suck it up" at all. It's learning to be less scared of the world.
I picked up the Chicago Tribune this week. It's finally been established conclusively--after it was established no one would go to jail for it--that Chicago cops have been tying people to radiators, beating them, and (natch) shocking their balls for years. No one is going to jail. Now there's Gitmo and extraordinary rendition and telcos with big old Matrix hoses coming out the back of their heads. Journalists are disappearing in battle zones, being imprisoned. CIA agent "outed." Missing weapons of mass deception and so on. So when should we start feeling paranoid?
I'll add too that there was a time when people in the Eastern Bloc were getting random donations of old modems, which they wanted very much to help their dissident zamizdat publications. I have met a poet who can't communicate with his family per his government's order. Maybe some chatting or something would be nice.... Sometimes American's and others don't know how nice they have it.
Been reading your Von Daniken or whatever? Here just for kicks, to help you out of your pit of ignorence. Atlantis is mentioned in one source originally, Plato's Timaeus, to provide a hypothetical to measure against the Republic. The guy who brings up Atlantis mentions it as a story his granddaddy told him on the equivalent of April Fool's Day. Look, mystical bullshit is fun to read, but it's still bullshit. Real history mystery is more interesting. Like, the mystery for example, of why so many miserable ignernt fucks, oops, folks, over the centuries have wanted to believe in a place like Atlantis. Go learn something worth learning.
... I am a grad student at a Big 10 (11, whatever) university. The woman in charge of computers in our whole building gets about $35k based on her job title. She came into a lab I work in to do some network stuff. She didn't know what RAM is. She "backed up" lab data that was being moved to a new machine (Mac 9 to Mac 10), and she only copied the crap laying around on the desktop and at the root of the HD, not all the stuff in the OS-provided documents folder--in which was everyone's real work.
I am an English major. But I've learned to work on my own computer the same way learned to work on brakes after I took my car to a shop and it came back squirting DOT 3 like a geyser. No one really gives a shit about my life and my data the way I do.
In general, I think you'd be much better off hiring the quiet, hard-working kid or the kid who's reasonable and talkative. The kids who posture in stupid and irresponsible ways are, surprise surprise, not as smart nor as hard-working as the other kids. I don't think this has anything to do with smoking the odd blunt or getting loaded or liking satire, but it does have a lot to do with what you think is funny, what your core values are. Why hire the person who blogs vicious gossip? Why hire the person who mocks the boss? Why hire the person who thinks misogyny is funny? Or that vandalism is? And I'm not saying the responsible kids aren't rebellious or critical; they're just not stupid about what they think is funny.
Basically what I'm saying here is that many students are irresponsible jerks, and I think it's good to weed them out. In fact, some posters here reveal themselves to be the sort of person I would not hire. I wouldn't want people with such loser ideas about women working around any women I'd hired.
Slashdot: news for nerds. And we all know how well nerds play with the other monkeys. Rule number two for making friends: try not to be obnoxious. (Rule number one is shower approximately daily.)
I love Haldeman, and I loved the Strange and Norrell novel. BUT, I can't really trust taste when Serenity beats out BSG. That seems so klazy to me. I've read a lot of Haldeman, and his stuff is damn good, but it just seems to lack the psychological depth of the S&N novel. Like a lot of male-written SF, Haldeman's characters often seem to be little more than mouthpieces for an ideology or polemic, but no one is as transparent in that way as Orson Scott Card.
Yo dood like dunt no what yer talking bout eh, but like totally if u want to learn yer studunts sumpin, den Jew can't gib dem to much infermation so like don't gib dem all dem apostrofee liddle rules Ed said "er uh" or Jew woan teach dem nudding bout some larger issues. In sum dem areas teachurs god to mantane dem dissiplun mo dan dey kin teach. Uddr me doan no no teachers widdout grammur skeels. Nebber dem less, most childruns watch dem two much Dee tell a vision. And not dem read bookz or magazines, most of which amwrittem poor ennyway, such am dem manuals, magazines, newspaper articules am written very poorly. Itza said sitch u eight shun, but I not know whut doo. I am a teacher, and my grammar skills are just fine. Your essay is poorly orgnanized and wanders from the point. Do not confuse rant with reason.
Hey, I work in the US's oldest writing center, and I've taught writing since 1991. Strunk & White is useful because it is a key into the world of proscriptive grammar. We can talk about descriptive grammars, fluency, natural methods of language acquisition all we want--I myself am an avant-garde poet committed to process and organicism--but IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THE RULES OF PROSCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR YOU WILL STILL BE JUDGED BY THEM NO MATTER WHAT LINGUISTS AND POETS THINK. My students who are no nonnative speakers find S&W useful because it begins to give them advice about STYLE.
No discussion on slashdot is worthwhile, or seems really meant to be so, but if this conversation were to be worthwhile, we'd do well to distinguish carefully between writing process, correctness, and style. Writing is a complicated business, but with all due respect, a linguist offering advice on writing is like letting a primatologist pick your wedding dress-- far too many levels of abstraction away from the real practice. Oh, some of my best friends are linguists, so this isn't some anti-linguist bias.
Tennessee salary with those berries? Pretty funny you didn't think of that while you're hanging your hat on a free market argument. And are you sure you're talking about berries from California? Because we've got a helluva lot of acres of strawberries in West Tennessee. Anyway, things are never as simple as you slashdot clowns make them.
a) Those threats aren't remotely funny.
b) If dude can't see it, he can't see it. My mechanic's the same way. Of course he's paid more, so maybe it's easier for him to put up with adolescents like yourself.
*) If you aren't 12, my bad; for some reason thought you were.
Slashdot Mirror
I teach freshman comp at a Big 10 university. Most freshmen cannot construct a productive database query. They have trouble using services like Ebscohost or Factiva because if their topic is underage drinking, to choose a typical one they'd like, they'll type in "underage drinking" and start wading through the hits. Students from wealthier schools do well at this, and when I ask them about it, they had a teacher who taught them. Of course, there are computer hobbyist types constructing useful boolean searches, but they are pretty thin on the ground.
When I teach courses in rooms with laptops for all the students, they know how to go to MyStupid or Fork.com or how to watch Homesar or pooTube, but they don't know how to insert headers in Word, create a hanging indent, much less use a stylesheet.
So I'm guessing that an intranet would be a great idea, one that relied upon a monthly or weekly distribution of data from a state, federal or some other entity's office. Then you gots your wikipedia or what-have-you. Think of the idea of popping up little clones of the Internet in remote locations for the volks using the OLPC doohicky. Don't put any fun stuff in it. I remember Oregon Trail was enough to distract me. Don't allow students go get outside the LAN. And a real plus of this for parents, politicos, and other traditional enemies of teachers is that each state could pick just how ignorant it wants to be simply by excluding information in much the same way that they currently cherry pick textbooks, cut passages out of texts, ban books, and so on.
But here's the sticking-point that means this won't happen: you need teachers with some minimal computer training that they take seriously and follow. You know, how to log out, for example. How to do stylesheets so they can pass it on. I think the current situation is like watching cavemen try to figure out what to do with an abacus. The folks at this woman's school were obviously scratching their bits with their abacus. And now even more cavemen are going to be running around afraid the abacus is a demon sent by god to test them.
Now, the Puritans were not puritannical quite like we use the word these days. A few guys like Revend Michael Wigglesworth were truly odd uptight (check out his poem "I Erect a Pillar Unto God" (it's not a cigar, I tell you!) or his secret encoded diaries documenting his pedophilia). But most Puritans got married while knocked-up. But the Puritans, uptight or not, were a minority. A minority up there in the cold Northeast because even tho they weren't quite who we think they were, they were still too uptight for the rest of the folks. Go read "The Maypole at Merrymount" by Thomas Morton. It should be free somewhere; it's older than dirt. Also Jehlen and Warner's anthology of early American lit is a good book to give you a feel for the real uh deal.
The Puritan hoo-ha started showing up during the cold war and was given a big push by guys like Perry Miller who were all indebted to the Ivy League (in his case Harvard) institutions for which they worked and who were also responding with a backlash against libertine WW2 vets. Um, but I'm getting out of hand here. Basically the Puritan-America story gained credibility at the same time Thanksgiving was cooked-up and the flag pledge (written for kids by a socialist) gained the words "under god" from right Catholics. It was a load of crap intended to justify the presence of sticks up certain butts.
This is what I've been thinking. I think the fine should be (everything he has) + $1.
So where are we going to get new researchers? And do you really think you can buy dissertation-quality research online? It would be so great if posts here had to have an age affixed, at least until there's some way to more accurately quantify maturity vs. idiocy.
The point of these "pointless" essays is to teach you how to write and to insure you've mastered the material. If you don't need to learn that, great, enjoy the coast to your bachelor's degree. Or even better, drop out of school so that you don't discourage students who do want to learn. I'm pretty sure the assignment wasn't to "write a general bullshit essay," yet you blame someone else for that. Maybe it's bullshit because you don't give a damn about it? Finally, 6,000 words, oh how my little heart breaks for you! That's substantially less than thirty pages, more like 20. What a heart-breaker. Drop your lazy butt out of school, get a job carrying heavy things, then come back and report to us. I think just 60 words will do.
I am a college teacher. I've seen those essays. Students send me CDs of essay collections. From what I've seen, they are only going to change the "curve," if there is such thing in your class as a weighted grade distribution, to your benefit. Most of the essays I've seen would earn nothing better than a C in my classes because they are so awful. Maybe there are better products out there, but probably not for $20
I don't care if they're good at their job. If they lie about credentials, research, or anything else that matters, they should be canned. This is quite simply so that people with qualifications who aren't liars can get the job. There are people beating the doors down for these jobs. And such lying might well be the tip of the iceberg. At any rate, such a lack of integrity should be punished, not winked at, especially given the cynicism in industry, politics, the media, you name the spot, about lying.
Those degrees are worth something. I dont' think it's right for someone to lie about their work and have the lie accepted, effectively peeing in the face of everyone who actually DID the work.
I also think hysterics like Gilcrhist here the UI should be canned. I think faculty who abuse grad students should be canned. The list goes on. I'll summarize it: there are a lot of incompetent, lazy, cruel, idiotic, arrogant, dishonest, or greedy faculty who should be canned. There are simply too many good young people in these fields. Good lord, tenure is great for protecting Frankenstein from the torch-bearing mob, but I wish there were a way to clean up all the dead wood in our universities.
But A) Cremo is full of crap; you don't need peer review to rule out a guy who starts out blithering about his past lives; B) Chip Morninstar doesn't know enough about litcrit to damn a whole field by the sample of twits who hang out at any event called cyber-something; and finally, C) There are a lot of idiots on Slashdot blowing smoke about things of which they have little more than a single clue. YMMV, Ciao!
brain development that's going on. Recent research suggests that people don't have their full cognitive hardware until early 20s. ethos appeal: another educator here; gf and I are working on the baby.
I am finishing my dissertation this spring. I have won two teaching awards and have been teaching since 91 (went back for PhD in my field). My question to you is why should students bother to come sit in uncomfortable chairs to be one of a couple of hundred listening to a lecture when they can listen to it or watch it at their convenvience when they feel alert and ready to learn? Why put restrictions on a file so that it can't be accessed by someone who was sick or someone from another area in the university? Your post said nothing about learning the material of the class and everything about learning blind obedience to your standards. If you have been tasked with making those restrictions, I feel sorry for you. If you came up with them yourself, I feel even sorrier for you. I take teaching very seriously, and the number one thing I've learned is that you need willing students, or "You can lead a horse to water...."
thanks for making the /. cliche pay
Well, this is friendly advice. But it might go down wrong. I was a lot like you. I grew up in the rural South, and I'm not the nerd so much as the poet type. Smart, skinny, sensitive. Don't get me wrong, I was still a little redneck. But my folks beat me a lot, and that marks you in a way. So I got beat up a lot until I got really mean. I don't advise that. I'm lucky I'm not in jail. I chose violence as a path out of being bullied. But I got the violence under control by working my butt off learning to respect myself. That meant, for me, working out and being conscious of how I thought about myself and the world. It's this way: if you're really a smart guy, maybe you know things those other people don't; maybe they're just dumb knuckle-draggers. Whatever. YOU have to find a way to deal with it without feeling like a victim. That's not "suck it up" at all. It's learning to be less scared of the world.
I picked up the Chicago Tribune this week. It's finally been established conclusively--after it was established no one would go to jail for it--that Chicago cops have been tying people to radiators, beating them, and (natch) shocking their balls for years. No one is going to jail. Now there's Gitmo and extraordinary rendition and telcos with big old Matrix hoses coming out the back of their heads. Journalists are disappearing in battle zones, being imprisoned. CIA agent "outed." Missing weapons of mass deception and so on. So when should we start feeling paranoid? I'll add too that there was a time when people in the Eastern Bloc were getting random donations of old modems, which they wanted very much to help their dissident zamizdat publications. I have met a poet who can't communicate with his family per his government's order. Maybe some chatting or something would be nice.... Sometimes American's and others don't know how nice they have it.
Been reading your Von Daniken or whatever? Here just for kicks, to help you out of your pit of ignorence. Atlantis is mentioned in one source originally, Plato's Timaeus, to provide a hypothetical to measure against the Republic. The guy who brings up Atlantis mentions it as a story his granddaddy told him on the equivalent of April Fool's Day. Look, mystical bullshit is fun to read, but it's still bullshit. Real history mystery is more interesting. Like, the mystery for example, of why so many miserable ignernt fucks, oops, folks, over the centuries have wanted to believe in a place like Atlantis. Go learn something worth learning.
... I am a grad student at a Big 10 (11, whatever) university. The woman in charge of computers in our whole building gets about $35k based on her job title. She came into a lab I work in to do some network stuff. She didn't know what RAM is. She "backed up" lab data that was being moved to a new machine (Mac 9 to Mac 10), and she only copied the crap laying around on the desktop and at the root of the HD, not all the stuff in the OS-provided documents folder--in which was everyone's real work. I am an English major. But I've learned to work on my own computer the same way learned to work on brakes after I took my car to a shop and it came back squirting DOT 3 like a geyser. No one really gives a shit about my life and my data the way I do.
In general, I think you'd be much better off hiring the quiet, hard-working kid or the kid who's reasonable and talkative. The kids who posture in stupid and irresponsible ways are, surprise surprise, not as smart nor as hard-working as the other kids. I don't think this has anything to do with smoking the odd blunt or getting loaded or liking satire, but it does have a lot to do with what you think is funny, what your core values are. Why hire the person who blogs vicious gossip? Why hire the person who mocks the boss? Why hire the person who thinks misogyny is funny? Or that vandalism is? And I'm not saying the responsible kids aren't rebellious or critical; they're just not stupid about what they think is funny. Basically what I'm saying here is that many students are irresponsible jerks, and I think it's good to weed them out. In fact, some posters here reveal themselves to be the sort of person I would not hire. I wouldn't want people with such loser ideas about women working around any women I'd hired.
I expect someone to drill holes in the damn hard drive.
snivtor n 1: girbnitz pooslocky himdibble frockish gornt puck. Snotch skocj plimsnork. 2: grovitz boomwhangle diddlepoker himdibble. adj 1: liblong freewill timmy hooscow. 2. grovnitz boomwhangly himdibblery. 3: Snarky polewaxer himtokky
FoxNews calls plaintiffs "treasonous" and defends the DoJ's detention of same at undisclosed locations.
Slashdot: news for nerds. And we all know how well nerds play with the other monkeys. Rule number two for making friends: try not to be obnoxious. (Rule number one is shower approximately daily.)
I love Haldeman, and I loved the Strange and Norrell novel. BUT, I can't really trust taste when Serenity beats out BSG. That seems so klazy to me. I've read a lot of Haldeman, and his stuff is damn good, but it just seems to lack the psychological depth of the S&N novel. Like a lot of male-written SF, Haldeman's characters often seem to be little more than mouthpieces for an ideology or polemic, but no one is as transparent in that way as Orson Scott Card.
Yo dood like dunt no what yer talking bout eh, but like totally if u want to learn yer studunts sumpin, den Jew can't gib dem to much infermation so like don't gib dem all dem apostrofee liddle rules Ed said "er uh" or Jew woan teach dem nudding bout some larger issues. In sum dem areas teachurs god to mantane dem dissiplun mo dan dey kin teach. Uddr me doan no no teachers widdout grammur skeels. Nebber dem less, most childruns watch dem two much Dee tell a vision. And not dem read bookz or magazines, most of which amwrittem poor ennyway, such am dem manuals, magazines, newspaper articules am written very poorly. Itza said sitch u eight shun, but I not know whut doo. I am a teacher, and my grammar skills are just fine. Your essay is poorly orgnanized and wanders from the point. Do not confuse rant with reason.
Hey, I work in the US's oldest writing center, and I've taught writing since 1991. Strunk & White is useful because it is a key into the world of proscriptive grammar. We can talk about descriptive grammars, fluency, natural methods of language acquisition all we want--I myself am an avant-garde poet committed to process and organicism--but IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THE RULES OF PROSCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR YOU WILL STILL BE JUDGED BY THEM NO MATTER WHAT LINGUISTS AND POETS THINK. My students who are no nonnative speakers find S&W useful because it begins to give them advice about STYLE. No discussion on slashdot is worthwhile, or seems really meant to be so, but if this conversation were to be worthwhile, we'd do well to distinguish carefully between writing process, correctness, and style. Writing is a complicated business, but with all due respect, a linguist offering advice on writing is like letting a primatologist pick your wedding dress-- far too many levels of abstraction away from the real practice. Oh, some of my best friends are linguists, so this isn't some anti-linguist bias.
Tennessee salary with those berries? Pretty funny you didn't think of that while you're hanging your hat on a free market argument. And are you sure you're talking about berries from California? Because we've got a helluva lot of acres of strawberries in West Tennessee. Anyway, things are never as simple as you slashdot clowns make them.
a) Those threats aren't remotely funny. b) If dude can't see it, he can't see it. My mechanic's the same way. Of course he's paid more, so maybe it's easier for him to put up with adolescents like yourself. *) If you aren't 12, my bad; for some reason thought you were.