Towle_

Really, downvoted? The people here are ridiculous. I'm fucking done. Peace out.

WOW. Thank you for posting. Sincerely, College Senior.

Agreed. Since no single term beats all the others for clarity though, I'm willing to grant them "reverse mentorship."

Personally, however, 'reverse' anything makes me think of "reverse racism," my least favorite phrase ever. Even in the absence of any political agenda, just taking the term at face value, it doesn't make any damn sense. Racism against white people is still racism. There's nothing 'reverse' about it.

I posted in another thread that it was ironic Facebook would be against the re-purposing of a facebook's info and photos, given that's exactly what Zuck did to create Facemash.

But honestly, one must sympathize with their desire to protect their brand. They don't need "their" photos to be the source material for the entire internet's memes and jokes. Let somebody with less at stake fill that niche.

"[I]magine the possibilities for a Halo movie done right."

This seems a tall order, if you plan to base the story around Master Chief. Now that's not a necessity, of course... but this is Halo.

Master Chief is a vessel character, like Neo from The Matrix or, dare I mention it, Bella from Twilight. The idea is for you, the individual audience member, to slip yourself into that hollow vessel and become the character. Master Chief is me. I am Master Chief. We are one in the same. You are also Master Chief. Master Chief is also you. By design, vessel characters have literally no personality. They should say and/or do nothing which would upset the illusion that you are them. Neo never says anything smart, never says anything stupid, never makes a moral choice we couldn't all see ourselves making. Hell, he hardly even talks period. Same goes for Master Chief. Obviously, you can write for/around a vessel character. The Wachowski brothers did it. But can you write for a vessel character whose story has already been told? Try and imagine, say, a prequel story where we watch young Master Chief running around military school or whatever. Did you imagine something boring? I did.

Mashable article by Ori Brafman, author of Click: http://mashable.com/2010/06/17/facebook-connect-fail/

Why Facebook Can't Genuinely Connect People

"But there are specific factors, or accelerators, that trigger such connections -- and there are three that Facebook is seriously lacking: Physical proximity, vulnerability and a clearly defined community."

He goes on to discuss how and why Facebook lacks each of the three.

C'mon guys, everybody knows it's wrong to take a bunch of info and photos from one facebook site and re-purpose them on another.

Mere hours before lamebook was hacked together:

"You are probably going to be a very successful computer person. But you're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole."

/irony

To end prosperity, guarantee everyone in Canada $20,000 a year.

Extra Credit: Why aren't the senators' party affiliations listed?

Long live the Austrian School. Nothing else makes sense.

Idea: Stock bought/sold on Nov. 19th not subject to capital gains tax

Yeah, they are now. That's the freaking point. Two groups who slaughtered each other for centuries are now indistinguishable to observers.

I doubt that the majority of problems comes from a sense of entitlement, like you strangely enough, seem to believe.

What? I'm not making value judgments.

This is absurdly simple. If people have reason to believe that their efforts will be in vain, then they make no effort. But it's worse than that with socio-economic groups. Some members come to rely on the group's official explanation for lack of success, in order to maintain self-dignity. Those members hold back the others in their group to the best of their ability, else the official defense of mediocrity be disproven.

A great example is the Irish Catholics in America. "No Irish Need Apply" signs? Never happened (in America). http://tigger.uic.edu/~rjensen/no-irish.htm The myth of The Other keeping them down was necessary for them as a group. Even up through the first half of the 20th century, they insisted they were being held down as the explanation for their much lower income levels relative to white Protestants. Then came 1960. JFK was elected. If one of your group can get elected president, there's no more need for excuses. Since 1960, Irish Catholics have grown more and more like white Protestants. Both have almost the exact same income distribution now. Catholic church attendance has plummeted since 1960, asymptotically approaching Protestant church attendance. The group stopped reaching for excuses, and things got better for them. Fast.

It should be noted that it matters not whether those excuses are valid. When an entire group buys into the idea, correctly or incorrectly, that their lack of success is someone else's fault, the group as a whole stops trying at all. "What's the point in trying? They won't let us succeed."

edit 1: A strong, telling corollary is that forced immigrant groups always fare poorer than willful immigrant groups. Always.

edit 2: How many generations removed from communist tyranny are America's Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants? How're they doing?

The more excuses any given demographic has available to it, the worse it will fare.

Have the Japanese hit such an enormous creative block that they're investigating our PBS cartoons from 1998 in hope of business plans?

I'd like to see the study done with people who are living in a country where their race is a tiny minority.

You mean like people of East Asian descent in Finland? ;)

I joke, but I'm also making a point. That's valuable if that's what they did, but we don't actually know if that's what they did; we don't know where their subjects grew up, not just their nationality but more importantly their immediate environment. We have no idea. The researchers make no attempt to detail those factors.

Why? Wouldn't somebody with a PhD doing a study on racial anything want to a) know those things and b) tell us about them? a) Yes. b) If and only if it supports their already-formed conclusion.

Wow!

Sifting through sixrevisions.com ... they have some fantastic shit. Good writing, sure, but GREAT topics-- and that's such a rarity.

A big* high-five to abraham for the submission.

*The kind that makes your hand sting. Because I love you, that's why.

Call it America's brainiest place to live.

I will do no such thing, CNN.

I grew up in the DC metro area. It's a horrible place, don't ever move there. Where SF has an entrepreneurship draw and LA has a fame draw and NY has a money draw, DC has a power draw. People literally move there so they can take their shot at being the best Machiavellian sonofabitch they can be. There aren't any brainiacs around there. Some very smart people, sure, but no brainiacs.

tl;dr:

They don't get it.

"Leibnitz > Newton" could provoke a fist fight. This would be hilarious to see.

edit: Better than xkcd, depending on your sense of humor (i.e., whether you have one) is smbc-comics.com. Dunno how he licenses his stuff though.

They know something we don't know.

A 5% increase in capital gains tax in 2011 shouldn't be enough for this movement by these people. They should be planning on holding onto their stock indefinitely, especially at places like Amazon with no ceiling. Why aren't they?

£200M in finance: Because nobody knows the VC game like pencil-pushing bureaucrats.

I am more gun shy about posting comments that might get a below the average response.

This is what makes this a dangerous road to go down.

Whether or not they're plants, they are certainly not representative of the movement as a whole, neither its former nor current self. The bigots are the people "we" associate with the Tea Party because CNN focuses on them. And CNN focuses on them because they, like everyone else in the media, are in the business of re-confirming the worldview of their audience.

Who is a loyal CNN viewer? According to CNN, he is educated and informed and secular and (implicitly) liberal. Also according to CNN, Sarah Palin is none of those things. So, it becomes part of the loyal CNN viewer's worldview to dislike her.

How can CNN re-confirm this worldview in their coverage of Tea Party rallies? Easy. Since the loyal CNN viewer knows he is educated and secular (after all, CNN told him so) then he knows he's against racists, who are neither. So CNN turns the Tea Party into a bunch of racists and makes Sarah Palin their leader. Worldview re-confirmed. "See! What did I tell you about that Sarah Palin lady..."

(Note that I am not making any judgments one way or the other about the Tea Partiers or Palin herself. I am just explaining how this works.)

A short history of the Tea Party:

It was started as a libertarian-minded movement with a Ron Paul flavor to it. Initially, the right- and left-wing mainstream media were unsure of how to cover the Tea Party. Their ideology of libertarianism was foreign to the two-party landscape, and the movement had no visible leader.

Eventually, the Tea Party gained enough momentum that non-libertarian politicians (most notably Sarah Palin) saw it as politically useful and started speaking at rallies. These politicians were not libertarians, however; most were neo-conservatives. They echoed some of the familiar Tea Party rhetoric, only what was politically palatable and made sense to the two-party world. The rest of the libertarian ideology was thrown in the trash.

Because of her familiarity to the public, both sides of the media identified Palin as the de-facto leader of the Tea Party. Her ideology replaced the movement's. The complex story of a decentralized, leaderless, libertarian-inspired grassroots uprising was replaced by the simple story of Palin leading a bunch of people who hate Obama.

Of course, you are what the media says you are. The rallies themselves began to draw more and more Palin crazies, after they were told it was her movement. Those are the people you see on CNN holding up the often-racist, always-illogical signage.

And that's how the Tea Party went from enlightened to bigoted.

Also interesting is division by 7 resulting in a decimal.

1/7= .142857 repeating

2/7= .285714 rep

3/7= .428571 rep

4/7= .571428 rep

5/7= .714285 rep

6/7= .857142 rep

It's the same string of six digits, the only difference is which digit you start at.

As soon as employers made college a necessity for jobs of any significant income (and even some of shockingly low income, such as “receptionist”) back in the 80s or 90s, college started increasing tuition costs into the stratosphere. The cost for a four year degree at even a modest state school is now, in technical economic terms, fucking ridiculous.

Other way around, bro. Big federal aid started ~1980, THEN everyone went to college, THEN since everyone has a degree, you may as well hire up overqualified recent grads, THEN it becomes a semi-requirement you have a degree to be a receptionist.

C'mon, man. Whole nations worth of individuals don't just up and decide everyone needs a degree for no reason. That wouldn't make any sense.

This article would be a lot more interesting/revealing if it were what the submitter claims it to be (that's not a jab, just a sheepish admission of disappointment).

We have here the top ten brands for either political affiliation. Notably, some appear on both sides. While it's perhaps interesting that those brands do so well on either side, it would be far more interesting to know which brands are supported almost entirely by one side or the other. For example, say Dodge trucks have 90% Republican supporters and 10% Democrat. If that's the case, I want to know about it.

Edit: Sushi's a better example, and not just because mine was fictitious.

I feel that mindset runs contrary to the mission of the site itself.

Criticism is not impolite. In fact, it's the direct opposite. Criticism is a show of respect. You criticize someone when you care about them, when you desire their betterment and you respect them enough to be confident that they will not react negatively to the idea that someone else may know better than they do.