kennon

Good tips but the 3-month claims create unrealistic expectations. It likely results in higher book sales but means most people will give up before they actually become fluent in a foreign language.

Fluency, also, is difficult to define. I listened to a couple minutes of Benny stammering his way through a Mandarin language interview. His level seems on par for 3 months of study, so perhaps he equates basic communication as "fluency." If I can talk to a stranger on the bus for 10 minutes, does that mean I'm fluent? Not according to most language rating scales, though they are admittedly very subjective.

The Foreign Service Institute of the US State Dept sorts foreign languages into three groups, based upon how long it takes a typical student to reach professional competency (CEFR C1, IFL 3/3+):

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...

Professional competency means: can you perform office functions in that language? Most non-Latin languages take a year of dedicated study (1000 hrs) to reach fluency. Exceptionally difficult languages, such as Arabic or Mandarin, take 2 years. Also, it's debatable whether even the 3/3+ moniker equates to fluency. I scored a 3+ in Russian and there are many, many situations that I cannot navigate in that language.

So could you, for instance, learn Arabic to a C1 level within 3 months? It's highly doubtful and shame on the author for giving people that impression.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

--eisenhower, 1953

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech

Just curious what you do with returned inventory? I adhere to particular brands because I more or less know general quality and more importantly, I know how the clothes will fit. With a new designer each week, suddenly variance becomes a serious issue. Big retailers can absorb the inventory, but what will you do with out-of-date items?

In any case, i like the idea and hope it works out. I buy clothing online pretty frequently (most stores dont carry my size) and it's nice to see the industry evolving.

I agree with rmc. There are similar cultural roles in Samoa, India, Thailand. Gender-- the cultural notion, not the biological one-- is definitely more malleable than we typically assume.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender

Also, if you haven't read Middlesex, it is excellent.

I like that the article is attempting to encourage people to cook more, but the premise is flawed. You don't take someone who's interested in food and tell them to read the French Laundry Cookbook. You tell them to start with Julia Child, or the Joy of Cooking, or Cooks Illustrated, or Mark Bittman. Crawl, then walk, then run.

Similarly, you don't tell a novice to spend $1000 on equipment they might never use. I've cooked "gourmet" for over a decade and I've never owned a stand mixer. You tell them to buy a good chef's knife, a good paring knife. A stock pot, a frying pan, maybe a saucepan. I have a cast iron pan but i use my nonstick pans much more often.

The difficulty in learning to cook is not in getting the right tools. It's in getting someone to overcome their fear of it. You just need to show them that it's actually not a difficult thing, that you can screw up a recipe multiple times and still have a delicious result. Make a pot of spaghetti, then a simple soup or stew, roast a chicken, fry a steak. Then go nuts making Keller's Oysters and Pearls. But only after.

The people who would find use out of many of the items listed are the same people who know what they need, anyway.

Actually this brings up one concern I've had for a while. I've been doing yoga fairly regularly (2x a week) for about six years. I have no problem keeping up with advanced classes, holding plank/bridge/wheel, can almost do a full split, etc. Yet, I have pretty extreme APT. I don't really know where I'm going wrong; I've tried similar exercise and stretching regimens in the past, supplementing the yoga, but never seemed to get anywhere with them. As a result, I feel like perhaps more direct strength training (squat, deadlift, etc) might be worth a shot. Thoughts?

Also, is APT the same as lordosis or is there a medical distinction?

I think it'll be interesting to see if there are households who have a tablet but not a desktop/laptop. Until that happens, it still feels like a luxury product.

Despite owning my own bike, I have considered signing up for DC's bikeshare program (havent pulled the trigger yet; just moved here). A couple advantages for me:

  - I don't have to worry about my own (rather nice) bike getting stolen
  - I don't have to lug around a lock+chain for short trips.
  - I'm not stuck with my bike if I use another means for the return trip 
    (e.g., going to a bar, then cabbing home or hitching a ride)

When I first moved here I was amazed by the number of people that use the program. I'm quite curious about the actual municipal cost, though-- especially as a before/after comparison. Also would be interested in other effects. For instance, did it decrease parking woes? Increase public transportation usage? Cause more traffic accidents?

I don't think this is news to anyone who's familiar with the rising popularity of social games. During the facebook gaming boom, "pink" games far outpaced "blue" ones in popularity and profit. I worked at a zynga competitor around 2008-10 and it was very clear that female audiences were less demanding, less prone to cheating, and more willing to regularly spend money (in the aggregate) than their male counterparts. In other words: lower maintenance, easier profits. We would release the exact same feature in two games-- one pink and one blue-- and the pink game's revenues would spike while the blue's flatlined. Definitely not a scientific approach, but one that repeated itself on multiple occasions.

All of this transitioned nicely into mobile social games, where we are today. There is some risky gender stereotyping that can arise in tandem with these kinds of discussions, but from my experience the revenues make it pretty clear which audience to target.

If that's the case, then there's also a bit of a UI issue. The current shuffle button is a toggle, not a "click once each time you want to shuffle" button.

> My ISP doesn't install software on my computer, ...

Not for lack of trying. I recently helped my friend set up Comcast and part of the installation process included downloading a required suite of "configuration" software. We were able to figure out a way around it but most people probably just click through without a thought.

Very cool, but I'm still a little confused. The earth's surface more or less just extends out in two dimensions, but doesn't space extend out in three? How does all of this work when you have take into account the z-axis as well as x and y? How would a three-dimensional object "close" in around itself?

I understood mtgx's question to be based on practical grounds, not moral ones. But in answer to your question, I think of espionage as something akin to the military. Perhaps in an ideal world neither would be necessary, but unfortunately the world is not a utopia.

Thus, from a realistic standpoint, spying is sort of like doing market research for a startup. It allows you to make predictive decisions instead of reactive ones.

I'm curious why you think international spying is unnecessary. Until countries cease to compete for limited resources, it seems to me like an inevitability.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if this is selling below manufacturing cost? At least, I thought that was the case with the Kindle Fire, which has less impressive specs?

Either way, could be interesting times ahead if Amazon, Apple, and Google are all marking out their tablet+store territory...

I think you may be contradicting yourself. Using your example, one thing leads to another but it all hinges on an initial lucky roll of the dice: born in the US to the right parents. No one "earns" this head start but almost everyone reading this discussion has it.

Like you, I believe that I've had some say in getting to where I am today, but it's hard to tell how much of that is reality and how much is self-aggrandizement.

Interesting, thanks for the advice. I guess I was basing my assumptions on the experiences friends have had at larger firms, where all the salary changes were relegated to yearly reviews.

This is my first time working at a company with more than 40 people, so it's all been a learning process. Glad I asked about raises here-- otherwise, I probably would've waited till my first year was up, only to be disappointed!

I've actually been hoping that a formal review process will be put into place soon at my current company, and I've been asking my boss(es) about it regularly. This is because I was under the impression that a formal review is the only way for me to get a raise. From that perspective, it's definitel in the company's best interest to dodge this as long as possible: upon reviewing me, they either have to tell me I don't deserve what I think I deserve, or they have to pay me more.

Is my understanding of the process wrong? Granted, this isn't a GE kind of company-- we have employees in the hundreds, not thousands-- so hopefully it's different.

I agree, except for one thing: I couldn't find a way to put a 24-hr hold on a ticket through their website. Seems like a pretty standard feature; not sure why they don't allow it.

I wasn't sure if it's inappropriate to post a job listing on here, but it sounds like a good opportunity for someone who is looking for something a bit different from the usual startup/desk job.

I think you underestimate the importance of skype as a international means of communication, and overestimate the value most people place on privacy. When living abroad, it's the primary tool for keeping in touch with people back home or in other parts of the world. And why not? It's (mostly) free.

Even if skype came out and said they were recording every conversation, I don't know if all that many people would stop using it. There wasn't all that much outrage over immunity for the big telcos, for instance.

Or did you mean the company would be ruined for some other reason besides loss of reputation? Maybe I misunderstood the comment.

I'm actually learning Russian right now, while living in St. Petersburg, so I think about this a lot. The program I'm in is intended to take us to a high level of fluency-- Superior, or Level 3-4 on the various scales. As a result, there is a lot of talk about thinking in the target language. I, sadly, still feel like I very rarely do this. I can handle very simple contexts rapidly, but I don't know if I'm actually thinking directly in Russian, or simply using the lookup table you describe at an extremely rapid rate. When I read texts or hear other people speaking in Russian, I almost always still reform the sentences into English in my head.

Some of the other students seem to not have this problem. By their own admission, they're able to operate in many, if not most, contexts completely in Russian-- though, of course, there's no way to know what this means. They mention dreaming in Russian, for instance. This hasn't happened to me yet. There are times when I can intuit what someone wants without actually translating word for word, but usually that's just because I didn't catch all of their words to begin with.

It might be background-- I'm the only engineer, the others are all Russian majors. Maybe they have less need of precise rules and translations. It's very hard for me to adopt a new Russian phrase without having found an English equivalent for it. It might be time spent learning the language. The other students have been at it 2, 3 times longer than I have. It might just be that I'm older: 30, as opposed to 22, 23. When I was in the Peace Corps, the volunteers in their 50s and 60s had huge problems learning the local language. So it's probably true that, at least for most people, the older you get, the more ingrained your modes of thought. I guess that means that the earlier you can expand this, the better.

The first thing that popped into my head was: Asperger's?

I would argue that the China example is somewhat invalid. Seems to me that China's economy has been expanding because they've begun to mimic "western" capitalistic principles more closely than in the past. That is, Chinese citizens are more able and willing to start up businesses for personal gain, something that wasn't really possible a couple decades ago.

Also, I picked the cow and the hay, even though I lean more towards individualism-- maybe not compared to the average American, though (I'm Chinese, born in the US).

You can make any kind of list with tadalist as well, and the interface is much cleaner. You could argue that yours has more features, but to me, they're just unnecessary clutter. I don't want to have to guess at what your little icons represent when my needs are so uncomplicated. All I want is someplace online where I can put lists of text. I like what you've written, but none of it would compel me to use it over tadalist or other established sites.

A few years ago, when I was a Cal undergrad, I turned down an internship at the larger company you're referring to. More specifically, I already accepted another offer by the time they called me back. I work a few blocks away from there now, and when I walk by the campus, I sometimes still wonder whether I'd be in an entirely different branch of the industry if timing on that phone call had worked out just a little bit differently.

As others have mentioned, the company's size is far less important than the quality of the people you will be working with directly. This site has a decidedly strong bias towards do-it-yourself, but to me, the point of an internship is to acquaint yourself with people who are a few years further down their career path than you. They've been in your shoes and can help guide you. Try to figure out which boss or coworker will be a better mentor. You'll have plenty of opportunities to strike out on your own after you graduate.

From my experience living abroad (a couple years in Central Asia), a lot of American expats try to take America with them when they move to a foreign country. Suffice to say, most, like this author, become incredibly cynical as a result. Yes, local culture can be infuriating. And it's true that the hypocrisy of the state can seem more glaring when it's backed by arbitrary religious fiat. But come on-- complaining about local dress, taxi driver hygiene, or the lack of sweet, sweet cable tv?

Yet the author's original message is actually a good one. Life in the US is pretty damn good, and that's why we all pay a premium for it. There's usually a reason why a given place has a lower cost of living-- you pay for it in other ways instead.

Right, and then you could argue that people who actually think of themselves as "smart" will know of such experiments, and will thus rate themselves as "average," knowing that such a label actually indicates that they really are smart.

So basically this kind of survey says very little at all.

I think the numbers encompass all jobs within the region-- not just tech ones, as you seem to be implying. If you include all employment sectors, then there are plenty of fulltime workers earning less than $30k: 27 percent, according to the article.