Meramec Caverns

Or, you know, move beyond capitalism entirely.

I'm suddenly reminded my my high school chemistry lab partner. Thanks for putting up with me, Christine, wherever you are.

0. Yes, but I work in a field with really stange gender and racial dynamics (Teaching English as a Foreign Language).

1. Yes, as teaching is usually considered a more female-oriented profession, and communication/social skills also seem to be thought of as coming more naturally to women. Also, I like to observe how gender influences student participation and skill-building.

2. No, I avoid leaderhip responsibilities.

3. No. I look at who's the best-suited individual, regardless of gender.

4. Yes. I frequently think about cultural differences, multiple intelligences and (potentially undiagnosed) developmental issues.

5. Not exactly, no. I think a lot about being a polite guest in my host country, and how to be a person of integrity and how to a good role model for children. But I don't tend to think about personal skills vis-a-vis those kinds of roles/relationships.

edit: I'm actually between jobs now. I've been going through the hiring process for a new position. The two female admins I've been in contact with have been great about follow-up and communication in general. The male admin is so bad about responding to emails that I've stopped even CCing him.

I agree. It's way to jargon-y for many people. I tend to lead in particular aspects that sound technical, and not too "out there" such as agroforestry or integrated pest management or ecosystem mimicry or even just sustainable agriculture.

While I share the overall skeptical attitude, I have to say translation software is already a part of my daily life. I am a bit of an outlier, being a foreign language instructor, but much of these uses are for my personal life in countries where I have a minimal grasp of the language. I frequently have conversations on an app called WeChat which has a built-in translation function. However, the quality of translation software output hasn't noticibly progressed in the last decade or so since Altavista's Babel Fish was replaced by Google Translate. Asian languages are still as likely as not to be rendered into English wordpasta.

I'd like to see Kurzweil's past predictions. I always hear techno-utropian say that his predictions have been highly accurate so far (this infographic calims 89%), but I have yet to see the substance. And I'm not about to do the research myself.

I don't allow myself to use the word anymore

I'm about to that point myself. I can tell I'm starting to sound like a broken record to the people around me.

As ever, this stuff is way over my head.

I got hit with the Firefox block recently. You know, they're been prophesying the death of Flash for 4 or 5 years now. I wish it would just hurry up. I know know a handful of sites that still implement it. I'm looking at you Spotify.

Really it's Japan. Compared to them, we're angels in the Korean consciousness. Japan colonized Korea from 1910-1945. During that time the Japanese destroyed/confiscated cultural artifacts and buildings, instituted forced labor (including forced prostitution), and eventually began a policy of cultural assimilation. By contrast the American influence on the peninsula is realtively hands-off or indirect. In my experience there definitely are a lot of people who are discontent with the prescence of US troops in Korea, but there's not the visceral prejudice that many have against Japan. What was surprising to me was that far right-wing nationalists are also typically very pro-American. Which is awkward as I have much more sympathy toward

we supported the oppressive regime in the South

This unfortunately appears to be our country's MO in foreign countries. We have a much lengthier track record of setting up despotisms than democracies.

It wasn't just the North that America fucked over. The US military set-up the hard-line anti-Communist Rhee Syngman as the first president (dictator, really) of the Republic of Korea. Before and during the war he ordered mass killings of political dissidents. The Jeju Massacre was one such event. One incident where Americans directly killed civilians was the Nogeun-ri Massacre. Tens to hundreds of thousands of lives lost due to American influence.

I searched for it, but no old posts came up. Odd.

The EXIF metadata on those pics would also be some handy evidence.

This is hard, because relatively few of the speeches delivered in history have actually been recorded. My votes for probably great speech-givers, but we'll never know for sure: Spartacus, Crazy Horse, and Hasan Ala Dhikrihi

Not exactly an alternative, but bookfinder4u.com is a search engine to compare book prices across websites. Like a Kayak/Trivago for books.

feminism is about gender equality from a very specific perspective on society, namely one that assumes the existence of patriarchy.

The concept of patriarchy arose within a certain branch of feminism, and tho it's permeated it's not a fundamental concept to feminism per se.

it's disingenuous to decide that because someone thinks something you don't feel is very liberal they're suddenly a secret conservative even though they're life-long democrats who've always supported liberal causes.

Well, to characterize anyone as liberal, conservative, or whatever is necessarily going to be a generalization. Capitalist libertarians are hard for so many people to grasp because they tend to be "liberal" on social issues and "conservative" on economic issues. Hence, it's useful to have a seperate term to describe them, because there are so many people that can be characterized that way. Maybe what we need is a new term to for people who tend towards what's usually considered to be liberal positions, except on identity issues.

My issue wasn't with users, necessarily. I didn't have much problem unfollowing people with irksome personalities (unless there were in-person social connections). My issue was more that ~half of the stuff particular users posted would be insightful or interesting, and the other half made me feel like I was wasting my precious time on that website. So the problem came down to 1) the means of filtering undesirable content were ineffective or cumbersome, and 2) people often didn't use them anyway.

I'm also with you on the teenage girl hate. I didn't mean to perpetuate it by leading in with those overgeneralizations.

I forgot to add that I'd like something persistant, so that someone else could come along and read them all. I guess I might end up doing this with threads I find worthwhile on a static, pure HTML website.

The more vocal users tend to be stauchy anti-feminist. Reddit's reputation has been shaped by it's explicitly racist subreddits. I know those subs aren't representative of the entire userbase, but in terms of the overall impression the site makes it's hard liberal on religious issues, moderately conservative on fiscal issues, and strongly conservative on social issues. The same can be said of Tumblr. The majority are apolitical, but the most vocal users are staunchy left-wing.

In undergrad I read an eye-opening article about the medicalization of pregnancy/labor in the US. It went from the most semiotic aspects that treat women giving birth as a medical problem - such as being kept in a wheelchair - to the more profound and practical. The thing that stuck out the most for me is the orientation of a pregnant woman's body. In most traditional cultures women give birth in a vertical position, often by squatting. In the medicalized American version women are horizontal, which means they aren't being aided by simple gravity. Gotta see if I can dig that article up.

It's weird to me that so many alternative/local currencies are denominated in time units. As if the time spent to do something were the only metric to take into account for its value.

they feel safe from the attention of straight males with no respect for boundaries. Is that ironic?

I was surprised the article didn't address that.

Did you catch the image gallery linked at the top of the article: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/gallery/2015/aug/12/tokyo-without-ads-japan-stripped-bare-in-pictures

I way pretty impressed when I was in Japan. Overall the signage there felt less intrusive than in South Korea, or the heavily trafficked areas of the US.

Wow, I've really stopped reading them in the last few years. It's good to see some of my old favorites are still going strong. A really delightful comic that caught my attention recently is Eth's Skin. It takes place in an alternate reality with magic and mermaids. Two of my old favorites that haven't been mentioned yet are Perry Bible Fellowship and Sinfest.

I was surprised how much that thread took off.

Wow, never heard about that riot before. I was also thinking about resumes re: colorism. Tho with the way they touch the photos up, I'm sure it not as much of a prejudicial point as it could be. I've noticed in other parts of Asia not even Ireland or S. Africa are considered "real" native English countries.

Ah, ha. I assumed the person who reg'd that username had forgotten about it :)

My point is that there is a lack of trust among many black Americans about white people entering their spaces. The church shooting crystalized that distrust among a lot of black people I know.

I'm not sure how to explain the categorical difference between a group of black activists excluding whites versus a government or company excluding Muslims from an airplane. Well, one difference is de jure discrimination versus de facto, but even that is not what I'm getting at.

Additionally, the message from a lot of the Black Lives Matter groups has been to encourage white people to form their own auxillary groups to support BLM.

I'm surprised that the article's author seems surprised. Here in America it seems more often taken for granted that parent's social status determine (to a degree) their childens'. And we've never had an aristocracy and tend to believe the Horatio Alger myth.

This is the same as it's ever been. The Chinese ran a meritocratic system for centuries. Who do you think tended to fare better in the imperial examinations? The sons of merchants or the sons of bureaucrats? Obviously the latter, because their parents could afford tutors and they themseves didn't have to work and could study instead.

The other major factor is family connections. I've seen it in my own personal life. My wealthier friends got higher-paying jobs because their dads schmoozed at the country club. My friends of more modest means, myself included, were on their own.

I'm more inclined to turn the interpretation of this article on its head, "Graduates who were educated at private school are only paid 7 per cent more on average"

First of all, atheists are not nihilists.

This was my first thought, too. My bias, though. I lean toward nihilism but I'm not atheist.