I have to wonder if tenured philosophy professors are any more or less unhappy than, say, newly tenured literature professors or economists or chemists.
I ask because 1, 3, 4, and 5 seem like the most persuasive reasons, but they're also the ones that aren't specific to philosophy.
Apparently the woman only said that she was sick until the airplane had returned to the gate and she exited the airplane.
At that point, probably thirty or fourty minutes had already gone by.
Then five minutes to get in touch with an the right law enforcement agent.
Fifteen minutes to get to the plane.
Five minutes talking to the woman.
Five minutes for the pilot to get the man off the plane.
Five minutes of conversation. Five minutes to reboard.
Twenty minutes of checklists.
Fourty minutes of taxing/waiting.
Since that adds up to more than two hours, it means that the actual process must have been faster.
The fundamental issue with that line of thinking is that deal-making only works when one of the parties is not under duress. If your life is on the line, you will take terrible deals, because you have no choice.
Capitalism is a system where the companies hold all the power and labor holds none- because if labor doesn't take the deal, labor will die. You can't negotiate a fair deal under those circumstances.
Which is why you need the government- social safety nets give power back to labor. So do unions. But both have been severely cut back in the past few decades.
Anyone can start a company under capitalism. You are empowered to create wealth yourself and enrich yourself from that creation. That's a beautiful thing and should not be taken for granted.
MIT provides a great book on learning deep learning. Amazon web services and many other big name virtualization services provide free trial periods for their services. A raspberry pi and a cheap tv and keyboard/mouse will get you the ability to write programs and you can get free phone service and internet with absurdly cheap smartphones available at most retail stores. All of the courses you need to work up to a masters in theoretical physics are available through MIT OCW and the perimeter institute or other programs(Stanford, UCI), and there are many programs that will help you with starting up a company. There's no excuse nowadays. A couple of years ago, yes, but now, there's no excuse.
Get a job as a security guard? Security guards have a surprising amount of down time when it comes to work, and one of my good friends wrapped up his degree while working as a security guard on campus. That's not what you want to hear though. What you likely want to hear is 'Free Monayz!' Well either you're taking that money from someone else who earned it productively or you're taking that money from someone who saved it in the form of inflation if you print it.
So let me get this straight: your solution to labor's subservience to capital is for all the millions of working poor to get jobs as security guards while earning degrees in theoretical physics?
I get what you're trying to say, but you're proposing an individual solution (that cannot scale) to a systematic problem.
What capital? We're not building widgets here. You take advantage of the resources that are given to you and make something of yourself. That's how it works.
So how much capital do you reckon you need to start a company, and why isn't that amount "a lot"?
A friend of mine got an MBA at MIT and started a company. He had to spend the first 6 months without any income, living off his savings. On top of the capital he needed to start it.
I agree with this. It is why I feel healthcare (where your option may become: Pay or Die) is not a system that should be left to the free market but is better at it's place under a government. Of course this should be a government that operates with the consent of the governed, is kept highly accountable for it's actions and is insensitive to lobbying. I think that especially the latter is undoing many of the benefits of democracy.
...which is exactly his point. People will do things that are objectively not in their best interest (become scientists, poets, or French poetry critics) because we've been strongly inculcated in that whole "do what you love" "everything is worth it as long as [you touch someone with your art] [your science is remembered after you die] [insert reason here]" philosophy.
Which means those fields get a free pass to treat their members horribly, and people will still gravitate towards them in huge numbers, because "do what you love" is so strongly ingrained in us.
A perfect example is that game dev crunch article that was going around a few days ago: if you're complaining about 80 hour work weeks you don't really love what you're doing!
That's only about a third of the point, it's also criticizing not being aware of the flip side "But that too is our culture: everyone else’s dream is a delusion. Mine is a tale of noble perseverance. Everybody else should be practical." And then the author goes on to mention how extending the same generosity we give ourself with regards to pursuing higher purposes would probably be helpful in the long run.
I agree it's an unfortunate word choice, but I couldn't think of a better way to word it without making the post significantly longer and I assumed most people would understand what I meant. If you have a better way to phrase it, I'd love to hear it- I don't say that sarcastically.
I don't have a citation, but I think it's reasonably to say that a large part of the good things for poor people have just been things getting cheaper, so that the same amount of economic output buys you more comfort. That's largely a result of private innovation driving down prices. That may or may not be what GP was referring to.
I thought it was illegal not to have read Hamlet by 21?
Seriously though, give it another try. Shakespeare's wide-ranging enough that there's likely to be something to your taste. And with his comedies, especially, I'd recommend watching Shakespeare and not reading him- that's how his plays were meant to be experienced. Although it's nice to read an annotated version and discover all the (often dirty) jokes you didn't get.
Added benefit to reading Shakespeare: you'll understand about 40% more literary allusions (read the Bible, Ovid, Homer, and Virgil to get the rest).
One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that there are so many succesful modern retellings of his plays. Something about the stories are just timeless.
Watch the originals, by all means, but the reimagined ones are not too shabby either:
As someone new to Shakespeare, you should definitely start out by watching performances, rather than reading scripts. Until you've absorbed the rhythm and the literary style, it can be very difficult to follow their plots just from a cold reading of the text; particularly for the histories. (And while King Lear is classed as a tragedy, I've personally always felt that it reads more like one of the histories)
If you do start reading the scripts for pleasure (which totally is not required!), then it's probably a good idea to start with one which you've seen performed, just to let your brain adapt itself to seeing the words in written form, and to get used to looking back and forth between the text and the annotations, without needing to worry about losing the plot.
This. Plays were the movies of their time; they were meant to be watched. The scripts are great, too, but they're supposed to accompany the play, not the other way around.
It's like reading the lyrics to a song. Sure, some lyrics are absolutely fantastic in their own right, but they were meant to be sung to music, not just read by themselves.
Hell, even with music, some bands go from being mediocre to flat-out amazing when they perform live.
Over the years I've seen (heard) a lot of Shakespeare plays, and I mostly agree with you. Yes, just reading the play is inadequate because the written form is so bare. Attending a live performance is a much better experience. The dialog is meant to be spoken and to be heard.
What I do recommend, and is my own practice, is reading the play before going to the performance. We are especially blessed to read Shakespeare today, the internet is so very helpful. So many versions of every Shakespeare play, most have annotations about Elizabethan language that help the reader make sense of it.
Reading AOT makes it much easier to follow what's happening on stage. Even small local productions can be done well, Shakespearean plays were always meant as entertainment, go and enjoy!
I think you are right about the classification of the plays, Comedy, Tragedy, etc, don't necessarily fit our modern sensibilities. In Shakespeare's time, "Merchant of Venice" was called a "comedy", but in our era we'd say it's more tragic than not. I'd agree familiarity with the play is more important than its categorization.
It's been a long time since I was in that position; almost none of the plays are new to me at this stage. (I'll confess, though, that I've neither seen nor read Coriolanus, Cymbaline, or Timon of Athens. Or, for that matter, any of the Apocrypha) For me personally, I would absolutely do exactly the same as you; if I was going to attend a production of any of those plays which I've not yet experienced, I would read the script, first.
But for someone who isn't yet accustomed to the language, I expect that it would be a hard slog, getting through the texts without an actor's interpretation to help you along.
> But for someone who isn't yet accustomed to the language, I expect that it would be a hard slog, getting through the texts without an actor's interpretation to help you along.
That's the beauty of the web. The online transcripts of the plays provide many explanations of the language and its cultural context, which makes the dialog so much more understandable to people coming to it the first time.
Without doing this it will be difficult for a beginner to understand what the actors are saying or what's happening on stage. Frankly, I can have trouble with plays I've seen only once before or haven't seen in a long time, I figure it won't hurt to read it before seeing it again.
You don't watch/read Shakespeare for M Night Shyamalan twists, but instead for the quality of the language, the actor's performances, and the director's liberties with the script.
I'd highly recommend performances using original pronunciation if you can track some down. It makes a remarkable difference compared to the RP commonly used for Shakespeare. Half the rhymes just don't work in modern English, and especially not in RP English.
It took me a little while to tune in to what sounds to modern ears like a heavy West Country (pirate!) accent. That said I found it far easier to enjoy than RP.
Grown up in Japan and got into theatre, I've tried a few of Shakespeare (in Japanese translations), but I didn't fully get it---until I came to US and actually read it aloud in English. I agree that it is much more approachable as spoken words.
She didn't say "all women", she said "many women." I attend the University of Texas at Austin. I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field. One of the reasons was the fact that although I'd taken AP CS courses in high school, I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late". This attitude came from my peers, the companies that attended our career fairs, and even from my first exposure to the online tech press/blogosphere- I remember reading an essay by Paul Graham wherein he essentially implied that if a woman hasn't started coding by 13 all hope is lost for her. The only people I didn't get that impression from were (most of) my instructors, but that wasn't really enough, especially in the 500+ person intro classes I was in at the time.
Incidentally, like many women in CS, I was encouraged to look for role models among other women in my department and in the broader tech world. Dear other technical college women, if you're reading this: Don't. In my personal experience, successful women in the field are much, much more likely to have had parents who were programmers and to have started earlier. All the women who were pointed out to me as role models had this background. It was only when I started looking to the successful men in my program that I started to find people who had first learned to code in their sophomore years and decided to stay. I have my own theories as to why that imbalance exists, but the simple truth is, I could have learned a lot more about how to "catch up" from those men than the women I was pushed towards.
I understand the feeling of needing to "catch up" to fit in. For the first three years after I started programming I kept my work almost completely private, I felt so far behind. I wrote several hundred projects that I never showed to anybody, and didn't even keep. I still feel the gap a little bit today (five years in), but it seems mostly gone.
I fit the programmer archetype exactly, and it took me three years of near constant engagement before I felt I could even begin to fit in (culturally) with experienced programmers. I can easily imagine the task is considerably harder if you don't fit the archetype.
On the flip-side - the desire to "catch up", and the solitary nature of the challenge lent me considerably more motivation and creativity than I seem to have now that I have "acclimatized".
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I'm very interested to see how it is going to turn out for my sister. She's a very talented programmer, but she doesn't try to immerse herself in the culture of it at all, rather she is treating it as an auxiliary skill to her studies in GIS. I feel some smug satisfaction knowing she is coding circles around most of the guys in her classes, despite not taking on the identity of "I am a programmer".
> I started out as a CS major, still am, but no longer want to work in the field.
Working in the tech field has almost nothing to do with CS. Many/most developers don't study CS in college, and technical ability is only a very small part of what makes a good developer.
> I still felt looked down upon because I'd first been exposed to and developed an interest in CS "late".
Come on, there are assholes everywhere who use this tactic to make themselves feel superior or to get rid of potential competition, men and women alike. This is not exclusive to CS. A lot of people are worried that they put so much time into something and that someone 'fresh' could make them look bad by picking it up quicker. It makes it that much more satisfying when you beat them.
If it was just a small minority of men in my program, I would have agreed with you, but this attitude seemed also prevalent- and I could be wrong about this- in companies and the larger tech world.
One thing I noticed in particular, was that a hell of a lot of "diversity initiatives" (stuff like code camps, scholarships to diversity conferences, etc) set up by companies like Square and Google and nonprofits like Grace Hopper gave their opportunities mostly to minorities who were already very successful, with internships in prestigious companies. If even the programs explicitly meant to increase the percentage of women/minorities in the industry go largely to very experienced people, I thought at the time, then there's really no hope for me at that point.
In any case, none of this is what led to me deciding I didn't want a tech career, it was just a contributing factor. I probably could have pushed through it, but I realized I didn't like tech enough to do so- I liked coding well enough, but I didn't like or value the work most tech companies were doing.
I have to agree that there are a lot of bad programming jobs out there, but there are some really good ones, too--many times in places that aren't obvious. I'm speaking only from my own experience here, but I'm currently working at a big-name company and they pay well but the work is boring as hell and the culture is not to my liking. I've worked at smaller/no-name companies and had a vastly better experience--more diverse work, more opportunities to develop new skills, and a much friendlier culture as well.
If you have any interest in staying in the field--and I hope you do--don't limit your view of potential jobs to just the high-profile companies. Talk to some of the smaller shops around, you might really like what you find.
On your diversity note. I find it amusing, since when I was at collage the diversity push was all for women, so unless you were an exceptional student all of the scholarships went to women. And now it appears to be being pushed to a smaller and smaller subset.
I hope that you've found something you enjoy to go into a career in. I know I studied tech and now work tangentially to it, and sometimes I feel like I made the wrong choice.
I played around with a Franklin PC 8088 when I was a kid for a couple years that we had it. I tried BASIC but never got close to my goal of writing a Tic Tac Toe program. Didn't know how to read input. Didn't even know that the "^" on the "^SAVE" menu item at the bottom meant to hold down CTRL, so my "programs" never survived more than the hour or two I tried (mostly in vain) to get something to work.
No one in my family or peers really knew much about computers and while the Apple IIe at school were much more impressive, that was just playing trivia games and such. Not writing anything ourselves.
It wasn't until I was about 16 that I touched a computer again. Built my own eventually to play DOOM. I didn't know anything "technical" at that point beyond autoexec.bat and... config something. I forget the other one.
It wasn't until I was 21 that I did my first real "programming". Which consisted of reading a book on HTML and being paid $5/hr by my father in law to write some truly bad markup while he did the real work.
I picked up some books on c#, ASP.NET 1.0, MSSQL Server and did my best to absorb what I could. My father-in-law didn't know/work-with most of that (he did help me figure out some SQL basics though) and I didn't have a peer group or support system or anything. About a year later I had a job paying about as well as Home Depot might writing c#.
Almost 20 years later I'm writing Scala and make a good living.
I don't say this as advice exactly. Just saying the "you can't start late" stuff is bullshit. I've often regretted not having access to college so I could answer "write a binary tree on the board" questions. So I didn't feel inadequate in those ways. But it hasn't stopped me getting a job and I'm overall pretty satisfied with my career (well... there was a dark time when I attempted to manage that was pretty cringe worthy) and accomplishments.
I wish I had something more to offer people who think a career in tech is out of their reach because they couldn't afford college, or they started too late. All I really have to offer is this:
Pick up a book. Remember how practically no one actually read a text-book from front to back in grade school? If they had they'd have had a huge advantage right? Pick up a book. Those that say "I learn by doing" will never ever ever be exposed to the same depth or amount of knowledge as you'll get from the condensed, edited brain-on-paper of accomplished authors. Be well read. It's like cheating. And it's cheap. Often even free (Not talking Blogs. Those are mostly only useful for very specific questions/topics; I'm talking about the free Ruby book, or beg for a copy of haskellbook. Or torrent if you must and pay them back for it later).
Personally, I think that while Gawker wasn't right to release the tape, fining them $115 million isn't right either. $115 million could easily sink Gawker entirely. I'm not exactly the biggest fan of the place but it's a dangerous precedent to set for press freedom if a single editor's single bad decision can take down an entire site.
Of course, the amount is likely to be revised down in appeals.
While I respect that conclusion in general, I think that Gawker in particular has done a lot of sadistic and mean "reporting" which serves no public good. Them being sunk seems almost a public good in my opinion.
Indeed. The final straw for me was when they outed a Conde Nast exec, there was no scandal, no real story at all but they(Nick Denton) went ahead and destroyed this guy's life. You can read about it here:
I agree. However, my- or anybody's- personal opinion of a place should have no bearing on whether our judicial system decides to take an independent media outlet down during a court case involving one man.
Let me put it this way: I don't care for Gawker and wouldn't mind personally if it sank (though there are good journalists there doing good work); I do care for the potential chilling effect this could have on other media.
(And let me make clear that I do think Bollea should have been compensated and Gawker punished, just not with $115 million.)
I realize this judgment was based only on this case, but from my perspective, this isn't a single bad decision, but the latest in a series of bad decisions. Gawker posted an entirely unsubstantiated prostitution allegation against a competitor's executive, from a source who said straight up (in the article Gawker published!) that he was going public to make good on a blackmail threat. [1] They posted a video of a young woman possibly being raped, and told her to "not make a big deal out of this" when she begged them to take it down. [2]
Gawker was 100% in the wrong to release this tape, and they've shown a pattern of seriously abusive behavior before now. Some of sites in the Gawker network have decent writers with some integrity, and I'll be sorry that if need to find new employment; but Gawker as an entity is too corrupt to be salvaged.
I ask because 1, 3, 4, and 5 seem like the most persuasive reasons, but they're also the ones that aren't specific to philosophy.