It's the fastest way to send money
Today
when I was in the elevator, it stopped along the way down and two women
stepped in, a mother and her teenage daughter. Both were ethnically
Middle Eastern, and the mother was all proper and wore a headscarf,
whereas the daughter let her black hair be free and was wearing a shirt
that said "Be my sugar daddy". Oh, to be a fly in the ceiling in that
household... hmmm, perhaps I should develop and pitch a sitcom from
this. It's love and laughs with... "The Abdullahs at no. 69" ?
Mr. Wiggles asks: "What kind of blogger are you?"
Around here you get to see many people who are ethnically Chinese or Japanese. But how to tell these two groups apart? The handy booklet "How to spot a Jap" from 1942 provides a bunch of handy heuristics, drawn by Milton Caniff himself. I have never read Terry and the Pirates, but I did read some Johnny Hazard comics.
Speaking of which, earlier today I read Will Eisner's graphic novel "The Neighborhood: Dropsie Avenue" that follows the history of a New York City neighbourhood populated by various ethnic groups. If you have read any Eisner, dear reader, you can already see this book in your mind, since all his books and stories are exactly the same, with the possible exception of The Spirit. And Jesus, all you people in these books, try to cut down your histrionic theatrics a little. And if your monologue goes on for several panels or even a whole page or two, it is really not necessary to switch to a totally new pose in every single panel. But at least this book nicely illustrated the logical and therefore totally predictable end result of rent control. What the war doesn't destroy, rent control will. This book also provided an interesting backdrop for the immigration debate, for example, Steve Sailer's new piece "George Borjas vs. David Card's Unworldly Philosophy".
I often agree with EconLog, but their argument of why anybody in the world should be allowed to come to America (and presumably, to any other rich Western country) presented in the post "What We Owe Immigrants" is... well, let's say that it is interesting. Dennis Mangan cuts through the smokescreen in his post "Taking the Bait".
It was perhaps a mistake to put out the article "The Rise and Fall of the Hit" that begins by stating that "The era of the blockbuster is so over" now that that new butt-pirates movie is having the biggest box office opening of the movie history. I don't intend to go see it, but I am certain that my Disney-loving wife and my mother-in-law will be seeing it together as soon as the crowds thin down a bit.
Simplicity is sometimes a virtue, as the webcomic "Kawaii Not" proves.
Paul Graham has been diligent recently, with new essays "Copy what you like", "The power of the marginal", "Why startups condense in America" and "The hardest lessons for startups to learn".
Chelsea Girl's experiences as a stripper were always an interesting read. In a new non-stripper post that has been linked from many places recently, she explains "what it feels like for a deep-throating girl".
For all the multiculturalism around here, I don't really have much contact to black people and their culture. A few years ago I had a student who was black, and since we took the same subway and bus home, we talked about all kinds of stuff. He used to call me Casper: it was our thing. I also remember how he once said that I was the coolest white man that he ever knew. But seriously, he was a really nice guy, and I hope he is doing fine. Meanwhile, to learn more about the black culture, I checked out LaShawn Barber's blog. Apparently it is possible to be a black woman and political conservative. On the other side of the political spectrum, Egotistical Whining gives us "A Racist FAQ". Even though the whole FAQ reads like an Onion parody of some progressive teenager, this is the intellectual level of feminist left. I especially liked the part where she says that "Like even if every black person in America hated white people, the most you'd get are some funny looks, not being beaten by cops or discriminated against in the workplace for being too 'ethnic'" (Fred Reed disagrees in "The Problem of Race in America", but what does he know?) That, and the one where she simply tells people to shut up.
Another post that has generated lot of linkage recently has been John Derbyshire's "Robotics vs. Helotics". Myself, I am not very optimistic for the future of robotics (even in the sense of general-purpose reprogrammable machines, as opposed to the usual machines built to do one thing and that one thing only, let alone in the sense of building artificially intelligent humanoids), and I can't imagine the robots ever becoming so advanced that they would be able to clean a house as a maidbot. And let me immediately issue a warning that anybody who asks "What about Roomba?" only proves himself to be an idiot who doesn't even understand what the problem is here. The simple subproblem of sweeping the dust off the flat floor is utterly trivial. Saying that the success of Roomba means that general-purpose maidbots will soon be built is like saying that once you have successfully climbed on top of the tree in your backyard, you will soon be able to climb to the stratosphere. For starters, consider the important subproblem of recognizing which objects are garbage to be thrown away and which ones are to be kept and put in their proper place (which the maidbot surely must be able to do) is so tremendously difficult that the present-day engineering and AI techniques cannot even begin to solve it.
But I certainly agree that many kinds of specialized machines will become more ubiquitous as we reorganize the world to be less messy so that machines can operate in it, and this way make it harder for the bottom half of the Bell Curve to find work that would be worth even the minimum wage. Even if the machine that displaces the prole can't do the whole job by itself like a good little robot ought to, it might enable one man do the work of three men, which is almost as good. And once enough messiness has been removed, the machine can take over. ATM's and Internet banking have no intelligence and they don't even look anything like human, but they made scores of bank employees redundant. And around here when you take the subway, you see TTC employees sitting in their booths and getting paid $20 an hour simply for taking money from the customer and then pressing a button that lets a predetermined number of tokens slide to the customer. Replacing these guys with machines that do the same work much cheaper doesn't exactly require futuristic rocket science.
Mr. Wiggles asks: "What kind of blogger are you?"
Around here you get to see many people who are ethnically Chinese or Japanese. But how to tell these two groups apart? The handy booklet "How to spot a Jap" from 1942 provides a bunch of handy heuristics, drawn by Milton Caniff himself. I have never read Terry and the Pirates, but I did read some Johnny Hazard comics.
Speaking of which, earlier today I read Will Eisner's graphic novel "The Neighborhood: Dropsie Avenue" that follows the history of a New York City neighbourhood populated by various ethnic groups. If you have read any Eisner, dear reader, you can already see this book in your mind, since all his books and stories are exactly the same, with the possible exception of The Spirit. And Jesus, all you people in these books, try to cut down your histrionic theatrics a little. And if your monologue goes on for several panels or even a whole page or two, it is really not necessary to switch to a totally new pose in every single panel. But at least this book nicely illustrated the logical and therefore totally predictable end result of rent control. What the war doesn't destroy, rent control will. This book also provided an interesting backdrop for the immigration debate, for example, Steve Sailer's new piece "George Borjas vs. David Card's Unworldly Philosophy".
I often agree with EconLog, but their argument of why anybody in the world should be allowed to come to America (and presumably, to any other rich Western country) presented in the post "What We Owe Immigrants" is... well, let's say that it is interesting. Dennis Mangan cuts through the smokescreen in his post "Taking the Bait".
It was perhaps a mistake to put out the article "The Rise and Fall of the Hit" that begins by stating that "The era of the blockbuster is so over" now that that new butt-pirates movie is having the biggest box office opening of the movie history. I don't intend to go see it, but I am certain that my Disney-loving wife and my mother-in-law will be seeing it together as soon as the crowds thin down a bit.
Simplicity is sometimes a virtue, as the webcomic "Kawaii Not" proves.
Paul Graham has been diligent recently, with new essays "Copy what you like", "The power of the marginal", "Why startups condense in America" and "The hardest lessons for startups to learn".
Chelsea Girl's experiences as a stripper were always an interesting read. In a new non-stripper post that has been linked from many places recently, she explains "what it feels like for a deep-throating girl".
For all the multiculturalism around here, I don't really have much contact to black people and their culture. A few years ago I had a student who was black, and since we took the same subway and bus home, we talked about all kinds of stuff. He used to call me Casper: it was our thing. I also remember how he once said that I was the coolest white man that he ever knew. But seriously, he was a really nice guy, and I hope he is doing fine. Meanwhile, to learn more about the black culture, I checked out LaShawn Barber's blog. Apparently it is possible to be a black woman and political conservative. On the other side of the political spectrum, Egotistical Whining gives us "A Racist FAQ". Even though the whole FAQ reads like an Onion parody of some progressive teenager, this is the intellectual level of feminist left. I especially liked the part where she says that "Like even if every black person in America hated white people, the most you'd get are some funny looks, not being beaten by cops or discriminated against in the workplace for being too 'ethnic'" (Fred Reed disagrees in "The Problem of Race in America", but what does he know?) That, and the one where she simply tells people to shut up.
Another post that has generated lot of linkage recently has been John Derbyshire's "Robotics vs. Helotics". Myself, I am not very optimistic for the future of robotics (even in the sense of general-purpose reprogrammable machines, as opposed to the usual machines built to do one thing and that one thing only, let alone in the sense of building artificially intelligent humanoids), and I can't imagine the robots ever becoming so advanced that they would be able to clean a house as a maidbot. And let me immediately issue a warning that anybody who asks "What about Roomba?" only proves himself to be an idiot who doesn't even understand what the problem is here. The simple subproblem of sweeping the dust off the flat floor is utterly trivial. Saying that the success of Roomba means that general-purpose maidbots will soon be built is like saying that once you have successfully climbed on top of the tree in your backyard, you will soon be able to climb to the stratosphere. For starters, consider the important subproblem of recognizing which objects are garbage to be thrown away and which ones are to be kept and put in their proper place (which the maidbot surely must be able to do) is so tremendously difficult that the present-day engineering and AI techniques cannot even begin to solve it.
But I certainly agree that many kinds of specialized machines will become more ubiquitous as we reorganize the world to be less messy so that machines can operate in it, and this way make it harder for the bottom half of the Bell Curve to find work that would be worth even the minimum wage. Even if the machine that displaces the prole can't do the whole job by itself like a good little robot ought to, it might enable one man do the work of three men, which is almost as good. And once enough messiness has been removed, the machine can take over. ATM's and Internet banking have no intelligence and they don't even look anything like human, but they made scores of bank employees redundant. And around here when you take the subway, you see TTC employees sitting in their booths and getting paid $20 an hour simply for taking money from the customer and then pressing a button that lets a predetermined number of tokens slide to the customer. Replacing these guys with machines that do the same work much cheaper doesn't exactly require futuristic rocket science.
LaShawn Barbers blog is indeed interesting. Comments on her posts are revealing. As a black female conservative, she is bitterly hated by white liberals. Black liberals, while disagreeing with her, are capable of discussing with her.
Now what does that tell us about white liberals?
Posted by Anonymous | 5:45 PM
It's not at all uncommon for me to see Middle Eastern families in which the generations have different views of female modesty. The plural of anecdote is not data, and all that, but nonetheless things like that make me doubt, quite seriously, the conventional wisdom that Muslims are getting progressively more fundamentalist with each generation. What I guess is that you only hear about the unusual, man-bites-dog cases in which the younger generation has become fundamentalist, but not about the much more common cases of increasing secularism.
"Egotistical Whining" comes off as a screaming militant in her blog, but for some reason I can't quite articulate I suspect she's probably not so bad in person. Maybe it's just that I've read enough blogs to get a sense of when the blogger is just blowing off steam. Christ, I do that all the time myself :)
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 6:27 PM
I'm a shy person but I made the FAQ out of frustration. This fact is invisible to white men, but people of color have to explain the same basic facts over and over. "No, rappers are entertainers" "No, immigrants don't refuse to speak English on purpose" "No, black people sitting together at a lunch table is not the same as hundreds of years of oppression" "No, I won't love you long time". So after the same stupid crap over and over from the willfully ignorant, I wanted to condense what I would usually answer into a short little FAQ. It's not nice, because the willful ignorance is very painful. When folks are basically saying "I care so little about people who aren't exactly like me, that I think I can talk about their lives without opening book one or really ever listening to the lived experience of anyone who is not exactly the same as me", it's hard to be like "Oh, poor baby. I'll totally give up all my self esteem to coddle you."
And really, if one wanted to see the most intellectual woman of color feminist ever- you'd be at the library, not reading my blog. But that would require seeing people not like you as legitimate sources of information. And to do that, that would require a geniune change in one's person that I can't help you with. You can only do that for yourself.
Posted by shannon | 11:38 PM
Despite his writing style-which is always alternating between flippancy and melodrama-Fred has better credentials for understanding the naturte of contemporary social reality than just about anyome on the planet. check out his biography:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Bio.htm
Posted by Anonymous | 11:02 AM
Shannon, the reason you have to keep answering questions like that is you hang out with idiots. No person of normal intelligence and sophistication asks to touch a black person's hair, calls all Asians Chinese, or makes fun of people's accents. If you run into this kind of thing a lot, it's probably because you're in ed school, or some other holding pen for uncivilizable morons.
Posted by Anonymous | 7:52 PM