coverup

It is common in the U.S. White men fetishize Asian women like crazy.

Though, what's even more common is cultural appropriation of material goods. E.g.: http://whitegirlsandindianheaddresses.tumblr.com/

This isn't the same thing as what OP posted, yes yes I know. Rather, these are all instances of the same larger thing.

In fact, the three of them don't even agree on what the problem is.

Priest: We're frustrated.

Ophthalmologist: The firefighters are blind.

Engineer: The golf course is running inefficiently.

"Yell something responsible.

Yellly is why you'll never yell the same way again.

'One of the biggest challenges we faced after we hit our early goals was how do we stay top-of-mind and keep our users engaged? Enter Yellly. Problem solved.' Chelsey Nino Perry, Florida"

Love the random C-level positions.

Here is a good reddit thread that addresses your question:

http://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/1js239/why_do...

I'm considering doing exactly this sometime next year, and I have a lot of questions, if you're interested in having an American pen pal! Let me know and I'll give you my email.

That's true, but it's unempathetic, and if everyone stopped thinking there, no one would help each other. Imagine a depressed person who commits suicide. You could say, well, this person clearly wanted to die, and so she killed herself. She wanted to die more than she wanted to be around for her family, etc. and so that was selfish, the end.

But what was making her want to die? Do you think she was unaware of it, or unaware that she was having thoughts that she couldn't seem to control? Could it be the case that living with major depressive disorder might have been so mind-rendingly terrifying that it made even death seem more desirable? But isn't the best solution in this case not really death, but rather for the depression to go away, and only failing that would one ever want to die? Don't you think a suicidal person would be more aware of this than anyone?

You say this guy wanted to get thinner but he also wanted to keep overeating, and unfortunately he didn't seem to want to get thinner enough, so he kept eating. But what he really wanted was for his uncontrollable desire to overeat to go away, and he could not make that happen himself.

You and washadjeffmad both make very important points. Thank you!

You seem to be assuming the government wants people to break its laws, so it gets to punish people.

It costs the government money to put people in prison; not only the cost of their food, shelter, supervision, etc. but also the cost of removing a taxpayer from the workforce. Furthermore, a democratically elected government that is increasingly imprisoning more and more of its people is not likely to remain popular. It is in the government's best interest to only enforce laws that the majority of people are happy to obey.

Civil disobedience is a technique that protesters who think a law is unjust use to take advantage of this interest. By deliberately disobeying the unjust law and accepting the punishment for it, they help put pressure on legislators to change it. The government prefers a situation in which no laws are ever broken--that's why it makes such an extensive effort to incentivize citizens not to break them--but in the case where enough people feel it is in their best interest to break the law even with the punishment that comes with doing so, as people who use civil disobedience do, then the law must change if it is to reflect the will of the people.

The example you gave re: homosexuals/death penalty is extreme, but follows the same principles, as long as that government is democratically elected. Most democracies don't get to the point where they're throwing the death penalty around willy-nilly though, thank God.

E.E. Cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

One of Cummings's short poems that I enjoy:

  should this fool die

  let someone fond
  of living lay

  in his left hand


  a flower whose

  glory by no
  mind ever was

  taught how to grow

Ah. Yeah, I agree with you that the more efficiently people can be hired for grunt work and nothing more, the less valuable the work will be. If you need something difficult, you still hire a full time person, but now if you need something easy you can get it much more cheaply, which shifts the overall distribution of the value of X-type-of-work lower.

But one might make the point that all this means is we were paying too much for grunt work before these marketplaces showed up...

You're right, I misunderstood.

Could you explain what you mean when you say these marketplaces tend to get parasitical? I'm not sure I understand what that process entails.

Something I don't think a lot of people realize is that "programmer" is a working class profession. The ability to code is a commodity.

By working class, I mean "not the capitalist class." There is still a big difference between programming and say, boilermaking. But in 2015, tech companies are the factories of last century. (We even call them software shops!)

There is a spectrum of quality of course, and a lot of people take a lot of pride in their craft, especially when they do it well, noting the beauty of good code, etc. but at the end of the day, most people who make chairs, for example, are not the highly-paid turtlenecked Danish guy whose work is basically art that you can sit on...most people who make chairs work in factories and churn them out on an assembly line. So it is with programming.

To your point, it certainly is in the interest of those who hire programmers to pay them as little as possible, given the nature of the economic system we find ourselves in. Consider also the trend of startups paying sub-market salaries and compensating with equity. The startup route certainly looks like a way to do programming while freeing yourself from the will of The Man (I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, but you understand the vibe, I hope), but when you get right down to it, it's more of the same. Instead of corporate execs, you have investors. Instead of middle management, you have founders. The programmer is still just the programmer.

I'm not sure what you mean by "sophisticated". Languages in the 16th century were just as complex as they always have been.

The vocabularies might be bigger or smaller compared to today. Certainly no one was saying "bae" back then (for instance), but no one calls each other "thou" today, either.

EDIT: except for the older generations of Geordies, apparently.

It is definitely more lenient.

But one of the points in the Foucault book jMyles mentioned is that the leniency of imprisonment didn't come about because we're somehow morally superior than earlier societies, it's because it's the most efficient way so far devised for the state to exert its power over a human body.

Someone please correct me if I'm misinterpreting.

You might start with Discipline and Punish, a history of the western (in particular, the French) penal system, drawing many parallels to educational, military, and medical institutions as they are all facets of an overarching technology of power that has emerged over the past couple of centuries.

Be warned: it will illuminate White Collar Hell like nothing else.

I don't know... what you're talking about is something like how Netflix used their data to motivate shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, which they "knew" in some sense would have mass appeal. The masses are easy to please because you can just average over their individual tastes and capture huge swaths of the general population (see also: political parties, popular music, "middle-brow" chain restaurants), but it's much more difficult to get an accurate prediction for a single person. If you zoom in close enough, everyone becomes an outlier.

Also, creating art is not as simple as entering the infinite realm of possible songs (or paintings, or meals or...) and just choosing a set of parameters. Again, a broad set of parameters, sure. I'm going to write a rock song. I'm going to cook a boeuf bourguignon. But how to capture the weird unsystematic idiosyncrasies of any given individual, and do so in a way that doesn't feel soulless and artificial?