islander - the I in the fpp is myself. I have done extremely well on standardized tests, and I'm not talented at anything but standardized tests :)
There are serious criticisms of affirmative action to be made - for one, American universities target middle class and upper class visible minorities so that they can claim to be diverse, without ever actually dealing with such "difficult" students as actually poor and disadvantaged students, who in the US (where I have been until recently) are disproportionately visible minorities. Doing this, they avoid the difficulties of helping students who haven't had access to AP courses (big thing in the US elite universities) or other enrichments.
But Judge Sotomayor is an example of affirmative action working perfectly: finding a bright kid who hasn't had the same preparation as those whose parents are educated anglophones, and giving her the chance to show what she can do - and she showed that she could be an A student at a time when not all students in the Ivy League were (most are now - grade inflation). None of the critics are willing to look at her grades at the end of her university career - you know, the grades that actually matter. She was among the best in both universities.
Up in Canada, we just don't have these issues. Because we don't have heavy disparity in our universities and in the options coming out of university - the way they do in the US and the UK - admission to university isn't that big a deal. We essentially give affirmative action to all students - you can get into a good Canadian university with average marks, and you get the chance to prove yourself then. Not in all programs, but in enough that I don't feel that we have barriers raised at age 18 the way the US does. And even if your university doesn't have the same job prospects as a more prestigious one (York vs Uni of Toronto, for an example I know intimately), you can always easily transfer if you do well and the graduate/professional school options are just as open to you. This is somewhat true in the US, at least for the grad schools (people go from non-prestigious undergrad to prestigious grad all the time), but I don't know about the professional.
Then again, I think that the answers to social mobility aren't in admissions to elite universities at all - but in effective collective bargaining, higher wages at the bottom and solid mass education (especially high schools and community colleges). But I still get pissed at the people who pretend that SATs mean anything other than a talent at testing.
I've never had a problem ordering a plain coffee - you have to use their sizes, but that's not a problem since their tall really is the size of the large at the actual non-chain mom (but not pop bc she owned it alone) donut shop I worked at. But you just say "I'd like a coffee please," and they give me a coffee. Sometimes they do ask which brew I would like (the dark, or the medium, etc - which will have fancy names up, but if you just say the medium they know which one that is).
Their coffee is much darker than a lot of people are used to. But it's not bad - saying it's bad would be like saying that semi-sweet chocolate is bad because it doesn't taste like milk chocolate. They are different things. I regularly drink dark coffee, though I don't like espresso (darker again). They did introduce a new price level of coffee into Canada - at a time when most coffee shops were charging about $1 for a small, and $1.25-1.50 for a large, Starbucks came in with $1.50 for a small, and $2.25 (or similar) for a large - I was a coffee-shop addicted teenager at the time, so it really hit me hard. But the coffee I had been drinking for $1-1.25 really was swill, even from supposedly better places like Second Cup. Nowadays, even McDonalds is serving half-way drinkable coffee.
So what we have here is a chain that successfully got people to pay more money for a superior product - why does this annoy people so? We don't complain about upscale china places that ask you if you are interested in porcelin or stoneware, though these are distinctions not everyone would make.
What I would complain about is something completely different: in the city where I lived until Wednesday, several coffee shops discounted pretty heavily if I brought my own travel mug, from $1.25 to $1 or from $1.50 to $1.25. Having worked at a coffee shop, I think I remember that the paper cups cost about $0.25. But by offering such a discount, they are also encouraging the use of re-usable cups, which is good. But Starbucks only offered a measly $0.10 discount :(.
Okay, that makes me sound really cheap. And I should just tell myself that another reason for their higher prices are that Starbucks pays its employees much more than other coffee shops and, I believe, offers health benefits in the US. (Is this true?)
Dreadnought and I just moved back to Canada and the US - and we're so relieved to be back in the land of universal health care. Not everything is universal - Ontario has stopped paying for eye exams (I suspect it's because the optomitrists started doing more expensive exams to bill more). But we don't have to try to figure out how we can put 1/8 of our not quite adequate income to health care - and that was with an excellent employer based plan. Our half alone was the equivalent of 3 months rent. I can't imagine what we would have done had we been on the private market.
All systems can improve, though there must be a careful balance between costs and actual effectiveness - but Blue Horse said it right: What many people in the US have is "NOTHING. Anything is better than that."
Ah, it's like the Reformation never happened - let's open up the chantries and get some serious industrial praying going!
Also, I want my dog-saint back.
Take the kitty out of the cup! Put down the camera, and take the poor, little, cold kitty out of the cup! For the love of all that is holy, take that wet cat and dry it off!
I'm just freezing looking at it.
NAFTA hasn't been that bad for Canada. Generally the suckitude has been when the US is ignoring NAFTA - as in the softwood lumber stupidity.
But I fully support putting environmental and labour clauses into trade agreements - and to make sure trade agreements don't subvert a nation's sovereignty over their own domestic policy. There was a NAFTA case where an American firm forced Canada to accept the use and import of a chemical which had been banned in the US, and which the Canadians wished to have banned, but were told that it would unduly limit "free trade".
(not to say that the words didn't come from French, just that the timing is probably very unclear. And also that while new words are often adopted for new things or ideas, but others are adopted for a variety of reasons. The English had a word for the skull before they adopted "skull" from the Norse languages - probably Danish - but for some reason the Norse word replaced the Old English.)
--------
Back to 1066 - that was the beggining of the end. Long live King Harold!
A linguist friend tells me
Your linguist friend has a good story, but the one thing I know about the influence of Norman French on English is that we don't know a lot of the details. English language texts between 1066 and c1250(? maybe later?) are very few and far between - they exist (I have a friend who is writing on several), but our knowledge of how the Norman Invasion changed English is largely based on our knowledge of English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, rather than earlier.
Other than oil. Gold. Diamonds. Rubber. Cocoa. Coltan, that refined as tantalum is usused in just about every current electronics consumer product.
And people. Their muscles do lots of low-pay jobs in Europe. All kinds of jobs.
I just wanted to repeat Flagpole's comment.
And add: raw coffee and cocoa at cheap prices so that we can make money roasting and processing, rubber, maize, cheap fresh fruits and vegetables for winter consumption in the north, flowers for our tables, palm oil, copper...
Africa Export Goods - note how many are primary resources (agriculture, fishing or mining) which support manufacturing and industries all over the world. (And, except for oil and few other commodities, often make more money for the manufacturers than the initial producers.)
I wish it weren't simply self-assessment based on adjectives. It's not a measure of what you actually do/think, but merely your self-image. Some people have an accurate image of themselves, but I'm sure that I don't.
I wish it has instead been designed with actual questions about moral dilemnas, and thus looked how different people actually choose.
With the casual carpool, doesn't just one person end up paying for all the gas?
Seems to me that it would be better for the driver to simply have an agreed on carpool, with either multiple cars or splitting gas costs.
Carbonated water doesn't count - not until you can get a carbonator on your tap. That would be awesome - I don't know if I would ever drink anything else.
Or at least not for a week or two. At which point I would be so sick of carbonated water I would want still. But I'd still do at least a week straight. (I wonder what carbonated coffee would taste like? Can you boil carbonated water?)
I think I remember seeing some expose on tv years ago showing how most municipal tap water has less bacteria than bottled water.
Certainly, Toronto has excellent drinking water. It comes from the deep parts of Lake Ontario, which consist of water directly melted off glaciers (and still there thousands of years later, well, until we get done with it). Even when it goes back into the lake, it's been filtered a lot of times through sand. No clorine anymore - don't know if they used to have it.
I do find the demographics of bottled water very interesting - using bottled water is correlated with income, but inversely correlated with years of tertiary education. I've never heard of that before. I supose as a poor person with a post-graduate degree, it's obvious that I would drink tap water, though like many others I will buy the occasional bottle in order to get a bottle to keep refilling.
I even drank Cambridge (UK) water, which tastes like it was used to wash a blackboard first. (Kind of true - all of the local springs are in the chalk hills). But Waterloo (Ontario) water - that I can't handle. It's awful. It's not quite as bad as some well water I tasted once up north (which I think had a lot of sulfer or something), but still eekch.
You know, I'd maybe be all angry.
Except they are trying to scare kids about drinking and driving. And damn straight they should. There are so many communities in North America where people just refuse to take drinking and driving seriously, where losing a friend to drunk driving is a normal thing to happen in high school, where people just drive home from bars without thinking.
I'd rather think my friend dead for a few hours than to have them die for real because we didn't think we needed a designated driver.
I think the people who are saying reducing carbon emissions is win-win are thinking that even if you don't believe in global warming, you should support clean energy because it will help with high oil prices.
But yeah, there are people who think change sources of energy will be painless, because some technology will majically save us. I just feel like even if that technology did come around, our stupid market policies would be sure to drive it into the ground before it could be adopted. But more realistically is just thinking it's not going to come.
This whole situation does suck for farmers, and hugetime for contract truck drivers. But again, we've let artificially low gas prices lure us into creating an unsustainable world, and also unnaturally low food prices. There will be a painful adjustment period.
I know I sound callous, but the only reason that I haven't been hit by the increase in food prices is that our household income is so low that we were already shopping the way every one else is going to be once the food prices start reflecting the real costs of food production. Also, I think our local grocery store (catering to a fairly poor and non-mobile population) already had higher prices than the suburban stores that compete with each other. We had few crazy bargains to start with.
You know what the rest of us do when we need hauling capacity?
Well, if we can drive, we rent a Uhaul.
If we can't drive, we borrow a handcart, and do it the old-fashioned way. I've moved by handcart, including furniture like bookcases. Which, by the way, seriously sucks. I had some awesome friends who helped when they can, but I really don't suggest moving by handcart on your own.
islander - the I in the fpp is myself. I have done extremely well on standardized tests, and I'm not talented at anything but standardized tests :) There are serious criticisms of affirmative action to be made - for one, American universities target middle class and upper class visible minorities so that they can claim to be diverse, without ever actually dealing with such "difficult" students as actually poor and disadvantaged students, who in the US (where I have been until recently) are disproportionately visible minorities. Doing this, they avoid the difficulties of helping students who haven't had access to AP courses (big thing in the US elite universities) or other enrichments. But Judge Sotomayor is an example of affirmative action working perfectly: finding a bright kid who hasn't had the same preparation as those whose parents are educated anglophones, and giving her the chance to show what she can do - and she showed that she could be an A student at a time when not all students in the Ivy League were (most are now - grade inflation). None of the critics are willing to look at her grades at the end of her university career - you know, the grades that actually matter. She was among the best in both universities. Up in Canada, we just don't have these issues. Because we don't have heavy disparity in our universities and in the options coming out of university - the way they do in the US and the UK - admission to university isn't that big a deal. We essentially give affirmative action to all students - you can get into a good Canadian university with average marks, and you get the chance to prove yourself then. Not in all programs, but in enough that I don't feel that we have barriers raised at age 18 the way the US does. And even if your university doesn't have the same job prospects as a more prestigious one (York vs Uni of Toronto, for an example I know intimately), you can always easily transfer if you do well and the graduate/professional school options are just as open to you. This is somewhat true in the US, at least for the grad schools (people go from non-prestigious undergrad to prestigious grad all the time), but I don't know about the professional. Then again, I think that the answers to social mobility aren't in admissions to elite universities at all - but in effective collective bargaining, higher wages at the bottom and solid mass education (especially high schools and community colleges). But I still get pissed at the people who pretend that SATs mean anything other than a talent at testing.
posted by jb 15 years ago
In "Starwho? Whatbucks?"
I've never had a problem ordering a plain coffee - you have to use their sizes, but that's not a problem since their tall really is the size of the large at the actual non-chain mom (but not pop bc she owned it alone) donut shop I worked at. But you just say "I'd like a coffee please," and they give me a coffee. Sometimes they do ask which brew I would like (the dark, or the medium, etc - which will have fancy names up, but if you just say the medium they know which one that is). Their coffee is much darker than a lot of people are used to. But it's not bad - saying it's bad would be like saying that semi-sweet chocolate is bad because it doesn't taste like milk chocolate. They are different things. I regularly drink dark coffee, though I don't like espresso (darker again). They did introduce a new price level of coffee into Canada - at a time when most coffee shops were charging about $1 for a small, and $1.25-1.50 for a large, Starbucks came in with $1.50 for a small, and $2.25 (or similar) for a large - I was a coffee-shop addicted teenager at the time, so it really hit me hard. But the coffee I had been drinking for $1-1.25 really was swill, even from supposedly better places like Second Cup. Nowadays, even McDonalds is serving half-way drinkable coffee. So what we have here is a chain that successfully got people to pay more money for a superior product - why does this annoy people so? We don't complain about upscale china places that ask you if you are interested in porcelin or stoneware, though these are distinctions not everyone would make. What I would complain about is something completely different: in the city where I lived until Wednesday, several coffee shops discounted pretty heavily if I brought my own travel mug, from $1.25 to $1 or from $1.50 to $1.25. Having worked at a coffee shop, I think I remember that the paper cups cost about $0.25. But by offering such a discount, they are also encouraging the use of re-usable cups, which is good. But Starbucks only offered a measly $0.10 discount :(. Okay, that makes me sound really cheap. And I should just tell myself that another reason for their higher prices are that Starbucks pays its employees much more than other coffee shops and, I believe, offers health benefits in the US. (Is this true?)
posted by jb 15 years ago
In "God's sick little joke, she said..."
Dreadnought and I just moved back to Canada and the US - and we're so relieved to be back in the land of universal health care. Not everything is universal - Ontario has stopped paying for eye exams (I suspect it's because the optomitrists started doing more expensive exams to bill more). But we don't have to try to figure out how we can put 1/8 of our not quite adequate income to health care - and that was with an excellent employer based plan. Our half alone was the equivalent of 3 months rent. I can't imagine what we would have done had we been on the private market. All systems can improve, though there must be a careful balance between costs and actual effectiveness - but Blue Horse said it right: What many people in the US have is "NOTHING. Anything is better than that."
posted by jb 15 years ago
In "What if the lyrics on your favorite music video actually described what you saw?"
I think what makes this work is that the original video is deeply creepy and pedophiliac.
posted by jb 15 years ago
In "Pay for Pray"
Ah, it's like the Reformation never happened - let's open up the chantries and get some serious industrial praying going! Also, I want my dog-saint back.
posted by jb 15 years ago
In "bath time kitteh"
Take the kitty out of the cup! Put down the camera, and take the poor, little, cold kitty out of the cup! For the love of all that is holy, take that wet cat and dry it off! I'm just freezing looking at it.
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "A suggestion box"
NAFTA hasn't been that bad for Canada. Generally the suckitude has been when the US is ignoring NAFTA - as in the softwood lumber stupidity. But I fully support putting environmental and labour clauses into trade agreements - and to make sure trade agreements don't subvert a nation's sovereignty over their own domestic policy. There was a NAFTA case where an American firm forced Canada to accept the use and import of a chemical which had been banned in the US, and which the Canadians wished to have banned, but were told that it would unduly limit "free trade".
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "1066"
(not to say that the words didn't come from French, just that the timing is probably very unclear. And also that while new words are often adopted for new things or ideas, but others are adopted for a variety of reasons. The English had a word for the skull before they adopted "skull" from the Norse languages - probably Danish - but for some reason the Norse word replaced the Old English.) -------- Back to 1066 - that was the beggining of the end. Long live King Harold!
posted by jb 16 years ago
A linguist friend tells me Your linguist friend has a good story, but the one thing I know about the influence of Norman French on English is that we don't know a lot of the details. English language texts between 1066 and c1250(? maybe later?) are very few and far between - they exist (I have a friend who is writing on several), but our knowledge of how the Norman Invasion changed English is largely based on our knowledge of English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, rather than earlier.
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "Christian Bale and Kermit."
Yeah, the difference is that Kermit is cuter. :)
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "Africa is giving nothing to anyone--apart from AIDS."
Other than oil. Gold. Diamonds. Rubber. Cocoa. Coltan, that refined as tantalum is usused in just about every current electronics consumer product. And people. Their muscles do lots of low-pay jobs in Europe. All kinds of jobs. I just wanted to repeat Flagpole's comment. And add: raw coffee and cocoa at cheap prices so that we can make money roasting and processing, rubber, maize, cheap fresh fruits and vegetables for winter consumption in the north, flowers for our tables, palm oil, copper... Africa Export Goods - note how many are primary resources (agriculture, fishing or mining) which support manufacturing and industries all over the world. (And, except for oil and few other commodities, often make more money for the manufacturers than the initial producers.)
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "The Alan Moore Index."
Updated Prisoners of Gravity fan-site link, for all your obscure-Canadian-tv-show-about-comics-and-SF&F needs.
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "AND ARE YOU? "
I wish it weren't simply self-assessment based on adjectives. It's not a measure of what you actually do/think, but merely your self-image. Some people have an accurate image of themselves, but I'm sure that I don't. I wish it has instead been designed with actual questions about moral dilemnas, and thus looked how different people actually choose.
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "Casual Car Pooling on the rise in San Francisco."
With the casual carpool, doesn't just one person end up paying for all the gas? Seems to me that it would be better for the driver to simply have an agreed on carpool, with either multiple cars or splitting gas costs.
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "Bottle or tap?"
Carbonated water doesn't count - not until you can get a carbonator on your tap. That would be awesome - I don't know if I would ever drink anything else. Or at least not for a week or two. At which point I would be so sick of carbonated water I would want still. But I'd still do at least a week straight. (I wonder what carbonated coffee would taste like? Can you boil carbonated water?)
posted by jb 16 years ago
I think I remember seeing some expose on tv years ago showing how most municipal tap water has less bacteria than bottled water. Certainly, Toronto has excellent drinking water. It comes from the deep parts of Lake Ontario, which consist of water directly melted off glaciers (and still there thousands of years later, well, until we get done with it). Even when it goes back into the lake, it's been filtered a lot of times through sand. No clorine anymore - don't know if they used to have it. I do find the demographics of bottled water very interesting - using bottled water is correlated with income, but inversely correlated with years of tertiary education. I've never heard of that before. I supose as a poor person with a post-graduate degree, it's obvious that I would drink tap water, though like many others I will buy the occasional bottle in order to get a bottle to keep refilling. I even drank Cambridge (UK) water, which tastes like it was used to wash a blackboard first. (Kind of true - all of the local springs are in the chalk hills). But Waterloo (Ontario) water - that I can't handle. It's awful. It's not quite as bad as some well water I tasted once up north (which I think had a lot of sulfer or something), but still eekch.
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "On a Monday morning last month"
You know, I'd maybe be all angry. Except they are trying to scare kids about drinking and driving. And damn straight they should. There are so many communities in North America where people just refuse to take drinking and driving seriously, where losing a friend to drunk driving is a normal thing to happen in high school, where people just drive home from bars without thinking. I'd rather think my friend dead for a few hours than to have them die for real because we didn't think we needed a designated driver.
posted by jb 16 years ago
In "The oil shock of 2008."
I think the people who are saying reducing carbon emissions is win-win are thinking that even if you don't believe in global warming, you should support clean energy because it will help with high oil prices. But yeah, there are people who think change sources of energy will be painless, because some technology will majically save us. I just feel like even if that technology did come around, our stupid market policies would be sure to drive it into the ground before it could be adopted. But more realistically is just thinking it's not going to come.
posted by jb 16 years ago
This whole situation does suck for farmers, and hugetime for contract truck drivers. But again, we've let artificially low gas prices lure us into creating an unsustainable world, and also unnaturally low food prices. There will be a painful adjustment period. I know I sound callous, but the only reason that I haven't been hit by the increase in food prices is that our household income is so low that we were already shopping the way every one else is going to be once the food prices start reflecting the real costs of food production. Also, I think our local grocery store (catering to a fairly poor and non-mobile population) already had higher prices than the suburban stores that compete with each other. We had few crazy bargains to start with.
posted by jb 16 years ago
You know what the rest of us do when we need hauling capacity? Well, if we can drive, we rent a Uhaul. If we can't drive, we borrow a handcart, and do it the old-fashioned way. I've moved by handcart, including furniture like bookcases. Which, by the way, seriously sucks. I had some awesome friends who helped when they can, but I really don't suggest moving by handcart on your own.
posted by jb 16 years ago
(limited to the most recent 20 comments)