KennethMyers

Same guys called me two days ago!

ESL/EFL teacher here. Yes. A Spanish engineer who was my student recently thinks the moon landing was faked. A Puerto Rican accountant thinks the CIA has weather-controlling satellites and steers hurricanes to PR. Many Europeans think 9/11 was done by Bush. Many, many Arabs that I've taught say the holocaust never happened, and that Jews are responsible for a hundred unrelated things.

QAnon theories are false, but in my opinion, so are the beliefs of Islam.

And if the standard required for censorship is that "someone with related beliefs killed someone in Germany", or "there's like a whole subreddit for people who are frustrated with family members who believe this", then we've got to ban Islam, Christianity, Rap music, eyeliner, sports, and probably everything else you can think of.

Nobody banned 9/11 truthers from major internet communications protocols. Nobody banned birthers.

The shift in the US, in less than a year, towards banning speech that annoys the elites, is something I would've thought impossible a mere few years ago.

I was taught in high school that here in America we fought free speech with more free speech.

During my undergrad studies in anthropology, a prof remarked off-hand that the prohibition of first-cousin marriage a pretty new and baseless thing, and that the offspring were very negligibly at risk. It was an off-hand comment, but an off-hand comment made by someone with a PhD in the field, so I'm with her on this one. But now googling . . .

Ack! You shared my blog post! Thank you, Aaron Lidman! I feel important!

EDIT: ok, now your submission has been flagged. Oh well. WTF?

Me and my wife would both love to be considered for awesome jobs!

Her:

Dallas / Ft Worth Texas | Local, Remote, or somewhere awesome | Full Time or Part Time

Stack: Writing, Modelling, Udacity Python, Illustration

Resume: http://goo.gl/8zfFFl

Contact: meggymyers@gmail.com

Megan wears lots of hats, and wears them well. She's an obsessive self-taught neophyte programmer who also does artistic nude modelling and the occasional visual arts show or children's book. She would really love to find something that paid decent entry-level wages and let her pour coffee and hang out with programmers and grow as a programmer.

Me:

Dallas / Ft Worth Texas | Local, Remote, or somewhere awesome | Full Time or Part Time

Stack: Cowboy coding for gentleman science with lots of BASIC bash and Prolog, Professoring (TESOL), Writing, Marketing

Resume: http://goo.gl/P1aOnb

Contact: kenmyers@gmail.com

I'm an ESL professor who finished a Georgetown fellowship in Manila last year and I haven't found anything awesome in Texas since.

I'm also a writer. My blog has topped HN a couple times with posts like "A Rough Guide to Social Skills for Smart Awkward People" and "Why God Hates German Words."

You've probably seen this map I've made at some point, too: http://i.imgur.com/CK6aONG.jpg

Mark Manson called me a "really, really, really fucking good writer", and I think I'm good at getting lots of eyeballs on things.

An employer who thought the f-bomb in a hacker news post spoke poorly of my communicative abilities would not be my ideal employer.

Yep, this is not the stuff I'm good at. Correct.

I'm looking for other jobs too. I can do lots of things.

Huh? Oh, the visa asking guy, not me, right?

I have a passport, and I'm a US citizen.

I think I should. I think I should do this with my craziest friends and see what comes of it. Maybe word of mouth will get us the requisite numbers to make some money. Maybe we'll just at least have what we wanted for ourselves. Why not, right? It's like zero overhead. Thanks for your encouragement.

Patti would talk dirty to me. And so would Lorna. And they're hot. That, and the fact that I know and love these people, might be the reason I was over-optimistic about the price point.

I've got some systems in play for myself too :) There's definitely something in this noospheric vicinity that people want.

Thanks for your thoughts. The one thing I'd have over Google Now is that I wouldn't be trying to anticipate people's information needs; they could just give me a list of a hundred things to check. Setting them up might take an hour per customer, and that would be labor that was plainly bet in the hopes of continued business. If people wanted to change things all the time, that would, in fact, be a nightmare. And I don't think anyone, even in a cheap country like the Philippines, would be excited about their share of $10 a month. So it looks like there are a bunch of insurmountable cons.

Maybe this is something I should just pitch to friends. I could handle the scripting load for 30 people, and 30 customers is $900 a month.

Probably a good point. The price point just may not be feasible. Thanks for your input!

* My email, where I maintain good, legitimate correspondence.

* My RSS reader, where I subscribe to the blogs of friends, plus the Machine Learning Research Institute, Ben Goertzel, and Venkatesh Rao.

* Reddit, where I'm split evenly between smart things and slutty things: http://www.reddit.com/r/Anarcho_Capitalism+anarchotranshuman... )

Anecdotal personal stuff: I learned to stop subvocalizing in grad school. I had no idea it was a canonical speed reading strategy. I can read really fast now, with unimpeded comprehension.

Common sense stuff: The author says that scientists say that reading without subvocalization is impossible. The fact that deaf people can read is extremely inconvenient for this theory. Seriously, man?

Former administrator of an international student program, here. If you're an international student, you can work for the school (at least you could at mine). We used to give kids literally 1-hour careers sitting at a desk in our program at minimum wage so they could get social security cards. If you were to furnish Paypal with a valid ss#, could you then get your money? That's a lot of money. If your school won't do it, I'd work on tranfering your 1-20 to another school that will.

Since there's no fraud and no money, I hope so.

You're right. I actually said "German" because the word is simpler and it makes for a more sonorous title. But I've also met super-important linguists who in conversation call old Englishes "German" and the Norman language "French".

Post author here.

You're right about "smart." There are other minor inaccuracies that other people pointed out. The origin of "fuck" isn't clear. Were the anglo-saxons actually enslaved? (I'd say yes. Serfdom/slavery, what's the differece?) I didn't write this thing like a researcher. I wrote it like a daytime applied linguist with a secret passion for his crazy-ass blog. I'll do a rigorous one if people actually want that.

I never have to ask.

>If it were 100%, I'd worry we were being too conservative in >who we funded."

Note to self: if you're succeeding in everything you're doing, you're probably failing to attempt awesome things in which you could succeed.

I'm in agreement that life was life, and it wasn't so bad. You're right.

Some of the specifics, though, of my case, would be impossible without the internet. I'm sure I'd have a job. But remotely writing textbooks for a Korean company probably wouldn't have happened. (How could it have! How would we have even found each other!) I would have never developed my friendship with my bff Anissa. A lot of the most important things in my life would not have been possible before the internet.

BUT - that's probably not true of everyone. I may be a weird case.

Hey ComputerGuru, thanks for reposting this. Where'd it go?

You're totally right. As a matter of fact, in undergrad I had a professor (Dr. Robert? Hard) who found even more correlates, some of them environmental, and plugged them into a GIS that would highlight good candidate sites for archaeological digs. Amazingly, he would go to these places, and often find important sites. Foremost among these was Cerro Juanaqueña, where Dr. Hard (at least a decade ago) earned the distinction of finding the oldest use of corn north of Mexico.

So yes, there comes a tipping point where agriculture becomes the most attractive option, and when that happens, humans begin the sequence that causes them to lose a few important things and gain a lot of great things.

And strangely, it looks like we're getting some of the things we lost back.

God I love civil dialogue. Please, nobody ever tell the rest of the internet about Hacker News.

You may be right. Most anthropologists see technological/memetic evolution as largely supplanting genetic evolution after the sedentary shift (so that we, say, invent glasses rather than getting better eyes), but I often wonder myself how much we've changed in the last 10,000 years or so.

And I agree that the city is (speaking emotively and not scientifically here) especially brutal. And yet strangely inescapable. I've adopted Emerson's strategy of living in the countryside in the orbit of a great city, and descending on it from time to time.

I think that the value of money has diminishing returns, so that more than $60K per annum doesn't make you more happy (http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper....

If automation and efficiency could bring most people to the point where they could hit this point of diminishing returns at 20 hours a week, I think we'd find more (though not all) people opting for that kind of life.