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 . . .
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
