a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

Talking about things you don't understand is a natural human activity. The poor as well as the rich are able to do it. It's very peculiar that you're so obsessed with this completely normal aspect of human life and view it as a character flaw. Please, seek professional help for whatever issues in your life are causing you to build up this much anger and resentment.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

He insisted on saltine crackers for the breadcrumbs and Old Bay seasoning in particular. (Old Bay is known enough now that I've seen it in random parts of the country and even overseas, but I suppose back in the day it was a lot more of a local thing. Personally, I can't tell the difference between the saltines and just making the breadcrumbs with bread that's a bit stale.)

edit: Also it goes without saying that an MD crab cake is blue crab. I think VA crab cakes would be blue crab too, but out west I've had Dungeness crab cakes and they aren't bad but it's not the same.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

My father's family have been in Maryland since the 1600s. When my father made fried chicken, he made it with lard, a seasoned breading, and a milk gravy, somewhat like country fried steak. But he never billed it as "Maryland fried chicken" or conveyed any sense of "this is how ~we Marylanders~ do it" whereas with other things, like crab cakes, there was definitely a sense of This Is How We Do It Here And Those People In Virginia Can Go To Hell.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

Man, I seriously hope people don't use what they post here to predict the outcome of future interactions.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

One example is a little-known disreputable degree mill called Carnegie Mellon University

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

A civil war happened the last time a King Charles broke with Parliament.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

In terms of ethnicity, isn't China something like 91% Han Chinese? I wonder if that has anything to do with the incentive structure behind why their media denigrates other races.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

You really sound like you know what other people should be doing. Have you considered a career in management?

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

Euclid's Elements. I was gifted at most everything language-related in school, but I was complete dogshit at math. Studying Euclid changed my entire perspective. I don't think I'd have had the self-belief to do programming without having read it.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

The psychology involved in the response you're wondering about is really quite simple to understand.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

It's something of a meme to say talk about shorting what he recommends his viewers buy. Sometimes people will come up with data showing that if you did that over such-and-such a period you'd be up like 50%, but I don't think that's necessarily worse than anyone would do if they had to pick stocks on national TV every day.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

If history's any indication, you can't give companies an inch. They'll take advantage of employee ignorance of the law, or do shady things with the payments under the logic that if the employee sues them for the money they can tie the case up in the legal system until they give up, or whatever other chicanery they can imagine to squirm out of having to pay.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

Confessions is on the program Sophomore year, as are excerpts from Summa Theologica. I vaguely remember one of the differences between the campuses being that Annapolis students read some Calvin and Santa Fe students read something else, but I don't remember what it was.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

I forget if War and Peace was the first book of a semester or whether it was over spring break, but long novels were typically scheduled so that you had some free time away to read them.

The books me and my friends found to be ass-kickers were the dense philosophy books with many seminars back-to-back, like how there were seven? on Critique of Pure Reason and six? on Phenomenology of the Spirit. Important books, to be sure, but there's a limit to endurance.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

That's an extremely complicated question for me. I'll talk about each of the classes and offer what thoughts I can:

Math -- without math class at St. Johns I don't think I'd have ever thought I could be a programmer, much less that I could learn it on my own from books and online self-study. I still don't know much about math-as-math, but having a class dedicated to studying proofs and formal logic in various forms and communicating that to a group has been extremely valuable to me in my professional life. So I'm somewhat of a patriot for the math program.

That said, I think the poster in this thread who argues it's "a bad way to learn math" is correct. The St. John's program was founded in 1937, and, let's face it, the world of math and science is different now. If you sat me down next to a math major and made both us do a math test, they'd massacre me.

I'm more critical of the lab program. It felt like a complicated review of high school physics, chemistry, and biology and it was the area where the "amateur" nature of the teaching often hurt, rather than enhanced, the lesson. My thoughts about "the world's moved on since 1937" are even more acute related to lab. I don't feel I was very literate in science after I graduated beyond being able to talk about the Maxwell equations or relativity with some confidence.

Language class is a mixed bag. It's meant to support seminar by giving you access to Greek (and in junior and senior year, French) so that you can dig into some of the original sources. I enjoyed and was good at it -- but it's two years of college French that may make you able to read French literature but unable to order a meal in Paris.

When it comes to the seminar class, I enthusiastically endorse the St. John's method. I don't think there is a better way to read philosophy, history, literature, politics, etc.

Unrelated to the subjects themselves: at the very least, you're spending four years with roughly the same class of <100 people, reading the same texts, doing the same intellectual work, exposing your thoughts in class, living in the same area, eating in the same dining hall. That kind of -- let's call it intimacy -- means you're going to make some pretty deep friendships and rivalries and learn some social skills about getting on in group settings.

Would I recommend it? It's not for everyone. For people who don't need their hand held and who like the idea of reading and talking about a bunch of important books that discuss a lot of important questions in life, I think it's very right. For people who want to prepare for a specific technical career, or who are very shy, or who are not intellectuals by nature, I don't think it's right at all.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

You're right, that view is "a little" dramatic. The Holocaust proposition was maybe more defensible 20 years ago when we could still look at Third World with rose-colored glasses.

Nowadays, I think if someone argues along the lines of "3,000 years of Western culture culminated in the Holocaust," they should also consider that the same logic leads to "5,000 years of Chinese culture culminated in the ongoing genocides in Xinjiang and Tibet" or "1,400 years of Muslim culture culminated in 9/11" or any number of other such propositions that I think most thinking people can see are problematic. Those things happen in spite of, not because of, the broader cultural/intellectual canons.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

St. John's graduate here. It looks like that list includes a lot of what we read in "lab" class mixed in with what we read in math class. Freshman math was almost entirely the study of Euclid and Nicomachus.

a_techwriter_00

3년 전discuss

To my knowledge in the US "40 and older" is a protected class but "under 40" is not.

a_techwriter_00

4년 전discuss

As an example of this, Oregon's had the 'Death With Dignity Act' since 1997. It allows a process for terminally ill people with a prognosis of less than 6 months to live to see a doctor and be prescribed a lethal dose.

There are numerous safeguards (you have to ask, wait 15 days, and ask again; the doctor can refer you to psychiatric care if they think your judgment is impaired; and others).

The state government of Oregon has a FAQ about the law at: https://www.oregon.gov/oha/ph/providerpartnerresources/evalu...

a_techwriter_00

4년 전discuss

I assume "this job takes team bonding so seriously that when the boss tells you to get drunk with him or get in bed with another random employee, that's just part of the job, so don't work here if you're not cool with it" is always on the job description or at least disclosed up-front in a job interview so that everyone can make an informed decision about whether or not they're a good culture fit, right?

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