seryn

I'm 40 years old. But I remember being 17. Obviously I wasn't as smart at 17 as I thought I was, but I was a responsible adult. I could have held down a real job at least as well as the people I deal with now do. I was not living at home, so I am not imagining this level of competence.

I find that I really resent people saying that 19 is not old enough to make adult choices. Why the fuck not?

I'm not disagreeing with the people who think the Portland bomber was manipulated, perhaps to the point of illegality, but seriously, why wasn't he trained to be an adult by 19 years old? Why wasn't he expected to shoulder adult responsibilities and make adult choices and deal with the consequences?

When I was 17, you had to be 25 to rent a car. You had to be 21 to drink. You had to be 18 to marry, enlist, or sign legal documents. That was around when they started trying teenagers as adults for serious crimes too, so it seemed incredibly unfair. We'd already spread out the levels of responsibility we expected from 18 year olds. But if you enlisted at 18y 3mo, your parents couldn't wave a magic wand and get you out of your committment. We have decided that 18 year olds can make (at least some) adult decisions, as unfair as it was that it was limited in my case, there is a line drawn by society.

So 19 years old, unrestricted drivers license, can buy a house, can buy a car, can enlist in the military, can sign an employment contract, can get married without parental permission, can be held liable as an adult for criminal activity. You don't get privileges without accepting responsibilities.

The 17 year old me would be beyond angry if being 19 is no longer enough to qualify as an adult. It was already a gigantic hassle because I couldn't sign contracts on my own, I didn't need that delayed because other people were socially retarded and underparented to the point of irresponsibility.

Parents have a job to raise their children to know right from wrong, to be able to make a choice and abide by the consequences. And we, as a collective society, have decided that 18 years old is when most people have matured to the point where this can be expected of them. It's unfortunate when this is untrue, but it really should not be held against those who are ready to step forward.

I made a minor error. I mistakenly referred to an incident as invoking Godwin's Law. It was actually a corollary.

This is the relevant part (for those who don't follow links): For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress.

It is, according to the wiki, a canonical corollary in that Godwin himself adopted it, and many other people consider this the actual principle of Godwin's Law. (Myself included.)

The original GL was that the likelihood of any conversation including a reference to [genocidal World War II German leadership] approaches 1 (100% likely to happen) as a conversation grows in scope or length.

When someone says "Jews and American Indians have been discriminated against [by people who think like you]." That's perhaps subtle, but you've still implied that someone is a genocidal monster and it will terminate any threads in any well-moderated forum. In strictly moderated forums it would get you booted or banned. In the original USENET the appropriate response is, "Bye." Because there is nowhere the thread can legitimately go from there. It was one of the failings of an unmoderated forum that there was no one who could stop those threads officially.

I froze the thread where it happened and screened any further comments. I'm not going to screen comments on all posts, but I will deal with any incidents that arise.

There is a group on Ravelry, called Remnants, which is this catchall thing. Everyone is automatically subscribed to it and you can't get rid of it though you can shuffle it to another page.

One of the posts there (which you have to be a member of Ravelry to see, but it is free and there's probably a bugmenot for it) is from a store manager who describes her staff as "young puppies". One non-busy evening customers came in. The staff found out the customers were going to the Olympics. One of the staff members asked if you have to get tickets for individual events. The customer said he wasn't paying so he didn't know. The staff member was supposedly crushed by the customer's "harsh tone".

The store manager, the original poster, was not there when this happened and it was only related to her after the fact. She then conveyed this to the store owner with the statement that she would like a cash register button that allows her to "add a fee for this kind of behavior". The store owner created the fee button. Now customers they don't like get charged more. [It does not say where they live, where the store is, nor does it give the real life names of these people.]

One of my friends posted about this in her LJ. That is where I found it because I am not so idiotic as to torture myself by reading the Remnants group on Ravelry.

The other commenters all thought this was a really amazingly good idea. Some said they wished more stores would have signs saying that prices change based upon customer attitude. I disagree strongly. I left this comment which I am editing for clarity now:

I find most of these [odd expectations for personal behavior] strange and I'm just eccentric. I'm from here. Imagine what tourists from other countries feel? Imagine how people who look different or who have other cultural expectations feel. It's discriminatory and intolerant to presume rudeness. I wasn't there. Maybe the guy was actually condescending and snippy, but it didn't sound like it to me from what I read.

I guess I can see the attitude problem if the tone was really there, but the OP didn't actually hear it (said she wasn't there or she'd have sent that clerk out to get cookies.) I think the OP is really intolerant. If you're not paying for an event like the Olympics, you probably don't know if there are individual fees per thing or how cumbersome the logistics are. It was an annoying and off-topic question that was answered, textually at least, politely and possibly to the best of the customer's knowledge.

Personally I hate it that stores have these bizarre and unreasonable social expectations that no one explains. I understand that the staff shouldn't have to be mistreated or put up with rudeness, but for the customers to be denigrated for [politely] answering unrelated questions asked by yappy-puppy clerks*? I'm not shopping there and I hope they go out of business.

*the OP described them as puppy-like.

Knowing they have a penalty button on the cash register? "Hello Amazon! Thanks for taking my money with no hassle and delivering my purchases to my door for free." If this is what personalized customer service means, why on Earth would I want it? Small store owners are constantly whining about how people go to big box stores and order online and how there won't be any small stores anymore if no one supports them. Well guess what? We've just seen an example why. I'm pretty sure when I go to Target I'm going to get treated just like everyone else there. I order my yarn online because the local yarn stores are staffed by bitches who don't think fat women should be allowed to buy nice yarn and say so in front of me without ever turning away from their phones where they are speaking loudly to a remote person.

If there is ever a store with a sign saying that people are treated differently for nebulous and undefined reasons, I'm not going in there.

You want to know what irritates me? TV schedules. I have TiVo, I know about Hulu. You wouldn't think this would still be a big deal. But we got deluged in January, to the point where there were conflicts in the recording of content. But now, there's nothing recording for the next 2 weeks (the TiVo content forecast only goes 2 weeks into the future). Why did they do that? We already know they only have enough content for about 30% of the year, so why not spread it out more?

I'd also like them to move House back to 9pm because I didn't have a conflict then. Of course if Chuck continues being as puerile as it has been, there won't be a conflict any longer. I cannot believe people campaigned to resurrect this show. It ended cleanly and the revised version is stupid and plays up the "humor".

Want to know what's good? Doc Martin is on PBS currently. So I was able to watch season one via Netflix streaming and now I'm able to watch season 3. I didn't expect to really like the show, but I do.

I listened to music today. And I got my stupid iPod to use a bedamned playlist.

I bought salted toffee today. It's excellent. Ridiculously expensive though and I keep thinking I ought to be able to make that myself. I might try at some point.


weird requests I would like to change how words are spelled. Not all of them. I'd like to ban "ough" in spelling. That's not how American-derived dipthongs are spelled and having 3 silent letters is ridiculous in a country where they drop necessary doubled letters in past tense verbs just because the Microsoft spell-checker has become the country's official dictionary. Also... we shouldn't have ough words that are not "ow!" sounds, it's confusing. I used the word "slough" today and it's not "slow" or "slau"... it's "sluff". There's not even an alternate pronunciation like there is for "enough"--- though that's probably just for poets.

I would also like there NEVER to be words where 'c' is used both as an 's' and as a 'k'. Circus is just wrong. Cyclops. Though I had a literature prof who pronounced that as "ky klops".

And I would like a name that country game that chose a random region on the globe instead of forcibly dividing by continent. I saw a map from last week's Jeopardy with the Strait of Gibraltar (note, Strait, not "straight") and I was reminded that Africa is spittin' distance from Europe. I shouldn't have discovered that in this century. It should have been something I learned before leaving high school.

I would like to know why we were taught that the song "Blue Danube" was about a river somewhere in Europe but were told that Hungary and Romania and Bulgaria were not. Must be like Chinese people saying India isn't part of Asia because "Only Asian people are Asian." Of course I am old enough to have learned the continents as "North America, South America, Australia, Antartica, Africa, Europe, Asia, Russia". Might have been residual Cold War era geography.

And finally... I would like schools to stagger their dismissal times. It's absolutely wrong that there are 70 cars waiting for an hour to pick up children from school. It blocks traffic half the afternoon. Since we don't have all the schools consolidated in some sort of child ghetto, they're scattered all over residential areas, shouldn't the children be able to walk home? We probably should have regions near businesses where all the schools are located centrally. If all the schools were in one place, then everything would be integrated and services could be provided which are not financially feasible when there are 26 locations. There could be a great school library. There could be opt-in enrichment courses. But since we're not likely to move the children off somewhere away from my home, we should at least not make it so the main thoroughfare is impassable from 2pm until 4pm. Where are the police and why aren't these people being arrested?

As an aside to another conversation--- largely irrelevant so not cited-- I think one of the largest problems with our current culture is the mismatch between what people believe is a unique experience.

Think of the phrase, "Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and you cry alone." Except it's not true. Humor isn't very universal. Even among peoples who share a language... there's a line in the movie Bottle Shock where Alan Rickman's character says, "You don't like me because you think I'm an arsehole, but I'm not. I'm British." Most Americans don't think the British have humor because they see Stephen Fry as a dramatic actor.

Now remember how it felt to be a teenager. No one else had ever had a bad breakup like yours. No one else had ever lost a pet like yours. No one else has ever been misunderstood like you are. Everything bad that happens to you hurts so much that it must be unique. And yet... when someone dies we send sympathy cards because we're all expected to have personal experience from which to sympathize. I don't think there are people who haven't had a bad breakup or lost someone special... and I seriously suspect that everyone is still misunderstood, it's just that once you get to be an adult you're not expected to be a clone of everyone else and differences are tolerated.

We act like tragedy is unique, but it's not. That's why so much literature has its basis in tragedy. It's universal. Everyone gets it. It's easy to make an emotional connection with a remote reader if you kill off a beloved character. A durable emotional connection over time is what makes something "literature".

No one even tries to have a sustainable emotional connection via joy. So the height of our literary culture settles for mediocrity.

I'm disappointed in Maine voters. I realize, living in California, that I don't have a lot of room to talk. I voted against the proposition that says the voters can take away rights from people who have them, which was numbered 8, but even I was not all that enthused because they never seemed to explain it that way.

The majority should NOT be able to decide some minority group no longer has the same rights as everyone else.

And to reiterate my arguments against domestic partnership laws to get around the semantics... in Washington (the state) they voted on new rules which would make domestic partnerships more equitable with marriage. That is precisely the problem. Marriage is a social contract defined by unwritten common consensus. Domestic partnerships are explicitly defined and the provisions must be specifically allocated and can be revoked at any time without real outrage. They're not rights, they're privileges and thus contingent upon your group's current popularity.

You should not have to worry that your rights are going to be taken away for no reason. Who will be next to be declared subhuman?

Obama's endorsed a UN resolution saying that criticism of religion isn't part of free speech.

I think criticizing someone's religion to their face is rude. I think being rude in a non-public area is going to subject you to being asked to leave. I think it can be unwise to mouth off when you're outnumbered.

But it's free speech. If religious people can have governmental offices closed on Sundays because they're the majority, then I should be allowed to complain. Unless we're going to amend the Constitution and the whole body of law to eliminate that pesky business about Freedom of Religion.

I thought about going back and locking those posts ranting about Christianity and how Christians pat themselves on the back for their tolerance, but decided not to. Now seeing that Obama is shouting about how tolerant Christians are while campaigning to restrict anyone who disagrees from saying so, I rather like the hypocrisy.

I have to say that Obama's Christianity was so much a caveat for me that it almost didn't matter what good policies he had. That has been proven true with his health care reform speech saying women don't have the right to get legal medical procedures if the government becomes the only health insurance option-- and the only argument on that subject is religious.

I would really like to see someone running the country who is a religious minority (preferably atheist), childfree or gay (preferably both), and who insists that Congress members not live in Washington DC so they can actually live the kind of life their constituents do.

One of the things I find that differs for me compared to other people is a relatively high disbelief in the power of genetics. Oh, sure, there are traits in appearance and physiology, but I think there is a much much larger component to the environment in which the individual grows.

I think people are much more like bonsai trees, they can be trained and restricted and shaped over time into almost anything. Obviously there are some who are not bonsai or even bamboo, they're azalea or marigold or honeysuckle or whatever. When you get someone like that, no matter how much trimming or shaping is done, they will never be an austere bonsai, though they might resemble the intention for a brief period.

I watched (while knitting and with a heavy hand on the fast forward) Idiocracy last night. The basic premise is that smart people don't really have children compared to idiots and centuries later, the world's gotten butt-stupid.

But there's a reason smart people don't have children. It's completely unrewarding, expensive, and causes lifelong medical issues for many women. Not to mention that the world is vastly overpopulated and millions are starving, the air isn't fit to breathe, there isn't enough potable water, and most of the world's people live in over-crowded conditions rife with disease and violence. It takes a special kind of delusion to be able to see all that and damn someone else to a lifetime of suffering through it. The only people who have lots of children are too stupid to look at the bigger picture.

However. My own parents are not very smart. They're sort of average plus lucky. They did have a lot more hands-on training in life skills than most people get today, which meant fewer things had to be professionally done. But my mother got dumber and dumber as time went on. Some of that is my own expanding world-view, but a lot of it was that she didn't do anything intellectual. I'm not sure how conscious of this she was, but she knew she was unhappy and alcohol numbed it. I got as far as I did in my education because of that situation. I was required to come straight home from school, but I only made noise once before getting the premise of "Don't annoy a sleeping dragon." There are not a lot of quiet activities. I could read, I could do my homework, or I could do my outside chores. If when my mother awoke, something wasn't done, there were penalty tasks assigned. So I quickly learned to focus on getting my schoolwork done. There is a lot of public school education that seeps in just by doing the assigned work.

I doubt I was all that much smarter than anyone else, but I was organized and quiet and did what I needed to do in order to get unnoticably good grades. (A bad grade would mean a term of, "Since you are clearly wasting your time doing homework, you will make dinner and clean the kitchen every day." The only way to have that stop was to improve but with less available time in which to study.) I do thoroughly believe that people who having music on while they're studying retain less information, but regardless, I don't think most children had the same incentives.

I consider myself fairly average in genetic smartness. I didn't come from some phenomenal stock. But I did astonishingly well in school and made it into grad school while that still meant something largely based on continual effort. It makes me rather intolerant of the stupid.

I don't believe it can possibly be all genetics. Or really even mostly genetics. I just had the right incentives and an environment conducive to learning. I never failed a test. There was a fractional likelihood that failure could cause my actual death. There is a lot a body can do to focus with that kind of incentive. But I absolutely believe it was wrong for my parents to have children since they intended to torture them.

So I think it wouldn't matter what genetic stock people have as far as intelligence if there is a need they can internalize which drives them to study hard, work towards a goal, and learn. It's not about the genetics, it's about expectations. From what I've seen, even smart parents have relatively low expectations and the children certainly live down to them.