Don't know many Indian women, do you? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Then you'd know I was one of the sedate ones!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
the TV station Global has lady well shaved everywhere except for her long hair and at least half covered with body paint (usually a lot of green, yellow and blue from the Brazil's flag in long seusous stripes) who begins to appear on tv at least a week before carnaval. They sell video high lights of her and the carnaval each year.
No I do not, never been my pleasure. I did have a year at full pay off, which I spent in the cognitive science department at Johns Hopkins with the graduate students. There were two Indian ladies in the "journal club" / course. Two professors ran it, selected papers for us to read and discuss. One was about how phonemes are composed of about 8 or 10 different features, like voiced or not etc. When you hear a word it is "broken down" into its phonemic content for processing. Humans are "pre wired" at birth to be able to learn a fixed set of phonemes, but most languages include less than half of the possible combinations. After a certain young age, if you have not heard some, you can no longer even hear them. These two young Indian ladies had some developed we speakers of English do not. We had one make a list (or it was given in one of the papers we read that week) of word pairs that differed only by some of these phonemic features that are absent in English. One lady said the words to the other from the list we had "scrambled." - To all of English speakers, concentrating very hard to try to hear the difference, it was impossible to hear any difference. The speaker was just repeating the same word twice, so it seemed to us. Despite this false impression, the other Indian lady wrote all of the word pairs in the same order as they were on the list, without a single error!! If you have children, let them hear all the different languages you can. - Not important that they know or learn the meaning of the words. Just need to hear as many of the possible combinations of phonemic features as possible. They are very "quantized" - won't go into details, but the continuously variable output of a speech synthesizer shows this clearly. (Your perception "switches" abruptly.)
Well, I meant it as a warning. You are the first one who actually asked for advice, how to avoid the problems of the future. OK, I will try to give you a few wisdoms, take it from someone who is pretty statisfied with his life, except 1-2 minor things... Things to do if you are under 25: 1. Don't get married or have kids until 30. What's the hurry? 2. College is overrated. Think about it twice before wasting 4-5 years on an education that can be easily outsourced. 3. Learn a language, most useful is Spanish. 4. Don't go into debt, but if you do, there are tricky ways to get out of it. 5. Travel until you don't have a family. After that it will be very hard. Get 2 other buddies and discover America. 6. Don't buy expensive shit. What's the point? 7. When you buy your next car, think about mileage and effectiveness instead of color. 8. You can do pretty much any bad thing with MODERATION. That is the key to life. 9. Make sure you have good credit. Now if you are already in college and let's say you will have a nice student loan to pay off in the next 10-15 years, here is a neat trick to get ride of it. Maybe not very moral, but effective. Make your credit good and sign up for credit cards. When each has at least 5K limit or more on them, cash out them and pay off your student loan. Then declare bankruptcy. In 2 years your credit will be fine and you won't have a student loan. Free education anyone? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Well, if you have a good life, enjoy it and appreciate it, because who knows what brings the tomorrow? Most likely not very nice surprizes.... P.S.: Don't get FAT!!!!
10. Constantly remind young people that the future is going to suck because [insert doomsday scenario here]. P.S.: When you run out of credible doomsday scenarios, just deliver a pessimistic comment and tell them to lower their expectations.
Dub, you are a moron, get out of my thread. Your #10 doesn't even fit, since the list was made for under 25, but you are too stupid tosee it. Oh hell, let's put you on Ignore...
Yes, because obese children have such high self-esteem, and don't get enough shit thrown at them in life. Let's have adults insult them too!!! Do you think that kids wants to be fat? Do you know the success rate for weight loss in obese adults, never mind children? He's a kid and needs structure and support in order to grow and be healthy. You know that obesity is associated with poverty? Why? Because high caloric low nutrient foods are cheap. Please. Give me a break.
Hey, I'm an old guy who does NOT tell kids that the future is going to be rotten. Quite the contrary, I think you kids are going to have really pleasant times and i envy you. You'll have different problems than we had and some of them will be tough ones, but on the balance your lives will be safer, more comfortable, and more fulfilling than ours. The odds are very small that you will have to live through a world war. If we can stop the Religious Redneck Retard in the White House from actually re-starting the Crusades for just another year and a half, the trend of the past sixty years will continue: The number of people killed by government violence continues to drop steadily, if not quite monotonically. Just look at our perspective: we're getting outraged over conflicts in places like Darfur and Iraq, where the death tolls haven't approached one million. I was born during WWII, which killed somewhere between forty and sixty million human beings! Only four conflicts since them exceeded one million, and only the Congo civil war exceeded two million. Of course I weep for the victims, but for the goddess's sake it's impossible to deny that three generations of humanity have steadily backed away from war as a way of solving problems. As for terrorism, well I weep for those victims too, but it's a tiny risk; more people are killed by drunk drivers, probably even in Iraq. What on earth makes you say something like that??? The life expectancy both at birth and at the end of childhood has been rising steadily for decades and has not stopped doing so. It has become common for retired people to still have parents to take care of. When I was 25 my life expectancy was fifty more years. If you're 25 today it's fifty-five. We've made such huge progress in curing and delaying illness, that the list of the top ten causes of death now includes auto accidents, homicide and suicide--all of which BTW drop off precipitously after your own postulated cutoff age of 25. As for being poorer than your parents, it's deceptive to compare standards of living across a Paradigm Shift. Your generation will (hopefully) be telecommuters so you won't need the income to support three cars, full-time nannies and a steady diet of take-out food. You won't need to pay to live on a parcel of inflated real estate near a major city and hoard your vacation time and money to "get away from it all." You might live quite happily with only one parent in a household working full time. You have the internet and all the culture that comes with it: information, entertainment, companionship, games, even employment. It's difficult to compare "prosperity" between generations with such different needs and resources. How would you compare the "poverty" of a successful but illiterate farmer in 1500CE who never traveled more than twenty miles from his home, to today's city dweller with the most menial job, with an internet connection to the whole world, a car that carries him to different communites a hundred miles every weekend, and an annual vacation a thousand miles from home? Yes well Americans should adjust to the reality of a global civilization and stop assuming that everybody else will automatically learn our language. China is a hot market and before long they will have enough influence that others will have to learn their language instead of vice versa; fortunately contrary to popular belief it is really not one of the world's most difficult, at least the spoken language. And my own hunch is that Latin America is poised to become a regional superpower over the next quarter century, and Americans who know Spanish will have a tremendous advantage. Also, Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, Turkish, Urdu, or any other major Middle Eastern language will open up a lot of job opportunities; the federal government alone is desperate for these. It's also only a snapshot when a trend line would be more informative. Hunger has been vanquished in huge swaths of the world. In my memory, millions of people died of starvation in China alone; today all but the most rural Chinese can afford TV sets. China and India between them contain a third of the world's population and their economies are growing at 8% a year. Despite its favelas, Latin America produces enough food to export a lot of it. Aside from a few pockets of intractably stupid government like Burma, the world's Hunger Zone has been relentlessly diminished until it is now almost entirely an African problem. Their birth rate is falling steadily--as it is everywhere--so you can expect to see an increase in prosperity even there, during your lifetime if not mine. Good thinking. At our age we can take the chance, but even my wife and I have some overseas investments. You young folks should definitely diversify internationally. You should also face the possibility that you won't want to spend the rest of your lives in the USA and be prepared to emigrate. No one was more pessimistic about the future than the Baby Boomers, the Americans who would be my younger siblings if I had any. They had nuclear bomb drills in grade school and watched our cities explode in race riots. But they partied their asses off. Quite a few Americans are moving to countries who need IT ventures started. I have a friend whose son is blissfully happy--and financially successful if not rich--in Estonia. Poland, many of the former Warszaw Pact countries fall in that category. My advice is to stop wondering how to become an elite American, and work on being merely a middle-class citizen of Earth, and in the process help build a global economy with a growing middle class. Despite the doomsaying about IT on this thread, this is the Information Age and the construction of the world's IT infrastructure is just beginning. Look at the EU. People don't have to spend their whole lives in one country, and since they all learn three languages when they're kids they're easily mobile. The whole world will be like that in your time. Get yourself into a mindset where you can embrace the likelihood of leaving America, rather than figuring out a way to make the most of staying here. What alarms a lot of us older folks with more perspective is that, perhaps for the first time in human history in a major nation, stupid people have seized political power. One of the ways they wield that power is to ensure that the percentage of the population who is as stupid as they are keeps increasing. Particularly the educational system that turns out college graduates who on the average read at what my generation called "sixth grade level." Each year the number of people increases who can easily be persuaded to believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, evolution is an evil conspiracy, and terrorism is a bigger threat than drunk driving. Our leadership is being taken over by morons and people who know how to manipulate morons. I haven't seen any good suggestions for dealing with this problem, which could easily flush our country down the toilet. Uh oh. I guess I did just say that maybe the future is going to be rotten. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! But my message is: This is just one country. Make sure you can leave when you want to or have to.
Oh, I don't blame the child, I blame the parents. By the way you can get cheaper food from the Dollar Store than from McDonalds... I give you a break, you give me 10 push-ups...
Hey, I would like to be optimist too, but there is this little thing called reality, kind of bothers me... What makes you say such a thing? I was specially refering to US kids. If their job is not going to be outsourced, if they don't get fat by 12, if a few nukes don't go off in a few cities and if they find a huge amount of oil in the US, THEN what you said might become true. Otherwise better get ready. Life is cyclical. The 90s were good, since 911 it is all downhill and I don't think we reached the bottom yet... Actually, the law of averages syas that there chance will be BIGGER. The world got lucky several times in the last 60 years, luck eventually runs out. Also, there is a thing called 4th generation war. It is different than our usual picture of world wars. One could (Fox News does it all the time) that WW3 has already started... If you look at smaller timeframe, let's say the last 30 years, that number is actually increasing... As much as I know the government exaggerates the risk, his tiny risk is way bigger than 10-20 years ago, and will get bigger. But let's forget war. How about viruses? Again, the world got lucky several times in the last 30-40 years. QWe can have a SARS like epidemic (law of averages) anytime, and with fast transportation, it will be much more widespread than 30 years ago would have been. Hey, I thought you were optimistic... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
