Category: Society

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rePost::Wisconsin protests—now with farmers (and tractors) – Boing Boing

• The City of Madison issued a press release on Saturday thanking protesters for another huge protest with no arrests and no citations. That’s right. In 18 days, nobody has done anything worthy of arrest, or even ticketing. Good work, Wisconsin! In the Upper Midwest, even our “thugs” are well above average.
via Wisconsin protests—now with farmers (and tractors) – Boing Boing.
 

It has been a little depressing watching how protest in my country are too heated to become a dialogue and not a media whorism stunt.  I hope how civil the Wisconsin protest are become the norm and not something that I feel is something worth blogging about.

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rePost :: PeteSearch: The American Way of Dating

Hmm the weird thing is that we follow the american model when out heterogeneity as a nation maybe lends itself more towards the British model.

The British standard is “go to a party, down some drinks, make eye contact with a person you fancy, proceed to kissing and often much more, wake up the next morning to find that you have magically become one half of a couple”. It seems like the goal was to avoid any unambiguous declarations of interest, so that at any point either person can end the process without the other losing face.
This isn’t how it usually works in the US, at least in the mainstream. The formality and rituals surrounding courtship feel like something out of a Noh play. The very idea of actually asking a near-stranger for a date, explicitly and with no particular preamble, in the full knowledge that you may be turned down, seems nothing short of revolutionary compared to the system I grew up with.
via PeteSearch: The American Way of Dating.

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rePost::Goodbye academia, I get a life. – blog.devicerandom

It has been long and painful to discover that it was just an illusion. When I found that academia was not working for me, I got immediately depressed -my whole worldview was crumbling. Then I remembered that I had a life. I liked my life. I had a billion things that I loved to do. I want to do them again. Quitting and reclaiming back your life is not failing. It is waking up and winning.
A week ago I was with friends, talking about my job, and I found myself comparing science to a drug addiction. Being a scientist, from the brain chemicals point of view, is one week of adrenaline rush when you’re finally on to something and pieces go together -followed by six months (if you are lucky) of pain and suffering, only to get again that adrenaline shot.
Well, noble addiction as it is, it is toxic the same. The next month I’ll be 30. It’s really time to get my life back.
via Goodbye academia, I get a life. – blog.devicerandom.

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rePost::Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist

Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done. They will have amassed awards and prizes. As this year’s new crop of graduate students bounce into their research, few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else. They might use their research skills to look harder at the lot of the disposable academic. Someone should write a thesis about that.
via Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist.

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rePost:: RH Bill Now!!! ::Market Manila – Sausage Casings (a.k.a. Pig’s Intestines) – General

These days, I start off these information sessions with a simple fact — the minimal cost to raise a child from birth to 18 years old in lower middle class conditions that assume just the minimal caloric intake, a roof over their heads, clothing, medical care, schooling, etc. is roughly PHP1 million. ONE MILLION PESOS or roughly PHP60,000 per year in today’s peso value. If you want a more realistic figure, think PHP2-3 million given inflation et al. I know, I know, the hair on the back of some of your necks is rising with indignation, Marketman boiling down the joy of bringing human life onto this planet into pesos and centavos. But it is an irrefutable fact that if you are responsible for making them, you are indeed fully responsible for ensuring that they are fed, housed, clothed, educated, etc. Boiling it down to a peso figure always seems to wake up youngsters listening, as a careless romp now seems like a million peso gamble. To make a long story short, I explain the different types of birth control. The responsibility that comes with parenthood. The myths that seem to overwhelm medical facts. And basically seek to simply educate, with the ultimate responsibility left with each individual how they wish to conduct their own personal affairs. See what the topic of sausage casings can lead to?
via Market Manila – Sausage Casings (a.k.a. Pig’s Intestines) – General.

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rePost :: Firefighters watch a house burn down over fees… pathetic::Think Progress » Tennessee County’s Subscription-Based Firefighters Watch As Family Home Burns Down

The conservative vision was on full display last week in Obion County, Tennessee. In this rural section of Tennessee, Gene Cranick’s home caught on fire. As the Cranicks fled their home, their neighbors alerted the county’s firefighters, who soon arrived at the scene. Yet when the firefighters arrived, they refused to put out the fire, saying that the family failed to pay the annual subscription fee to the fire department. Because the county’s fire services for rural residences is based on household subscription fees, the firefighters, fully equipped to help the Cranicks, stood by and watched as the home burned to the ground:
Imagine your home catches fire but the local fire department won’t respond, then watches it burn. That’s exactly what happened to a local family tonight. A local neighborhood is furious after firefighters watched as an Obion County, Tennessee, home burned to the ground.
via Think Progress » Tennessee County’s Subscription-Based Firefighters Watch As Family Home Burns Down.

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rePost :: :: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Not addiction; dependency

I have to admit a certain affinity towards how Ternovskiy feels. It is an impulse I try to fight against constantly.

By “the world,” of course, Ternovskiy means the Internet, which is also where most of his friends are. His closest confidant is a Russian immigrant named Kirill Gura, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Every night for the past five years, Ternovskiy has turned on his computer, found Kirill on MSN Messenger, and talked to him until one of them fell asleep. “He’s a real friend,” Ternovskiy says … Ternovskiy says that he sees the computer as “one hundred percent my window into the world.” He doesn’t seek much else. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he says. “It might replace everything.”
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Not addiction; dependency.

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Quote :: I am a Muslim and I am a fan of South Park. ….. :: The South Park Controversy « CHUP! – Changing Up Pakistan

I am a Muslim and I am a fan of South Park. To make those terms mutually exclusive is polarizing and frankly, unproductive. Aasif Mandvi over at the Daily Show summarized my sentiment exactly when he said last night, “Yes, it [the depiction] would make me uncomfortable and I can understand people being upset about it…but here’s whats more upsetting. Someone, in the name of a faith that I believe in, threatening another person for doing it.”
via The South Park Controversy « CHUP! – Changing Up Pakistan.

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rePost :: Facebook wants to control the Web, like it or not

Damn, part of me is considering deleting my facebook account seriously.
What do you think??

As usual with Facebook, you’re already entered into their nefarious scheme by default, though you can opt out. But it’s not exactly a cakewalk. PC World’s JR Raphael details the multistep tango [8] for turning off auto-sharing and disentangling your data from third-party sites.
Zuckerberg talks about the convenience of the Social Graph, and he’s right — it is more convenient when Pandora knows more about my musical preferences. (Of course, considering a premium Pandora account costs $36 a year, it should already know plenty.) It’s more convenient to simply click a button on a site I’ve just discovered and populate yet another Web profile with information I’ve already entered into Facebook. It’s more convenient to see which friends share my perverse interests without having to scroll through their Facebook profiles.
But the social graph isn’t about convenience — it’s about control. Facebook wants to own single-sign-on and authentication, just as Apple wants to own what apps you can install on your Wonder Tablet [9], and Amazon wants to control how you manage e-books on your Kindle [10] — only Facebooks wants to do it across the entire Web.
Factory City blogger Chris Messina [11] writes:
When all likes lead to Facebook, and liking requires a Facebook account, and Facebook gets to hoard all of the metadata and likes around the interactions between people and content, it depletes the ecosystem of potential and chaos — those attributes which make the technology industry so interesting and competitive. … it’s dishonest to think that the Facebook Open Graph Protocol benefits anyone more than Facebook — as it exists in its current incarnation, with Facebook accounts as the only valid participants.
As I and others have said before, your identity is too important to be owned by any one company.
via Facebook wants to control the Web, like it or not.

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WTF :: News Sources ?? :: Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose

About 83 percent say TV. Less than 10 percent say radio, only 2 percent say the papers.
But here’s the clincher. What then are the top trusted sources of news? Two out of three won’t surprise you: “TV Patrol,” and its rival, “24 Oras.” But the third top trusted source of news is “Wowowee.”
The question then becomes: Is one citizen’s definition of a news source very different from that of others? The figures can apply to radio, where Bombo Radyo and DZRH find themselves as trusted news sources together with Love Radio on FM; or to the broadsheets, where the Inquirer and Manila Bulletin are in the company of the tabloid Bulgar.
via Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose.