Tag Archives: english

New Science Tells Us That Men In Politics Are Blowhards

by Kristi23Gay Posted on January 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of researchers in Switzerland wanted to judge how confident students in different career paths were. First, they split them into groups of 12 and gave each a short test:

  1. In which year was the Nobel Prize in physics awarded to Albert Einstein?
  2. In which year was pope John Paul I (the direct predecessor of John Paul II) elected Pope?
  3. In which year did the reactor accident happen in Chernobyl?
  4. In which year was Elvis Presley born?
  5. In which year did the first flight with the supersonic jet Concorde take place?

The answers are 1921, 1978, 1986, 1935, and 1976. My guesses were 1920, 1979, 1986, 1940,1 and 1973, so I was off by a total of 10 years. How do I think this compared with the rest of my group? I’m going to say I was third best. If it turns out that I was, in fact, only fifth best, I was overconfident by two ranks.

So how did everyone do? The first answer is simple: as you’d expect, men were vastly overconfident in their results and women were vastly underconfident. The chart on the right shows the second answer: political scientists were way overconfident and humanities students were way underconfident. Buck up, history majors! You know more than the budding politicians even if they’re oh-so-sure they know everything.

Bottom line: Science™ says that men in politics are blowhards. Ignore them. Women with English degrees know more than they think. Listen to them. That is all.

1This means that Elvis was drafted into the army at age 23. Doesn’t that seem a little late?

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New Science Tells Us That Men In Politics Are Blowhards

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Lets All Agree That Apostrophe’s Arent Necessary

by LynwoodWingfiel Posted on January 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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German Lopez says that “apostrophes offer an exciting opportunity to show other people how smart and educated you are”—which all by itself makes it worth learning how to use them. For example:

Another common issue is irregular plural words, like children and teeth. For these words, you add an apostrophe and an s — so children’s toys and teeth’s roots.

Live by the apostrophe, die by the apostrophe. My middle-school English teacher beat into us that only humans can possess things. Animals too, I suppose. Or countries. But in any case, never inanimate objects. So it’s “roots of teeth,” because teeth don’t own roots.

Of course, some young punks think this is a dated rule that makes no sense, and they go around merrily giving inanimate objects possession of everything. This is appalling. Of course this rule makes no sense, but that’s the whole reason that good grammar demonstrates how smart and educated you are. If we did what made sense, we’d eliminate the apostrophe entirely since it’s never necessary for comprehension. But that way lies anarchy.

Anyway, everyone1 loves to argue about grammatical minutiae, so have a beer and get to it in comments.

1Actually, not everyone. But my readers sure seem to like it!

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Lets All Agree That Apostrophe’s Arent Necessary

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Hip Hip Hooray For They!

by MonikaKerr Posted on January 9, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post reports some terrific news:

Singular “they,” the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening.

….The Post’s style guide ratified this usage last month, which caused some grammar pedants to shriek. But as Post copy editor Bill Walsh explained, the singular they is “the only sensible solution to English’s lack of a gender-neutral third-person singular personal pronoun.”

OK, so we can now say:

I talked to Pat, and they said the sofa was on its way.
Pat said their sofa had been promised for tomorrow.
Pat came over, and I talked to them about when the sofa would arrive.

Takes some getting used to, doesn’t it? But I’m all for it. I will celebrate the day when gendered pronouns are gone for good.

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Hip Hip Hooray For They!

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I Hated All the Star Wars Movies, Except This One. Here’s Why.

by SharylDellinger Posted on December 18, 2015

Mother Jones

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens just hit theaters. We asked Mother Jones’ own Ben Dreyfuss—a known Star Wars critic—and Edwin Rios—a self-proclaimed fanboy—to share their thoughts after seeing the highly anticipated picture. This discussion has been edited for clarity.

Edwin Rios: BEN!

Ben Dreyfuss: Eddie! OK, Star Wars is here! I just walked out of a 10 a.m. showing. You saw it this morning?

ER: I’ve been up since 4 a.m. Somehow, I’m alive after a 5:15 a.m. showing.

BD: 5:15 a.m. is commitment. That is true love. So let’s start this this way, then: You are a Star Wars fan, correct?

ER: Yeah, back when I was a child, my pops had the original VHS box set. I may or may not have watched it on loop.

BD: OK, so you are saying you love the original Star Wars films because they remind you of playing catch with your dad? There are daddy issues here. Which is fine!

ER: Hmm, I hadn’t thought of that.

BD: OK, so let me just start by saying that I am not a Star Wars fan. I guess when they first came out in the ’70s and early ’80s, the graphics were kickass and new and “wow!” but for people our age they’re not that impressive.

ER: Totally understand that. The first film actually came out in 1977. I would imagine it was pretty revolutionary for its time—the graphics, the camera work, the idea that these randos are traveling through space on an intergalactic adventure.

BD: But let’s talk about this new one. And SPOILER ALERT: We will spoil it all.

ER: Yeah, c’mon, it’s the 21st century, and we’re on the Internet. Spoilers are everywhere. By the way, did you hear Daniel Craig apparently made a cameo?

BD: WHAT?

ER: Yeah! Apparently he was in that scene with Rey, when she asked the Stormtrooper oh so nicely to loosen her restraints.

BD: That was a great scene. OK, general thoughts: I really enjoyed it. I thought it was far and away the best of the series.

ER: See, I’m not sure about “best of the series.” I thoroughly enjoyed every moment, from the iconic John Williams opener to the TIE fighter battle at the end. It harkened to the original trilogy most of the time. But—

BD: Well, I mean we could call this entire fucking film an homage to the original. SO many elements are reproduced. They even joke about it when Harrison Ford is looking at a model of the Death Star and the SUPER DEATH STAR and he says, “I get it. It’s big.”

ER: I mean, it’s a fan’s wet dream.

BD: There is this fight in films like this about whether they should be written for fans or for general audiences. I think you see a lot of ones that go awry are because they’re trying too hard to accommodate the diehards, à la Watchmen, but this one had seemed to also have enough broad appeal to stand on its own.

ER: Totally agree. Can we talk about this cast? That’s what did it for me. It’s just a young and diverse collection of heroes and villains. Badass female lead, badass black and Latino duo.

BD: The leads, whose names I don’t know, but the guy and the girl, they were both pretty fucking amazing.

ER: For sure. This was John Boyega’s (Finn) and Daisy Ridley’s (Rey) launch party. Oh, and Adam freaking Driver killed it as a petulant Darth Vader wannabe.

BD: Totally. And I found, to my surprise, that they really were more interesting than the original actors who admittedly had less to do in this film. But I was sort of bored by their requisite presence and wanted to get back to the Star Wars: The New Class.

ER: A cast of nobodies embodying the allure of an iconic series. It looks all too familiar. Also, can’t forget Oscar Isaac. He was severely underutilized.

BD: Let’s talk a bit about the plot.

ER: How did you feel about the First Order’s weird Nazi overtones?

BD: Oh man! They laid that on thick! That scene with them literally heiling the SS guy?

ER: I literally whispered, “damn, that’s so Nazi,” under my breath when that scene came on.

BD: In one of the first scenes, the Stormtroopers go to the shitty sand planet and are executing people, and the hero, Finn, watches his friend die and there’s the blood on his mask—and he like grows as a person. I mean, from the standpoint of his military career he really did not have a stellar first mission. But I thought the actual emotional moment was some pretty beautiful storytelling that you don’t often see in this genre.

ER: Yeah, it’s something you barely thought about in the original movies. What would happen if a Stormtrooper just said, “Forget this, I’m outta here”? And what if some random scavenger on a desert planet ran into that same Stormtrooper? It’s an alternative perspective on the typical storyline.

BD: How did you feel about the old crew’s presence? Carrie Fisher wasn’t really given much to do.

ER: Neither was R2-D2.

BD: WAIT. R2 D-2. Now I have a question. I totally didn’t understand what the fuck that was about. He had a map but went dark when Luke flew away and then just decided to repower on right at the last second after X many years?

ER: Actually, let’s get back to that, because I have thoughts on that. In a word: It was so fucking implausible. Like WTF R2, NOW YOU WANT TO WAKE UP?

BD: HAHAHAH. It made NO SENSE. They didn’t even try and justify it in dialogued.

ER: Yeah, BB8, who is so adorable, was just like, “Oh shit, you’re awake!” And C3PO is like, “Oh, hi.” Basically.

BD: Is BB8 the ball?

ER: Yeah.

BD: The ball was great. The ball is a fucking star.

ER: Ball So Hard.

BD: Why does the ball talk in clicks and beeps? Like I know R2-D2 does too but it seems very difficult for many of the humans to deal with. Like some know how to speak beep and squeak but other don’t. Why don’t they program the robots to talk in English like Mr. Gold C3PO?

ER: Good question.

BD: THE BALL CAN CLEARLY UNDERSTAND ENGLISH. WHY CAN’T HE SPEAK IT? This is actually my biggest complaint about this movie. I took the time to tweet about it from the theater.

ER: I mean, the droid is still a robot. And it has the capacity to understand, which made it hilarious when Finn was trying to get BB to side with him.

BD: Yeah that was a cute scene. There were a lot of really cute scenes.

ER: Here’s my problem with the plot: It lacked context.

BD: How so?

ER: So let me get this straight: The First Order and the Resistance are fighting. The First Order is basically like the Empire, but not like the Empire. The Resistance is like the Republic, but not actually the Republic. The First Order is controlled by the Dark Side, while the Resistance is trying to establish peace?

BD: Yeah, without any Force. Like they have no Jedi since Luke ran off to play Survivor on some island.

ER: Beautiful shot, by the way. Mark Hamill in his best acting performance since The Kingsman. I just saw that movie recently and was like “OMG Mark Hamill’s head explodes!”

BD: He has spent the last like 20 years doing voiceover work. I think he was in a bunch like animated Batman series.

ER: For sure. He’s kept busy. But back to the plot: Luke has disappeared, and everyone is trying to find him.

BD: You’ve just reminded me of another plot flaw. What sets this movie off aside from the personal revelation that being a Stormtrooper is bad? Like the Super Death Star Ray that the Empire or First Order whatever the hell they’re called is already online. They use it to kill like 10,000,000,000 people midway through and then are going to use it to kill the rest of them. But they didn’t just turn it on. They could have done that months or years or whenever ago.

ER: Right. Also, not a smart move to absorb the sun’s energy to power the weapon. It really screwed the First Order at the end of the day.

BD: I’m no scientist but when suns collapse they like create dark holes I think which are bad. Wait, I have another question. Let’s just acknowledge this right here: Adam Driver or whatever his character’s name is kills Harrison Ford in a pretty obvious moment of like “shake my hand, pa, let’s have a game of catch” and then stabs him in the heart. Then some other shit happens and the girl discovers she has the Force and gets Luke’s lightsaber and then suddenly has all this Force power and does some Force shit and she kills Adam Driver in the woods.

ER: So, two things: I still want to know Rey’s backstory. Whose child is she? And why was she abandoned in the desert? And with whom? But yeah, back to Han Solo’s horrific death scene: It genuinely felt like that moment in Empire Strikes Back, I think, when Luke finds out Vader is his pops and has a WTF moment. Only this time, Kylo Ren seems to have a moment of “maybe I can be good” and then says, “no way” and kills his dad.

BD: So my other question was, how does the girl become so good at sword fighting? I get she has the Force in her because she just has the Force in her, but Adam Driver has been training to kill people with his crucifix lightsaber for years. She just got her first lightsaber and is suddenly winning fucking gold medals in fencing at the Olympics.

ER: If you can fight with a staff in the desert, you can use a lightsaber. Although it also raises the question: How was Finn using the lightsaber so well? He worked in sanitation!

BD: That’s a great point.

ER: He was a janitor, basically. And yet he wielded a lightsaber and went pound for pound against Kylo Ren. Also, let’s appreciate just how much of a child Kylo Ren acted like when things went wrong for him. And how he Force-choked that one general.

BD: Literally having a tantrum and destroying his battleship room with his lightsaber.

ER: He’s got anger and daddy issues.

BD: Final thoughts: I really liked it. I think the reason it is better than the original movies (which are overrated) and the prequels (which are garbage but also somewhat underrated because everyone hates them so much) is largely because J.J. Abrams is a better and more technically inventive filmmaker than George Lucas. (also, for the record, I called this months ago)

ER: But Ben, the originals are not overrated, and The Force Awakens exemplifies why. The things that made the Star Wars series great—its pace, its wit, its storytelling—are what made this movie all the more memorable.

BD: NO WHAT MADE IT GREAT WAS THE CAST AND J.J. ABRAMS.

ER: For the Star Wars fan, this was a wet dream come true. For the typical moviegoer, it was straight-up a good holiday action film.

BD: “Wet dream” is a thing I bet most Star Wars fans know well since they’re all adolescent boys with acne. (Sorry, no offense. I was once one too.)

ER: J.J. Abrams, you done good.

BD: And with that, let’s publish this motherfucker.

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I Hated All the Star Wars Movies, Except This One. Here’s Why.

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George Zimmerman Posted a Photo of Trayvon Martin’s Dead Body

by Bobbie07Ynuwisj Posted on September 28, 2015

Mother Jones

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Over the weekend, George Zimmerman retweeted an image of Trayvon Martin’s dead body. The image was first tweeted to him by a fan who wrote, “Z-Man is a one man army.”

After the tweet was deleted, apparently by Twitter, Zimmerman posted a tweet directing media inquiries to the phone number of a car audio shop. When I called it, a disgruntled man said it was not affiliated with Zimmerman. I asked what he meant, and he said, “It’s pretty cut and dry, dude. Do you understand English?” Then he hung up. The number, it turns out, belongs to a man Zimmerman has been waging a social media campaign against.

Twitter would not comment on why they took down the photo, but the company directed me to its policy, which states that users “may not publish or post threats of violence against others or promote violence against others.”

Previously, Zimmerman’s tweets have referred to black people as primates and “slime.”

In August, Zimmerman teamed up with the owner of a gun store with a no-Muslims-allowed policy to sell prints of his Confederate flag art, which he says “represents the hypocrisy of political correctness that is plaguing this nation.”

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George Zimmerman Posted a Photo of Trayvon Martin’s Dead Body

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It’s Not the Economy, Stupid. The Spanish Language Is the Ur-Motive of Anti-Immigration Sentiment.

by AbbeyAGWvozn Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore on the conservative hostility toward illegal immigration:

This very weekend I was reading an advance copy of an upcoming book that includes the results of some intensive focus group work with what might be called the “angry wing” of the GOP base. The author notes that one thing that simply enrages grass-roots conservatives is the use of non-English languages by immigrants.

Yep. You can read all about it from one of Kilgore’s predecessors, who wrote about it during our last big try at immigration reform in 2006. It’s based on an excellent piece by Chris Hayes, written before he sold out to the bright lights and big paychecks of cable television.

I agree that language is probably the key original driver of anti-immigrant sentiment, though it’s long since inspired further animus based around crime, gangs, social services, and other culture-related issues. The odd thing is that this is one of the few areas where I think the anti-immigrationists have a bit of a point. It’s not a very big point, since (a) Spanish occupies no official role in the United States, and (b) Latin American immigrants all end up speaking English by the second and third generations anyway. Hell, the third-generation Latino who speaks lousy Spanish is practically a cliche.

That said, I’ve long believed that having multiple official languages makes it very hard to sustain a united polity. The Swiss manage, but the whole reason they’re famous for it is because it’s so unusual. Even the Belgians and Canadians have trouble with it, and they’re pretty tolerant people.

Would a congressional declaration that English is the official language of the United States do anything to calm anti-immigrant fervor? At this point, probably not. But if it were written narrowly and carefully, I’d probably support it. I figure that if God considered a single common language such a boon that it threatened his dominion, it must be pretty powerful stuff.

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It’s Not the Economy, Stupid. The Spanish Language Is the Ur-Motive of Anti-Immigration Sentiment.

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Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

by PhoebeKmk753134 Posted on August 28, 2015

Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

By on 28 Aug 2015commentsShare

It’s a safe bet that most kids who make excuses for bad grades are just totally full of it. Couldn’t upload your homework because the internet was down? Nice try. The latest video in your YouTube series went viral, and you just had to spend all night responding to comments? You’re not that important. Dog ate your homework? Stop it. But if a kid says her GPA is a touch low because her home is shrouded in toxic air pollution, maybe listen to her.

In a recent study published in the journal Population and Environment, researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso reported that kids living in highly polluted areas tended to have lower GPAs than their peers — and that’s after the researchers accounted for the child’s age, race, and sex, their family’s household income, and the mother’s education level, age during pregnancy, and English proficiency.

Previous studies have shown correlations between students’ academic performance and air pollution levels around schools, but this is the first to look at home environments, where students likely spend most of their time. The researchers conducted the study using data from the EPA’s National Air Toxics Assessment and the academic records of 1,895 fourth and fifth graders around El Paso. The overall differences in GPA were small, the researchers reported, but the association with home toxicity was strong, and that’s cause for concern:

Effects appear to be insidious, since they are mild, unlikely to be perceived, and, hence, unlikely to be addressed in any way. It would be important to note that seemingly trivial effects on children’s development may translate into substantial impacts throughout the life course, in terms of physical and mental health and personal success (e.g., lifetime earnings).

How exactly these pollutants influence a child’s academic performance is a bit murky. Sara E. Grineski, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at UTEP and one of the study’s coauthors, said in the press release that there could be a few things going on here:

“Some evidence suggests that this association might exist because of illnesses, such as respiratory infections or asthma. Air pollution makes children sick, which leads to absenteeism and poor performance in school. The other hypothesis is that chronic exposure to air toxics can negatively affect children’s neurological and brain development.”

The primary sources of the harmful pollution came from what the researchers called “non-mobile road sources” — things like trains, construction vehicles, and airplanes. That the researchers separated out these various sources of pollution is another reason that this study is unique compared to previous research that just looked at pollution in aggregate:

While point (e.g., factories) and on-road mobile (e.g., freeways) sources of air pollution have received the most attention in the policy and academic arenas, the contribution to non-road mobile sources to the overall pollution burden is increasingly being recognized nationwide. For example, new evidence suggests that the particle pollution generated from the Los Angeles International airport extends over 10 km and is of the same general magnitude as the entire freeway system in Los Angeles, California, USA (Hudda et al. 2014).

Since low-income and minority neighborhoods tend to be the most popular dumping grounds for air pollution compared to their more affluent counterparts, this is clearly a job for — oh, sorry. It’s just that environmental justice gets violated so often these days that it seems like it should have its own superhero by now — a Superman to its Metropolis, a Batman to its Gotham. Do you think we could get Captain Planet to spearhead an Environmental Justice League?

Source:

Study Links Air Pollution to Children’s Low GPAs

, UTEP News.

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A Grist Special Series

Oceans 15


That 15-foot-long tiger shark need wrestling? Leave it to the prosYou probably aren’t going to tango with a tiger shark anytime soon — but David Shiffman does it on a weekly basis, for science.


These first-time fishermen know all the best (and worst) parts of fishingAndrew and Sophie never planned to be commercial fishermen — but they tried it for a summer. Here’s what they learned.


How to feed the world, with a little kelp from our friends (the oceans)Paul Dobbins’ farm needs no pesticides, fertilizer, land, or water — we just have to learn to love seaweed.


This surfer is committed to saving sharks — even though he lost his leg to one of themMike Coots lost his leg in a shark attack. Then he joined the group Shark Attack Survivors for Shark Conservation, and started fighting to save SHARKS from US.


Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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Air pollution at home could lower kids’ GPAs

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For Saturday: A Very Long and Possibly Tiresome Conversation About Whether "Anchor Baby" Is a Slur

by Thaddeu2881 Posted on August 22, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday morning, I asked exactly why the term “anchor baby” is considered by many to be offensive. As penance, last night I waded through lots of comments to that post—a few of which were actually on topic!—as well as some email and Twitter and other articles on the subject. So here’s the follow-up.

At the end of this post I’ll offer a tentative conclusion, but first I have a few comments. Before even that, though, here’s a nickel paraphrase of the various answers I came across:

  1. The term was invented by anti-immigration activists, who meant it as a slur. So it’s a slur.
  2. Latinos consider it a slur, so it’s a slur.
  3. It implies that babies of immigrants have a kind of second-class citizenship. You and I are “real” US citizens while others are mere grown-up anchor babies.
  4. It dehumanizes both mother and baby by turning them into a label for political purposes.
  5. It implies that Mexican mothers are coldly calculating parasites. Like the Reagan-era “welfare queen” slur, it suggests they see the child merely as a legal boon, not someone to love and cherish, as the rest of us do.
  6. In reality, this hardly ever happens. It’s basically a lie intended to whip up anti-immigrant fervor, and this makes it offensive.

A couple of comments before I wade into each of these. First, I’m obviously diving into an ongoing conversation that I haven’t followed in any depth. I don’t pretend to any expertise on this topic. Second, we’re talking here only about Mexican/Latino immigrants, not the well-documented “birth tourism” of (mostly) well-to-do Asian families. That said, here are my comments on each of the six items above.

  1. I don’t think I buy this. The etymology of the term probably goes back to the “anchor children” of the post-Vietnam era, and at the time it seems to have been primarily descriptive, not meant as a slur.
  2. This is the kind of explanation that conservatives like to sneer at, but it’s perfectly sensible as long as it’s not abused. Who’s better placed to know if something is hurtful than the person it’s aimed at? That said, there still needs to be some reason they consider it hurtful. It can’t just be a case of hypersensitivity. We’ll get to that in a minute.
  3. I saw this one a lot, but I have to say it always had the ring of something cut-and-pasted from somewhere else to help fill up a column. It was never really explained, just asserted, and always using suspiciously similar language.
  4. I don’t buy this at all. We use labels all the time. It’s human nature. I’m a “baby boomer,” for example. Is this offensive? Does it imply that my parents were mere automatons who pumped out babies just because all their friends were pumping out babies? There are thousands of labels we use for other people, and they aren’t automatically offensive or demeaning. It depends on the label.
  5. Now we’re getting somewhere. I find this, by far, the most persuasive argument. However, it depends a lot on whether there’s any truth to this charge. Keep reading.
  6. This one is….tricky. It also turns out to be heart of the argument, I think.

So: do anchor babies actually exist? Or is this merely a myth? This one gets a bunch of bullet points all its own:

The notion that having a baby in the US helps the parents gain citizenship is legally specious. The child can’t sponsor them for citizenship until age 21, and even then it normally takes another decade before they qualify. It’s unlikely that Mexican immigrants are having babies just on the chance that they’ll gain US citizenship three decades later.
However, in practice it might help parents stay in the US. Judges are probably less likely to deport parents who have a baby that can’t be legally deported along with them.
On a related note, parents might do this not to anchor themselves to the US, but to anchor the child. In other words, they want a better life for their child, and the best way to guarantee that is to give birth on US soil.
All that said, we’re still left with an unanswered question: how common is it for parents to illegally cross the border solely (or primarily) for the purpose of ensuring that their child will be a US citizen? As near as I can tell, there’s basically no research on this point at all—and even if there were, it would probably be inconclusive. Parents who immigrate illegally almost certainly have a whole host of reasons for doing so: a better life for themselves, a better life for their children, money to send home to family, etc. How can you possibly tease out just how important US citizenship is in this jumble of motives?
And now we get to the end. If anchor babies are basically a myth, then the term is obviously a slur. There’s no reason to make up this name for something that never (or very rarely) happens except as a way of demeaning a class of people and appealing to crude xenophobia. But if it does happen, then it makes sense to have a term for it. Otherwise you can’t even talk about the subject sensibly. And if that’s the case, there’s nothing inherently insulting about “anchor baby” as a descriptive term.

I don’t have a firm conclusion here. Sorry. At this point, I guess I’d say that it’s up to the anti-immigration folks to demonstrate that anchor babies actually exist in any meaningful numbers. They’ve had plenty of time, but so far don’t seem to have come up with anything. So put up or shut up, folks. Unless you’ve got some evidence that this is a real (and common) phenomenon, it’s a slur.

Finally, I get why some lefties find this whole conversation amusing. Privileged middle-class white guy just doesn’t get it, and has to write a thousand words of argle-bargle to understand something that’s obvious to anyone with a clue. Sure. But look: you have to interrogate this stuff or you just end up as a tribal hack. And since this is a blog, and I’m an analytical kind of person, what you get is a brain dump translated into English and organized to try to make sense. It can seem naive to see it put down in words like this, but the truth is that we all think this way to some degree or another.

POSTSCRIPT: On Twitter, Frank Koughan good-naturedly suggests that it should be a rule of blogging that if you ask readers a question, you post an update so that everyone doesn’t have to wade through 300 comments. Fair enough. But this post is an example of why I don’t always do this: it can turn into a lot of work! Sometimes there’s a simple answer in comments, but that’s rare. Usually about 95 percent of the comments are off topic and the other 5 percent all disagree with each other. So it’s not as easy as it sounds.

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For Saturday: A Very Long and Possibly Tiresome Conversation About Whether "Anchor Baby" Is a Slur

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Why Do Americans Love Tech Startups More Than Europeans?

by DamianMoulds Posted on July 10, 2015

Mother Jones

Jim Pethokoukis muses again today about the relative success of tech startups in America vs. Europe. He notes that apparently Europe is getting better in this regard, but still lags the US, and offers a few conventional reasons for the US advantage (plenty of capital, lots of talent, risk-loving culture, etc.) and then adds a few other possibilities from comments. This one in particular struck me:

Startups need customers. My experiences is American businesses are generally more likely to take a chance on a new company’s product if they think it will be advantageous, even if that company might not be exactly stable. I say generally, because it is certainly not universal. I was in the past deeply involved with another startup in the U.S. that generated most of its revenue from the UK for its first several years because for this particular market the major players in the UK were more change-seeking than their counterparts in the US. Ironically, this was largely because we addressed some pain points related to labor and energy that were not as painful for similar companies in the U.S.

Back when I was in the tech biz, we introduced a new version of a product we’d been selling for several years. It was already reasonably successful in Europe, though still a bit of a tougher sell than in the US. But the new version was a problem. It worked well. It introduced new capabilities that were pretty useful. And it was basically just a plug-in to the original product. All of that was fine. The product itself was not the problem. Its name was the problem.

No, this is not a funny story about accidentally naming something “cow dung” in Croatian. It was all in English. The problem was this: our new product added the ability to support remote users via the internet, so we called it AC Internet Server (AC being the original product name). Our European distributors and sales force were aghast. They told us no one would buy it if it had “Internet” in the name.

We in marketing were nonplussed. This was 1999, not 1990. Everyone wanted internet versions of existing products. Hell, they wanted them even if internet connectivity didn’t make sense for a particular product. It was hot and new. When we were brainstorming names for the new product, we were willing to consider just about anything. The only rule was that “Internet” had to be in the name somewhere.

But in Europe—in 1999—they wanted no part of that. To them, the internet didn’t suggest hot and new. We were told in no uncertain terms that it suggested fragile and unreliable.

Now, in retrospect, you can certainly argue that Americans went overboard on all things internet in the late 90s. But even in retrospect, I’m still gobsmacked that a lot of large European companies were unwilling to get on the bandwagon at all. Not for anything mission critical, anyway. And this despite the fact that internet connections were roughly as good and as cheap in Europe at the time as they were in the US. This wasn’t a problem of outdated infrastructure.

But there you have it. European companies do seem to be less willing to roll the dice and try something new that might not be fully ready for prime time. Americans, for better or worse, seem almost gleeful about it. Sometimes that spells disaster. But over the long run, it means that (a) our startups do indeed have a bigger pool of potential buyers and (b) new technology gets a quick trial by fire and then gets adopted rapidly if it works. Even when this produces lots of epic failures like pets.com, it probably works out better for everyone in the long run.

Is this still true of European companies? Are they generally less willing to adopt new technologies? Are they generally less willing to buy products from startups with an uncertain future? I don’t know. This all happened 15 years ago and I have no experience since then. Feel free to chime in via comments if you have something to add.

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Why Do Americans Love Tech Startups More Than Europeans?

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Sorry, Obama. The Founding Fathers Loved Peas

by LilaMontanez Posted on July 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, after the New York Times proposed adding peas to guacamole (what’s next, mayonnaise?), President Barack Obama announced that the proper way to make guacamole is with avocado, onions, garlic, and hot pepper. It wasn’t the first time the leader of the free world had disparaged peas. In 2011, when Congress stalled on raising the debt ceiling, he announced that it was time for all parties involved to “eat our peas“—swallow the tough pill, if you will.

But Obama’s anti-pea polemic, published just days before the Fourth of July, puts him at odds with an important group of Americans—the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers loved peas.

Thomas Jefferson’s favorite vegetable, according to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, was the English pea. He cultivated 19 different kinds of peas in the Monticello vegetable garden, including 15 kinds of English peas. Among them were Marrowfat, Hotspur, Blue Prussian, and Early Frame. (Jefferson even spoke with Mother Jones about his peas in February.) Letters to his daughter, Mary, often made reference to the status of the peas. Here he is discussing peas in a letter to George Washington:

Peas. Observations on the writings of Thomas Jefferson/Google Books

Peas weren’t just sustenance for Jefferson. They were a way of life; every year he would hold a contest with his neighbor to see whose peas would sprout first. Per the Monticello website:

Though Jefferson’s mountaintop garden, with its southern exposure to warmth and light, should have provided an advantage for the contest, it seems that the contest was almost always won by a neighbor named George Divers.

As Jefferson’s grandson recalled: “A wealthy neighbor Divers, without children, and fond of horticulture, generally triumphed. Mr. Jefferson, on one occasion had them first, and when his family reminded him that it was his right to invite the company, he replied, ‘No, say nothing about it, it will be more agreeable to our friend to think that he never fails.'”

Divers, that clever knave! There’s even a children’s book, First Peas to the Table, inspired by Jefferson’s fruitless obsession with winning at peas.

Jefferson’s friends in government got in on the action too. At his prodding, George Washington attempted to plant English peas at Mount Vernon, with mixed results. But Washington loved peas so much that when a bunch Tories attempted to kill him, they did so by poisoning a dish of his favorite food—peas. Wise to the plot, a 13-year-old girl fed them to his chickens first as a precautionary measure. (Or at least, that’s the legend. It’s probably apocryphal.)

The point is, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington loved peas. If avocados had even been around when they were president, they would have made pea guacamole. And they would have loved that, too. Pea hold these shoots to be self-evident.

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Sorry, Obama. The Founding Fathers Loved Peas

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