Isn't English already Americas official language? Can someone confirm this for my own knowledge please..
Occupy Wall St.
- Thread starter boneil
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Isn't English already Americas official language? Can someone confirm this for my own knowledge please..
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The placard-holder is complaining about the influx of Spanish-speaking Mexicans into southern states -- Arizona, California, Texas. In these states, signs and notices can be found in both Spanish and English. And in many neighborhoods in cities like LA and Houston, you can't make yourself understood in English. The irony resides in the fact that the placard-holder inadvertently misspelt "official."
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I find myself supporting what you're saying. I don't want to be taxed to support someone else's health care -- even if it were a life and death situation. I'm not my brother's keeper in the USA. Medical costs keep soaring and I don't see why I should foot the bill in a nation of mutual strangers. I would do it in Norway where I know there's a social contract that will cover me as well. There's no such guarantee in the USA.
maybe i'm being too misanthropic, but if i could count on the average person to make smart life decisions (yes, i know there are extreme cases/accidents/etc.), maybe it'd be an easier pill to swallow. as it is, i don't want to put in 100 hour work weeks because the nation has an obsession with type ii diabetes. further, if i choose to guzzle down shake shack every day, knowing my life will be short but oh so sweet, i shouldn't (and wouldn't) expect anyone else to foot the bill.
additionally, i'm loving the "misspelt."
additionally, i'm loving the "misspelt."
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British English. I override my spell-check all the time (e.g., "learnt instead of "learned", "recognise" instead of "recognize," "centre" instead of "center," "labour" instead of "labor."
Here is the Daily Telegraph using "misspelt."
BBC doing the same thing here.
More here on the topic of "misspelt."
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The issue with "English Only" isn't a hatred for Mexicans, it is the fact that we have seemingly open borders.
My girlfriend has gone through an excruciating process to work in this country. Only because she wasn't lucky enough to be born within fence jumping distance. I have never heard a Republican who is against LEGAL immigration. The problem is that the answer for the Democrats tends to be amnesty, which is unacceptable since you cannot have amnesty until you have a secure border. If the border is not secured, you will just have to have another round of "amnesty" later on down the road.
The argument that illegals do jobs Americans won't, for wages Americans won't work for, is bullsh*t in my book. That is almost an argument for slavery. If we are going to have people work in this country they should work for the same wages that everyone else does. To allow otherwise is morally repugnant.
Plain fact is this. We need to secure our borders and then we can consider amnesty. Until then, employers should not be allowed to hire ANYONE for less than minimum wage. Taking advantage of Mexicans simply because they are here illegally and cannot complain is not something this country should encourage or accept.
If that means fruit is a little more expensive or dishes don't get washed, so be it. In all actuality all it will mean is investments in machinery which will do the job of illegals for a marginally higher cost.
As for the protesters, it looks as if what I predicted might actually come true. Americans, as we always do, have become bored with the protesters. Our short attention span has begun to fade. Cold weather is coming and cities are sick of paying for the protesters who still cannot come up with a coherent message. few issues to push.
My girlfriend has gone through an excruciating process to work in this country. Only because she wasn't lucky enough to be born within fence jumping distance. I have never heard a Republican who is against LEGAL immigration. The problem is that the answer for the Democrats tends to be amnesty, which is unacceptable since you cannot have amnesty until you have a secure border. If the border is not secured, you will just have to have another round of "amnesty" later on down the road.
The argument that illegals do jobs Americans won't, for wages Americans won't work for, is bullsh*t in my book. That is almost an argument for slavery. If we are going to have people work in this country they should work for the same wages that everyone else does. To allow otherwise is morally repugnant.
Plain fact is this. We need to secure our borders and then we can consider amnesty. Until then, employers should not be allowed to hire ANYONE for less than minimum wage. Taking advantage of Mexicans simply because they are here illegally and cannot complain is not something this country should encourage or accept.
If that means fruit is a little more expensive or dishes don't get washed, so be it. In all actuality all it will mean is investments in machinery which will do the job of illegals for a marginally higher cost.
As for the protesters, it looks as if what I predicted might actually come true. Americans, as we always do, have become bored with the protesters. Our short attention span has begun to fade. Cold weather is coming and cities are sick of paying for the protesters who still cannot come up with a coherent message. few issues to push.
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Things happening in Oakland:
http://ows.bylinebeat.com/post/11933577103/video-occupyoakland-live-steam
Looks like they're using sound cannon. And apparently tear gas and rubber bullets as well.
http://ows.bylinebeat.com/post/11933577103/video-occupyoakland-live-steam
Looks like they're using sound cannon. And apparently tear gas and rubber bullets as well.
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Yeah, Atlanta is cracking down also. If only they had a concise message. All this would not of been for naught.
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Also, just to bring attention to something. While spelled incorrectly, you instantly got the message. It took me a couple passes and about a minute to reading for the other sign. This was with a stable picture and a comfortable couch. Imagine trying to read that sign in a parade or protest. Also, imagine trying to understand this sign without a finance education or experience.
Simplify the message. Use words and phrases that conjure emotion or action. Big, bold lettering.
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Domestic dissidence is now classed as "low-level terrorism." During the past decade, under the pretext of "terrorism," the USA has become ever more of a national security state where even citizens have very few rights (if any). They can even be assassinated by executive order. The FEMA camps, I understand, have been built to house large numbers of "dissidents" when the **** hits the fan. USA's rulers knew that Obama's bull**** about "hope and change" would have only so much traction before it wore out. This is not just me saying it -- a lot of conservatives and libertarians are saying it as well.
Abdel
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For the record, the United States has no official language.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States
SYau
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I thought it was Spanish.
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The "99%" are among the world's top 10%. Funny how now they suddenly start making moral arguments about the rapacity of bankers when those same bankers and institutions (IMF) have been doing the same in the rest of the world for decades. I've got no sympathy for the so-called 99%. A fair number of them seem to be pampered young white people who are furious that their Master of Fine Arts degree hasn't led to some $90,000 a year job.
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Vancouver's Occupy movement is going to end very quickly:
Vancouver set for showdown with occupiers after woman’s deat
Occupy Vancouver protesters told to leave after police officers bitten
This one in particular has less what I'd call 'legit' protestors, and a lot of addicts and vagrants from the downtown east side with nothing better to do.
Vancouver set for showdown with occupiers after woman’s deat
Occupy Vancouver protesters told to leave after police officers bitten
This one in particular has less what I'd call 'legit' protestors, and a lot of addicts and vagrants from the downtown east side with nothing better to do.
DominiConnor
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Protestors, taking care to dress "city gentleman" more than I normally do, complete with poppy. (For US readers, the traditional way of showing support for ex-servicemen in Britain is to wear a paper poppy for the first half of November)
They talked reasonably about their issues and I think they may have been perturbed by someone talking the way I do who agreed with them on much of substance.
The interactions with the police are quite different than those I see in NY...
They have formed an agreement that they will stay in a specified area and I observed that when a dispute amongst the protestors moved from shouting to pushing a well oiled mechanism of one female cop and three heavies walked towards them and generally helped calm things down. Overall the camp seemed to work well, they like to believe that it's a "consensus" with everyone taking part in decision making but it really wasn't too hard for me to spot the organisers who seemed good at their job.
My wife walks past them at night and is not very large and she tells me she feels entirely safe doing so, she watched as some violent anaarchists attempt to get the protestors to join in the shit that anarchists enjoy so much and they were soundly rebuffed.
They hate the media, enough that I felt it proper to disclose that I write for a few tech and career websites.
They are something of a tourist show, a bit like a huge troupe of buskers, tourists take photos city workers (St Pauls is the nearest station for Goldman Sachs, Jones Day (big US law firm) Merrill Lynch and the London Stock Exchange which is less popular amongst bankers than anti-capitalist protestors. They've also handled it badly putting up officious barriers in the way of city workers which wouldn't even slow down violent anarchists and generally being the assholes you'd expect them to be.
The occupiers do not have even a remotely coherent position...
One group were promoting a feminist response to the Afghan and Iraq wars which (minus the cliched feminism) actually represents what most Brits feel about the wars, but has nothing to do with banking. Lots o eco-types who didn't even seem to care about the good and bad role that global finance will play in the next generation of energy, a lost opportunity for them.
There was also pretty much every other protest type that one expects to see.
They are trying quite hard to honour their side of the deal with St Paul's cathedral and not only do they not damage London's most famous church they take care not to make much noise at the quart hours when prayers are said. St Pauls of course is divided. Unlike US Christians the hierachy is mostly to the left of the political centre, so the internal argument is between those who dislike capitalism and those who don't want their pretty (and newly restored) cathedral made to look untidy. The effective head of the church of England used to be a Marxist agitator, as I say it ain't like the US churches.
They do however seem to see it ending in some sort of fight.
The bulk of the protestors will I believe leave when the agreement expires but that creates a space for the violent types which is sad, democracy requires that we give a hearing to those we disagree with, indeed especially those we see as wrong headed.
They talked reasonably about their issues and I think they may have been perturbed by someone talking the way I do who agreed with them on much of substance.
The interactions with the police are quite different than those I see in NY...
They have formed an agreement that they will stay in a specified area and I observed that when a dispute amongst the protestors moved from shouting to pushing a well oiled mechanism of one female cop and three heavies walked towards them and generally helped calm things down. Overall the camp seemed to work well, they like to believe that it's a "consensus" with everyone taking part in decision making but it really wasn't too hard for me to spot the organisers who seemed good at their job.
My wife walks past them at night and is not very large and she tells me she feels entirely safe doing so, she watched as some violent anaarchists attempt to get the protestors to join in the shit that anarchists enjoy so much and they were soundly rebuffed.
They hate the media, enough that I felt it proper to disclose that I write for a few tech and career websites.
They are something of a tourist show, a bit like a huge troupe of buskers, tourists take photos city workers (St Pauls is the nearest station for Goldman Sachs, Jones Day (big US law firm) Merrill Lynch and the London Stock Exchange which is less popular amongst bankers than anti-capitalist protestors. They've also handled it badly putting up officious barriers in the way of city workers which wouldn't even slow down violent anarchists and generally being the assholes you'd expect them to be.
The occupiers do not have even a remotely coherent position...
One group were promoting a feminist response to the Afghan and Iraq wars which (minus the cliched feminism) actually represents what most Brits feel about the wars, but has nothing to do with banking. Lots o eco-types who didn't even seem to care about the good and bad role that global finance will play in the next generation of energy, a lost opportunity for them.
There was also pretty much every other protest type that one expects to see.
They are trying quite hard to honour their side of the deal with St Paul's cathedral and not only do they not damage London's most famous church they take care not to make much noise at the quart hours when prayers are said. St Pauls of course is divided. Unlike US Christians the hierachy is mostly to the left of the political centre, so the internal argument is between those who dislike capitalism and those who don't want their pretty (and newly restored) cathedral made to look untidy. The effective head of the church of England used to be a Marxist agitator, as I say it ain't like the US churches.
They do however seem to see it ending in some sort of fight.
The bulk of the protestors will I believe leave when the agreement expires but that creates a space for the violent types which is sad, democracy requires that we give a hearing to those we disagree with, indeed especially those we see as wrong headed.
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... and in other news a dog was selected to lead the Occupy Denver protests
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Well, this may come as a shock, but even I as a quant/engineer/whateverYouWantToCallMe support OWS. Why?
A) There is undeniable economic inequality in the US. If you step on somebody's toes, they have every right and justification to say "ow". That alone garners my support for this.
B) Yes, there are twits who got unmarketable degrees. But what of us who got what we thought would be marketable degrees? Such as oh, I don't know, a BS in operations research and an MS in statistics, as well as Stanford online coursework? Even despite this, with my mentor needing to build up trading revenue, time is so precious that even training me for free by proxy is very difficult for him at the moment and I'm thankful for everything he does for me, so I could get up to speed to be an entry-level analyst when he gets enough trading revenue.
And I'm not exactly what you call "stupid". And on top of that, I have work experience (some number > 0). And the job hunt is still ridiculous, because no employer wants to train--they just want someone to come in and be a solution, regardless of the fact that oh, they're a young, new graduate who is quite trainable!. Now imagine most people my age. Where do they go and find work? This is a recursion process with next to no base case...certainly not large enough to absorb all of the graduates coming out. What is supposed to happen--to have anyone without an engineering degree from Stanford or MIT (or the like) go flip burgers (aka the intersect of MIT/Stanford/etc. and engineering degree)?
C) Those that say "equality of opportunity not equality of outcome" when, oh, so many of them got their opportunities through certainly other mechanisms besides toil. Even worse if you're poor because due to reduced budgets and cutting funding for state universities, they reduce admissions for American students in favor of foreigners who can pay their way through.
In short, the pain people (of my age and older) are feeling is not just in their heads. It isn't as simple as "getting a job" (I wish!), and they most certainly do not have the opportunities that those who came before them did.
They have every right and justification to do what they are doing. As I said, if I lived in NYC, I'd go down to Zuccotti Park myself just to find some reporter and prove to them that not everyone in that crowd is a liberal-arts airhead twit that makes Rick Perry look intelligent by comparison (zing!).
As for some coherent message, how about this:
A) Acknowledge China's currency manipulation/command economy and slam massive tariffs on them to balance out their obvious economic cheating (hacking/IP stealing, etc...)
B) Put a $50,000-$75,000 price tag per year on every H1B/other working visa. If you truly cannot find candidates with the right skill set for your company and only a sponsored foreigner can fill that role due to some niche skill set he or she has, I'm sure you won't mind paying a little bit extra. Otherwise, hire American, hire for attitude, train for skill. Pick your poison.
C) The way to solve the problem of admitting foreign students into our universities and not letting them find jobs in the US so they go back to their native countries and use their American educations to compete with America?
Stop admitting foreign students into our universities for Pete's sake! If you really think that only foreign students can understand the coursework at the best universities, you are sorely mistaken. Right now, I'm running above a perfect score in Andrew Ng's machine learning course, and am loving it. Now, while he may give the Stanford students a bit less hand-holding with finding partial derivatives and assume they know some linear algebra, I remember that his Youtubed lectures for regression used the example of housing prices. What example did he use in his slides? The same exact one! I mean heck, whether you're at MIT or Swampville University, neither Newton's laws, nor calculus, nor the rest of the fundamental scientifically observed and experimentally corroborated laws of our universe will change. And while I realize Andrew Ng may be sliding so much of Machine Learning under the rug in the form of the "fminunc", "fmincg", "optimset", and other pre-written functions, and that a great deal of the effort in writing a program is to find the libraries you need and understanding their documentation, I am sure that this man is finding that there are plenty of people who can understand him quite clearly, and if he'd ratchet up the difficulty a bit more, there would still be a great deal of people who can understand him and do well in his assignments.
D) Have universities create apprenticeship programs so that even if a recession hits, the university is partnered up with companies who can take advantage of the skills their graduates learn. Honestly, the whole dog-and-pony show of interviewing is ridiculous. Who would know better what someone is capable of? Some human resource drone (human resources--arguably human, rarely resourceful, or as Dominic puts it--where those too stupid to be homeless get put to mitigate the damage their stupidity can cause)/technical interviewer with better things to do, or a professor who's worked with this student for a triple-digit amount of hours?
Now, some people may not agree with my policies, but when going from the standpoint of "how do we make life better for American citizens, the rest of the world be damned", I think I'm at least in the ballpark.
A) There is undeniable economic inequality in the US. If you step on somebody's toes, they have every right and justification to say "ow". That alone garners my support for this.
B) Yes, there are twits who got unmarketable degrees. But what of us who got what we thought would be marketable degrees? Such as oh, I don't know, a BS in operations research and an MS in statistics, as well as Stanford online coursework? Even despite this, with my mentor needing to build up trading revenue, time is so precious that even training me for free by proxy is very difficult for him at the moment and I'm thankful for everything he does for me, so I could get up to speed to be an entry-level analyst when he gets enough trading revenue.
And I'm not exactly what you call "stupid". And on top of that, I have work experience (some number > 0). And the job hunt is still ridiculous, because no employer wants to train--they just want someone to come in and be a solution, regardless of the fact that oh, they're a young, new graduate who is quite trainable!. Now imagine most people my age. Where do they go and find work? This is a recursion process with next to no base case...certainly not large enough to absorb all of the graduates coming out. What is supposed to happen--to have anyone without an engineering degree from Stanford or MIT (or the like) go flip burgers (aka the intersect of MIT/Stanford/etc. and engineering degree)?
C) Those that say "equality of opportunity not equality of outcome" when, oh, so many of them got their opportunities through certainly other mechanisms besides toil. Even worse if you're poor because due to reduced budgets and cutting funding for state universities, they reduce admissions for American students in favor of foreigners who can pay their way through.
In short, the pain people (of my age and older) are feeling is not just in their heads. It isn't as simple as "getting a job" (I wish!), and they most certainly do not have the opportunities that those who came before them did.
They have every right and justification to do what they are doing. As I said, if I lived in NYC, I'd go down to Zuccotti Park myself just to find some reporter and prove to them that not everyone in that crowd is a liberal-arts airhead twit that makes Rick Perry look intelligent by comparison (zing!).
As for some coherent message, how about this:
A) Acknowledge China's currency manipulation/command economy and slam massive tariffs on them to balance out their obvious economic cheating (hacking/IP stealing, etc...)
B) Put a $50,000-$75,000 price tag per year on every H1B/other working visa. If you truly cannot find candidates with the right skill set for your company and only a sponsored foreigner can fill that role due to some niche skill set he or she has, I'm sure you won't mind paying a little bit extra. Otherwise, hire American, hire for attitude, train for skill. Pick your poison.
C) The way to solve the problem of admitting foreign students into our universities and not letting them find jobs in the US so they go back to their native countries and use their American educations to compete with America?
Stop admitting foreign students into our universities for Pete's sake! If you really think that only foreign students can understand the coursework at the best universities, you are sorely mistaken. Right now, I'm running above a perfect score in Andrew Ng's machine learning course, and am loving it. Now, while he may give the Stanford students a bit less hand-holding with finding partial derivatives and assume they know some linear algebra, I remember that his Youtubed lectures for regression used the example of housing prices. What example did he use in his slides? The same exact one! I mean heck, whether you're at MIT or Swampville University, neither Newton's laws, nor calculus, nor the rest of the fundamental scientifically observed and experimentally corroborated laws of our universe will change. And while I realize Andrew Ng may be sliding so much of Machine Learning under the rug in the form of the "fminunc", "fmincg", "optimset", and other pre-written functions, and that a great deal of the effort in writing a program is to find the libraries you need and understanding their documentation, I am sure that this man is finding that there are plenty of people who can understand him quite clearly, and if he'd ratchet up the difficulty a bit more, there would still be a great deal of people who can understand him and do well in his assignments.
D) Have universities create apprenticeship programs so that even if a recession hits, the university is partnered up with companies who can take advantage of the skills their graduates learn. Honestly, the whole dog-and-pony show of interviewing is ridiculous. Who would know better what someone is capable of? Some human resource drone (human resources--arguably human, rarely resourceful, or as Dominic puts it--where those too stupid to be homeless get put to mitigate the damage their stupidity can cause)/technical interviewer with better things to do, or a professor who's worked with this student for a triple-digit amount of hours?
Now, some people may not agree with my policies, but when going from the standpoint of "how do we make life better for American citizens, the rest of the world be damned", I think I'm at least in the ballpark.
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