Fiery_penguin_of_doom Posts

You admit that police officers and firemen do a far more difficult job than a burger flipper, but in comparison to the risk they face on a daily basis compared to a doctor, is it fair that their income is not equalized???

Napoleon didn't conquer Britain.

Of all the languages I've encountered, I'd have to say Chinese takes the cake for being the most difficult to master. As someone who has attained fluency in even the dreaded Japanese in less than a year's time, I can honestly say that if Chinese was not my first language, I would never be able to learn it.

For one thing, it's pretty much the only commonly-used character-based language in the modern world (Japanese has kana, and Korean is phonetic). Other languages somewhat commonly used today are sound-based or alphabetical (yes, even Arabic). Someone who is considered well-educated in the language will have command of over 5000 characters (there were over 86,000 in existence back in 1994). Because I know some of you will look at that and go "that's not very many", stop for a moment and imagine 5000 breasts. Not 50, not 500, not 1000, but 5000. That's a lot of breasts.

Also, you will find that most people who know Chinese can speak, listen to, and read it far, far better than they can write it. The reason is simple: you really think it's an easy task to memorize over five-thousand of what are pretty much pictograms (compared to the 26 of the English alphabet, or about 200 times less), and be able to recall every single one of them at will when writing something? I myself have had many an experience where I would sort of know how a character I wanted to write roughly looked like, but was unable to produce it on paper; I'm sure those of you who know Chinese or Japanese (well) know what I mean when I say that the character kinda almost surfaces in your brain but never really actually surfaces. And, unlike Japanese, you can't just write out the hiragana to compensate; you forget the character, that's it. Find a dictionary or give up.

And, Chinese is a language with such incredible depth it is absolutely impossible for one to even hope to master even part of it (the great professors and scholars definitely know a lot, but they still use a lot of reference books and resources with the more ancient texts). Chinese has no grammar; characters are strung together, and what a particular sentence means comes from convention. A particular character can serve as a noun, verb, or adjective with absolutely no hint of what it is except of what experience tells you. This means that one can arrange characters in different and novel ways to create a sentence that is more poetic, has a deeper meaning, or a different one altogether, but it's not like you can just randomly arrange them either. In this sense, Chinese is a very artistic language. Anyone who has encountered Chinese art will know that various crafts of Chinese culture were not meant to be understood by the layman, but only by scholars, and the language itself owes its unfathomable depth to this attitude.

And, anyone who's gone further than knowing enough to survive in China (or even has advanced Japanese skills) will know, Chinese makes use of expressions, many of which whose meaning is rooted in some ancient story or moral and is not immediately apparent in just the idiom. For example, "塞翁失马" literally means "Old Cai lost his horse", but we say it to remind people that something greater may come in place of what you have just lost. There are so many of these in the Chinese language that even the average teenager will know very, very many of them. Oh, and did I mention that China has a history of almost five millennia, meaning the Chinese language had that much time to develop and get more complicated, incorporating various historical events and legends that arose?

And, if that's not bad enough, because China is so huge and various parts are topographically isolated to a certain extent, there are god knows how many dialects spoken in China. And these dialects are not like the dialects of Japanese, where people who come from different parts of Japan can still understand each other pretty much. No, each dialect in Chinese sounds like a different language altogether; we do not understand or even recognize a dialect we are not familiar with. And it's not as if each dialect makes use of the same expressions; particularly with casual phrases, each dialect will have unique, slangish ways of saying the same thing which, even if you look at the characters for them, won't make any sense unless you speak that dialect.

I hope this was informative. In fact, everything people struggle with in Japanese is due to what they imported from Chinese: kanji, numerical modifiers (eg. 一枚), idioms (some common ones are 一石二鳥, 一生懸命, 精一杯 etc.), you name it. Feel free to disagree, but from my experience (I am fluent and literate in English, Chinese (Mandarin and two other dialects), and Japanese, and know some French and German) and what I know about various societies from my studies this is the conclusion I have come to.

So, the bailout finally passed. I think that most of the lawmakers, regardless of ideology or constituency, realized there wasn't really a choice anymore. We had to try something, and even Ben Bernanke, who isn't exactly eager for the government to meddle in the business world, was for the measure. They decided that the opportunity to stop the financial markets from completely grinding to a halt and bringing on a deep and long depression was worth both the money and the precedent being expended. I personally agree. What is really needed is some level of certainty, which only the government is large and powerful enough to provide. The precedent being set is dangerous, certainly, but the consequences of a collapsed financial market would send ripples through the world and could have potentially disastrous effects.

It's too bad we can't really point the blame at any specific group of people. We could take all their money and put it into the bailout plan. It probably wouldn't amount to much, but it'd make me feel better =).

You know what's really weird with capitalism?

A person can learn some lines and show a little emotion and earn millions of dollars. Or a person can be in charge of teaching children how to write and speak properly and earn less than $40,000 a year.

Now, that's not weird. What's weird is that it makes sense. Movies bring in a ton of money, and where's the money going to go? It'd be ludicrous to earn twenty million dollars off of a movie and only pay the lead actor $40,000. So, it makes sense to do things that way, but it still seems like such a total rip-off that a person doing what is essentially a pointless job gets paid so much more than a person whose job it is to care for the very future itself.

You can compare being a movie actor to every other business, and you'll get the same result. Doctors are very important, but they make chump change compared to movie stars. Same with construction workers, district attorneys, pretty much every other job in the world.

It hurts my head thinking about that. A man can earn in six months what I'll never be able to accumulate in my lifetime. Makes me think of Kaiji. Makes me wish my dad was a famous director or actor or something and that I was born with good looks.

They were both quite bad choices.

How is it nitpicking when you used it to try and prove your point???

You ask how can doctors and nurses be expected to get through the 12-16 hour days for the same pay as a fast food worker, but are those doctors and nurses in their job because they want to be, or because they get the golden ticket of a big paycheck???

Why is a person who flips burgers for a living any less important of a person to society than a doctor or a teacher??? Teenagers can only run so many businesses before there are no more teenagers to work. Some people have to do those "sub-par" jobs in order for society to run. Why should they not get a fair slice of the pie???

It's not called "British" English, it's called Proper English and is completely different to American English.

Moo...


Thank you for your time.

Which is better? Teaching a person how to get a job or teaching a person how to get a job and giving him twenty dollars for clothes so he may actually get the job?

fucking game!! :x

Teaching a person to fish is all well and good, but if you do not feed that man for the first couple days he'll die before he learns how to do it on his own.

Or it could lead to a system where people have a better ability to become what they want to be. How many people are there that want to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, ect, but cannot because the apparent hardships outweigh the benefits??? It is all good to say you want to be a doctor, but when you do not have the money to pay the bills for the 6-10 years of medical training, society loses out on those fringe participants who would rather choose 'living' another day with a full belly than risk going hungrey for the 'chance' of fulfilling their dream.

Why would people become apathetic if wealth was distributed evenly???

Of all the social systems listed socialism is the best bet of them all. But this is based around a view point that people should be able to have an equal ability to compete for a good and fulfilling life. Although we hear alot of success stories about how people go from zero to hero and escape poverty, people do not realize that alot of the time it is done through socialist methods. One person here mentioned how he is going to university because the government is paying for it at the moment. This is an example of socialism at work. People do not realize it. Schools, police, fire departments, and publically funded hospitals are all forms of socialism, but everyone thinks it as natural in a capitalist society when it is actually not a capitalist function at all. You only need to look at the Industrial Revolution in order to see capitalism at its finest. It was not a pretty picture.

I would also not call adults working at a McDonalds "failures". Sometimes things do not work out in life the way people expect and working at a place like that is what is needed to survive. Someone HAS to do the work, or else who would serve us our Big Macs and Shakes???

To respond to the point of "adult failures and high school kids" getting more than minimum wage working at a McDonalds, or at least having MW higher, why should they not get a fair wage for the work they have to perform??? Working at places like that is hard work, although it does not look like it. The amount of money raked in at a McDonalds on a daily basis is staggering. Giving employees a couple extra bucks an hour can do no harm for such a big corporation.

Volume 3 of When Douchebags Attack....

Another problem (that I rarely see mentioned) is that the minimum wage hasn't gone up in years. It went up in the 90s, and before that, in the 70s. That doesn't make sense, considering that prices raise more than once every couple of decades.

I'd like to see some Dystopian government.

"A dystopian society is a state in which the conditions of life are miserable, characterized by human misery, poverty, oppression, violence, disease, and/or pollution"

I don't really find it true that if you start out poor you'll most likely end poor.
Me and my mom are bad. Like - according to tax return information and shit we don't make enough money to live. We get by very thin, usually by some money under the table that she makes by doing some house cleaning and preparing food for this handicapped woman every Saturday.

And.. I'm attending college fully covered by the government. Yes I'm using tax dollars, but I also work, so it's not like I'm leeching. I can take that and run and get a nice education and in turn a nice career, because if I do well in school then it's more likely that I'll be able to continue my education at full coverage (if the economy doesn't shit anymore then it already has ~.~)

There are a lot of programs out there, trust me, my moms been in about every one of them due to cancer and unemployment and then she had her knee ruined and couldn't walk for a long time.

I also understand that sometimes programs are dumb, like you make $10 more to fit into this program a month and what not.
Hell my moms had cancer twice, now has a chronic disease that will be the death of her and a permanently damaged knee but she doesn't qualify for disability - yet there's people out there who get full disability because they have diabetes. :roll: Nonetheless she still works full time at a doctors office and then under the table on Saturdays.

I'm just stating that despite the oddness to some things there's a lot of opportunities that I personally think make it so you can make the best of your situation.