Honest question. I'm not white ; do many white people in America really truly believe high school history as it is taught?
i.e that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?
That's not an honest question--you are being fatuous. Every culture suffers from this to a very large degree. It's easy to give examples drawn from parts of the world where printing presses predated European inventions. The traditionally taught dynastic histories of China go back thousands of years beyond where there is any credible archeological evidence of a civilization in continuity with later Han culture. Koreans are similarly taught that their civilization has a 5000-year history based on nothing other than latter-day textual sources to support the deeper part of its antiquity.
The fact that non-white cultures also distort their youths' understanding of history to their own benefit isn't a valid argument for Americans to continue to do so. And it isn't a valid argument against skepticism on the part of students.
Clearly. The point is that this isn't some white thing. It's a universal flaw of human cultures that has resulted in much ignorance and atrocity throughout history.
I don't think the parent claimed that it is "some white thing" in the sense that this phenomenon only applies to white cultures. Instead, he was referring to the topic of discussion here, namely an example of white culture perpetrating this mistake.
From your username, I'm guessing you were born in 1983; I was too. There's a huge variety in American education so it's possible our experiences were completely different.
However, when I was in high school our textbooks were so concerned with political correctness that if anything they were overly focussed on diversity.
I took AP US history, World History, Asian History, and AP European History. The Average student only got one section of European history in the overall World History class.
>that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?
I find it very hard to believe (not impossible, just very unlikely) that you were actually taught that. More likely you just saw your history classes through your own biases.
I am not American so I could not talk for them, but in Europe nobody teaches that white people invented everything.
E.g everybody knows when he studies history what this article says along the invention of the compass and gears and zero and algebra in Asia.
But people from western countries invented almost everything since the Guttemberg press, maybe because of this press, as books became hundreds or thousand of times cheaper that what they were before and Asian countries had to face an obsolete language with thousand of characters (Japanese realised they had such and inferior language and created higajana and katakana later).
Knowledge spread so fast other places could not compete. It has nothing to do with the color of your skin.
I wouldn't say Chinese is "obsolete". Written chinese does not convey pronunciation at all and therefore changes very slowly compared to spoken chinese. That meant even though chinese people from different regions of china couldn't always communicate using spoken chinese because of language divergence they could communicate by writing. I think this has had an effect on the unity of China - over thousands of years it stayed as a single nation; in comparison the Europe where many languages have diverged from Latin and where there are many nation-states where people are bound together by their language.
If China was not united during the incursions by European countries in the 1800's, maybe they'd have ended up even worse off.
With today's technology, would you say Chinese is now un-obsoleted?
I wouldn't say modern technology has completely erased the disadvantages of written Chinese. When I was taking Mandarin in college the typing system seemed like a rather inelegant hack.
The way we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america. I am a high school sophomore and so far I have had to site through 5 years of American History classes, and no World History classes. In these classes we learn about the contributions of blacks to society, and in more recent history, the contributions of other races, but hardly anything about other countries unless we were at war with them.
We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and World History, when in fact, teaching America separately means artificially separating it from the rest of the world and having to constantly compensate for that.
You're telling me you've never learned about Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, China, Medieval Europe?
I find that very unlikely. If it is true please don't go around making statements like we are taught in america is that nothing happens outside of america.
You can't speak for America as a whole since we don't have a national curriculum.
More than likely you just feel the way you do because you just took US history and haven't gotten to any or the world history classes.
>We're taught as if there is a concrete separation between American History and World History,
There's nothing wrong with teaching a separate US history and world History class. When you get to college you'll find that history classes are even further subdivided by time and geography.
The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in third grade, and I hardly think that counts. I've gone to school in three different states, so I have at least some reasonable sample of nation, and although there is no national curriculum, the curricula are generally similar enough.
And college history courses assume that you already have enough knowledge from high school history courses to understand the historical context of what they teach, but by teaching American history separate (and before) world history, we are not taught any global context for events in American History.
>The only time I was ever taught about ancient greece, egypt, china, etc was in third grade, and I hardly think that counts.
If that's true you are an extremely rare case. I just took a look at the social studies standards for my state (Georgia, not exactly a top performer education wise) for middle schoool.
6th grade is the history and geography of Latin America, the Caribbean, Canada, Europe and Australia, 7th is Africa, Southwest Asia (Middle East), Southern and Eastern Asia, and 8th is US/Georgia History.
If you really haven't had any world history since 3rd grade it looks like it may have been a consequence of moving between 3 states.
If each state had world history at a different year in their curriculum, you may have missed them entirely.
Please don't try to speak for America on a forum with an international audience. Your experience is not representative.
Perhaps you are stuck in some weird loop due to attending school in different states, or have attended really lousy schools.
When i was in elementary school in NYC, we learned about ancient civilizations and NYC history in 4th grade -- the ancient part was kicked off with a field trip to the Egyptian artifacts at the Met.
In high school in upstate ny, we studied global history and current events from grade 9 through 11. The Chinese portion sucked -- we basically covered the opium wars though the cultural revolution, but we studied many aspects of global history.
In my state (Michigan) world history is a state wide requirement, so the first part of your comment is absolutely wrong. And I can't talk about any other schools, but the school I attended (a large, public, middle of the road high school) did a very good job of incorporating US history into a broader world perspective. If you've had a bad high school experience, please do not generalize to the entirety of the US.
About a billion people agree with you, and a billion people don't.
The other several billion do not give a shit, even under the most promising of conditions, because they have real, actual, human problems in their modest, meager, live-a-day lives.
Are you fucking stupid, sir? Or are you simply ignorant? Do you not understand this is the very meta-issue that finds itself under debate? Are you incapable of abstract thought?
Yeah. In Europe, cars treat bikes like vehicles, and bikes treat cars like vehicles.
In America, bikers simply do not follow the laws they are supposed to - and neither do cars. It's not really a "bike is victim" paradigm - it's more like nobody pays any attention to the god damn laws, at all. Because the fucking cops don't enforce the rules!
They give tickets to speeders and red light runners but NOT - NEVER, in fact, to people who don't signal when turning or changing lanes, people who drive too slowly in the fast lane, people who pass on the right, people who stop in the middle of the street to wait for a parking spot, people who do not use turn lanes appropriately, people who stop at yellow lights, people who drive too slowly, people who do not yield to pedestrians, people who block driveways, people who turn left or U-turn illegally, people who ... the list goes on for miles.
Bicycle riders make all these same mistakes as well.
Your reply is not directly to me but you're probably right. I used Europe as well as a generalization but there are some exceptions and I didn't bike in every single EU country (for instance, I've never done that in urban areas/traffic in Spain).
In general the more south you go the more horrible the driving in EU (yeah another generalization but this one seems pretty good).
I've been honk'd heavily in Italy (Naples) once because I was waiting for the traffic light to go green. I thought it must be I missed something but nope.. they just were "never stopping at this one and its bad practice to do so", one guy said.
I see cops every now and then, and I know how they are feared and hated in the US (it's true in EU as well but not nearly as much).
And I was surprised because indeed, they don't ticket anybody. I don't know if ticketing people every time they pass on red, etc would work, but maybe. I know that if I do that in Germany for example and a cop is around I'm going to pay for it every single time.
I think it's just technology adoption lag. Cruisers have had these cameras on their dashboards (dash cams) for a while now. At first with resistance but now it's saved more cops than burnt.
This entire article is nonsense. People in SV buy expensive cars, boats, planes, flashy watches/jewelry, and all the other shiny things that rich people in LA, NY, and Florida/Texas buy.
There's also a very poor underclass and a shrinking middle class - just like everywhere else. It's suburban America with boring office parks and shitty chain restaurants and Target stores and burrito stands just like the other 95% of the state/region. Everything is just way more expensive because there's so much money floating around here.
Islands is actually a fairly large chain in southern california (where all that is good and bad in hamburgers come from) and they make pretty damn delicious burgers and Mexican-American food, especially for a "theme" chain restaurant.
For some reason it's not as popular as it used to be, which is a shame :( I think it's tough for them to compete against the heavily saturated advertising of Chili's, TGIF, Outback that sort of thing. They're kind of in a weird spot with tough competitors, even though they're way better in terms of the actual food they make.
They're probably resisting the pressure to serve food out of microwaves and bags, and paying the price :(
You were the head of marketing and you didn't know who your own customers were? ... Excuse me?
If you feel you were wronged, sue them for what you feel is right and move on as quickly as possible. This entire situation sounds insane. Either you or they are completely off the rocker.
Before joining Oracle, Benioff worked as an assembly language programmer at the Macintosh Division of Apple Computer, where he was inspired by the company and its co-founder, Steve Jobs.
High school entrepreneur, Apple Macintosh assembly hacker, standout Oracle executive... this guy is the real deal, the true exceptional case that you take a risk on, not the money-less 'business' (and I do put that in quotes) guy most people run across day to day.
Actually, my point was more about businesspeople in general vis-a-vis the startup scene. Technical people may indeed undervalue the importance of business people (and, in many cases, vice versa).
The nitpick offers an interesting perspective, and it's well received, but I think it's orthogonal to my point.
In general, I think there's a common misunderstanding between these two camps, especially w/r/t their intersection in the software industry. Just as it's not fair for a businessperson to assume that all technical co-founders are interchangeable ("He's just a skill set"), it's not fair for technical co-founders to assume all business co-founders are worthless ("He's just a rolodex").
Net worth is one way, but not the only way, to evaluate the quality of a "businessperson" any more than "patents" are the only way to assess technical contributors. (And I note that the concept of a "business person" is about as generalized as the concept of an "engineer" -- it's the kind of grouping that's so broad as to be useless.)
There are lots of good "business people" who have spent much of their careers as employees rather than owners. They did their job, they got paid, but even if they were stellar, they probably weren't paid an order of magnitude more than their peers. (As there are many fantastic engineers without patents and/or high profile products.) This may be why they're trying to do a startup rather than switch to a new job.
Try working a few times for some not-so-great business people and you'll learn that the good ones are often undervalued.
"Hey Markus, you forgot to give me the information XYZ in time!"
The most important thing to realize is that this is a test; he is testing whether or not you know how to play this game; whether or not you can be relied upon in the future to work together at this game against common opponents (not necessarily enemies, but roadblocks). In this case, author failed the test, and boss's-boss now knows that he will never be able to count on author to advance a common goal without fear of putting his foot in his mouth.
I'm a straight male so from my personal experience, women also do this in relationships. They will test you relentlessly, just like your backslapping male buddies will give you shit. It's the same exact game, with inverted strategies. In a sexual relationship or good friendship, you're expected to be dominant and talk back to these tests, in a professional relationship, you're supposed to subordinate yourself to organizational superiors.
It's really not that complicated, you just have to use your brains and your balls at the right times. You don't even really need to be a smooth talker or a great politician, it's really just about context.
This kind of thing is inherent in an elite education, and inherent in some peoples' personalities. Most people without an elite education, elite parents, or natural ability are never taught this, and they basically fuck it up at every opportunity possible until they catch on or are explicitly taught this.
i.e that white people invented absolutely everything and Europe is the only old world with history worth studying? Then again maybe it's changed in the past 15 years?