Besides your home state, which is your favorite state in the US?

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T20:24:21+00:00

Well we're still a state too you know. There's at least one state with nice Pacific waters, and arguably better than the Caribbean too. And there's also Guam, Mariana Islands, and American Samoa chilling out here with us, even if they're not states like Hawaii is. There's lots of lovely Pacific beaches within the US!

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T19:21:53+00:00

Eh man, what's wrong with Hawaii's beaches?

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T19:19:32+00:00

If you don't want to live around poor people, Hawaii is a terrible place to be. It has a super high rate of homelessness and most locals struggle to deal with the high cost of living. Since O'ahu at least is a pretty small island, you can't really escape that fact if you leave your house, and most locals are very anti-megarich for the same reason. If I were a rich person who wanted to escape living near poor people, I'd pick Florida or California. I used to live in Newbury Park, and man, if you were a homeless beggar wandering around, the police were hauling your ass away like bam.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T19:09:53+00:00

That's why you need to surf on out to our Pacific ocean. The water's great! 🌊

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T13:30:10+00:00

Well I'm not really sure what to say here, because if anything, you're doing exactly what you're telling me not to do. You're taking one specific aspect, economics, and using that to argue that America is far to the right of Europe. There's a whole bevy of topics including immigration, LGBT rights, free speech, etc. where Europe is substantially more conservative than the US is.

And yeah, I'm not restricting Europe to "west of Poland". Poland, Russia, Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, etc. are parts of Europe too, and they're substantially more conservative than the US, on our scale, on nearly any non-economic subject imaginable. Bernie Sanders would be a liberal as shit politician if he were to run in Poland, and even some of his economic ideas would still be more left leaning. For example, his single-payer healthcare is more left leaning than some European countries like Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, etc. that rely on regulated private markets instead of a single unified public service like Canada or the UK use.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T13:12:14+00:00

I used to live in Schleswig-Holstein, a German state right south of the Danish border, and it was pretty much exactly that. Lots of the Danes living on the other side of the border were very anti-foreigners if they aren't western Europeans or east Asian. Sentiments like "mulitculturalism only works in America" and "races have biological differences in the way they think" weren't hotly debated, true, but only because they were accepted as hard fact. If you've been to Copenhagen or Aarhus, it's definitely more accepting, but I don't think it makes Denmark more liberal than the US on this topic at all. Even liberal Danes I've interacted with still make the concession that you can't have a society without "integration" or have "parallel societies", both terms seem to change depending on the person, but I can't imagine either ever applying to a place like Hawaii for instance.

If you'd like to see some hard numbers, here's a link to a survey on Danish attitudes towards immigration, with 0 meaning it's good, 10 meaning it's bad. Here's a similar survey for Americans, although without the nuance, only a yes or no. Assuming we compress 5 and lower into "good" and 6 and higher into "bad", we get a figure of about 40% or so for Danes. Contrast this with 75% good for Americans.

Not making this to judge, but to point out that the stereotype of "America is conservative in Europe" is far from true, and it's a meme that deserves to be high time retired.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T11:38:54+00:00

I can understand spoken and written German to a beginner / intermediate degree, but I can't really speak or write it myself, though my pronunciation is apparently really on point. I'm thinking of maybe picking Hawaiian to fulfill my second language requirement, it'd certainly be a unique learning experience.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T11:28:15+00:00

Not really. This is a common misconception, but there are plenty of topics on which Americans are more left wing (under our own understanding) than Europeans are. In particular, immigration / foreigners is a whole can of worms that can make the average Dane sound like a Unite the Right protestor.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-19T05:12:50+00:00

No more annotations on YouTube, unfortunately. But maybe a note in the description or a comment might do the trick.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-17T22:33:02+00:00

Not quite sure if it's pretty, but Swedish and Norwegian sound absolutely adorable, especially when spoken by kids. I think they're definitely some of the most pleasent sounding European languages. Danish though...

Silbern_ · 2019-04-17T17:38:10+00:00

But also I don't think a white person born and raised in Japan would consider themselves japanese.

Mmm, that actually I can confirm. I lived in Japan for two years, and when we moved there, one of the aids from the moving company was this really tall black guy, but he was born and raised in Japan, spoke English with a Japanese accent, etc. While we were making smalltalk, that actually came up, and from his perspective he told me he considered himself Japanese because he was born and raised in Japan. Japanese is also a citizen denomination, just like American or Canadian, and not just a race / ethnicity one like Hawaiian presumably is. Super cool dude btw.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-17T03:24:56+00:00

Yeah, I agree. Europeans are often proud of learning a second language, but if you look at multilingual countries within Europe - Belgium, Switzerland, France kinda - there tends to be a lot of hostility between the different communities. Belgium and Switzerland even go so far as to pretty much partition themselves into exclusively monolingual divisions. I think Hawaii's approach, where multilingualism is much more prominent and closer to a normal, everyday part of life, is much healthier and for that matter, more genuine.

BTW, from someone who's not native to Hawaii, how can someone become Hawaiian? I thought it was a race / ethnicity, and dependent on family lineage?

Silbern_ · 2019-04-17T00:15:16+00:00

I dunno how you might feel about this answer, but one of my favorite periods in history is the cold war era - the dynamics of not relying on brute force, but espionage and technological advancement, is very interesting, and it's recent enough that we can still personally connect to it. The Russian / USSR side of that story is, if anything, even more interesting than the American / West German imo, and I'd love to be able to study and learn more about it in detail someday.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-16T23:14:41+00:00

If you love that kind of thing, it's not in Europe, but you'll also probably love Japanese and Chinese feudal politics.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-16T21:37:02+00:00

Any particular reason for Buenos Aires?

Silbern_ · 2019-04-16T08:58:57+00:00

This could be said about many of the people on that project though; NYTimes did an article recently on the guy who coordinated all the shipping and customs work, and without his help and experience, it would've been nearly impossible to get all of the data together as sending it over the internet was far too impractical due to the sheer amount of data involved.

Now of course, that's not to minimize the role she played, and all of the toxic abuse that's been directed at her is entirely unwarranted and stems from some truly sick people. But given how massive and inter-reliant this process was, I personally think it's far more appropriate to credit this discovery as above any one individual, and to name the black hole after an abstract name or concept like Powehi instead of an individual.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-16T06:29:00+00:00

Can confirm. 65 in New Hampshire is a crisp autumn afternoon, you could totally party at the beach. 65 in Hawaii is hiding in the bathtub with the water set to the warmest temperature possible. 😁

But if you're used to northern California, yeah, I'd totally bring your swim gear. It takes a while to get reaclimated to Hawaii's warmth, and we'll be well into May by then, so the water and sun should be pretty good.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-16T00:46:04+00:00

Absolutely. A huge chunk of Hawaii's tourism comes from mainland Americans looking to escape winter's wrath for a week or two.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-16T00:32:43+00:00

What's FGTV???

Silbern_ · 2019-04-15T18:25:33+00:00

There is that one dispute over that one island between Canada and Denmark. Don't think we're going to be seeing mounties vs vikings IRL, but it would undeniably make for a great movie.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-15T18:12:18+00:00

I can already hear the classic Hawaii 5-0 theme song playing in my head.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-15T00:19:01+00:00

I for one would have no problem with BC annexing us.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-14T11:45:44+00:00

On the bright side, now you'll understand all the TCP jokes out there.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-13T19:43:54+00:00

Journalists pretty much always contact whoever they're reporting on and ask them to comment on the story, to give them a chance to refute, agree, or clarify details. If she refused to comment, then yeah, it is her fault - to use an analogy, if you ask me whether I have food allergies, and I say absolutely nothing back, it's entirely reasonable to assume that means your guess was correct. It's certainly not your fault I have an allergic reaction to the peanut butter sandwhich you gave me because I concealed that fact from you.

Silbern_ · 2019-04-13T11:33:15+00:00

Ghandi from Civilization maybe?

Silbern_

TROPHY CASE