If the government had announced that they were displacing 9,000 “Village People” no one would stand for it. Everybody loves those guys.
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Assume much? My neighborhood is 82% renters, but you already knew that right? As well as also knowing what is motivating the corporation renovating my building? They are an out of state corp. that gets HUGE sums of federal money to “renovate” older buildings for disabled vets. They spend very little on the “renovations”, keep the difference (plus ongoing government finances), you get the picture.
I am amazed that you feel comfortable making all sorts of assumptions, since you know jack-shit about my neighborhood.
So, you’re actually gonna go there with the whole “SO YOU ARE UPSET WITH DISABLED VETS”… I don’t even know how to respond to that type of ridiculousness, so I’ll just say, fuck off trolley?
Edit: Since we are just going to project all of our own stereotypes and childish generalizations, I am going to make an assumption of my own. You are one of those people who think that gentrification is “revitalizing a neighborhood”, and that all the working class people that get squeezed should just be grateful that they have all sorts of great hip new restaurants and boutique shops in their hood that they can’t afford and aren’t welcome inside anyways.
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What is FAST supposed to do?
- The FAST webpage itself mentions a neutral hydrogen survey related to studying dark matter and galaxy formation, studying pulsars, helping interferometry, studying interstellar molecules, helping SETI, and more studying pulsars.
- An older article in New Scientist mentions that “astronomers expect it to uncover thousands of new galaxies and deep-sky objects up to 7 billion light years away”.
- A TechCrunch article on this move mentions radio telescopes are “a common strategy used by scientists to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life” though it does note sources of radio waves could be “natural (pulsars, quasars and black holes all emit radio waves)” – if waved off as less interesting.
- The New York Times article says “one of whose purposes is to detect signs of extraterrestrial life” and doesn’t really mention any others.
- Xeni’s headline condenses this to “telescope for alien life search”.
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Wow!!! I had no idea Phil Collins was such a looker in his early days. Great tune and great photo montage. Is it just me, or does the change around 2:20 sound majorly Kinks/Ray Davies inspired?
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Let me sum up your initial post:
- sore subject for you
- you’re being displaced, having been told two weeks ago.
- “your” building was purchased “with federal money to turn into housing for disabled vets”.
- you have to leave.
- your neighborhood became trendy over a 20 year period because of “all the minorities and creatives”
- rentals only available for the wealthy, who want to live in a “curated environment” blah blah.
- “White brats” priced you out.
- So very disappointed in the BB post!
- the Chinese folk got a consolation check, while (I’M ASSUMING THIS RIGHT HERE) you didn’t.
So much to tease out there! So full of actionable intelligence! The terrible Corp being run by white brats who are leeching off of the Feds! Feel free to go on your little screed about my generalizations, but as the saying goes with regard to your OP, if we had some ham, we could have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs.
As for your own generalizations, I live in Baltimore. Do feel free to tell me about the difficulties you face in the housing market.
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For this headline, I was also thinking Phil Collins, but this.
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Of course there is also the 900,000 people who were displaced to create an Olympic village near Beijing, which is now completely uninhabitable.
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I dunno; Gabriel was pretty clearly following his own unique muse, but he was definitely tracking what others were doing, too. Could be.
The old Genesis shows were astounding, especially live. From the audience, the blacklight sequences of Watcher of the Skies made his head look like a big ol’ freaky glowing bat hovering over the stage. It took Peter Gabriel to truly rock the reverse mohawk.
I got to see gentrification in action in Seattle and it was pretty ugly. It mostly seemed like the least wealthy landlords preying on the least wealthy tenants, with the indigenous population suffering the most.
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No argument there. We have a giant concrete filled hole in Waxahachie, Texas to attest to that. Pisses me off every time I think about it, and I can only imagine how it infuriates the towns residents who were promised a huge economic magnet and got the world’s dumbest ruin instead.
That would be true enough, but so much of what the PRC backed developers build ends up being such a study in graft and corruption as to be unusable.
I’m a physicist, not an astronomer, so take what I say next with a grain of salt. My understanding is that SETI’s use of ground-based radio telescopes like the VLA in New Mexico and Arecibo in Puerto Rico is less effective than orbital or deep space telescopes, but easier to repair/upgrade, longer projected operation lifetimes and generally cheaper than spending money on a space mission. In which case they have a legitimate scientific role and this one could too. What gives me pause is that China has one of the largest space launch capabilities (if not the largest) of any nation. Combined with a routine level of development corruption and carte blanche use of eminent domain that are both legendary even by US standards (and our contractors are pretty damn corrupt), I’ll be impressed if this telescope even gets completed, let alone ever becomes operation. China’s oligarchs and their Party bosses have a reputation that makes me skeptical at best. Given the PRC’s penchant for not letting their scientific institutions share or engage with the rest of the world, I doubt we’d ever hear about it if they do find a nice alien halloo or evidence of a Dyson swarm.
The US and other Western nations indisputably have their own boondoggles, graft, mismanaged funding models and even occasional abuse of eminent domain. We are not without fault. Our problems, however, are not exactly the same as China’s problems.
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I mean no offense by this, but I would argue that the problem is your perception of the word than the word itself. Not everyone sees those things you describe when they hear the word villager.
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During my time in China, I definitely noticed a disdain by urbanites for rural Chinese. Of course we see the same thing in the West, and it’s as bigoted in either place. I’m a city slicker born and raised, but I’ve never seen people from small towns as in any way inferior to myself, and I must admit that it kind of makes my blood boil when I witness that (IMO massively stupid) disdain.
I will say that because Americans don’t ordinarily call our small towns villages, many of my countrymen and countrywomen might have a different perception of the word. However, I personally find little merit in catering to American provincialism*.
ETA: Yes, I recognize the irony that provincialism has largely diverged from its original meaning of someone who lives in a province (both being from a French word for the official scope of a ruler), and now has a derogatory meaning. Though with provincialism, I think the disdain is more for someone who is ignorant of the wider world than someone who lives in a given place.
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How can you say this:
AND this?:
That’s all I was talking about re: the word villager. You are right that not everyone sees the same subtext in every word. I had a big tiff with people last week over the word “pussy” where some people saw it as this super strong gendered slur and I saw it as a lot less vicious than that. So, yeah, different people see different words differently. But my point here is, I think on balance with the city/country bigotry that you so clearly described, the word “villager” does come with some baggage that belittles people. Not belittling them to slavery and servitude. But looking down our noses at them, at least just a little bit, seeing them as a little more ignorant, not-with-the-times and perhaps a bit more expendable than city folk. I do think villager comes with some of that, whereas city slicker or city dweller or a bunch of other words do not. Whatever, at this point we are beating a dead horse.
I just took exception to what I saw as @ambiguator’s implication that the purpose of using the word villager was to make “scientists” feel better. It came off a little like concern trolling to me. Perhaps I was being unfair to @ambiguator on that specific point.
I don’t fundamentally disagree with what you say. Yet I’m pretty reluctant to let bigots claim a legitimate term for a small town and its residents. It seems to me that any disdain that gets loaded into the word villager has to do with the fact that it describes people who live in rural areas, not the word in and of itself, and that the bigots would use any word for rural dwellers as a slur, so I’m disinclined to give them any ground. Indeed, I even have trouble thinking of a single word for rural dwellers which hasn’t been used derogatorily enough that it’s totally neutral, other than rural dwellers which doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Even rural populations has a certain neo-colonialist baggage the way a lot of people and media use it. It feels like giving the bigots every word for a group of people is tantamount to letting them erase the distinction of said group, in this case that not everyone lives in cities.
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Dang: am I the only BB-er who’s read The Three-Body Problem?
TL;DR: this is a project that the Chinese completed decades ago. They just didn’t tell anyone about it until it was (is) too late. The fleet has launched and all the Wall-Facers in fact have been eliminated.
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Again, I gotta say that from where I stand, “city slicker” is something of an insult, although admittedly a fairly mild one. The archetype of the city slicker is someone who is inconsiderate of others, physically pushy and rude, extremely foulmouthed, untrustworthy, and openly disdainful of those who make city life possible (such as farmers - no farms, no food).
By contrast, “villager” implies simplicity, honesty, fair dealing, self reliance, integration with one’s neighbors and environment, and a lack of formal education. Seems like much less of an insult to me! I’d much rather be called a villager, although technically I am not in either group.
One interesting thing about both stereotypes - each considers the out-group very bigoted, while making excuses for any bigotries of the in-group. And of course real people rarely conform exactly to stereotypes.
Me, you, @psyghamn and @Capissen38 at least…
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I will admit to a wee bit of concern trolling, but only a little bit. And, I will definitely admit that the content of the article doesn’t seem demeaning or dehumanizing toward the displaced people at all.
I just don’t see how using “villagers” instead of “people” adds anything to this headline, except to minimize the perceived impact of those being displaced. I feel like I’m being told to think, “oh, well, it’s not like they’re tearing down buildings or anything important; they don’t even have a town or a farm; it’s just some unimportant village and you should focus on the shiny new telescope instead.”
As someone who grew up in a small town, maybe I’m a little overly sensitive on this subject.
Relevant: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-ambiguous-grammar
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Fair enough. I maybe went a bit on the offensive there in the beginning. As much as I don’t want to cater to the idea that rural living is anything demeaning, your use of language is no less valid than mine.
I have deciphered the first couple of pages of the original while making heavy use of a dictionary. And while I’m very proud of that, I don’t think it counts as having read it.
The translator who is working on the German version says that the English translation “cuts some parts of the novel to cater to the English readers”, and that’s never a good sign. Until the German version comes out next fall, my Chinese is unlikely to improve enough to make it through that book, so I guess I’ll just take her word for it and read the German translation when it comes out.
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Well that, the dark forest and tales of the wandering earth
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