When my family moved to Somerset from London in the 1970s our elderly next-door neighbour, after hearing we'd moved from London, said "I went to Bristol [25 miles away] once. Didn't like it much." Apart from that he'd stayed in the town we'd moved to. I think about that a lot and sometimes envy his contentment in staying where he was - he had everything he needed.
I grew up watching movies where it was common for the character to be living as adults in the town they were born in, and sometimes even in the very house they were born.
As an immigrant, I thought this was a missed opportunity. In my head this is what it means to be a local.
My wife on the other hand has been migrating for so long that she has no ties to any land. Not of her forefathers which she has never been to. Not of her grandfather which she also has never been to. Nor of her fathers given that he hates the place. still has longing for the land of her childhood but she is not allowed to go back to. And now she is here, too detached to continue to live in the same place as us.
Gregory Aldrete opens his Great Courses lecture series on ancient history by noting that although most of us engage with history through works of art and accounts military conquest, 90 to 95 percent of all people living back then would have been born on a farm, spent their lives tilling soil interrupted by the occasional calamities of flood or disease, and then died likely not having travelled more than a few kilometers away.
The article says nothing about English language skills. It says:
'University officials have described the unwritten policy as a prudent response to the current uncertainty facing Chinese and other foreign students when they apply for visas to study in the United States. “They are telling us that these foreign students may not show up if we offer them a position,” the faculty member says. “And that could jeopardize our research.”'
My wife teachers in universities in London, and the issue of Chinese students turning up with little or no English is real, often having paid for someone else to take the required English language tests for them. She has had students write their essays in Chinese and then just copied and pasted from Google Translate, generating utterly unintelligible dross. But that is definitively not the explanation here - this is all Chinese students, proficient in English or not.
To repurpose Winston Churchill's quote on democracy, "Wikipedia is the worst form of encyclopaedia, apart for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
While studying a neuroscience-adjacent MSc at UCL in London during the mid-2010s, senior academics would regularly recommend Wikipedia as an excellent primer for neuroanatomy. They wouldn't do it for people on actual neuroscience courses, who needed to know things in more detail, but they were very complimentary about the accuracy of the information on there.
For those saying that news is news because it's uncommon, that's kinda true, but the issue is that the availability heuristic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic - means that lots of people take the frequency of a cause on the news and think it roughly applies to the frequency of it in the real world. This forces politicians to treat those uncommon causes as much more common than they are - see the difference in terrorism percentages in the image - and skews the kinds of action they take. If you want politicians to actually have a positive impact on people's lives they should be spending a hell of a lot more attention on heart disease and cancer than terrorism. And the media should be covering breakthroughs in heart disease and cancer treatment much more too. The bias towards negative stories really doesn't help, although that's a bit of a tangent.
Aamzingly, I don't even get this page. I just see the default "this page is not available" from my browser. I'm with Vodafone, and I wonder if it is legal to pretend a site doesn't exist without notifying me.
Pretty sure it's DNS level block. So just using private DNS would be enough, no need for full blown VPN. It's just that VPNs also usually use their own DNS instead of the ISPs.
I recommend NextDNS or similar to bypass those DNS blocks and also block ads at a very deep level that works ok mobile and even inside apps.
"now that we ourselves have become a resource to extract"
I take your general point, but I'm interested in what you mean by "we" here - the general population or HN readers? People have been a resource to extract from since the beginning of farming, and particularly so since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The difference is perhaps that the attention of rich, western people is being exploited now and is causing this particular concern. Read any first-person accounts of the industrial revolution and the idea that this is anything new falls apart.
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