I never enjoyed Shakespeare UNTIL I started reading his plays, and now he’s one of my favorites.
The drama and stories in his work don’t do much for me, I view them more as a vehicle for his poetry (which is some of the greatest ever written). And I enjoy it more on the page than spoken by others.
I know there are at least some others out there like me! Nabokov cleverly said something along the lines of “with Shakespeare, the metaphor is the thing, not the play.”
I also see the plays as vehicles for the poetry; but like a lot of poetry, it's made to be spoken aloud. In particular, it should be spoken as if it were prose - the metre is in the words, and comes through on its own. It's clunky to speak it as lines of verse.
Indeed it should be spoken aloud (or at least 'aloud in your head'). But if it should be spoken as if it were prose, why do you think he took all the trouble to put it in to verse?
I'm neither a poet nor a playwright; I really don't know (but I'm glad he did).
Prosody - the musical, rhythmic quality of speech - is emphasised in verse. If a sentence runs over one-and-a-half lines, you can speak it as a normal sentence, with no pause after the first line and a pause in the middle of the second; the song-like quality will still come through, but it becomes easier for an audience to make sense of.
I think this applies to a lot of verse; not just Shakespeare's plays. If you read a sonnet like Ozymandias as a set of distinct lines, it sounds boring and stilted. If you speak it as a tale told by a traveller in a bar, it's much more engaging and exciting. The metre is carried by the words, they don't need help from the speaker.
Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.
Well, I sort of agree. A halting, too-strongly-pushed, stopping-at-the-end-of-every-line reading doesn't exactly let the lines sing. But there is an art to reciting iambic pentameter whereby it can attain the naturalness of speech while still retaining that underlying rhythm. When it's done well, you might not even realise they're doing it - until your ear is attuned enough to pick it up.
I really think this is a dying art, by the way. If you see a Shakespeare production, at least here in the UK, the actors older than about sixty are able to imbue the lines with that underpinning iambic rhythm; the younger actors don't know how or don't bother. For me, that means they don't really catch that song-like quality. I really think those older actors might be the last generation to properly know how to scan.
>Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.
Incidentally, somewhere I came across Arthur Quiller-Couch discussing this. He used as his example this speech of Edmund Burke, which he claimed achieved its power by means of hidden iambic pentameter:
>The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
He points out that three fragments are actually iambic lines:
>Are purchased at ten thousand times their price...
>Be shed but to redeem the blood of man...
>The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.
Of course, this was in a time when the audience's ear (though perhaps not conscious mind) would be better attuned to that rhythm.
I like the idea of "blind" or anonymous congressional voting. It feels counterintuitive, but donors might be less willing to "buy" votes if they can't confirm that they're getting what they pay for. And a representative who has accepted lots of corporate money might feel safer "betraying" those donors.
I think representatives would still feel pressure to vote in line with the interests of their constituents and get results, otherwise they get replaced by the next exciting candidate.
They wouldn't! That's the downside. Or maybe not a downside -- there could be an even stronger incentive for politicians to get stuff done. Since voters would have to make their decisions based entirely actual results, and not an individual politician's voting record, the politicians might have a stronger incentive to build coalitions and influence other politicians' votes.
My half-baked point is that the harm of voters NOT having access to this information is less than the harm of lobbyists and major donors having access to it.
I should point out that places like Germany do vote for the party, not the person for positions like Parliament. In each region the parties submit slates of people they would put into the positions if they got all of the votes, and then once people vote they get a proportionate number of their slate into actual offices. There are lots of details here, but it is a system that works.
Any differential privacy experts care to weigh in? Is there a differential privacy method that can introduce a specific amount of noise in voting results in order to not fully hide nor fully reveal specific representative voting records?
What they say and how they behave.
I really don't believe there are a relevant number of people who can consistently say one thing and vote a completely different thing for years on end.
Maybe I'm naive, though. I really do think nearly everyone in congress does want to make the world a better place, they're just lost/confused about how to go about that, often getting caught up in the game of staying in congress rather than using their time there for good.
It's actually how congress worked before the "sunshine" act of 1971 which made voting records public.
The vast majority of people don't actually go and look up their senator's/congressperson's voting records, where as lobbyists do. So I think the voter disclosure argument is overblown; I don't think that voters actually need to know the exact voting records of their congressperson. I think voting should be selecting people based on character and rhetoric and then letting those people act as representatives.
It would be less democratic, but more functional (and more akin to what the founders imagined anyway).
I'd prefer the regular public voting and a secret non-binding vote. You'd get a lot of information out of the secret vote telling you what representatives really thought. Especially if it were a landslide in the secret ballot and down party lines in the public one. You can think of plenty of examples of past issues that would have gone that way.
I've only started to develop an aesthetic reaction to, and appreciation for, poetry in the past year. Before that, it was a complete mystery to me.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that most people have very particular taste in poetry. (So particular that some people might never discover their own!) It doesn't help that there is a lot of bad poetry out there, as well as poetry that might be good in some superficial "academic" sense, like you described, but doesn't produce any reaction in the reader.
There's also the fact that reading poetry is so different from reading regular prose, and it can take some getting used to. It took me several re-readings before poems that I now love first started to "click."
For me, it all started with discovering Nabokov's novels last summer -- his writing sparked an appreciation of prose and imagery that I never experienced before, despite being a lifetime reader. I read that he loved Keats, so I picked a few of Keats's best-known poems and read them over and over, until I internalized them and eventually came to love them. As I've explored other poets, I find that the more I read, the more I become sensitive to. But still, I'd say that 80% of the poetry I encounter (especially modern stuff) leaves me feeling stupid and insensitive, at least after the first couple readings. Better than the 99% a year ago, though!
EDIT: I went through something similar with classical music a couple years ago. Despite being a musician and music lover, I could just never get into it. I immersed myself in it for a few months and began to see/feel the beauty in it. I think it's just a very different way of approaching music compared to modern genres and structures, kind of like how poetry is fundamentally different from the novels most of us grow up reading.
Keats was the gateway for me as well. For me, good poetry is simultaneously unconventional in its design and convergent in its meaning. The poem introduces a novel way of understanding or describing its subject. In a political environment of constant repetition, loaded phrases, mottos, memes, etc., this is refreshing.
However, this classification sort of breaks down the walls of poetry, since many poems are ostensibly divergent i.e. arbitrary and pretentious. At the same time, many mediums (visual, aural, kinesthetic) can be "poetic" without having anything to do with literal poetry. Is there a better word to describe this quality? For example, I don't care for poetry as far as it is a category of written works, but I really like those lines that Keats wrote down.
Similar story here. Getting older has helped a lot and suddenly I'm way more open to different genres and they land with me. Being educated about those genres also helps me get into them. Poetry, classical music, jazz, hip hop, absract sounds, art from other cultures, lots of abstract visual art...in earlier times of my life much of that was just not going to land with me.
Why did this get flagged as a dupe? This particular article hasn't been linked yet, and it seems to have more substance and analysis than the other two posts today.
There was a comment about the political influence and aspirations of certain big names in tech, but it has suddenly disappeared. It contained some criticism of Paul Graham and Sam Altman, but seemed totally reasonable to me -- can anyone say why it was deleted?
I wrote it, I don't feel like being an ass and I'm feeling overly aggressive today, not to mention I am a guest in someone else's house.
...but my overall point is that the tech elite is composed of a lot of rich white guys with connections, who naturally help each other out. Sam Altman runs YC now and as of last year was apparently seriously considering running for governor of California. That strikes me as grandiose and not good for society. Sam is 33 and because he's a tech billionaire thinks that he should run the most developed economy in the world? He genuinely believes that people outside of tech and business know who he is? He's qualified, because he's shook hands with the best off of society for the past decade?
Why does he deserve that power? Why does Zuckerberg deserve to be president? What makes him qualified? He made a PHP app that got big. Come on. That's what all this boils down to: money and power and a lot of people value that more than anything else in life.
How about we be honest with ourselves as individuals and societies and stop enabling that?
Trump lowered the bar so much that most people think they can do a better job than the current president, and are probably right.
What they miss is that running as a republican is very different than running as a democrat (as I guess most tech people would want to). Zuckberg would beat Trump in the democratic primaries, no question about that. But he won't be in front of Trump, he would be in front of many experiences politicians who actually have a clue about how one manages a country.
> Zuckberg would beat Trump in the democratic primaries, no question about that.
So, where is this all coming from -- that Zuckerberg wants to run for president? I'll bet my house and every last penny I own, he does not want to be president, he will never run for president.
Oh, and he would never win. He's an insanely smart dude, but he hasn't got the charisma to win presidency.
(I do think that a lot of people on HN should run for some higher office in gov't, particularly tptacek and rayiner).
It's very possible that a lot of his current rhetoric and actions are part of PR and image control for Facebook as a brand and even a genuine desire to extend his horizons.
However, some of his actions are distinctly political.
He hired "Joel Benenson, a former top adviser and longtime pollster to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign", and prior to that he hired "David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run".
Your statement is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not sure Zuckerberg is actually "insanely smart". He's similar intelligence to a lot of people on HN, but people conflate power and success with visionary ability. Maybe he is that, or maybe he's just a relatively smart guy with lots of connections, a very favorable background, and the same hangups, limitations, biases, and delusions as everyone else.
In all fairness, the prior President was a one-term Senator, who pretty much started running for President just 18 months into that one term.
The actual merits of Trump or Obama notwithstanding, it's been three election cycles now since without traditional career politician in the White House. I'm not sure I can fault tech billionaires for thinking that this might be a real emerging trend, rather than just a pair of consecutive flukes.
Obama was a community organiser in 1985, 22 years before the presidental election. He had already made political speeches in college previous to that (where he majored in political science). After that he was a civil rights attorney, and his first elected position was to the Illinois senate in 1996, 8 years before he was elected to the United States Senate.
That is 100% traditional career politician in almost every way, it's just he was good enough to do it faster than most people.
From state legislator to launching an (ultimately successful!) Presidential campaign in a year-and-a-half? We'll have to agree to disagree.
Either way, if anything in U.S. politics is non-controversial... it should be the observation that three Presidential cycles in a row have been won by upstarts, whose credentials are strikingly out of place alongside their peers of the past century. That's not arguing equivalence, but ignoring all commonality is absurd.
Maybe it's attributable to being "good", or "lucky", or "racist", or some other factors of sheer coincidence. Or maybe it's a symptom of fundamental social or media shift, and signifies a new norm.
George W Bush was not an upstart by any definition of the word. To be sure, he had no particular claim to talent but then his father had been President and his grandfather had been Senator.
If you feel like you can do a better job of winning an election against a Clinton and the entirety of mainstream media, you should run in 2020. Against Trump, naturally, so we confirm the hypothesis.
It boggles the mind that some people think that utter and complete feathering and tarring of Trump in the runup to the election can even be interpreted as any kind of "enablement".
My point was, the dude is not as clueless as the media and pundits portray him, and he did accomplish the impossible more than once in his life, most recently in the 2016 election.
I voted for Bernie in the CA primary. Hillary won the Democratic primary pretty handily. Actually, I was surprised by how well Bernie did. In November, I voted for Hillary.
Which, as somebody who voted for Hillary the whole way through, I really appreciate. I wish that the fact-free narratives that came up hadn't helped convince a number of other Bernie supporters not to do the sane thing.
> Sam Altman runs YC now and as of last year was apparently seriously considering running for governor of California. That strikes me as grandiose and not good for society
Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Governor of California. At least as far as the 'what makes him qualified' thing goes, apparently that's not a real concern for voters :)
> Let's not forget Grey Davis' being a politician didn't help California against rolling brownouts and massive deficits in the 2000s.
The correct spelling is Gray Davis [1].
The rolling brownouts were caused by Enron [2] who was enabled by legislation (AB 1890) that his predecessor Pete Wilson signed in 1996 [3]. People went to jail for that. [4]
There were no massive deficits under Davis. When the tech bubble burst in 2001, there was a revenue decline but that's about it.
Arianna Huffington has a different take on the issue. Others do as well. Davis blames federal regulation while at the sane time has retrospectively apologized for being slow to act as the crisis began.
No, Davis doesn't blame Federal regulation because it wasn't Federal regulation that caused the California energy crisis. The crisis was caused by state de-regulation. That de-regulation (AB 1890) was engineered and signed by Governor Pete Wilson.
Staff concludes that supply-demand imbalance, flawed
market design and inconsistent rules made possible
significant market manipulation as delineated in final
investigation report. Without underlying market
dysfunction, attempts to manipulate the market
would not be successful.
This wasn't on Davis; this was on Wilson and Enron. As for Arianna Huffington, she ran as an independent against Davis is the recall election engineered by Darrell Issa. She'd been a conservative commentator (supporting Newt Gingrich) before she and Andrew Breitbart launched HuffPo.
Still Pete or Gray, their experience in politics did not prepare them for the events that followed. All major players have some blame, Pete, Gray and Enron. Enron was greedy and Pete and Gray, as evidenced by their political careers, didn't handle the sitch well in the eyes of the public.
As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I'm greedy, quite greedy. But Enron wasn't just greedy, it was a criminal organization. As such, people went to jail and it went out of business. The job losses at Enron were 4000 but they were 85,000 at Arthur Anderson, its accounting firm.
Wilson enabled this although to be fair, he didn't foresee it. The CA energy crisis was the result of mid-90s neoliberal hubris. Like supply side voodoo economics, its lessons get quickly forgotten. Hubris is like that.
From that Wiki article you linked (just about everyone gets blamed) And to note, some of the contracts were signed by Davis:
>Some critics, such as Arianna Huffington, alleged that Davis was lulled to inaction by campaign contributions from energy producers.[28] In addition, the California State Legislature would sometimes push Davis to act decisively by taking over power plants which were known to have been gamed and place them back under control of the utilities, ensuring a more steady supply and slapping the nose of the worst manipulators . Meanwhile, conservatives argued that Davis signed overpriced energy contracts, employed incompetent negotiators, and refused to allow prices to rise for residences statewide much like they did in San Diego, which they argue could have given Davis more leverage against the energy traders and encouraged more conservation.[29] More criticism is given in the book Conspiracy of Fools, which gives the details of a meeting between the governor and his officials; Clinton Administration Treasury officials; and energy executives, including market manipulators such as Enron, where Gray Davis disagreed with the treasury officials and energy executives<
Again, these are opinions and in Huffington's case not disinterested opinions. She ran for governor in the recall.
The fact remains that the CA energy crisis was enabled by Republicans for the benefit of Ken Lay's Enron Corp. Then when it happened Republicans complained loudly and political advantage of their created crisis.
Yeah, he was powerless against the Uber of its day: Enron.
I'm not sure the fault there was Grey Davis's. Seems there was skulduggery afoot (it's actually a really interesting story, and seemingly a perennial one)
I welcome it. I'd much rather have a crowded field than what we had in the last election on the Democratic side - a field emptied by the presence of a dominant presumptive nominee. More competition is a good thing.
More competition is also how we got Trump on the republican side because the number of candidates lowered the bar for receiving a plurality of the votes. Trump never would have beaten someone like Cruz, Rubio, or even Jeb in a primary straight up.
I dont agree at all, and I do not think the data backs it up. Jeb is a clear loss mono e mono against trump in the primary, no question.
the candidates you mentioned only did well in limited/specific geographies (such as their home state). i followed the primaries on both sides, and had you consolidated the votes to trump vs other, trump would have won. its also very unlikely that 'other' would all vote for 'other' if they weren't specifically allowed to vote for someone like Cruz.
>the candidates you mentioned only did well in limited/specific geographies
That is because the other candidates all took their own piece of the pie. The republican and democratic primaries were very similar. You had someone framed as a populist outsider who was selling themselves on their ability to fix the system. On the democratic side you had one other establishment candidate who more or less campaigned on the status quo. On the republican side you had numerous establishment candidates that basically campaigned on the status quo who split the vote and several outsider candidates that never had much support at all. The democratic side was consolidated much earlier around their candidate. The republican side never consolidated around an establishment candidate because it was never clear which establishment candidate was the favorite. This allowed Trump to succeed with his consistent 20-30% of republicans in early primaries.
Maybe, but even at the end when it was Trump vs. Cruz vs. Kasich Trump polled well ahead. I don't think that quantity really was the determining factor -- I think Trump is just the natural end state for the way America seems to be at the moment with its massive political division and the inability for either side to treat the other with good intentions.
People like voting for winners and it was clear that Trump was going to win the plurality of the vote by that point. It also came at the end of a long and grueling primary that served to normalize Trump and rally establishment republican behind him. There is no way he would have won against a generic republican if the race started with only two candidates.
Not always. You don't want just one or two, but you also don't want the situation where they have to have a JV debate beforehand because they can't fit all the candidates.
I think we see similar behavior with other famous/rich people; Hollywood stars are always involving themselves in politics (and are often surprised when their engagement means nothing).
That being said, the point of campaigning for office is to demonstrate why you deserve the votes. Nothing wrong with a young successful guy giving it a try. Who knows - maybe the qualities that made him successful would translate well to governing. If anything, I think we should encourage more non-lawyers to run!
I suppose everyone thinks "Trump did it, why shouldn't I? I'm certainly better than that guy!"... but I think they forget that they weren't playing a successful authority figure on TV for years.
The society can't ever be honest and collectively stop enabling whatever. Everyone all the time responds to incentives, and power goes to whoever is lucky and good at collecting votes and support. Competence, technological acumen or vision is an extra. Altman being governor would be a high percentile outcome considering all of this.
It doesn't make much sense. California doesn't have a super high median income or GDP per capita compared to other rich US states. The US has around a dozen states with median incomes equal to or higher than Switzerland.
California ranks #8 in GDP per capita in the US among states. It's around $59,000 for 2017, which is high globally but not particularly high vs the overall US figure of ~$57,000.
California ranks near the bottom in education and is 35th in poverty rate.
The title of most developed US state goes to Massachusetts most likely. It has a super high GDP per capita and median income, and is generally highly developed in most regards including education, poverty, and median standard of living. The problem is, it's the size of a Scandinavian nation. New Hampshire is even worse: they have one of the world's highest median incomes and GDP per capita figures, but only 1.3 million people.
Why should all of our leaders be charismatic lawyers? How are they more qualified? Or in some cases, famous actors. The current president's main qualification was inheriting a ton of money and being good at getting in the news.
The bar is not terribly high and I think successful tech leaders are probably more qualified than anyone else that shows up.
I think the idea of having representatives and leaders is a bit old fashioned to begin with. But if we are going to have them, they should be the most competent intelligent people we can find from outside of politics.
I wouldn't want to vote for them, but do you think that your actual politicians are qualified or deep thinkers?
By "qualified" I don't mean "better than Trump", that's a very low bar.
Sorry, didn't mean to drag you back into the discussion! I posted my question because I was concerned that maybe a moderator deleted it. I guess I was being a little paranoid!
I'll be honest I had no idea who Sam Altman is so I read his wikipedia page and I still don't quite understand how he got to where he is today? Was his success started by the Loopt sale?
He's a very smart guy, according to a lot of people, and he's also nice. He made an app that was reasonably successful, sold it. When in YC, pg recognized his genius... and over time decided he's the guy who should run YC.
What's odd to me is that this seems like it should be bad for Jews, and that they wouldn't want this to be the case, and that in general people wouldn't want a minority treated as the majority group in these cases...
Eh, it is what it is. I am politically liberal, all for BLM/LGBT marches, equal rights, believe white privilege is a real thing, etc. Voted for Sanders. Still getting downvoted because the mere mention or skepticism of how privilege is applied attracts the usual attention.
As far as I can tell, my Jewish friends are considered white when they are referred to regarding privilege (by the left) and a minority by the alt-right. They get the worst of both worlds. Asian-Americans get it on a similar, if lower level.
Because, in general, those who like to point out that someone is Jewish are the alt-right. And they don't point that out because they love Mel Brooks movies and matzo balls.
I've heard people talk about the risk to cars, but what other kinds of embedded systems will still be in use after 20 years? Maybe certain industrial machines?
I think that's actually bootload's point? A policy of measured, non-violent responses to perceived aggression -- like China's response here -- is a good way to avoid being tricked into war. (Compared to North Vietnam's response to our encroachment in the Gulf of Tonkin, which many suspect was an attempt to goad them into war.)
The drama and stories in his work don’t do much for me, I view them more as a vehicle for his poetry (which is some of the greatest ever written). And I enjoy it more on the page than spoken by others.
I know there are at least some others out there like me! Nabokov cleverly said something along the lines of “with Shakespeare, the metaphor is the thing, not the play.”