How can you read that and say it's about ignoring logic? It's about challenging the basis upon which Logic is seen as the definitive, end-all answer to a problem or a conclusion built using logic being privileged in relation to an alternate conclusion or solution that takes into account someone else's preferred methodology? Conflating "logic" with the scientific method to try and add an air of authority / naturalness / inevitability to an argument.

IN THE CONTEXT of the two articles that person I was addressing posted, they were talking about "rationality" and "logic" being used to shut down political arguments from minorities or other groups through exactly this kind of appeal to scientism, tradition, and faux intellectuality in the face of an 'irrational and emotional' argument. Obviously you don't throw the concept of 'logic' out the window when trying to effect political change - but logic is not infallible and is often used as a shorthand, or a bludgeon, for trying to shut down another valid argument, especially when it's done from a position of assumed authority and hierarchy used to maintain a status quo. Casting your opponent as illogical and irrational has always been a great tactic to discredit them. Inside of a formal debate, 'logical' and 'illogical' are fine terms, but get them into politics where few things are that simple and it's a tool for shuttind down conversation.

If you read the review of the gender studies textbook by Edward Nilges (https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R13NVLBGSH548B/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0415902002) you'll see the actual context of the book, and might find it reasonable or at least a coherent argument, rather than the strawman you've constructed for entire fields of study. You're committing the very sin the book is commenting on - in short, a logical fallacy of appeal to authority using capital-L Logic as a transcendental signifier of Truth. But logic has long been known to be fallible - from Zeno's paradoxes to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem - and not by any means a 1:1 description of reality (any serious academic logician would be horrified by such a claim) or a repository of Truth. Logic is a tool, and can be used to "describe reality" but only by analogy, as a model, and necessarily in a vastly incomplete and inefficient, as well as biased way (someone has to ask the question, set the starting conditions, and what evidence to look at - a necessarily exclusive process and inherently non-neutral and un-"natural").

Only a couple players in NBA history have been good enough to go pro out of high school. No high schools can compete with the coaching and competition level at a top collegiate program, much like college professors are going to be able to teach you better than your high school math teacher and your fellow students will push you a bit more than the scrubs you dominated in the streets or against crosstown rivals. A year or two in a good program will make you a better player and raise your profile - scouts won't pay much attention to you otherwise, and good fucking luck getting enough people to know your name to make it worth something. Non-pro basketball, the NBA farm teams, already have players better than most college players, so you won't be able to get into them easily.

Influencers - social media mavens making sponsored content - take that advertising budget and spread it across a thousand creators with a hundred thousand subscribers. Make memeable content. Pay some magazine writers - you can have dozens of articles for the price of a tv ad.

Celebrity - the cult of celebrity is alive, fractured but alive. Microfandoms that will follow a b-level star anywhere because they're so charming in the media and are memeable themselves.

You're on Slashdot and don't participate in any of this social media bullshit? You're not the demographic for these shows and were never even considered as a possible viewer. You've been priced out of the profitability analysis already.

However, maybe a Halt and Catch Fire kind of show will be created to attract the old-school geek market every few years, maybe some sci-fi as well - those tend to make it to Slashdot's feed. There's so many demographics, every now and then they'll circle back around and try and get something from this crowd.

A VU meter is different than some LEDs. Most LED meters are peak meters that operate at Full Scale (0 db is the top LED, you can't go higher without clipping), meaning they'll show the volume of the loudest part of the track, the absolute peak of a waveform's transient. This is useful with digital, as you generally never want to clip or overshoot 0 dbFS. A VU meter has different ballistics (the way it reacts to incoming signal is slower) and acts as more of an indication of average volume of the signal. A peak meter is good for knowing when you need to throw a limiter on, but it won't give enough information about how loud your signal actually is - one loud momentary transient can be twice as loud as the rest of the audio and fool your eyes into thinking your mix is louder than it really is. You can of course modify the LED ballistics to approximate a VU meter, but generally audio software keeps them separate. If it's the kind of 10-LED strip with 3 reds 3 yellows and 4 greens or whatever, that gives you much less granular information than a VU meter is capable of, and takes extra mental effort to interpret. It's not that it's difficult to interpret, but it's something else to take note of and that can add up when you're paying attention to dozens of different meters across all your tracks and plugins - so why not just throw a VU meter on it and avoid having to think about it? They're different tools for different purposes and needles are in no way obsoleted by LEDs.

For those who don't read TFA, it also installs standalone versions of each plugin, so you don't need Photoshop, Lightroom, or Aperture. It doesn't play nicely with GIMP, but you can still import/export between them. Since most of these are color filters, you'd just do your cropping and retouching in GIMP or whatever, then open it up in Color Efex and add a graduated bleach bypass high contrast sunlight filter. For free!

Not a loophole. You have to offer the exact same benefits - health, vacation, sick leave, stock, etc - to H-1Bs as you do to American workers, and prove it in the case of an audit. They are free to opt out of benefits, but you do have to offer them.

And lest you think there are ways the company can coerce the employee... one complaint from an anonymous disgruntled employee can trigger an audit. Even better, an anonymous complaint from a competitor who knows your practices because your disgruntled employee transferred to them can do it too.

I was a literature major myself, stopped taking classes just in time after my first experience with graduate-level education. Most of my post was written as a defense to the layman, going over issues I've debated with my more technically-minded friends. The "taking one stupid professor/artist you've read about and condemning the whole idea because of it" tactic is one I have had to dismiss more than a few times - not all modern art is scatological, postmodern books aren't incomprehensible, and subjects besides the classics are worth discussing, etc.

That argument was against the anti-intellectualism of undergrads, complaining about too much theory. There's nothing wrong with casual reading circles, and if that's the style of study you want to follow, that's great, but if you're going to take classes you've got to leave your preconceptions at the door. And if you're going to turn a class into a Harry Potter plot recap (which seriously did happen in one of my Dickens classes one day), why are you paying thousands per year to stunt your growth and career potential?

Again, I had no idea what position you were arguing from, so I gave a summary and basic defense of lit 101. Hopefully someone else will read it and get something from it if you don't need to.

I was lucky enough to go to a good school in the UC system, so most of my professors WERE actual professors - one was a world-class Chaucer scholar (fluent in middle english and all), and another for Dickens (who unfortunately did let his class turn into a Harry Potter recap occasionally, but then again there was not one word of theory mentioned and he kept it free of 'bullshit' academic jargon). I don't think that there's anything wrong with modernity and novelty as subjects - and I had to go out of my way to take a class that had anything more recent than 1930. The publish-or-perish issue is certainly valid, but like I said, I view that as the symptom of the larger issue of the humanities' decreasing importance - bordering on outright scorn in at least half of the comments on this very story.

What happened to you to make you so bitter towards harmless humanities cranks?

The whole point of the article is that there are too many Ph.Ds out there. One way to get noticed is to do work in new areas - either reexamining an older work through the prism of newer theories, examining a newer book/artist that hasn't had a lot of critical attention paid to it yet, or tearing down someone else's criticism of older work.

The humanities isn't narrowing, it's broadening. I assure you there are just as many people studying the classics as there were before, but there are also people following other interests that have more meaning for them - people spending their time on minority authors, foreign works, the avant garde, or radically different approaches to criticism. There's also a lot of political ax-grinding and agenda-driven studies, but that comes from being in such a personal field.

It's easy to set up a strawman argument against professors who write theses about things you don't understand or don't want to understand or don't think are valid art (let's not go there), but it's still a pretty small area of interest. You are, however, more likely to hear some (cultural) conservative bitching about corner-case dissertations and minor gallery pieces made with menstrual blood, and whatever happened to gosh-darn UNDERSTANDABLE art, in the same way that you get old-timer laments about how violent the country has become when crime is at an all-time low, or how every teenager dresses like a prostitute because Miley Cyrus.

There has been a backlash against 70s-80s style Continental theory for quite some time now - the heyday of 'overly theoretical' has died down. But also... why should undergrads dictate what they should be taught? I promise you, any high-schooler coming into Lit 101 has a pretty narrow view of how to interact with art, because that's just not taught in high school, because high school English is geared towards SAT scoring. It's difficult to learn new ways of reading outside of the common-sense interpretations, the "what does X symbolize?" essay questions printed in sophomore textbooks. If all you want to do is talk about what base symbolism means and whether characters have 'realistic' depictions, or bear testimony about how deeply something moved you, why pay thousands in tuition when you could just join a reading circle?

What is so scary about learning new frameworks with which to interpret art? Placing works in context, historically and stylistically and politically? Spending some time thinking about how meanings are produced? Examining how something completely constructed and with a particular motivation can end up seeming so 'natural' and 'true'? Learning to completely disregard authorial intention in favor of coming up with your own meaning for something, OR learning more about an author and how the circumstances they lived in shaped their thought and style? Examining cultural or historical bias in older works through today's ideas about race, class, ethnicity, gender/sexuality, political power, psychology, etc? About looking beyond 'obvious' meanings? Learning a bit more about linguistics and grammar and cognitive language processing?

All those things take a bit of "theory," because you kind of need a framework of words and concepts to be able to articulate them - how do you describe what you don't know how to describe because you haven't known to look for it before? Or if you don't need them, it's certainly easier to have a pre-established dictionary of terms to work with than to reinvent the wheel in every paper you write. Theory is shorthand for complex ideas. It's jargon, but no worse than reading a scientific paper without enough preparation. It makes no sense to an outsider, and people feel threatened by that for some reason - the big scary professor doesn't make sense to me, therefore he doesn't deserve a living. Kind of like how some people don't understand science, therefore it's wrong or incomprehensible or against the natural order of things because it doesn't make sense according to what I've seen with my own two eyes or it's those goddamn liberals pushing their values on me to take away my oil and turn our children into perverts and drug-users (which, I'll admit... art does kind of have a tendency to doing that.) It's not grounded in something I can easily understand without learning something or using a different viewpoint, therefore it's bullshit.

Humanities and science aren't enemies - ignorance is their joint enemy. There shouldn't be such enmity between the two; one investigates natural truth, one examines man-made truths. The problem with the humanities isn't the content or spirit of it, which is simply finding/learning how to create new meanings, but economic and political aspects of academia, based on the choices our culture has made about its value.

I'm pretty sure she's referring to the Asian Carp becoming a massively annoying and costly invasive species in the Mississippi River. It is like she said, in the 1970s a bunch of fish farmers in the south brought in carp to clean their ponds (they feed on plankton and algae and microorganisms). But the carp thrived, and various factors including flooding caused them to escape the ponds and enter the Mississippi, where they have been swimming upstream and infesting other rivers and lakes for decades. The U.S. government has spent a decade trying a bunch of different tactics to prevent their entry into the great lakes - dams, gates, electrified fences, and mass poisonings. According to this article, in the Illinois River, which is connected to the lakes, 9 out of every 10 fish are Asian Carp. They wreak havoc on fishing and tourism, and are only eight miles away from Lake Michigan. One way of stopping them, closing the Chicago Lock, would cause at least a billion dollars in lost or wasted money from barges having to transfer loads back onto land. There has been a hundred million dollars spent in the past few years to examine the issue nationwide (they are now found in 23 states), to attempt to mitigate or remove them. All because some fish farmers tried to save a bit of money cleaning their ponds by changing one element of the local ecology.

Sorry I blew your cover, whoever wanted to hide that they live by any of the thousands of miles of rivers and lakes effected.

Well, in the middle of hundreds of hours of political investigation into whatever third-party candidate Slashdotters insist you should vote for (both parties are the same after all), and doing all the research into every single product I buy (because if you purchase something and it ends up being a dud, you obviously should have done the market research as a fully rational and informed consumer), and learning how to do all my own home improvement, programming, cooking, car maintenance, electronics repair, contract law (because if you break the terms of a contract it's on you regardless of how ridiculous the contract is, since contracts are sacred unless it you're talking about a EULA), disproving religion, teaching myself economics (Austrian or Keynesian depending on whether I am employed or not) researching climate science so that we can be Fully Informed and Decide for Ourselves whether climate change is for real, and anything else us fully independent and high-IQ posters don't need the government or expensive third-parties to help us with, sometimes it is helpful to have cognitive shortcuts, and let an organization whose politics form some sliver of a Venn diagram with mine do a bit of the work for me. And in exchange for the smallest bit of peace of mind, I'll send them a donation. Capitalism at work! What could be more ethical?

Inequality, yes, the vaguest of concepts. If you're going to credit the Tea Party with anything other than retired seniors with signs saying "big government get your hands off my medicare!" then you could charitably allow the Occupy people a noun or two about higher wages, a more equitable tax structure, fewer loopholes and subsidies for corporations, expanding (or at least not cutting) vital social services - all of which have at least as much popular support if not (much) more than the tea party platform which is pushed by a vocal minority of the Republican party. The Occupiers haven't had a congressional election to demonstrate their numbers yet.

I suggest doing some research about Dresden, many historians and ex-military feel that it was not justified, and an act of pointless brutality to the extent that some wish to call it a war crime.

Because the upkeep/maintenance costs for thousands of nuclear weapons is really expensive even today. A huge portion of the Department of Energy budget is devoted to nuclear weapons. So the fewer we have, the less money we spend, no? But the majority of nuclear weapons are for counterforce purposes - destroying military installations and other nuclear weapons. So a unilateral disarmament down to a fifth of the previous arsenal places the U.S. or Russia at an unacceptable risk for a decapitating first strike - regardless of how likely that actually is, you can't roll the dice with MAD. Both sides must have equivalent armament to assure MAD - you don't want to upset the strategic balance because even if you aren't realistically going to be attacked, a much greater nuclear arsenal still generates a lot of diplomatic soft power and you'll have the threat hanging over your head. I sure hope you don't make libertarian/tea-party posts elsewhere, because the cost difference between 1000 and 5000 is huge and both countries would dearly love to clear up some budgetary room at zero cost to their military's effectiveness. 1000 IS as effective as 5000 if both sides are at that level (and in the event of a nuclear war, 2000 exploded bombs results in much less fallout than 10000 - fallout is awful in either case, but you may as well have a whole lot less of it) and we're long past the one-upsmanship of the mid-period Cold War. Again, the majority of nuclear missiles are targeted at the other side's nuclear capabilities - it would take fewer than 1000 to decimate the civilian government, population, and infrastructure. We have no need to drive Russia into bankruptcy - indeed, Russian financial trouble is actually more likely to cause a nuclear incident, as weapons are stolen and engineering talent set free to be hired by other organizations and countries.

I don't want to take anything away from the sciences (when I get cancer, I could fucking die anyway, research or not), it's mostly an economic issue. IF the school thinks it can attract more students/make more money through price discrimination, well, this is Slashdot, let's call that a market inefficiency being addressed.

If your friends can't hack it in their chosen fields and want to default to something else that's their problem; since they're doing well I assume they managed to motivate themselves. Maybe the idea of potentially earning several hundreds of thousands of dollars more is financial incentive enough, rather than a 20% break on your tuition.