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KennethMyers

Re:Ask HN: Extremely brazen phone scammer – what to do? on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @06:13PM (#25352869)
Same guys called me two days ago!
ESL/EFL teacher here. Yes. A Spanish engineer who was my student recently thinks the moon landing was faked. A Puerto Rican accountant thinks the CIA has weather-controlling satellites and steers hurricanes to PR. Many Europeans think 9/11 was done by Bush. Many, many Arabs that I've taught say the holocaust never happened, and that Jews are responsible for a hundred unrelated things.
QAnon theories are false, but in my opinion, so are the beliefs of Islam.

And if the standard required for censorship is that "someone with related beliefs killed someone in Germany", or "there's like a whole subreddit for people who are frustrated with family members who believe this", then we've got to ban Islam, Christianity, Rap music, eyeliner, sports, and probably everything else you can think of.

Nobody banned 9/11 truthers from major internet communications protocols. Nobody banned birthers.

The shift in the US, in less than a year, towards banning speech that annoys the elites, is something I would've thought impossible a mere few years ago.

I was taught in high school that here in America we fought free speech with more free speech.

During my undergrad studies in anthropology, a prof remarked off-hand that the prohibition of first-cousin marriage a pretty new and baseless thing, and that the offspring were very negligibly at risk. It was an off-hand comment, but an off-hand comment made by someone with a PhD in the field, so I'm with her on this one. But now googling . . .
Re:A Stoic Mind Hack: Alien Possession on Saturday May 16, 2015 @07:54PM (#9558081)
Ack! You shared my blog post! Thank you, Aaron Lidman! I feel important!

EDIT: ok, now your submission has been flagged. Oh well. WTF?

Re:Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (June 2014) on Monday June 02, 2014 @08:23PM (#7837416)
Me and my wife would both love to be considered for awesome jobs!

Her:

Dallas / Ft Worth Texas | Local, Remote, or somewhere awesome | Full Time or Part Time

Stack: Writing, Modelling, Udacity Python, Illustration

Resume: http://goo.gl/8zfFFl

Contact: [email protected]

Megan wears lots of hats, and wears them well. She's an obsessive self-taught neophyte programmer who also does artistic nude modelling and the occasional visual arts show or children's book. She would really love to find something that paid decent entry-level wages and let her pour coffee and hang out with programmers and grow as a programmer.

Me:

Dallas / Ft Worth Texas | Local, Remote, or somewhere awesome | Full Time or Part Time

Stack: Cowboy coding for gentleman science with lots of BASIC bash and Prolog, Professoring (TESOL), Writing, Marketing

Resume: http://goo.gl/P1aOnb

Contact: [email protected]

I'm an ESL professor who finished a Georgetown fellowship in Manila last year and I haven't found anything awesome in Texas since.

I'm also a writer. My blog has topped HN a couple times with posts like "A Rough Guide to Social Skills for Smart Awkward People" and "Why God Hates German Words."

You've probably seen this map I've made at some point, too: http://i.imgur.com/CK6aONG.jpg

Mark Manson called me a "really, really, really fucking good writer", and I think I'm good at getting lots of eyeballs on things.

Re:Dear HN: Please Fucking Hire Me To Do Anything on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @01:10PM (#6251767)
An employer who thought the f-bomb in a hacker news post spoke poorly of my communicative abilities would not be my ideal employer.
Re:Dear HN: Please Fucking Hire Me To Do Anything on Wednesday August 21, 2013 @12:01AM (#6248084)
Yep, this is not the stuff I'm good at. Correct.
Re:Dear HN: Please Fucking Hire Me To Do Anything on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @11:00PM (#6247916)
I'm looking for other jobs too. I can do lots of things.
Re:Dear HN: Please Fucking Hire Me To Do Anything on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @10:42PM (#6247855)
Huh? Oh, the visa asking guy, not me, right?
Re:Dear HN: Please Fucking Hire Me To Do Anything on Tuesday August 20, 2013 @10:41PM (#6247854)
I have a passport, and I'm a US citizen.
I think I should. I think I should do this with my craziest friends and see what comes of it. Maybe word of mouth will get us the requisite numbers to make some money. Maybe we'll just at least have what we wanted for ourselves. Why not, right? It's like zero overhead. Thanks for your encouragement.
Patti would talk dirty to me. And so would Lorna. And they're hot. That, and the fact that I know and love these people, might be the reason I was over-optimistic about the price point.
I've got some systems in play for myself too :) There's definitely something in this noospheric vicinity that people want.
Thanks for your thoughts. The one thing I'd have over Google Now is that I wouldn't be trying to anticipate people's information needs; they could just give me a list of a hundred things to check. Setting them up might take an hour per customer, and that would be labor that was plainly bet in the hopes of continued business. If people wanted to change things all the time, that would, in fact, be a nightmare. And I don't think anyone, even in a cheap country like the Philippines, would be excited about their share of $10 a month. So it looks like there are a bunch of insurmountable cons.

Maybe this is something I should just pitch to friends. I could handle the scripting load for 30 people, and 30 customers is $900 a month.

Probably a good point. The price point just may not be feasible. Thanks for your input!

Ask HN: Would you use a service that sent you customized spoken information?

I'm an American currently on a teaching fellowship at a university in the Philippines. I'm surrounded by people who are sharp and computer savvy with excellent English and pretty accents.I want to make something for myself, and I'd like to know if it has broader appeal.An MP3 is recorded in the daytime here, and if you're in the US you receive it at 5am. It runs like this:"Hi Ken, this is...

( Read More... | 24 comments | 11 points | on HN )

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