Or maybe it means that high status and low status English have different difficulties, and native speakers tend to learn the one that their parents use (finding others harder) while L2 speakers learn to speak from a description of English which is actually a description of a particular high status accent (usually either Oxford or New England I think)

you don't see people wearing little rings around their neck in memory of Frodo

I suspect you mean something like ‘you see many many fewer people wearing little rings than crosses’, but if you mean it literally it (slightly) surprises me and my model of the world (in particular, the part of the world you're in) needs updating.

I'm fairly sure I'm the only 24-year-old grad-student with a Roth IRA topped-up for 2012-2014, and this is because when I got extra money, it went into the retirement account rather than towards consumption, or even towards extra charity.

This is true for me as well (I'm slightly older), but I also have some sources of income that I expect most graduate students don't.

If we want to talk about how money is awesome, we should also be talking about how to make sure that people who aren't like us actually get some of it. I mean it: no amount of Tumblry "checking our privilege" is actually going to make the people who work in, say, our favorite food trucks or hole-in-the-wall falafel joints, anywhere near as wealthy as us. We'll need to actually exercise our intelligence for that.

But one of the main reasons why money is awesome is because spending money is rivalrous. My primary expensive hobby is art collecting. I have the number of original paintings I have because I put up more money than the other people bidding on them, and if everyone had more money, then the primary effect would be that the prices increase.

When you say we need to exercise our intelligence, let me talk about Franklin Barbecue in Austin. It's quite possibly the best barbecue in the US, and they've sold out of brisket every day that they've been open. Officially, it opens at 11 AM, but generally people recommend that you show up at ~8 AM to wait in line.

To the economist in me, this is a terrible setup. They could spend their customers' extra money; they can't spend their customers' wasted time. They should auction off the barbecue, which will raise prices and lower wait times. But it'll also get rid of the communal experience of waiting in line, and less of their customers will be students and more of them will be engineers. The way to get more money to 'food trucks' is to embrace the inequality that makes engineers that will bid on barbecue.

If we're allowed to discuss genetically mediated differences with respect to race and behavior, then we're also allowed to discuss empirical studies of racism, its effects, which groups are demonstrated to engage in it, and how to avoid it if we so wish. If we're allowed to empirically discuss findings about female hypergamy, we're also allowed to discuss findings about male proclivities towards sexual and non-sexual violence.

Speaking for myself, I would be happy to see a rational article discussing racism, sexism, violence, etc.

For example, I would be happy to see someone explaining feminism rationally, by which I mean: 1) not assuming that everyone already agrees with your whole teaching or they are a very bad person; 2) actually providing definitions of what is and what isn't meant by the used terms in a way that really "carves reality at its joints" instead of torturing definitions to say what you want such as definining sexism as "doing X while male"; 3) focusing on those parts than can be reasonably defended and ignoring or even willing to criticize those part's that can't.

(What I hate is someone just throwing around an applause light and saying: "therefore you must agree with me or you are an evil person". Or telling me to go and find a definition elsewhere without even giving me a pointer, when the problem is that almost everyone uses the word without defining it, or that there are different contradictory definitions. Etc.)

Garbage dumps would have metal that's more concentrated than you'd find it in ore. I'm not sure how much energy would be needed to refine it.

If I were writing science fiction, I think I'd have modest tech-level efforts at mining garbage dumps in coastal waters.

The History of the Next Ten Billion Years-- a Stapledonian handling of the human future. Entertaining, though I think it underestimates human inventiveness.

Julius Caesar is, like A Few Good Men, mostly building up to the famous speech. But I thought it had interesting - and LW-relevant - things to say about the merits of trusting reason, friendship, or one's moral intuition.

Comedy ages very quickly. I'll be interested to see how Pratchett is regarded in 20 years, but I don't have a lot of hope.

Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. I recommend starting with Mort (the fourth book published). The first two books are straight-up parodies of fantasy cliches that are significantly different from what comes afterward, and the third book, Equal Rites, I didn't care for very much. Pratchett said that Mort was when he discovered plot, and it's the book that I recommend to everyone.

"We also have lawyers in Muggle Britain, and they'd think your lawyers are cute."

It's a funny line, but is it plausible? Is it just that wizard law is less complex?

Except when physically constrained, a person is least free or dignified when under the threat of punishment. We should expect that the literatures of freedom and dignity would oppose punitive techniques, but in fact they have acted to preserve them. A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. Some ways of doing so are maladaptive or neurotic, as in the so­ called 'Freudian dynamisms'. Other ways include avoid­ing situations in which punished behaviour is likely to occur and doing things which are incompatible with punished behaviour. Other people may take similar steps to reduce the likelihood that a person will be punished, but the literatures of freedom and dignity object to this as leading only to automatic goodness. Under punitive contingencies a person appears to be free to behave well and to deserve credit when he does so. Non-punitive con­tingencies generate the same behaviour, but a person cannot then be said to be free, and the contingencies de­serve the credit when he behaves well. Little or nothing remains for autonomous man to do and receive credit for doing. He does not engage in moral struggle and therefore has no chance to be a moral hero or credited with inner virtues. But our task is not to encourage moral struggle or to build or demonstrate inner virtues. It is to make life less punishing and in doing so to release for more reinforcing activities the time and energy consumed in the avoidance of punishment. Up to a point the litera­tures of freedom and dignity have played a part in the slow and erratic alleviation of aversive features of the human environment, including the aversive features used in intentional control. But they have formulated the task in such a way that they cannot now accept the fact that all control is exerted by the environment and proceed to the design of better environments rather than of better men.

-- B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity

One strategy: Take insular, scholarly interest in a broadly popular subject. For example, I'm interested in APBRmetrics and associated theoretical questions about the sport of basketball. One nice plus to this hobby is that it also leaves me with pretty up-to-date non-technical knowledge about NBA and college basketball.