I believe the word "trite" generally implies overuse to the point of uselessness. These warnings very much have a use to indigenous peoples, and they serve that use well - so I'd argue that they don't qualify.
> Worn out; common; used until so common as to have lost novelty and interest; hackneyed; stale; as, a trite remark; a trite subject.
wiktionary:
> From Latin trītus "worn out," a form of the verb terō (“I wear away, wear out”).
> 1. Often in reference to a word or phrase: used so many times that it is commonplace, or no longer interesting or effective; worn out, hackneyed.
> 2. (law) So well established as to be beyond debate: trite law.
so i think you're kind of right; certainly the etymological origin means 'worn out', which implies 'useless', but it seems like it's commonly used nowadays in english to simply mean 'used very commonly', without the implication of uselessness, in particular in the legal sense
traditional aboriginal people might not want to be exposed to that and close the web page rather than continuing. it's a taboo similar to certain kinds of photographs in cultures you may be more familiar with
It's not really out of concern for people's cultures. Lots of cultures have all sorts of taboos about types of images or information. Muslim fundamentalists for instance don't like pictures of any people, of any ethnicity, alive or dead. This is just a nonsense fashion for the Australian government. All their websites have something like the one at the bottom of the page:
"The Australian War Memorial acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia. We recognise their continuing connection to land, sea and waters. We pay our respects to elders past and present."
It makes a change from chaining aboriginals neck to neck which they kept up after I was born, along with taking babies, and having exclusion zones "boundary roads" in cities.
In context here "trite" would be the term diminishing recognition of particular race issues, and "gammon" is the term disparging a particular attitude within the UK and doesn't target all with a particular genetic background or skin colour.
As an Australian I don't find the "trite" comment that diminishes recognition of indigenous contributions to the commonwealth war effort to be acceptable here and labelled that comment as gammon.
Curiously, in addition to the UK term which derives from a ham cut, there's an Australian indigenous term common in NSW and the NT with an unrelated etymology that also works here to a degree.
"Gammon" is a clear reference to a ruddy skin color and is intended to be offensive. It is a textbook racial slur.
Claiming that its not is like claiming the "n-word" isn't a racist slur because it was about a particular attitude and doesn't apply to all African Americans (see Chris Rock's https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niggas_vs._Black_People for an example of this).
It seems clear you've never heard it used or how it's used there.
If you are and you have then it would seem you're arguing in bad faith.
It's a slur on character as two people of clearly the same race, age, and gender could overwhelmingly be voted as one Gammon, one not.
It's about a cetrain shoutiness and empire centric values and attitude.
I've seen a lot of Chris Rock and your opinion notwithstanding that doesn't easily apply here.
As a genuine question, how is it that you've honed in on my response to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40194063 which is an actual dismissal of recognition of non western values?
You appear to have latched onto the mote in one comment and ignored the beam in another.
I'm from the UK, but have only admittedly heard it used twice (once in person, which I objected to and my objection was accepted).
Yes, I've latched onto that one thing because I don't have anything to say about the other. Catering for other minority value systems is an extremely thorny issue for many reasons (on the extreme you get utility monsters) and far too hard a problem for me to have a firm opinion on. I've leaned both ways depending on minority size, history and apparent value strength and dont have a proper philosophy for it to share.
I'm from Australia, widely travelled, and have worked with many people with many different belief systems.
I have no issue with respecting the wishes of those that don't want images and names of the recently deceased put out in public, which is an actual thing here in Australia with many people that I grew up with alongside, it's no stranger than many of the beliefs held by other groups.
If all signs in the prison camp were written right-to-left instead of vertically, they probably would have noted that before creating the sign. Especially considering their lives depended on it.
If you can't read the signs how would you know it's right-to-left? You are only seeing two unknown characters, you don't know which comes first. It's not about vertical vs horizontal. It's that someone who speaks English would assume that all of these signs they can't read are written left-to-right, and write the vertical characters they are copying in the wrong order.
This is such a facially bizarre thing to contest. They got a Japanese NCO to write the text, and presumably copied it as he wrote it. Why imagine that the NCO wrote it vertically and the soldiers horizontally? Likewise the article doesn't suggest that anyone thought the sign was written by a native speaker; why even imagine that's a requirement?
I mean, consider this in the abstract - the objections you're making here rest on the implicit assumption that you know more about the realities of life in a Japanese POW camp than TFA's author. (After all, if he fabricated the story about the sign he'd obviously fabricate it so as to be consistent with his experiences in the camp.) Do you really think that premise is more likely than the alternative - that TFA's extremely brief telling of the story simply doesn't include whatever details would answer your objections?
Most likely the circumstance they got the Japanese NCO to write the text in was a conversation about learning Japanese and how to write it too. Nobody is deliberately trying to stop them from learning to write, they are most likely in favour of it, the trickiness was just around avoiding the Japanese running the camp from noticing their interest in workshops specifically. If stroke order is important in this context then I expect the Japanese NCO showing them the characters would have told them and explained the proper order.
The only premise the story depends on is: that the camp guards saw the workshop and took it for granted that it was approved by somebody, since it was orderly and operating openly. If you accept that, it doesn't matter if the sign was amateurish or even upside-down - it would just look like something the workers had been told to make, or had made themselves to test the tools or to pass the time.
A bunch of posters here seem to be imagining that the sign was the lone keystone of the ruse, and that for some reason it needed to look like it was written by a native speaker or else the whole plan toppled. But nothing in TFA suggests that, it just says the sign was one of several things the POWs did to make the whole setup look like it had approval to be there.
Which one is it? There is no way to tell unless you already know the characters. Unless someone could read the existing signs they would almost certainly assume they were left-to-right and make any new sign like that if they only had the characters to copy.
I appreciate what you are pointing out here. I agree with you that getting it just right would be a challenge.
Did you happen to see the lathe? I ask you, which would be more difficult to get right in the smallest detail?
While most Allied soldiers would not be literate in Japanese, that doesn't mean they would all be completely ignorant, either. It just takes one to know enough to ask about character order.
While I agree that it was high risk, I'm willing to believe the people who were present when they say they pulled it off. Sometimes we dodge bullets without even knowing they were fired.
As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.
I already agreed that writing kanji without years of practice would be very hard to make look native. But they said they did it and it worked. Maybe it was obviously not native and it didn't matter. I don't know. But I'm not going to say they lied about making the sign.
Can we agree that it seems improbable that they fooled anybody about who drew the sign and also agree that they got to keep their workshop and their tools and have an amazing (and true) story?
> There have been XPRIZE competitions for vehicle efficiency, oil spill technology, more efficient rockets, health sensors, AI systems, genomics, etc.
All of which are based on existing technologies that have been delivering for decades if not an entire century (vehicle efficiency). Even something as nebulous as "AI systems" has been around for twenty years in the form of Google's original semantic search capabilities.
This "Quantum AI" prize, however, is a solution in search of a problem.
If you've been fired, it typically signals you had very bad performance or committed some fireable offense. If you were laid off, you were ostensibly just on the wrong team at the wrong time.
It's not about how you view your last employer, it's about how your next potential employer will view you.
And inexperienced people are notorious for falling for unfounded hype. Eventually they either learn to discern value, which is hard, or just write off hype, which usually works fine but occasionally makes them late to the party.
> RAM being the issue would mean Samsung phones are somehow more RAM efficient than Pixel phones, which is hard to believe.
Not necessarily. It’s at least possible that the overall experience is degraded in the low RAM system, and Samsung is willing to overlook this… which isn’t hard to believe.
Photo of men with artificial limbs built in the camp: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C4416
A wireless set hidden in the sole of a prisoner's sandals: https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C14187