There's a difference in meaning between "he ran home" and "he was running home." Most people aren't aware enough of the language they use to avoid overusing certain things, but mechanical transformations aren't the answer. One should aspire to learn how language works, and then use it appropriately.
Yeah, bad example. I was referring more to removing "was" and "ing" if you are overusing it too much, particularly when writing scenes that include action.
It really does work though. Through peer review, I found that making some changes along these lines vastly improved some of my stories.
I found this article rather superficial. It touched on a few (very few) points of comparison and ignored a huge number of factors affecting entrepreneurship in Europe.
Rather than waste time expanding on that though, I have a question. In this statement " If we truly believe the next global superstar in tech will hail from Europe, why would we only fund them at one-fifth the amount of their future US competitors?" Who the hell is "we"?
Of course, this question begs the question of whether "we" believe any such thing, because no such idea follows at all from the preceding disquisition. We have several arguments, weak arguments, trying to prop up the idea of a healthy startup ecosystem, and then suddenly we are defining success by the measure of outliers.
But in any event, who is we? The would-be pundits? The startup people in Europe? VC's? The people who give VC's money? Only the last two have any real say in where the money is invested, the VC's much more than the funders.
Do VC's generally believe this? If not, why? Is the claim that they are benighted and too envious. I would find that surprising, given that all the San Hill people I know are hyper-capitalists, to put it mildly, and crunch numbers as readily as most people blink on a windy day.
It's commonplace for VC's to get article and interviews published, given that half of their job is self-marketing, but to be blunt, the attempt to sound like a pundit/prophet is usually much better than this.
Umm, documentary fallacy much? That and pretending like hundreds of scripts written by dozens of hands somehow cohere.
Oh, yes, and that thing about people not living according to economic theories, but having societies and cultures, only a slice of which economic theories try to capture. And while I'm at it, the fact that economic theories float above the actual behavior of humans and only thinly capture what they are up to, while floating below any serious philosophy that explain why people should or do anything in the first place.
Well, in his defense, your Bundy and Armstrong examples are just awful, and the bit about whether X is moral or Y is moral is even worse. You've begged the question of what defines morality entirely and replaced a rational basis for evaluation with the assumption that most people you know would consider one thing "worse" than another.
Here's an equally worse argument. If I took a knife away from Ted Bundy, when I encountered him walking around a park at night, wouldn't that be immoral, because taking things that belong to other people is wrong? If I took a syringe of enhancement drugs away from Lance Armstrong, as we both prepared for a race, wouldn't that be immoral.
Your Bundy example implies that the only reason one would or would not kill someone is whether they listen to Ted Bundy. That's a ridiculous mockup. Personally, if Bundy begged me not to kill someone, I'd assume the person was his accomplice. As for Lance, cycling advice isn't moral advice, and it would be perfectly reasonable to refuse to have anything to do with someone, because you found them morally reprehensible. In fact, taking cycling lessons from Lance at this point would simply reinforce the notion that what he did was not seriously wrong and this make one complicit.
In any event, since you are bandying the word "morality" around, let me bring up the issue of "moral authority." If someone's moral authority is suspect, one should not, in general, look to them for moral guidance.
my rant about hypocrisy had nothing to do with morality, and i wasn't suggesting you accept moral advice from either person. i thought that was pretty clear.
given the recent news regarding pot - i'm pretty sure that assumption was a safe bet.
my first example is ridiculous. that is the point. no sane person would do that. i went less over the top with armstrong. he's obviously a very skilled cyclist, and knows a lot about it. if he offered me cycling advice i would probably listen to it. facts are facts and are independent of who says them.
The problem with most libertarian beliefs is that they are very high-level and most attempts to apply and create a coherent system fail miserably. At their most useful, they can influence the current system to prevent certain undesirable excesses, but as an ideology, it's long on corrections and short on workable alternatives.
It's also the case that those fews well-informed and articulate libertarians who are engaged in politics never seem to be the ones who actually run for anything. Look at the Libertarian candidates for public office in the US over the years. Would you want a "ferret activist" as Lt. Governor of California? You could have had, complete with ferret in hand in his official election photo in the ballot handbook.
Libertarianism is an orientation and an armchair pursuit.
I wouldn't write off mockery as unproductive. It's been an element of perfectly productive political discourse since the beginning of recorded political discourse. If done well and in an informed fashion, it ends up dispelling the illusion that any ignorant bit of pseudo-theory someone can conjure up is worthy of the public sphere.
I'm afraid your knowledge of history is almost completely inaccurate.
The "Goths" were just a few dozens Germanic tribes who moved West and conquered territory which was already occupied by Germanic tribes. Now, before the latter Germans started pushing West so hard, ca. 500 BCE, there were Celts in a lot of these regions, but 1) current Celtic populations don't show any evidence of "Aboriginal Bread"; 2) Celts are very closely related genetically, culturally, and linguistically to both the Italic and Germanic peoples; 3)the Baltic peoples are Indo-European too. They aren't "aborigines," and certainly not culturally distinct and exemplary of some multi-millenial cultural continuity distinct from the Germans or Celts or Italians or Greeks or Albanians or Iranian or Indo-Aryans...etc. The non-Indo-European and non-Finno-Ugric Neolithic peoples of Europe disappeared under waves of IE and Finno-Ugric immigration everywhere (except possibly for the Basque).
The only non-immigrants are people who stayed very near the North shore of the Black Sea, but it's nonsense to claim that because they didn't move much in 5.5K years, they remembered how to make their ancestral bread, while no one else did. That area itself saw waves of immigrants (both IE and non-IE) and was basically part of the East-West highway, so the opposite scenario is much more likely.
Moreover, while the Romans enslaved people from various conquered populations, they did not enslave whole regions or tribes or clans or what have you. Prisoners were taken here and there, but large populations and their cultures were not lost to slavery. In addition, all those Germanic tribes and other conquered peoples _were_ most of the Roman Empire eventually. They didn't get enslaved or absorbed, nor did they conform much. They just took over.
One might also point out that the Northern and Western European diets never conformed to the Mediterranean.
