1. Austerity and self-deprecation are hardly unique to "WASP culture" (quote unquote). I imagine you know South Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, East Asians, etc., who engage in those practices to a greater or lesser extent.

2. Among those who do practice austerity and self-deprecation, the extent and degree of the practice can vary with time and circumstances.

3. There's a deeper problem: When it comes to understanding why we human animals behave the way we do, we're much like the alchemists of old. In astronmomical terms, behavioral scientists are still working to get to the equivalent of Ptolemy. They've got a ways to go to reach the level even of Copernicus or Kepler, let alone Hubble and LeMaître.

• One pair of my grandparents were immigrants. Grandpa built a business but to the end of his life his English was tough to understand. Grandma hardly spoke English at all. They lived in a neighborhood surrounded by other immigrants from their home country.

• Their kids — my mom and her siblings — grew up speaking English at school and with each other (apart from when they switched to cut us kids out of the conversation) but not with their parents.

• Their many grandkids — my generation — grew up speaking only English. AFAIK, only one of us knows any of our grandparents' language at all (she took it in school IIRC).

• I also speak neither German nor Irish Gaelic, the languages of my immigrant ancestors on my dad's side of the family. And for practical purposes my own kids speak only English. (My grandkids aren't yet old enough to talk.)

I've repeatedly seen the same phenomenon here in Texas. Example: I have nephews whose great-grandparents on the other side of the family were Mexican immigrants. My nephews speak zero Spanish (AFAIK) and are as American as anyone.

I've read that this is a widespread phenomenon among immigrants from every country.

So: Patience — assimilation into American culture will happen.

I wasn't trying to present a balanced assessment of Anglo culture, which has clearly been a world leader in many, many respects. I was reacting to your seeming insistence — which appears to be getting more pronounced — that immigrants should embrace Anglo culture as superior to their own.

There are good- and bad elements in every culture. Cafeteria-style cultural mixing is how progress happens (modulo intellectual-property law).

Now you're overvalorizing what you refer to as Anglo social and political norms. Those norms weren't a monolith — neither were they an unalloyed good.

The Anglos in question famously included enslavers of kidnapped Africans, mainly but not exclusively in the American South. Our whole constitutional system was bastardized to keep those worthies on-side for ratification.

To be sure, the spectrum of Anglo norms included abolition, mainly in the North. But in the South, those norms also included secession and civil war to preserve enslavement as an economic and social system.

IIRC, the enslaver class were largely of English stock — although many white southerners were of Protestant Scots-Irish descent (e.g., John C. Calhoun), and some of Welsh (e.g., Jefferson Davis).

Now let's talk about immigrants' cultural contributions: The residents of some regions of Germany were no slouches commercially. In the U.S., they and Irish Catholics were largely anti-slavery. German immigrants especially were pro-Union; that led to violence against them during the Civil War by Confederates. [0]

(I don't know enough about Dutch contributions to say anything useful about them.)

Bottom line: Let's not fetishize the Anglo-Dutch origins of the American system. The finest crop seeds will be useless without decent soil, water, and light. Seeds don't provide those things. And as summarized above, in our case the seed was far from uniformly good.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nueces_massacre

My immigrant ancestors were farmers, ordinary workers, and small-business people. Not one of them had much education. But in the main they had reasonable shares of motivation, family orientation, and work ethic. They had the gumption to leave their various countries and come here where opportunities were greater — just as you said was the case for "desis like [you]."

My people filled a need when they came to the U.S. at various times in the 19th and 20th centuries. I imagine your people did the same. Sure, in purely-economic terms they didn't make the near-term contributions that their descendants have. But life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie.

It's debatable whether taking half of billionaires' wealth would materially advance the efforts in those areas.

What seems far less debatable is the political consequences of the accummulation of so much wealth — coupled with essentially zero legal restrictions on the use of that wealth in the quest for (governmental) power.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49943550

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

(Raises hand.) I'm doing things with my online law-school course materials, in just a few minutes using Claude, that I never even considered doing before because I didn't want to take the time to improve my rudimentary JavaScript- and CSS skills. Instead of just a fairly-simple, single-page HTML document, Claude is helping me turn the materials into something genuinely useful for both my students and practitioners.

Phrases I've heard:

- This isn't my favorite

- Um, not really my cup of tea

Fun fact: Texas's counties range in population from ~5.1 million (Harris — Houston) to less than 500 (Loving, King, Kenedy [sic])

[QUOTE:]

Russia has been staging covert operations and deniable provocations against European countries for many years. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022 they have increased. These have included incursions by reconnaissance drones, hacking, arson, parcel bombs targeting cargo flights and plots to kill executives of leading European arms firms. In recent months the pace of such shadowy attacks appears to have risen again. The Russian operations have three main goals, according to analysts and security officials: trying to coerce European countries into halting their support for Ukraine; raising the costs of providing that support; and attempting to make NATO look powerless.

[/QUOTE]

And of course there've been "suspicious" cable cuts in the Baltic Sea and other European waters ....

https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/09/21/russias-grey-zon...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49757500

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

My (late) kid brother did that for a number of years. Big time sink and PITA.

(Sarcasm noted.) There was a bitter joke about Islamist takeovers by elections after the Arab Spring: "One man [literally], one vote, one time."

I haven't calculated a cube root by hand since, what, sixth grade? (It's been so long I don't remember.) I'd hate to spend the mental cycles having to do that kind of task.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49629685

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

(I use the flipped classroom approach extensively. But the legal profession being the eager embracers of novelty that we are , I refer to the approach as "enhanced Socratic method," given that Socratic method was something we all endured in law school.)

For math and engineering courses, the basic flipped-classroom approach was used at West Point for over 150 years: In the so-called Thayer method, students study textbooks in advance, then in class, they work on problems on chalkboards. The instructor moves from chalkboard to chalkboard, coaching the students in real time. [1]

(I do much the same thing in my contract-drafting classes: In small groups, students do drafting exercises using online whiteboards. I lurk on my laptop, quietly coaching in person as needed.)

[0] https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/flipped-classrooms

[1] https://flippedlearning.org/syndicated/avoiding-flipped-lear...