Hi everyone, the other day while watching Silicon Valley TV show, my friend thought that it would be hilarious and educational to create a website like urban dictionary for all the lingos from the show. So we created one. Hope you enjoy it, feel free to add some words on the website and let us know what you think!
Really like this one:
Y combinator => A label you add to your startup's intro (if chosen) that your company exchanges 7% of protected equity to arbitrary increase your valuation with.
Chinese(Pan-Asian, whatever), don't burn trash anymore for quite some time as far as I can remember, although I grew up in urban area, which might be a little different.
Honestly, I don't know where this stereotype comes from, and why the show runners choose to pick this one opposed to many others out there which might be even more interesting, IMO.
It's hard to make humorous shows without exposing some group to ridicule. While males are of course an acceptable target, but then the show looks too "PC". So in order to show that we're totally cool and not PC, a safe target is needed.
Edgy comedy doesn't have to be derived from covert racism. There are many different ways for the show to be un-PC. It's simply a cop-out for the writing team and the creator. This is also evident when the only prominent black character in the show is a prostitute and the only Latinos are portrayed as thugs.
Actually, I am OK with certain stereotyping, because that is how comedy works. However, burning trash is not remotely funny and not true anymore, it is not representative at all. In that case, it is not even a good stereotype, it just lazy thinking & writing because they don't bother to understand what it is like to be an Asian nerd.
Landfills currently handle roughly half of China's MSW, while only about 10% is incinerated. Official credo suggests that landfills will continue to play a dominant role. But Beijing's push to increase the share of burned waste is unmistakable: a central target calls for 30% of MSW to be treated by waste-to-energy incineration by 2030.
And late last year they opened the worlds biggest incinerator outside Beijing[1].
In the article[0], it says only 2% was burned in 1990.. so it seems this is a new initiative.
In the show (and the stereotype; I have no idea if it is true), "burning trash" refers to burning trash at home, not at a controlled municipal facility.
I can't seem to find the search button. Also, can someone define what "side effects" are, please. I am studying Scheme now and I don't understand the relevance of "side effects" to Scheme or anything else.
> Also, can someone define what "side effects" are, please. I am studying Scheme now and I don't understand the relevance of "side effects" to Scheme or anything else.
Something done by code that isn't represented by the return value of that code. For instance, if you define a function that changes a global variable and then returns double its argument, the change to the global variable is a "side effect". See also "pure functional" (code which doesn't have side effects).
That's not the kind of definition this dictionary is going for, though; that's tech jargon, not startup jargon.
Just a suggestion: Make signing up and signing in easier. Just have a username/password, don't ask for email and don't make the user repeat. If they make a typo when registering, they can make a new account.
Your site is very niche, meaning that fewer visitors will agree to invest time into registering to upvote / submit.
Feel free to submit your own definitions. It works in a way similar to Reddit/Hacker News. Anyone is free to submit new definitions and rankings are based on upvotes/time. We are going to remove any definitions that are blatantly offensive.
I found the Jian Yang entry offensive. Within liberal culture, it's typical to allow offensive stereotypes against Asians, on the basis that it is actually mocking the stereotype, not Asians. But this is inconsistent, since no one would accept this logic if it were applied to Black people or gays.
Are you offended by the definition of Jian Yang, or the actual character in the show? That's like being offended by Wikipedia's entry on the KKK because it accurately describes their position.
Anyway–it's not stereotyping Asians, it's stereotyping Chinese-national engineers in Silicon Valley. That's a pretty specific cultural subset.
> no one would accept this logic if it were applied to Black people or gays.
No? Because comedies have never had characters like Tracy Jordan or Franck Eggelhoffer?
So, just how specific does cultural satire have to get before you won't declare it racism?
I ask, because "Chinese" includes about 56 recognized ethnic groups in mainland China. I don't think we can say whether this character is Han, Zhuang, Hui, or necessarily any specific race that happens to exist primarily within the borders of what we call the nation of China.
Seems to me that character is more making fun of the culture of a nation than of a single ethnic group (or even some set of ethnic groups). If they had a character that made fun of, say, British culture, would that be OK with you? Or only if the character was white? (Which would seem awfully racist to me.)
Or is it only safe to satirize culture if the subject of the satire has ethnic roots in the Caucuses?
Or is it not about ethnicity, but appearance? Is it enough if they merely appear white? Because that opens the comedic landscape far beyond the Caucasus. Can we satirize Mexican culture, provided we limit it to Mexicans of European descent? (Again, how racist is that?)
There are some real battles worth fighting, but this really seems like a cosmetic one to me, no matter how much you think it "smells like racism."
It's like some people have a sense of indignation that's only tuned to detect a few things, and throw any sense of nuance or concept of false-positives out the window.
Tracy Jordan's entire character is not being a Black stereotype, and making fun of the discrepancy between his character and the stereotype. Jian Yang is an Asian stereotype.
The character of Jian Yang is a very specific subset of Chinese nationals, namely those who come to work in a very specific industry in a very small part of Northern California.
That's like being upset about a show with a character poking fun at Americans who teach English in South Korea. (Which, I'm guessing, could provide some pretty good material.)
I put a couple of things in but they weren't related to the show so much as the Valley itself.
Where's the downvote button, btw? Someone wrote that "Silicon Valley billionaires" are less douchey than regular billionaires and that shit ain't true.
"Michaelochurch it" or "MOCh it" (pronounced "maach") needs to be in the SV dictionary. This is obviously for taking any conversation and jacknifing it to absurdity. Fits very well in that it sounds similar to regular mocking, but is way more intense and is where one has full intention of hellbanning themself just cause. Sometimes conflated with "going nuclear". Love me some MOCh.
Regarding the other branch of this subthread, consider banning "attack definitions", which exist solely to attack a specific named person.
Also, in addition to downvoting, you need some way to flag effectively identical definitions for merging. And to avoid more such definitions, you should tie search to addition, so that if it looks like there's an existing definition for a term (or close to the suggested term), you show that and confirm that the user meant to submit a new definition.
