No, it's like saying your dad took a dump on my carpet, so your dad should clean it up; your dad hemmed and hawwed for 50 years before finally paying up, and you are pissed off that this might take the tiniest bite out of your inheritance.
I literally have no notion what sort of housing 10k could buy for years and years in a major Indian city, but everything you said is equal to or better than this guy's home.
This truck has no indoor plumbing, no electricity (he has battery packs he charges at work), and no heat at all, not even animal dung.
As I recall, the study didn't say that you got less happy as you earned more money (richer people weren't less happy), it was that you didn't get more happy as you got more absolute money. That's a crucial difference.
Also, that same study acknowledged that you did get happiness from making more money than your peers, regardless of that income boundary. It's just that if you make $200k, you probably still have peers that make more than you, just as much as the peers of those making $100k and $400k.
Yes, it costs more to live i Beverly Hills than it does to live in Sarajevo, but that cost represents the fact that it's BETTER to live in Beverly Hills than to live in Sarajevo
This isn't strictly the case. There's some element of truth here, but it can also reflect the wealth of your neighbours (which doesn't necessarily make the place better to live in), the paucity of locally-available resources, the tourism industry, local policy decisions, certain cultural differences that change the supply and demand in the area, and a whole host of complicated economic factors. And you have a huge bias toward living where you already are (possibly because you were born there) since that's where your non-economic assets like family and friends live and possibly where you were born.
Two places that are equidistant from the farm that produces potatoes, in opposite directions, can find those identical potatoes cost twice as much in one place than the other because of cost of living differences. It's the same potatoes, travelling the same distance. We're not comparing private jets to public buses here.
Why are you purposely pretending not to understand what people are saying? They are basically always referring to the 1% of their own country. You're moving goalposts, and then pretending that everyone else is with the Orange County argument.
And even so, I don't think he'd have to exclude himself because he's not the top 1% of Orange County -- because there's a 99% chance he isn't in the top 1% of the US (assuming he's from the US, and assuming that slashdot's 1%er commenters are in proportion to the greater population). With this said, Cost of Living, tax differences, and government benefits are real factors that makes the actual worldwide 1% a little fuzzy.
In addition, you're quoting income numbers, not wealth numbers. Just because you have a higher income than 99% of people, doesn't mean you have a higher wealth than 99% of people.
So there's a variety of estimates, and note most of those sites are actually explicitly making the same point you are so they aren't biased against you. Where's 22k coming from?
You're being unfair and unnecessarily polarizing. Just because you've met people who have both beliefs doesn't mean they always go together. People aren't always either right about everything or wrong about everything.
I'm not convinced there's any correlation at all, though there could be. As anecdotal evidence, at the time of writing there are four responses to my post. Two of them are explicitly meat eaters who are making the "chemicals are bad" argument and both precluding any possibility they are wrong. Clearly none of them are vegans.
I've also met lots of vegetarians and vegans, and literally none of them have irrational fears of chemicals in foods (they have rational fears of things that actually cause food poisoning and such). The only time I've seen those two beliefs together are in stereotypes.
In fact, the person I know who is most irrational about food is almost a complete carnivore. He's all-in on his keto diet. He lost like 150 lbs when he switched to basically only ever eating sausages, and from that he's drawn the conclusion that a co-worker of ours could cure her Multiple Sclerosis by cutting the grains and veggies out of her diet. Second place goes to a vegetarian who was pretty convinced that ancient humans never hunted for meat.
They will if they are the sort who abstain from meat due to ethical considerations (the "fish are friends, not food" crowd). Your chemic shitstorm isn't alive so there's no ethical debate about eating them.
Also normal people who don't give two shits will eat it. I eat normal meat but if this tasted like real meat, and wasn't substantially less healthy or more costly, I'd eat it for sure.
If it comes even close in price I can see restaurants choosing it because then they don't have to have separate vegetarian and vegan menu options.
Kickstarter provides an interesting answer to that, when it comes to things like art and software.
It's the perfect "DRM" (really just the "RM" part) without any copyright. They sell to consumers, and only have to provide a product if there's enough money to fund its development (although most successful Kickstarter projects have already had significant investment before they hit Kickstarter). Of course they usually sell afterward in the artificial scarcity market, but prior to release it's playing in the real scarcity market of original works. Because the product doesn't actually exist yet, nobody can distribute it on Warez sites before it is paid back. Assuming they have correctly estimated their costs, anyway.
It does lend itself to a game of "rational self-interest chicken". Suppose we decided that copyright was gone, and after the product releases absolutely nobody will pay a dime ever again. That means you could want the product, but gamble on it funding even without your contribution. But you could lose that gamble. So you have to weigh the odds of it failing against how much you want it to exist.
Both MOOC and UAT are barely perceptible on the graph. Your earlier graph also shows that MOOC only really appeared as a term around 2 and a bit years ago, and has never been a common term.
It's not even clear to me why MOOC would have anything to do with the IT industry in particular. It seems like a term that the education industry should be familiar with. I bet the vast majority of students of a MOOC cannot recognize the acronym. I can at least understand somebody thinking that UAT was a common industry abbreviation because it is related to the industry.
If you are even remotely part of the IT industry, it is very unlikely that MOOC is a term you are unfamiliar with.
Not necessarily. Software can apply different rules to different players. Many games are asymmetric.
Also, I'm not sure to what degree random variation is allowed. Are two players actually playing by the same rules if one of them spawns near random epic-level loot and the other spawns near the highest level monster and no weapons or armour? Perhaps you need "symmetric randomness" where a random value is used in two places, or a common random seed between two players.
That does imply that things like timed speedruns of the same deterministic single-player game is a sport though (most platformers I can think of are basically deterministic).
1. Slashdot was more than a social setting (it is not). 2. I believed for one moment you were serious. I do not believe it. I think you're trying to make a point by creating a false equivalency.
Look, keep using man-made, I'm not on a crusade, and I'll keep using man-made. But FFS, humanmade does roll off the tongue. Human rolls off the tongue, and man-made rolls off the tongue, and human-made doesn't introduce any special linguistic controtion by joining the two terms.
But this is how we fix that? I'm living in bizarro world where anything, literally anything, that has the 3 letters M A N together, must be changed because it's clearly sexist
Not to pick on you in particular, but you are an anonymous coward so you can represent the group. Do you not realize that YOU are the PC police when you jump on everybody's tiniest difference in language usage, even when it's completely correct and completely understandable, and you are the one bringing up these strawman language changes with manager and manual.
I'm living in a bizarro world where anything, literally anything, that has the 5 letters "H U M A N", must be changed because it's clearly PC bullshit. Next Dehumanizes will become demanizes! Humane will become mane! Oh the manity!
I don't believe for one second you looked up "artificial" in the dictionary. You might have looked up artifice and then jumped to conclusions on the basis of a common etymology.
You don't have grounds to complain about human-made vs. man-made if you're introducing the same nonsensical distinction between artificial and man-made.
Driving for ~4 hours round trip (including *2* border crossings and gas money) to save a net of $20 (the difference between $40 direct shipping and $15 within-US shipping, minus the $5 parcel holding fee) is not worth it 99% of the time.
The great lakes region is one of the most populated parts of that 100 miles thing, so 4 hours is pretty conservative to go around the lake and then across a busy bridge. I know where I grew up it's more 12 hours total (6 out and 6 back).
Everything you mentioned in your first paragraph is completely trivial. Do you seriously believe that it's significantly harder to build a robot that can handle a bacon burger, or a two-patty-three-bun burger, or a chicken burger?
This is just a robot that makes a tower of ingredients. Sometimes the ingredient list is "bottom-bun, patty, top-bun", sometimes it's "bottom-bun, patty, middle-bun, patty, bacon, top-bun". That's basically trivial. The only substantial difference between a big mac and a chicken burger is the cooking method, which is highly automated already.
I don't understand why you think that's difficult, or that a plain burger is at all a likely result. A robot that can make a tower of various ingredients is the same complexity as the design projects we ask groups of 3 second-year engineering students to do, in between their other courses (I remember my second year design project, I judge it to be more difficult). This microcontroller is easily capable of doing that on-demand, in fact it's overkill: http://www.mouser.com/ProductD..., and it costs less than 5 dollars.
This is certainly not enormously complex or expensive. It doesn't take a great deal of manual dexterity to assemble a burger.
Where it gets slightly more difficult is when you have all burgers, and you suddenly want to add a wrap, or a pizza, or a bowl of soup, or an ice-cream cone. Something that is completely different and doesn't fit with the existing robot's design. You might want a different robot for that, or maybe reduce to one employee who makes specialty items.
I think you massively overestimate how difficult it is to make a hamburger robot, and underestimating how much of the cooking is automated today. A big reason McDonalds isn't automated is because it doesn't just sell hamburgers. Another reason is that the sort of ordering interface that customers would use only recently became commonly available & understood. You need a touchscreen or similar, that can handle requests like "no pickles" or "allergic to nuts" or whatever, vending-machine-like payment methods, etc. -- I've used these at human-staffed places where there is no cashier and it works great, but it's not super common yet and some people will always hate it just like some people hate self-checkout at grocery stores, even though I prefer it. Apparently McDonalds is looking into doing that to the ordering process.
(Another reason is drive-through, mainly because drive-through windows were not designed to be easy to robotically pass credit cards and food to a person who positioned thier car in any idiot position, and it's not an easy retrofit).
No, the British empire is all countries ruled or administered by the UK. That's not the same thing for a couple reasons. One, because there are multiple Queens in the world, and two, because the Queen of England is nominally Queen of non-UK countries too, but neither the UK nor the Queen rules or administers there.
I don't see this issue coming up when we are talking about US or EU companies being prosecuted for bribery in foreign nations, even when it wouldn't be considered bribery in those foreign nations.
That's not a reasonable comparison. The right comparison would be if those companies were prosecuted for bribery in foreign nations, where such foreign nations required bribery by law (which, by definition they don't, because then it wouldn't be bribery).
Plus, we can't divorce the actual subject matter from the issue. The US is demanding the ability to violate the privacy rights of foreign citizens (as the EU sees it), and the EU says it's against the law to aid and abet that. Yes, it's up to the multinational corporation to figure out how they can satisfy all laws at once, or otherwise just not do business. If both sides stick to their guns, this most likely ends with tech companies' formal headquarters outside of the US (it's not like the EU is demanding US data that US law prohibits sending). Then the former US headquarters becomes $TechCompanyName-US$, and their data centres are primarily outside of the US because only US-only data can remain in the US (so, ultimately, the Internet is a little bit slower and a little bit more expensive in the US).
I disagree that every other computer camp is a boy's computer camp, but I agree that it's just not a serious problem when boys are allowed into 95% of computer camps (and the same goes for a theoretical boys-only camp). People all the time do things whose gender makeup doesn't reflect real life. Girls have a girls' night out. Boys have a boys' night out. It's not a hell-worthy sin.
It would be a bit different maybe if the all-girls camp was materially better than the camps boys had access to. But as is, I don't know how you can get worked up over it.
Here, you recognize that there is an unfair advantage given to some students, but dismiss it because (apparently) any unfair disadvantatge that isn't literally impossible to overcome is irrelevant.
Hard != impossible.
Then here, you introduce the notion that the GP is talking about working harder, but he wasn't talking about that, he was talking about being at a different maturity level:
You are right, usually AP classes usually mean more work
Then here, you pretend you didn't even say that and state that hard work = more opportunities. But we just established that you don't need to work as hard with a different birthday. Therefore, Work Hard != More Opportunities. It's, at best, (Work Hard) * (Birthday weighting function) = More Opportunities.
Work hard = more opportunities? Seems legit.
People don't generally object to the work hard part! They object to the birthday weighting function. When somebody argues about it for paragraphs it is intellectually dishonest to ignore that, brush it aside, and discuss hard work as though you disagreed on that subject.
An intellectually honest argument might involve the theory that the birthday weighting function was not as significant as your opponent believed.
(note I'm not an American, did not go to American schools, and this talk of AP classes is about a school system with which I am unfamiliar. I am saying this as a person just watching an argument crash into walls like those children's toys that spin randomly and then go again)
Right, but it would also negate the advantages of touch, chiefly the more intuitive targetting and the availability of multi-touch gestures. You are just operating an actual mouse (mouse-equivalent device) that has unusual non-ergonomic packaging and no physical keyboard.
Anybody who has moved property between family members (without incurring income tax, or, in the US, gift tax) has been aware of "gifting" as a verb for a very long time.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's like saying your dad took a dump on my carpet, so your dad should clean it up; your dad hemmed and hawwed for 50 years before finally paying up, and you are pissed off that this might take the tiniest bite out of your inheritance.
I literally have no notion what sort of housing 10k could buy for years and years in a major Indian city, but everything you said is equal to or better than this guy's home.
This truck has no indoor plumbing, no electricity (he has battery packs he charges at work), and no heat at all, not even animal dung.
As I recall, the study didn't say that you got less happy as you earned more money (richer people weren't less happy), it was that you didn't get more happy as you got more absolute money. That's a crucial difference.
Also, that same study acknowledged that you did get happiness from making more money than your peers, regardless of that income boundary. It's just that if you make $200k, you probably still have peers that make more than you, just as much as the peers of those making $100k and $400k.
Yes, it costs more to live i Beverly Hills than it does to live in Sarajevo, but that cost represents the fact that it's BETTER to live in Beverly Hills than to live in Sarajevo
This isn't strictly the case. There's some element of truth here, but it can also reflect the wealth of your neighbours (which doesn't necessarily make the place better to live in), the paucity of locally-available resources, the tourism industry, local policy decisions, certain cultural differences that change the supply and demand in the area, and a whole host of complicated economic factors. And you have a huge bias toward living where you already are (possibly because you were born there) since that's where your non-economic assets like family and friends live and possibly where you were born.
Two places that are equidistant from the farm that produces potatoes, in opposite directions, can find those identical potatoes cost twice as much in one place than the other because of cost of living differences. It's the same potatoes, travelling the same distance. We're not comparing private jets to public buses here.
Cost of living isn't guaranteed to be fair.
Why are you purposely pretending not to understand what people are saying? They are basically always referring to the 1% of their own country. You're moving goalposts, and then pretending that everyone else is with the Orange County argument.
And even so, I don't think he'd have to exclude himself because he's not the top 1% of Orange County -- because there's a 99% chance he isn't in the top 1% of the US (assuming he's from the US, and assuming that slashdot's 1%er commenters are in proportion to the greater population). With this said, Cost of Living, tax differences, and government benefits are real factors that makes the actual worldwide 1% a little fuzzy.
In addition, you're quoting income numbers, not wealth numbers. Just because you have a higher income than 99% of people, doesn't mean you have a higher wealth than 99% of people.
Also, the 1% of the world is $34k from what I've read: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new..., http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/...
This other source says $47.5k: http://dailycaller.com/2011/11...
This site puts it at around $32.5k: http://www.globalrichlist.com/
So there's a variety of estimates, and note most of those sites are actually explicitly making the same point you are so they aren't biased against you. Where's 22k coming from?
No, he's saying the map says there's a road here, therefore any map that doesn't indicate a road here is in some way inaccurate.
You're being unfair and unnecessarily polarizing. Just because you've met people who have both beliefs doesn't mean they always go together. People aren't always either right about everything or wrong about everything.
I'm not convinced there's any correlation at all, though there could be. As anecdotal evidence, at the time of writing there are four responses to my post. Two of them are explicitly meat eaters who are making the "chemicals are bad" argument and both precluding any possibility they are wrong. Clearly none of them are vegans.
I've also met lots of vegetarians and vegans, and literally none of them have irrational fears of chemicals in foods (they have rational fears of things that actually cause food poisoning and such). The only time I've seen those two beliefs together are in stereotypes.
In fact, the person I know who is most irrational about food is almost a complete carnivore. He's all-in on his keto diet. He lost like 150 lbs when he switched to basically only ever eating sausages, and from that he's drawn the conclusion that a co-worker of ours could cure her Multiple Sclerosis by cutting the grains and veggies out of her diet. Second place goes to a vegetarian who was pretty convinced that ancient humans never hunted for meat.
They will if they are the sort who abstain from meat due to ethical considerations (the "fish are friends, not food" crowd). Your chemic shitstorm isn't alive so there's no ethical debate about eating them.
Also normal people who don't give two shits will eat it. I eat normal meat but if this tasted like real meat, and wasn't substantially less healthy or more costly, I'd eat it for sure.
If it comes even close in price I can see restaurants choosing it because then they don't have to have separate vegetarian and vegan menu options.
I have literally never a comment section that didn't examine the "better than a human" part.
If everybody can be as attractive as they choose to be, wouldn't that mean the end of romance?
I don't follow this line of reasoning at all.
When there's no more romance, sex becomes no different than masturbation.
Actually, I'm not sure I really follow this one either.
Kickstarter provides an interesting answer to that, when it comes to things like art and software.
It's the perfect "DRM" (really just the "RM" part) without any copyright. They sell to consumers, and only have to provide a product if there's enough money to fund its development (although most successful Kickstarter projects have already had significant investment before they hit Kickstarter). Of course they usually sell afterward in the artificial scarcity market, but prior to release it's playing in the real scarcity market of original works. Because the product doesn't actually exist yet, nobody can distribute it on Warez sites before it is paid back. Assuming they have correctly estimated their costs, anyway.
It does lend itself to a game of "rational self-interest chicken". Suppose we decided that copyright was gone, and after the product releases absolutely nobody will pay a dime ever again. That means you could want the product, but gamble on it funding even without your contribution. But you could lose that gamble. So you have to weigh the odds of it failing against how much you want it to exist.
They don't use humans for janitors.
Although they do use sentient holograms for slave-mines, apparently.
I'd also put MOOC and UAT in the same category. Acronyms I assume that most slashdotters did not know.
User-Acceptance testing is something I typically see spelled out.
Lets use your same link to compare the other three acronyms pointed out here, CPU, RAM, and SSD:
http://www.google.com/trends/e...
Both MOOC and UAT are barely perceptible on the graph. Your earlier graph also shows that MOOC only really appeared as a term around 2 and a bit years ago, and has never been a common term.
It's not even clear to me why MOOC would have anything to do with the IT industry in particular. It seems like a term that the education industry should be familiar with. I bet the vast majority of students of a MOOC cannot recognize the acronym. I can at least understand somebody thinking that UAT was a common industry abbreviation because it is related to the industry.
If you are even remotely part of the IT industry, it is very unlikely that MOOC is a term you are unfamiliar with.
You have clear evidence to the contrary.
Not necessarily. Software can apply different rules to different players. Many games are asymmetric.
Also, I'm not sure to what degree random variation is allowed. Are two players actually playing by the same rules if one of them spawns near random epic-level loot and the other spawns near the highest level monster and no weapons or armour? Perhaps you need "symmetric randomness" where a random value is used in two places, or a common random seed between two players.
That does imply that things like timed speedruns of the same deterministic single-player game is a sport though (most platformers I can think of are basically deterministic).
I'd actually consider doing it if:
1. Slashdot was more than a social setting (it is not).
2. I believed for one moment you were serious. I do not believe it. I think you're trying to make a point by creating a false equivalency.
Look, keep using man-made, I'm not on a crusade, and I'll keep using man-made. But FFS, humanmade does roll off the tongue. Human rolls off the tongue, and man-made rolls off the tongue, and human-made doesn't introduce any special linguistic controtion by joining the two terms.
But this is how we fix that? I'm living in bizarro world where anything, literally anything, that has the 3 letters M A N together, must be changed because it's clearly sexist
Not to pick on you in particular, but you are an anonymous coward so you can represent the group. Do you not realize that YOU are the PC police when you jump on everybody's tiniest difference in language usage, even when it's completely correct and completely understandable, and you are the one bringing up these strawman language changes with manager and manual.
I'm living in a bizarro world where anything, literally anything, that has the 5 letters "H U M A N", must be changed because it's clearly PC bullshit. Next Dehumanizes will become demanizes! Humane will become mane! Oh the manity!
I don't believe for one second you looked up "artificial" in the dictionary. You might have looked up artifice and then jumped to conclusions on the basis of a common etymology.
You don't have grounds to complain about human-made vs. man-made if you're introducing the same nonsensical distinction between artificial and man-made.
Driving for ~4 hours round trip (including *2* border crossings and gas money) to save a net of $20 (the difference between $40 direct shipping and $15 within-US shipping, minus the $5 parcel holding fee) is not worth it 99% of the time.
The great lakes region is one of the most populated parts of that 100 miles thing, so 4 hours is pretty conservative to go around the lake and then across a busy bridge. I know where I grew up it's more 12 hours total (6 out and 6 back).
Everything you mentioned in your first paragraph is completely trivial. Do you seriously believe that it's significantly harder to build a robot that can handle a bacon burger, or a two-patty-three-bun burger, or a chicken burger?
This is just a robot that makes a tower of ingredients. Sometimes the ingredient list is "bottom-bun, patty, top-bun", sometimes it's "bottom-bun, patty, middle-bun, patty, bacon, top-bun". That's basically trivial. The only substantial difference between a big mac and a chicken burger is the cooking method, which is highly automated already.
I don't understand why you think that's difficult, or that a plain burger is at all a likely result. A robot that can make a tower of various ingredients is the same complexity as the design projects we ask groups of 3 second-year engineering students to do, in between their other courses (I remember my second year design project, I judge it to be more difficult). This microcontroller is easily capable of doing that on-demand, in fact it's overkill: http://www.mouser.com/ProductD..., and it costs less than 5 dollars.
This is certainly not enormously complex or expensive. It doesn't take a great deal of manual dexterity to assemble a burger.
Where it gets slightly more difficult is when you have all burgers, and you suddenly want to add a wrap, or a pizza, or a bowl of soup, or an ice-cream cone. Something that is completely different and doesn't fit with the existing robot's design. You might want a different robot for that, or maybe reduce to one employee who makes specialty items.
I think you massively overestimate how difficult it is to make a hamburger robot, and underestimating how much of the cooking is automated today. A big reason McDonalds isn't automated is because it doesn't just sell hamburgers. Another reason is that the sort of ordering interface that customers would use only recently became commonly available & understood. You need a touchscreen or similar, that can handle requests like "no pickles" or "allergic to nuts" or whatever, vending-machine-like payment methods, etc. -- I've used these at human-staffed places where there is no cashier and it works great, but it's not super common yet and some people will always hate it just like some people hate self-checkout at grocery stores, even though I prefer it. Apparently McDonalds is looking into doing that to the ordering process.
(Another reason is drive-through, mainly because drive-through windows were not designed to be easy to robotically pass credit cards and food to a person who positioned thier car in any idiot position, and it's not an easy retrofit).
No, the British empire is all countries ruled or administered by the UK. That's not the same thing for a couple reasons. One, because there are multiple Queens in the world, and two, because the Queen of England is nominally Queen of non-UK countries too, but neither the UK nor the Queen rules or administers there.
This is the British Empire today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I don't see this issue coming up when we are talking about US or EU companies being prosecuted for bribery in foreign nations, even when it wouldn't be considered bribery in those foreign nations.
That's not a reasonable comparison. The right comparison would be if those companies were prosecuted for bribery in foreign nations, where such foreign nations required bribery by law (which, by definition they don't, because then it wouldn't be bribery).
Plus, we can't divorce the actual subject matter from the issue. The US is demanding the ability to violate the privacy rights of foreign citizens (as the EU sees it), and the EU says it's against the law to aid and abet that. Yes, it's up to the multinational corporation to figure out how they can satisfy all laws at once, or otherwise just not do business. If both sides stick to their guns, this most likely ends with tech companies' formal headquarters outside of the US (it's not like the EU is demanding US data that US law prohibits sending). Then the former US headquarters becomes $TechCompanyName-US$, and their data centres are primarily outside of the US because only US-only data can remain in the US (so, ultimately, the Internet is a little bit slower and a little bit more expensive in the US).
Also, there is absolutely such a thing as an international company: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I disagree that every other computer camp is a boy's computer camp, but I agree that it's just not a serious problem when boys are allowed into 95% of computer camps (and the same goes for a theoretical boys-only camp). People all the time do things whose gender makeup doesn't reflect real life. Girls have a girls' night out. Boys have a boys' night out. It's not a hell-worthy sin.
It would be a bit different maybe if the all-girls camp was materially better than the camps boys had access to. But as is, I don't know how you can get worked up over it.
That's intellectually dishonest.
Here, you recognize that there is an unfair advantage given to some students, but dismiss it because (apparently) any unfair disadvantatge that isn't literally impossible to overcome is irrelevant.
Hard != impossible.
Then here, you introduce the notion that the GP is talking about working harder, but he wasn't talking about that, he was talking about being at a different maturity level:
You are right, usually AP classes usually mean more work
Then here, you pretend you didn't even say that and state that hard work = more opportunities. But we just established that you don't need to work as hard with a different birthday. Therefore, Work Hard != More Opportunities. It's, at best, (Work Hard) * (Birthday weighting function) = More Opportunities.
Work hard = more opportunities? Seems legit.
People don't generally object to the work hard part! They object to the birthday weighting function. When somebody argues about it for paragraphs it is intellectually dishonest to ignore that, brush it aside, and discuss hard work as though you disagreed on that subject.
An intellectually honest argument might involve the theory that the birthday weighting function was not as significant as your opponent believed.
(note I'm not an American, did not go to American schools, and this talk of AP classes is about a school system with which I am unfamiliar. I am saying this as a person just watching an argument crash into walls like those children's toys that spin randomly and then go again)
Right, but it would also negate the advantages of touch, chiefly the more intuitive targetting and the availability of multi-touch gestures. You are just operating an actual mouse (mouse-equivalent device) that has unusual non-ergonomic packaging and no physical keyboard.
Anybody who has moved property between family members (without incurring income tax, or, in the US, gift tax) has been aware of "gifting" as a verb for a very long time.
This source cites Seinfeld as the cause of it becoming more common in non-tax conversations: http://www.quickanddirtytips.c...
Seinfeld is not exactly a millenial.