We should have some kind of limit on immigration. It might be a very high limit, but there should be a limit because otherwise there would be a billion more people here overnight, and no economy can adapt that many people so quickly.
Really? Why not? All people in this country are producers and consumers. This is the basis of civilization. If a billion people came overnight, there would be a billion new jobs because there would be a billion people needing to do things. Of course I'm exagerating here -- a billion people overnight would certainly break something, but you're exagerating too... a billion people would not show up overnight. But my point is that bringing in people is not in itself dangerous. People are the units of the economy.
A fence and people to watch it solves all of these problems.
You've got to be kidding? If you have smart, ambitious people living in shit on one side of that fence, and people living in prosperity on the other side of that fence, and you don't provide a reasonable way for those smart, ambitious people to cross over legally... well... what do you think is going to happen? What would you do in such a situation. You would find a way. That is what we're fighting against here, that is why we're losing -- because we're not fighting some heady battle against "immigration" we're fighting to opress smart, ambitious people. And that's not going to work.
You're 100% right... and the only way to eliminate illegal immigrants is to make immigration legal.
No, I'm serious: if they weren't illegal, they wouldn't want to work for third world wages for long. The problem now is they can't demand anything and they can't job hop, they can't improve themselves because we've essentially made them slaves by making them "illegal". It is that slave labor that the citizens can't compete against. Let them be an unabashed part of materialistic mainstream American culture and you eliminate the third world people in our country.
It's stupider than patents. I have several friends caught up in this crap, and it is bad for everyone. Let me explain how the H1B forces down wages for American workers (who it was supposed to protect): once you get an H1B person over here they are pretty much locked in their job, so the company can massivly underpay them, which makes American born workers even less desirable. If the H1B's had job mobility, they might come in on the cheap (like college kids do anyways), but they'd job-hop and be sucked into American consumerism and they'd demand more and wages would go up for everyone. Well, everyone who can do a decent job.
And that's just it -- the entire immigration debate (from the high-tech workers to strawberry pickers) is simply an effort to protect our lazy and/or stupid people at the expense of everyone else in the country and the world. Worried about there being too many people who come to take advantage of the system? And what controls are there for keeping US citizens from popping out more babies than they or the government can take care of? None. At least most of the immigrants want to work. The immigration debate is a thinly veiled double standard that has it's roots in racism and fear of legitimate competition.
Even with the illegal strawberry pickers, the fact that we don't give them legal status forces them to make shady deals with their employers, which in turn allows the employers to pay them less and refuse them benefits they'd have to pay for legal workers. Who suffers? Not just the illegal immigrants -- but also the citizens since they can't reasonably compete with what amounts to slave labor. Every attempt at protecting ourselves backfires.
And don't just say we need to increase security. That just does not work. We can't get security in Iraq even having the country overrun by military. Force can not stop a people who truly believe their life is only worth living if they violate the laws of that force. And even if it were possible to succeed in that endeavor... what? We get the honor of being like all the lousy countries who have fought to close their borders over the years? Name them for me... not a prestigious list. Rather, we should be finding ways to make the most of the reality that people want to come here, take advantage (in the positive sense of the word) of the people who want to be a part of America. Stop trying to change, outlaw, or discourage them. They are customers of the American lifestyle and economy.
Here's a vague starting point: make the rule that anyone who wasn't a convicted felon in their country could come here for 3 months. If they could find a job and stay off the streets during that time, they (and their dependents) could stay as long as they were working somewhere. After 5 years, they'd be citizens. That would give them the motivation to become a group we can appreciate, perhaps even better than your average natural born American.
But in this case it's "big oil" { insert doom-and-gloom music here }, so therefore their attempts to skew results are somehow more evil than other groups doing it?
You know, I'm going to argue that it is. Because with great power comes great responsibility. Specifically, even with big tobacco, when they lied, at least it was misinformation that each person could sort through themselves and take personal action. Anyone could avoid the problems of cigarettes if they wanted to. But with big oil, they're pissing in the community pool. These lies, if successfully sold, fuck over everyone.
Also, it does matter what you really believe. I've argued wrong positions before, but I argued them for the right reasons, and it does make a difference. These people are lying -- or prehaps they dont' even have an opinion, they're just saying whatever the dollar tells them to say. But it seems like they know they're wrong, they know they're causing problems, they don't care, and they're just being manipulative. That's worse because it means no amount of evidence or discussion can ever turn them around. And that is always a dangerous thing.
They interviewed me a couple months back and despite several emails that included my full sigunature and my full name, they totally flubbed it in the article. My name is Jonathan Field, and somehow they got my name as Jon Athan. Page after page of things like "Athan says this" and "according to Athan's development philosophy".
Back at the office they made me new "Jon Athan" buisiness cards as a joke.
Isn't it because all of the alleged advantages of other architectures just weren't compelling enough? And because unless you've got a rare sense of aesthetics for processor architecture design, nobody really cares what kind of chip is in the machine?
To elaoborate: I used to have and Amiga with an '040, and I remember then the arguments about how it was a "better" processor. But when the Commodore died I got a Cyrix Pentium-class PC and it seemed faster rendering in Lightwave, and that was all I really cared about at the time. Years later I switched to the Mac because I liked OSX. I ran it on a G4, and everyone said the G4 was "better" than the x86 of the day. I'm on a MacBook Pro now, with a Core Duo, and it seems faster. At least as fast, if not faster, than my wife's G5. Battery life is about as good as my G4 was. Maybe it gets a little hotter, but I don't really notice.
So in the end, regardless of any aesthetic concerns about the architecture or theories about what is "right", "clean" or "better", x86 seems to have been good enough all along the way to make switching a waste of time. So if it's not pragmatically better, why all the sorrow?
Anything they do to increase the money involved in the project will cause them to suck more. Simply because more money attracts more money hungry people, and money hungry people suck.
If you can get what you want as quickly as you want at lower risk to you, you should take advantage. Almost everybody else will.
An interesting claim -- it all depends on how broad your definition of lower risk is. If one is taking advantage in a way that can never possibly be traced, you're right. And those situations do arise. But most meaningful situations in life are not so completely shielded, for example, if people around us find out that we're the type to "take advantage", even if we're not doing it to them, they're usually going to be less trusting, which is a disadvantage. This is why most people I know who are always taking advantage end up less successful than the more generous people I know.
There's no one answer to everything, but in general the golden rule is very beneficial to the practitioner. I think "ethics" and "morality" are simply our names for our mind's soft understanding of that fact.
Is it possible anywhere to get a full field of vision helmet or goggles? From what I've read on VR, the effect of immersion doesn't work until your field of vision is very near completely covered. All the alleged VR gear I see these days just make it look like you're watching a little TV screen. The term VR has been watered down to the point where it covers Wolfenstein 3D if you sit close enough to the screen. I'm surprised there's no truly immersive gaming googles for WoW or something yet...
Well I'm American and I certainly don't prefer killing people. But yeah, broadly speaking, you're right.
I guess I shouldn't be, but I'm fairly surprised that my original post was moderated as a Troll since it's a fairly innocuous statement. Just trying to get people to think a little about how our Iraq plans haven't gone as well as we'd hoped. Not even blaming anyone... but I even the idea that we can't machine-gun and atom-bomb our way to a better tomorrow is still too tough to swallow. Even here on Slashdot where the populous is a hair sharper than average. Oh well... maybe in another 1000 years.
Considering everything else is in all liklihood a inhospitable rock to our fragile lifeform, we're still probably better off working with a "completely hosed" planet earth, then say, anything in this solar system. Or the 100 nearest solar systems.
In other words, let's say we screw everything up here... assuming we survive at all it's still a million times easier to work on getting earth back to a livable state than to terraform some other planet. Really, it is. Think about what is involved.
Or, simply put: there is no redundancy. There is no insurance against our own stupidity.
First, this loss of data by Google doesn't say much about the online vs. desktop storage debate. Chances are that less people have lost email through this recent gmail foul-up than who lost their email because their own computer crashed. It's just that now there's someone to point the finger at.
Aside from that, though, I don't see that online will replace desktop in the foreseeable future -- there's too many things that are cumbersome to do online (like music and video editing) and way too many things that I wouldn't want in someone else's hands. The former might be fixed when we get consistent gigabit broadband (though maybe not if video quality and speed expectation continues to increase), but the latter, I don't know. There's certain things I create that I want to keep to myself.
I hate to say it, but even someone born in 1973 like myself has lost interest in space exploration. It sure seemed cool when I was growing up, but my interests these days lay more in discovery of large scale social interaction... stuff that wasn't possible back then, and further understanding of the human mind and body. I still appreciate that people are doing pure science and I wouldn't want that to stop. But I've become more realistic -- and getting off this planet just doesn't make sense to me any more. The advantages are... what? I'd much rather see how to build a better human society in this stellar garden of eden we've already got than to figure out how to live in a theme park on Mars.
Amusing:) But I do think it's a little more subtle than that. There are many cases where military intervention is the best way to peace. The classic example would be WWII. But it is unfortunate that we think we can always make peace, or make people behave, with force. It just doesn't usually work. Until someone comes up with a good theory about when to apply force, we're just going to keep making these foolish mistakes over and over.
I've suspected this for a long time, but I hope it soon becomes common wisdom:
In certain situations, no amount of military might can force peace.
I'm not going to try and make it any more specific or broad than that. But I really hope that somewhere in the collective pscyhe we let go this idea that enough force can make everyone behave. It can't. If a people are really burned up about something, you'd have to kill them all to control them.
But all hope is not lost -- the alternative is to understand the underlying causes and use military might where appropriate, and negotiation and even *gasp* appeasement where it is not. There is no simple answer to all the conflict in the world. Military might is just one tool in the kit, and a highly overrated one than that.
Yeah, but I don't want a 96 Honda Civic. Can folks accept the fact that there are many things to consider in buying a car? Before the hybrids, I never bought a Honda because I just didn't like them that much. I preferred Toyotas. I don't mind that you like your car better than mine. Why do you mind that I like my car better than yours?
Taking into account everything that matters to me, I just liked the Prius best. I imagine this is what most people who bought one did. Can the rest of you let it go?
I don't disagree that it is at least part a status symbol. But so is every car. Even using an old car is a symbol of your cleverness in not being duped by the new cars. Worrying about whether a car is a status symbol or not is a red herring, in my opnion. They all are. People buy what they like.
As to whether there's any benefit to getting a hybrid, there's also the idea that purchasing what the industry sees as an "alternative" vehichle will help fund further innovation. The used car market depends on other people buying new cars, so you're not changing anything there. So I chose to put my money into new cars that push the envelope, however ineffectively at this point.
Besides, it's a reasonably nice car for the money. There are more expensive cars that aren't any better... why all the hate on the hybrids?
Yeah, but I like my Prius. Why don't people get that? Since when was buying a car about getting the scientifically provable "best" car? Maybe I think the Prius looks better, or is more comfortable? Maybe I like the way it drives? Maybe I think that spending my money on what the industry sees as an "alternative" car is a good idea? Maybe I'm wrong about that last one, but maybe it doesn't matter anyways.
Honestly now: when you see someone in a BMW, do you say "you know, my car gets better gas milage than yours and cost less"? Why are hybrid owners the subject of such ridicule. Do you rag on people using carburator technology instead of fuel injectors? How about boxer or rotary engines vs. standard? What's the big deal that my car works a little different than yours and has different advantages and disadvantages?
Look, the reality of milage doesn't change because the EPA changes their testing methodology. Yes, the current EPA numbers are inflated. Sounds like the new ones will be deflated. Regardless, I get a real world 40 MPG out of my Prius and that's better than the real world high 20's, low 30's I got out of my previous cars with similar performance. What's the big deal? Why do so many folks go nutty over proving that hybrids are the greatest thing ever or the stupidest thing ever? All cars have different performance, comfort, efficiency, safety, appearance, and cost metrics. So you choose one you like.
Wow, that's a pretty harsh reaction. I'm not a fan of lying to kids either, but I think you're forgetting some of what it's like to be a kid. I sure didn't take it like you're describing.
I don't actually recall my parents making a big story out of Santa; I think I learned most of the story from books like "The Night Before Christmas", various television specials, and talking with friends. Like most kids, fantasy blends with reality to a large degree and my world included lots of make believe. I didn't even really think about whether it was "real" or not until I was in the second grade. Up until that point Santa was in the same category to me as Big Bird on Sesame Street, my lego cars being real cars, and my teddy bear having feelings. These fantasies are all exploratory for a child, and I sure as heck wouldn't have wanted parents who blasted me with reality every time I brought them up. As it was they played along.
When a friend finally told me that Santa wasn't real, I was skeptical, but also realized that he might be right. I went home to my parents and they told me the truth (as they understood it): there was no more Santa, but it was a tradition of giving that was started by some old fellow St. Nicholas, and that what was important was the spirit of Santa Claus. Not the mystical spirit, but the spirit of giving to each other, particularly those in need. My young mind thought about it, and I think it was a perfectly reasonable growing experience. I didn't have any resentment towards my parents.
So I agree with you that lying to your kids is bad. But there is make believe play that is important for child development and Santa Claus seems a perfectly reasonable part of that. I've known people who had realistic and unplayful parents and they seem to have more resentment than I do. Think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
We should have some kind of limit on immigration. It might be a very high limit, but there should be a limit because otherwise there would be a billion more people here overnight, and no economy can adapt that many people so quickly.
Really? Why not? All people in this country are producers and consumers. This is the basis of civilization. If a billion people came overnight, there would be a billion new jobs because there would be a billion people needing to do things. Of course I'm exagerating here -- a billion people overnight would certainly break something, but you're exagerating too... a billion people would not show up overnight. But my point is that bringing in people is not in itself dangerous. People are the units of the economy.
A fence and people to watch it solves all of these problems.
You've got to be kidding? If you have smart, ambitious people living in shit on one side of that fence, and people living in prosperity on the other side of that fence, and you don't provide a reasonable way for those smart, ambitious people to cross over legally... well... what do you think is going to happen? What would you do in such a situation. You would find a way. That is what we're fighting against here, that is why we're losing -- because we're not fighting some heady battle against "immigration" we're fighting to opress smart, ambitious people. And that's not going to work.
Cheers.
You're 100% right... and the only way to eliminate illegal immigrants is to make immigration legal.
No, I'm serious: if they weren't illegal, they wouldn't want to work for third world wages for long. The problem now is they can't demand anything and they can't job hop, they can't improve themselves because we've essentially made them slaves by making them "illegal". It is that slave labor that the citizens can't compete against. Let them be an unabashed part of materialistic mainstream American culture and you eliminate the third world people in our country.
Cheers.
It's stupider than patents. I have several friends caught up in this crap, and it is bad for everyone. Let me explain how the H1B forces down wages for American workers (who it was supposed to protect): once you get an H1B person over here they are pretty much locked in their job, so the company can massivly underpay them, which makes American born workers even less desirable. If the H1B's had job mobility, they might come in on the cheap (like college kids do anyways), but they'd job-hop and be sucked into American consumerism and they'd demand more and wages would go up for everyone. Well, everyone who can do a decent job.
And that's just it -- the entire immigration debate (from the high-tech workers to strawberry pickers) is simply an effort to protect our lazy and/or stupid people at the expense of everyone else in the country and the world. Worried about there being too many people who come to take advantage of the system? And what controls are there for keeping US citizens from popping out more babies than they or the government can take care of? None. At least most of the immigrants want to work. The immigration debate is a thinly veiled double standard that has it's roots in racism and fear of legitimate competition.
Even with the illegal strawberry pickers, the fact that we don't give them legal status forces them to make shady deals with their employers, which in turn allows the employers to pay them less and refuse them benefits they'd have to pay for legal workers. Who suffers? Not just the illegal immigrants -- but also the citizens since they can't reasonably compete with what amounts to slave labor. Every attempt at protecting ourselves backfires.
And don't just say we need to increase security. That just does not work. We can't get security in Iraq even having the country overrun by military. Force can not stop a people who truly believe their life is only worth living if they violate the laws of that force. And even if it were possible to succeed in that endeavor... what? We get the honor of being like all the lousy countries who have fought to close their borders over the years? Name them for me... not a prestigious list. Rather, we should be finding ways to make the most of the reality that people want to come here, take advantage (in the positive sense of the word) of the people who want to be a part of America. Stop trying to change, outlaw, or discourage them. They are customers of the American lifestyle and economy.
Here's a vague starting point: make the rule that anyone who wasn't a convicted felon in their country could come here for 3 months. If they could find a job and stay off the streets during that time, they (and their dependents) could stay as long as they were working somewhere. After 5 years, they'd be citizens. That would give them the motivation to become a group we can appreciate, perhaps even better than your average natural born American.
Cheers.
But in this case it's "big oil" { insert doom-and-gloom music here }, so therefore their attempts to skew results are somehow more evil than other groups doing it?
You know, I'm going to argue that it is. Because with great power comes great responsibility. Specifically, even with big tobacco, when they lied, at least it was misinformation that each person could sort through themselves and take personal action. Anyone could avoid the problems of cigarettes if they wanted to. But with big oil, they're pissing in the community pool. These lies, if successfully sold, fuck over everyone.
Also, it does matter what you really believe. I've argued wrong positions before, but I argued them for the right reasons, and it does make a difference. These people are lying -- or prehaps they dont' even have an opinion, they're just saying whatever the dollar tells them to say. But it seems like they know they're wrong, they know they're causing problems, they don't care, and they're just being manipulative. That's worse because it means no amount of evidence or discussion can ever turn them around. And that is always a dangerous thing.
So yeah, it's more evil.
Cheers.
They interviewed me a couple months back and despite several emails that included my full sigunature and my full name, they totally flubbed it in the article. My name is Jonathan Field, and somehow they got my name as Jon Athan. Page after page of things like "Athan says this" and "according to Athan's development philosophy".
;)
Back at the office they made me new "Jon Athan" buisiness cards as a joke.
Bitches.
Fair enough :)
Isn't it because all of the alleged advantages of other architectures just weren't compelling enough? And because unless you've got a rare sense of aesthetics for processor architecture design, nobody really cares what kind of chip is in the machine?
To elaoborate: I used to have and Amiga with an '040, and I remember then the arguments about how it was a "better" processor. But when the Commodore died I got a Cyrix Pentium-class PC and it seemed faster rendering in Lightwave, and that was all I really cared about at the time. Years later I switched to the Mac because I liked OSX. I ran it on a G4, and everyone said the G4 was "better" than the x86 of the day. I'm on a MacBook Pro now, with a Core Duo, and it seems faster. At least as fast, if not faster, than my wife's G5. Battery life is about as good as my G4 was. Maybe it gets a little hotter, but I don't really notice.
So in the end, regardless of any aesthetic concerns about the architecture or theories about what is "right", "clean" or "better", x86 seems to have been good enough all along the way to make switching a waste of time. So if it's not pragmatically better, why all the sorrow?
Cheers.
Anything they do to increase the money involved in the project will cause them to suck more. Simply because more money attracts more money hungry people, and money hungry people suck.
Cheers.
If you can get what you want as quickly as you want at lower risk to you, you should take advantage. Almost everybody else will.
An interesting claim -- it all depends on how broad your definition of lower risk is. If one is taking advantage in a way that can never possibly be traced, you're right. And those situations do arise. But most meaningful situations in life are not so completely shielded, for example, if people around us find out that we're the type to "take advantage", even if we're not doing it to them, they're usually going to be less trusting, which is a disadvantage. This is why most people I know who are always taking advantage end up less successful than the more generous people I know.
There's no one answer to everything, but in general the golden rule is very beneficial to the practitioner. I think "ethics" and "morality" are simply our names for our mind's soft understanding of that fact.
Cheers.
Is it possible anywhere to get a full field of vision helmet or goggles? From what I've read on VR, the effect of immersion doesn't work until your field of vision is very near completely covered. All the alleged VR gear I see these days just make it look like you're watching a little TV screen. The term VR has been watered down to the point where it covers Wolfenstein 3D if you sit close enough to the screen. I'm surprised there's no truly immersive gaming googles for WoW or something yet...
Cheers.
Well I'm American and I certainly don't prefer killing people. But yeah, broadly speaking, you're right.
I guess I shouldn't be, but I'm fairly surprised that my original post was moderated as a Troll since it's a fairly innocuous statement. Just trying to get people to think a little about how our Iraq plans haven't gone as well as we'd hoped. Not even blaming anyone... but I even the idea that we can't machine-gun and atom-bomb our way to a better tomorrow is still too tough to swallow. Even here on Slashdot where the populous is a hair sharper than average. Oh well... maybe in another 1000 years.
Cheers.
Considering everything else is in all liklihood a inhospitable rock to our fragile lifeform, we're still probably better off working with a "completely hosed" planet earth, then say, anything in this solar system. Or the 100 nearest solar systems.
In other words, let's say we screw everything up here... assuming we survive at all it's still a million times easier to work on getting earth back to a livable state than to terraform some other planet. Really, it is. Think about what is involved.
Or, simply put: there is no redundancy. There is no insurance against our own stupidity.
Cheers.
First, this loss of data by Google doesn't say much about the online vs. desktop storage debate. Chances are that less people have lost email through this recent gmail foul-up than who lost their email because their own computer crashed. It's just that now there's someone to point the finger at.
Aside from that, though, I don't see that online will replace desktop in the foreseeable future -- there's too many things that are cumbersome to do online (like music and video editing) and way too many things that I wouldn't want in someone else's hands. The former might be fixed when we get consistent gigabit broadband (though maybe not if video quality and speed expectation continues to increase), but the latter, I don't know. There's certain things I create that I want to keep to myself.
Cheers.
I hate to say it, but even someone born in 1973 like myself has lost interest in space exploration. It sure seemed cool when I was growing up, but my interests these days lay more in discovery of large scale social interaction... stuff that wasn't possible back then, and further understanding of the human mind and body. I still appreciate that people are doing pure science and I wouldn't want that to stop. But I've become more realistic -- and getting off this planet just doesn't make sense to me any more. The advantages are... what? I'd much rather see how to build a better human society in this stellar garden of eden we've already got than to figure out how to live in a theme park on Mars.
Cheers.
Today's fantasys are shaped by authors which focus far more on dark gothic horror and sex. Look where we are today.
Yes, we're living in a much better world -- at least in the civilized bits with access to gothic horror and sex. Cool!
Amusing :) But I do think it's a little more subtle than that. There are many cases where military intervention is the best way to peace. The classic example would be WWII. But it is unfortunate that we think we can always make peace, or make people behave, with force. It just doesn't usually work. Until someone comes up with a good theory about when to apply force, we're just going to keep making these foolish mistakes over and over.
Cheers.
Heh... Troll. Guess we haven't learned this lesson yet :)
Cheers.
I've suspected this for a long time, but I hope it soon becomes common wisdom:
In certain situations, no amount of military might can force peace.
I'm not going to try and make it any more specific or broad than that. But I really hope that somewhere in the collective pscyhe we let go this idea that enough force can make everyone behave. It can't. If a people are really burned up about something, you'd have to kill them all to control them.
But all hope is not lost -- the alternative is to understand the underlying causes and use military might where appropriate, and negotiation and even *gasp* appeasement where it is not. There is no simple answer to all the conflict in the world. Military might is just one tool in the kit, and a highly overrated one than that.
Cheers.
If you don't like the categorization, get out of the category by choosing a different car.
:)
That's pretty funny
Cheers.
Yeah, but I don't want a 96 Honda Civic. Can folks accept the fact that there are many things to consider in buying a car? Before the hybrids, I never bought a Honda because I just didn't like them that much. I preferred Toyotas. I don't mind that you like your car better than mine. Why do you mind that I like my car better than yours?
Taking into account everything that matters to me, I just liked the Prius best. I imagine this is what most people who bought one did. Can the rest of you let it go?
Cheers.
I don't disagree that it is at least part a status symbol. But so is every car. Even using an old car is a symbol of your cleverness in not being duped by the new cars. Worrying about whether a car is a status symbol or not is a red herring, in my opnion. They all are. People buy what they like.
As to whether there's any benefit to getting a hybrid, there's also the idea that purchasing what the industry sees as an "alternative" vehichle will help fund further innovation. The used car market depends on other people buying new cars, so you're not changing anything there. So I chose to put my money into new cars that push the envelope, however ineffectively at this point.
Besides, it's a reasonably nice car for the money. There are more expensive cars that aren't any better... why all the hate on the hybrids?
Cheers.
Yeah, but I like my Prius. Why don't people get that? Since when was buying a car about getting the scientifically provable "best" car? Maybe I think the Prius looks better, or is more comfortable? Maybe I like the way it drives? Maybe I think that spending my money on what the industry sees as an "alternative" car is a good idea? Maybe I'm wrong about that last one, but maybe it doesn't matter anyways.
Honestly now: when you see someone in a BMW, do you say "you know, my car gets better gas milage than yours and cost less"? Why are hybrid owners the subject of such ridicule. Do you rag on people using carburator technology instead of fuel injectors? How about boxer or rotary engines vs. standard? What's the big deal that my car works a little different than yours and has different advantages and disadvantages?
Cheers.
Look, the reality of milage doesn't change because the EPA changes their testing methodology. Yes, the current EPA numbers are inflated. Sounds like the new ones will be deflated. Regardless, I get a real world 40 MPG out of my Prius and that's better than the real world high 20's, low 30's I got out of my previous cars with similar performance. What's the big deal? Why do so many folks go nutty over proving that hybrids are the greatest thing ever or the stupidest thing ever? All cars have different performance, comfort, efficiency, safety, appearance, and cost metrics. So you choose one you like.
By the way, I don't hate HUMMER owners.
Cheers.
Amen.
Wow, that's a pretty harsh reaction. I'm not a fan of lying to kids either, but I think you're forgetting some of what it's like to be a kid. I sure didn't take it like you're describing.
I don't actually recall my parents making a big story out of Santa; I think I learned most of the story from books like "The Night Before Christmas", various television specials, and talking with friends. Like most kids, fantasy blends with reality to a large degree and my world included lots of make believe. I didn't even really think about whether it was "real" or not until I was in the second grade. Up until that point Santa was in the same category to me as Big Bird on Sesame Street, my lego cars being real cars, and my teddy bear having feelings. These fantasies are all exploratory for a child, and I sure as heck wouldn't have wanted parents who blasted me with reality every time I brought them up. As it was they played along.
When a friend finally told me that Santa wasn't real, I was skeptical, but also realized that he might be right. I went home to my parents and they told me the truth (as they understood it): there was no more Santa, but it was a tradition of giving that was started by some old fellow St. Nicholas, and that what was important was the spirit of Santa Claus. Not the mystical spirit, but the spirit of giving to each other, particularly those in need. My young mind thought about it, and I think it was a perfectly reasonable growing experience. I didn't have any resentment towards my parents.
So I agree with you that lying to your kids is bad. But there is make believe play that is important for child development and Santa Claus seems a perfectly reasonable part of that. I've known people who had realistic and unplayful parents and they seem to have more resentment than I do. Think about it.
Happy holidays.