This kind of thing is actually a documented mental illness (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1151359 among others). It began with The Exorcist leading to a bunch of people suddenly, literally, living in fear of their lives of being possessed by the devil. Later people watching Jaws, including some people living in Kansas far from any body of water that could reasonably contain a shark, became so afraid of shark attacks that they couldn't leave their homes. It doesn't happen often, but for those afflicted it can apparently be almost completely debilitating.
Some would, but are there really that many teachers out there close to death? Under my idea, the teacher retiring doesn't remove them from the former student payments. And as for killing the best teachers, I'll take that as tongue in cheek on your part. The problem with gauging performance is how to gauge it. There are already dozens of posts about teaching to the test, so I won't go into that. Really what better gauge of performance is there than the customers themselves? Which teacher was the greatest influence in your life? I can name three right off the top of my head (all of whom are still alive, BTW). One thing I think my system might do is unfairly penalize teachers of the young (I can't even recall a teacher before the fourth grade or so, but I'm certain I had some) and teachers who work with disadvantaged and learning-disabled students (who would by and large go on to underperforming jobs).
I agree - teachers are paid far too little (and no, I'm not a teacher either). How's this for a solution: upon graduation from high school you pick 3 teachers that have been the most influential in your life. 0.1% of your income thereafter (until all three have passed away) is divided amongst those teachers. With about 100 students per year, some of them presumably going on to become successful, it could add up to a fair chunk of change. Good teachers could actually earn a good wage that way (whoever Bill Gates chooses could become rich), and bad teachers would very quickly find themselves on the lower end of the income curve, perhaps making a system that actually removes bad teachers from the fold.
China at this point holds so much US debt that it really can't be used as a threat anymore. If they threaten to dump the debt on the market driving down the US credit rating, the result would be an enormous hammering of the Chinese economy. Also, the US could also simply decide not to repay the debt - this would have catastrophic consequences for both the US and China, but it's clear that in any maneuver involving the US debt China and the US have a kind of MAD thing going.
The US President has one of the greatest powers on earth - the power to say NO, and only a majority of the House and Senate can override him. For the life of me I've never understood the turmoil swirling over the line item veto. The President doesn't like a line in a bill, he can veto the entire bill and tell people in the House and Senate that he will keep vetoing it until that line disappears. A President who is OK with gridlock can cause an unbelievable one by micromanaging bills with vetoes every step of the way, and it deeply saddens me that no President seems to take that option.
AMEN! I've been doing videogame reviews for about a decade now (shameless plug: game-over.net), and every couple of years my machine becomes so bogged down with overlapping DRM schemes (that are only partially uninstalled when the game is removed) that I have to nuke the hard drive flat and do a fresh Windows install. People who download a copy of the game that has had the DRM stripped have far less trouble than I do.
TFA is atrociously thin on what I'm certain is a long-ongoing feud between many townspeople and not the inflammatory comments of a single blogger. I think all rational people realize that when someone whips out the Nazi comparison that they're just behaving irrationally and will most likely be ignored, so the argument we're supposed to believe is that 12 counselors resigned over being called jackasses? Seems unlikely. For those of you hoping to start a grass roots revolution so easily, I'd be willing to bet that at least some level of phone calls to their homes at all hours and perhaps a few loud townhall meetings were involved (both of which, incidentally, you can't do at either the US House or Senate).
I can't speak for a terminal masters program, but I can say that my PhD was essential free (at least in a monetary sense- the cost to my social life would need to be debated separately). I got my PhD in physics from Rice University. The first six months cost me perhaps $7k. After that I was an employee of the university (first as a teaching assistant, then as a research assistant) and my tuition was waved. I even earned a stipend of about $10k. Lived frugally (rent $175/month with four other people in one apartment, split the phone and electric five ways, ate more Ramen noodles than you can imagine, drove a beater), and six years later had a PhD. That said, my best friend went from college straight into work and today he's earning more than I do (though not a great deal more). Still, I have the PhD, and by and large my job is very technically oriented with a minimum of management BS. I'm happy with the decision I made.
So if they were discussing this new piece of software and using laptops, presumably you can hear all that on the cockpit voice recorder. As opposed to say, sleeping, which may or may not sound like snoring or nothing at all.
Probably it's not just enough people dying that would do it, but enough of the right type of people. Poor people, old people, people in generally poor health to begin with - not much to get excited about. Soccer moms, cute white kids of middle class white families, perhaps two or three movie stars, a captain of industry or two - that would get some action. 15,000 people died in the US in 2007 of AIDS (source: CDC), five times the 9-11 bodycount, but it's just the fags, so no sweat. In order for swine flu to become the driving force of healthcare reform, you'd literally need to see bodies in the streets. Oh, wait, we saw that in New Orleans during Katrina - never mind.
I'd agree with you, and yet struggle with the fact that the incredibly mediocre Dollhouse managed to get a second season and is also on Fox. I can't help but recall the story of Gilligan's Island and how it was cancelled as a top rated show to make room for Gunsmoke which was a favorite of someone in the programming head's family. I think more than any diabolical plot or general statement about shows that will or won't survive on TV, it comes down to literally one or two keys guys at a network liking a show - so it lives - or they don't like it - and it dies.
As another NH resident I've watch with a sick sort of fascination the train wreck that is Fairpoint. I recall when Verizon held those lines, and though their service was on the whole satisfactory I knew that advanced services (most notably Fios to compete with the local cable monopoly) was never going to arrive. Then came Fairpoint, and I read the writing on that wall from a mile away. Why would Verizon sell a profitable service region to Fairpoint? The answer is that they wouldn't, and whatever phone service we had from Verizon was about to get a whole lot worse. I fled for AT&T immediately afterwards (and none to happy about that), but I'd like to thank the PUC for selling us out by allowing the sale to go through via whatever collection of bribes and general incompetence made it happen. Repeatedly the PUC claimed that Fairpoint would meet certain performance milestones or by god their would be hell to pay. And here we are, and the ones paying the hell are the present Fairpoint customers, and Fairpoint itself will almost certainly go into bankruptcy (which is more than likely where they were headed before the sale happened in the first place).
This is sort of tangiential to one of my pet peeves about sex offender laws: Anyone ever wonder why there isn't a murderer registry? Think of the children doesn't extend to killing them (or anyone for that matter, child or adult), only touching them?
I have no idea if she has a case or not - stranger shit has happened. From the Monroe homepage "Monroe offers Certificate, Associate, Bachelor's, and Master's degree programs leading to employment in the most relevant areas for today's rapidly changing global economy." Perhaps that could be construed either as a guarantee of employment, or perhaps at least a guarantee of a certain level of assistance in finding a job which she claims (and perhaps can prove) she has not received. That said, regardless of her employability or lack thereof up until this point, she has almost certainly made herself largely unemployable in the future through her actions.
Could be I'm completely off the mark here - if so, I hope that someone straightens me out without using the word moron more than fifteen times in the reply. When you order a computer without any operating system at all, you're really asking for an addition step during the assembly, not fewer steps, right? What I mean is, the computer is assembled, and then an operating system is installed, and some type of software is run on the machine to test the hardware, maybe perform a burn in period, that kind of thing. If you then want a computer sans OS, they have to wipe the drive - admittedly not an onerous task, but an additional task nonetheless - in which case an OS-less computer would cost more maybe, or at least the difference between the cost of the OS and the cost of the labor to uninstall it? Or would they simply ship you an assembled, untested unit? Or do they not test assembled computers at all anymore?
Convenient? As in portable? As in more durable? Diode pumped 1.06um YAG lasers frequency-doubled to 530nm can fit in a pen, run off two watch batteries, and take a 5g impact. Portable, cheap, durable, and even scalable to a certain extent. Argon Ion lasers output a secondary line at 514nm, but admittedly they take about 70kW input power and require 8gpm or so cooling water, but they can be really durable, supporting years of operation in poor conditions. The only real difference I see these lasers providing is that it could be used to produce direct emission displays. Neat, but already entering the crowded field of plasma and LCD units.
Without bothering to dig out statistics to prove it, I'll claim that we're taller on the whole and our life spans are getting longer. Does any of that measure into beauty? I don't know. I do know that unquestably as a society we're getting fatter and dumber, which definitely makes the majority of women less attractive to a guy like me who wants a woman who is fit and intelligent.
It's not just IT. I work in an applied physics role and my manager can hardly spell laser. And while I hesitate to extend this trend of two data points, I expect that same is true of many engineering concerns where the marketing crowd has taken over the ship.
But to throw my $0.02 into the original discussion, you couldn't pay me double my present salary and get me into management. I love the science. People, not so much.
This is actually a pretty serious problem for us. We began with two radios in our trucks - one for our general fire frequencies (36.64MHz primary, nearby secondaries) and local police band (something like 600MHz). Things were good; we could go mutual aid to nearby towns and talk to them, and they could talk to us. Then a nearby town got a federal grant and went midband, and all our trucks got a third radio. Then another town got another federal grant and went highband - four radios. A large fire scene, like a recent fire at a pallet recycling plant that called in 22 towns for water supply, became nothing short of absurd. Try driving down a winding dirt road carrying 12 tons of water in a truck 34 feet long and picking the right handset out of that pile.
Then we got these new boxes that find the frequencies in use and let everyone talk on their native radios, except that they kind of don't work. Guys inside substantial (steel frame) buildings can't seem to talk to anyone. If the water hole is more than 1/2 a mile away, they're out of the loop too. And operations that you'd like to keep on their own frequencies like water supply or medical services get sucked into the network anyway. There's also the problem of too many people trying to talk on the radio at once and stepping all over each other. We do need a solution to this problem, but this isn't it.
I'm one of those. Part of it is that I just don't see it - HD is nice, but not new-player-and-new-media-purchase nice. The other part of it is something of media purchasing fatigue - I bought it on VHS and rebought it on DVD, and now I have to buy it again on some HD format? No thanks.
My wife and I took group dance lessons before a friend's wedding because they wanted to do a special first dance and didn't want to go alone (my wife and I just kind of hugged and swayed at our own wedding, but what the heck). Myself and the prospective groom were the only men in a room of 20 people. 'Nuff said.
It's fun to play Nietzsche-reading, Beethoven-listening, society-superior intellectual snob who never turns on a TV, but I'm going to go against the grain here and say that I like TV. I'm not watching Dancing with the Stars or whatever iteration Surviver is currently on, but I watch a cycle of local news while I'm cooking dinner, and if you're willing to sift through the chaff there are some good shows. Early seasons of Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Dexter. Heck, I'm watching M*A*S*H reruns on Ion most of which I've forgotten over the years.
Vital? No, not vital. But neither is it something that should be thrown away by government fiat at the behest of corporate interests
I programmed a PDP-11 in graduate school to pull data from my vapor deposition rig. Circa 1975 or so. Gotta love those 8" floppy disks. I don't know about today, but four or five years ago I went back to my graduate lab for a visit, and there it was still chugging my code along. Why replace it if it ain't broke?
Admittedly we're talking about close to 30 years ago, but my father told me a story about going to a medical convention, and out in front of the convention hall were women handing out cigarettes to doctors and lighting them. A little farther on is a guy with a clipboard. "Why, what brand of cigarette are you smoking, doctor?" Marlboros - smoked by over 90% of doctors surveyed.
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This kind of thing is actually a documented mental illness (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1151359 among others). It began with The Exorcist leading to a bunch of people suddenly, literally, living in fear of their lives of being possessed by the devil. Later people watching Jaws, including some people living in Kansas far from any body of water that could reasonably contain a shark, became so afraid of shark attacks that they couldn't leave their homes. It doesn't happen often, but for those afflicted it can apparently be almost completely debilitating.
Some would, but are there really that many teachers out there close to death? Under my idea, the teacher retiring doesn't remove them from the former student payments. And as for killing the best teachers, I'll take that as tongue in cheek on your part. The problem with gauging performance is how to gauge it. There are already dozens of posts about teaching to the test, so I won't go into that. Really what better gauge of performance is there than the customers themselves? Which teacher was the greatest influence in your life? I can name three right off the top of my head (all of whom are still alive, BTW). One thing I think my system might do is unfairly penalize teachers of the young (I can't even recall a teacher before the fourth grade or so, but I'm certain I had some) and teachers who work with disadvantaged and learning-disabled students (who would by and large go on to underperforming jobs).
I agree - teachers are paid far too little (and no, I'm not a teacher either). How's this for a solution: upon graduation from high school you pick 3 teachers that have been the most influential in your life. 0.1% of your income thereafter (until all three have passed away) is divided amongst those teachers. With about 100 students per year, some of them presumably going on to become successful, it could add up to a fair chunk of change. Good teachers could actually earn a good wage that way (whoever Bill Gates chooses could become rich), and bad teachers would very quickly find themselves on the lower end of the income curve, perhaps making a system that actually removes bad teachers from the fold.
China at this point holds so much US debt that it really can't be used as a threat anymore. If they threaten to dump the debt on the market driving down the US credit rating, the result would be an enormous hammering of the Chinese economy. Also, the US could also simply decide not to repay the debt - this would have catastrophic consequences for both the US and China, but it's clear that in any maneuver involving the US debt China and the US have a kind of MAD thing going.
The US President has one of the greatest powers on earth - the power to say NO, and only a majority of the House and Senate can override him. For the life of me I've never understood the turmoil swirling over the line item veto. The President doesn't like a line in a bill, he can veto the entire bill and tell people in the House and Senate that he will keep vetoing it until that line disappears. A President who is OK with gridlock can cause an unbelievable one by micromanaging bills with vetoes every step of the way, and it deeply saddens me that no President seems to take that option.
AMEN! I've been doing videogame reviews for about a decade now (shameless plug: game-over.net), and every couple of years my machine becomes so bogged down with overlapping DRM schemes (that are only partially uninstalled when the game is removed) that I have to nuke the hard drive flat and do a fresh Windows install. People who download a copy of the game that has had the DRM stripped have far less trouble than I do.
TFA is atrociously thin on what I'm certain is a long-ongoing feud between many townspeople and not the inflammatory comments of a single blogger. I think all rational people realize that when someone whips out the Nazi comparison that they're just behaving irrationally and will most likely be ignored, so the argument we're supposed to believe is that 12 counselors resigned over being called jackasses? Seems unlikely. For those of you hoping to start a grass roots revolution so easily, I'd be willing to bet that at least some level of phone calls to their homes at all hours and perhaps a few loud townhall meetings were involved (both of which, incidentally, you can't do at either the US House or Senate).
I can't speak for a terminal masters program, but I can say that my PhD was essential free (at least in a monetary sense- the cost to my social life would need to be debated separately). I got my PhD in physics from Rice University. The first six months cost me perhaps $7k. After that I was an employee of the university (first as a teaching assistant, then as a research assistant) and my tuition was waved. I even earned a stipend of about $10k. Lived frugally (rent $175/month with four other people in one apartment, split the phone and electric five ways, ate more Ramen noodles than you can imagine, drove a beater), and six years later had a PhD. That said, my best friend went from college straight into work and today he's earning more than I do (though not a great deal more). Still, I have the PhD, and by and large my job is very technically oriented with a minimum of management BS. I'm happy with the decision I made.
So if they were discussing this new piece of software and using laptops, presumably you can hear all that on the cockpit voice recorder. As opposed to say, sleeping, which may or may not sound like snoring or nothing at all.
Probably it's not just enough people dying that would do it, but enough of the right type of people. Poor people, old people, people in generally poor health to begin with - not much to get excited about. Soccer moms, cute white kids of middle class white families, perhaps two or three movie stars, a captain of industry or two - that would get some action. 15,000 people died in the US in 2007 of AIDS (source: CDC), five times the 9-11 bodycount, but it's just the fags, so no sweat. In order for swine flu to become the driving force of healthcare reform, you'd literally need to see bodies in the streets. Oh, wait, we saw that in New Orleans during Katrina - never mind.
I'd agree with you, and yet struggle with the fact that the incredibly mediocre Dollhouse managed to get a second season and is also on Fox. I can't help but recall the story of Gilligan's Island and how it was cancelled as a top rated show to make room for Gunsmoke which was a favorite of someone in the programming head's family. I think more than any diabolical plot or general statement about shows that will or won't survive on TV, it comes down to literally one or two keys guys at a network liking a show - so it lives - or they don't like it - and it dies.
As another NH resident I've watch with a sick sort of fascination the train wreck that is Fairpoint. I recall when Verizon held those lines, and though their service was on the whole satisfactory I knew that advanced services (most notably Fios to compete with the local cable monopoly) was never going to arrive. Then came Fairpoint, and I read the writing on that wall from a mile away. Why would Verizon sell a profitable service region to Fairpoint? The answer is that they wouldn't, and whatever phone service we had from Verizon was about to get a whole lot worse. I fled for AT&T immediately afterwards (and none to happy about that), but I'd like to thank the PUC for selling us out by allowing the sale to go through via whatever collection of bribes and general incompetence made it happen. Repeatedly the PUC claimed that Fairpoint would meet certain performance milestones or by god their would be hell to pay. And here we are, and the ones paying the hell are the present Fairpoint customers, and Fairpoint itself will almost certainly go into bankruptcy (which is more than likely where they were headed before the sale happened in the first place).
Unsucessfully.
This is sort of tangiential to one of my pet peeves about sex offender laws: Anyone ever wonder why there isn't a murderer registry? Think of the children doesn't extend to killing them (or anyone for that matter, child or adult), only touching them?
I have no idea if she has a case or not - stranger shit has happened. From the Monroe homepage "Monroe offers Certificate, Associate, Bachelor's, and Master's degree programs leading to employment in the most relevant areas for today's rapidly changing global economy." Perhaps that could be construed either as a guarantee of employment, or perhaps at least a guarantee of a certain level of assistance in finding a job which she claims (and perhaps can prove) she has not received. That said, regardless of her employability or lack thereof up until this point, she has almost certainly made herself largely unemployable in the future through her actions.
Could be I'm completely off the mark here - if so, I hope that someone straightens me out without using the word moron more than fifteen times in the reply. When you order a computer without any operating system at all, you're really asking for an addition step during the assembly, not fewer steps, right? What I mean is, the computer is assembled, and then an operating system is installed, and some type of software is run on the machine to test the hardware, maybe perform a burn in period, that kind of thing. If you then want a computer sans OS, they have to wipe the drive - admittedly not an onerous task, but an additional task nonetheless - in which case an OS-less computer would cost more maybe, or at least the difference between the cost of the OS and the cost of the labor to uninstall it? Or would they simply ship you an assembled, untested unit? Or do they not test assembled computers at all anymore?
Convenient? As in portable? As in more durable? Diode pumped 1.06um YAG lasers frequency-doubled to 530nm can fit in a pen, run off two watch batteries, and take a 5g impact. Portable, cheap, durable, and even scalable to a certain extent. Argon Ion lasers output a secondary line at 514nm, but admittedly they take about 70kW input power and require 8gpm or so cooling water, but they can be really durable, supporting years of operation in poor conditions. The only real difference I see these lasers providing is that it could be used to produce direct emission displays. Neat, but already entering the crowded field of plasma and LCD units.
Without bothering to dig out statistics to prove it, I'll claim that we're taller on the whole and our life spans are getting longer. Does any of that measure into beauty? I don't know. I do know that unquestably as a society we're getting fatter and dumber, which definitely makes the majority of women less attractive to a guy like me who wants a woman who is fit and intelligent.
But to throw my $0.02 into the original discussion, you couldn't pay me double my present salary and get me into management. I love the science. People, not so much.
Then we got these new boxes that find the frequencies in use and let everyone talk on their native radios, except that they kind of don't work. Guys inside substantial (steel frame) buildings can't seem to talk to anyone. If the water hole is more than 1/2 a mile away, they're out of the loop too. And operations that you'd like to keep on their own frequencies like water supply or medical services get sucked into the network anyway. There's also the problem of too many people trying to talk on the radio at once and stepping all over each other. We do need a solution to this problem, but this isn't it.
I'm one of those. Part of it is that I just don't see it - HD is nice, but not new-player-and-new-media-purchase nice. The other part of it is something of media purchasing fatigue - I bought it on VHS and rebought it on DVD, and now I have to buy it again on some HD format? No thanks.
My wife and I took group dance lessons before a friend's wedding because they wanted to do a special first dance and didn't want to go alone (my wife and I just kind of hugged and swayed at our own wedding, but what the heck). Myself and the prospective groom were the only men in a room of 20 people. 'Nuff said.
Vital? No, not vital. But neither is it something that should be thrown away by government fiat at the behest of corporate interests
I programmed a PDP-11 in graduate school to pull data from my vapor deposition rig. Circa 1975 or so. Gotta love those 8" floppy disks. I don't know about today, but four or five years ago I went back to my graduate lab for a visit, and there it was still chugging my code along. Why replace it if it ain't broke?
Admittedly we're talking about close to 30 years ago, but my father told me a story about going to a medical convention, and out in front of the convention hall were women handing out cigarettes to doctors and lighting them. A little farther on is a guy with a clipboard. "Why, what brand of cigarette are you smoking, doctor?" Marlboros - smoked by over 90% of doctors surveyed.