While this sounds wrong, Judaism was never designed for everyone. Many parts of the religion are impractical in a world of nothing but Jews, since the most inconvenient rules are worked around (by the observant) through the use of "Shabbas Goyim". Judaism doesn't have sins in the same way as Christianity, it has rules you need to follow because *you* are a Jew. Gentiles aren't subject to a lot of them (after all, they aren't Jews), and as long as the Gentile is breaking the rule instead of you, all is well (before you ask, only some rules are like this; murder for hire isn't religiously acceptable). While it may be selfish, a ban on donating organs coupled with being allowed to receive them makes total sense, but only non-Jews (or secular Jews) can donate in such a scenario.
Citation needed. I've worked a U.S. federal gov't jobs and private sector jobs. Same basic skill set required for all of them, and the gov't job required a hell of a lot more in the way of continuing education to perform due to the nature of the work. In base salary, the government paid about 20-40% less. Health benefits were more costly, with higher copays and less generous coverage; I can't say how much it cost the government, but I'm guessing it was less. The retirement match was better in percentage terms, but when you applied it against the lower base pay, it all came out in the wash. The two things gov't work was better at were:
Maximum hours per week; flexible work scheduling (if you worked over 40 hours, you built up time off; you couldn't cash it in, so it was a form of mandatory vacation)
Better education benefits (when pursuing degrees that relate to your job, they'd pay you for a year while you pursued the degree). Of course, as noted, the job required a lot more knowledge than a typical B.S. provided, so the education benefits were necessary since most people would have a hard time learning all of it on their own
My friend worked a nearly identical contractor job that replicated the duties of the public sector workers, and while his own pay and benefits were only slightly better, his company charged his time at well over twice what he was paid.
-1 Reactionary: I'm pretty bleeding heart on most issues, but try as I might, I'm not seeing how the GPP indicated his political affiliation, or did anything other than point out a very mild form of hypocrisy (which I don't consider all that hypocritical, since the government is merely subjecting itself to private industry rules instead of the usual more generous government rules).
Depends on your definition of "IT". A lot of "IT" jobs with required programming skills (basically software developer jobs with a side of support) pay that much. Depends on what you're doing, in what industry, and in what part of the state, but given that a family health care plan in NY costs around $13,000, you're getting $6.00-6.50 an hour just on health care benefits. The people I know working these combined "IT/programming" jobs in NYC are often getting $100K in salary (off a B.S. and five years of work experience), which is another $50/hour right there. $45 is not at all unreasonable.
Punishment and rehabilitation aren't the only justifications for imprisonment. In some cases it's just to remove them from society to prevent them from re-offending. If you buy that argument, then not punishing him makes total sense; he's learned his lesson in the worst possible way, and at this point should pose little to no danger.
They neglected to teach their child about the dangers of firearms...
Really? You consider that a problem? For a three year old? Most three year olds have a hard time grasping the danger of running into the street, and a two ton car barreling along at 30+ MPH is a hell of a lot less abstract that a bit of metal that will kill you if you pull on the wrong part of it. Even if you tell them about it, they'll file it with all the other things that they "shouldn't do", which includes such incredibly dangerous acts as pulling their siblings' hair, etc. They might have informed her of the danger and she just didn't listen, understand or remember. Your other points may be legitimate, but claiming that a failure to put a *3 year old* through a primer on gun safety shows negligence is inane.
No one ever does. I've corrected an error in one of my posts by replying within a minute of posting. No one else had replied at that point. I got 10 different nitpicker responses over the course of the next ten hours, most of them from Anonymous Cowards. Don't take it too hard. People *love* piling on. Unless you make a habit of it, everyone will forget within a day.
Did you even read the story? Or did you just read the first paragraph and immediately decide to cover your fear by posting a troll comment? This sort of memory lapse could happen to you as much as anyone else (this assumes you have children of course). Barring the occasional case of complete eidetic memory, your brain is not uniquely equipped to remember everything important at the same time; it takes shortcuts just like everyone else, and sometimes horrible things just happen. I know that's a terrifying concept, but living in denial is not going to make it better.
No problem. Like I said, it's a common misunderstanding. Particularly understandable if you haven't filled out and filed your own income tax return for a full time job.:-)
No, you can't. That's flat out wrong. This is a common misunderstanding of the progressive tax system. Just because your maximum bracket is 35% doesn't mean you pay 35% on your entire income. You pay 35% on the income *above* the previous bracket. Anything below that line is taxed at the lower brackets. For 2009, the first $8,350 of a single person's income is taxed at 10%, then 15% for the amount between $8,351– $33,950, 25% for $33,951 – $82,250, etc. This is the case no matter how much they earn.
Link to an appropriate story: the "crime" is somewhat different (I consider it a more excusable crime than leaving a loaded gun lying around), but it's still a case of memory failure, and the fact remains that any accidental death tends to punish the parents incredibly severely; they aren't about to do this again just because they weren't punished the first time.
The Wii is relevant because the kid thought she was going for a control...
I'm surprised they can intuit the thoughts of the deceased. The kid was three, and there were no witnesses. The mother was speculating. Three year olds are morons, you don't need a Wii controller attachment to make it really frikking dangerous to leave a gun within their reach. I'm fairly sure the Wii game didn't involve pointing the gun at *yourself*.
No. It's where all of Mexico's money went. As of two years ago, his telecom monopoly was charging five pesos (~50 cents) per minute to both sides of any call involving a cell phone. So every call involving a cell phone earned him ~$1 per minute. It's not exactly surprising that he's doing so well, what's surprising is that Mexicans haven't lynched everyone involved with this state sanctioned monopoly sweetheart deal.
You do realize that you can't actually gain money by donating to charity? Under absolute maximum tax bracket circumstances (for WA state), every dollar he gives to charity means he gets a deduction worth a little under 37 cents. And if most of his earnings are now classed as long term capital gains (highly likely), then the deduction is only worth 15 cents on the dollar. Giving to charity means you give a little less to the government in exchange for giving a lot more to a charitable cause. It's not some magical tax dodge.
In four years of college, I think I had one professor take attendance, and only in a first year class. What college were you going to? As for laptops, they are a distraction to the other students, either through incessant keyboard clacking, or, if the laptop isn't in the very back row, creating a visual distraction for everyone behind them.
I don't know about you, but myself and a few of my friends found that even though it seemed like both ways of taking notes would trigger the witless stenographer, writing by hand actually locked the information in, while computer note-taking meant you remembered little or none of it. Maybe it's just the time lag involved; in order to keep up while taking notes by hand, you have to buffer the information, reformat it to be shorter or faster to write, then commit it to paper (yes, I was a CS major, and it infects my description of non-CS related things). If you can type at the same speed the professor is providing the information, you're not forced to look for shortcuts, so you don't do any interpretation.
Of course, the other problem is the incessant keyboard clacking. They may simply be trying to reduce the "auditory clutter" in the room. If not for loud keyboards, I couldn't care less if other students are using a computer to take notes; if I'm right and the computer is a less effective tool, that hurts them, not me.
You're missing the point. You're being at least as immature as he is; after all, you never even explained what was so wrong about accessing shared drives in the first place, you just jumped straight to "IT asshole." So presumably you deserve something at least as bad as what happens to him. In this case, you'd probably get fired if anyone discovered what you were doing.
Standard modern hard drives (7200 rpm), reading a contiguous file top out around 70-80 MB/s. Gigabit ethernet is faster than that. Even if they're only on 100Mb ethernet, the increase in seeking triggered by the network reads and writes competing with the local reads and writes will drastically lower the maximum throughput on the hard disk.
Except you are responding to childish behavior by acting like a child yourself, not treating them like a child. When your child kicks you in the shin, you don't kick them back to demonstrate the error of their ways. Being an asshole and pretending you're not responsible is not a mature way of dealing with things. (I was about to write "...not an *adult* way of dealing with things," but as you've probably noticed, many adults are not mature)
Well, in your scenario, the lawyer also gets rich. And he gets paid every time. So you may end up supporting the stupid, but the (presumably above average intelligence) lawyer is also making out like a bandit. As are all the defense lawyers. And unlike the plaintiff, the lawyers are more likely to be smart enough to hang on to their money. So the logical end result is not an Idiocracy, but a population with an unnatural bent for rules and laws.
Or we could recognize that the effects of a handful of people winning the unjustified lawsuit lottery won't outweigh the billions of other moderately intelligent people succeeding more often than their less intelligent counterparts.
It would sound funny as hell (since the grammar would be out of whack), but you could assign English words and makewords to Chinese characters. It's entirely possible to learn the written form without learning any spoken form. Since the symbols represent concepts and words, not pronunciation, you could call them anything, as long as you associate that sound with the correct concept. The grammar would be the sticking point; by reusing English pronunciation, you'd probably have a hard time keeping the grammar straight, but if you can deal with that, you'd be fine.
For the earliest forms of "writing" I suspect there were no "lonely" writers. The earliest forms likely being one step away from pictures, if they simply explain it to the other members of their group then it's pure memorization. Some languages (e.g. Chinese) are still like this, with specific symbols representing a word or concept instead of representing sounds or syllables. The written form of Chinese is mostly the same across the country, while the spoken language differs; the symbols have nothing to do with the pronunciation, they simply express the concept.
Slashdot Mirror
While this sounds wrong, Judaism was never designed for everyone. Many parts of the religion are impractical in a world of nothing but Jews, since the most inconvenient rules are worked around (by the observant) through the use of "Shabbas Goyim". Judaism doesn't have sins in the same way as Christianity, it has rules you need to follow because *you* are a Jew. Gentiles aren't subject to a lot of them (after all, they aren't Jews), and as long as the Gentile is breaking the rule instead of you, all is well (before you ask, only some rules are like this; murder for hire isn't religiously acceptable). While it may be selfish, a ban on donating organs coupled with being allowed to receive them makes total sense, but only non-Jews (or secular Jews) can donate in such a scenario.
My friend worked a nearly identical contractor job that replicated the duties of the public sector workers, and while his own pay and benefits were only slightly better, his company charged his time at well over twice what he was paid.
-1 Reactionary: I'm pretty bleeding heart on most issues, but try as I might, I'm not seeing how the GPP indicated his political affiliation, or did anything other than point out a very mild form of hypocrisy (which I don't consider all that hypocritical, since the government is merely subjecting itself to private industry rules instead of the usual more generous government rules).
Depends on your definition of "IT". A lot of "IT" jobs with required programming skills (basically software developer jobs with a side of support) pay that much. Depends on what you're doing, in what industry, and in what part of the state, but given that a family health care plan in NY costs around $13,000, you're getting $6.00-6.50 an hour just on health care benefits. The people I know working these combined "IT/programming" jobs in NYC are often getting $100K in salary (off a B.S. and five years of work experience), which is another $50/hour right there. $45 is not at all unreasonable.
Or you could just read the source for these sorts of stories going back twenty years.
Punishment and rehabilitation aren't the only justifications for imprisonment. In some cases it's just to remove them from society to prevent them from re-offending. If you buy that argument, then not punishing him makes total sense; he's learned his lesson in the worst possible way, and at this point should pose little to no danger.
They neglected to teach their child about the dangers of firearms...
Really? You consider that a problem? For a three year old? Most three year olds have a hard time grasping the danger of running into the street, and a two ton car barreling along at 30+ MPH is a hell of a lot less abstract that a bit of metal that will kill you if you pull on the wrong part of it. Even if you tell them about it, they'll file it with all the other things that they "shouldn't do", which includes such incredibly dangerous acts as pulling their siblings' hair, etc. They might have informed her of the danger and she just didn't listen, understand or remember. Your other points may be legitimate, but claiming that a failure to put a *3 year old* through a primer on gun safety shows negligence is inane.
No one ever does. I've corrected an error in one of my posts by replying within a minute of posting. No one else had replied at that point. I got 10 different nitpicker responses over the course of the next ten hours, most of them from Anonymous Cowards. Don't take it too hard. People *love* piling on. Unless you make a habit of it, everyone will forget within a day.
Did you even read the story? Or did you just read the first paragraph and immediately decide to cover your fear by posting a troll comment? This sort of memory lapse could happen to you as much as anyone else (this assumes you have children of course). Barring the occasional case of complete eidetic memory, your brain is not uniquely equipped to remember everything important at the same time; it takes shortcuts just like everyone else, and sometimes horrible things just happen. I know that's a terrifying concept, but living in denial is not going to make it better.
No problem. Like I said, it's a common misunderstanding. Particularly understandable if you haven't filled out and filed your own income tax return for a full time job. :-)
You're in too deep! Get out while you still can!
No, you can't. That's flat out wrong. This is a common misunderstanding of the progressive tax system. Just because your maximum bracket is 35% doesn't mean you pay 35% on your entire income. You pay 35% on the income *above* the previous bracket. Anything below that line is taxed at the lower brackets. For 2009, the first $8,350 of a single person's income is taxed at 10%, then 15% for the amount between $8,351– $33,950, 25% for $33,951 – $82,250, etc. This is the case no matter how much they earn.
Link to an appropriate story: the "crime" is somewhat different (I consider it a more excusable crime than leaving a loaded gun lying around), but it's still a case of memory failure, and the fact remains that any accidental death tends to punish the parents incredibly severely; they aren't about to do this again just because they weren't punished the first time.
The Wii is relevant because the kid thought she was going for a control...
I'm surprised they can intuit the thoughts of the deceased. The kid was three, and there were no witnesses. The mother was speculating. Three year olds are morons, you don't need a Wii controller attachment to make it really frikking dangerous to leave a gun within their reach. I'm fairly sure the Wii game didn't involve pointing the gun at *yourself*.
No. It's where all of Mexico's money went. As of two years ago, his telecom monopoly was charging five pesos (~50 cents) per minute to both sides of any call involving a cell phone. So every call involving a cell phone earned him ~$1 per minute. It's not exactly surprising that he's doing so well, what's surprising is that Mexicans haven't lynched everyone involved with this state sanctioned monopoly sweetheart deal.
You do realize that you can't actually gain money by donating to charity? Under absolute maximum tax bracket circumstances (for WA state), every dollar he gives to charity means he gets a deduction worth a little under 37 cents. And if most of his earnings are now classed as long term capital gains (highly likely), then the deduction is only worth 15 cents on the dollar. Giving to charity means you give a little less to the government in exchange for giving a lot more to a charitable cause. It's not some magical tax dodge.
In four years of college, I think I had one professor take attendance, and only in a first year class. What college were you going to? As for laptops, they are a distraction to the other students, either through incessant keyboard clacking, or, if the laptop isn't in the very back row, creating a visual distraction for everyone behind them.
I don't know about you, but myself and a few of my friends found that even though it seemed like both ways of taking notes would trigger the witless stenographer, writing by hand actually locked the information in, while computer note-taking meant you remembered little or none of it. Maybe it's just the time lag involved; in order to keep up while taking notes by hand, you have to buffer the information, reformat it to be shorter or faster to write, then commit it to paper (yes, I was a CS major, and it infects my description of non-CS related things). If you can type at the same speed the professor is providing the information, you're not forced to look for shortcuts, so you don't do any interpretation.
Of course, the other problem is the incessant keyboard clacking. They may simply be trying to reduce the "auditory clutter" in the room. If not for loud keyboards, I couldn't care less if other students are using a computer to take notes; if I'm right and the computer is a less effective tool, that hurts them, not me.
You're missing the point. You're being at least as immature as he is; after all, you never even explained what was so wrong about accessing shared drives in the first place, you just jumped straight to "IT asshole." So presumably you deserve something at least as bad as what happens to him. In this case, you'd probably get fired if anyone discovered what you were doing.
Standard modern hard drives (7200 rpm), reading a contiguous file top out around 70-80 MB/s. Gigabit ethernet is faster than that. Even if they're only on 100Mb ethernet, the increase in seeking triggered by the network reads and writes competing with the local reads and writes will drastically lower the maximum throughput on the hard disk.
Except you are responding to childish behavior by acting like a child yourself, not treating them like a child. When your child kicks you in the shin, you don't kick them back to demonstrate the error of their ways. Being an asshole and pretending you're not responsible is not a mature way of dealing with things. (I was about to write "...not an *adult* way of dealing with things," but as you've probably noticed, many adults are not mature)
Well, in your scenario, the lawyer also gets rich. And he gets paid every time. So you may end up supporting the stupid, but the (presumably above average intelligence) lawyer is also making out like a bandit. As are all the defense lawyers. And unlike the plaintiff, the lawyers are more likely to be smart enough to hang on to their money. So the logical end result is not an Idiocracy, but a population with an unnatural bent for rules and laws.
Or we could recognize that the effects of a handful of people winning the unjustified lawsuit lottery won't outweigh the billions of other moderately intelligent people succeeding more often than their less intelligent counterparts.
It would sound funny as hell (since the grammar would be out of whack), but you could assign English words and makewords to Chinese characters. It's entirely possible to learn the written form without learning any spoken form. Since the symbols represent concepts and words, not pronunciation, you could call them anything, as long as you associate that sound with the correct concept. The grammar would be the sticking point; by reusing English pronunciation, you'd probably have a hard time keeping the grammar straight, but if you can deal with that, you'd be fine.
For the earliest forms of "writing" I suspect there were no "lonely" writers. The earliest forms likely being one step away from pictures, if they simply explain it to the other members of their group then it's pure memorization. Some languages (e.g. Chinese) are still like this, with specific symbols representing a word or concept instead of representing sounds or syllables. The written form of Chinese is mostly the same across the country, while the spoken language differs; the symbols have nothing to do with the pronunciation, they simply express the concept.
It's been posted and modded to oblivion multiple times.