1) It's not clear from the article if he actually makes 16000 a year or if he just lives on it and puts away the rest, but I really hope he makes enough to save. And a low salary may be enough to live in Malaysia without letting him save well for the future. 2) Living in Malaysia means you are living far away from relatives. 3) Living in Malaysia also means your kids get Malaysian educations (he mentions a 3 bedroom apartment so he might have kids), your town is policed by Malaysian police, and that if you get sick you get Malaysian medical treatment, etc. And even ignoring the question of it not being a democracy, what kind of legal treatment does a non-citizen get the next time he forgets to bribe a government official? 4) I doubt he speaks Malaysian. Yes, English is a second language, but not speaking the primary one puts him at a distinctive disadvantage. 5) What kind of a social life does he have when all the people around him are from a different culture except a few expatriates? And related to that, what does he know about Malaysian customs? Yeah, they like white foreigners, but "liking" someone for such reasons is a lot different from being comfortable with them. 6) Any company willing to let him work remotely from Malaysia is probably willing to hire a native Malaysian, so his job's days may be numbered. 7) If he does lose his job, how's he going to find another one? Go remotely search for another company willing to hire someone living in Malaysia at American prices, and fly to America for the job interview? 8) What does he think of the food? Is there anything on TV he wants to watch? (That sounds insignificant, but moving to a place where there is for all practical purposes no TV would be a downside for lots of people.) 9) What's he going to do if the government changes in a hostile way? They could nationalize his bank account. They could elect Islamic fundamentalists. They could just start a program of blaming the country's ills on foreigners.
Historians would be interested in you precisely because you're average and unexceptional.
Historians would be interested in having information about a few average and unexceptional people from an era. That's because they want to know how people lived in some era; they don't want to know about a particular unexceptional person. Once they have a couple from each different social group, more will not provide more information.
The chemical company sold the property to the government against their will under the threat of having it confiscated (they didn't want to sell it because it wasn't safe). When they did sell it, the deed included a statement specifically warning of the chemical danger and which said not to build anything on the site, and that it should be sealed off "so as to prevent the possibility of persons or animals coming in contact with the dumped materials."
After basically confiscating the property against their will with a warning not to build, the government then sold off the land for homes and constructed sewers, exposing the chemicals. People got sick.
This was spun by the media into a case of irresponsible chemical companies.
And I encounter atheists who think medieval people though the Earth was flat,
Just because atheists can have misconceptions doesn't mean that the misconceptions are related to their atheism. If they believed medieval people were clueless because from age 5 they had been taught by atheist preachers that medieval people were clueless, you might have a point, but such atheist preachers don't exist.
But that's exactly why those Christians believe that dinosaur bones are fake.
"That character doesn't count because she's not written as a real human being" would rule out many male characters as well. You don't really think Donkey Kong or any Mario game has a lot of literary merit as a story, do you? Likewise, ruling out characters who empower others would get rid of lots of male characters. Having a small handful of female characters doesn't look so sexist when your criteria are so strict that you're down to a small handful of males as well.
And I think we can be pretty confident you won't be seeing 24/7 video feed from random guy's Google Glasses on YouTube as well.
I am not so confident. Maybe not literally 24/7, but certainly some guy sending a feed consisting of a very large number of hours of indiscriminately taken video per day. Most people won't do that, but there's no way to tell in advance who will.
It's not a bad thing for the company to do, but to describe it as this headline did is deceitful. Saying that a company is to pay off its loan early, without qualifiers such as "plans to", implies that paying off the loan early is a done deal, even if the words don't literally say that. It's not a done deal.
Everyone with a loan intends to (or claims to intend to) pay off their loan. That is not newsworthy. So announcing it as news implies a newsworthy aspect above and beyond just "they're going to pay off the loan sometime in the future". Typically it means that paying off the loan is a certainty because the only remaining obstacles are procedural ones such as not having some bureaucrat's approval.
Making such a statement when the obstacles are not procedural, and they don't have the money, and the "5 years early" date is still four years in the future, is deceitful, regardless of whether it's literally accurate.
My first impulse was to say that refusing to rent to gay people or unmarried people is discriminating against a protected class (in areas that do prohibit it anyway), and "having an opinion I don't like" isn't. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that (in areas where gays are a protected class) you can't say "I refuse to rent to people who support gay rights. See, that's okay, it's just about opinions, I don't discriminate against gays themselves." Refusing to rent to people who support gay rights has a disparate impact on gay people. Likewise, refusing to give jobs to people who oppose gay rights has a disparate impact on straight people.
Programmers for government projects 1) can always say "I don't care much about the subject, and as long as I'm not spending millions of dollars on it it's none of your business". and 2) don't have millions of dollars to spend on it anyway.
And wanting gay sex to be illegal is not the same thing as just opposing gay marriage.
There's a difference between having views and spending millions of dollars to promote them. Moreover, his views are more extreme than just opposing gay marriage.
This isn't the same thing as refusing to buy from your local baker because he's a Republican.
That would only be comparable if the porn star was lobbying the Muslim nation's government to make porn legal, as well as giving 10% of her money to an organization whose major goals include promoting porn in Muslim nations.
In the case of Card: -- His views are more extreme than just opposing gay marriage; he wants gay sex to be illegal because society needs to send a message that it's bad. -- He's actively advocating making gay sex illegal, and wrote on that subject (of course it wasn't for us, it was for a church audience). There's a difference between that and your grocer opposing gay marriage--your grocer may oppose it, but except for a single vote at election time, he's probably not doing anything about it. -- As a Mormon, he gives 10 percent of his income to the church. That's a lot. If a significant chunk of the money he makes from that Superman story goes to objectionable activities, it's proper to not buy the story because that's not where you want your money to go.
I'm sick and tired of automatic systems that say "please be sure to listen to all of the following options as our menu has been changed". As a rule, they never give you a date when the menu has been changed, so this statement seems to typically be a lie used as an excuse to convince people to listen to the options every time.
"Nearly infinite" means "it's not infinite, but it's large enough that it has most of the same practical effects as it would if it were infinite".
You seem to be interpreting the word "nearly" to mean "has a numerical value close to" rather than "has effects similar to". Obviously it is nonsensical for something to be nearly infinite using that first definition, but that should be a warning sign that you're not using the definition that people mean, not that everyone else is speaking nonsense.
250000 can buy more than a car in the driveway. Would you rather have grandpa's Nobel Prize than, oh, a college education? Or an expensive medical treatment?
I don't know the exact odds of hitting Mars, but let's try a very rough back of the envelope estimate. It's going to pass about 650000 miles from Mars, more or less. Assume that it is equally likely to hit every spot within a cross sectional area that reaches out to 650000 miles. This is wrong, of course, but I'm just doing a back of the envelope calculation to get within an order of magnitude or so, not calculating accurately.
Mars has a radius of somewhat over 2000 miles. The ratio of the cross sectional area of Mars to that of the 650000 mile radius is (pi * 2000 ^ 2) / (pi * 650000 ^ 2) or about a 1 in 100000 chance of actually hitting the planet.
In a real calculation you'd have to take into account things like non-uniform probability distributions within the radius, gravity, etc. But if you want this thing to hit, it's almost certain you're going to be disappointed.
Headline: CEO says French workers have a 3 hour day.
Article: CEO says that French workers have a 7 hour day but loaf a lot.
In this case it's not just Slashdot that's to blame for the misleading headline, but come on. What he actually said may be insulting to the French, but is not inherently ridiculous. What the headline claims he said is ridiculous. Sensationalism.
Unless they surveyed all billionaires, and found that billionaires contributed disproportionately to groups that don't believe in global warming (which they didn't, of course), this headline is about as misleading as saying "billionaires contribute to anti-corporate groups to discredit opponents" or "billionaires kill cute puppies". But then a headline which says "billionaires believe in and contribute to all sorts of causes just like everyone else, and we're pointing to the causes we don't like" doesn't get a lot of ad views.
The wars, bailouts, and trashing the Constitution are supported by Obama and the Democrats, and are therefore a case of supporting government power by a left-leaning establishment, so the media doesn't bother to complain much about them.
(In fact I would suggest that the fact that the media was far more opposed to such things on Bush's watch shows that the media is specifically left-leaning and not establishment leaning.)
Slashdot Mirror
1) It's not clear from the article if he actually makes 16000 a year or if he just lives on it and puts away the rest, but I really hope he makes enough to save. And a low salary may be enough to live in Malaysia without letting him save well for the future.
2) Living in Malaysia means you are living far away from relatives.
3) Living in Malaysia also means your kids get Malaysian educations (he mentions a 3 bedroom apartment so he might have kids), your town is policed by Malaysian police, and that if you get sick you get Malaysian medical treatment, etc. And even ignoring the question of it not being a democracy, what kind of legal treatment does a non-citizen get the next time he forgets to bribe a government official?
4) I doubt he speaks Malaysian. Yes, English is a second language, but not speaking the primary one puts him at a distinctive disadvantage.
5) What kind of a social life does he have when all the people around him are from a different culture except a few expatriates? And related to that, what does he know about Malaysian customs? Yeah, they like white foreigners, but "liking" someone for such reasons is a lot different from being comfortable with them.
6) Any company willing to let him work remotely from Malaysia is probably willing to hire a native Malaysian, so his job's days may be numbered.
7) If he does lose his job, how's he going to find another one? Go remotely search for another company willing to hire someone living in Malaysia at American prices, and fly to America for the job interview?
8) What does he think of the food? Is there anything on TV he wants to watch? (That sounds insignificant, but moving to a place where there is for all practical purposes no TV would be a downside for lots of people.)
9) What's he going to do if the government changes in a hostile way? They could nationalize his bank account. They could elect Islamic fundamentalists. They could just start a program of blaming the country's ills on foreigners.
Historians would be interested in having information about a few average and unexceptional people from an era. That's because they want to know how people lived in some era; they don't want to know about a particular unexceptional person. Once they have a couple from each different social group, more will not provide more information.
Love Canal itself wasn't the Love Canal the media was looking for. (Or maybe it was.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal
The chemical company sold the property to the government against their will under the threat of having it confiscated (they didn't want to sell it because it wasn't safe). When they did sell it, the deed included a statement specifically warning of the chemical danger and which said not to build anything on the site, and that it should be sealed off "so as to prevent the possibility of persons or animals coming in contact with the dumped materials."
After basically confiscating the property against their will with a warning not to build, the government then sold off the land for homes and constructed sewers, exposing the chemicals. People got sick.
This was spun by the media into a case of irresponsible chemical companies.
Just because atheists can have misconceptions doesn't mean that the misconceptions are related to their atheism. If they believed medieval people were clueless because from age 5 they had been taught by atheist preachers that medieval people were clueless, you might have a point, but such atheist preachers don't exist.
But that's exactly why those Christians believe that dinosaur bones are fake.
Don't be a prick.
"That character doesn't count because she's not written as a real human being" would rule out many male characters as well. You don't really think Donkey Kong or any Mario game has a lot of literary merit as a story, do you? Likewise, ruling out characters who empower others would get rid of lots of male characters. Having a small handful of female characters doesn't look so sexist when your criteria are so strict that you're down to a small handful of males as well.
I am not so confident. Maybe not literally 24/7, but certainly some guy sending a feed consisting of a very large number of hours of indiscriminately taken video per day. Most people won't do that, but there's no way to tell in advance who will.
It's not a bad thing for the company to do, but to describe it as this headline did is deceitful. Saying that a company is to pay off its loan early, without qualifiers such as "plans to", implies that paying off the loan early is a done deal, even if the words don't literally say that. It's not a done deal.
Everyone with a loan intends to (or claims to intend to) pay off their loan. That is not newsworthy. So announcing it as news implies a newsworthy aspect above and beyond just "they're going to pay off the loan sometime in the future". Typically it means that paying off the loan is a certainty because the only remaining obstacles are procedural ones such as not having some bureaucrat's approval.
Making such a statement when the obstacles are not procedural, and they don't have the money, and the "5 years early" date is still four years in the future, is deceitful, regardless of whether it's literally accurate.
Your knowledge is lacking.
My first impulse was to say that refusing to rent to gay people or unmarried people is discriminating against a protected class (in areas that do prohibit it anyway), and "having an opinion I don't like" isn't. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that (in areas where gays are a protected class) you can't say "I refuse to rent to people who support gay rights. See, that's okay, it's just about opinions, I don't discriminate against gays themselves." Refusing to rent to people who support gay rights has a disparate impact on gay people. Likewise, refusing to give jobs to people who oppose gay rights has a disparate impact on straight people.
Programmers for government projects 1) can always say "I don't care much about the subject, and as long as I'm not spending millions of dollars on it it's none of your business". and 2) don't have millions of dollars to spend on it anyway.
And wanting gay sex to be illegal is not the same thing as just opposing gay marriage.
There's a difference between having views and spending millions of dollars to promote them. Moreover, his views are more extreme than just opposing gay marriage.
This isn't the same thing as refusing to buy from your local baker because he's a Republican.
That would only be comparable if the porn star was lobbying the Muslim nation's government to make porn legal, as well as giving 10% of her money to an organization whose major goals include promoting porn in Muslim nations.
In the case of Card:
-- His views are more extreme than just opposing gay marriage; he wants gay sex to be illegal because society needs to send a message that it's bad.
-- He's actively advocating making gay sex illegal, and wrote on that subject (of course it wasn't for us, it was for a church audience). There's a difference between that and your grocer opposing gay marriage--your grocer may oppose it, but except for a single vote at election time, he's probably not doing anything about it.
-- As a Mormon, he gives 10 percent of his income to the church. That's a lot. If a significant chunk of the money he makes from that Superman story goes to objectionable activities, it's proper to not buy the story because that's not where you want your money to go.
I'm sick and tired of automatic systems that say "please be sure to listen to all of the following options as our menu has been changed". As a rule, they never give you a date when the menu has been changed, so this statement seems to typically be a lie used as an excuse to convince people to listen to the options every time.
That's not true.
"Nearly infinite" means "it's not infinite, but it's large enough that it has most of the same practical effects as it would if it were infinite".
You seem to be interpreting the word "nearly" to mean "has a numerical value close to" rather than "has effects similar to". Obviously it is nonsensical for something to be nearly infinite using that first definition, but that should be a warning sign that you're not using the definition that people mean, not that everyone else is speaking nonsense.
250000 can buy more than a car in the driveway. Would you rather have grandpa's Nobel Prize than, oh, a college education? Or an expensive medical treatment?
I don't know the exact odds of hitting Mars, but let's try a very rough back of the envelope estimate. It's going to pass about 650000 miles from Mars, more or less. Assume that it is equally likely to hit every spot within a cross sectional area that reaches out to 650000 miles. This is wrong, of course, but I'm just doing a back of the envelope calculation to get within an order of magnitude or so, not calculating accurately.
Mars has a radius of somewhat over 2000 miles. The ratio of the cross sectional area of Mars to that of the 650000 mile radius is (pi * 2000 ^ 2) / (pi * 650000 ^ 2) or about a 1 in 100000 chance of actually hitting the planet.
In a real calculation you'd have to take into account things like non-uniform probability distributions within the radius, gravity, etc. But if you want this thing to hit, it's almost certain you're going to be disappointed.
Headline: Long lost continent found
Article: Long lost micro-continent found
Next headline: New startup sells $5 cars
Next headline's article: New startup sells $5 toy cars.
I mean, come on.
Headline: CEO says French workers have a 3 hour day.
Article: CEO says that French workers have a 7 hour day but loaf a lot.
In this case it's not just Slashdot that's to blame for the misleading headline, but come on. What he actually said may be insulting to the French, but is not inherently ridiculous. What the headline claims he said is ridiculous. Sensationalism.
Given their opinions, they'd be called pirates anyway, whether it's in their name or not, so putting it in their name doesn't really lose much.
Unless they surveyed all billionaires, and found that billionaires contributed disproportionately to groups that don't believe in global warming (which they didn't, of course), this headline is about as misleading as saying "billionaires contribute to anti-corporate groups to discredit opponents" or "billionaires kill cute puppies". But then a headline which says "billionaires believe in and contribute to all sorts of causes just like everyone else, and we're pointing to the causes we don't like" doesn't get a lot of ad views.
I hate letterbox monitors. And 5:4 and 4:3 monitors are much of the way towards extinction.
I also use a tablet that is 4:3 (though not for programming). Fortunately Apple uses 4:3 with the result that cheap Android ripoffs often do as well.
The wars, bailouts, and trashing the Constitution are supported by Obama and the Democrats, and are therefore a case of supporting government power by a left-leaning establishment, so the media doesn't bother to complain much about them.
(In fact I would suggest that the fact that the media was far more opposed to such things on Bush's watch shows that the media is specifically left-leaning and not establishment leaning.)