If you think there is some sort of moral obligation to give the government your money, then you're the one with the strange point of view, not Microsoft.
Well, uh, call me "strange" if you must, but I actually am not an anarchist. I'll join the various libertarian appeals here on occasions to complain that our government is too big -- but I think we need SOME government. And funding for that government has to come from SOMEWHERE.
Our elected representatives have set up a system to fund that government through taxation, and I absolutely agree that at least SOME of that revenue needs to be collected to serve fundamental government services (e.g., police and emergency services, at least some military, basic infrastructure, etc.).
So yeah, I actually believe I have a "moral obligation to give the government my money" as a general matter, assuming I actually want the benefits the government provides. I may disagree about the amount that I think is fair, but I have the option to try to elect representatives who will agree with my view -- if not, by continuing to live in this country, I agree to abide by its laws.
If you don't like the government and don't believe you have a moral obligation to fund it, move to some other place where you can have your anarchist paradise.
As for the specific case of businesses asking for special tax breaks, I also believe it is immoral and antithetical to the nature of law to ask for personal exemptions from laws that others must follow. It leads to corruption of politicians and the legislative process, and it's fundamentally unfair. If tax rates are too high to attract businesses, then lower tax rates for ALL businesses. Asking for a special exemption from the law just for yourself is not just. And yeah, I think taking an advantage of such an exemption is actually immoral.
Of course, I realize these things happen all the time. That doesn't mean it's desirable or moral behavior. Is it "legal"? Well, yeah, if you buy a politician or a few, it is. But don't pretend that it should be sanctioned as "moral."
How is it unfair? The state gets additional jobs, higher tax revenues (if applicable), and most likely an economic boost from people spending money.
At the expense of likely quid-pro-quo types of arrangements with politicians. I'm not naive, and I realize that these sorts of things happen in the real world. But every time we rationalize private deals made between big corporations (or rich people) and politicians, we're asking for more corruption.
In several financial and political philosophies, companies provide a net benefit and therefore should pay zero taxes. Therefore, it is your position that is unfair.
Umm, NO. Sure, you're right that some people argue for zero corporate tax. I'm not saying that's an invalid argument. But what's unfair is that if you REALLY want "zero corporate tax," you give it to ALL corporations. That's fair.
What you're talking about is an anticompetitive practice that gives large corporations an unfair market advantage. Say I give a major tax break to a company that employs 10,000 employees. You know who gets screwed? 200 other local companies that each have 50 employees or whatever. Because they're forced to pay the normal tax rates, while your giant corporation is exempt. Sure, most of those companies may not be competing directly against the big company, but some of them might be.
If a state imposed higher than average taxes, and never negotiated, it would lose employment.
And if the state's corporate tax rates are uncompetitive, the FAIR way to fix that is to lower them for ALL corporations, not give an unfair advantage to large corporations that already have many advantages in the marketplace.
Or is your goal to drive local small businesses out of business?
By artificially lowering the tax rates for a few select corporations, you are also allowing the state to continue ignoring a potential problem of too high corporate tax rates for anyone else. Anyone with the clout to negotiate gets the lower rate, while other local small businesses get screwed. That's the exact OPPOSITE behavior of something that will drive tax rates to zero -- because the local tax rates are artificially propped up by the people who can't fight them.
What is fair? You need to define words before you use them. I suppose I should ask, fair to whom? Because that seems to be the crux of your argument.
"Fair" in terms of the law means that we all get to play by the same rules. No one should get to "negotiate" out of abiding by the law. If corporate tax is too high in a state or local area to draw these large businesses, the correct way to fix this is by lowering corporate taxes FOR EVERYBODY. If enough big businesses refuse to move to a state because of its tax structure, it puts pressure on the state legislature to move toward your ideal world of zero corporate tax. If, on the other hand, companies get arbitrary individual tax rates, there's no such pressure, and the only benefits accrue to the biggest companies with the best lobbyists and connections... which is a recipe for corruption and unfair to actual local smaller businesses.
Says the guy that hides behind "athanasiuskircher". Fuck you you pseudo tough-guy.
Look, I normally don't respond to AC trolls -- but my record of posts is available for you to peruse as you'd like. I've been active here for years, and I haven't hid my knowledge of stats, which I make use of periodically in posts (and even do some of my own calculations to respond to posts from time-to-time).
I have a durable record you can feel free to follow and search. I'm not "hiding" as an AC, and on the rare occasion where I'm unnecessarily harsh to someone in a post, I apologize. You, on the other hand, are an AC randomly swearing at people while you hide behind the cloak of complete anonymity, knowing whatever you say will never follow you anywhere.
That is to say, if you were accepted to Harvard, but instead attended a state school, you will statistically wind up with the same salary as if you had attended Harvard. http://www.usnews.com/educatio...
This is all very interesting, but some details of the study you cite suggest that other factors are at play. From your link:
As with the earlier study, there were some students who did fare better financially if they attended elite schools. The students who fell into this category were Latino, black, and low-income students, as well as those whose parents did not graduate from college.
In an E-mail, the researchers explained these exceptions: "While most students who apply to selective colleges may be able to rely on their families and friends to provide job-networking opportunities, networking opportunities that become available from attending a selective college may be particularly valuable for black and Hispanic students and for students who come from families with a lower level of parental education."
The researchers want to blame the effects on all networking, which is undoubtedly significant, but that's not to say there weren't also other factors present -- like the fact that minority kids, poor kids, and kids without well-educated parents might not have the kind of cultural exposure to the "upper class educated world" that white rich kids with high SAT scores might have. By going to a better school, they might be exposed to more ideas that are more typical of wealthier classes, as well as learning social skills and networking.
Whatever the cause -- the point is that this is SERIOUS confounding variable in this study. Students with high SAT scores are already disproportionately from upper-class or upper-middle-class white (and Asian) families. Saying that those sorts of people will achieve whether they go to Harvard or not isn't actually saying much at all.
The fact that "better" schools make a significant difference for all these other non-privileged groups proves that they actually do something for students who actually NEED the help to succeed in life.
Moreover, I just find this finding hilarious:
Applicants, who shared similar high SAT scores with Ivy League applicants could have been rejected from the elite schools that they applied to and yet they still enjoyed similar average salaries as the graduates from elite schools. In the study, the better predictor of earnings was the average SAT scores of the most selective school a teenager applied to and not the typical scores of the institution the student attended.
Holy crap! If I want my kid to succeed, I just need for him to APPLY to Harvard, since the best predictor is the average SAT score of the most selective school he applies to. It doesn't matter whether he's accepted, rejected, whatever -- as long as he applies, it will help.
Of course... that's preposterous. Once again, the interpretation of this finding gets murky. What's probably more telling here is that kids who BOTHER applying to Harvard or wherever are mostly from households with high-achieving parents or parents who really push their kids to succeed. Those kids will likely do well wherever they go to.
The question of whether better schools "add value" is mostly relevant to kids who would NOT generally have good opportunities to succeed in life otherwise, like poor kids, minority kids, kids whose parents were not well-educated. And for those kids, your study absolutely shows a significant difference.
Well, I've actually written articles in peer-reviewed professional publications and essays on the topic of the use of statistics.
[citation needed]
Well, sure, if you insist. I actually participated in the founding of the discipline of combinatorics, partly to discuss issues of probability and statistics of distributions. See my treatise Ars Magna Sciendi sive Combinatoria (1669), for example.
If you dig into my earlier treatises, you'll find I actually considered a number of issues in this sort of mathematics even before Leibniz's De Arte Combinatoria (1666) (he was actually a bit of a fan of my work, I exchanged some great letters with him about it back in the day), and well before all those young Bernoulli whippersnappers got involved.
(What's that -- you wanted a serious answer? You want me to give real-world information about myself to a guy who hides as an AC?)
Gather enough anecdotes and you can start to do statistics on them.
Sure, you could. If you want to work with a complete unreliable dataset, where all your conclusions are much more likely to be invalid.
If you are scientific you will follow up with a well randomized survey.
"Well-randomized surveys" are not anecdotes. Anecdotes are individual stories, which may all have their individual bias. Since they are reported without context or regard for selection, they are more subject to cherry-picking, confirmation bias, etc.
But usually inquiry begins with anecdotes.
Agreed. You have to get interested in a topic first, and if you've never heard anything about it, you probably would never look into it. But after we've heard a couple stories then we move onto better data collection techniques if we want to draw any valid conclusions.
Or didn't you take Statistics 101?
Well, I've actually written articles in peer-reviewed professional publications and essays on the topic of the use of statistics. What are your credentials?
I don't have school age children yet, but I will soon. I have no intention of taking out loans or making them take out loans, no matter how hard it is to achieve this goal.
That's not necessarily a reasonable policy. I completely agree with most of your post that student loans are out of control and are causing all sorts of price distortions.
But absolutes are rarely good general policies. A good college education is in fact a lifelong investment, and while motivated students can succeed anywhere, a good school and a good line on a resume can really give someone a jumpstart for the first few years of a career and the first few jobs. I am NOT by any means arguing that anyone should take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, as some people are today. You're never going to get any return on investment for that. But would I say that a kid or parent should NEVER take out a low-interest-rate loan for the extra $10k or $20k (TOTAL, not per year) to allow them to get 4 years of education at a significantly better school, which might be repaid in a salary bump from better job offers in just a few years after graduation? No -- that seems a draconian policy which doesn't take into account the real "investment" that education can be.
People should be careful about taking on debt. But sometimes there are valid reasons to do so, if you gain larger benefits in the long-run.
Instead I'm going to have to compete with irresponsible borrowers who have borrowed way more money than anything that remotely makes sense for them to borrow.
It's not only you, but your kids who will have to compete with these people on the job market. I'm all for instilling responsible spending habits and financial sense in kids, but part of responsible financial management is knowing when debt is a good and rational choice. Credit card debt is almost always irrational, because interest rates are ridiculously high. Other types of loans can sometimes be justified.
Heck, I have a car loan on my current car (at a crazy low interest rate) even though I could have paid in cash -- but that money's better off in the long-term investments I have for retirement (where it will likely gain at least 5 times as much value as the amount as the minimal interest charge on my car loan), and even if I stuffed that money under my mattress, it would lose value due to inflation, whereas now my car loan loses principal with inflation instead, making my effective interest rate less than zero. (Of course, I would have been less likely to take on this debt without being financially secure -- if you don't have a large emergency fund in the bank, adequate insurance, etc., this may be a harder decision.)
The USA college tuitions have been going up 3 times the rate of inflation for three decades. While much of the increased annual fees go to "need based" tuition scholarships, the university endowments have funded an arms race on "country club" campuses complexes, the maintenance of which draws from the same tuition and fees.
THIS. Whenever the topic of college tuition increases comes up, the assumption is that it must have to do with the cost of instruction (i.e., faculty salaries) or maybe lab equipment or something.
In reality, the biggest factor for many colleges has been this "arms race" (great term) to make sure all the new dorms have a swimming pool and a climbing gym and whatever. New buildings and facilities keep going up, which have ongoing staffing and maintenance costs. You could often fund many endowed professorships with the cost of a new building.
After campus facilities "improvements," the biggest reasons for increased costs are often enlarged administration bureaucracies and sports programs. College administration staff in many colleges has increased by 50% or so at many universities in the past few decades, even as faculty size remains roughly constant. High-profile sports at big athletic schools are often thought to bring in the cash, but actually most schools lose huge amounts of money on them. It's only a precious few that win that gamble.
But, as the parent says, it's great that we can have wealthy foreign students throwing in the cash so our kids can have the new climbing gyms, a boatload of administrators, and great sports coaches that often earn a lot more than college presidents.
Oh, wait? You were concerned about better education? Hah! There's where we need to cut costs. Let's put everything online and create MOOCs, so we can reallocate the buildings with classrooms for more climbing gyms, have professors record their lectures so they can then be dispensed with (along with their pesky salaries -- think of how many administrative staff we could hire by getting rid of that endowed chair!) and have the courses "taught" by adjunct drones who respond to emails, and without those annoying "class schedules" where you might have to actually show up and interact with real people to learn and discuss deep ideas, we can use online classes to meet whenever and have more flexibility to schedule athletic events whenever we want!
I'm being a bit sarcastic here, but these are really some disturbing trends. I'm not saying that traditional college lectures were always the best way to teach information, nor that higher ed couldn't be improved in general. But the pressures which are creating the tuition cost often have little to do with education... but I guess we have foreign students to pay for it (which is ironic since most foreign students are coming to the U.S. because of its educational reputation at universities, not for the climbing gyms).
Anecdote is not data. Graduates from many prestigious schools in general have better outcomes. Highly motivated people can generally get ahead anywhere -- if you're such a highly motivated person, then it's not surprising that you did well in life, regardless of where you got your degree, or whether you even had a college degree AT ALL.
With far less debt.
Well, you might have a point if you were talking about some random expensive second-rate private college. But the schools brought up in the summary like the Ivies and your chosen example of MIT have incredibly generous financial aid packages that are generally entirely need-based.
Some facts from MIT's financial aid info:
-- 72% of undergraduates receive either a need-based or merit-based scholarship.
-- 41% of undergraduates have student loan debt at graduation, and the average debt at graduation is $17,900. The median debt for all undergraduate financial aid recipients who graduated in 2013 was $10,948.
For a school that estimates its ANNUAL tuition and fees now come to over $60,000/year (with 4-year cost in the $250,000 range), coming out with just over $10,000 in debt is pretty darn miniscule, I'd say. And that's less than the cost of ONE YEAR of college at many state universities these days. (Lest you think that these numbers are skewed because everyone comes from rich families, note also that at least 1/3 of MIT graduates come from familes with annual incomes of less than $75,000.)
So, sorry -- if you actually get into and graduate from MIT, chances are your debt levels are going to be at the levels of many state university graduates, perhaps lower.
(Note that MIT and the Ivies can do this because they have big endowments. Your argument would be better targeted at lesser private universities that change $50+k/year and don't have the resources to give such generous aid.)
Besides, you are surrounded by "normal" people, if there is such a thing. If you surround yourself with abnormal people you never learn to deal with the rest of the world. Which amounts to a bad education.
Meh. You have a point, I suppose. But there are many, many years and daily opportunities to learn to socialize with people who aren't as smart as you ("normal" people). Even if you go to a place like MIT, you can easily find plenty of opportunities to deal with "normal" people while you're there -- go outside your down, volunteer, join some non-university social groups, become active in local politics or non-profit organizations... whatever. Build up your resume AND learn to deal with "normal" people, all while going to a top-tier school -- what a concept!
However, there are far fewer opportunities to surround yourself with incredibly smart people to get a high-quality education. Not to mention that it's useful to get this training while you're young and your brain is still more malleable. And unless you end up at some really top-tier company, chances are you're not going to be challenged intellectually by those around you.
Sure, it's definitely possible for a well-motivated student to get a great education elsewhere and to do great things in life. But if you have the opportunity to attend a top school with decent financial aid rules, there are few downsides to it, contrary to your implications.
I do. 'Big History', to begin with, is so ugly a term
Part of the problem, I think, is that this isn't really "history" in the traditional sense (at least not as the word was understood before the past few decades or so). I'm NOT saying it shouldn't be taught in schools, mind you, but this whole project is based somewhat on a false premise.
"History," as the term traditionally means, has to do with a "story" (it's in the word, and in fact "history" and "story" used to basically mean the same thing in early English). That is, it's a narrative based on human accounts of events. Read the intro to the first major "history" in Western civilization if you don't believe me, Herodotus's "Histories" (where the word acquired its meaning) describes exactly this -- history is recounting events based on what humans have said and done, and trying to sort of causes and effects within that narrative.
This sort of "history" is what actual historians are trained in -- evaluating written documents and sources, as well as the role of artifacts, in creating a narrative about history. The word "prehistoric" only has meaning based on that meaning of "history" -- i.e., before written records exist, we have "prehistory."
From TFA, it's clear that 90% of this course is about prehistoric events. Therefore, it's NOT a history course at all. Gates does NOT want to "remake the way history is taught" -- he wants to substitute a traditional course on history with a course on scientific theories about prehistory.
That's great -- and I'm all for interdisciplinary approaches and perhaps devoting more time to this stuff in schools. Maybe this course could take the place of part of a history elective and part of a science elective, or maybe it could serve as a kind of "bridge" between the disciplines, with science teachers starting it off, and history teachers swapping in once we get to modern anthropology and archaeology.
But let's be honest about what this is. It wouldn't make sense to have a person with "history" degree teach this course -- since the kind of methodologies and understanding have little to do with what historians do. The kinds of questions raised by scientific theories about prehistory and how we evaluate them are very different from the ways we critique human history narratives based on human records of events. Historians have some overlap with archaeologists in their methods, but very little overlap with anthropologists (particularly those who work on early humans), evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and cosmologists -- which are actually the main topics of this curriculum as it's advertised.
t's an important shade of meaning here. The people *DO* have those rights. The government is actively disregarding those rights but they do exist.
Meh. What does it mean to have an unenforceable "right"? Yes, you can go with the Declaration of Indepedence and say we have "inalienable rights," but as a practical matter, our rights can be severely curtailed and restricted according to current legal doctrine.
I get what you're trying to say, but I don't buy it. I think it requires some sort of supernatural objective thing that somehow "endows" us with these "rights" that exist for all time and in all places. I don't think that exists.
Instead, I think that society and governments negotiate rights for citizens based on their metaethical systems. Do I believe that people DESERVE the rights you discuss? Absolutely. I think it's a moral necessity. But as a practical matter, those rights only can exist when someone observes them. If the government ceases to observe those rights, they are no longer in force... it's that simple.
From an ethical standpoint, I believe that the people deserve to have them back, but saying that the people continue to have them when no one actually observes them is just bizarre. It's like a shop offering the "right to free ice cream for senior citizens," but most of the time a senior citizen shows up and asks for ice cream, the shop finds some arbitrary excuse why they can't serve them the ice cream that day. What the heck could it possibly mean for the shop to advertise a "right to free ice cream" in that situation?
And let's not forget that the Constitution is an instrument of our government. It may have been written by elected representatives of "the people," but it's basically no different from any other legal document. It's interpreted by the courts, and legislatures and executives act within what they consider to be its purview. If all the government basically interprets the Constitution so that the "rights" ennumerated there no longer have legal effect, then you really don't have them anymore. You SHOULD demand for them back, but pretending, "Yeah, I still have my rights, but nobody respects them" is just wordplay. It doesn't mean anything.
However, a voting populace that expects better treatment generally gets it.
Sorry, but that is absolute and utter nonsense. Look at history, if you need plenty of examples. A voting populace that DEMANDS better treatment often gets it. A voting populace that merely "expects" better treatment from politicians who have proven that they will not give them better treatment is just ignorant and stupid. Why would someone who has more power over you and who has a track record of violating rights voluntarily give up that power when people continue to elect them, even as they take away more rights?
You're acting like the relationship between government and the general population is one of some sort of mutual respect governed by laws of etiquette -- I respect you, and I expect that you'll respect me back.
The problem is that stuff only works well among parties that have equal power in a relationship, or when the respect is always given by the party with more power. The U.S. government has consistently been enlarging its power, particularly over the past century or so, and there is definite truth to the phrase about how power corrupts.
And I can totally imagine them coming home and their grandparents asking them "Where did you go this year?" in the most obnoxious wasy possible, like all grandparents do. Good luck explaining this one!
Yeah, yeah. Been there, done that. About 375 years ago.
Back when Vesuvius was actively erupting in the 1630s, I decided to take a closer look. While the volcano was still smoldering and active, I hired a local guide to take me to the top, then was lowered into the crater to take some scientific observations and temperature measurements. You wanna read more about it? Here's some info on my book. (Of course, science has progressed a lot since then.)
We didn't have fancy videocameras back then, so I had to make make my own drawings of what I saw.
One of the great strengths of a populace gifted with civil rights is an abiding belief that those rights belong to them.
Great. But what's the use of a "belief" if it's no longer true? You're talking about a country that re-elected someone as the head of state who was KNOWN to have ordered the targeted killings of American citizens without trial. I don't see how much further one can get from "your rights are all now optional" than the head of government killing people (i.e., effective removal of ALL rights) with no legal process, and the electorate implicitly condoning the process by reelecting him.
Maybe the populace believes they have rights. But they are in error. And it's a real problem, because as long as they have this false belief, they will continue acting like they have something that don't have, rather than standing up and asking for their rights back.
No law or condition of government can abridge an ingrained belief in individual rights.
Well, I'm not sure what qualifies as a "condition of government," but the U.S. government has certainly done a very good job at abridging the ingrained belief in individual rights, particularly around the 4th Amendment, in just the past decade. For roughly 200 years the text of that Amendment you quoted was pretty roughly adhered to by courts and the government, with just a few circumscribed and clear exceptions.
But then, after 2001, it became optional. The government said: "Ooooh -- watch out! There could be evil bogeymen out there who might want to blow up planes!! Ooooh -- we seem never to see these people, and the few ones that pop up we don't seem to catch with our usual methods, but let's just search everyone who wants to travel in the country anyway... let's have government agents doing invasive body scans with no probable cause."
Well, the government said that, and people obeyed, even though it explicitly violates a number of clauses in the Fourth Amendment (something created to thwart the "general warrants" that had been issued in England before, which now basically exist in every airport terminal), as they had been understood and interpreted by courts for hundreds of years. So -- yeah, the government has definitely "abridged an ingrained belief in individual rights" through fear of unseen enemies.
when you no longer believe that basic rights are afforded to you, you have already lost.
When you have convinced yourself that rights exist that really don't anymore or that they still are in force when actually they've been significantly eroded, you've either become naive or ignorant. In either case, you're actually promoting the continued suppression of these rights by believing that things exist which don't -- since that allows people to endorse a government which no longer is observing those rights.
If, instead, you observe the empirical and legal shifts which prove that these rights have been eroded significantly in recent years, you might actually have cause to stand up and complain... and maybe try to get some of them back, rather than simply saying "I believe!" out of ignorance and complacency.
While (correlation != causation) and all that, there really is a pretty extensive research base showing the benefits of music (and the arts in general) for students.
Most of the research out of the social sciences (and the poorly-designed tests they like to give) is absolute garbage; biased, not rigorous, and subjective. Unless they get their act together and produce more quality research like you'd see out of a field like physics, it can't be taken seriously.
No claims of vague, subjective benefits will change any of this.
I've never posted before on a story that I submitted, but in this particular case I think I should clarify some background -- I was trying not to make the submission too long, so the last link is to a longer article that reviews important research, but I know that's too much to ask for people to read that....
Anyhow, I myself was very skeptical of this study when I heard of it earlier this week, but I looked into it more. Here are some useful things to know (again, much of this is summarized in some of the links):
(1) It is well-established that adult professional musicians and people with significant musical training have really different brains from most of the "normal" population. I believe this is almost a unique pattern among professions. There are literally hundreds of studies which have shown this, and it's very common to exclude musicians or those with musical training from brain studies about music (and sometimes even from studies about related fields dealing with auditory cognition, like language), because neuroscientists and cognition specialists have found that musicians' brains are wired very differently. Musicians are generally segregated and studied in separate studies, because whatever music training does -- it does something VERY noticeable. That claim has been known for decades and is NOT under dispute.
(2) This present study found similar markers in similar aspects of brain function which were ambiguous after one year of music training, but clear after two years of training. These suggest that the adaptations observed in adult professional musicians and those with extensive musical training begin relatively quickly.
(3) The areas of the brain and the type of functions altered here are known to be correlated with things like better sound and language processing as well in "normal" (non-musician) brains.
(4) Students who were participating in the study, had music training, and showed these brain changes, also demonstrate improvement in school. Students who were chosen as a matching "control" in terms of their other backgrounds and abilities (but did NOT have the music training), did not have the observed brain changes, nor did they see the academic benefits. It's not enough to eliminate all confounding variables, but it's a start.
I still wouldn't say this is strong, hard "proof" of anything like you might get in a physics experiment. But it's a LOT better than what you get in most social science research, which (I agree with AC) is often "garbage." Musicians' brains are a pretty unique dataset, and when we can match what may be happening with these kids to known alterations that are found in those who have had extensive musical training (and alterations known to affect language processing), it's the first step toward eliminating that dreaded "correlation != causation" problem. And the last link to the Atlantic article mentions a few other similar long-term studies that are ongoing which also show similar trends in preliminary results.
Lastly, just to clarify why so many things are about "at-risk" students. IF this research pans out, and IF these effects are real, the kids at schools in low-income areas are least likely to have access to this sort of music training, because those schools are most likely to have eliminated all arts and "superfluous" activities to streamline the curriculum and focus on direct readi
I have kids...I'm not a moron...I didn't save my password. It prompts me for each purchase.
I have no idea how they lost this.
Well, let's see, could it be because they didn't always offer the options that you think are so great now??
From TFA:
The FTC's complaint against Google says that when the company initially introduced in-app purchases in 2011, buyers did not have to input their passwords. When the company implemented the requirement the following year, Google did not tell users that entering a password triggered the opening of a 30-minute window where the password would not need to be entered again when making a purchase.
Since then, Google has added more password protection options, letting users control how often they need to input a password: every time they make a purchase, every 30 minutes, or never.
It doesn't take a moron to get caught in a situation where they don't offer the reasonable options you mention, or don't clearly warn you that it's a "free-for-all" for purchases for 30 minutes.
Frankly -- everytime Slashdot runs an article like this, a bunch of ACs (mostly) come out of the woodwork who want to "blame the victim." And yes -- that is precisely what you are doing. Taking money from someone without their express authorization is THEFT. I don't care if you are some app programmer who makes 90% of your profits off of ill-advised in-app purchases. It's wrong, unless you are damn sure that the purchase is authorized..
I don't care about the kids argument. As an ADULT, I don't want purchases without confirmation to be a default unless I expressly authorize it. For developers out there -- the moral thing to do in any system where you are going to take money from someone is to at least allow them to confirm that they want you to take it... at least once (probably twice). There's nothing wrong with offering an option, a la Amazon's "one-click" check-out, for people who OPT IN, but that is precisely what it should: a screen popping up and saying explicitly, "You are about to authorize password-less purchases for forever/next 30 minutes/whatever!! Please type in your password again and check this box if you agree you REALLY want this!"
Everyone around here seems to get offended in other situations where people "blame the victim" or where technology doesn't offer "opt-in." When someone's gonna take your money, you damn well should have a system that is opt-out by default.
Google didn't clearly have all of this a few years ago. Hence, they were taking money from people without permission. Hence, they should definitely give it back if people request it. This has nothing to do with kids or bad parents or morons or whatever -- it's basic ethics that you don't get to take people's money if they didn't say you could.
Does FERPA have any teeth in it? I've yet to hear about it actually being enforced.
Well, per the Supreme Court decision Gonzaga University v. Doe, FERPA was ruled NOT to create an individual right for a student to sue over a privacy breach.
Basically, under most circumstances, the main penalty that would be possible for FERPA violations would be removal of federal funding from a university. Most universities do instruct faculty on its requirements, and they may have internal disciplinary measures for faculty who violate it.
From a practical standpoint, having worked at a couple different universities, I usually hear about FERPA actually being invoked when students or parents want access to educational records or want access to make a correction to an educational record, which it also requires. I've heard of students suing over various things, but not FERPA -- and usually if an instructor does something stupid like post a list of grades that a student complains about, someone just tells the instructor not to do that again, and most people just comply because violations are often out of ignorance.
No, those are not stereotypes. They are characters probably based on real people. I watch the show and it completely reminds me of my college and grad school years and the people whom I knew then, including the Texan. It literally gives me flashbacks.
The thing is -- I understand why some people think these are stereotypes. It's rare, even among the hyper-nerdy communities, to find a collection of traits as extreme as represented on the show in a small group of people. But all of these traits and behaviors do exist; they aren't fictional.
I could be wrong about this, but I think part of the problem is that many people who think of themselves as "nerds" in the real world because they were good at math and science in high school and were unpopular or whatever know that they don't act like this, and they don't really know people like this.
But you have to remember that these guys are Ph.D.s working at Caltech (well, and one master's in engineering), with degrees from places like MIT. If you've spent any significant time at a place like Caltech or MIT, or know a number of people from places like this, chances are you've seen at least some of the more extreme breeds of "nerdiness" displayed on the show. This is the upper echelon of weird nerds.
If you were just in the chess club in high school, did well in calculus, hung out with "nerds" there, and went to your local state school where you partied a bit while you got your IT degree, you may not have encountered a lot of people like this... even if you always felt like you were a "nerd." But that doesn't mean these people don't exist. There are times when all of the characters do go "over the top" in some ways, or they display incongruous traits of nerdiness that don't tend to be together in the real world -- but this is a sitcom, not a documentary, so I don't expect 100% realism.
but the show isn't about nerds laughing at themselves; it's about non-nerds laughing at nerds, and nerds not "getting" what's so funny.
That's your opinion, and you're certainly welcome to it. I've mostly seen early seasons of the show, but my impression is that it's only partly about what you say.
In general, the show is often about a failure to communicate. The non-nerds laugh at the nerds, it's true, but the nerds get plenty opportunities to laugh at the non-nerds too. Have you seriously missed all the jokes made at Penny's expense? (And I'm not talking about Sheldon's weird attempts at humor that the other nerds often don't find funny -- I mean jokes about Penny's ridiculousness, her ineptitude, her inability to function in some everyday tasks, etc.)
The show points out the problems that both sides have with ineffective communication, and that's a big source of humor. But, on the other hand, the show celebrates the virtues of both sides too. The nerds often solve problems or do awesome things, and the non-nerds are suitably impressed -- when the problem solved is actually something "practical" and not something having to do with comic books or sci-fi or some weird technological achievement with no obvious practical benefit. Penny sometimes occasionally demonstrates some sort of "obvious" solution to a problem that the nerds missed because they got mired in details and couldn't see the simple solution. Both of these things happen in real life, too.
So, if you don't like the show, don't watch it. But I'd say that the "non-nerds laughing at nerds" is only one part of the show. It's a pretty "equal opportunity offender" in targeting the ridiculous characteristics of ALL characters, nerd and non-nerd alike.
BTW it seems the only requirement to fire walking is just don't stop.
I never understood the mystique surrounding firewalking. It's basic heat transfer. You see the effects all the time.
Touch the coin on your desk. It feels a bit "cool," right? Now touch the wooden part of the desk. That feels more like the temperature of the room, right? But they're obviously both at the same temperature. Our bodies are sensitive to rate of heat transfer, absolute temperature is irrelevant.
It's the reason why no one ever worries about getting his tongue stuck to a wooden post in winter, but people talk about this happening with a metal flagpole. Metal transfers heat faster, making it more likely for skin to freeze.
The "hot coals" in a firewalking demonstration similarly have very poor heat conduction. So if you only touch them briefly, it won't be long enough for heat to flow into your feet... even if the temperature of the coals is very hot.
Next time you see a "professional" firewalker, ask him whether he'd do a demonstration if you mixed in some hot smooth iron "stones" with all the coals. He'll probably say no way (if he has any sense). Even if the iron and the wood coals are the same temperature, the iron would transfer heat much faster, likely resulting in serious burns for any firewalker.
In my university, you have one allowed calculator, and you still had to pay to get a sticker to let the exam procs know that "yes, this calculator is allowed"
I guess I understand this stuff for standardized tests somewhat, but what sort of crap is this for university exams? If your exam can be thwarted by just having a slightly more powerful graphing or programmable calculator, your exam is probably not testing very much.
When I was an undergrad, most exams in advanced science and engineering classes allowed you to bring ANYTHING as long as it didn't involve communication with people outside the room. Forget about just calculators (ANY calculator), some people would be STACKS of textbooks, and I even remember some laptops (though those were less common back then -- largescale wireless also didn't quite exist yet).
When I first had a test like this, I packed a pile of books too, along with whatever calculator I had (I think a TI-85), etc. But I quickly realized that most of this was useless. In the limited time we had, if I didn't already know the stuff, I'm not going to have time to learn it from a book.
And the tests always had complex questions designed to test your ability to confront new types of problems (and to often present symbolic answers with your work, not just some final numerical output from a calculator, nor even some symbolic answer spit out by Mathematica, even if you had a laptop), so even if you had somehow programmed your calculator to output a numerical answer and handle every problem you had encountered in the class so far, you'd still have to have some pretty serious critical thinking skills to do well.
If the only thing standing between you and an A on exams is having a "non-stickered" slightly more "advanced" piece of crap calculator built on 20-year-old technology to do your exams with, that course is probably not asking very much of its students.
Yes, people who are self-taught often have gaps in our knowledge, but we tend to be *much* faster at filling those gaps. Also, the fact that we acquired all the knowledge we did without a college degree indicates that we are motivated to fill those gaps ourselves.
Meh. Your generalizations are just as bad as someone arguing the opposite. I agree that someone who is self-taught AND motivated can be amazing -- ultimately, that's sort of what college used to be about, i.e., taking you from the high school "spoon feed you knowledge" mentality to the self-learning place where you can teach yourself what you don't yet know.
Good college grads learn to teach themselves, sometimes as a result of university training. Other people pick up the self-teaching and motivation skills on their own, and they would have done so regardless of whether they went to college or not.
The vast majority of people in the world are probably not that motivated and aren't particularly good at teaching themselves, and those sorts of people exist both in the college-degree crowd and among the people without one. The vast majority of people who don't have a college degree were also challenged intellectually to a lesser degree, and therefore they are probably somewhat less likely to have picked up those skills.
But whatever. These are meaningless generalizations. I've met people who never went to college whom I would count among the most intelligent, clear-thinking, amazing folks I've ever known. I've also met Ph.D.s who are idiots (even from prestigious universities).
One can argue the merits and drawbacks of college, but one thing I think is pretty clear: very few people have the kind of natural motivation to self-teach that you describe about yourself. If someone challenges you with tasks that require you to do so, I think you have a somewhat better chance of picking that up. It could happen on a job with the right boss or the right team; it could happen at college. Traditionally, a broad-based college education was partly about exposure to a lot of ideas, and in the process of critiquing those ideas from various fields, you'd learn how to think, how to learn knew things, and how to think intelligently about them. Nowadays, college has often become a glorified trade school for lots of students (though admittedly, it always had part of the crowd who went there just to party, it's just in the past those were just rich people's kids who had time to waste and money to spend). So it doesn't surprise me at all that lots of college grads today come unprepared with practical knowledge and what they learned in technology may be out-of-date by the time they graduate.
But that doesn't mean all higher education is crap, or that it can't help some people to learn how to think... it just depends on the school, the program, and the motivation of a student. Motivated people can often get ahead anywhere.
Simple, no? Blame the victim all you want, but that line of thinking pretty quickly devolves into unplugging from the Internet and trying to pay your bills with physical cash.
Only if you miss the point.
There's a difference between "blaming the victim" and "taking reasonable precautions." In an ideal world where everything is happy rainbows and roses, a woman should be able to walk naked down a dark alley with no risk of anything bad happening to her. A guy should be able to walk down a dark alley in a part of town known for pickpocketing and muggings wearing expensive gold jewelry showing everywhere and a fancy expensive electronic device hanging off of every part of his body... with no fear.
In the REAL WORLD, bad people are out there. Bad people suck. So, if you're a single young woman, it may not be a good idea to walk down that dark alley alone in the middle of the night, even if you're wearing clothes. It may not be a good idea to flash your iPhone around alone with your fancy wristwatch and jewelry late at night when you're alone in an area known for muggings.
If something bad happens to people like this, we should NOT "blame the victim." But we SHOULD encourage people to take appropriate precautions to avoid ending up in a similar bad situation.
The reality is that there are lots of weird and bad people out there who want to access nudey photos of famous women, and they'll go to stupid lengths to do it. So, if you're a famous woman (or even if you're not -- and just don't want nude pictures of you showing up somewhere), it's a reasonable precaution to take GP's advice. Either don't take the photos in the first place, or keep them in a place where you are incredibly certain that no one else could EVER have access -- and an electronic device attached to the internet is NEVER one of those "safe" places.
Similarly, to use your example of online finances, I assume you wouldn't advise people to post all of their financial passwords and account numbers in plaintext on the internet, would you? Why not? We should just TRUST that no one would ever use that information in a bad way, shouldn't we!? So, please reply to my post with all of your financial account information immediately. I promise -- I won't do anything at all with it. And surely you can trust the rest of the internet crowd who reads Slashdot, no?
No -- the real world has jerks in it. It's sad. And it's terrible that good people have to be restricted in their actions because of it, but that's what living in the real world is like. So, you can do online finance, but you take reasonable precautions... like using strong passwords and not posting your financial data on the internet for anyone to see. If you are likely to be a hacking target -- like a rich person with lots of financial stuff, or a famous actress with nudey photos of yourself -- you may want to go up a few more levels in terms of precaution.
There is a reason everyone (all doctors, all dieticians, everyone) says drink lots of water, the more water you push through your kidneys keeps the contaminant load lower and works the kidney's less.
Well, most of that has been widely shown to be a myth. The whole "drink a lot of water" or "at least 8 glasses per day" is only generally peddled by bottled water advertisers. Doctors and dieticians who say it are a bit ignorant... or at least are overstating the benefits. What doctors who actually know what they are talking about say is: drink when you feel thirsty. If you don't feel thirsty, there's no need to force excess water into your system -- unless you already have medical problems or your kidneys are malfunctioning.
The less water you drink ups the contaminant load and force the kidney's to process it with less available flow. This damages the kidney's.
Actual scientists who study kidney function will tell you that drinking more water actually gradually decreases the kidneys' ability to filter. Not a lot, but there is a decline. On the other hand, too much toxin build-up at a time is also probably bad -- but the problem is not that your kidneys work "harder" with less water... they actually filter better, but the effects of concentrated toxins have been shown to have a SMALL effect, at least for "normal" water input ranges. The GP's thing sounds a bit crazy, but it's hard to tell whether he was dehydrated just on the basis of urine color -- when losing that much weight, urine is going to be a dark color almost no matter what happens, due to the large amount of stuff being processed as fat cells are used up.
This is basic knowledge about how the kidney's function and you shortened the life of your kidney's significantly.
[Citation needed.]
Would I arbitrarily restrict water intake like GP? No, I wouldn't. It sounds like it might put a strain on the kidneys, but the idea that this amounts to "10 years off the life of your kidneys" sounds a bit bogus to me. Our bodies have a pretty good regulation mechanism for thirst -- if GP was denying that urge a LOT, he might be doing a little damage to various parts of his body. But processing 30 pounds of fat is going to put a strain on the kidneys no matter what... some water may help, but I'm not sure that adding a little bit of water is going to make 10 years of difference.
Anyone that has tried to exercise and eat what they want can tell you that it doesn't work.
THIS. Some people just have better regulating systems in their bodies -- either they have better genes, or they good about recognizing when they are full and stopping eating, or they have strong willpower, or they naturally gravitate toward eating things that their bodies will regulate well... or some sort of combination.
But the simple fact is that -- unless you're a professional athlete or a manual laborer who does REALLY hard work for many hours per day -- chances are dietary inputs have a MUCH greater impact on weight than exercise.
I know there are people here who will chime in and say "all calories are not the same" and that's true. But we can at least use calories as an approximation. It takes VERY little imbalance for your body to get way out of whack. Say you eat enough that your body stores an extra 100 calories per day. Roughly speaking, about 3500 calories will equal a pound of fat. If you maintain this, you'll gain about a pound per month. Do this for a few years, and you could end up 50 pounds overweight... all because of an extra 100 calories per day.
Now, think about what it would take to correct that extra 100 calories per day. In terms of exercise, that's roughly running a mile, or doing some other sort of less vigorous workout for a longer period.
But in terms of eating, 100 calories can be pretty small. That's less than a typical can of soda. Or a SMALL cookie. Or a tablespoon of butter or mayo. Did you squeeze an extra packet of mayo on your sandwich today? That could be your 100 calories.
So, roughly speaking, which is easier to correct? Refrain from squeezing that extra packet of mayo, or running a mile every day? If you start talking in terms of real desserts -- like a large cookie or a piece of cake or a bowl of ice cream, you can easily get to 300-700 calories. If you eat dessert most days, you'd have to run 3-7 miles to correct for that.
Of course -- it's not quite that simple. Different types of calories will produce greater or lesser feelings of fullness. Protein and fats seem to be better at reducing hunger than carbs are (in general -- again, this is speaking very roughly), which is probably the reason for the results seen in this study. So, chances are if you have the right balance of foods in your diet, you'll be less likely to accumulate that 100 calorie/day excess or whatever, because you'll feel more full without eating more.
Anyhow, that's all in the details. My general point is: it takes a lot more work to offset extra caloric input through exercise than it does to just eat a little less. If you stop and buy the giant cinnamon bun in the mornings with a large latte, you may have already consumed more calories than a typical large steak dinner. And when a single cinnamon bun or a large dessert might be 800 calories or more, offsetting that with exercise would be just insane.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think there is some sort of moral obligation to give the government your money, then you're the one with the strange point of view, not Microsoft.
Well, uh, call me "strange" if you must, but I actually am not an anarchist. I'll join the various libertarian appeals here on occasions to complain that our government is too big -- but I think we need SOME government. And funding for that government has to come from SOMEWHERE.
Our elected representatives have set up a system to fund that government through taxation, and I absolutely agree that at least SOME of that revenue needs to be collected to serve fundamental government services (e.g., police and emergency services, at least some military, basic infrastructure, etc.).
So yeah, I actually believe I have a "moral obligation to give the government my money" as a general matter, assuming I actually want the benefits the government provides. I may disagree about the amount that I think is fair, but I have the option to try to elect representatives who will agree with my view -- if not, by continuing to live in this country, I agree to abide by its laws.
If you don't like the government and don't believe you have a moral obligation to fund it, move to some other place where you can have your anarchist paradise.
As for the specific case of businesses asking for special tax breaks, I also believe it is immoral and antithetical to the nature of law to ask for personal exemptions from laws that others must follow. It leads to corruption of politicians and the legislative process, and it's fundamentally unfair. If tax rates are too high to attract businesses, then lower tax rates for ALL businesses. Asking for a special exemption from the law just for yourself is not just. And yeah, I think taking an advantage of such an exemption is actually immoral.
Of course, I realize these things happen all the time. That doesn't mean it's desirable or moral behavior. Is it "legal"? Well, yeah, if you buy a politician or a few, it is. But don't pretend that it should be sanctioned as "moral."
How is it unfair? The state gets additional jobs, higher tax revenues (if applicable), and most likely an economic boost from people spending money.
At the expense of likely quid-pro-quo types of arrangements with politicians. I'm not naive, and I realize that these sorts of things happen in the real world. But every time we rationalize private deals made between big corporations (or rich people) and politicians, we're asking for more corruption.
In several financial and political philosophies, companies provide a net benefit and therefore should pay zero taxes. Therefore, it is your position that is unfair.
Umm, NO. Sure, you're right that some people argue for zero corporate tax. I'm not saying that's an invalid argument. But what's unfair is that if you REALLY want "zero corporate tax," you give it to ALL corporations. That's fair.
What you're talking about is an anticompetitive practice that gives large corporations an unfair market advantage. Say I give a major tax break to a company that employs 10,000 employees. You know who gets screwed? 200 other local companies that each have 50 employees or whatever. Because they're forced to pay the normal tax rates, while your giant corporation is exempt. Sure, most of those companies may not be competing directly against the big company, but some of them might be.
If a state imposed higher than average taxes, and never negotiated, it would lose employment.
And if the state's corporate tax rates are uncompetitive, the FAIR way to fix that is to lower them for ALL corporations, not give an unfair advantage to large corporations that already have many advantages in the marketplace.
Or is your goal to drive local small businesses out of business?
By artificially lowering the tax rates for a few select corporations, you are also allowing the state to continue ignoring a potential problem of too high corporate tax rates for anyone else. Anyone with the clout to negotiate gets the lower rate, while other local small businesses get screwed. That's the exact OPPOSITE behavior of something that will drive tax rates to zero -- because the local tax rates are artificially propped up by the people who can't fight them.
What is fair? You need to define words before you use them. I suppose I should ask, fair to whom? Because that seems to be the crux of your argument.
"Fair" in terms of the law means that we all get to play by the same rules. No one should get to "negotiate" out of abiding by the law. If corporate tax is too high in a state or local area to draw these large businesses, the correct way to fix this is by lowering corporate taxes FOR EVERYBODY. If enough big businesses refuse to move to a state because of its tax structure, it puts pressure on the state legislature to move toward your ideal world of zero corporate tax. If, on the other hand, companies get arbitrary individual tax rates, there's no such pressure, and the only benefits accrue to the biggest companies with the best lobbyists and connections... which is a recipe for corruption and unfair to actual local smaller businesses.
Says the guy that hides behind "athanasiuskircher". Fuck you you pseudo tough-guy.
Look, I normally don't respond to AC trolls -- but my record of posts is available for you to peruse as you'd like. I've been active here for years, and I haven't hid my knowledge of stats, which I make use of periodically in posts (and even do some of my own calculations to respond to posts from time-to-time).
I have a durable record you can feel free to follow and search. I'm not "hiding" as an AC, and on the rare occasion where I'm unnecessarily harsh to someone in a post, I apologize. You, on the other hand, are an AC randomly swearing at people while you hide behind the cloak of complete anonymity, knowing whatever you say will never follow you anywhere.
Have a nice day! Cheers!
That is to say, if you were accepted to Harvard, but instead attended a state school, you will statistically wind up with the same salary as if you had attended Harvard. http://www.usnews.com/educatio...
This is all very interesting, but some details of the study you cite suggest that other factors are at play. From your link:
As with the earlier study, there were some students who did fare better financially if they attended elite schools. The students who fell into this category were Latino, black, and low-income students, as well as those whose parents did not graduate from college.
In an E-mail, the researchers explained these exceptions: "While most students who apply to selective colleges may be able to rely on their families and friends to provide job-networking opportunities, networking opportunities that become available from attending a selective college may be particularly valuable for black and Hispanic students and for students who come from families with a lower level of parental education."
The researchers want to blame the effects on all networking, which is undoubtedly significant, but that's not to say there weren't also other factors present -- like the fact that minority kids, poor kids, and kids without well-educated parents might not have the kind of cultural exposure to the "upper class educated world" that white rich kids with high SAT scores might have. By going to a better school, they might be exposed to more ideas that are more typical of wealthier classes, as well as learning social skills and networking.
Whatever the cause -- the point is that this is SERIOUS confounding variable in this study. Students with high SAT scores are already disproportionately from upper-class or upper-middle-class white (and Asian) families. Saying that those sorts of people will achieve whether they go to Harvard or not isn't actually saying much at all.
The fact that "better" schools make a significant difference for all these other non-privileged groups proves that they actually do something for students who actually NEED the help to succeed in life.
Moreover, I just find this finding hilarious:
Applicants, who shared similar high SAT scores with Ivy League applicants could have been rejected from the elite schools that they applied to and yet they still enjoyed similar average salaries as the graduates from elite schools. In the study, the better predictor of earnings was the average SAT scores of the most selective school a teenager applied to and not the typical scores of the institution the student attended.
Holy crap! If I want my kid to succeed, I just need for him to APPLY to Harvard, since the best predictor is the average SAT score of the most selective school he applies to. It doesn't matter whether he's accepted, rejected, whatever -- as long as he applies, it will help.
Of course... that's preposterous. Once again, the interpretation of this finding gets murky. What's probably more telling here is that kids who BOTHER applying to Harvard or wherever are mostly from households with high-achieving parents or parents who really push their kids to succeed. Those kids will likely do well wherever they go to.
The question of whether better schools "add value" is mostly relevant to kids who would NOT generally have good opportunities to succeed in life otherwise, like poor kids, minority kids, kids whose parents were not well-educated. And for those kids, your study absolutely shows a significant difference.
Well, I've actually written articles in peer-reviewed professional publications and essays on the topic of the use of statistics.
[citation needed]
Well, sure, if you insist. I actually participated in the founding of the discipline of combinatorics, partly to discuss issues of probability and statistics of distributions. See my treatise Ars Magna Sciendi sive Combinatoria (1669), for example.
If you dig into my earlier treatises, you'll find I actually considered a number of issues in this sort of mathematics even before Leibniz's De Arte Combinatoria (1666) (he was actually a bit of a fan of my work, I exchanged some great letters with him about it back in the day), and well before all those young Bernoulli whippersnappers got involved.
(What's that -- you wanted a serious answer? You want me to give real-world information about myself to a guy who hides as an AC?)
Gather enough anecdotes and you can start to do statistics on them.
Sure, you could. If you want to work with a complete unreliable dataset, where all your conclusions are much more likely to be invalid.
If you are scientific you will follow up with a well randomized survey.
"Well-randomized surveys" are not anecdotes. Anecdotes are individual stories, which may all have their individual bias. Since they are reported without context or regard for selection, they are more subject to cherry-picking, confirmation bias, etc.
But usually inquiry begins with anecdotes.
Agreed. You have to get interested in a topic first, and if you've never heard anything about it, you probably would never look into it. But after we've heard a couple stories then we move onto better data collection techniques if we want to draw any valid conclusions.
Or didn't you take Statistics 101?
Well, I've actually written articles in peer-reviewed professional publications and essays on the topic of the use of statistics. What are your credentials?
I don't have school age children yet, but I will soon. I have no intention of taking out loans or making them take out loans, no matter how hard it is to achieve this goal.
That's not necessarily a reasonable policy. I completely agree with most of your post that student loans are out of control and are causing all sorts of price distortions.
But absolutes are rarely good general policies. A good college education is in fact a lifelong investment, and while motivated students can succeed anywhere, a good school and a good line on a resume can really give someone a jumpstart for the first few years of a career and the first few jobs. I am NOT by any means arguing that anyone should take out hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans, as some people are today. You're never going to get any return on investment for that. But would I say that a kid or parent should NEVER take out a low-interest-rate loan for the extra $10k or $20k (TOTAL, not per year) to allow them to get 4 years of education at a significantly better school, which might be repaid in a salary bump from better job offers in just a few years after graduation? No -- that seems a draconian policy which doesn't take into account the real "investment" that education can be.
People should be careful about taking on debt. But sometimes there are valid reasons to do so, if you gain larger benefits in the long-run.
Instead I'm going to have to compete with irresponsible borrowers who have borrowed way more money than anything that remotely makes sense for them to borrow.
It's not only you, but your kids who will have to compete with these people on the job market. I'm all for instilling responsible spending habits and financial sense in kids, but part of responsible financial management is knowing when debt is a good and rational choice. Credit card debt is almost always irrational, because interest rates are ridiculously high. Other types of loans can sometimes be justified.
Heck, I have a car loan on my current car (at a crazy low interest rate) even though I could have paid in cash -- but that money's better off in the long-term investments I have for retirement (where it will likely gain at least 5 times as much value as the amount as the minimal interest charge on my car loan), and even if I stuffed that money under my mattress, it would lose value due to inflation, whereas now my car loan loses principal with inflation instead, making my effective interest rate less than zero. (Of course, I would have been less likely to take on this debt without being financially secure -- if you don't have a large emergency fund in the bank, adequate insurance, etc., this may be a harder decision.)
The USA college tuitions have been going up 3 times the rate of inflation for three decades. While much of the increased annual fees go to "need based" tuition scholarships, the university endowments have funded an arms race on "country club" campuses complexes, the maintenance of which draws from the same tuition and fees.
THIS. Whenever the topic of college tuition increases comes up, the assumption is that it must have to do with the cost of instruction (i.e., faculty salaries) or maybe lab equipment or something.
In reality, the biggest factor for many colleges has been this "arms race" (great term) to make sure all the new dorms have a swimming pool and a climbing gym and whatever. New buildings and facilities keep going up, which have ongoing staffing and maintenance costs. You could often fund many endowed professorships with the cost of a new building.
After campus facilities "improvements," the biggest reasons for increased costs are often enlarged administration bureaucracies and sports programs. College administration staff in many colleges has increased by 50% or so at many universities in the past few decades, even as faculty size remains roughly constant. High-profile sports at big athletic schools are often thought to bring in the cash, but actually most schools lose huge amounts of money on them. It's only a precious few that win that gamble.
But, as the parent says, it's great that we can have wealthy foreign students throwing in the cash so our kids can have the new climbing gyms, a boatload of administrators, and great sports coaches that often earn a lot more than college presidents.
Oh, wait? You were concerned about better education? Hah! There's where we need to cut costs. Let's put everything online and create MOOCs, so we can reallocate the buildings with classrooms for more climbing gyms, have professors record their lectures so they can then be dispensed with (along with their pesky salaries -- think of how many administrative staff we could hire by getting rid of that endowed chair!) and have the courses "taught" by adjunct drones who respond to emails, and without those annoying "class schedules" where you might have to actually show up and interact with real people to learn and discuss deep ideas, we can use online classes to meet whenever and have more flexibility to schedule athletic events whenever we want!
I'm being a bit sarcastic here, but these are really some disturbing trends. I'm not saying that traditional college lectures were always the best way to teach information, nor that higher ed couldn't be improved in general. But the pressures which are creating the tuition cost often have little to do with education... but I guess we have foreign students to pay for it (which is ironic since most foreign students are coming to the U.S. because of its educational reputation at universities, not for the climbing gyms).
I did fine.
Good for you! Want a gold star?
Anecdote is not data. Graduates from many prestigious schools in general have better outcomes. Highly motivated people can generally get ahead anywhere -- if you're such a highly motivated person, then it's not surprising that you did well in life, regardless of where you got your degree, or whether you even had a college degree AT ALL.
With far less debt.
Well, you might have a point if you were talking about some random expensive second-rate private college. But the schools brought up in the summary like the Ivies and your chosen example of MIT have incredibly generous financial aid packages that are generally entirely need-based. Some facts from MIT's financial aid info:
-- 72% of undergraduates receive either a need-based or merit-based scholarship.
-- 41% of undergraduates have student loan debt at graduation, and the average debt at graduation is $17,900. The median debt for all undergraduate financial aid recipients who graduated in 2013 was $10,948.
For a school that estimates its ANNUAL tuition and fees now come to over $60,000/year (with 4-year cost in the $250,000 range), coming out with just over $10,000 in debt is pretty darn miniscule, I'd say. And that's less than the cost of ONE YEAR of college at many state universities these days. (Lest you think that these numbers are skewed because everyone comes from rich families, note also that at least 1/3 of MIT graduates come from familes with annual incomes of less than $75,000.)
So, sorry -- if you actually get into and graduate from MIT, chances are your debt levels are going to be at the levels of many state university graduates, perhaps lower.
(Note that MIT and the Ivies can do this because they have big endowments. Your argument would be better targeted at lesser private universities that change $50+k/year and don't have the resources to give such generous aid.)
Besides, you are surrounded by "normal" people, if there is such a thing. If you surround yourself with abnormal people you never learn to deal with the rest of the world. Which amounts to a bad education.
Meh. You have a point, I suppose. But there are many, many years and daily opportunities to learn to socialize with people who aren't as smart as you ("normal" people). Even if you go to a place like MIT, you can easily find plenty of opportunities to deal with "normal" people while you're there -- go outside your down, volunteer, join some non-university social groups, become active in local politics or non-profit organizations... whatever. Build up your resume AND learn to deal with "normal" people, all while going to a top-tier school -- what a concept!
However, there are far fewer opportunities to surround yourself with incredibly smart people to get a high-quality education. Not to mention that it's useful to get this training while you're young and your brain is still more malleable. And unless you end up at some really top-tier company, chances are you're not going to be challenged intellectually by those around you.
Sure, it's definitely possible for a well-motivated student to get a great education elsewhere and to do great things in life. But if you have the opportunity to attend a top school with decent financial aid rules, there are few downsides to it, contrary to your implications.
I do. 'Big History', to begin with, is so ugly a term
Part of the problem, I think, is that this isn't really "history" in the traditional sense (at least not as the word was understood before the past few decades or so). I'm NOT saying it shouldn't be taught in schools, mind you, but this whole project is based somewhat on a false premise.
"History," as the term traditionally means, has to do with a "story" (it's in the word, and in fact "history" and "story" used to basically mean the same thing in early English). That is, it's a narrative based on human accounts of events. Read the intro to the first major "history" in Western civilization if you don't believe me, Herodotus's "Histories" (where the word acquired its meaning) describes exactly this -- history is recounting events based on what humans have said and done, and trying to sort of causes and effects within that narrative.
This sort of "history" is what actual historians are trained in -- evaluating written documents and sources, as well as the role of artifacts, in creating a narrative about history. The word "prehistoric" only has meaning based on that meaning of "history" -- i.e., before written records exist, we have "prehistory." From TFA, it's clear that 90% of this course is about prehistoric events. Therefore, it's NOT a history course at all. Gates does NOT want to "remake the way history is taught" -- he wants to substitute a traditional course on history with a course on scientific theories about prehistory.
That's great -- and I'm all for interdisciplinary approaches and perhaps devoting more time to this stuff in schools. Maybe this course could take the place of part of a history elective and part of a science elective, or maybe it could serve as a kind of "bridge" between the disciplines, with science teachers starting it off, and history teachers swapping in once we get to modern anthropology and archaeology.
But let's be honest about what this is. It wouldn't make sense to have a person with "history" degree teach this course -- since the kind of methodologies and understanding have little to do with what historians do. The kinds of questions raised by scientific theories about prehistory and how we evaluate them are very different from the ways we critique human history narratives based on human records of events. Historians have some overlap with archaeologists in their methods, but very little overlap with anthropologists (particularly those who work on early humans), evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, and cosmologists -- which are actually the main topics of this curriculum as it's advertised.
t's an important shade of meaning here. The people *DO* have those rights. The government is actively disregarding those rights but they do exist.
Meh. What does it mean to have an unenforceable "right"? Yes, you can go with the Declaration of Indepedence and say we have "inalienable rights," but as a practical matter, our rights can be severely curtailed and restricted according to current legal doctrine.
I get what you're trying to say, but I don't buy it. I think it requires some sort of supernatural objective thing that somehow "endows" us with these "rights" that exist for all time and in all places. I don't think that exists.
Instead, I think that society and governments negotiate rights for citizens based on their metaethical systems. Do I believe that people DESERVE the rights you discuss? Absolutely. I think it's a moral necessity. But as a practical matter, those rights only can exist when someone observes them. If the government ceases to observe those rights, they are no longer in force... it's that simple.
From an ethical standpoint, I believe that the people deserve to have them back, but saying that the people continue to have them when no one actually observes them is just bizarre. It's like a shop offering the "right to free ice cream for senior citizens," but most of the time a senior citizen shows up and asks for ice cream, the shop finds some arbitrary excuse why they can't serve them the ice cream that day. What the heck could it possibly mean for the shop to advertise a "right to free ice cream" in that situation?
And let's not forget that the Constitution is an instrument of our government. It may have been written by elected representatives of "the people," but it's basically no different from any other legal document. It's interpreted by the courts, and legislatures and executives act within what they consider to be its purview. If all the government basically interprets the Constitution so that the "rights" ennumerated there no longer have legal effect, then you really don't have them anymore. You SHOULD demand for them back, but pretending, "Yeah, I still have my rights, but nobody respects them" is just wordplay. It doesn't mean anything.
However, a voting populace that expects better treatment generally gets it.
Sorry, but that is absolute and utter nonsense. Look at history, if you need plenty of examples. A voting populace that DEMANDS better treatment often gets it. A voting populace that merely "expects" better treatment from politicians who have proven that they will not give them better treatment is just ignorant and stupid. Why would someone who has more power over you and who has a track record of violating rights voluntarily give up that power when people continue to elect them, even as they take away more rights?
You're acting like the relationship between government and the general population is one of some sort of mutual respect governed by laws of etiquette -- I respect you, and I expect that you'll respect me back.
The problem is that stuff only works well among parties that have equal power in a relationship, or when the respect is always given by the party with more power. The U.S. government has consistently been enlarging its power, particularly over the past century or so, and there is definite truth to the phrase about how power corrupts.
And I can totally imagine them coming home and their grandparents asking them "Where did you go this year?" in the most obnoxious wasy possible, like all grandparents do. Good luck explaining this one!
Yeah, yeah. Been there, done that. About 375 years ago.
Back when Vesuvius was actively erupting in the 1630s, I decided to take a closer look. While the volcano was still smoldering and active, I hired a local guide to take me to the top, then was lowered into the crater to take some scientific observations and temperature measurements. You wanna read more about it? Here's some info on my book. (Of course, science has progressed a lot since then.)
We didn't have fancy videocameras back then, so I had to make make my own drawings of what I saw.
One of the great strengths of a populace gifted with civil rights is an abiding belief that those rights belong to them.
Great. But what's the use of a "belief" if it's no longer true? You're talking about a country that re-elected someone as the head of state who was KNOWN to have ordered the targeted killings of American citizens without trial. I don't see how much further one can get from "your rights are all now optional" than the head of government killing people (i.e., effective removal of ALL rights) with no legal process, and the electorate implicitly condoning the process by reelecting him.
Maybe the populace believes they have rights. But they are in error. And it's a real problem, because as long as they have this false belief, they will continue acting like they have something that don't have, rather than standing up and asking for their rights back.
No law or condition of government can abridge an ingrained belief in individual rights.
Well, I'm not sure what qualifies as a "condition of government," but the U.S. government has certainly done a very good job at abridging the ingrained belief in individual rights, particularly around the 4th Amendment, in just the past decade. For roughly 200 years the text of that Amendment you quoted was pretty roughly adhered to by courts and the government, with just a few circumscribed and clear exceptions.
But then, after 2001, it became optional. The government said: "Ooooh -- watch out! There could be evil bogeymen out there who might want to blow up planes!! Ooooh -- we seem never to see these people, and the few ones that pop up we don't seem to catch with our usual methods, but let's just search everyone who wants to travel in the country anyway... let's have government agents doing invasive body scans with no probable cause."
Well, the government said that, and people obeyed, even though it explicitly violates a number of clauses in the Fourth Amendment (something created to thwart the "general warrants" that had been issued in England before, which now basically exist in every airport terminal), as they had been understood and interpreted by courts for hundreds of years. So -- yeah, the government has definitely "abridged an ingrained belief in individual rights" through fear of unseen enemies.
when you no longer believe that basic rights are afforded to you, you have already lost.
When you have convinced yourself that rights exist that really don't anymore or that they still are in force when actually they've been significantly eroded, you've either become naive or ignorant. In either case, you're actually promoting the continued suppression of these rights by believing that things exist which don't -- since that allows people to endorse a government which no longer is observing those rights.
If, instead, you observe the empirical and legal shifts which prove that these rights have been eroded significantly in recent years, you might actually have cause to stand up and complain... and maybe try to get some of them back, rather than simply saying "I believe!" out of ignorance and complacency.
While (correlation != causation) and all that, there really is a pretty extensive research base showing the benefits of music (and the arts in general) for students.
Most of the research out of the social sciences (and the poorly-designed tests they like to give) is absolute garbage; biased, not rigorous, and subjective. Unless they get their act together and produce more quality research like you'd see out of a field like physics, it can't be taken seriously.
No claims of vague, subjective benefits will change any of this.
I've never posted before on a story that I submitted, but in this particular case I think I should clarify some background -- I was trying not to make the submission too long, so the last link is to a longer article that reviews important research, but I know that's too much to ask for people to read that....
Anyhow, I myself was very skeptical of this study when I heard of it earlier this week, but I looked into it more. Here are some useful things to know (again, much of this is summarized in some of the links):
(1) It is well-established that adult professional musicians and people with significant musical training have really different brains from most of the "normal" population. I believe this is almost a unique pattern among professions. There are literally hundreds of studies which have shown this, and it's very common to exclude musicians or those with musical training from brain studies about music (and sometimes even from studies about related fields dealing with auditory cognition, like language), because neuroscientists and cognition specialists have found that musicians' brains are wired very differently. Musicians are generally segregated and studied in separate studies, because whatever music training does -- it does something VERY noticeable. That claim has been known for decades and is NOT under dispute.
(2) This present study found similar markers in similar aspects of brain function which were ambiguous after one year of music training, but clear after two years of training. These suggest that the adaptations observed in adult professional musicians and those with extensive musical training begin relatively quickly.
(3) The areas of the brain and the type of functions altered here are known to be correlated with things like better sound and language processing as well in "normal" (non-musician) brains.
(4) Students who were participating in the study, had music training, and showed these brain changes, also demonstrate improvement in school. Students who were chosen as a matching "control" in terms of their other backgrounds and abilities (but did NOT have the music training), did not have the observed brain changes, nor did they see the academic benefits. It's not enough to eliminate all confounding variables, but it's a start.
I still wouldn't say this is strong, hard "proof" of anything like you might get in a physics experiment. But it's a LOT better than what you get in most social science research, which (I agree with AC) is often "garbage." Musicians' brains are a pretty unique dataset, and when we can match what may be happening with these kids to known alterations that are found in those who have had extensive musical training (and alterations known to affect language processing), it's the first step toward eliminating that dreaded "correlation != causation" problem. And the last link to the Atlantic article mentions a few other similar long-term studies that are ongoing which also show similar trends in preliminary results.
Lastly, just to clarify why so many things are about "at-risk" students. IF this research pans out, and IF these effects are real, the kids at schools in low-income areas are least likely to have access to this sort of music training, because those schools are most likely to have eliminated all arts and "superfluous" activities to streamline the curriculum and focus on direct readi
I have kids...I'm not a moron...I didn't save my password. It prompts me for each purchase.
I have no idea how they lost this.
Well, let's see, could it be because they didn't always offer the options that you think are so great now??
From TFA:
The FTC's complaint against Google says that when the company initially introduced in-app purchases in 2011, buyers did not have to input their passwords. When the company implemented the requirement the following year, Google did not tell users that entering a password triggered the opening of a 30-minute window where the password would not need to be entered again when making a purchase.
Since then, Google has added more password protection options, letting users control how often they need to input a password: every time they make a purchase, every 30 minutes, or never.
It doesn't take a moron to get caught in a situation where they don't offer the reasonable options you mention, or don't clearly warn you that it's a "free-for-all" for purchases for 30 minutes.
Frankly -- everytime Slashdot runs an article like this, a bunch of ACs (mostly) come out of the woodwork who want to "blame the victim." And yes -- that is precisely what you are doing. Taking money from someone without their express authorization is THEFT. I don't care if you are some app programmer who makes 90% of your profits off of ill-advised in-app purchases. It's wrong, unless you are damn sure that the purchase is authorized..
I don't care about the kids argument. As an ADULT, I don't want purchases without confirmation to be a default unless I expressly authorize it. For developers out there -- the moral thing to do in any system where you are going to take money from someone is to at least allow them to confirm that they want you to take it... at least once (probably twice). There's nothing wrong with offering an option, a la Amazon's "one-click" check-out, for people who OPT IN, but that is precisely what it should: a screen popping up and saying explicitly, "You are about to authorize password-less purchases for forever/next 30 minutes/whatever!! Please type in your password again and check this box if you agree you REALLY want this!"
Everyone around here seems to get offended in other situations where people "blame the victim" or where technology doesn't offer "opt-in." When someone's gonna take your money, you damn well should have a system that is opt-out by default.
Google didn't clearly have all of this a few years ago. Hence, they were taking money from people without permission. Hence, they should definitely give it back if people request it. This has nothing to do with kids or bad parents or morons or whatever -- it's basic ethics that you don't get to take people's money if they didn't say you could.
Does FERPA have any teeth in it? I've yet to hear about it actually being enforced.
Well, per the Supreme Court decision Gonzaga University v. Doe , FERPA was ruled NOT to create an individual right for a student to sue over a privacy breach.
Basically, under most circumstances, the main penalty that would be possible for FERPA violations would be removal of federal funding from a university. Most universities do instruct faculty on its requirements, and they may have internal disciplinary measures for faculty who violate it.
From a practical standpoint, having worked at a couple different universities, I usually hear about FERPA actually being invoked when students or parents want access to educational records or want access to make a correction to an educational record, which it also requires. I've heard of students suing over various things, but not FERPA -- and usually if an instructor does something stupid like post a list of grades that a student complains about, someone just tells the instructor not to do that again, and most people just comply because violations are often out of ignorance.
No, those are not stereotypes. They are characters probably based on real people. I watch the show and it completely reminds me of my college and grad school years and the people whom I knew then, including the Texan. It literally gives me flashbacks.
The thing is -- I understand why some people think these are stereotypes. It's rare, even among the hyper-nerdy communities, to find a collection of traits as extreme as represented on the show in a small group of people. But all of these traits and behaviors do exist; they aren't fictional.
I could be wrong about this, but I think part of the problem is that many people who think of themselves as "nerds" in the real world because they were good at math and science in high school and were unpopular or whatever know that they don't act like this, and they don't really know people like this.
But you have to remember that these guys are Ph.D.s working at Caltech (well, and one master's in engineering), with degrees from places like MIT. If you've spent any significant time at a place like Caltech or MIT, or know a number of people from places like this, chances are you've seen at least some of the more extreme breeds of "nerdiness" displayed on the show. This is the upper echelon of weird nerds.
If you were just in the chess club in high school, did well in calculus, hung out with "nerds" there, and went to your local state school where you partied a bit while you got your IT degree, you may not have encountered a lot of people like this... even if you always felt like you were a "nerd." But that doesn't mean these people don't exist. There are times when all of the characters do go "over the top" in some ways, or they display incongruous traits of nerdiness that don't tend to be together in the real world -- but this is a sitcom, not a documentary, so I don't expect 100% realism.
but the show isn't about nerds laughing at themselves; it's about non-nerds laughing at nerds, and nerds not "getting" what's so funny.
That's your opinion, and you're certainly welcome to it. I've mostly seen early seasons of the show, but my impression is that it's only partly about what you say.
In general, the show is often about a failure to communicate. The non-nerds laugh at the nerds, it's true, but the nerds get plenty opportunities to laugh at the non-nerds too. Have you seriously missed all the jokes made at Penny's expense? (And I'm not talking about Sheldon's weird attempts at humor that the other nerds often don't find funny -- I mean jokes about Penny's ridiculousness, her ineptitude, her inability to function in some everyday tasks, etc.)
The show points out the problems that both sides have with ineffective communication, and that's a big source of humor. But, on the other hand, the show celebrates the virtues of both sides too. The nerds often solve problems or do awesome things, and the non-nerds are suitably impressed -- when the problem solved is actually something "practical" and not something having to do with comic books or sci-fi or some weird technological achievement with no obvious practical benefit. Penny sometimes occasionally demonstrates some sort of "obvious" solution to a problem that the nerds missed because they got mired in details and couldn't see the simple solution. Both of these things happen in real life, too.
So, if you don't like the show, don't watch it. But I'd say that the "non-nerds laughing at nerds" is only one part of the show. It's a pretty "equal opportunity offender" in targeting the ridiculous characteristics of ALL characters, nerd and non-nerd alike.
BTW it seems the only requirement to fire walking is just don't stop.
I never understood the mystique surrounding firewalking. It's basic heat transfer. You see the effects all the time.
Touch the coin on your desk. It feels a bit "cool," right? Now touch the wooden part of the desk. That feels more like the temperature of the room, right? But they're obviously both at the same temperature. Our bodies are sensitive to rate of heat transfer, absolute temperature is irrelevant.
It's the reason why no one ever worries about getting his tongue stuck to a wooden post in winter, but people talk about this happening with a metal flagpole. Metal transfers heat faster, making it more likely for skin to freeze.
The "hot coals" in a firewalking demonstration similarly have very poor heat conduction. So if you only touch them briefly, it won't be long enough for heat to flow into your feet... even if the temperature of the coals is very hot.
Next time you see a "professional" firewalker, ask him whether he'd do a demonstration if you mixed in some hot smooth iron "stones" with all the coals. He'll probably say no way (if he has any sense). Even if the iron and the wood coals are the same temperature, the iron would transfer heat much faster, likely resulting in serious burns for any firewalker.
In my university, you have one allowed calculator, and you still had to pay to get a sticker to let the exam procs know that "yes, this calculator is allowed"
I guess I understand this stuff for standardized tests somewhat, but what sort of crap is this for university exams? If your exam can be thwarted by just having a slightly more powerful graphing or programmable calculator, your exam is probably not testing very much.
When I was an undergrad, most exams in advanced science and engineering classes allowed you to bring ANYTHING as long as it didn't involve communication with people outside the room. Forget about just calculators (ANY calculator), some people would be STACKS of textbooks, and I even remember some laptops (though those were less common back then -- largescale wireless also didn't quite exist yet).
When I first had a test like this, I packed a pile of books too, along with whatever calculator I had (I think a TI-85), etc. But I quickly realized that most of this was useless. In the limited time we had, if I didn't already know the stuff, I'm not going to have time to learn it from a book.
And the tests always had complex questions designed to test your ability to confront new types of problems (and to often present symbolic answers with your work, not just some final numerical output from a calculator, nor even some symbolic answer spit out by Mathematica, even if you had a laptop), so even if you had somehow programmed your calculator to output a numerical answer and handle every problem you had encountered in the class so far, you'd still have to have some pretty serious critical thinking skills to do well.
If the only thing standing between you and an A on exams is having a "non-stickered" slightly more "advanced" piece of crap calculator built on 20-year-old technology to do your exams with, that course is probably not asking very much of its students.
Yes, people who are self-taught often have gaps in our knowledge, but we tend to be *much* faster at filling those gaps. Also, the fact that we acquired all the knowledge we did without a college degree indicates that we are motivated to fill those gaps ourselves.
Meh. Your generalizations are just as bad as someone arguing the opposite. I agree that someone who is self-taught AND motivated can be amazing -- ultimately, that's sort of what college used to be about, i.e., taking you from the high school "spoon feed you knowledge" mentality to the self-learning place where you can teach yourself what you don't yet know.
Good college grads learn to teach themselves, sometimes as a result of university training. Other people pick up the self-teaching and motivation skills on their own, and they would have done so regardless of whether they went to college or not.
The vast majority of people in the world are probably not that motivated and aren't particularly good at teaching themselves, and those sorts of people exist both in the college-degree crowd and among the people without one. The vast majority of people who don't have a college degree were also challenged intellectually to a lesser degree, and therefore they are probably somewhat less likely to have picked up those skills.
But whatever. These are meaningless generalizations. I've met people who never went to college whom I would count among the most intelligent, clear-thinking, amazing folks I've ever known. I've also met Ph.D.s who are idiots (even from prestigious universities).
One can argue the merits and drawbacks of college, but one thing I think is pretty clear: very few people have the kind of natural motivation to self-teach that you describe about yourself. If someone challenges you with tasks that require you to do so, I think you have a somewhat better chance of picking that up. It could happen on a job with the right boss or the right team; it could happen at college. Traditionally, a broad-based college education was partly about exposure to a lot of ideas, and in the process of critiquing those ideas from various fields, you'd learn how to think, how to learn knew things, and how to think intelligently about them. Nowadays, college has often become a glorified trade school for lots of students (though admittedly, it always had part of the crowd who went there just to party, it's just in the past those were just rich people's kids who had time to waste and money to spend). So it doesn't surprise me at all that lots of college grads today come unprepared with practical knowledge and what they learned in technology may be out-of-date by the time they graduate.
But that doesn't mean all higher education is crap, or that it can't help some people to learn how to think... it just depends on the school, the program, and the motivation of a student. Motivated people can often get ahead anywhere.
If it's out there someone is going to steal it.
Simple, no? Blame the victim all you want, but that line of thinking pretty quickly devolves into unplugging from the Internet and trying to pay your bills with physical cash.
Only if you miss the point.
There's a difference between "blaming the victim" and "taking reasonable precautions." In an ideal world where everything is happy rainbows and roses, a woman should be able to walk naked down a dark alley with no risk of anything bad happening to her. A guy should be able to walk down a dark alley in a part of town known for pickpocketing and muggings wearing expensive gold jewelry showing everywhere and a fancy expensive electronic device hanging off of every part of his body... with no fear.
In the REAL WORLD, bad people are out there. Bad people suck. So, if you're a single young woman, it may not be a good idea to walk down that dark alley alone in the middle of the night, even if you're wearing clothes. It may not be a good idea to flash your iPhone around alone with your fancy wristwatch and jewelry late at night when you're alone in an area known for muggings.
If something bad happens to people like this, we should NOT "blame the victim." But we SHOULD encourage people to take appropriate precautions to avoid ending up in a similar bad situation.
The reality is that there are lots of weird and bad people out there who want to access nudey photos of famous women, and they'll go to stupid lengths to do it. So, if you're a famous woman (or even if you're not -- and just don't want nude pictures of you showing up somewhere), it's a reasonable precaution to take GP's advice. Either don't take the photos in the first place, or keep them in a place where you are incredibly certain that no one else could EVER have access -- and an electronic device attached to the internet is NEVER one of those "safe" places.
Similarly, to use your example of online finances, I assume you wouldn't advise people to post all of their financial passwords and account numbers in plaintext on the internet, would you? Why not? We should just TRUST that no one would ever use that information in a bad way, shouldn't we!? So, please reply to my post with all of your financial account information immediately. I promise -- I won't do anything at all with it. And surely you can trust the rest of the internet crowd who reads Slashdot, no?
No -- the real world has jerks in it. It's sad. And it's terrible that good people have to be restricted in their actions because of it, but that's what living in the real world is like. So, you can do online finance, but you take reasonable precautions... like using strong passwords and not posting your financial data on the internet for anyone to see. If you are likely to be a hacking target -- like a rich person with lots of financial stuff, or a famous actress with nudey photos of yourself -- you may want to go up a few more levels in terms of precaution.
There is a reason everyone (all doctors, all dieticians, everyone) says drink lots of water, the more water you push through your kidneys keeps the contaminant load lower and works the kidney's less.
Well, most of that has been widely shown to be a myth. The whole "drink a lot of water" or "at least 8 glasses per day" is only generally peddled by bottled water advertisers. Doctors and dieticians who say it are a bit ignorant... or at least are overstating the benefits. What doctors who actually know what they are talking about say is: drink when you feel thirsty. If you don't feel thirsty, there's no need to force excess water into your system -- unless you already have medical problems or your kidneys are malfunctioning.
The less water you drink ups the contaminant load and force the kidney's to process it with less available flow. This damages the kidney's.
Actual scientists who study kidney function will tell you that drinking more water actually gradually decreases the kidneys' ability to filter. Not a lot, but there is a decline. On the other hand, too much toxin build-up at a time is also probably bad -- but the problem is not that your kidneys work "harder" with less water... they actually filter better, but the effects of concentrated toxins have been shown to have a SMALL effect, at least for "normal" water input ranges. The GP's thing sounds a bit crazy, but it's hard to tell whether he was dehydrated just on the basis of urine color -- when losing that much weight, urine is going to be a dark color almost no matter what happens, due to the large amount of stuff being processed as fat cells are used up.
This is basic knowledge about how the kidney's function and you shortened the life of your kidney's significantly.
[Citation needed.]
Would I arbitrarily restrict water intake like GP? No, I wouldn't. It sounds like it might put a strain on the kidneys, but the idea that this amounts to "10 years off the life of your kidneys" sounds a bit bogus to me. Our bodies have a pretty good regulation mechanism for thirst -- if GP was denying that urge a LOT, he might be doing a little damage to various parts of his body. But processing 30 pounds of fat is going to put a strain on the kidneys no matter what... some water may help, but I'm not sure that adding a little bit of water is going to make 10 years of difference.
Anyone that has tried to exercise and eat what they want can tell you that it doesn't work.
THIS. Some people just have better regulating systems in their bodies -- either they have better genes, or they good about recognizing when they are full and stopping eating, or they have strong willpower, or they naturally gravitate toward eating things that their bodies will regulate well... or some sort of combination.
But the simple fact is that -- unless you're a professional athlete or a manual laborer who does REALLY hard work for many hours per day -- chances are dietary inputs have a MUCH greater impact on weight than exercise.
I know there are people here who will chime in and say "all calories are not the same" and that's true. But we can at least use calories as an approximation. It takes VERY little imbalance for your body to get way out of whack. Say you eat enough that your body stores an extra 100 calories per day. Roughly speaking, about 3500 calories will equal a pound of fat. If you maintain this, you'll gain about a pound per month. Do this for a few years, and you could end up 50 pounds overweight... all because of an extra 100 calories per day.
Now, think about what it would take to correct that extra 100 calories per day. In terms of exercise, that's roughly running a mile, or doing some other sort of less vigorous workout for a longer period.
But in terms of eating, 100 calories can be pretty small. That's less than a typical can of soda. Or a SMALL cookie. Or a tablespoon of butter or mayo. Did you squeeze an extra packet of mayo on your sandwich today? That could be your 100 calories.
So, roughly speaking, which is easier to correct? Refrain from squeezing that extra packet of mayo, or running a mile every day? If you start talking in terms of real desserts -- like a large cookie or a piece of cake or a bowl of ice cream, you can easily get to 300-700 calories. If you eat dessert most days, you'd have to run 3-7 miles to correct for that.
Of course -- it's not quite that simple. Different types of calories will produce greater or lesser feelings of fullness. Protein and fats seem to be better at reducing hunger than carbs are (in general -- again, this is speaking very roughly), which is probably the reason for the results seen in this study. So, chances are if you have the right balance of foods in your diet, you'll be less likely to accumulate that 100 calorie/day excess or whatever, because you'll feel more full without eating more.
Anyhow, that's all in the details. My general point is: it takes a lot more work to offset extra caloric input through exercise than it does to just eat a little less. If you stop and buy the giant cinnamon bun in the mornings with a large latte, you may have already consumed more calories than a typical large steak dinner. And when a single cinnamon bun or a large dessert might be 800 calories or more, offsetting that with exercise would be just insane.