I am personally highly in favor of the Scandinavian model. However, those generous tuition-free opportunities are inseparable from the admission requirements on the page immediately before (language requirements, minimum proficiency levels, minimum grades, minimum GPA):
Where I teach we have "open admissions" (anyone with a high school diploma is guaranteed admission), but the students are responsible for finding funding (loans, grants, or out-of-pocket) to pay for it. Actually in the 70's, to my understanding, we were briefly no-tuition for a year two, but it wasn't sustainable. Anyway, the great majority of students we currently have could not meet the academic admission requirements in Denmark. So making college free here would realistically mean cutting off a large number of people from accessing college (which isn't crazy because the success rate currently stands at around 25% here).
So ideologically there'd be a pretty big argument over how cruel we were being not letting absolutely everybody attend college. The American model in many ways tends to be throw everyone to the wolves and a small number of the strong will survive, and we can pat ourselves on the back that everyone had an equal opportunity (for both students AND teachers).
Certainly they/we should have that right. But of course here in America, it's pretty much par for the course that any opportunity to screw the little guy is taken as a point of pride in the last 50 years or so.
I know this wasn't the main thrust of your comment, and I agree with everything else in it. But whenever people say "make college free" I find that they're submerging critical questions about for whom, and under what circumstances, it's free.
Free for whom? Are there residence or citizenship requirements? Are there age requirements? Are there entrance requirements? Do they get free housing? Do they get free food? Do they get free health care or insurance? Do they get free travel? (For several of these: if "yes" then you'll get a bunch of scammers gaming the system, if "no" then only people with a certain wealth level can take advantage.) Are there criteria they must meet to stay in the program? If they fail those criteria, is there allowance or incentive to pay out-of-pocket for the remainder of the program? For how long?
First that comes to mind is New York state (where I live), where the Taylor Law makes it illegal: "One of the most controversial parts of the Taylor Law is Section 210, which prohibits New York state public employees from striking." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Law
Example of legal punishments handed out a few years ago when transit workers went on strike in NYC: http://www.labornotes.org/2012/01/public-employees-need-right-strike
Other states are not quite so codified; but here's a ruling in California that establishes "essential" workers cannot strike, including police & firefighters, possibly nurses and teachers: http://www.slotelaw.com/articles/public-employees-right-strike-clarified-california-supreme-court
More lunatic alarmist nonsense like got us into Iraq and every other endless war in the Middle East and Asia.
The million deaths is a ridiculous scare-mongery figure you pulled out of your ass; even if North Korea had the same death rate as the United States, you would expect 4 million deaths over 20 years just naturally anyway (population 24 million * 800 deaths per 100,000 people * 20 years ~ 4 million).
Washington in the Farewell Address: "As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils!... Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?"... to say nothing of wars in fucking Asia, which he would never have even dreamed we'd be stupid enough to get involved with.
"...to blackmail them not to release a movie about Kim Jong Un."
Well, there's your flawed assumption right there. The stated goal of the hackers was explicitly not that until a few weeks went by and the media became determined to whip the North Korea story.
"But in their initial public statement, whoever hacked Sony made no mention of North Korea or the film. And in an email sent to Sony by the hackers, found in documents they leaked, there is also no mention of North Korea or the film... “[M]onetary compensation we want,” the email read. “Pay the damage, or Sony Pictures will be bombarded as a whole. You know us very well. We never wait long. You’d better behave wisely.”... It was only on December 8, after a week of media stories connecting North Korea and the Sony film to the hack, that the attackers made their first reference to the film in one of their public announcements."
First thing: I came here to say that video games have one significant disadvantage, in that the games (rules, if you like) are not stable; the publishers change them every few years in order to boost the revenue stream. The rules to video games are generally not in the public domain, unlike common sports. They are controlled by a single publisher interest. And the hardware quickly changes and becomes unavailable, too (or at least requires an emulator). So that would be my biggest dispute with video games being a sport -- they're constantly becoming defunct in terms of the rules, platforms, and access.
Second thing: But let's put that aside and focus on a snapshot of some video game at a particular moment in time. I used to work at Papyrus, publisher of NASCAR Racing for the PC in the 90's, we were developing and negotiating for a real-life NASCAR-sanctioned video racing league, and of course we had an in-house league every week that was very serious. (Most of the principals are still continuing that work at iRacing.com now.) We still needed an after-race adjudication committee to go over replays and make judgements about unsportsmanlike behavior -- who was at fault for a wreck, could one have been avoided, did someone stop-and-go a restart (I remember a huge argument one week about that one), etc. Maybe in some other game you'd establish out-of-the-box rules for behavior like not pulling out the ethernet cable, not flooding the chat box with offensive messages, not shouting verbally in the playing space to confuse other players, etc. You'll never entirely get away from the need for some kind of human judgements on fair play. Frankly that falls in the rather large category of geek fantasies that tech solves all social problems when it doesn't.
Pretty well put, I mostly agree, and am glad you wrote that. One point on your very last statement: do keep in mind that for many public and infrastructure unions (like police, government admins, teachers, bus drivers, etc.) it's been made illegal to go on strike by law, or as part of a contract required by the employer. I agree that that pretty much takes the possibility of fair negotiations off the table.
But the definition of "profit center" is a department, which if treated as an entirely separate business in terms of its revenues and costs, turns a profit. Clearly if security earns no outside revenue than it can't be a profit center.
A better analysis is that the thinking about profit centers is "One of the biggest mistakes I have made... The only profit center is a customer whose cheque hasn’t bounced.” (Peter Drucker, who coined the phrase "profit center").
I would absolutely not feel safer with a gun around. I've taken self-defense classes for a few years but reject weaponry. The chances of accidents, being used against the owner, suicide of a loved one, etc., are far too high.
Has anyone you know actually defended themselves in any of those cases with a gun, or is it all really a panicky fever dream? I honestly can't tell if you're asserting that an evening stroll in Gary, Indiana requires a gun to be safe or not. Coming from a non-gated community in New York City (Brooklyn) where I don't think I've ever heard a gun go off, and certainly never seen one outside of police, and traveling around frequently at 2AM or later on the street and public transit, your worldview seems crazily warped.
I agree 100% on the age figures. Of course, my comment was a diplomatic response to the GGP post who argued "by college age the students are NOT adults and CANNOT make their own decision", which is off-calibrated by about a full decade.
I might argue that a student texting is pretty low-impact on other students in the room; say, equivalent to doodling on notebook paper. Compared to the possibility of disruption by striking up social conversations, perhaps texting is actually an improvement.
Do your classes have mandatory/scored attendance? I don't, and so that opens the pipe to truly-disinclined students to simply not be there at all, and fail on the tests like they were going to anyway. I've found in the last year that I've had much higher levels of discussion, and very enjoyable interactions, even in my remedial classes with the half of the students that are actually motivated to come to class and get engaged with the subject (irrespective of having cell phones accessible).
You need to come visit Earth in the 21st Century sometime. At least among the college students I teach:
- College is the time to practice, exercise, and test out being an adult. Yes it's fundamentally a safer and lower-impact space than elsewhere. If there are some failures along they way then they can recover and be used as learning experiences.
- Students are not having educations paid for by mommy and daddy; mommy and daddy are probably dirt poor or not in the picture. Student's education are being paid for by financial aid from the state (I think 80%) at my school and egregious loans.
- Phones are part of their lives even if they're not physically on the at all times. Most of my students have jobs, children, other family members they take care of, and expect to be available in case of an issue or emergency. Yes, this makes it much harder for them.
Frankly I say this as an lecturer who fought bitterly against having any phones out in the classroom for several years (points off, attendance penalties, etc.) Within the last year I finally surrendered on the issue because it was simply unwinnable and caused escalations up to and including physical threats against myself. Having relaxed that requirement, I've found that counter-intuitively it seems like less of a problem; students do seem to keep them available in a mature fashion, and actually fewer of them are challenging the rule by fiddling continuously with them. So that's just anecdotal, but it's been my pleasantly surprising experience in all my classes this year.
A half-dozen, no; 30 people, yes. The probability of getting all-KKK members is microscopically small, and is accounted for in the confidence level of the estimate. You simply don't know what you're talking about, and are making a classic perennial mistake of the uninformed, is all.
What, pray tell, does stop-and-frisk "do to make NYC work", if anything? It practically never finds weapons or drugs. It's not even targeted at the cohort most likely to use drugs. It's just raw gamesmanship by the NYPD (look at our mighty stop numbers), against the usual part of the population who takes it on the chin because their poor, uneducated, and don't have the power to fight back (legally or politically). You might as well claim that slavery was a requirement "to make the South work".
Totally disagree, as a resident of NYC for about 10 years now. What was it, 2 weeks back, I put my folks (senior citizens from Maine) on the subway to go home by themselves for the first time (early meeting for me at work that day) -- and reported being offered help up stairs multiple times, by both black and white people. Frankly, I'm more prone to trusting strangers here than back in Maine where I grew up.
If anything I would say the converse: NYC policing is only able to be as corrupt as it is in such a large and diverse city. When the managers break the law and say, "you're required to write 20 tickets and one arrest every month", they can pick on the black neighborhoods to dish out abuse, because they know they're poor and powerless. The war on drugs is effectively indistinguishable from simple race-based sabotage.
Have you ever lived in NYC, or are you just responding via TV show knowledge?
From what I've read in the past, it's mostly about being able to scam your way through the HR hiring process at some joint. In most organizations it's a long, hard slog to fire anyone after that point, no matter how clueless.
Slashdot Mirror
I am personally highly in favor of the Scandinavian model. However, those generous tuition-free opportunities are inseparable from the admission requirements on the page immediately before (language requirements, minimum proficiency levels, minimum grades, minimum GPA):
http://studyindenmark.dk/study-options/admission-requirements
Where I teach we have "open admissions" (anyone with a high school diploma is guaranteed admission), but the students are responsible for finding funding (loans, grants, or out-of-pocket) to pay for it. Actually in the 70's, to my understanding, we were briefly no-tuition for a year two, but it wasn't sustainable. Anyway, the great majority of students we currently have could not meet the academic admission requirements in Denmark. So making college free here would realistically mean cutting off a large number of people from accessing college (which isn't crazy because the success rate currently stands at around 25% here).
So ideologically there'd be a pretty big argument over how cruel we were being not letting absolutely everybody attend college. The American model in many ways tends to be throw everyone to the wolves and a small number of the strong will survive, and we can pat ourselves on the back that everyone had an equal opportunity (for both students AND teachers).
Certainly they/we should have that right. But of course here in America, it's pretty much par for the course that any opportunity to screw the little guy is taken as a point of pride in the last 50 years or so.
"Just make all the STEM programs FREE."
I know this wasn't the main thrust of your comment, and I agree with everything else in it. But whenever people say "make college free" I find that they're submerging critical questions about for whom, and under what circumstances, it's free.
Free for whom? Are there residence or citizenship requirements? Are there age requirements? Are there entrance requirements? Do they get free housing? Do they get free food? Do they get free health care or insurance? Do they get free travel? (For several of these: if "yes" then you'll get a bunch of scammers gaming the system, if "no" then only people with a certain wealth level can take advantage.) Are there criteria they must meet to stay in the program? If they fail those criteria, is there allowance or incentive to pay out-of-pocket for the remainder of the program? For how long?
First that comes to mind is New York state (where I live), where the Taylor Law makes it illegal:
"One of the most controversial parts of the Taylor Law is Section 210, which prohibits New York state public employees from striking."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Law
Example of legal punishments handed out a few years ago when transit workers went on strike in NYC:
http://www.labornotes.org/2012/01/public-employees-need-right-strike
Other states are not quite so codified; but here's a ruling in California that establishes "essential" workers cannot strike, including police & firefighters, possibly nurses and teachers:
http://www.slotelaw.com/articles/public-employees-right-strike-clarified-california-supreme-court
More lunatic alarmist nonsense like got us into Iraq and every other endless war in the Middle East and Asia.
The million deaths is a ridiculous scare-mongery figure you pulled out of your ass; even if North Korea had the same death rate as the United States, you would expect 4 million deaths over 20 years just naturally anyway (population 24 million * 800 deaths per 100,000 people * 20 years ~ 4 million).
Washington in the Farewell Address: "As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils!... Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice?" ... to say nothing of wars in fucking Asia, which he would never have even dreamed we'd be stupid enough to get involved with.
"...to blackmail them not to release a movie about Kim Jong Un."
Well, there's your flawed assumption right there. The stated goal of the hackers was explicitly not that until a few weeks went by and the media became determined to whip the North Korea story.
"But in their initial public statement, whoever hacked Sony made no mention of North Korea or the film. And in an email sent to Sony by the hackers, found in documents they leaked, there is also no mention of North Korea or the film... “[M]onetary compensation we want,” the email read. “Pay the damage, or Sony Pictures will be bombarded as a whole. You know us very well. We never wait long. You’d better behave wisely.”... It was only on December 8, after a week of media stories connecting North Korea and the Sony film to the hack, that the attackers made their first reference to the film in one of their public announcements."
http://www.wired.com/2014/12/evidence-of-north-korea-hack-is-thin/
For rhetorical purposes, I would not have posed that as a question.
First thing: I came here to say that video games have one significant disadvantage, in that the games (rules, if you like) are not stable; the publishers change them every few years in order to boost the revenue stream. The rules to video games are generally not in the public domain, unlike common sports. They are controlled by a single publisher interest. And the hardware quickly changes and becomes unavailable, too (or at least requires an emulator). So that would be my biggest dispute with video games being a sport -- they're constantly becoming defunct in terms of the rules, platforms, and access.
Second thing: But let's put that aside and focus on a snapshot of some video game at a particular moment in time. I used to work at Papyrus, publisher of NASCAR Racing for the PC in the 90's, we were developing and negotiating for a real-life NASCAR-sanctioned video racing league, and of course we had an in-house league every week that was very serious. (Most of the principals are still continuing that work at iRacing.com now.) We still needed an after-race adjudication committee to go over replays and make judgements about unsportsmanlike behavior -- who was at fault for a wreck, could one have been avoided, did someone stop-and-go a restart (I remember a huge argument one week about that one), etc. Maybe in some other game you'd establish out-of-the-box rules for behavior like not pulling out the ethernet cable, not flooding the chat box with offensive messages, not shouting verbally in the playing space to confuse other players, etc. You'll never entirely get away from the need for some kind of human judgements on fair play. Frankly that falls in the rather large category of geek fantasies that tech solves all social problems when it doesn't.
Pretty well put, I mostly agree, and am glad you wrote that. One point on your very last statement: do keep in mind that for many public and infrastructure unions (like police, government admins, teachers, bus drivers, etc.) it's been made illegal to go on strike by law, or as part of a contract required by the employer. I agree that that pretty much takes the possibility of fair negotiations off the table.
You're like the guy who watches a magician conjure an elephant and smugly go, "He had it up his sleeve".
But the definition of "profit center" is a department, which if treated as an entirely separate business in terms of its revenues and costs, turns a profit. Clearly if security earns no outside revenue than it can't be a profit center.
A better analysis is that the thinking about profit centers is "One of the biggest mistakes I have made... The only profit center is a customer whose cheque hasn’t bounced.” (Peter Drucker, who coined the phrase "profit center").
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_center
I would absolutely not feel safer with a gun around. I've taken self-defense classes for a few years but reject weaponry. The chances of accidents, being used against the owner, suicide of a loved one, etc., are far too high.
"Right now though, no, it makes no sense to release the movie to a few small theaters."
But they'll miss out on it being eligible for the Oscars.
Has anyone you know actually defended themselves in any of those cases with a gun, or is it all really a panicky fever dream? I honestly can't tell if you're asserting that an evening stroll in Gary, Indiana requires a gun to be safe or not. Coming from a non-gated community in New York City (Brooklyn) where I don't think I've ever heard a gun go off, and certainly never seen one outside of police, and traveling around frequently at 2AM or later on the street and public transit, your worldview seems crazily warped.
So where are our flying cars? We want our flying cars.
I agree 100% on the age figures. Of course, my comment was a diplomatic response to the GGP post who argued "by college age the students are NOT adults and CANNOT make their own decision", which is off-calibrated by about a full decade.
I might argue that a student texting is pretty low-impact on other students in the room; say, equivalent to doodling on notebook paper. Compared to the possibility of disruption by striking up social conversations, perhaps texting is actually an improvement.
Do your classes have mandatory/scored attendance? I don't, and so that opens the pipe to truly-disinclined students to simply not be there at all, and fail on the tests like they were going to anyway. I've found in the last year that I've had much higher levels of discussion, and very enjoyable interactions, even in my remedial classes with the half of the students that are actually motivated to come to class and get engaged with the subject (irrespective of having cell phones accessible).
Good anecdote, thank you for that.
You need to come visit Earth in the 21st Century sometime. At least among the college students I teach:
- College is the time to practice, exercise, and test out being an adult. Yes it's fundamentally a safer and lower-impact space than elsewhere. If there are some failures along they way then they can recover and be used as learning experiences.
- Students are not having educations paid for by mommy and daddy; mommy and daddy are probably dirt poor or not in the picture. Student's education are being paid for by financial aid from the state (I think 80%) at my school and egregious loans.
- Phones are part of their lives even if they're not physically on the at all times. Most of my students have jobs, children, other family members they take care of, and expect to be available in case of an issue or emergency. Yes, this makes it much harder for them.
Frankly I say this as an lecturer who fought bitterly against having any phones out in the classroom for several years (points off, attendance penalties, etc.) Within the last year I finally surrendered on the issue because it was simply unwinnable and caused escalations up to and including physical threats against myself. Having relaxed that requirement, I've found that counter-intuitively it seems like less of a problem; students do seem to keep them available in a mature fashion, and actually fewer of them are challenging the rule by fiddling continuously with them. So that's just anecdotal, but it's been my pleasantly surprising experience in all my classes this year.
Smart people don't get defensive and make up silly stories. They use mistakes as learning opportunities to educate themselves better.
A half-dozen, no; 30 people, yes. The probability of getting all-KKK members is microscopically small, and is accounted for in the confidence level of the estimate. You simply don't know what you're talking about, and are making a classic perennial mistake of the uninformed, is all.
What, pray tell, does stop-and-frisk "do to make NYC work", if anything? It practically never finds weapons or drugs. It's not even targeted at the cohort most likely to use drugs. It's just raw gamesmanship by the NYPD (look at our mighty stop numbers), against the usual part of the population who takes it on the chin because their poor, uneducated, and don't have the power to fight back (legally or politically). You might as well claim that slavery was a requirement "to make the South work".
Totally disagree, as a resident of NYC for about 10 years now. What was it, 2 weeks back, I put my folks (senior citizens from Maine) on the subway to go home by themselves for the first time (early meeting for me at work that day) -- and reported being offered help up stairs multiple times, by both black and white people. Frankly, I'm more prone to trusting strangers here than back in Maine where I grew up.
If anything I would say the converse: NYC policing is only able to be as corrupt as it is in such a large and diverse city. When the managers break the law and say, "you're required to write 20 tickets and one arrest every month", they can pick on the black neighborhoods to dish out abuse, because they know they're poor and powerless. The war on drugs is effectively indistinguishable from simple race-based sabotage.
Have you ever lived in NYC, or are you just responding via TV show knowledge?
"Where they interview 0.00125% of the population"
This is the dumbest goddamn thing you can say about statistics.
From what I've read in the past, it's mostly about being able to scam your way through the HR hiring process at some joint. In most organizations it's a long, hard slog to fire anyone after that point, no matter how clueless.