Yeah! And then the Russians will team up with the Chinese to secretly build a moon base with a laser beam to destroy America! After all, they don't like us all that much, should we really trust them out in space?
This is high level paranoia. And I do mean high level paranoia. The best part is that if the government actually did invest in all of these extra securities to protect against Hollywood-level attacks, people like you would be the first to line up to say that the Socialist fear-mongering liberal Nazi's are raising our taxes (or the Socialist fear-mongering conservative Nazi's, depending on the cycle and your own personal tastes) for no good reason.
And at the expense of making this entire argument sound insanely stupid, would you have been okay with it if the art team had spent five seconds swapping the graphics so that you were shooting "angry bad guy #34" instead of "faceless civilian #33"?
This was about as gruesome and horrible as when you can hear -and see- someone being electroshocked in the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory game.
Meanwhile, the game titled Modern Warfare must at no time depict anything besides the slaughter of soldiers, many of which were forcibly recruited by their regime and had no choice in the matter. No, digital death is more palatable when you wrap it in camo and a gun that is about as useful as a nerf gun in a flamethrower fight.
This just bugs me. The belief that there is a moral right or wrong in a video game. It's as bad as demanding that any paintings depicting violence are repulsive, horrible things that must be burned.
Ah, but if so then the comment you are praising prior to mine is guilty of the same thing: a negative comment was made about men, so the negative comment was made about the women, so I then added on to the list. It was merely broken by mods choosing mine to be insightful.
I'm a noob I s'pose; geocities was my entry into the internet. For me, that was how I learned all the HTML codes: I would type in what I thought would look good, check out the end result, then go back and fix it up. Most of the content wasn't that good, but you could find all sorts of little gems with enough searching. Can't even recall how many custom Doom/Heretic levels I found thanks to geocities...
This better be implemented, just for the cool factor. Unfortunately, I could see the added joystick capability could end up making it too easy to perform particularly risky maneuvers (IE, aggressive drivers now have the skill of a race car video game), but it could also make driving easier. The only problem I see is parallel parking, which would be worlds different with joystick control. Although from how the article put it, it just sounds like these joysticks are the left and right side of a steering wheel: they react the same regardless of which one you touch.
I disagree. I think that when the right was finally added in and people are actively moving to take it away, you don't away a few generations to get it fixed. These aren't people being told they can't get married, they're being told they can't even have a civil union! What should they do? Wait until they're dead? Some of the couples getting gay married are well up in their 70's, they can't wait for the opposition to politely die off.
People who hate on gays don't want to be seen as horrible people; they're nice to gays in front of them but try to get them shut down. You know, like that psycho ex-girlfriend who meets up with your current girlfriend and convinces her you're a terrible person even though she hates the girlfriend's guts.
I saw an article on Yahoo! the other day about an interracial couple being denied their wedding license for being interracial. In the article, it stated that the constitution says that we can marry "whoever we want".
Shame that's not true. Oh well...as they say, it's the old people that are opposing gay marriage the most. We just have to wait a few years, then we can re-send gay marriage laws all over the country and finally get this biblical fear knocked out. I mean really, what year is it?
You're right, life isn't fair. So, Billy can choose to take the risk-free approach of being a meth head gang member, or take the slight risk of taking out a loan you think is too much for him and break out of that to get a high paying job so his ass isn't left in poverty.
But, you know, wouldn't to do something as insane as take out too big of a loan. That's just crazy talk.
Life's as fair as you make it. Take a risk, take a gamble, reach for the stars. Or give up, lie down, and let everybody kick you. Choice is yours, but I suppose when your world revolves around money the only choice is to give up and be head fry-cook; now paying $12 an hour!
Except that if Billy is working at any typical retail job, he won't be hired full time.
Even during the summer hours, the retail store I worked at would not grant me full time. Most jobs like that hire on part time because that means they can do whatever they like with your hours.
So, even when I was available 100% of the time, I tended to get 15 hours in a week. Because of where I lived, I was not legally allowed to work until I was 16; and I graduated when I was 17. So, I got 1 year of mediocre.
If Billy works in a place that will hire him younger, and if Billy stays the full 4 years in high school, Billy will do alright.
But remember, since we are looking at Billy as a kid that is not getting any help from his parents (why else would he be taking out a full 80k loan if only because his parents were entirely unwilling to support him in any way besides housing and food), he probably doesn't get all those shiny cool toys.
Buuuut if we assume that Billy is a happy boy in a well put family that lives in a place where minors under the age of 16 can work and is diligent, but not so much so that he graduates early, and his well put family is not quite so well put as to even offer a smidgeon of help to him, yeah, he'd do alright.
And by alright, I mean instead of an 80k loan, he'd be taking out a $67,760 loan. Sure, he shaved off 1/8 of his loan cost by having a bunch of bluetooth wielding businessmen shout down at him because he's a trashy wal-co employee, but he's still got a rather nasty loan leftover.
Another addendum: they can give you a nice raise, but only if they want to. They spoke volumes about how great of an employee I was, but my first (and only, given the timeframe) raise was a 6 cent one.
But we're talking two different Billys. Your Billy lives in a good part of the country. My Billy is living in Detroit, lucky Billy. Your Billy whistles while he works and can't wait for college. My Billy is just trying to find a job.
Point I'm making is that depending on where Billy is born, he may very well have no choice in the matter.
Yes, joining the military pays more than minimum wage, but you have to be physically fit and willing to go overseas and get blown up. Most jobs that don't require a degree or prior experience but pay well either get you killed or require some form of special skill. Very few kids wake up and say "I want to be a plumber!" Nor are these jobs particularly easy to find nowadays, what with the massive unemployment of adults looking to make money.
Your post points to the military a lot. The military is not for everyone. If every kid thought that joining the military was the best thing to do, we'd have more kids coming back in body bags. Would it be good for little Billy to learn discipline? Of course. Would little Billy die? Maybe. Would little Billy die for a cause he don't give a damn about? Probably. Would little Billy be safer simply taking out the damn loan? Definitely. It seems a bit extreme when possible death or physical injury is less of a hazard than having debt.
Just like not every high school student is going to be the next Einstein, not every high school student is going to be a soldier. We're all good at certain things, and we really need to stop trying to make everybody okay at everything.
Because high school students have plenty of time to spend at work? I calculated how much money I made working my job during school, and it was roughly $4800 before I took out gas expenses.
So, just to do the math...80,000 - 4800 = 75,200.
Yeah, Billy would have been in the green if he saved every penny./sarcasm
Even if Billy had worked all 4 years of high school (that may not be legal depending on his state's minor-employment laws) he would not have been able to accrue 80k unless he managed to find a job that would pay 20k a year to him working part time on a school schedule. And this is also assuming that Billy could finish his homework and maintain stellar grades with near constant work.
So, if Billy worked every day, and worked nights during the school week, and stayed up late to do his homework when he wasn't at work (maybe even doing his homework on his work break), and worked every day during summer vacation for his entire high school year, he'd make roughly 80k. He'd also be stressed, depressed, a loner, and would have minimal to no spare time to do anything besides work and study. While his summer vacation would offer a few more hours of freedom, he probably would not do much besides sleep, eat, and work.
If he worked weekends only during the school year and worked all summer, he may be able to make 40k.
However, this also assumes that he could keep two minimum wage jobs (as they all hire you part-time, which means they give you hours as they see fit), and do good in both of them so they don't fire him. When I was working in high school, they would give me maybe one or two days in a week to work, and give me four work days when it was a busy season.
Billy would also need to find a way to and from work that wouldn't cost him gas money. Billy would have to never go to the movies, never buy music, never buy video games, and so on. Unless Billy is going to college to be a business man, he'll be so disconnected from the world that he'll be lost in college. Graphic design? What's that Billy, you never used photoshop before? What's that Billy, you never even owned a computer?
Most careers won't even look at you unless you have either 5 years of experience in their field, or a college degree. The careers that don't ask for such things are minimum wage, typically dead-end too.
So, for little Billy student his options are a little limited. He can either take the financially responsible route and go for those minimum wage jobs, working seven days a week and getting roughly $20k a year to live on. Maybe when he's in his 30's he can start on college with a responsible loan size and really get started on his life.
Or, little Billy student can take a huge risk and bank on his career choice being a good one. If he gets a good paying job, $70k a year let's say, the student loan debt will be manageable and easy to deal with. There's a lot of college-level jobs that aren't filling up because everybody tried to cram into IT.
Just to look back: Billy student can be responsible and put his future on hold for over a decade, or Billy student can be risky and plunge right in. If he's diligent and doesn't give up, he may be rewarded. If he fails, then he'll go back to the minimum wage jobs. Of course, the huge difference is that he'll be able to continue sending out his application to jobs his college degree fits with.
Which is why I'm a skinny, semi-fit woman that has never sued anyone, is atheist, and pretty high up there in IQ-skill (if you believe that arbitrary system). Man I love when people throw broad sweeping generalizations at someone and miss the mark on each one.
What's that you say? I didn't address the "math" issue?
What's that? Every language has subtle nuanced differences, such as the various forms of Chinese, French, and Spanish to name a few? Geographical location alters the way in which we speak? Some historians believe that Americans speak a less bastardized form of old English because England has had near-constant contact with multiple languages?
But go ahead and believe that my lack of an "s" at the end of "math" makes me a fat, stupid, Christian with an IQ of 30 flipping burgers at McDonalds whilst suing the bejeezus out of everyone. Totally makes sense, oh troll of trolls.
Meditation is a lot about clearing your mind and simply relaxing, which does the body a lot of good. Praying makes us feel good about ourselves because we feel we've done something. Maybe then we should assume that prayer and the like does not have divine power, but that the sense of relaxation or helping someone else makes us feel better.
Now there's a study worth doing. Another study worth doing would be to see if loved ones praying for someone without that someone knowing would indeed speed up their recovery or not.
Either way, prayer does not literally move mountains, and its power is not as strong as one might think. From "every prayer of the righteous is heard and answered by God" to "every prayer of the righteous may make the praying person feel better about themselves". Seems a little...placebo-y.
The title makes it sounds so exciting, like we're experimenting with our robotic Turks.
But the statistician within me is also fascinated with this. It always made me wonder, as the human mind can precondition itself. The study about whether or not prayer helps the sickly followed this mindset, and since the sick humans had no idea what the study was about, when they were told that people were praying for them they thought they were much sicker and actually recovered more slowly. If they hadn't told the sick humans, however, would there have been a large difference?
That being said, I always find that there's three sides to the 'ism fight. You have the 'ist people, who do hate someone based on some sort of genetic difference. You have the people who have this particular genetic difference that have this irrational hate and fear of the 'ist people (compare this to the people who cough loudly and exaggerate whenever they see someone smoking to try and get them to fight).
Then you have the third side. That's the majority of people, the people who don't care and just want to have fun. I'm a girl, I don't see rampant and out of control sexism. I see a few men parroting the same tired statements, but it's no more sexism than it is stupidism. So, it's best to just ignore the loud cries of the uber-offended, and to ignore the loud cries of the uber-offenders. These are societal extremes that will never be happy.
It could be googolplexian numbers of money being thrown at healthcare;
Ftfy
Fixed that for you, unless you are either failing at grammar And Capitalizing Every Word, or you are SHOUTING THAT YOU FIXED IT. It's hilarious that you have the time to reply, quote me, and fix the spelling error, but you don't have the time to type out "fixed that for you".
Maybe I'm alone in finding the humor in someone correcting minor errors in chatspeak format.
Slashdot Mirror
This is high level paranoia. And I do mean high level paranoia. The best part is that if the government actually did invest in all of these extra securities to protect against Hollywood-level attacks, people like you would be the first to line up to say that the Socialist fear-mongering liberal Nazi's are raising our taxes (or the Socialist fear-mongering conservative Nazi's, depending on the cycle and your own personal tastes) for no good reason.
And Nintendo had motion control with Kibry Tilt and Tumble on the Gameboy Color.
And hopefully not a judge that is part of a copyright lobby.
And at the expense of making this entire argument sound insanely stupid, would you have been okay with it if the art team had spent five seconds swapping the graphics so that you were shooting "angry bad guy #34" instead of "faceless civilian #33"?
This was about as gruesome and horrible as when you can hear -and see- someone being electroshocked in the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory game.
Meanwhile, the game titled Modern Warfare must at no time depict anything besides the slaughter of soldiers, many of which were forcibly recruited by their regime and had no choice in the matter. No, digital death is more palatable when you wrap it in camo and a gun that is about as useful as a nerf gun in a flamethrower fight.
This just bugs me. The belief that there is a moral right or wrong in a video game. It's as bad as demanding that any paintings depicting violence are repulsive, horrible things that must be burned.
Jesus Christ.
Ah, but if so then the comment you are praising prior to mine is guilty of the same thing: a negative comment was made about men, so the negative comment was made about the women, so I then added on to the list. It was merely broken by mods choosing mine to be insightful.
Or funny, actually but uh...insightful works I guess. Of course, if you missed the funny then you just look at the glass from one side.
2013: study confirms, women are still not having sex with the self-righteous nerds.
I'm a noob I s'pose; geocities was my entry into the internet. For me, that was how I learned all the HTML codes: I would type in what I thought would look good, check out the end result, then go back and fix it up. Most of the content wasn't that good, but you could find all sorts of little gems with enough searching. Can't even recall how many custom Doom/Heretic levels I found thanks to geocities...
-raises hand- I'm a woman and I woulda loved to go. Just sayin'.
This better be implemented, just for the cool factor. Unfortunately, I could see the added joystick capability could end up making it too easy to perform particularly risky maneuvers (IE, aggressive drivers now have the skill of a race car video game), but it could also make driving easier. The only problem I see is parallel parking, which would be worlds different with joystick control. Although from how the article put it, it just sounds like these joysticks are the left and right side of a steering wheel: they react the same regardless of which one you touch.
I disagree. I think that when the right was finally added in and people are actively moving to take it away, you don't away a few generations to get it fixed. These aren't people being told they can't get married, they're being told they can't even have a civil union! What should they do? Wait until they're dead? Some of the couples getting gay married are well up in their 70's, they can't wait for the opposition to politely die off.
People who hate on gays don't want to be seen as horrible people; they're nice to gays in front of them but try to get them shut down. You know, like that psycho ex-girlfriend who meets up with your current girlfriend and convinces her you're a terrible person even though she hates the girlfriend's guts.
Because marrying the same gender is the same as marrying a goat...
Shame that's not true. Oh well...as they say, it's the old people that are opposing gay marriage the most. We just have to wait a few years, then we can re-send gay marriage laws all over the country and finally get this biblical fear knocked out. I mean really, what year is it?
But, you know, wouldn't to do something as insane as take out too big of a loan. That's just crazy talk.
Life's as fair as you make it. Take a risk, take a gamble, reach for the stars. Or give up, lie down, and let everybody kick you. Choice is yours, but I suppose when your world revolves around money the only choice is to give up and be head fry-cook; now paying $12 an hour!
Even during the summer hours, the retail store I worked at would not grant me full time. Most jobs like that hire on part time because that means they can do whatever they like with your hours.
So, even when I was available 100% of the time, I tended to get 15 hours in a week. Because of where I lived, I was not legally allowed to work until I was 16; and I graduated when I was 17. So, I got 1 year of mediocre.
If Billy works in a place that will hire him younger, and if Billy stays the full 4 years in high school, Billy will do alright.
But remember, since we are looking at Billy as a kid that is not getting any help from his parents (why else would he be taking out a full 80k loan if only because his parents were entirely unwilling to support him in any way besides housing and food), he probably doesn't get all those shiny cool toys.
Buuuut if we assume that Billy is a happy boy in a well put family that lives in a place where minors under the age of 16 can work and is diligent, but not so much so that he graduates early, and his well put family is not quite so well put as to even offer a smidgeon of help to him, yeah, he'd do alright.
And by alright, I mean instead of an 80k loan, he'd be taking out a $67,760 loan. Sure, he shaved off 1/8 of his loan cost by having a bunch of bluetooth wielding businessmen shout down at him because he's a trashy wal-co employee, but he's still got a rather nasty loan leftover.
Another addendum: they can give you a nice raise, but only if they want to. They spoke volumes about how great of an employee I was, but my first (and only, given the timeframe) raise was a 6 cent one.
But we're talking two different Billys. Your Billy lives in a good part of the country. My Billy is living in Detroit, lucky Billy. Your Billy whistles while he works and can't wait for college. My Billy is just trying to find a job.
Point I'm making is that depending on where Billy is born, he may very well have no choice in the matter.
Your post points to the military a lot. The military is not for everyone. If every kid thought that joining the military was the best thing to do, we'd have more kids coming back in body bags. Would it be good for little Billy to learn discipline? Of course. Would little Billy die? Maybe. Would little Billy die for a cause he don't give a damn about? Probably. Would little Billy be safer simply taking out the damn loan? Definitely. It seems a bit extreme when possible death or physical injury is less of a hazard than having debt.
Just like not every high school student is going to be the next Einstein, not every high school student is going to be a soldier. We're all good at certain things, and we really need to stop trying to make everybody okay at everything.
So, just to do the math...80,000 - 4800 = 75,200.
Yeah, Billy would have been in the green if he saved every penny. /sarcasm
Even if Billy had worked all 4 years of high school (that may not be legal depending on his state's minor-employment laws) he would not have been able to accrue 80k unless he managed to find a job that would pay 20k a year to him working part time on a school schedule. And this is also assuming that Billy could finish his homework and maintain stellar grades with near constant work.
So, if Billy worked every day, and worked nights during the school week, and stayed up late to do his homework when he wasn't at work (maybe even doing his homework on his work break), and worked every day during summer vacation for his entire high school year, he'd make roughly 80k. He'd also be stressed, depressed, a loner, and would have minimal to no spare time to do anything besides work and study. While his summer vacation would offer a few more hours of freedom, he probably would not do much besides sleep, eat, and work.
If he worked weekends only during the school year and worked all summer, he may be able to make 40k.
However, this also assumes that he could keep two minimum wage jobs (as they all hire you part-time, which means they give you hours as they see fit), and do good in both of them so they don't fire him. When I was working in high school, they would give me maybe one or two days in a week to work, and give me four work days when it was a busy season.
Billy would also need to find a way to and from work that wouldn't cost him gas money. Billy would have to never go to the movies, never buy music, never buy video games, and so on. Unless Billy is going to college to be a business man, he'll be so disconnected from the world that he'll be lost in college. Graphic design? What's that Billy, you never used photoshop before? What's that Billy, you never even owned a computer?
...what we're all thinkin'.
Most careers won't even look at you unless you have either 5 years of experience in their field, or a college degree. The careers that don't ask for such things are minimum wage, typically dead-end too.
So, for little Billy student his options are a little limited. He can either take the financially responsible route and go for those minimum wage jobs, working seven days a week and getting roughly $20k a year to live on. Maybe when he's in his 30's he can start on college with a responsible loan size and really get started on his life.
Or, little Billy student can take a huge risk and bank on his career choice being a good one. If he gets a good paying job, $70k a year let's say, the student loan debt will be manageable and easy to deal with. There's a lot of college-level jobs that aren't filling up because everybody tried to cram into IT.
Just to look back: Billy student can be responsible and put his future on hold for over a decade, or Billy student can be risky and plunge right in. If he's diligent and doesn't give up, he may be rewarded. If he fails, then he'll go back to the minimum wage jobs. Of course, the huge difference is that he'll be able to continue sending out his application to jobs his college degree fits with.
Which is why I'm a skinny, semi-fit woman that has never sued anyone, is atheist, and pretty high up there in IQ-skill (if you believe that arbitrary system). Man I love when people throw broad sweeping generalizations at someone and miss the mark on each one.
What's that you say? I didn't address the "math" issue?
What's that? Every language has subtle nuanced differences, such as the various forms of Chinese, French, and Spanish to name a few? Geographical location alters the way in which we speak? Some historians believe that Americans speak a less bastardized form of old English because England has had near-constant contact with multiple languages?
But go ahead and believe that my lack of an "s" at the end of "math" makes me a fat, stupid, Christian with an IQ of 30 flipping burgers at McDonalds whilst suing the bejeezus out of everyone. Totally makes sense, oh troll of trolls.
Meditation is a lot about clearing your mind and simply relaxing, which does the body a lot of good. Praying makes us feel good about ourselves because we feel we've done something. Maybe then we should assume that prayer and the like does not have divine power, but that the sense of relaxation or helping someone else makes us feel better.
Now there's a study worth doing. Another study worth doing would be to see if loved ones praying for someone without that someone knowing would indeed speed up their recovery or not.
Either way, prayer does not literally move mountains, and its power is not as strong as one might think. From "every prayer of the righteous is heard and answered by God" to "every prayer of the righteous may make the praying person feel better about themselves". Seems a little...placebo-y.
The title makes it sounds so exciting, like we're experimenting with our robotic Turks.
But the statistician within me is also fascinated with this. It always made me wonder, as the human mind can precondition itself. The study about whether or not prayer helps the sickly followed this mindset, and since the sick humans had no idea what the study was about, when they were told that people were praying for them they thought they were much sicker and actually recovered more slowly. If they hadn't told the sick humans, however, would there have been a large difference?
Math and the brain, it's amazing how they meet.
Careful, this conversation is a TRAAAAP..
Hey, I only trust Admiral Ackbar for traps!
That being said, I always find that there's three sides to the 'ism fight. You have the 'ist people, who do hate someone based on some sort of genetic difference. You have the people who have this particular genetic difference that have this irrational hate and fear of the 'ist people (compare this to the people who cough loudly and exaggerate whenever they see someone smoking to try and get them to fight).
Then you have the third side. That's the majority of people, the people who don't care and just want to have fun. I'm a girl, I don't see rampant and out of control sexism. I see a few men parroting the same tired statements, but it's no more sexism than it is stupidism. So, it's best to just ignore the loud cries of the uber-offended, and to ignore the loud cries of the uber-offenders. These are societal extremes that will never be happy.
It could be googolplexian numbers of money being thrown at healthcare;
Ftfy
Fixed that for you, unless you are either failing at grammar And Capitalizing Every Word, or you are SHOUTING THAT YOU FIXED IT. It's hilarious that you have the time to reply, quote me, and fix the spelling error, but you don't have the time to type out "fixed that for you".
Maybe I'm alone in finding the humor in someone correcting minor errors in chatspeak format.