Interesting that you seem to be directing all of this hate to "gay hypocrites" instead of people who support straight marriage.
Hate? I didn't read anything hateful in that comment. Incorrectly reframing an argument is one of the biggest problems with this issue.
"I don't believe in gay marriage," for example, often gets reframed into "gays don't deserve rights."
Also, let's get real. Marriage-like benefits will not be extended to anything other than romantic pairings anytime soon, or ever. It's just how it is.
Fifteen years ago no one would have believed that gay marriage would ever become a reality. It was a weird and foreign idea. Now it's legal in a bunch of states and will probably be a national thing before long. Things aren't just the way they are. Things change and that change starts by people talking about it.
Unfortunately, the actual marriage related problems haven't be framed in the proper context and hence the solutions -- gay marriage -- is completely wrong. The problem is marriage as a legal status for individuals. It shouldn't exist and no benefits for it should exist either. Extending it to homosexuals does nothing to solve the actual problems presented by legal marriage.
I completely agree. Legal marriage should be opposed whether it's for gay or straight couples. Why is it the government's business who I've devoted my life to? Why should I be taxed differently because my significant other and I decided to sign a piece of paper? It's an archaic social custom that should have no place in modern society.
Those that modded you troll kind of proved your point. Although I think you exaggerated quite a bit, I agree with what you're saying. When an employer can dictate your politics, what's the point of democracy?
This is pretty spot on. The whole issue appears to be the tendency of some people to try and condense the truth into a general statement, such as, "fleas on rats spread the bubonic plague." Of course the truth is more complex and may not be fully understood, but I don't think serious scholars ever asserted that fleas on rats were the only mechanism by which the disease was spread. The important part of the theory was that fleas on rats on boats brought the bacteria from China to Europe and then facilitated its spread.
Several of those may not currently be on Netflix, but they have been in the past and may be in the future. The selection rotates. I watched Sideways on Netflix, I'm pretty sure I've seen several of those titles on there before. If you want to have Hollywood's entire back catalog available to you then there is simply no service that offers it -- not your local rental store (if you even still have one), not any streaming service, and not traditional cable/satellite TV.
As the guy who doesn't know that the Academy Award is an Oscar, I think you're being disingenuous when you pretend to care about it. So what, Netflix isn't for you, but to argue that it's a substandard service is just asinine. If you go to a video rental store, for the cost of a couple movies you could cover a whole month of Netflix. Furthermore, for me, if I go to the local rental store, I've already seen almost everything they have that's not a new release (which cost more). Netflix has tons of foreign and indie films that interest me. They're producing original content and some of it is superb (House of Cards).
I don't like to buy movies because I don't usually watch a movie more than once. That's why Netflix is a great deal for me. It's not the greatest service if you're looking for something specific -- but all those things I've seen in theaters or in the past. Sometimes I cancel the service for a while (usually football season) but I've always started it back up again.
Netflix provides more quality entertainment for your money than any other service. If it weren't for sports I wouldn't even have regular TV.
Also, you won't find any of the top 200 movies on IMDB on regular TV, either, nor would you care to. When's the last time you watched Citizen Kane? Wizard of Oz? Also, being the huge movie buff that you apparently are, you should know that the Academy Awards and the Oscars are the same thing.
Btw, #5 and #6, on the IMDB top 200 are on Netflix: Pulp Fiction and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That's just from taking a quick look at the list. In fact, I see several others on that list that I recall seeing on Netflix.
Yeah, this is basically how I feel. I use Ubuntu with XFCE. I don't even have Unity installed so it doesn't bother me any. The main reason I use Ubuntu is that I can easily find answers with a quick Google search when I run into problems. I just don't have time to spend hours dealing with minor driver issues or finding out why my OS isn't playing nice. As much as the idealistic "fragmentation leads to competition which leads to more and better options" sounds nice, I think it's good that Ubuntu provides a more accessible option for people who want to use Linux without devoting their life to it. That's not to say that I think all the other distros should just go away and Ubuntu should be the one Linux to rule them all -- I just think the community's recent hostility toward Ubuntu and Shuttleworth is a case of cutting off its nose to spite its face. It's almost as if these members of the community don't want Linux to be successful outside of the server space.
Maybe CentOS will succeed in getting the community behind it while simultaneously extending Linux's popularity beyond its current niche, but I fear that if Red Hat succeeds in making CentOS more popular and accessible then the community will just turn on them the minute they try something new.
While your snark does a great job of insulting the anti-dodgeball crowd, it does little to argue against "liberal" education policy as a whole and tells nothing about your own position. It's easy to attack a strawman, especially when you don't explain your own beliefs to open yourself up to criticism.
Your attacks are weak, also. If you believe that selective pressure has caused certain human populations to become more or less bright, as a group, than others, then you know jack shit about evolution and the human brain. Homo sapiens haven't even been a species long enough for such selective pressure to have any meaningful effect on our various populations. We are, inherently, no more intelligent than cavemen. The difference is the environment we're brought up in. Is there variation within our populations? Sure. But when it comes to cognition that variation is extremely acute - right handed or left handed, for example.
I'm no fan of certain liberal hysterics your post attacks (see my sig -- it was too long and the author's name is cut off; it's Stephen Jay Gould), but I'm even less of a fan of bullshit. Your post stinks of bullshit.
I was steered into "gifted" classes as a child but math never came as second nature to me. I don't have Asperger's syndrome or anything -- I never read particularly fast or could effortlessly absorb patterns. What landed me into the gifted program was the fact that I came from a family of educated individuals. People who spoke English, not some broken dialect that violates basic grammatical rules. They also imposed high expectations, taught me much through travel, and made a point to buy me books rather than toy guns.
Excluding those very rare individuals who have some disorder like Asperger's, children generally have approximately the same academic potential. They're like seeds from a tree. Minor genetic variation exists among them and some really are more predisposed to success than others, but much more important than predisposition is the environment in which they're grown. "Gifted" children in the United States aren't neglected because the vast majority of those who will test as gifted will have one common factor: they come from educated families. Having opportunity doesn't make one gifted.
I think you're looking at "consequences" as a very black and white thing. Snowden is facing the consequences for his actions -- he's exiled from his country and may never be able to return. He's already sacrificed so much to do the right thing. Sticking around to be persecuted wouldn't help out any. He took the risk of being tortured, imprisoned, and even executed. Isn't that enough? That's the most we ask of our soldiers and then we declare them heroes -- we ask that they risk their lives. We ask that they risk sacrifice, not that they do sacrifice. Kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers have no place in the defense of our country. Why should the whistleblower be so self-sacrificial? Why is he not a hero for risking his life when that's the standard of valor we place upon ourselves?
He's no more altruistic than the big pharmaceutical companies. It's not really altruism when you stand to make a large profit. Gates just figured out that the charity business can be an extremely successful one -- it gives one the ability to strong-arm entire nations all while immune to criticism under the protection of "philanthropy." The Gates Foundation, like similar foundations, exists so those of his lineage will all be filthy rich no matter what and no individual will be able to screw it all up for the rest of the family. It's like a trust fund designed to last centuries rather than decades.
Your attack on televangelists is irrelevant. They're much more an analog to Gates than a dichotomy.
but unfortunately the Ukraine signed an agreement that they would disarm their nuclear stockpile with the agreement that the west would protect their borders.
It was created as a method of control and manipulation over the masses.
There's no empirical evidence to back up this claim. Even those religions which were used as a form of control were usually not created for that reason. Sure, it could be argued that Confucianism fits your model, and probably a few others, but I sincerely doubt Jesus of Nazareth went around preaching about peace and love so Constantine could use his ideas as a form of control ~300 years later.
Religion is not a thing that was invented in one part of the world and spread from there. Many religions throughout the world developed completely independent from each other at different times. Personally, I think most of them were inspired by something good. But many ideas can be warped and perverted and turned into something terrible -- I doubt Marx would approve of Stalin's version of Communism just as I doubt Jesus would approve of American Evangelicals' version of Christianity.
Maybe, although you're consciously unaware of it, your body craves the carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids that cheap pizza provides. And then other times, despite the fact that it's dinner time, you had a late lunch and you don't currently need any energy input, especially considering that you haven't used much energy sitting around browsing Slashdot.
There may be randomness in decision making sometimes, but basing a decision off of 'this is what I feel like' isn't random, you're just not making a conscious effort to employ logic (even though you probably do without realizing it).
That, and/or they discovered that humans aren't the only ones who make decisions that seem unreasonable and arbitrary to a third party observer.
Such as drinking crap like Tab or Mountain Dew. It may give you kidney stones, do a poor job of hydrating, lack vital nutrients, and only contain monomers which provide nothing more than short term energy, but it tastes sooo good.
I think you're both right, both saying the same thing, the OP just did so in a more cynical fashion. The important thing that the headline muddles is that there are no actual transitivity violations being observed, only seeming transitivity violations, so headline proposes something false ("why transivity [sic] violations can be rational').
Journalism wouldn't be interesting if the journalists understood the important minutiae of the scientific journals they refashion into pop articles.
1) Instruction. Make teaching a more prestigious career. Pay more, but also require higher credentials. Most people who would make the best teachers pursue other careers because they can get paid more doing something else.
2) Curriculum. Start teaching deductive logic in elementary school. It would vastly improve students' ability to understand mathematics, argumentative writing, hard sciences, politics, and just about anything else. Philosophy should be introduced by high school. Foreign language should also be introduced in elementary school. Most people have a very tenuous grasp of grammar before studying a foreign language.
3) Health. Longer school days, less homework. In the lower grades, combine recess with physical education, and force exercise upon kids. Their physical education grade ought to be based on progress -- a goal is set by the instructor and the student must progress towards it, such as loss of body fat, increase in strength, etc. No more packed lunches -- all students are provided two healthy meals during the school day. Furthermore, rather than just a school nurse, hire pediatric doctors. A child's health shouldn't be dependent on their parent's ability to obtain quality insurance or buy quality food.
Schools function the same way they did a hundred years ago and that's why they fail. Everyone always points to parents as the problem and they're right. Shitty parents are more often than not the problem that holds children back. We need to abandon the archaic idea that a person owns their child. A child affects society and this system of entrusting parents to do the bulk of raising their children (all while working 40+ hours a week) is absurd. I hate to quote Hilary but she was right, it takes a village.
When I was in high school there was only one local charter school and it sure didn't resemble any institution such as those depicted in Waiting for Superman. Students who had no shot of graduating went there. All the coursework was on a computer (which was kind of a big deal then, I graduated over ten years ago), students only had to be there three hours a day, and there was no certified teacher present. The 'teacher' was more like a supervisor - a guy who only had a high school diploma, was only in his early twenties, and everyone knew him by his first name. The idea was that the computers were the teacher, so they didn't need a certified teacher to run the whole gig.
Despite the fact that the coursework was mind numbingly easy, everyone cheated, and the supervisor didn't care. In fact, they'd take pot breaks with the supervisor. You could just keep taking the modules until you got them right, anyway. Then, once all the coursework was completed, the students received a full high school diploma from THE LOCAL HIGH SCHOOL. Totally indistinguishable from the one I got. Yet none of these students were competent enough to take the most basic college courses.
The charter school existed for a couple reasons. First, the No Child Left Behind Act had just been passed and the school system was scrambling for a solution to increase the graduation rate. Second, it was a private institution which received a government grant to function (by paying the supervisor minimum wage instead of paying a certified teacher a teacher's wage, by only staying open 3-4 hours a day, they were able to pocket most of that money). Finally, it was a way to get 'problem students' out of the system -- a sort of purgatory before they either took blue collar jobs or ended up in prison.
I had a couple of friends that went that route. I'm not friends with any of them anymore. One currently lives in government subsidized housing, is unemployed, and has a couple kids. One's a heroin addict and career criminal. One lives with his mother, he just got out of prison.
I think the flaw in your logic is the belief that democracy is an ideal that ought to be strived for. Also, I question your assertion that the Senate wasn't intended as a check on urban areas. It gave the rural southern states representation they wouldn't have had if population was the only metric, especially considering that blacks only counted as 3/5th of a person. Without the senate the south would have been similar to the thirteen colonies compared to England (which, as the urban centers in the north grew exponentially, eventually happened and caused a civil war).
Personally, I don't think it's right for people in cities a thousand+ miles away from my rural home to dictate the laws around here because there's more of them. Democracy only works on a very small scale. When it's expanded from sea to shining sea it becomes a tyranny throughout most the land, whether it's a tyranny for of most the people or not.
That's a prime example of a Catch-22. The NSA is doing illegal things, but it's illegal to expose the NSA's illegal activities. Conclusion: even is the NSA does something illegal they have every right to do so because they have the power to do illegal things whereas whistleblowers don't. Might makes right.
If that's going to be official government policy, it'd be much better to install a dictator so the whole system runs more efficiently. The Chinese system is preferable to what we have now. It's much more honest, they throw less people in prison, and their economy grows and their standard of living increases every year. That's not to say that I think we should model ourselves after the Chinese -- it's just that our system has deteriorated to the point that their's is better. The United States has become an embarrassment of all the ideals it's supposed to stand for.
I believe what he was trying to say is that corporate America is unlikely to wean itself off of the Microsoft monopoly anytime soon, but Microsoft's stranglehold of the consumer market is vulnerable if gaming is taken away. Apple has dug deep into one important niche -- the non-gaming, high-end users -- and Steam on Linux has the potential to knock off the gaming niche. This is important because those two niches are where the high dollars are spent.
So while you're right, that the consumer market has the potential change quickly, I think he's correct in pointing out that corporate America will largely remain latched on to Microsoft for the foreseeable future. Two centuries is a bit of a hyperbole, but corporations are much slower to change up the technologies they depend on than individuals. An individual has to set up a new computer. A corporation has to set up thousands of new computers, write software, train people, etc. In the long term, I see specialized Linux systems becoming the standard in most corporations, but it's also probably the stranglehold Microsoft will keep within its grasp longer than any other.
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Interesting that you seem to be directing all of this hate to "gay hypocrites" instead of people who support straight marriage.
Hate? I didn't read anything hateful in that comment. Incorrectly reframing an argument is one of the biggest problems with this issue.
"I don't believe in gay marriage," for example, often gets reframed into "gays don't deserve rights."
Also, let's get real. Marriage-like benefits will not be extended to anything other than romantic pairings anytime soon, or ever. It's just how it is.
Fifteen years ago no one would have believed that gay marriage would ever become a reality. It was a weird and foreign idea. Now it's legal in a bunch of states and will probably be a national thing before long. Things aren't just the way they are. Things change and that change starts by people talking about it.
Unfortunately, the actual marriage related problems haven't be framed in the proper context and hence the solutions -- gay marriage -- is completely wrong. The problem is marriage as a legal status for individuals. It shouldn't exist and no benefits for it should exist either. Extending it to homosexuals does nothing to solve the actual problems presented by legal marriage.
I completely agree. Legal marriage should be opposed whether it's for gay or straight couples. Why is it the government's business who I've devoted my life to? Why should I be taxed differently because my significant other and I decided to sign a piece of paper? It's an archaic social custom that should have no place in modern society.
Those that modded you troll kind of proved your point. Although I think you exaggerated quite a bit, I agree with what you're saying. When an employer can dictate your politics, what's the point of democracy?
This is pretty spot on. The whole issue appears to be the tendency of some people to try and condense the truth into a general statement, such as, "fleas on rats spread the bubonic plague." Of course the truth is more complex and may not be fully understood, but I don't think serious scholars ever asserted that fleas on rats were the only mechanism by which the disease was spread. The important part of the theory was that fleas on rats on boats brought the bacteria from China to Europe and then facilitated its spread.
Several of those may not currently be on Netflix, but they have been in the past and may be in the future. The selection rotates. I watched Sideways on Netflix, I'm pretty sure I've seen several of those titles on there before. If you want to have Hollywood's entire back catalog available to you then there is simply no service that offers it -- not your local rental store (if you even still have one), not any streaming service, and not traditional cable/satellite TV.
As the guy who doesn't know that the Academy Award is an Oscar, I think you're being disingenuous when you pretend to care about it. So what, Netflix isn't for you, but to argue that it's a substandard service is just asinine. If you go to a video rental store, for the cost of a couple movies you could cover a whole month of Netflix. Furthermore, for me, if I go to the local rental store, I've already seen almost everything they have that's not a new release (which cost more). Netflix has tons of foreign and indie films that interest me. They're producing original content and some of it is superb (House of Cards).
I don't like to buy movies because I don't usually watch a movie more than once. That's why Netflix is a great deal for me. It's not the greatest service if you're looking for something specific -- but all those things I've seen in theaters or in the past. Sometimes I cancel the service for a while (usually football season) but I've always started it back up again.
House of Cards: Present.
Netflix provides more quality entertainment for your money than any other service. If it weren't for sports I wouldn't even have regular TV.
Also, you won't find any of the top 200 movies on IMDB on regular TV, either, nor would you care to. When's the last time you watched Citizen Kane? Wizard of Oz? Also, being the huge movie buff that you apparently are, you should know that the Academy Awards and the Oscars are the same thing.
Btw, #5 and #6, on the IMDB top 200 are on Netflix: Pulp Fiction and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That's just from taking a quick look at the list. In fact, I see several others on that list that I recall seeing on Netflix.
Yeah, this is basically how I feel. I use Ubuntu with XFCE. I don't even have Unity installed so it doesn't bother me any. The main reason I use Ubuntu is that I can easily find answers with a quick Google search when I run into problems. I just don't have time to spend hours dealing with minor driver issues or finding out why my OS isn't playing nice. As much as the idealistic "fragmentation leads to competition which leads to more and better options" sounds nice, I think it's good that Ubuntu provides a more accessible option for people who want to use Linux without devoting their life to it. That's not to say that I think all the other distros should just go away and Ubuntu should be the one Linux to rule them all -- I just think the community's recent hostility toward Ubuntu and Shuttleworth is a case of cutting off its nose to spite its face. It's almost as if these members of the community don't want Linux to be successful outside of the server space.
Maybe CentOS will succeed in getting the community behind it while simultaneously extending Linux's popularity beyond its current niche, but I fear that if Red Hat succeeds in making CentOS more popular and accessible then the community will just turn on them the minute they try something new.
While your snark does a great job of insulting the anti-dodgeball crowd, it does little to argue against "liberal" education policy as a whole and tells nothing about your own position. It's easy to attack a strawman, especially when you don't explain your own beliefs to open yourself up to criticism.
Your attacks are weak, also. If you believe that selective pressure has caused certain human populations to become more or less bright, as a group, than others, then you know jack shit about evolution and the human brain. Homo sapiens haven't even been a species long enough for such selective pressure to have any meaningful effect on our various populations. We are, inherently, no more intelligent than cavemen. The difference is the environment we're brought up in. Is there variation within our populations? Sure. But when it comes to cognition that variation is extremely acute - right handed or left handed, for example.
I'm no fan of certain liberal hysterics your post attacks (see my sig -- it was too long and the author's name is cut off; it's Stephen Jay Gould), but I'm even less of a fan of bullshit. Your post stinks of bullshit.
I was steered into "gifted" classes as a child but math never came as second nature to me. I don't have Asperger's syndrome or anything -- I never read particularly fast or could effortlessly absorb patterns. What landed me into the gifted program was the fact that I came from a family of educated individuals. People who spoke English, not some broken dialect that violates basic grammatical rules. They also imposed high expectations, taught me much through travel, and made a point to buy me books rather than toy guns.
Excluding those very rare individuals who have some disorder like Asperger's, children generally have approximately the same academic potential. They're like seeds from a tree. Minor genetic variation exists among them and some really are more predisposed to success than others, but much more important than predisposition is the environment in which they're grown. "Gifted" children in the United States aren't neglected because the vast majority of those who will test as gifted will have one common factor: they come from educated families. Having opportunity doesn't make one gifted.
Sticking around hasn't helped Manning any.
I think you're looking at "consequences" as a very black and white thing. Snowden is facing the consequences for his actions -- he's exiled from his country and may never be able to return. He's already sacrificed so much to do the right thing. Sticking around to be persecuted wouldn't help out any. He took the risk of being tortured, imprisoned, and even executed. Isn't that enough? That's the most we ask of our soldiers and then we declare them heroes -- we ask that they risk their lives. We ask that they risk sacrifice, not that they do sacrifice. Kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers have no place in the defense of our country. Why should the whistleblower be so self-sacrificial? Why is he not a hero for risking his life when that's the standard of valor we place upon ourselves?
It's not just a tax write off. By keeping his money in the foundation and the investments of the foundation, its a tax shelter.
He's no more altruistic than the big pharmaceutical companies. It's not really altruism when you stand to make a large profit. Gates just figured out that the charity business can be an extremely successful one -- it gives one the ability to strong-arm entire nations all while immune to criticism under the protection of "philanthropy." The Gates Foundation, like similar foundations, exists so those of his lineage will all be filthy rich no matter what and no individual will be able to screw it all up for the rest of the family. It's like a trust fund designed to last centuries rather than decades.
Your attack on televangelists is irrelevant. They're much more an analog to Gates than a dichotomy.
but unfortunately the Ukraine signed an agreement that they would disarm their nuclear stockpile with the agreement that the west would protect their borders.
Treaties like that caused WWI.
none of the new rich are sponsoring great art, whether for themselves or the public.
However, if you've ever been to a Californian art gallery, you'd know that they do sponsor plenty of really crappy art.
It was created as a method of control and manipulation over the masses.
There's no empirical evidence to back up this claim. Even those religions which were used as a form of control were usually not created for that reason. Sure, it could be argued that Confucianism fits your model, and probably a few others, but I sincerely doubt Jesus of Nazareth went around preaching about peace and love so Constantine could use his ideas as a form of control ~300 years later.
Religion is not a thing that was invented in one part of the world and spread from there. Many religions throughout the world developed completely independent from each other at different times. Personally, I think most of them were inspired by something good. But many ideas can be warped and perverted and turned into something terrible -- I doubt Marx would approve of Stalin's version of Communism just as I doubt Jesus would approve of American Evangelicals' version of Christianity.
Maybe, although you're consciously unaware of it, your body craves the carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids that cheap pizza provides. And then other times, despite the fact that it's dinner time, you had a late lunch and you don't currently need any energy input, especially considering that you haven't used much energy sitting around browsing Slashdot.
There may be randomness in decision making sometimes, but basing a decision off of 'this is what I feel like' isn't random, you're just not making a conscious effort to employ logic (even though you probably do without realizing it).
That, and/or they discovered that humans aren't the only ones who make decisions that seem unreasonable and arbitrary to a third party observer.
Such as drinking crap like Tab or Mountain Dew. It may give you kidney stones, do a poor job of hydrating, lack vital nutrients, and only contain monomers which provide nothing more than short term energy, but it tastes sooo good.
I think you're both right, both saying the same thing, the OP just did so in a more cynical fashion. The important thing that the headline muddles is that there are no actual transitivity violations being observed, only seeming transitivity violations, so headline proposes something false ("why transivity [sic] violations can be rational').
Journalism wouldn't be interesting if the journalists understood the important minutiae of the scientific journals they refashion into pop articles.
Here's some suggestions:
1) Instruction. Make teaching a more prestigious career. Pay more, but also require higher credentials. Most people who would make the best teachers pursue other careers because they can get paid more doing something else.
2) Curriculum. Start teaching deductive logic in elementary school. It would vastly improve students' ability to understand mathematics, argumentative writing, hard sciences, politics, and just about anything else. Philosophy should be introduced by high school. Foreign language should also be introduced in elementary school. Most people have a very tenuous grasp of grammar before studying a foreign language.
3) Health. Longer school days, less homework. In the lower grades, combine recess with physical education, and force exercise upon kids. Their physical education grade ought to be based on progress -- a goal is set by the instructor and the student must progress towards it, such as loss of body fat, increase in strength, etc. No more packed lunches -- all students are provided two healthy meals during the school day. Furthermore, rather than just a school nurse, hire pediatric doctors. A child's health shouldn't be dependent on their parent's ability to obtain quality insurance or buy quality food.
Schools function the same way they did a hundred years ago and that's why they fail. Everyone always points to parents as the problem and they're right. Shitty parents are more often than not the problem that holds children back. We need to abandon the archaic idea that a person owns their child. A child affects society and this system of entrusting parents to do the bulk of raising their children (all while working 40+ hours a week) is absurd. I hate to quote Hilary but she was right, it takes a village.
When I was in high school there was only one local charter school and it sure didn't resemble any institution such as those depicted in Waiting for Superman. Students who had no shot of graduating went there. All the coursework was on a computer (which was kind of a big deal then, I graduated over ten years ago), students only had to be there three hours a day, and there was no certified teacher present. The 'teacher' was more like a supervisor - a guy who only had a high school diploma, was only in his early twenties, and everyone knew him by his first name. The idea was that the computers were the teacher, so they didn't need a certified teacher to run the whole gig.
Despite the fact that the coursework was mind numbingly easy, everyone cheated, and the supervisor didn't care. In fact, they'd take pot breaks with the supervisor. You could just keep taking the modules until you got them right, anyway. Then, once all the coursework was completed, the students received a full high school diploma from THE LOCAL HIGH SCHOOL. Totally indistinguishable from the one I got. Yet none of these students were competent enough to take the most basic college courses.
The charter school existed for a couple reasons. First, the No Child Left Behind Act had just been passed and the school system was scrambling for a solution to increase the graduation rate. Second, it was a private institution which received a government grant to function (by paying the supervisor minimum wage instead of paying a certified teacher a teacher's wage, by only staying open 3-4 hours a day, they were able to pocket most of that money). Finally, it was a way to get 'problem students' out of the system -- a sort of purgatory before they either took blue collar jobs or ended up in prison.
I had a couple of friends that went that route. I'm not friends with any of them anymore. One currently lives in government subsidized housing, is unemployed, and has a couple kids. One's a heroin addict and career criminal. One lives with his mother, he just got out of prison.
I'm rather skeptical of charter schools.
I think the flaw in your logic is the belief that democracy is an ideal that ought to be strived for. Also, I question your assertion that the Senate wasn't intended as a check on urban areas. It gave the rural southern states representation they wouldn't have had if population was the only metric, especially considering that blacks only counted as 3/5th of a person. Without the senate the south would have been similar to the thirteen colonies compared to England (which, as the urban centers in the north grew exponentially, eventually happened and caused a civil war).
Personally, I don't think it's right for people in cities a thousand+ miles away from my rural home to dictate the laws around here because there's more of them. Democracy only works on a very small scale. When it's expanded from sea to shining sea it becomes a tyranny throughout most the land, whether it's a tyranny for of most the people or not.
That's a prime example of a Catch-22. The NSA is doing illegal things, but it's illegal to expose the NSA's illegal activities. Conclusion: even is the NSA does something illegal they have every right to do so because they have the power to do illegal things whereas whistleblowers don't. Might makes right.
If that's going to be official government policy, it'd be much better to install a dictator so the whole system runs more efficiently. The Chinese system is preferable to what we have now. It's much more honest, they throw less people in prison, and their economy grows and their standard of living increases every year. That's not to say that I think we should model ourselves after the Chinese -- it's just that our system has deteriorated to the point that their's is better. The United States has become an embarrassment of all the ideals it's supposed to stand for.
Damn straight. Teaching math, programming, or argumentative writing (among other subjects) without logic is like teaching a language without grammar.
The future of Linux: on all devices. You should check out my toaster.
I believe what he was trying to say is that corporate America is unlikely to wean itself off of the Microsoft monopoly anytime soon, but Microsoft's stranglehold of the consumer market is vulnerable if gaming is taken away. Apple has dug deep into one important niche -- the non-gaming, high-end users -- and Steam on Linux has the potential to knock off the gaming niche. This is important because those two niches are where the high dollars are spent.
So while you're right, that the consumer market has the potential change quickly, I think he's correct in pointing out that corporate America will largely remain latched on to Microsoft for the foreseeable future. Two centuries is a bit of a hyperbole, but corporations are much slower to change up the technologies they depend on than individuals. An individual has to set up a new computer. A corporation has to set up thousands of new computers, write software, train people, etc. In the long term, I see specialized Linux systems becoming the standard in most corporations, but it's also probably the stranglehold Microsoft will keep within its grasp longer than any other.