I'm off books completely. I just use people's code snippets and tutorials. I understand programming at this point so all I'm really picking up is syntax and idiosyncracies.
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Ray Bradbury
Second this. Oddly, a lot of these maker spaces seem to avoid the kinds of tools one would find in a conventional wood or metal-shop.
But to the larger question - libraries are going to need more active support and protection to survive much into this new century. Baltimore's public libraries have been consolidating for years.
Two neutrinos start out at the same time from St. Louis. The first neutrino takes a train to Chicago, with an average speed of 1/40000 *C. The second takes a taxi to Denver, discovers he doesn't have enough to pay the fare, and so finds himself deposited back at his starting point, four hours after he started out. Springfield goes supernova ten minutes after the first neutrino leaves it. The first neutrino transitions to a Tau neutrino at Bloomington. If the excess mass is converted to additional momentum, how many were going to St. Ives?
I respectfully disagree. Generally I think most people can agree with the basic facts that OWS are highlighting. I'm sorry to keep posting the same link to the same thread, but I feel like many people would rather ignore it than spend a few moments actually reading, and that's a shame; http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
I also think 'ultra-socialist' is unfounded. Progressive taxation, uncorrupted politics and the rule of law (for banks and individuals) are not radical - they're the way the system is actually supposed to work.
That's kind of naive. For space, lots and lots of thorough testing is required. Yes the testing itself can be automated so that it (re)runs in a hurry, to some degree, but initially creating all that test methodology and infrastructure is costly and time-consuming.
Space is an unforgiving environment. Witness the Russian/Chinese Phobos-Grunt mission, or the recent JAXA orbiter Akatsuki-Venus, lost on its way to Venus.
I'm glad you've got a great job, and feel like all your needs are covered.
The message of OWS is not simply that they're whining and all want the government to solve their problems. There's a lot of big interlocking issues, but let me see if I can hit some of the highlights
- corporate profits are near an all-time high - fraction of income and wealth held by the top 1% is at an all-time high - hiring, especially for good, solid, middle-class jobs with benefits has tanked - the rate of growth in price of big ticket essentials like health care, education, and (until recently) housing have all outstripped income growth for at least 15 years. - in fact, median income in real terms has barely moved in the last 30 years - in the same period of time, productivity has gone through the roof - who is benefiting from that? - a lot of great middle-class jobs have gone offshore, as a result of lobbying that has allowed capital flight (rebranded as 'free trade') - the government (e.g. the taxpayers) have been left footing the bill for a lot of excessive risk-taking by big banks - that the banks have been allowed to make those foolish bets is a direct result of the roll-back of regulations - that the real-estate market bubbled up, then tanked, is again a result of the discarded regulations (that had been working fine for decades) and 'innovative financial products' - Wall Street banks stole billions of dollars from their investors with these products, broke all kinds of laws, paid themselves tremendous bonuses, stuck the taxpayers with the bills, and they're getting away with it. - corporations and rich individuals have undue influence on politics (even moreso because of recent Supreme Court decisions) and continue to use it to push for further roll-back of regulations, yet more tax breaks for the rich, and dismantling of the social safety net.
Basically the rich don't get it - they've pursued their own interests to an unprecedented degree, and in doing so have, inadvertently or not, eroded the middle class in America. But there's not going to be any more growth in America without a middle class and without a manufacturing base to cater to it. When the American economy was working, that's how it worked, and that's why everyone else envied it.
If all the money in America is sloshing around in a bunch of hedge funds in Greenwich, waiting to short Eurobonds or whatever the next scheme is, it's not actually going to create very many jobs. That that tremendous amount of wealth has been amassed by so few and so self-interested is a result of relentless lobbying and government pressure over decades that has basically changed all the rules regarding taxes and wealth accumulation. OWS is reminding people, most of whom haven't been paying attention since everybody's so busy trying to be productive and keep their own job, that they've basically all been screwed.
It's OK to advocate for your own best interests, because you'd better believe the 1% surely are, and they have a lot more resources than you and me.
I'm sure lots of individual OWS protesters would benefit from some lifestyle coaching. On the other hand, if you look closely, you'll see that lots of people like lawyers, doctors, technology people have also been contributing time to the movement - it's not just a big party for unemployed people.
But that doesn't really address my point - the level of anger here at Slashdot has less to do with negative interaction with hippies, and more to do with the fact that they've struck a nerve. It's far easier to make fun of the pictures on Fox News than it is to sit down and consider what the real message is, and how it might relate to your own life and prospects. There's very few people here who are going to get rich in some new startup or writing the next Angry Birds. There's a lot of people here who are going to scrape by on part time IT, freelance work and occasionally installing WiFi for the neighbors, and wish they had a 40-hour-a-week developer job with benefits and a path forward. (Or actually working that developer job, and finding out that to hold it really requires something like 60 hours a week.)
It's easier to be angry at or make fun of the protesters than to admit they have a point.
I'm going go to out on a limb here and say that the level of animosity directed at OWS is more telling about Slashdot than about the movement itself. Take a look in the mirror for a moment - have you all really had bad firsthand experience with "hippy rapists crapping in the streets downtown" or whatever - or is it more true that OWS has hit a nerve here?
The honest answer is a lot of Slashdotters are either IT people or programmers (or IT people wishing you were programmers) and you ARE part of the 99%. Your jobs CAN and HAVE been outsourced, to a large degree. Your current income level IS a product of outsourcing and capital flight. How much IT support comes from offshore?
How many of you paid a big chunk for a CS degree and are now wondering how you're ever going to pay it off? Still renting? Living with friends? Living at home? Living without health care? Not yet confronted down-the-road looming expenses like kids, a mortgage, your parents' end-of-life care?
Maybe put aside, for a moment, your epigrams about dirty hippies, and think about how OWS is relevant to your own situation.
They aren't protesting capitalism - they are protesting the government having been totally corrupted by capitalism, to the point where the entire game is rigged. You can malign the OWS as much as you want, and please, by all means, have fun telling whatever stories you want about them. But if some kind of change doesn't happen, the situation for the 99% is only going to get worse.
"because they have no freaken clue what they are debating against they are going to be there for a long time, and their only goal is to protest against...Something..."
This is BS. If you're going to comment on something, make a token effort at least to educate yourself on the topic at hand. The truth is this "they have no agenda" meme is a right-wing talking point and an excuse for wholesale ignoring the many points that have been put forward by the movement.
"the press tends to get sensitive whenever they are barred from anywhere and tend to make a big deal out of it" "The press will only get in their way of doing their job" You're joking me, right? The free press is an essential part of a functioning democracy. They are a proxy for us, the citizens, as witnesses as to what is done with the power that we have collectively vested in our government. "Of the people, by the people, for the people" does that ring any kind of bell? The police are doing things in our name, with our implicit consent. If what they are doing is in violation of law, is denying people their rights, is violent in ways that are inappropriate, we have a right to know. We pay the police's salary. We (some of us anyway) elected the mayor and the city council.
It seems like every day on/. we get one or a couple of articles whose comment threads trend heavily towards NASA-bashing. I'd love for NASA programs to be compared apples-for-apples against DoD programs.
You fought in the text editor wars?
on
Vim Turns 20
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· Score: 1
"not as clumsy or random as emacs. An elegant editor, from a more civilized age."
Re:emacs this emacs that
on
Vim Turns 20
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· Score: 1
If only you could mod this parent comment up to 11 -
Here's the last line in the article; "I hear about people going out to lunch less often and cooking for themselves more. If the whole economy became a tiny number of highly paid robot engineers and a mass of low-wage salad-makers, there would be many reasons to regret that outcome but high unemployment wouldn’t be the issue." The whole article is worth a read, and even has an informative graph!
The logical fallacy here is that if the government stopped issuing student loans, somehow the price of education would come down. It's absolutely false. The real outcome is that a lot of people who once had the opportunity to go to school, at some cost, would lose it.
The argument that you can freelance your way to a better life, and that every minimum-wage worker should just do that, is terribly wrong but also absolutely irrelevant. High-school graduates are at a decision point before they enter a permanent minimum-wage service economy, they are the ones for whom the student loan question is important.
Also, you'll never freelance your way from a french-fry computer into a microchip design job, a genetic engineering job, a whole raft of job types that we would all consider to be core of the information economy. If you want a first-world economy, you have to find all the best-and-the-brightest, and plug them into a study program that makes them ready for those jobs, with some realistic repayment program.
The question about the value of education is a fair one. Generally you should get out of it what you put into it. The idea should be impressed on kids that they are making important choices and that the debt they're incurring is theirs to keep. Still, I think it's unfair that they're made to play what amounts to a carnival game with their future. If you buy an mp3 player and it doesn't work, you take it back, you ask for a refund, you call the BBB or write bad Amazon reviews - you have some recourse. If you dig yourself way in for a degree that isn't helpful, what can you do? There's no refund or guarantee. You can't even default on that debt now. That was fine when everybody felt that academia was something apart from capitalism, that there was something altruistic in the pursuit (hence, 'higher learning') and in the efforts of the professors and the staff to impart knowledge, etc. Nobody felt they were being taken advantage of, mostly, and you owned the results. Now, and especially with the rise of for-profit universities, its Caveat Emptor for everyone.
The government hasn't lost a great deal of money on student loans (yet) - they are loans. Bottom line - you could wave your wand and make the whole program go away tomorrow and a.) the price of education wouldn't budge b.) the needle wouldn't move on the debt. Only defense and entitlement reforms are going to do that to any real degree c.) your taxes wouldn't go down one bit d.) kids would still take out loans to get though school - they'd just have to take them all from for-profit entities, with less control to the rates and rules associated with them
Let me encourage everyone in this thread to go read THE CASE FOR MARS by Robert Zubrin. The goal is not "...sending a few ex-pilots into space to achieve something a robot would achieve for a tiny fraction of the cost..." The goal is a growing, self-sufficient colony for humans on another planet. It's not impossible, it's not centuries away, it's not any more risky than plenty of other things Americans have done.
The initial costs seemed extreme to send explorers sailing west from Spain, but the greater value became self-evident over time once colonies were established. America especially has always benefited from (cue the Aaron Copeland soundtrack), no, has largely defined itself as having a frontier. If you put a colony on Mars, not only is humanity safer in the long run, but the science you want to happen on Mars will surely get done faster.
For a long time, I unhappily lived with the fact that I was a "buffet Catholic" - meaning that while I called myself a Catholic, I thought I could choose among the various doctrine whichever were palatable to me, and leave the rest behind. Ultimately I had to confront the notion that I really no longer a Catholic by any conventional definition. I think we've arrived at a moment where we are surrounded by buffet Americans.
Buffet Americans feel like they're real Americans all right, but they don't need to care at all about cities or the people in them, or certain minorities that annoy them, or different generations, or federal departments that they are not immediately benefiting from, or states that seem to have different problems or concerns than the place they grew up. Basically if you know you'd be arguing the opposite side of the coin if only you were born under different circumstances, maybe it's not such a great argument.
WRT DOE, maybe Ron Paul could use wikipedia to find out the purpose of the departments before he proposes doing away with them;
"The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material. Its responsibilities include the nation's nuclear weapons program, nuclear reactor production for the United States Navy, energy conservation, energy-related research, radioactive waste disposal, and domestic energy production. DOE also sponsors more basic and applied scientific research than any other US federal agency; most of this is funded through its system of United States Department of Energy National Laboratories." - Wikipedia
So I for one am not really ready to cede nuclear reactor and nuclear waste regulation to the states or to individual corporations, for instance. ("Well ok maybe we could move those parts to another agency.") DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration monitors other country's nuclear abilities, works nonproliferation issues, manages the safety and security of our own stockpile of nuclear weapons [...] ("Geez, I guess we need somebody to be looking after that stuff.") Groups like the Southeastern Power Administration manage the sale of power from hydroelectric plants ("just sell all this stuff outright - who cares if all the dams are private") There's a group that looks after the power grid - pushes industry for higher efficiency, better security and reliability, analyzes blackouts ("well we could trust all that to corporations, couldn't we?") Etc.
I could make a defense of each department Mr. Paul wants to do away with, but its not likely to convince readers here, I see. But you know, if you're supporting this initiative of his, its really worth your time to at least take a swag at actually figuring out what each of those departments does before you vote to chuck them. I'm pretty sure most of the people in these departments don't think the whole thing is a scam - they at least are trying to do the tasks ascribed to these departments for the benefit of the nation.
You know, our federal parks are some of America's great treasures. I'm not about to sell Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Acadia, Arches, etc to a bunch of corporations. Prior generations entrusted them to us - we don't really own them either, we are simply stewards unto the next generation. Also, the amount of money coming out of your individual income to support these things is laughably small. And once you sell them, you can never get them back. The fact that so many people from Europe and Asia make the effort to visit them is a hint as to their true value.
NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit. NASA built a spacecraft that's going to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Oh, and another one that's going closest to the sun. And robots to scoot around Mars for years at a time. And a telescope (Kepler) that's found hundreds of exoplanets already. Just for starters.
If you want a bigger better NASA then call your congresspeople and support their budget.
"We have a generation afraid to take risks, expect to be rewarded for being mediocre, and generally a failure, yet have a massive ego issue."
Maybe I simply don't belong here anymore - but as a parent, a self-described liberal, and someone who generally looks upon my own life and career in science and engineering as being at least moderately successful, it's hard to see how you might contrive a more offensive comment without stooping to profanity.
Thanks for a lot of great music! What's the score with the kids/educational albums - will there be any more of them coming? My kids are growing up listening to them (ABC's, 123's) and know a lot of the lyrics by heart.
There's no reason they have to all be explicitly for kids either - I'd love Here Come The Philosophers or Here Come Astronomy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm off books completely. I just use people's code snippets and tutorials. I understand programming at this point so all I'm really picking up is syntax and idiosyncracies.
“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Ray Bradbury
Second this. Oddly, a lot of these maker spaces seem to avoid the kinds of tools one would find in a conventional wood or metal-shop.
But to the larger question - libraries are going to need more active support and protection to survive much into this new century. Baltimore's public libraries have been consolidating for years.
Two neutrinos start out at the same time from St. Louis. The first neutrino takes a train to Chicago, with an average speed of 1/40000 *C. The second takes a taxi to Denver, discovers he doesn't have enough to pay the fare, and so finds himself deposited back at his starting point, four hours after he started out. Springfield goes supernova ten minutes after the first neutrino leaves it. The first neutrino transitions to a Tau neutrino at Bloomington. If the excess mass is converted to additional momentum, how many were going to St. Ives?
I respectfully disagree. Generally I think most people can agree with the basic facts that OWS are highlighting. I'm sorry to keep posting the same link to the same thread, but I feel like many people would rather ignore it than spend a few moments actually reading, and that's a shame;
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
I also think 'ultra-socialist' is unfounded. Progressive taxation, uncorrupted politics and the rule of law (for banks and individuals) are not radical - they're the way the system is actually supposed to work.
That's kind of naive. For space, lots and lots of thorough testing is required. Yes the testing itself can be automated so that it (re)runs in a hurry, to some degree, but initially creating all that test methodology and infrastructure is costly and time-consuming.
Space is an unforgiving environment. Witness the Russian/Chinese Phobos-Grunt mission, or the recent JAXA orbiter Akatsuki-Venus, lost on its way to Venus.
I'm glad you've got a great job, and feel like all your needs are covered.
The message of OWS is not simply that they're whining and all want the government to solve their problems. There's a lot of big interlocking issues, but let me see if I can hit some of the highlights
- corporate profits are near an all-time high
- fraction of income and wealth held by the top 1% is at an all-time high
- hiring, especially for good, solid, middle-class jobs with benefits has tanked
- the rate of growth in price of big ticket essentials like health care, education, and (until recently) housing have all outstripped income growth for at least 15 years.
- in fact, median income in real terms has barely moved in the last 30 years
- in the same period of time, productivity has gone through the roof - who is benefiting from that?
- a lot of great middle-class jobs have gone offshore, as a result of lobbying that has allowed capital flight (rebranded as 'free trade')
- the government (e.g. the taxpayers) have been left footing the bill for a lot of excessive risk-taking by big banks
- that the banks have been allowed to make those foolish bets is a direct result of the roll-back of regulations
- that the real-estate market bubbled up, then tanked, is again a result of the discarded regulations (that had been working fine for decades) and 'innovative financial products'
- Wall Street banks stole billions of dollars from their investors with these products, broke all kinds of laws, paid themselves tremendous bonuses, stuck the taxpayers with the bills, and they're getting away with it.
- corporations and rich individuals have undue influence on politics (even moreso because of recent Supreme Court decisions) and continue to use it to push for further roll-back of regulations, yet more tax breaks for the rich, and dismantling of the social safety net.
Basically the rich don't get it - they've pursued their own interests to an unprecedented degree, and in doing so have, inadvertently or not, eroded the middle class in America. But there's not going to be any more growth in America without a middle class and without a manufacturing base to cater to it. When the American economy was working, that's how it worked, and that's why everyone else envied it.
If all the money in America is sloshing around in a bunch of hedge funds in Greenwich, waiting to short Eurobonds or whatever the next scheme is, it's not actually going to create very many jobs. That that tremendous amount of wealth has been amassed by so few and so self-interested is a result of relentless lobbying and government pressure over decades that has basically changed all the rules regarding taxes and wealth accumulation. OWS is reminding people, most of whom haven't been paying attention since everybody's so busy trying to be productive and keep their own job, that they've basically all been screwed.
It's OK to advocate for your own best interests, because you'd better believe the 1% surely are, and they have a lot more resources than you and me.
I'm sure lots of individual OWS protesters would benefit from some lifestyle coaching. On the other hand, if you look closely, you'll see that lots of people like lawyers, doctors, technology people have also been contributing time to the movement - it's not just a big party for unemployed people.
But that doesn't really address my point - the level of anger here at Slashdot has less to do with negative interaction with hippies, and more to do with the fact that they've struck a nerve. It's far easier to make fun of the pictures on Fox News than it is to sit down and consider what the real message is, and how it might relate to your own life and prospects. There's very few people here who are going to get rich in some new startup or writing the next Angry Birds. There's a lot of people here who are going to scrape by on part time IT, freelance work and occasionally installing WiFi for the neighbors, and wish they had a 40-hour-a-week developer job with benefits and a path forward. (Or actually working that developer job, and finding out that to hold it really requires something like 60 hours a week.)
It's easier to be angry at or make fun of the protesters than to admit they have a point.
I'm going go to out on a limb here and say that the level of animosity directed at OWS is more telling about Slashdot than about the movement itself. Take a look in the mirror for a moment - have you all really had bad firsthand experience with "hippy rapists crapping in the streets downtown" or whatever - or is it more true that OWS has hit a nerve here?
The honest answer is a lot of Slashdotters are either IT people or programmers (or IT people wishing you were programmers) and you ARE part of the 99%. Your jobs CAN and HAVE been outsourced, to a large degree. Your current income level IS a product of outsourcing and capital flight. How much IT support comes from offshore?
How many of you paid a big chunk for a CS degree and are now wondering how you're ever going to pay it off? Still renting? Living with friends? Living at home? Living without health care? Not yet confronted down-the-road looming expenses like kids, a mortgage, your parents' end-of-life care?
Maybe put aside, for a moment, your epigrams about dirty hippies, and think about how OWS is relevant to your own situation.
OWS protesters don't intend to scare people. What should scare people is that the protesters are RIGHT.
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
They aren't protesting capitalism - they are protesting the government having been totally corrupted by capitalism, to the point where the entire game is rigged. You can malign the OWS as much as you want, and please, by all means, have fun telling whatever stories you want about them. But if some kind of change doesn't happen, the situation for the 99% is only going to get worse.
"because they have no freaken clue what they are debating against they are going to be there for a long time, and their only goal is to protest against...Something..."
This is BS. If you're going to comment on something, make a token effort at least to educate yourself on the topic at hand. The truth is this "they have no agenda" meme is a right-wing talking point and an excuse for wholesale ignoring the many points that have been put forward by the movement.
A good place to start educating yourself might be here;
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-wall-street-protesters-are-so-angry-about-2011-10?op=1
"the press tends to get sensitive whenever they are barred from anywhere and tend to make a big deal out of it" "The press will only get in their way of doing their job" You're joking me, right? The free press is an essential part of a functioning democracy. They are a proxy for us, the citizens, as witnesses as to what is done with the power that we have collectively vested in our government. "Of the people, by the people, for the people" does that ring any kind of bell? The police are doing things in our name, with our implicit consent. If what they are doing is in violation of law, is denying people their rights, is violent in ways that are inappropriate, we have a right to know. We pay the police's salary. We (some of us anyway) elected the mayor and the city council.
It seems like every day on /. we get one or a couple of articles whose comment threads trend heavily towards NASA-bashing. I'd love for NASA programs to be compared apples-for-apples against DoD programs.
"not as clumsy or random as emacs. An elegant editor, from a more civilized age."
If only you could mod this parent comment up to 11 -
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/10/25/352918/robots-are-not-causing-the-recession/
Here's the last line in the article; "I hear about people going out to lunch less often and cooking for themselves more. If the whole economy became a tiny number of highly paid robot engineers and a mass of low-wage salad-makers, there would be many reasons to regret that outcome but high unemployment wouldn’t be the issue." The whole article is worth a read, and even has an informative graph!
Scheme is foundational to a lot of current ASIC design tools. Lisp was the root of a lot of early AI development.
God bless and thanks - RIP.
This, a thousand times this. Please mod up the parent!
The logical fallacy here is that if the government stopped issuing student loans, somehow the price of education would come down. It's absolutely false. The real outcome is that a lot of people who once had the opportunity to go to school, at some cost, would lose it.
The argument that you can freelance your way to a better life, and that every minimum-wage worker should just do that, is terribly wrong but also absolutely irrelevant. High-school graduates are at a decision point before they enter a permanent minimum-wage service economy, they are the ones for whom the student loan question is important.
Also, you'll never freelance your way from a french-fry computer into a microchip design job, a genetic engineering job, a whole raft of job types that we would all consider to be core of the information economy. If you want a first-world economy, you have to find all the best-and-the-brightest, and plug them into a study program that makes them ready for those jobs, with some realistic repayment program.
The question about the value of education is a fair one. Generally you should get out of it what you put into it. The idea should be impressed on kids that they are making important choices and that the debt they're incurring is theirs to keep. Still, I think it's unfair that they're made to play what amounts to a carnival game with their future. If you buy an mp3 player and it doesn't work, you take it back, you ask for a refund, you call the BBB or write bad Amazon reviews - you have some recourse. If you dig yourself way in for a degree that isn't helpful, what can you do? There's no refund or guarantee. You can't even default on that debt now. That was fine when everybody felt that academia was something apart from capitalism, that there was something altruistic in the pursuit (hence, 'higher learning') and in the efforts of the professors and the staff to impart knowledge, etc. Nobody felt they were being taken advantage of, mostly, and you owned the results. Now, and especially with the rise of for-profit universities, its Caveat Emptor for everyone.
The government hasn't lost a great deal of money on student loans (yet) - they are loans. Bottom line - you could wave your wand and make the whole program go away tomorrow and
a.) the price of education wouldn't budge
b.) the needle wouldn't move on the debt. Only defense and entitlement reforms are going to do that to any real degree
c.) your taxes wouldn't go down one bit
d.) kids would still take out loans to get though school - they'd just have to take them all from for-profit entities, with less control to the rates and rules associated with them
Let me encourage everyone in this thread to go read THE CASE FOR MARS by Robert Zubrin. The goal is not "...sending a few ex-pilots into space to achieve something a robot would achieve for a tiny fraction of the cost..." The goal is a growing, self-sufficient colony for humans on another planet. It's not impossible, it's not centuries away, it's not any more risky than plenty of other things Americans have done.
The initial costs seemed extreme to send explorers sailing west from Spain, but the greater value became self-evident over time once colonies were established. America especially has always benefited from (cue the Aaron Copeland soundtrack), no, has largely defined itself as having a frontier. If you put a colony on Mars, not only is humanity safer in the long run, but the science you want to happen on Mars will surely get done faster.
For a long time, I unhappily lived with the fact that I was a "buffet Catholic" - meaning that while I called myself a Catholic, I thought I could choose among the various doctrine whichever were palatable to me, and leave the rest behind. Ultimately I had to confront the notion that I really no longer a Catholic by any conventional definition. I think we've arrived at a moment where we are surrounded by buffet Americans.
Buffet Americans feel like they're real Americans all right, but they don't need to care at all about cities or the people in them, or certain minorities that annoy them, or different generations, or federal departments that they are not immediately benefiting from, or states that seem to have different problems or concerns than the place they grew up. Basically if you know you'd be arguing the opposite side of the coin if only you were born under different circumstances, maybe it's not such a great argument.
WRT DOE, maybe Ron Paul could use wikipedia to find out the purpose of the departments before he proposes doing away with them;
"The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is a Cabinet-level department of the United States government concerned with the United States' policies regarding energy and safety in handling nuclear material. Its responsibilities include the nation's nuclear weapons program, nuclear reactor production for the United States Navy, energy conservation, energy-related research, radioactive waste disposal, and domestic energy production. DOE also sponsors more basic and applied scientific research than any other US federal agency; most of this is funded through its system of United States Department of Energy National Laboratories." - Wikipedia
So I for one am not really ready to cede nuclear reactor and nuclear waste regulation to the states or to individual corporations, for instance. ("Well ok maybe we could move those parts to another agency.") DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration monitors other country's nuclear abilities, works nonproliferation issues, manages the safety and security of our own stockpile of nuclear weapons [...] ("Geez, I guess we need somebody to be looking after that stuff.") Groups like the Southeastern Power Administration manage the sale of power from hydroelectric plants ("just sell all this stuff outright - who cares if all the dams are private") There's a group that looks after the power grid - pushes industry for higher efficiency, better security and reliability, analyzes blackouts ("well we could trust all that to corporations, couldn't we?") Etc.
I could make a defense of each department Mr. Paul wants to do away with, but its not likely to convince readers here, I see. But you know, if you're supporting this initiative of his, its really worth your time to at least take a swag at actually figuring out what each of those departments does before you vote to chuck them. I'm pretty sure most of the people in these departments don't think the whole thing is a scam - they at least are trying to do the tasks ascribed to these departments for the benefit of the nation.
You know, our federal parks are some of America's great treasures. I'm not about to sell Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Acadia, Arches, etc to a bunch of corporations. Prior generations entrusted them to us - we don't really own them either, we are simply stewards unto the next generation. Also, the amount of money coming out of your individual income to support these things is laughably small. And once you sell them, you can never get them back. The fact that so many people from Europe and Asia make the effort to visit them is a hint as to their true value.
NASA chartered flights to low earth orbit. NASA built a spacecraft that's going to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Oh, and another one that's going closest to the sun. And robots to scoot around Mars for years at a time. And a telescope (Kepler) that's found hundreds of exoplanets already. Just for starters.
If you want a bigger better NASA then call your congresspeople and support their budget.
Slashdot: yesterday's news, today!
"We have a generation afraid to take risks, expect to be rewarded for being mediocre, and generally a failure, yet have a massive ego issue."
Maybe I simply don't belong here anymore - but as a parent, a self-described liberal, and someone who generally looks upon my own life and career in science and engineering as being at least moderately successful, it's hard to see how you might contrive a more offensive comment without stooping to profanity.
Yes, sorry I forgot about Here Comes Science, it's the best of the bunch!
John and John,
Thanks for a lot of great music! What's the score with the kids/educational albums - will there be any more of them coming? My kids are growing up listening to them (ABC's, 123's) and know a lot of the lyrics by heart.
There's no reason they have to all be explicitly for kids either - I'd love Here Come The Philosophers or Here Come Astronomy.