Why not let kids drop out if they don't want to be there? Because they're kids, not fully-formed people, and education is about helping students reach their full potential, not sorting them for digging trenches or becoming doctors.
I was a terrible student in grade school and high school. I was extremely bored in high school, and to this day I think of it as wasted time. Had I dropped out though and found myself stuck in a dead end job, I'd have gone postal by now. I'm getting my PhD currently.
Letting kids who want to skip school stay out will just allow them to set themselves up for a lifetime of failure, to become drains on society, before they have enough in their head to know any better. Even if it usually turns out that way anyway, we owe it to them to give them that chance. I personally feel that other expenditures of our tax money are trivial and short-sighted in comparison. I can deal with potholes, the kid down the street being forced to go to school and maybe becoming a successful doctor 20 years later is the better investment than road maintenance.
More to the point, evolution doesn't care so much if you get cancer after you reproduce. Of course, from an evolutionary standpoint, humans are a miserably failed experiment. An average of, what, 3 kids, and 14 years to reach reproducing age? It's no wonder there are so few of us compared to bacteria.
Sequencing of Tobacco is underway evidently. Funded in large part by Philip Morris.
I find it odd that tobacco and weed, two important cash crops no matter how you feel about their use, have not had their genomes sequenced yet, but the platypus has. I know that plant genomes are generally bigger, and platypi are very interesting, but, come on, priorities people.
Agreed. More of the endless flood of trollish, completely dishonest reporting which is constantly being pushed on/. these days.
Maybe itwbennet saw Florian Mueller doing it, figured he had to somehow be making a lot of money or else he would have stopped it, and decided to jump on the money train.
(Or blogger Kevin Foggarty, or the president of HTC. Not really sure who came up with it, to find out, I'd have to RTFA, and if it has that FUD in there, I don't want to bother.)
Here it begins, the FUD DRM campaign against Windows 8 and a collective group of people getting their panties in a twist.
And here comes their knight in shining armor, recoiledsnake, ready to fight the good fight on behalf of defenseless multinational corporations...
I tease, and that's not to imply that we should stand for lies just because the target is a wealthy corporation, but I do think we need to assume the worst when it comes to corporations. I'm assuming windows 8 is going to be windows 7 but with several added layers of stuff to make sure you're running only authorized copies of windows, office, and any other program. I'm assuming it will have more insulation between you and control of your own computer and will put up more resistance to you assuming control over it. I'm assuming this app store will be designed to put money into MS's pockets that would have otherwise gone to smaller, more creative organizations. I'm assuming all of that until MS proves otherwise. One would be a fool to trust any corporation has your interests at heart.
I'm guessing the justification would be something along the lines of "If we know who is applying, we'll know if they've done good work in the past or not, we'll know if they have a good track record." Which does play into it, you know some lab is very good at writing grants and sounding good on paper, but then doesn't do as much with the money when they get it as you'd like. The big downside is that rather than merit of the project being proposed, funding is based more on politics and, evidently, race factors into that.
I suspect double blind grants would get us better science overall, one could find other ways to weed out the labs that just glum up grants and don't do much science.
In this episode, does MacGuyver finally make out with the blonde army chick? Will any characters die and then come back to life? Does anyone wonder why the one black guy is carrying a spear?
Seriously, two questions. One: why was that show so bad? Two: why did I absolutely love that show?
When a company is charging 10,000,000 Percent more for something than they evidently need to, I would say that's an indication that the free market, competition, and or consumers are failing miserably, and some type of legislative action is needed to correct it.
"The market will bear it" seems like a pretty shitty justification to allow such excesses to continue. The market is creating monsters here. Excessive profits aren't leading to more jobs, they're leading to buying off the government, which leads to less competition, leading to more excessive profits, a feedback loop. I don't see how this ends well for the rest of us if we don't stop it. "The new Iphone 27! $5999! The difference between it and the Iphone 26 is that the iphone 26, released three months ago, is not going to work when we upgrade our network to 47932G technology!"
Sure sounds like you're promoting the idea. Me, I provided the only logical thought process by which I believe people can justify wealth re-distribution, that is the "I think that we should take their money from them because I personally do not think they should have it." i.e. "because, fuck them." I then questioned the morality of that assertion.
Well, that would be the strawman argument right there: I never made that assertion. Others may have, that's true. I'm in favor of wealth redistribution because I feel it's better for a stable society and is more moral. You can attack people who make statements in favor of wealth redistribution who do say "Because fuck rich people," you could even go so far as to say that MOST of the people who are arguing for wealth redistribution just hate rich people. Maybe it's the ONLY argument in favor of wealth redistribution you've heard.
But it's not an argument I made. It's not even an argument that the AC made.
So now it's okay to bigoted, just so long as it's against catholics?
Didn't say anything of the sort. Whining about bigotry is only justified when there's discrimination going on, which there's not for catholics. Jokes about priests and altar boys is just flat out -not- bigotry.
I'm atheist but fuck, that's unbelievably hypocritical.
It's debatable whether I'm catholic, but no, I don't think it is.
This is only hypocrisy if one confuses saying "Taxes should be higher" with "The government is better at investing money in society than anyone else." I'm sure his first preference would be that the wealthy give most of their money to effective charities. Realizing that they obviously won't do that of their own volition, his second preference is that the government tax the wealthy more. In the mean time, he feels he can give money to charity, spending it better than the government would, while urging the second preference.
I'm curious what right you think you have to the wealth of the uber-wealthy, what justification you have for wealth redistribution. "They have more than they need, so fuck them, gimme"?
You seem to have typed an awful lot there, it's too bad you had to go and throw a ridiculous straw man in there at the beginning, advertising that there was nothing of value in your post.
Just some questions to ponder. "No better than the rest of the population" indeed.
I don't recall that being a motto of the pope. Declaring yourself the infallible speaker for God would kind of shoot that to hell.
There's plenty of room to mock religion, the hats, dresses, opulent bling bling, and the whole Hitler youth thing are ample ground. You really don't need to go suggesting the pope is a hypocrite for not inviting assassination attempts.
Making pope jokes and altar boy jokes does not make one a bigot. Had he said something about needing a lot of space for his hundreds of children because every sperm is sacred, that's maybe very slightly bigoted, but not worth calling out. Save the bigot card for racism, sexism, or gaybashing.
How rude and insulting. The voters must be stupid, right?
My experience on this side of the pond is: YES THEY FUCKING ARE STUPID.
No. The voters *experienced* the riots and are livid that members of their own communities would betray their own in such a nihilistic orgy of crime costing lives, injuries, homes, at least hundreds of jobs (of people/families in their own communities, not of the banks or politicians) and costing millions upon millions of pounds when the country is facing austerity measures, for entertainment and to put a flat screen tv and an xbox in their front room.
I would guess that the scope and depth of the austerity cuts are many times greater than that of the riots, and that the anger is misplaced. Someone stole a TV from the store down the street? Annoying. The government cut funding to education so your kid can't go to the university he should have? MUCH MUCH WORSE.
Again, I don't know the situation, but my gut reaction would be to say people should stop venting their anger at the street looters and should vent their anger instead at the big-league looters in government.
Also, the "top 1%" isn't a club that's impossible to get in to. hard? sure. impossible? nope.
I'd say it's closer to impossible, and I don't know what that has to do with GP's point. We shouldn't try to change the current situation where the top 1% takes all because there's a slightly greater than zero percent chance we could make it into that 1%? That seems to be the only semi-logical reason people are opposed to any talk of wealth redistribution for the uber-wealthy. I guess if you think you have a shot at that, it's valid.
My philosophy is hope for the best and prepare for the worst: you should do all you can to get into that 1% but vote for taxes, a public welfare system, and budgets on the assumption that you won't.
Some of us are perfectly happy not trying to be Warren Buffet, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't be.
It's worth pointing out that Warren Buffet is telling anyone who will listen that he's not being taxed enough and that he shouldn't be that wealthy. One of the guys at the top is saying the situation is absurd.
What's up with the apparent urge by the British government to "make an example" out of people? Is it that their voters are angry the riots happened and want blood? Is there a legitimate fear that riots could happen again any time soon? Or is it simply an opportunity for them to look like they are tough on crime, vote for me and we'll protect you from those terrible (fill in the blank with whatever you have an irrational fear of)?
I agree it won't be useful for proving new drugs work, nor will it be good for discovering new things, but it -could- be a useful compendium for knowledge, and -could- help prevent some needless wastes of research money.
You have a new chemical cocktail that looks like it fights cancer in a petri dish. You are just about to spend a lot of money to make significant amounts of the components and order the rats when you decide to run it virtually through this rat.
Surprise! Program tells you that it would kill the rat, you somehow missed that chemical X in the compound and chemical Y would team up to cause the rat's brain to ooze out it's ears, and that this had been established decades ago.
Rather than reporting to your boss/colleagues that your miracle cure was actually a million dollar mistake because you didn't do your homework, you quietly bury your lab notebook in the desert and pretend you've been playing minecraft for the past few weeks. "Chemical X and Y? No, I didn't waste any time with them. OBVIOUSLY they would kill whatever you put them in!"
Biologists generally do work on the simplest model organisms they can. Cheaper, generally easier to study, fewer variables to screw up the results, and cheaper again. There's a reason you probably never hear about drug tests in chimpanzees: they're more complicated and hideously expensive to keep compared to e.coli, frogs, fish, mice, or rats.
The driving force behind this project itself is probably economics, someone got tired of wasting money on real rats when virtual ones might suffice.
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Why not let kids drop out if they don't want to be there? Because they're kids, not fully-formed people, and education is about helping students reach their full potential, not sorting them for digging trenches or becoming doctors.
I was a terrible student in grade school and high school. I was extremely bored in high school, and to this day I think of it as wasted time. Had I dropped out though and found myself stuck in a dead end job, I'd have gone postal by now. I'm getting my PhD currently.
Letting kids who want to skip school stay out will just allow them to set themselves up for a lifetime of failure, to become drains on society, before they have enough in their head to know any better. Even if it usually turns out that way anyway, we owe it to them to give them that chance. I personally feel that other expenditures of our tax money are trivial and short-sighted in comparison. I can deal with potholes, the kid down the street being forced to go to school and maybe becoming a successful doctor 20 years later is the better investment than road maintenance.
And just as obviously, we're going to elect the governor leading the charge to presidency and fix the budget.
More to the point, evolution doesn't care so much if you get cancer after you reproduce. Of course, from an evolutionary standpoint, humans are a miserably failed experiment. An average of, what, 3 kids, and 14 years to reach reproducing age? It's no wonder there are so few of us compared to bacteria.
Sequencing of Tobacco is underway evidently. Funded in large part by Philip Morris.
I find it odd that tobacco and weed, two important cash crops no matter how you feel about their use, have not had their genomes sequenced yet, but the platypus has. I know that plant genomes are generally bigger, and platypi are very interesting, but, come on, priorities people.
If a dog thinks his or her owner has had lung cancer for 10 years, something weird is going on...
Is your girl/boyfriend a smoker?
Agreed. More of the endless flood of trollish, completely dishonest reporting which is constantly being pushed on /. these days.
Maybe itwbennet saw Florian Mueller doing it, figured he had to somehow be making a lot of money or else he would have stopped it, and decided to jump on the money train.
(Or blogger Kevin Foggarty, or the president of HTC. Not really sure who came up with it, to find out, I'd have to RTFA, and if it has that FUD in there, I don't want to bother.)
The orange goo is the only resident of Alaska convinced she would be a good president and wanted to show it's support?
I walked passed an HMV today with big signs up proclaiming "EPIC SALE!", I imagined walking in there with a chaingun.
You must be EPIC STRONG if you can lift a chaingun.
Here it begins, the FUD DRM campaign against Windows 8 and a collective group of people getting their panties in a twist.
And here comes their knight in shining armor, recoiledsnake, ready to fight the good fight on behalf of defenseless multinational corporations...
I tease, and that's not to imply that we should stand for lies just because the target is a wealthy corporation, but I do think we need to assume the worst when it comes to corporations. I'm assuming windows 8 is going to be windows 7 but with several added layers of stuff to make sure you're running only authorized copies of windows, office, and any other program. I'm assuming it will have more insulation between you and control of your own computer and will put up more resistance to you assuming control over it. I'm assuming this app store will be designed to put money into MS's pockets that would have otherwise gone to smaller, more creative organizations. I'm assuming all of that until MS proves otherwise. One would be a fool to trust any corporation has your interests at heart.
I'm guessing the justification would be something along the lines of "If we know who is applying, we'll know if they've done good work in the past or not, we'll know if they have a good track record." Which does play into it, you know some lab is very good at writing grants and sounding good on paper, but then doesn't do as much with the money when they get it as you'd like. The big downside is that rather than merit of the project being proposed, funding is based more on politics and, evidently, race factors into that.
I suspect double blind grants would get us better science overall, one could find other ways to weed out the labs that just glum up grants and don't do much science.
In this episode, does MacGuyver finally make out with the blonde army chick? Will any characters die and then come back to life? Does anyone wonder why the one black guy is carrying a spear?
Seriously, two questions. One: why was that show so bad? Two: why did I absolutely love that show?
When a company is charging 10,000,000 Percent more for something than they evidently need to, I would say that's an indication that the free market, competition, and or consumers are failing miserably, and some type of legislative action is needed to correct it.
"The market will bear it" seems like a pretty shitty justification to allow such excesses to continue. The market is creating monsters here. Excessive profits aren't leading to more jobs, they're leading to buying off the government, which leads to less competition, leading to more excessive profits, a feedback loop. I don't see how this ends well for the rest of us if we don't stop it. "The new Iphone 27! $5999! The difference between it and the Iphone 26 is that the iphone 26, released three months ago, is not going to work when we upgrade our network to 47932G technology!"
Sure sounds like you're promoting the idea. Me, I provided the only logical thought process by which I believe people can justify wealth re-distribution, that is the "I think that we should take their money from them because I personally do not think they should have it." i.e. "because, fuck them." I then questioned the morality of that assertion.
Well, that would be the strawman argument right there: I never made that assertion. Others may have, that's true. I'm in favor of wealth redistribution because I feel it's better for a stable society and is more moral. You can attack people who make statements in favor of wealth redistribution who do say "Because fuck rich people," you could even go so far as to say that MOST of the people who are arguing for wealth redistribution just hate rich people. Maybe it's the ONLY argument in favor of wealth redistribution you've heard.
But it's not an argument I made. It's not even an argument that the AC made.
So now it's okay to bigoted, just so long as it's against catholics?
Didn't say anything of the sort. Whining about bigotry is only justified when there's discrimination going on, which there's not for catholics. Jokes about priests and altar boys is just flat out -not- bigotry.
I'm atheist but fuck, that's unbelievably hypocritical.
It's debatable whether I'm catholic, but no, I don't think it is.
He is giving most of his money to charity.
This is only hypocrisy if one confuses saying "Taxes should be higher" with "The government is better at investing money in society than anyone else." I'm sure his first preference would be that the wealthy give most of their money to effective charities. Realizing that they obviously won't do that of their own volition, his second preference is that the government tax the wealthy more. In the mean time, he feels he can give money to charity, spending it better than the government would, while urging the second preference.
I'm curious what right you think you have to the wealth of the uber-wealthy, what justification you have for wealth redistribution. "They have more than they need, so fuck them, gimme"?
You seem to have typed an awful lot there, it's too bad you had to go and throw a ridiculous straw man in there at the beginning, advertising that there was nothing of value in your post.
Speaking of holey men, why does the Pope, the holiest of holes, need a bulletproof car? Doesn't he have faith in the lord to protect him?
There's some part about not testing your Lord. Also common sense, and the fact that crazy people try to kill popes.
Just some questions to ponder. "No better than the rest of the population" indeed.
I don't recall that being a motto of the pope. Declaring yourself the infallible speaker for God would kind of shoot that to hell.
There's plenty of room to mock religion, the hats, dresses, opulent bling bling, and the whole Hitler youth thing are ample ground. You really don't need to go suggesting the pope is a hypocrite for not inviting assassination attempts.
And yet, he cared enough to let it be known that he doesn't care...
Making pope jokes and altar boy jokes does not make one a bigot. Had he said something about needing a lot of space for his hundreds of children because every sperm is sacred, that's maybe very slightly bigoted, but not worth calling out. Save the bigot card for racism, sexism, or gaybashing.
How rude and insulting. The voters must be stupid, right?
My experience on this side of the pond is: YES THEY FUCKING ARE STUPID.
No. The voters *experienced* the riots and are livid that members of their own communities would betray their own in such a nihilistic orgy of crime costing lives, injuries, homes, at least hundreds of jobs (of people/families in their own communities, not of the banks or politicians) and costing millions upon millions of pounds when the country is facing austerity measures, for entertainment and to put a flat screen tv and an xbox in their front room.
I would guess that the scope and depth of the austerity cuts are many times greater than that of the riots, and that the anger is misplaced. Someone stole a TV from the store down the street? Annoying. The government cut funding to education so your kid can't go to the university he should have? MUCH MUCH WORSE.
Again, I don't know the situation, but my gut reaction would be to say people should stop venting their anger at the street looters and should vent their anger instead at the big-league looters in government.
Also, the "top 1%" isn't a club that's impossible to get in to. hard? sure. impossible? nope.
I'd say it's closer to impossible, and I don't know what that has to do with GP's point. We shouldn't try to change the current situation where the top 1% takes all because there's a slightly greater than zero percent chance we could make it into that 1%? That seems to be the only semi-logical reason people are opposed to any talk of wealth redistribution for the uber-wealthy. I guess if you think you have a shot at that, it's valid.
My philosophy is hope for the best and prepare for the worst: you should do all you can to get into that 1% but vote for taxes, a public welfare system, and budgets on the assumption that you won't.
Some of us are perfectly happy not trying to be Warren Buffet, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't be.
It's worth pointing out that Warren Buffet is telling anyone who will listen that he's not being taxed enough and that he shouldn't be that wealthy. One of the guys at the top is saying the situation is absurd.
What's up with the apparent urge by the British government to "make an example" out of people? Is it that their voters are angry the riots happened and want blood? Is there a legitimate fear that riots could happen again any time soon? Or is it simply an opportunity for them to look like they are tough on crime, vote for me and we'll protect you from those terrible (fill in the blank with whatever you have an irrational fear of)?
I agree it won't be useful for proving new drugs work, nor will it be good for discovering new things, but it -could- be a useful compendium for knowledge, and -could- help prevent some needless wastes of research money.
You have a new chemical cocktail that looks like it fights cancer in a petri dish. You are just about to spend a lot of money to make significant amounts of the components and order the rats when you decide to run it virtually through this rat.
Surprise! Program tells you that it would kill the rat, you somehow missed that chemical X in the compound and chemical Y would team up to cause the rat's brain to ooze out it's ears, and that this had been established decades ago.
Rather than reporting to your boss/colleagues that your miracle cure was actually a million dollar mistake because you didn't do your homework, you quietly bury your lab notebook in the desert and pretend you've been playing minecraft for the past few weeks. "Chemical X and Y? No, I didn't waste any time with them. OBVIOUSLY they would kill whatever you put them in!"
Biologists generally do work on the simplest model organisms they can. Cheaper, generally easier to study, fewer variables to screw up the results, and cheaper again. There's a reason you probably never hear about drug tests in chimpanzees: they're more complicated and hideously expensive to keep compared to e.coli, frogs, fish, mice, or rats.
The driving force behind this project itself is probably economics, someone got tired of wasting money on real rats when virtual ones might suffice.