But isn't it true Doctor, that if you were to be completely submerged in this Fukishima Sea Water for a period of no more than 5 minutes it would almost certainly prove fatal? It seems dangerous to continue to allow people to swim and boat in it when accidental submersion turns fatal so quickly.
That hacked twitter post cause a $200 billion temporary loss in the stock market. You could make some serious cash if you knew it was fake and bought low, or knew the hack was coming and shorted stock beforehand.
at clause is designed to prevent situations like what recently happened in the Ukraine, where leaders of opposition factions in the government are arrested
Oh, then I guess it's a good thing that the TSA doesn't fall under the executive branch. Oh wait, it does? Well sure, but it's not like the Executive branch is led by a person of the opposite party of Rand Paul. Oh, it is? Well, that's certainly awkward, but I mean he's just another opposition party senator and it's not like he or one of his relatives are trying to directly run against the sitting president in an upcoming elect-....What's that? He's Ron Paul's son?! SHIT.
These emails are also from the president and founder of the company, not some out sourced customer relations kid. So yea, it probably should ruin it for the whole company.
Well he did like to do secret gift giving while he was alive, I'm not sure I'd wager that Saint Nicholas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas) if very anonymous anymore;)
Very interesting, thank you for pointing this out. I'll admit I had not before read into the origins of the Christmas tree and simply believed what I had heard about it coupled with what I knew about the protestants in England outlawing it for a time because they believed it to be of pagan origin which cemented it in my mind as fact. While I think the evidence still points to the chosen timing for Christmas being to compete with the pagan festival I thank you for pointing out that I was wrong about the tree being adopted because of this.
More accurately Christmas is a Christian holiday originally timed to coincide and compete with a Pagan holiday which it pushed out though many of the pagan traditions ended up being incorporated by converted followers. There are lots of things Christian about Christmas such as the story, celebrating the birth of Jesus (even tho they don't believe it happened that time of year) ect, but many of the traditions such as the trees and candles are co-opted from Saturnalia.
There's plenty of people work a 6-2 or 7-3 in places where traffic is unruly at conventional rush hour times. There's no reason not to let your employees do this if they're office workers that just need to get 8 hours of work in.
Don't the uranium cores get recycled into nuclear fuel and thus become profitable/useful? Would assume it would get sold to some nuclear facility and thus no longer need upkeep by the government itself. Even if they theoretically boxed it storage of a uranium core should be a far less costly matter than maintaining a functional nuclear warhead.
How does this help our nation? Oops I said the N-word, my apologies to the offended parties.
By recycling it into something useful (weapons into plowshares and all that) instead of it sitting around costing money through expensive guarding, monitoring and maintenance not to mention Russia under the treaty dismantling nuclear warheads that were meant for killing us. Oh, and 0% chance of it accidentally going off once it's dismantled versus the extremely small percentage chance beforehand.
All else being equal, a nation that spends 10% of it's resourced building machines of war will have a lower standard of living then a nation that's able to spend that 10% on things like education, infrastructure, or even private commercial ventures / R&D. Hence war being destructive to the economy in the sense that you're sinking resources into production that doesn't return value to you in the form of making your life better. Sort of like there's money to be made in boarding up houses after a fire but setting a bunch of fires doesn't help stimulate the economy.
Realistically, however; Things are a lot more complex as always and there are other factors involved like the nation that did spend 10% using their machines of war to take what the nation that didn't made or value returned in the ability to exert your will on other nations ect ect. But it's always a net loss for humanity as a whole....until the aliens come
The amount of work and planning that would go into closing those 5 departments, their assets, and signed federal contracts under those departments, would most assuredly increase costs for that first year.
There's this concept call "thinking" that has been catching on. You ought to try it sometime. Contrary to your moronic statement, governments do not spend money on things "for the greater good of humanity". They spend money on things that are good for their nation. How much money do you think that the countries affected by malaria have to spend on developing a vaccine for malaria?
If only there were some sort of organized union of nations that each paid towards operating costs in order to work on world issues of security, health and economic development.
Cuba and Hispaniola are not "a small island" nor are they in the middle of the ocean. Cuba alone is larger than England and together they're nearly the size of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales). Furthermore they are both considered part of North America. Everyone else rightly assumed the Earth was much larger and he'd run out of food before he got around to India. In his "wrongness" he ran into a gigantic new landmass full of riches and resources to report home about leading to European Colonization. So yea, he gets credit for starting that time period.
There's a difference between "such a device exists" and "They use a device". I believe those devices are possibly in use in Michigan which the ACLU is suing to find out more about, not in Florida.
Oh, I definitely agree with you there. As more and more of the population stays in school I think there is undoubtedly a pressure on teachers to try to keep average grades up and failure rates down which results in cases of relaxing standards. This doesn't mean the population is getting less intelligent or less educated though, it simply means the average graduate may be less intelligent, but now a much larger percentage of the population is attempting to graduate and learn and the population on the whole is getting better educated.
Imagine if you will that you switched from how cross country teams are now to having everyone forced to be on the cross country team, run and exercise. You might look at average run times for the team and exclaim that the population is getting slower and worse at running and that the system must be broken, but this is not the case. Now you simply have more people being pushed to run instead of the people who were already inclined and in a good position to do so. Forcing all these people to do training runs would mean the population as a whole is getting better at running, even though your average scores for your "team" would seem to disagree.
Firstly, proposing a hypothesis for a given condition (a hypothesis I am backing) is not a straw man. You simply disagree with my hypothesis. A straw man is where I insert a flawed argument into your mouth and then knock it down claiming victory. Fighting a man made of straw if you will. While it may certainly be more convenient for you to simply dismiss "what you see quite often" as logical fallacy instead of people simply disagreeing with you I'm afraid you'll have to coin your own "Ironhandx Fallacy" for that rather then trying to co-opt the definition of straw man.
Now, onto the matter at hand
As affluence has traditionally affected who can/can't go to school before, not anything to do with intelligence, test scores on average should stay roughly the same
I believe this premise to be correct but your conclusion that test scores should stay the same is incorrect. The problem stems from the fact that basic math and science tests are not a measure of intelligence they are a measure of the quality of prior education. People with affluence, which you admit heavily weight the original 20%, are going to have much better access to much better education both through private schooling and through living in areas with nicer schools due to the affluence of the average citizens there. People with affluence are afforded many advantages such as private tutors, parents that are more likely to value education having used it themselves to gain affluence, the ability to purchase educational materials and most importantly the time and environment needed to learn and study versus working to put food on the table.
I'd appreciate it if you took a moment of self reflection to examine what you just did. A self identified conservative put forward for debate possible solutions to a problem your platform holds important and regularly has problems with conservatives denying even exists. Presented with this extraordinary opportunity to initiate constructive dialogue to solve this important problem what action did you choose to take?
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope
Instead of addressing said solution or debating it you make ad hominem attacks on conservatives in general and then try to switch to another issue (evolution) which has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Presented with an "enemy" which doesn't fit your stereotype you ignore him and the opportunity for a solution he represents because a solution is not important to you. What you want is an enemy that is evil enough for you to hate, and anyone who tones down or breaks that stereotype must be dismissed and ignored because you're not interested in working towards a solution, you're interested in having someone sufficiently evil to point a finger at while you complain about the problem
It's almost as if a higher percentage of the population is attempting to get into college and get further educated then ever before instead of dropping out of high school to work at the local automotive/shoe/soap plant. How many minorities are first-generation college/HS students/grads in the current population? There's been a lot of social change in the last 100 years that is causing a much larger percent of the population attempt those tests then ever before.
The intentional re-interpretation of the word militia to Nerf the right to keep and bare arms (the bare part is so ignored now).
This is true, you hardly ever hear of the first and a half amendment these days, but it's not really all that relevant anymore. I suppose it's great and all if you're into that like the Founding Fathers were, but those were different times and the Constitution needs to be able to adapt. I think most Americans these days have little to no interest in shaving their arms.
The assumption that people will eat more because they walked around this mall is false. They may simply walk around at home a little less and sit down or go to bed earlier. There's plenty of energy being wasted on frivolous actions when you're talking about action of the human body and we usually respond to small amounts of extra exercise by resting rather than minute changes in the amount of food we cook for our meals. The amount we cook is usually binned in set amounts rather then being a continuous variable we carefully adjust and extra is thrown away or consumed needlessly more often then not. OTOH your point about production costs sounds reasonable but do you have any numbers to back up the idea that the energy used for mass production will be more then is reclaimed over the entire life of the tile?
real engineers build things that can kill people if they do things wrong. they have all the same pressures from management, but they still (theoretically) have standards, and licensing bodies, and like, rules and stuff.
This is part of the current problem. Software Engineers are writing lots of things that can kill you and we don't have any licensing body or laws requiring a PE to make specific applications. It generally means we can't be held responsible, but that cuts both ways. If we're working on a serious application we have nothing to hold back from management if we know the design doesn't pass muster. A PE must attach his signature to his work to approve it so a PE has leverage in the ability to refuse to do so unless the work meets his professional standards. As software engineers they can just take our work any day of the week and throw it into a production system and if we don't like it we can GTFO. So to sum up, we have the same pressures, the same dangers and moral responsibilities, with none of the leverage over management or our peers to enforce professional standards.
No. As a Software Engineer myself I see this 'blame the management not the engineer' mindset as an unacceptable abdication of responsibility. Management isn't the technical expertise, the engineer is. If your a Civil Engineer PE and your MBA boss asks you to sign off on a design, that's great and all, but you don't sign off unless you're sure that the designs are sound and acceptable according to your trained, professional opinion. The company is paying you to make that call honestly, they did not and can not simply buy your signature unless you have no sense of honor or integrity to your profession, in which case you shouldn't call yourself an engineer in the first place and can rightly look forward to being 'thrown under the bus' for signing off on a design that causes harm to others.
In your bridge example you state the designs are cross-checked and reviewed by a slew of other engineers. Guess whose job that is to make sure that's all been done properly before they sign their name on it? The CE with the PE license that's in charge of the bridge. If management doesn't give him the resources to have the designs cross-checked and reviewed he doesn't sign and the bridge doesn't open. He most certainly does not piss and whine about management privately, pocket the money, sign the design and say it's the fault of the MBA's who don't know anything about bridges when 20 people die on it.
Are management dicks? sometimes. Is it easy to stand up to them? No. Might there be negative consequences for doing the right thing and acting like a professional? Yes. Welcome to real life and having responsibility of a profession rather than a job.
Slashdot Mirror
I can see the 24hr News interview now:
That hacked twitter post cause a $200 billion temporary loss in the stock market. You could make some serious cash if you knew it was fake and bought low, or knew the hack was coming and shorted stock beforehand.
at clause is designed to prevent situations like what recently happened in the Ukraine, where leaders of opposition factions in the government are arrested
Oh, then I guess it's a good thing that the TSA doesn't fall under the executive branch. Oh wait, it does? Well sure, but it's not like the Executive branch is led by a person of the opposite party of Rand Paul. Oh, it is? Well, that's certainly awkward, but I mean he's just another opposition party senator and it's not like he or one of his relatives are trying to directly run against the sitting president in an upcoming elect-....What's that? He's Ron Paul's son?! SHIT.
These emails are also from the president and founder of the company, not some out sourced customer relations kid. So yea, it probably should ruin it for the whole company.
Well he did like to do secret gift giving while he was alive, I'm not sure I'd wager that Saint Nicholas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas) if very anonymous anymore ;)
Very interesting, thank you for pointing this out. I'll admit I had not before read into the origins of the Christmas tree and simply believed what I had heard about it coupled with what I knew about the protestants in England outlawing it for a time because they believed it to be of pagan origin which cemented it in my mind as fact. While I think the evidence still points to the chosen timing for Christmas being to compete with the pagan festival I thank you for pointing out that I was wrong about the tree being adopted because of this.
More accurately Christmas is a Christian holiday originally timed to coincide and compete with a Pagan holiday which it pushed out though many of the pagan traditions ended up being incorporated by converted followers. There are lots of things Christian about Christmas such as the story, celebrating the birth of Jesus (even tho they don't believe it happened that time of year) ect, but many of the traditions such as the trees and candles are co-opted from Saturnalia.
There's plenty of people work a 6-2 or 7-3 in places where traffic is unruly at conventional rush hour times. There's no reason not to let your employees do this if they're office workers that just need to get 8 hours of work in.
Don't the uranium cores get recycled into nuclear fuel and thus become profitable/useful? Would assume it would get sold to some nuclear facility and thus no longer need upkeep by the government itself. Even if they theoretically boxed it storage of a uranium core should be a far less costly matter than maintaining a functional nuclear warhead.
How does this help our nation? Oops I said the N-word, my apologies to the offended parties.
By recycling it into something useful (weapons into plowshares and all that) instead of it sitting around costing money through expensive guarding, monitoring and maintenance not to mention Russia under the treaty dismantling nuclear warheads that were meant for killing us. Oh, and 0% chance of it accidentally going off once it's dismantled versus the extremely small percentage chance beforehand.
All else being equal, a nation that spends 10% of it's resourced building machines of war will have a lower standard of living then a nation that's able to spend that 10% on things like education, infrastructure, or even private commercial ventures / R&D. Hence war being destructive to the economy in the sense that you're sinking resources into production that doesn't return value to you in the form of making your life better. Sort of like there's money to be made in boarding up houses after a fire but setting a bunch of fires doesn't help stimulate the economy.
Realistically, however; Things are a lot more complex as always and there are other factors involved like the nation that did spend 10% using their machines of war to take what the nation that didn't made or value returned in the ability to exert your will on other nations ect ect. But it's always a net loss for humanity as a whole....until the aliens come
The amount of work and planning that would go into closing those 5 departments, their assets, and signed federal contracts under those departments, would most assuredly increase costs for that first year.
There's this concept call "thinking" that has been catching on. You ought to try it sometime. Contrary to your moronic statement, governments do not spend money on things "for the greater good of humanity". They spend money on things that are good for their nation. How much money do you think that the countries affected by malaria have to spend on developing a vaccine for malaria?
If only there were some sort of organized union of nations that each paid towards operating costs in order to work on world issues of security, health and economic development.
Out of curiosity did you consider that too incredibly outlandish or something? Keep in mind it was written pre 9/11.
Cuba and Hispaniola are not "a small island" nor are they in the middle of the ocean. Cuba alone is larger than England and together they're nearly the size of Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales). Furthermore they are both considered part of North America. Everyone else rightly assumed the Earth was much larger and he'd run out of food before he got around to India. In his "wrongness" he ran into a gigantic new landmass full of riches and resources to report home about leading to European Colonization. So yea, he gets credit for starting that time period.
There's a difference between "such a device exists" and "They use a device". I believe those devices are possibly in use in Michigan which the ACLU is suing to find out more about, not in Florida.
Oh, I definitely agree with you there. As more and more of the population stays in school I think there is undoubtedly a pressure on teachers to try to keep average grades up and failure rates down which results in cases of relaxing standards. This doesn't mean the population is getting less intelligent or less educated though, it simply means the average graduate may be less intelligent, but now a much larger percentage of the population is attempting to graduate and learn and the population on the whole is getting better educated.
Imagine if you will that you switched from how cross country teams are now to having everyone forced to be on the cross country team, run and exercise. You might look at average run times for the team and exclaim that the population is getting slower and worse at running and that the system must be broken, but this is not the case. Now you simply have more people being pushed to run instead of the people who were already inclined and in a good position to do so. Forcing all these people to do training runs would mean the population as a whole is getting better at running, even though your average scores for your "team" would seem to disagree.
Firstly, proposing a hypothesis for a given condition (a hypothesis I am backing) is not a straw man. You simply disagree with my hypothesis. A straw man is where I insert a flawed argument into your mouth and then knock it down claiming victory. Fighting a man made of straw if you will. While it may certainly be more convenient for you to simply dismiss "what you see quite often" as logical fallacy instead of people simply disagreeing with you I'm afraid you'll have to coin your own "Ironhandx Fallacy" for that rather then trying to co-opt the definition of straw man.
Now, onto the matter at hand
As affluence has traditionally affected who can/can't go to school before, not anything to do with intelligence, test scores on average should stay roughly the same
I believe this premise to be correct but your conclusion that test scores should stay the same is incorrect. The problem stems from the fact that basic math and science tests are not a measure of intelligence they are a measure of the quality of prior education. People with affluence, which you admit heavily weight the original 20%, are going to have much better access to much better education both through private schooling and through living in areas with nicer schools due to the affluence of the average citizens there. People with affluence are afforded many advantages such as private tutors, parents that are more likely to value education having used it themselves to gain affluence, the ability to purchase educational materials and most importantly the time and environment needed to learn and study versus working to put food on the table.
I'd appreciate it if you took a moment of self reflection to examine what you just did. A self identified conservative put forward for debate possible solutions to a problem your platform holds important and regularly has problems with conservatives denying even exists. Presented with this extraordinary opportunity to initiate constructive dialogue to solve this important problem what action did you choose to take?
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope
Instead of addressing said solution or debating it you make ad hominem attacks on conservatives in general and then try to switch to another issue (evolution) which has nothing to do with the matter at hand. Presented with an "enemy" which doesn't fit your stereotype you ignore him and the opportunity for a solution he represents because a solution is not important to you. What you want is an enemy that is evil enough for you to hate, and anyone who tones down or breaks that stereotype must be dismissed and ignored because you're not interested in working towards a solution, you're interested in having someone sufficiently evil to point a finger at while you complain about the problem
It's almost as if a higher percentage of the population is attempting to get into college and get further educated then ever before instead of dropping out of high school to work at the local automotive/shoe/soap plant. How many minorities are first-generation college/HS students/grads in the current population? There's been a lot of social change in the last 100 years that is causing a much larger percent of the population attempt those tests then ever before.
The intentional re-interpretation of the word militia to Nerf the right to keep and bare arms (the bare part is so ignored now).
This is true, you hardly ever hear of the first and a half amendment these days, but it's not really all that relevant anymore. I suppose it's great and all if you're into that like the Founding Fathers were, but those were different times and the Constitution needs to be able to adapt. I think most Americans these days have little to no interest in shaving their arms.
The assumption that people will eat more because they walked around this mall is false. They may simply walk around at home a little less and sit down or go to bed earlier. There's plenty of energy being wasted on frivolous actions when you're talking about action of the human body and we usually respond to small amounts of extra exercise by resting rather than minute changes in the amount of food we cook for our meals. The amount we cook is usually binned in set amounts rather then being a continuous variable we carefully adjust and extra is thrown away or consumed needlessly more often then not. OTOH your point about production costs sounds reasonable but do you have any numbers to back up the idea that the energy used for mass production will be more then is reclaimed over the entire life of the tile?
False Dichotomy. I don't go to India to hire an incompetent electrician just because I don't need an electrical engineer PE to wire my new house.
real engineers build things that can kill people if they do things wrong. they have all the same pressures from management, but they still (theoretically) have standards, and licensing bodies, and like, rules and stuff.
This is part of the current problem. Software Engineers are writing lots of things that can kill you and we don't have any licensing body or laws requiring a PE to make specific applications. It generally means we can't be held responsible, but that cuts both ways. If we're working on a serious application we have nothing to hold back from management if we know the design doesn't pass muster. A PE must attach his signature to his work to approve it so a PE has leverage in the ability to refuse to do so unless the work meets his professional standards. As software engineers they can just take our work any day of the week and throw it into a production system and if we don't like it we can GTFO. So to sum up, we have the same pressures, the same dangers and moral responsibilities, with none of the leverage over management or our peers to enforce professional standards.
No. As a Software Engineer myself I see this 'blame the management not the engineer' mindset as an unacceptable abdication of responsibility. Management isn't the technical expertise, the engineer is. If your a Civil Engineer PE and your MBA boss asks you to sign off on a design, that's great and all, but you don't sign off unless you're sure that the designs are sound and acceptable according to your trained, professional opinion. The company is paying you to make that call honestly, they did not and can not simply buy your signature unless you have no sense of honor or integrity to your profession, in which case you shouldn't call yourself an engineer in the first place and can rightly look forward to being 'thrown under the bus' for signing off on a design that causes harm to others.
In your bridge example you state the designs are cross-checked and reviewed by a slew of other engineers. Guess whose job that is to make sure that's all been done properly before they sign their name on it? The CE with the PE license that's in charge of the bridge. If management doesn't give him the resources to have the designs cross-checked and reviewed he doesn't sign and the bridge doesn't open. He most certainly does not piss and whine about management privately, pocket the money, sign the design and say it's the fault of the MBA's who don't know anything about bridges when 20 people die on it.
Are management dicks? sometimes. Is it easy to stand up to them? No. Might there be negative consequences for doing the right thing and acting like a professional? Yes. Welcome to real life and having responsibility of a profession rather than a job.