Until those who are driving around overweight behemoths are made to pay for their huge negative externalities. E.g. with mandatory sentences for manslaughter every time they bump into a smaller car and kill someone, increased taxes, etc. It's hardly fair that those who do the responsible thing are penalized.
Yeah, it's totally fair to mandatorily throw a trucker in jail when someone plows their Miata into the rear of the truck and decapitates themself.
That said, I'm sure there's a ton of nutty greens that would love that policy, because trucks are the devil. Or would be, if they believed in the devil and not Gaia. Wait, is man the devil then? I get confused.
>>Back in college we used to prank each other by sending in requests for magazines and advertisements.
Heh, and I thought I was the only one that did that.
I also signed my roommate up for a lot of very spammy mailing lists in Chinese. He could never figure out how to unsubscribe to them, because they were Chinese, and this was back in the day before mail filters became common. He went nuts and ended up stealing my router.
>>When they get a batch of kids that don't give a shit about their education, the teachers seem down to the point of depression and talk about going back to school to get their PhD so they can teach college where people might be interested in the material.
Heh, yeah. My college roommate has been a high school math teacher for the last four years, and just last week quit so that he could go back to college so that he could get a master's and teach at a local community college, because none of the kids in his classes cared. He burned out.
But somehow I think your (and mine) personal experiences will convince the slashdotters on here that teachers (or the "system" or something) have set out to turn our kids into robots. Some conspiracy theory teacher named Gatto has said so on the internets, so it must be true.
>>Given that most of China's pollution happens in the interest of building cheap plastic crap for Americans, does that pollution count against communism or capitalism?
The cheap plastic crap counts against America and capitalism. The benzene spills into the rivers that make entire cities turn to bottled water? That counts against China and communism. (Issues with China not exactly being communistic aside.)
Seriously, look at what the USSR did to nature. Even to a non-green like me, it's abhorrent.
>>And I've met people that describe themselves as Jesus Christ. Doesn't make it true.
So Ted Turner is a rich white conservative that goes around calling himself a progressive, admiring Castro, and serving on boards of left wing organizations. Do you have a secret tap into his mind or something?
>>Whether they are anti-education or pro-education in an anti-education way, the result is the same.
I didn't say they were anti-education. I said the system doesn't work well for our best teachers, who tend to be creative outside of the box thinkers. I understand what you're saying, but it's like saying that Microsoft is anti-technology, because they don't like outside of the box thinkers at Microsoft. (Which isn't exactly true, but I digress.) Sure, it's true that they eliminate AAA talent, but it doesn't mean that they don't make technology, or are anti-technology, or whatever. Schools are all trying to make kids as smart as possible (contrary to your thesis) - they just don't deal well with mavericks.
So you'd think that his crazy notion about building an Open Door Policy at the school site (contrary to the elitist Gatekeeper notion of AP classes, which says only smartest kids should take AP classes) would have vanished. To the contrary... from 2004-2008 I worked on an AP Incentive Program in San Diego County, one of whose primary goals was requiring all school sites to adopt Open Door Policies, to train counselors to stop blocking kids from enrolling in AP classes, and to get people to stop worrying so much about their "Pass Rate" on AP tests. It was very successful, and this was the influence of Jaime Escalante (may he rest in peace) still permeating to schools after all these years, 20-30 years later. (As I said, schools are very socially conservative.)
Side note: If you read the story about Jaime Escalante, it was the Teachers Union as much as anything that forced him out, because his program was TOO successful. Class sizes were too big, and so the Union "helpfully" stopped him from teaching. There's a lot of problems like this with our school system, don't get me wrong, but schools wanting their kids to become automatons is not one of them.
>>So? The "liberal media" is owned by rich white conservative men, yet is portrayed as liberal.
Ted Turner describes himself as a progressive. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,465124,00.html) So it's both the reporters and the owners.
Hollywood is profoundly far-left, from top to bottom.
>>There often is a very real difference between those that work for an institution and their ideas (what you mentioned) and the ideas being pushed at the top (what he mentioned). So, your anecdote says nothing at all about his statement.
What I said was that teachers are all individually committed to making students independent thinkers, generally speaking. It's not like the situations with reporters and the media. Reporters have an editorial board to report to. Teachers are kings in their own classroom, subject only to pacing guides and state content standards. (And if you are going to try to say that pacing guides and state standards are where the secret zombification of our students is held, I'd recommend reading them some time - they all encourage higher-order thought.)
>>See, you proved my point. The "teacher" wanted one thing, and the "institution" wanted another, in fact the direct opposite.
The tallest blade of grass gets cut first.
As I said in my previous post, schools are socially conservative, and anyone doing anything different tend to either get booted out of the system or quit - and this includes most AAA teachers. This does not mean the schools are trying to turn our kids into robots. Rather, they can't deal with any teachers acting differently.
>>Public schools are not about education, its about creating dumbed down automatons who are easily controlled.
You know it's funny. I work teaching teachers technology, and I can't recall ever hearing a teacher say they really wished their kids would all be dumbed down automatons. Instead, you hear them all sharing positive stories about a kid that gets engaged with the subject matter and starts thinking on his own. Except for some really burned out teachers, this is pretty much universally true. They ALL want kids interested in a subject, capable of critical and independent thought, and being successful in life (ideally by going to college).
Now - inter-teacher rivalries and jealousies? Sure, I'll believe in that explanation as to why they undid the program at Garfield. But losing your entire cadre of teachers trained in his method probably had more to do with it than anything.
The only bit that I will agree with you in this regard is that schools tend to be very socially conservative institutions (by this I don't mean politically conservative, like Republicans, but rather resistant to change). AAA teachers tend to get kicked out of the system. I had Jan Gabay as my English teacher for the 9th and 12th grades - she was Teacher of the Year for the entire country in 1990-something, did a year traveling the country speaking on teaching, went back to Serra High for a couple years, and has since quit public schools to teach at the UC San Diego Charter School.
I also had Rick Halsey (IIRC, grandson of Admiral Bull Halsey) as a bio an AP Bio teacher, was an amazing teacher who took us into the canyons near the school to study actual plants and animals in the chaparral ecosystem. Every year he took his students on a week-long trip during Spring Break to go kayaking down the Colorado River or hiking in Anza Borrego, etc. He quit because the school was worried he was exposing them to too much liability risk.
Our system right now is rather dysfunctional. But teachers want kids to succeed - they don't want to produce dumb automatons. It's no longer the 1800s where we need to prep kids for work in the mills - "21st Century Skills" and all that is the current paradigm in education.
>>I was unaware that physics had shown that there wasn't a 4th dimension. I'm not sure how physics or physicists could prove this. Perhaps what you meant to say was that the math currently used by most physicists does not need a 4th dimension.
Actually, there's a good amount of work done trying to figure out if physics would work with more than 3+1 dimensions (i.e. 3 spatial, 1 time), and a lot of people are convinced only 3+1 would work.
>>He makes mathematically sound arguments, and backs it up with common sense. I think the opinion of Donald Knuth, who has invented more patents than you could ever dream of, is very relevant.
>>The failure of communism speaks volumes about communism. It does not say a goddamn thing about capitalism one way or the other
Well, if you define scourge as the word system in the world for the environment, capitalism doesn't come close.
It's kind of a ridiculous claim anyway, since the political system is what really matters, not the economic one. That's why I said communist dictatorships. We can compare them against capitalist republics, and see that the republics win, hands down, on the environment.
I've been part of a corporation. But there's a huge difference between doing your fiduciary duty and claiming Sony is a huge unified company. It's not. There's a lot of autonomy in the different branches. So much so, they're effectively different companies entirely, with their own financial statements, ways of doing business, etc. That's why I thought it was silly to boycott the PS3 when Sony Music rootkit-ed people's PCs. The PS3 people are a different company, with their own specially retarded ways of doing business (like disabling PS2 game support).
That's one of my favorite web comics of all time. I got the Dungeons and Discourse t-shirt. =)
But yeah, it seems like the "switch" is not really turning off people's moral compass, like the summary suggests, but rather that people are using a different benchmark to judge actions, the old consequentialist vs. intentionalist debate. Both approaches are valid, and incorporated into our legal system. So it's not like these people became psychopaths or something, it just sounds like perhaps they weigh the factors differently.
In any event, it's not like just a random magnetic field is being applied - these sorts of things can isolate parts of the brain to be shut down, so it shouldn't be any surprise at all that the brain arrives at different calculations. Framing it as a "low level" calculation as the summary does is misleading.
All controlled by the same fucking group of stockholders.
Sony is SONY, no matter how you try to twist it with that faulty logic.
Do you actually know how SONY is run? No, apparently not.
Each unit is more or less an autonomous company unto itself. There's a corporate culture about setting goals and such throughout the conglomerate, but that's about it.
If you don't believe me, talk to someone that works for SONY.
>>coupled with the dynamics of capitalism that have us in this hole.
Given that the USSR was the worst country in the world for the environment gives proof to the lie that capitalism is a global scourge.
Seriously, look sometime into what they did to their forests and rivers. I'm not a green, but it sickens me. And of course they emitted tons of pollution, CO2, and the occasional bit of nuclear fallout.
The reason Kyoto is a joke is because it sets CO2 targets based on the year before communism fell - all the eastern bloc countries now meet their targets now that they're no longer living in a communist dictatorship. (It's a joke since nothing would change, except us writing a 3 billion dollar cheque to Romania each year.)
>>That's fine. I knew I'd get people scoffing at my lack of reading - plenty of people do. I
Sorry if it came out negative. There's just so much good stuff out there in books, I've gone without TV for the last 10 years. Actually, I have TV now, but only because getting 50mpbs service from AT&T requires a bundled TV service.:/
Most people dislike books because they were forced to read them in school, and there's nothing worse than being made to read a book you hate (Wurthering Heights... eugh).
>>while reading I'll find myself thinking about other things still, and not really processing what I'm reading!
This is one of the best things! I keep a notepad handy and write down any random ideas I get while reading or listening to audiobooks in my car. Getting and processing new information is one of the best things to spur creativity, I've found.
Anyhow, as someone who reads things online but not in books, you sound like the opposite of me (I can read books in PDF, but it annoys me). Perhaps you're the target audience for a Kindle or Nook?
>>but damn if that isn't the *most* inspiring show about the universe I have ever seen! Immediately after watching it I couldn't stop thinking about space travel. I haven't read an actual book for about 8 years
No offense, but I think these two things might be correlated. Books are so much better than TV... I tried watching Cosmos on Netflix, and it's just not that good. Poor video quality, content is Sagan's trademarked breathy high level wankery, etc. There's a lot of better stuff out there these days. In books. I've been reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Greene, Physics of the Impossible (by the same guy that does the show on Science, Kaiko), but I'd really recommend Physics for the Rest of Us by Jones. It sounds like a For Dummies book, but it actually digs pretty deep into the structure of reality and the philosophical implications of science.
Again, not meaning to be a dick - I just think that Sagan is vastly overrated, and couldn't imagine going 8 years without reading a book.
What are it's properties then? All we've observed are anomalies in gravity and space-time. Positing some mysterious form of invisible matter isn't an explanation at all - all we still know is that there's these weird things going on with gravity and spacetime, and that our current theories are incomplete.
The Caprice Classic was famous for Sudden Acceleration long before the recent spate of Toyota incidents brought the issue into the national consciousness. The problem was caused by shorts in the cruise control system caused the car to accelerate to an arbitrarily high speed. And no, turning the cruise on or off didn't solve the problem (I flicked it when the car went out of control).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, it's totally fair to mandatorily throw a trucker in jail when someone plows their Miata into the rear of the truck and decapitates themself.
That said, I'm sure there's a ton of nutty greens that would love that policy, because trucks are the devil. Or would be, if they believed in the devil and not Gaia. Wait, is man the devil then? I get confused.
>>I guess everyone should just buy a 2005 Toyota Corolla and be done with it all. Oh wait...
Didn't we try that last summer with the Cash for Clunkers program?
And, as an added benefit, it turns out that Toyotas go even faster than expected.
>>and this is a bad thing... how?
Well, now that we (the American People) are majority shareholders in General Motors, I was kind of hoping to get our investment back.
But then again, I'm not sure anything can save GM.
>>Back in college we used to prank each other by sending in requests for magazines and advertisements.
Heh, and I thought I was the only one that did that.
I also signed my roommate up for a lot of very spammy mailing lists in Chinese. He could never figure out how to unsubscribe to them, because they were Chinese, and this was back in the day before mail filters became common. He went nuts and ended up stealing my router.
Which was totally awesome.
>>They were absolutely willing to hand over the machine, as long as they'd get it back.
I had a friend whose computer was confiscated for an investigation. He got it back 4 years later.
This was in the 90s, when a 4 year old computer was completely unusable. At least he got some of his old source code back, I guess.
>>When they get a batch of kids that don't give a shit about their education, the teachers seem down to the point of depression and talk about going back to school to get their PhD so they can teach college where people might be interested in the material.
Heh, yeah. My college roommate has been a high school math teacher for the last four years, and just last week quit so that he could go back to college so that he could get a master's and teach at a local community college, because none of the kids in his classes cared. He burned out.
But somehow I think your (and mine) personal experiences will convince the slashdotters on here that teachers (or the "system" or something) have set out to turn our kids into robots. Some conspiracy theory teacher named Gatto has said so on the internets, so it must be true.
>>Given that most of China's pollution happens in the interest of building cheap plastic crap for Americans, does that pollution count against communism or capitalism?
The cheap plastic crap counts against America and capitalism. The benzene spills into the rivers that make entire cities turn to bottled water? That counts against China and communism. (Issues with China not exactly being communistic aside.)
Seriously, look at what the USSR did to nature. Even to a non-green like me, it's abhorrent.
Excuse me.
The technical term is Hurd-Cylon, okay? Please use the correct term from now on.
Thanks,
Axilmar Stallman
>>And I've met people that describe themselves as Jesus Christ. Doesn't make it true.
So Ted Turner is a rich white conservative that goes around calling himself a progressive, admiring Castro, and serving on boards of left wing organizations. Do you have a secret tap into his mind or something?
>>Whether they are anti-education or pro-education in an anti-education way, the result is the same.
I didn't say they were anti-education. I said the system doesn't work well for our best teachers, who tend to be creative outside of the box thinkers. I understand what you're saying, but it's like saying that Microsoft is anti-technology, because they don't like outside of the box thinkers at Microsoft. (Which isn't exactly true, but I digress.) Sure, it's true that they eliminate AAA talent, but it doesn't mean that they don't make technology, or are anti-technology, or whatever. Schools are all trying to make kids as smart as possible (contrary to your thesis) - they just don't deal well with mavericks.
So you'd think that his crazy notion about building an Open Door Policy at the school site (contrary to the elitist Gatekeeper notion of AP classes, which says only smartest kids should take AP classes) would have vanished. To the contrary... from 2004-2008 I worked on an AP Incentive Program in San Diego County, one of whose primary goals was requiring all school sites to adopt Open Door Policies, to train counselors to stop blocking kids from enrolling in AP classes, and to get people to stop worrying so much about their "Pass Rate" on AP tests. It was very successful, and this was the influence of Jaime Escalante (may he rest in peace) still permeating to schools after all these years, 20-30 years later. (As I said, schools are very socially conservative.)
Side note: If you read the story about Jaime Escalante, it was the Teachers Union as much as anything that forced him out, because his program was TOO successful. Class sizes were too big, and so the Union "helpfully" stopped him from teaching. There's a lot of problems like this with our school system, don't get me wrong, but schools wanting their kids to become automatons is not one of them.
>>So? The "liberal media" is owned by rich white conservative men, yet is portrayed as liberal.
Ted Turner describes himself as a progressive. (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,465124,00.html) So it's both the reporters and the owners.
Hollywood is profoundly far-left, from top to bottom.
>>There often is a very real difference between those that work for an institution and their ideas (what you mentioned) and the ideas being pushed at the top (what he mentioned). So, your anecdote says nothing at all about his statement.
What I said was that teachers are all individually committed to making students independent thinkers, generally speaking. It's not like the situations with reporters and the media. Reporters have an editorial board to report to. Teachers are kings in their own classroom, subject only to pacing guides and state content standards. (And if you are going to try to say that pacing guides and state standards are where the secret zombification of our students is held, I'd recommend reading them some time - they all encourage higher-order thought.)
>>See, you proved my point. The "teacher" wanted one thing, and the "institution" wanted another, in fact the direct opposite.
The tallest blade of grass gets cut first.
As I said in my previous post, schools are socially conservative, and anyone doing anything different tend to either get booted out of the system or quit - and this includes most AAA teachers. This does not mean the schools are trying to turn our kids into robots. Rather, they can't deal with any teachers acting differently.
>>Public schools are not about education, its about creating dumbed down automatons who are easily controlled.
You know it's funny. I work teaching teachers technology, and I can't recall ever hearing a teacher say they really wished their kids would all be dumbed down automatons. Instead, you hear them all sharing positive stories about a kid that gets engaged with the subject matter and starts thinking on his own. Except for some really burned out teachers, this is pretty much universally true. They ALL want kids interested in a subject, capable of critical and independent thought, and being successful in life (ideally by going to college).
Now - inter-teacher rivalries and jealousies? Sure, I'll believe in that explanation as to why they undid the program at Garfield. But losing your entire cadre of teachers trained in his method probably had more to do with it than anything.
The only bit that I will agree with you in this regard is that schools tend to be very socially conservative institutions (by this I don't mean politically conservative, like Republicans, but rather resistant to change). AAA teachers tend to get kicked out of the system. I had Jan Gabay as my English teacher for the 9th and 12th grades - she was Teacher of the Year for the entire country in 1990-something, did a year traveling the country speaking on teaching, went back to Serra High for a couple years, and has since quit public schools to teach at the UC San Diego Charter School.
I also had Rick Halsey (IIRC, grandson of Admiral Bull Halsey) as a bio an AP Bio teacher, was an amazing teacher who took us into the canyons near the school to study actual plants and animals in the chaparral ecosystem. Every year he took his students on a week-long trip during Spring Break to go kayaking down the Colorado River or hiking in Anza Borrego, etc. He quit because the school was worried he was exposing them to too much liability risk.
Our system right now is rather dysfunctional. But teachers want kids to succeed - they don't want to produce dumb automatons. It's no longer the 1800s where we need to prep kids for work in the mills - "21st Century Skills" and all that is the current paradigm in education.
>>Why would I think that placing the control of both economic and political life into the hands of a political elite would be any better?
And who could say that putting power in the hands of a mob would be any better?
Historically speaking, nobody cares about the environment.
>>I was unaware that physics had shown that there wasn't a 4th dimension. I'm not sure how physics or physicists could prove this. Perhaps what you meant to say was that the math currently used by most physicists does not need a 4th dimension.
Actually, there's a good amount of work done trying to figure out if physics would work with more than 3+1 dimensions (i.e. 3 spatial, 1 time), and a lot of people are convinced only 3+1 would work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime#Privileged_character_of_3.2B1_spacetime
>>He makes mathematically sound arguments, and backs it up with common sense. I think the opinion of Donald Knuth, who has invented more patents than you could ever dream of, is very relevant.
He's also, apparently a religious troll. :)
>>The failure of communism speaks volumes about communism. It does not say a goddamn thing about capitalism one way or the other
Well, if you define scourge as the word system in the world for the environment, capitalism doesn't come close.
It's kind of a ridiculous claim anyway, since the political system is what really matters, not the economic one. That's why I said communist dictatorships. We can compare them against capitalist republics, and see that the republics win, hands down, on the environment.
I've been part of a corporation. But there's a huge difference between doing your fiduciary duty and claiming Sony is a huge unified company. It's not. There's a lot of autonomy in the different branches. So much so, they're effectively different companies entirely, with their own financial statements, ways of doing business, etc. That's why I thought it was silly to boycott the PS3 when Sony Music rootkit-ed people's PCs. The PS3 people are a different company, with their own specially retarded ways of doing business (like disabling PS2 game support).
That's one of my favorite web comics of all time. I got the Dungeons and Discourse t-shirt. =)
But yeah, it seems like the "switch" is not really turning off people's moral compass, like the summary suggests, but rather that people are using a different benchmark to judge actions, the old consequentialist vs. intentionalist debate. Both approaches are valid, and incorporated into our legal system. So it's not like these people became psychopaths or something, it just sounds like perhaps they weigh the factors differently.
In any event, it's not like just a random magnetic field is being applied - these sorts of things can isolate parts of the brain to be shut down, so it shouldn't be any surprise at all that the brain arrives at different calculations. Framing it as a "low level" calculation as the summary does is misleading.
Do you actually know how SONY is run? No, apparently not.
Each unit is more or less an autonomous company unto itself. There's a corporate culture about setting goals and such throughout the conglomerate, but that's about it.
If you don't believe me, talk to someone that works for SONY.
>>coupled with the dynamics of capitalism that have us in this hole.
Given that the USSR was the worst country in the world for the environment gives proof to the lie that capitalism is a global scourge.
Seriously, look sometime into what they did to their forests and rivers. I'm not a green, but it sickens me. And of course they emitted tons of pollution, CO2, and the occasional bit of nuclear fallout.
The reason Kyoto is a joke is because it sets CO2 targets based on the year before communism fell - all the eastern bloc countries now meet their targets now that they're no longer living in a communist dictatorship. (It's a joke since nothing would change, except us writing a 3 billion dollar cheque to Romania each year.)
>>That's fine. I knew I'd get people scoffing at my lack of reading - plenty of people do. I
Sorry if it came out negative. There's just so much good stuff out there in books, I've gone without TV for the last 10 years. Actually, I have TV now, but only because getting 50mpbs service from AT&T requires a bundled TV service. :/
Most people dislike books because they were forced to read them in school, and there's nothing worse than being made to read a book you hate (Wurthering Heights... eugh).
>>while reading I'll find myself thinking about other things still, and not really processing what I'm reading!
This is one of the best things! I keep a notepad handy and write down any random ideas I get while reading or listening to audiobooks in my car. Getting and processing new information is one of the best things to spur creativity, I've found.
Anyhow, as someone who reads things online but not in books, you sound like the opposite of me (I can read books in PDF, but it annoys me). Perhaps you're the target audience for a Kindle or Nook?
Anyhow, if you're interested in getting into fiction, you might be interested in reading Warbreaker online, by one of my favorite authors (he made the whole thing available online for free as he wrote it):
http://www.brandonsanderson.com/library/catalog/Warbreaker_Full-Books/
>>but damn if that isn't the *most* inspiring show about the universe I have ever seen! Immediately after watching it I couldn't stop thinking about space travel. I haven't read an actual book for about 8 years
No offense, but I think these two things might be correlated. Books are so much better than TV... I tried watching Cosmos on Netflix, and it's just not that good. Poor video quality, content is Sagan's trademarked breathy high level wankery, etc. There's a lot of better stuff out there these days. In books. I've been reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Greene, Physics of the Impossible (by the same guy that does the show on Science, Kaiko), but I'd really recommend Physics for the Rest of Us by Jones. It sounds like a For Dummies book, but it actually digs pretty deep into the structure of reality and the philosophical implications of science.
Again, not meaning to be a dick - I just think that Sagan is vastly overrated, and couldn't imagine going 8 years without reading a book.
>>It exists.
What are it's properties then? All we've observed are anomalies in gravity and space-time. Positing some mysterious form of invisible matter isn't an explanation at all - all we still know is that there's these weird things going on with gravity and spacetime, and that our current theories are incomplete.
And if you're lucky, you too can have a bunch of ignorant Slashdotters make fun of the incident as being caused between the chair and the floor. :p
>>Well, what was the cause then?
The Caprice Classic was famous for Sudden Acceleration long before the recent spate of Toyota incidents brought the issue into the national consciousness. The problem was caused by shorts in the cruise control system caused the car to accelerate to an arbitrarily high speed. And no, turning the cruise on or off didn't solve the problem (I flicked it when the car went out of control).
>>Queue the motortrend brake test? http://www.motortrend.com/features/consumer/112_1003_unintended_acceleration_test/braking_distance.html [motortrend.com]
Which is wrong, if you have vacuum-assist brakes. When you have the throttle open, your manifold vacuum gets eliminated, so you lose power braking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifold_vacuu, and from personal experience - the brakes felt like the car was off.
The brakes were in normal running shape (they get inspected when I get oil changes and the pads, etc., were all fine).