>>And so on. The fact that you think these middle-of-the-road positions are actually far left is a rather striking demonstration of just how far to the right our country has slid, as it is an indication that you have never been exposed to anyone whose ideas are truly leftist
Heh. I lived in the Bay Area for a number of years (where I got to listen to one friend of mine bash on Mother Theresa of all people), and was friends with some of the people in the Che Cafe Coop at UCSD. I have friends of every political alignment, religion, and know people in the majority of states in this country - I give workshops all over the country, so I have talked with people of as many different backgrounds as I think is humanly possible.
I know dyed-in-the-wool leftism when I see it, and I saw it in a lot of the liberal arts professors and grad students at UCSD. The survey I linked to (and there's plenty others) showed it was not just my one college, but a more general statement of fact. It's simply not debatable that liberal arts professors trend very heavily liberal in America.
And a job guarantee IS pretty far left. I'm not sure why you went off on potheads and the like, but I think you can certainly agree it's further left than the Democrat Party's current position. Hell, the job guarantee Wikipedia page talks about Marxism, social justice, and so forth. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee)
>>Undergrad at a branch campus of the University of TN, grad at UC Santa Cruz. There's a huge difference between the two
I'd imagine. Still, ego hammering typically takes place against incoming freshmen and sophomores (before they've learned enough to defend their beliefs), and I don't doubt that both sides engage in it - though my own personal experience with it has only been to witness far-left professors engaging in ego hammering. I'm just saying that might explain why you think conservative professors engage in it more.
Personally, when I teach, I do my damndest to present both sides of a story. Hell, when I do my twice-a-year lecture series on energy and global warming at a local college, and ask the students what source of power they'd build out themselves, they get frustrated because the primary sources I give them disagree rather heavily on how much each source of energy costs. If you ask hippie groups, nuclear is ridiculously expensive. Ask nuclear group, and it's cheaper than coal. Then I'll throw in California and Federal energy cost estimates as well. "Well, which is the real cost?" they ask. "Precisely," I say.
And yet even still, half of them will end up copying my libertarian viewpoints by the end of the lecture series. It'd be much higher if I presented an intentionally biased viewpoint, and smashed dissenters into submission, as my liberal studies profs did.
>>Much like the Peace Corps, the entire field is kind of self selecting for liberals and ultra-liberals.:-)
It's both that, and that they'll actively discriminate against you if you don't hold to their liberal-orthodox views. The Lawrence Summers case (http://www.slate.com/id/2112570/) had the most publicity, but in working in education I see it all the fucking time. If you don't believe me, announce you're a member of the Tea Party and see how many jobs you can get in academia. Call it a social science experiment. =)
>>As for "billions of dollars", well there's nothing polite that can be said about such a deliberate exaggeration.
From the references you apparently never bothered to read: "The Calico plant was also under development by Tessera until the company sold the plant last month to K Road Sun, a subsidiary of New York investment firm K Road Power. Tessera has been struggling to find funding for its plants, which cost about $2 billion."
Care to retract your statement?
>>>> A 500MW plant supplies enough power for 250,000 homes. >>Not relevant at all when the blocked projects you mentioned are a fraction of the size.
Mojave Solar is 553MW, the Ivanpah plant is 392MW, the First Solar Stateline project is 300MW, Blythe is a 968MW plant...
Unfortunately, the more common SSD failure mode is turning it on one day and it doesn't work. As I mentioned elsewhere, I read through thousands of comments on Newegg looking both at the overall score and the 1-egg ratings, to see if failure patterns emerged. One I remembered was a drive that would arbitrarily corrupt its data without a firmware update, but the firmware update also would wipe the drive...
>>It is worth noting that most of these failures do not seem to be wear related. There must be some severe quality issues where they build these things.
Exactly. Before buying my SSD, I read thousands of comments on Newegg, looking both at the highest average ratings and also filtering down to the "1 egg" rating to see what the reasons were for the low scores. If a pattern emerged ("Drive suddenly died" or "Firmware update destroyed data on the drive, and drive dies without firmware update") then I'd skip it and move on.
Normally I only care about performance in these sorts of things, but since SSDs have such a high failure rate, it became a primary criterion for me.
>>Gay marriage is a fairly simple issue. A minority of Americans are still being denied the legal and financial benefits of marriage because, until very recently, the majority of Americans preferred to treat them like second class citizens. The fact that we haven't yet corrected this injustice is a national embarrassment.
Here in California, it's been illegal for a while now to deny them legal and financial benefits. The only debate is over the term marriage (vs. civil partnership). The complications I referred to are regarding freedom of religion - people have been sued or fired here in California for not wanting to marry gay people. The recent gay marriage law passed in New York addressed this (you can't sue a Catholic church, for example, for refusing to marry a gay couple) but here in California there are no such protections.
While I understand that atheists rather paradoxically hate freedom of religion ("Freedom of religion means freedom from religion!" as their bumper stickers say), it is a fundamental part of our republic, like it or not.
>>You can't blame a wide range of problems on small disconnected groups with very little influence and expect to be taken seriously.
As I said, costing companies billions of dollars is, prima facie, having a great deal of influence in the state.
>>Who gives a shit if they stopped a project that generates less power than a Boeing 747 at takeoff.
A 500MW plant supplies enough power for 250,000 homes. More importantly, the state has a mandate to buy a certain, increasing, percentage of its power from green sources in the upcoming decade, and not being able to build out green power plants is going to throw that whole system into chaos. You think Enron was bad? Just wait until the state is forced to pay 100c/kWh for green energy on the spot market.
That's power and influence.
>>Did the Seirra Club black out San Diego? Obviously not.
There's more than just one problem with the power grid here in California, obviously.
>>Or else politics, finance, media and a pile of other grown up things (eg. crime) instead of your childish conspiracy theory of shadowy environmentalists with vast amounts of power stopping progress at every turn.
Give me a name, or shut the fuck up.
Sierra Club's name is on the various lawsuits I'm talking about.
>>Enron was too long ago? Bullshit
It went bankrupt in 2001. It's not sufficient to explain the lawsuits blocking green power plants since then.
I was trying to be serious and then YOU dumped that shit on things and now you are going on about "tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories" as if the Enron story wasn't in just about every news source on the planet. In fact I'm arguing the opposite to what you pretend your strawman of me is saying - that there's not some shadowy environmental conspiracy with vast amounts of power stopping progress at every turn - now that's the childish tinfoil hat conspiracy theory you pushed out that I'm trying to wean you away from! Grow up and don't pretend that those that are trying to talk you out of your delusion have an identical delusion of their own.
You've been repeatedly saying that the environmental lawsuits (which have successfully blocked many green power plants) are done by people who have "no real power", which is a contradiction. Costing companies billions is power. You've also said to look for the real people with power, which sounds like tinfoil-hat territory. If the Sierra Club is not actually blocking these power plants, then whom, pray tell, are the real power brokers here?
Enron hasn't been around for a decade, you need to update your hand-waving a bit.
>>Sure, there are a few radical leftist professors out thereâ"mostly in places like U.C. Berkeleyâ"but they are few and far between. Most college professors are nowhere near that far left of center, and the ones who are generally don't last long.
88% of college professors support increasing environmental protection even at the expense of jobs, and 65% support guaranteed jobs for all Americans. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html) So the norm for professors is pretty damn far left-wing. Nobody blinks at any of the ultra-left wing shenanigans that professors get up to unless they get caught red-handed engaged in outright academic misconduct, like Ward Churchill.
From the same survey: "The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent)."
I neither said nor implied any such thing. I live my life in a relatively conservative fashion. I have no objection to anyone else who does so. What makes me socially liberal is that I don't demand that everyone else live their lives the way I live mine. The social conservatives generally do. That, by definition, is intolerance in its purest form, and in my experience, those sorts of attitudes do not survive very long except in relative isolation.
Hmm, other than fundies (who I can't stand) by and large conservatives are happy to let people do whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt others. I don't know any conservatives that would call for making sodomy a crime again, for example. (Gay marriage is a more complicated issue, that doesn't fall cleanly along philosophical lines.)
Out of curiosity, where did you go to college? I went to UC San Diego, which is actually a fairly conservative school (engineering is pre-eminent in the school), but even still the ultra-liberal professors didn't seem to hold back at all at smashing conservative students in class, and trying to create clone armies of themselves from the impressionable incoming freshman. These classes were even mandatory in some of the colleges, like Thurgood Marshall.
>>So that's it? You've just been pretending to be very stupid in these posts just to string me along for some reason? What a shallow little person you are.
No, I'm saying that the obvious explanation is probably the right one, and you haven't provided the slightest amount of evidence that there's some shadow brokers behind the Sierra Club lawsuits that are blocking the development of new power plants in California.
I love tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but other than waving your hands, you haven't been able to explain why the environmental lawsuits have been so successful if they have "no power" as you say.
If they attend a public school, they tend to become less socially conservative. The very nature of a melting pot institution of higher learning inherently increases tolerance because it exposes you to a wide range of cultures and perspectives. Being in an environment where you encounter people who are different from you makes it harder to dehumanize people who disagree with you. This has nothing to do with the teachers or the institution, and everything to do with the fact that it is a microcosm of the world rather than a homogeneous group.
For someone who claims to have been exposed to a lot of ideas, it's pretty clear you are a bigoted asshat.
In the paragraph quoted above, you state that conservativism is essentially nothing more than close-minded intolerance bred through insular cultural groups, obviously a defect that doesn't survive contact with other people.
Modern conservatism is nothing more than a belief in smaller governments and lower taxes. Bigotry is not a part of it; by contrast, as your post above shows, hatred and intolerance are much more predominant in liberal thinking. Radical liberal professors will hunt down and fire anyone that doesn't buy in to their groupthink - conservative professors, by contrast, are much more live and let live people, which is why there's so few of them left in the liberal arts.
>>for example, generations of people wearing corsets or performing physical exercises do not in any way affect the distribution of body shapes, and the fact that appendix mostly does nothing useful, does not affect its shape or existence in modern humans.
A woman eating a corset would probably eat less, which would lead to skinnier kids and grandkids.
Look, as I've said repeatedly, I'm not saying that Lamarck was right (by any stretch of the imagination) - just that there are some cases of inheritance of acquired traits, which is another name for what we call Lamarckism.
>>The difference was (in general), a liberal professor is willing to accept that you have a different viewpoint.
LOL Oh, you funny.
Liberal professors are the most dogmatic, biased, unwilling to listen, blockheaded commies stuck in the '60s. Their entire goal is to create a clone army of likeminded Che-worshipping fuckheads, who don't have any facts on their side, but are even more so fanatically convinced that they're right. I had a girlfriend in high school that ran through one of their summer bridge programs for incoming minority students, and while she had never uttered a single racist word before in her life, after she got out of the program, she hated white people and joined the Voz Frontera (hispanic communist newspaper on campus.)
Liberal professors downgrade papers for anyone that disagrees with them, and are more interested in ideology than truth. Anyone that disagrees with them in class gets attacked - again, with the goal of crushing the egos of students and creating their beatnik clone army. It's sad to watch, too, as many of the objections raised in my philosophy classes were good ones, but the freshmen students simply didn't have the background or debating skills to argue against the professor, who would tend to dismissively say, "Oh, well, nobody has believed THAT in hundreds of years. It's *well known* to be wrong." It was sad and interesting at the same time, as it was obvious the professor didn't really have a good counterargument, but thought it important to crush the ego of the dissenting student anyway.
Conservative professors, by contrast, tend to hide their politics under a pile of rocks.
Of course, I went to college in California. Your mileage may vary elsewhere, of course.
Largely for state schools it's coming from reduced income from the states general budget. Somewhere along the line we bought into both "everyone needs a college degree" and "government shouldn't do anything" and so we have an entire generation that is going to be saddled by mountains of debt just to be able to get a job. It's kind of the company store all over but at a macro level instead of just in small towns.
As always, actually looking at numbers is essential to understanding reality. It turns out its a tradeoff between how many students we subsidize college for, and how much we subsidize, keeping state subsidy levels constant.
In other words, if we want to pay for twice as many kids to go to state college on the same budget, the state subsidy level has to drop in half.
It's amazing how many people don't understand this relationship: xy = z. (X = # of students, Y = subsidy per student, Z = total state budget.)
As much as people liked to complain about tuition hikes at my old school, or nostalgically reminisce about the 1970s where students didn't pay any in-state tuition at all at my school (UC San Diego), they don't realize that without the massive expansions in enrollment, they would have had a much lower chance of getting in.
So the possible solutions are: 1) Reduce the number of kids in state colleges and lower tuition. 2) Expand the number of kids in state colleges and raise tuition 3) Increase state funding levels. 4) Expand corporate or government grant/donor levels 5) Get non-residents kids into the school to help subsidize resident kids.
Naturally, the communists on Slashdot will advocate for #3 (also known as the easy way out), which utterly disregards the fact that our state is beyond bankrupt right now.
>>New species can not be produced by keeping genome the same and modifying its expression, because without a chain of mutations genome remains compatible. As I said, nothing like Lamarck.
Why are you so focused on speciation? The main point of what we call Lamarckism is the so-called "Inheritance of Acquired Traits" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_of_acquired_traits), which is exactly what happens in certain situations.
>>In other words, this does not make Lamarck any less wrong, his theory was a really bad guess.
I didn't say that Lamarck was right, only that he wasn't entirely wrong. He was right that environmental factors can influence succeeding generations. He's right in a small way, which is why epigenetics is called Neo-Lamarckianism by that reference above.
>>I'm astonished that you are blaming the excesses of Enron et al on a bunch of people that have to push very hard for years to get a traffic light in front of school approved.
My community got a traffic light built within a year or so after a kid got killed in the neighborhood. I don't know what this has to do with Enron - I guess you say they kill children?
>>I'll say that the actions of the Sierra Club and similar when they oppose large power generation projects are almost completely irrelevant and you need to look deeper into who else is opposing the project and what real political power they have.
Fine, give me a reasonable alternative hypothesis to the Sierra Club successfully costing energy companies billions of dollars.
Did these shadow brokers also tie themselves to the Diablo Canyon Plant, to get that one delayed by seven years? Or was it again a bunch of dirty hippies to blame?
>>I just think you are a bit naive on this issue
Environmental groups have tremendous power and influence. To claim otherwise is to ignore the last 40 years of history. Our country has done things, good things, that it can never do again due to environmental lawsuits.
>>As I tried to indicate above, pick an issue that a lot of people think is very important and you'll see that those on the political margins really don't have much influence at all. They are a handy "other" that those who actually have the influence can blame.
Are you seriously claiming that the Sierra Club (and likeminded idiots) have had no impact on the building of new power plants here in California? Yes or no, please.
I provided several links for you to read on the issue - you can go beyond those and read further if you don't like my references.
Alt energy is a huge issue for the state, especially since we have a mandate to build renewables into our mix. Nobody benefited from the lawsuits and plant shutdowns/relocations other than a dozen tortoises or so.
Slashdot Mirror
>>German for new Terinos
This is Italy, they all drive Gran Terinos.
>>dual it and have 2 one way tunnels
Just make sure you paint signal directional markings to provide optimal signal transfer, like a Denon ethernet cable.
>>And so on. The fact that you think these middle-of-the-road positions are actually far left is a rather striking demonstration of just how far to the right our country has slid, as it is an indication that you have never been exposed to anyone whose ideas are truly leftist
Heh. I lived in the Bay Area for a number of years (where I got to listen to one friend of mine bash on Mother Theresa of all people), and was friends with some of the people in the Che Cafe Coop at UCSD. I have friends of every political alignment, religion, and know people in the majority of states in this country - I give workshops all over the country, so I have talked with people of as many different backgrounds as I think is humanly possible.
I know dyed-in-the-wool leftism when I see it, and I saw it in a lot of the liberal arts professors and grad students at UCSD. The survey I linked to (and there's plenty others) showed it was not just my one college, but a more general statement of fact. It's simply not debatable that liberal arts professors trend very heavily liberal in America.
And a job guarantee IS pretty far left. I'm not sure why you went off on potheads and the like, but I think you can certainly agree it's further left than the Democrat Party's current position. Hell, the job guarantee Wikipedia page talks about Marxism, social justice, and so forth. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_guarantee)
>>Undergrad at a branch campus of the University of TN, grad at UC Santa Cruz. There's a huge difference between the two
I'd imagine. Still, ego hammering typically takes place against incoming freshmen and sophomores (before they've learned enough to defend their beliefs), and I don't doubt that both sides engage in it - though my own personal experience with it has only been to witness far-left professors engaging in ego hammering. I'm just saying that might explain why you think conservative professors engage in it more.
Personally, when I teach, I do my damndest to present both sides of a story. Hell, when I do my twice-a-year lecture series on energy and global warming at a local college, and ask the students what source of power they'd build out themselves, they get frustrated because the primary sources I give them disagree rather heavily on how much each source of energy costs. If you ask hippie groups, nuclear is ridiculously expensive. Ask nuclear group, and it's cheaper than coal. Then I'll throw in California and Federal energy cost estimates as well. "Well, which is the real cost?" they ask. "Precisely," I say.
And yet even still, half of them will end up copying my libertarian viewpoints by the end of the lecture series. It'd be much higher if I presented an intentionally biased viewpoint, and smashed dissenters into submission, as my liberal studies profs did.
>>Much like the Peace Corps, the entire field is kind of self selecting for liberals and ultra-liberals. :-)
It's both that, and that they'll actively discriminate against you if you don't hold to their liberal-orthodox views. The Lawrence Summers case (http://www.slate.com/id/2112570/) had the most publicity, but in working in education I see it all the fucking time. If you don't believe me, announce you're a member of the Tea Party and see how many jobs you can get in academia. Call it a social science experiment. =)
>>As for "billions of dollars", well there's nothing polite that can be said about such a deliberate exaggeration.
From the references you apparently never bothered to read:
"The Calico plant was also under development by Tessera until the company sold the plant last month to K Road Sun, a subsidiary of New York investment firm K Road Power. Tessera has been struggling to find funding for its plants, which cost about $2 billion."
Care to retract your statement?
>>>> A 500MW plant supplies enough power for 250,000 homes.
>>Not relevant at all when the blocked projects you mentioned are a fraction of the size.
Mojave Solar is 553MW, the Ivanpah plant is 392MW, the First Solar Stateline project is 300MW, Blythe is a 968MW plant...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_plants_in_the_Mojave_Desert
Care to retract your statement?
>>Buy a new SSD? SSD failure is predictable.
Write failures are predictable and reportable.
Unfortunately, the more common SSD failure mode is turning it on one day and it doesn't work. As I mentioned elsewhere, I read through thousands of comments on Newegg looking both at the overall score and the 1-egg ratings, to see if failure patterns emerged. One I remembered was a drive that would arbitrarily corrupt its data without a firmware update, but the firmware update also would wipe the drive...
>>It is worth noting that most of these failures do not seem to be wear related. There must be some severe quality issues where they build these things.
Exactly. Before buying my SSD, I read thousands of comments on Newegg, looking both at the highest average ratings and also filtering down to the "1 egg" rating to see what the reasons were for the low scores. If a pattern emerged ("Drive suddenly died" or "Firmware update destroyed data on the drive, and drive dies without firmware update") then I'd skip it and move on.
Normally I only care about performance in these sorts of things, but since SSDs have such a high failure rate, it became a primary criterion for me.
>>Gay marriage is a fairly simple issue. A minority of Americans are still being denied the legal and financial benefits of marriage because, until very recently, the majority of Americans preferred to treat them like second class citizens. The fact that we haven't yet corrected this injustice is a national embarrassment.
Here in California, it's been illegal for a while now to deny them legal and financial benefits. The only debate is over the term marriage (vs. civil partnership). The complications I referred to are regarding freedom of religion - people have been sued or fired here in California for not wanting to marry gay people. The recent gay marriage law passed in New York addressed this (you can't sue a Catholic church, for example, for refusing to marry a gay couple) but here in California there are no such protections.
While I understand that atheists rather paradoxically hate freedom of religion ("Freedom of religion means freedom from religion!" as their bumper stickers say), it is a fundamental part of our republic, like it or not.
>>You can't blame a wide range of problems on small disconnected groups with very little influence and expect to be taken seriously.
As I said, costing companies billions of dollars is, prima facie, having a great deal of influence in the state.
>>Who gives a shit if they stopped a project that generates less power than a Boeing 747 at takeoff.
A 500MW plant supplies enough power for 250,000 homes. More importantly, the state has a mandate to buy a certain, increasing, percentage of its power from green sources in the upcoming decade, and not being able to build out green power plants is going to throw that whole system into chaos. You think Enron was bad? Just wait until the state is forced to pay 100c/kWh for green energy on the spot market.
That's power and influence.
>>Did the Seirra Club black out San Diego? Obviously not.
There's more than just one problem with the power grid here in California, obviously.
>>Or else politics, finance, media and a pile of other grown up things (eg. crime) instead of your childish conspiracy theory of shadowy environmentalists with vast amounts of power stopping progress at every turn.
Give me a name, or shut the fuck up.
Sierra Club's name is on the various lawsuits I'm talking about.
>>Enron was too long ago? Bullshit
It went bankrupt in 2001. It's not sufficient to explain the lawsuits blocking green power plants since then.
You've been repeatedly saying that the environmental lawsuits (which have successfully blocked many green power plants) are done by people who have "no real power", which is a contradiction. Costing companies billions is power. You've also said to look for the real people with power, which sounds like tinfoil-hat territory. If the Sierra Club is not actually blocking these power plants, then whom, pray tell, are the real power brokers here?
Enron hasn't been around for a decade, you need to update your hand-waving a bit.
>>Sure, there are a few radical leftist professors out thereâ"mostly in places like U.C. Berkeleyâ"but they are few and far between. Most college professors are nowhere near that far left of center, and the ones who are generally don't last long.
88% of college professors support increasing environmental protection even at the expense of jobs, and 65% support guaranteed jobs for all Americans. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html) So the norm for professors is pretty damn far left-wing. Nobody blinks at any of the ultra-left wing shenanigans that professors get up to unless they get caught red-handed engaged in outright academic misconduct, like Ward Churchill.
From the same survey:
"The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent)."
Hmm, other than fundies (who I can't stand) by and large conservatives are happy to let people do whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt others. I don't know any conservatives that would call for making sodomy a crime again, for example. (Gay marriage is a more complicated issue, that doesn't fall cleanly along philosophical lines.)
Out of curiosity, where did you go to college? I went to UC San Diego, which is actually a fairly conservative school (engineering is pre-eminent in the school), but even still the ultra-liberal professors didn't seem to hold back at all at smashing conservative students in class, and trying to create clone armies of themselves from the impressionable incoming freshman. These classes were even mandatory in some of the colleges, like Thurgood Marshall.
>>So that's it? You've just been pretending to be very stupid in these posts just to string me along for some reason? What a shallow little person you are.
No, I'm saying that the obvious explanation is probably the right one, and you haven't provided the slightest amount of evidence that there's some shadow brokers behind the Sierra Club lawsuits that are blocking the development of new power plants in California.
I love tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but other than waving your hands, you haven't been able to explain why the environmental lawsuits have been so successful if they have "no power" as you say.
>>What is being proposed here is not new and in fact has been implemented on other devices before.
Right. And as a friend of mine pointed out in her Defcon talk this year, Android Intents are open to a wide range of abuse.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~emc/slides/SevenWaysToHangYourselfWithGoogleAndroid.pdf
>>But there's one thing we haven't seen you meantioned in your comments, all the supposed keylogging and password stealing.
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it is a massive security threat.
For someone who claims to have been exposed to a lot of ideas, it's pretty clear you are a bigoted asshat.
In the paragraph quoted above, you state that conservativism is essentially nothing more than close-minded intolerance bred through insular cultural groups, obviously a defect that doesn't survive contact with other people.
Modern conservatism is nothing more than a belief in smaller governments and lower taxes. Bigotry is not a part of it; by contrast, as your post above shows, hatred and intolerance are much more predominant in liberal thinking. Radical liberal professors will hunt down and fire anyone that doesn't buy in to their groupthink - conservative professors, by contrast, are much more live and let live people, which is why there's so few of them left in the liberal arts.
>>for example, generations of people wearing corsets or performing physical exercises do not in any way affect the distribution of body shapes, and the fact that appendix mostly does nothing useful, does not affect its shape or existence in modern humans.
A woman eating a corset would probably eat less, which would lead to skinnier kids and grandkids.
Look, as I've said repeatedly, I'm not saying that Lamarck was right (by any stretch of the imagination) - just that there are some cases of inheritance of acquired traits, which is another name for what we call Lamarckism.
>>Well, buildings can be named after benefactors whereas the faculty members inconveniently have already been named by their parents.
The Lucasian Chair of Mathematics would like to have words with you.
The position was named after this guy, who donated money to Camridge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Lucas_(politician)
>>The difference was (in general), a liberal professor is willing to accept that you have a different viewpoint.
LOL Oh, you funny.
Liberal professors are the most dogmatic, biased, unwilling to listen, blockheaded commies stuck in the '60s. Their entire goal is to create a clone army of likeminded Che-worshipping fuckheads, who don't have any facts on their side, but are even more so fanatically convinced that they're right. I had a girlfriend in high school that ran through one of their summer bridge programs for incoming minority students, and while she had never uttered a single racist word before in her life, after she got out of the program, she hated white people and joined the Voz Frontera (hispanic communist newspaper on campus.)
Liberal professors downgrade papers for anyone that disagrees with them, and are more interested in ideology than truth. Anyone that disagrees with them in class gets attacked - again, with the goal of crushing the egos of students and creating their beatnik clone army. It's sad to watch, too, as many of the objections raised in my philosophy classes were good ones, but the freshmen students simply didn't have the background or debating skills to argue against the professor, who would tend to dismissively say, "Oh, well, nobody has believed THAT in hundreds of years. It's *well known* to be wrong." It was sad and interesting at the same time, as it was obvious the professor didn't really have a good counterargument, but thought it important to crush the ego of the dissenting student anyway.
Conservative professors, by contrast, tend to hide their politics under a pile of rocks.
Of course, I went to college in California. Your mileage may vary elsewhere, of course.
As always, actually looking at numbers is essential to understanding reality. It turns out its a tradeoff between how many students we subsidize college for, and how much we subsidize, keeping state subsidy levels constant.
In other words, if we want to pay for twice as many kids to go to state college on the same budget, the state subsidy level has to drop in half.
It's amazing how many people don't understand this relationship: xy = z. (X = # of students, Y = subsidy per student, Z = total state budget.)
As much as people liked to complain about tuition hikes at my old school, or nostalgically reminisce about the 1970s where students didn't pay any in-state tuition at all at my school (UC San Diego), they don't realize that without the massive expansions in enrollment, they would have had a much lower chance of getting in.
So the possible solutions are:
1) Reduce the number of kids in state colleges and lower tuition.
2) Expand the number of kids in state colleges and raise tuition
3) Increase state funding levels.
4) Expand corporate or government grant/donor levels
5) Get non-residents kids into the school to help subsidize resident kids.
Naturally, the communists on Slashdot will advocate for #3 (also known as the easy way out), which utterly disregards the fact that our state is beyond bankrupt right now.
>>New species can not be produced by keeping genome the same and modifying its expression, because without a chain of mutations genome remains compatible. As I said, nothing like Lamarck.
Why are you so focused on speciation? The main point of what we call Lamarckism is the so-called "Inheritance of Acquired Traits" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritance_of_acquired_traits), which is exactly what happens in certain situations.
I'm hardly alone in drawing the parallels between epigenetics and Lamarckism. Hell MIT researchers even call it as such - http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/22061/
>>In other words, this does not make Lamarck any less wrong, his theory was a really bad guess.
I didn't say that Lamarck was right, only that he wasn't entirely wrong. He was right that environmental factors can influence succeeding generations. He's right in a small way, which is why epigenetics is called Neo-Lamarckianism by that reference above.
>>I'm astonished that you are blaming the excesses of Enron et al on a bunch of people that have to push very hard for years to get a traffic light in front of school approved.
My community got a traffic light built within a year or so after a kid got killed in the neighborhood. I don't know what this has to do with Enron - I guess you say they kill children?
>>I'll say that the actions of the Sierra Club and similar when they oppose large power generation projects are almost completely irrelevant and you need to look deeper into who else is opposing the project and what real political power they have.
Fine, give me a reasonable alternative hypothesis to the Sierra Club successfully costing energy companies billions of dollars.
Did these shadow brokers also tie themselves to the Diablo Canyon Plant, to get that one delayed by seven years? Or was it again a bunch of dirty hippies to blame?
>>I just think you are a bit naive on this issue
Environmental groups have tremendous power and influence. To claim otherwise is to ignore the last 40 years of history. Our country has done things, good things, that it can never do again due to environmental lawsuits.
>>As I tried to indicate above, pick an issue that a lot of people think is very important and you'll see that those on the political margins really don't have much influence at all. They are a handy "other" that those who actually have the influence can blame.
Are you seriously claiming that the Sierra Club (and likeminded idiots) have had no impact on the building of new power plants here in California? Yes or no, please.
I provided several links for you to read on the issue - you can go beyond those and read further if you don't like my references.
Alt energy is a huge issue for the state, especially since we have a mandate to build renewables into our mix. Nobody benefited from the lawsuits and plant shutdowns/relocations other than a dozen tortoises or so.
Sigh... apparently grandkids and Danish are not part of the Android dictionary...
Not just the pregnant woman's kid, but also their grandiose are born underweight if you starve the pregnant mother.
Was a study on this a few years back on Rakish women starved by the Nazis.
>>Those people you think have political power don't.
If they get plants shut down or moved - which they have - they have power. Read the references.