Yeah, I honestly think that Andy Schlafly rebelled against his momma, and the whole conservapedia thing is just a giant troll against the conservatives he hates.
Oddly enough, most Conservatives believe Einstein et al were correct about it, which puts Andy in a weird place of having to deal with conservative physics teachers and engineers (read the talk pages for relativity, they're hilarious), ultimately responding to their reasonable and reasoned responses with "Well, I don't know... but I'm not convinced."
And yeah, Andy hates relativity because it led to moral relativism (and it did contribute to this, actually, if you study the history of philosophy in the 20th century), as if a vaguely-related philosophy has anything the fuck to do with physics.
Palin made the point that she was technically right about it, and technically she was. The American colonists at the time referred to themselves as subjects of the British Empire. Lexington and Concord took place in April 1775, over a year before the Declaration of Independence. Read what Hancock and the others had to say in the summer of 1775 in the Olive Branch Petition:
"The union between our Mother Country and these colonies, and the energy of mild and just government, produced benefits so remarkably important, and afforded such an assurance of their permanency and increase, that the wonder and envy of other Nations were excited, while they beheld Great Britain riseing to a power the most extraordinary the world had ever known."
"Your Majestys ministers persevering in their measures and proceeding to open hostilities for enforcing them, have compelled us to arm in our own defence, and have engaged us in a controversy so peculiarly abhorrent to the affection of your still faithful colonists, that when we consider whom we must oppose in this contest, and if it continues, what may be the consequences, our own particular misfortunes are accounted by us, only as parts of our distress.
Knowing, to what violent resentments and incurable animosities, civil discords are apt to exasperate and inflame the contending parties, we think ourselves required by indispensable obligations to Almighty God, to your Majesty, to our fellow subjects, and to ourselves, immediately to use all the means in our power not incompatible with our safety, for stopping the further effusion of blood, and for averting the impending calamities that threaten the British Empire."
It's hilarious that all the people criticizing Palin thinks that the colonists at the time were "Americans". America didn't exist yet, you dumbfucks.
>>There are at least a hundred definitions of "terrorism" and they all include violence or the threat of violence.
They certainly spread terror among all the Call of Duty players - my cheevos!!! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! (Ok, well, they're trophies on the PS3, but still.)
They spread terror at Sony - let's hope their president gets axed for his ridiculous persecution of GeoHot, and his subpoenaing of all the donors to his legal fund.
But yeah, "terrorists" is a bit of an extreme label. Maybe "bullies" would apply better. To both sides.
Giving nukes to the commies kept the Warsaw Pact intact, and led to the deaths of millions of people from communist persecution. The USSR wouldn't go to war with America if we had nukes and they didn't. And I'm sure the survivors of Pearl Harbor were happy that Harry Dexter White (responsible for the Morgenthau Memo) provoked Japan.
It's tough to do what-ifs with history, but the point is that it's suicide to allow known spies into your government, let alone your country. The CPUSA was part of COMINTERN, and the CPUSA was required by their charter to conduct espionage on their own country - this is the very definition of treason. By no means am I saying the HUAC investigations were perfect, but there was a valid reason for them - hunting down traitors in our government. There were quite a few. (Note that in modern times, historians tried their best to make the CPUSA out to be a happy hippie group that just wanted workers' rights, but Venona destroyed all that politically correct nonsense.)
Somehow equating the HUAC to Stalin slaughtering his own people is like comparing the local poison-pill town gossip with a mass murderer. Sure, they're both bad, but they're not equally bad.
>>It should not be illegal for Communists, Nazis, or other 'undesirables' to seek and hold public office in the US
Oh, you funny. Inviting people who have sworn an oath to destroy our country into public office? Bad enough what Harry Dexter White did (provoke us into fighting Japan instead of potentially negotiating a peace) or Klaus Fuchs (passing nuclear secrets to the soviets), or any of the others.
>>Spies from behind the Iron Curtain should have been ferreted out mercilessly, sent welcome baskets, and asked if there was anything we could do to make their stay more comfortable.
Spies from the Iron Curtain should have been banned from public office, exiled, or imprisoned, depending on the severity of their deeds. Since the CPUSA was part of the espionage apparatus of COMINTERN, that's what the HUAC was all about. It was not about persecuting an innocent minority party or harmless worker's rights group. They literally had political and military espionage as part of their charter. They could have all been exiled or shot for treason.
>>It's important to hold law enforcement accountable and I think video is a good first step.
Video is a good first step, but there is NO second step.
My family was friends with Sam Knott before he died, and he devoted his life to reforming corrupt practices and stopping cops that abuse their power (http://www.sandiegomagazine.com/media/San-Diego-Magazine/February-2004/The-Killer-Cop/), but it didn't make much of a difference in the end.
Basically, cops are above the law. It shouldn't be that way, but that's how it is.
A cop went speeding around my neighborhood at 55MPH (in a 25 zone) and ran over a guy, killing him. Not chasing anyone, just driving fast. Court gave him a slap on the wrist, and nothing else happened to him. Anyone else would have been tried with involuntary manslaughter.
Other friends have been abused by cops in various ways, and have fun dealing with the police complaints bureau (it's the one that suspiciously looks like a trash can next to the phone). At least there is one now - Sam found that there had been numerous complaints about the CHP officer that killed his daughter, but the police simply ignored them. At least they pretend to care now.
Most cops are good, but there's also some bad, and some ugly ones.
>>We had no business claiming to be any better than the Soviets as long as we had institutions with names like the "House Unamerican Activities Committee."
We were absolutely better (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) than the USSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#Arrest_and_death) during this time period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge#Bukharin.27s_confession) and during any other time period.
Not that America is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but your statement putting us on moral parity with the communists is just painfully naive.
It's hard to say if America is more dictatorial today than in the past... you could make arguments either way, as in some areas we're much more free (the internet has seen to that) and in others less so (papers please).
Citation needed on providing arms to "the rest of Central America" - especially since you apparently think that Colombia is in Central America. It is actually in South America.
>>The fun thing is that you can do this with photons which were gravitational lensed around both sides of a galaxy and *still* collapse the wave function. Your measurement instantly changes something which happened a billion years ago (the lensing).
Even weirder? You can undo the wavefunction collapse, so the photon that you were about to measure appears instead two billion light years away.
Sorry, AC, you're trying to convince me of something that I've spent a long ass time studying (the cost of power).
I actually wrote part of the wikipedia page you just quoted to me. So, you know, thanks.
Estimates vary quite wildly by region and the person doing the estimation. Estimates can also involve a certain amount of crystal ball gazing - one of the reasons why some of the estimates instead of trying to predict the future, they look at costs of existing plants.
Go ahead and look at *all* the numbers on the page you just quoted to me, re-read them, and then tell me wind is cheaper than nuclear. The 90% capacity factor is US industrywide, BTW.
>>Judging by the labels the entire state of California seems to cause cancer:-D
Prop 65? One of the biggest jokes of a law, ever. We now have, as you say, spammed signs everywhere saying that the area may (or may not) contain cancer causing agents (of whose natural and severity is completely unknown). There's no penalty to putting up a sign even if you don't know if there's a cancer causing substance in the area, so most businesses do it to CYA. I asked once when I was working in an office what the chemicals were, precisely, and they had no idea.
>>I've never quite understood this type of "single issue" consumer
While I was flying out of McCarran on USAirways, the plane next to mine caught fire. Was fun and scary to watch all the fire trucks come out and put out a fire on a (thankfully) empty plane. Those people didn't get home to Santa Barbara that night.
Then on my flight, a railing that was part of the luggage rack broke off during takeoff, and hit the face of the woman sitting behind me, bloodying her. The flight attendance ran up, said "Oh my goodness!" and pushed the railing back up into place. Which then fell and hit the woman in the face again.
That might make me a single issue consumer, but after that experience (or pair of experiences), I will only fly USAir as the last resort.
Well, to be fair, I've had lots of bad experiences with USAir, but that was the event that put it over the top for me.
As far as the checked baggage thing goes, it turns out it's costing taxpayers $250M a year in additional TSA fees (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/04/carry-luggage-costing-taxpayers-tsa-millions-year/)
In other words, the entire thing is a boondoggle that not only doesn't make any sense, but also clogs up all the overhead bin space and delays flights. One guy sitting with me absolutely refused to gate check his bag after all the overhead bin space filled up, and they eventually had to just throw him off the flight.
>>Yes, I didn't know solid state drives were already hundreds of times faster than hard disks.
Heh, you're right. Consumer grade SSDs aren't hundreds of times faster than a HDD. Maybe one order of magnitude faster at sustained combined read/write (my SSD benched in at only 3x faster than my new HDD), but the real gain is in latency. Maybe that's what they meant by "faster". =)
>>Secondly, the grid *already* has to handle fluctuations.
Right. With coal, NG, or nuclear backstops.
It's not practical to build a 100% wind and solar grid, because the amount of overcapacity provisioning you have to do is pretty extreme. Variability in solar and wind plants is much much higher than at a coal or nuclear plant (which get a 90% capacity factor industry wide), and they run at much lower capacity factors than other power sources (around 10%-20%).
In other words, a 100MW solar plant is really a 10MW plant, but a 100MW nuclear plant is really a 90MW plant.
Solar is still one of the most expensive technologies around, even though it has been falling in price, but it's still an order of magnitude more expensive than coal.
Your post is full of ignorance and FUD. I work with school districts all overvthe country, and there's a lot of heterogeneity when it comes to Unions. There are districts and states that Teachers Unions own, and some that they don't. Sometimes they work in conjunction with districts to improve education, and sometimes they're obstructionist assholes.
But never pretend their primary goal is improving the quality of education. Their goals are, in order: keeping teachers employed, raising teacher wages/benefits, and gathering and using political power.
They own the state of California. They literally told our legislators that "we put you in power, we can get you out just as easily." Watch the video on YouTube.
Teachers here in CA are immune to Social Security, getting a gold-plated retirement system instead, which includes allowing teachers to buy additional years of experience. Teachers in CA can start as high as $65k/year (for nine months of work a year) compared with the $20k-ish they make in states like South Carolina. (You think our cost of living is 300% higher?)
If it sounds like I'm picking on teacher specifically, I'm not. I love working with teachers and teaching them technology. It's all of the public unions and government wages in general that are the problem. Here in CA parole officers average $100k/year, and we have lifeguards making $200k/year in LA.
It is likely to never change as long as the foxes rule the henhouse. Democrats will bankrupt the state rather than cut wages.
>>Um, how old is this guy? A 30 yr old would be in his teens in the later part of the 90s, not exactly fiancee age with friends joining internet firms.
The internet bubble was circa 1999ish, which could put him at 18 years old at the time (assuming you read his age literally at 30). Plenty of companies were hiring anyone they could at the time that knew how to make a webpage or code. I had plenty of friends at the time that dropped out of college to work for companies like mp3.com. Paper millionaires for a while. Vesting sucks.
But if he is 38, that doesn't make him magically too old to tell what all the teens are doing. It's the generation that grew up with Ataris and Nintendos, and gaming is in our blood - we were raised with the notion that video games were just for kids, but that was just because our parents mainly didn't know what to do with them.
That said, as far as MMORPGs go, I get a bit of bile in my throat every time I think about playing WoW again. Lord, when they made people compete on hours spent to try to become high warlord of the horde, it was like a death sentence for anyone who seriously tried (and didn't have friends to hotseat the character). Pretending the game is anything but a pointless grind when it comes to PvP is just silly. At least raiders get new content every couple months, right? PvPers get one new map only once a year or two in the game. People are still grinding Warsong Gulch as we speak. It's crazy.
I did beta the new AOE MMORTS. I loved AOE1 and 2 (3 was... meh), and the game, while cartoonly, was basically a MMO version of those earlier games. Would have loved it, except in order to extend the number of "hours of gameplay" it forces you to fight 20 hours worth of battles with the intro units in each branch (archery, cavalry, boat, infantry) until you just want to throw something at them. It's like they heard that EVE had a way too crazy learning curve, and so they made the learning curve so gentle in AOEO (20 hour tutorial!) that people collapse from exhaustion before even unlocking 2/3rds of the units. But besides that, it's kind of fun.
>>While I'm generally more in favor of a progressive income, capital gains, or property tax, I'm okay with a sales tax if it means paying for schools, police, and buses.
I like schools, buses and police, too. The issue is appropriate levels of pay. We pay far far higher wages for public employees in California than cost of living adjustments can account for.
Out of curiosity, how much do you think a prison guard should make here in California, on average?
>>Maybe, but there are teachers, school employees, government workers, law enforcement, and a large number of other people working on tax dollars that are definitely facing unemployment too due to the budget shortcomings
In California?
The state will eat itself first before it dares to lower the inflated salaries of its unionized employees. As the unions said to our legislators: "We put you in power, we can get you out of there." The teachers being fired are generally the new, non-tenured ones, who get pink slips every year and then re-hired near the start of the school year.
Unions are destroying our state, honestly. The cost of living is something like 15% higher than Texas (a state that bans public unions, you know, like FDR), but public union workers can make 200% what the equivalent worker in Texas makes. A parole officer in Texas averages $40k a year. A parole officer in California averages $100k. Think about that. That's more than a lot of pharmacists make, and they had to drop $100k just to get the PharmD after their name.
They don't need to "extend" anything. CA has laws on the books charging sales tax on anything bought outside of the state since the '30s.
It's called "Use Tax" because the fiction is that they're taxing the use of the item, not the sale. Oddly enough, the Use Tax is identical to your local sales tax rate.
They starting enforcing it for businesses about a year ago. Retroactive to 2007. California is a very business unfriendly state.
Coincidentally enough, I filed my Use Tax online for my corporation today. So if I sound bitter, it's from having to dig through four years of sales receipts to see if they paid CA sales tax or not.
It's a pretty cheap SSD, too, but too small for any long term use. I bought it as a stopgap until the new generation of SSDs comes on the market. After a lot of dickering around with my upgrade to Sandy Bridge, I finally bit the bullet and switched to a SSD for Win7 and HDD as a data drive (which is fast, but also sucks since the SSD is too small to do anything with it), while keeping a cloned copy of my system ready for any old apps I need.
With no apps installed on the SSD, or any data on it, and daily backups, I'm not overly concerned about it dying on me, though it'll obviously be a PITA.
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Yeah, I honestly think that Andy Schlafly rebelled against his momma, and the whole conservapedia thing is just a giant troll against the conservatives he hates.
Oddly enough, most Conservatives believe Einstein et al were correct about it, which puts Andy in a weird place of having to deal with conservative physics teachers and engineers (read the talk pages for relativity, they're hilarious), ultimately responding to their reasonable and reasoned responses with "Well, I don't know... but I'm not convinced."
And yeah, Andy hates relativity because it led to moral relativism (and it did contribute to this, actually, if you study the history of philosophy in the 20th century), as if a vaguely-related philosophy has anything the fuck to do with physics.
Palin made the point that she was technically right about it, and technically she was. The American colonists at the time referred to themselves as subjects of the British Empire. Lexington and Concord took place in April 1775, over a year before the Declaration of Independence. Read what Hancock and the others had to say in the summer of 1775 in the Olive Branch Petition:
"The union between our Mother Country and these colonies, and the energy of mild and just government, produced benefits so remarkably important, and afforded such an assurance of their permanency and increase, that the wonder and envy of other Nations were excited, while they beheld Great Britain riseing to a power the most extraordinary the world had ever known."
"Your Majestys ministers persevering in their measures and proceeding to open hostilities for enforcing them, have compelled us to arm in our own defence, and have engaged us in a controversy so peculiarly abhorrent to the affection of your still faithful colonists, that when we consider whom we must oppose in this contest, and if it continues, what may be the consequences, our own particular misfortunes are accounted by us, only as parts of our distress.
Knowing, to what violent resentments and incurable animosities, civil discords are apt to exasperate and inflame the contending parties, we think ourselves required by indispensable obligations to Almighty God, to your Majesty, to our fellow subjects, and to ourselves, immediately to use all the means in our power not incompatible with our safety, for stopping the further effusion of blood, and for averting the impending calamities that threaten the British Empire."
It's hilarious that all the people criticizing Palin thinks that the colonists at the time were "Americans". America didn't exist yet, you dumbfucks.
>>There are at least a hundred definitions of "terrorism" and they all include violence or the threat of violence.
They certainly spread terror among all the Call of Duty players - my cheevos!!! NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! (Ok, well, they're trophies on the PS3, but still.)
They spread terror at Sony - let's hope their president gets axed for his ridiculous persecution of GeoHot, and his subpoenaing of all the donors to his legal fund.
But yeah, "terrorists" is a bit of an extreme label. Maybe "bullies" would apply better. To both sides.
Giving nukes to the commies kept the Warsaw Pact intact, and led to the deaths of millions of people from communist persecution. The USSR wouldn't go to war with America if we had nukes and they didn't. And I'm sure the survivors of Pearl Harbor were happy that Harry Dexter White (responsible for the Morgenthau Memo) provoked Japan.
It's tough to do what-ifs with history, but the point is that it's suicide to allow known spies into your government, let alone your country. The CPUSA was part of COMINTERN, and the CPUSA was required by their charter to conduct espionage on their own country - this is the very definition of treason. By no means am I saying the HUAC investigations were perfect, but there was a valid reason for them - hunting down traitors in our government. There were quite a few. (Note that in modern times, historians tried their best to make the CPUSA out to be a happy hippie group that just wanted workers' rights, but Venona destroyed all that politically correct nonsense.)
Somehow equating the HUAC to Stalin slaughtering his own people is like comparing the local poison-pill town gossip with a mass murderer. Sure, they're both bad, but they're not equally bad.
>>It should not be illegal for Communists, Nazis, or other 'undesirables' to seek and hold public office in the US
Oh, you funny. Inviting people who have sworn an oath to destroy our country into public office? Bad enough what Harry Dexter White did (provoke us into fighting Japan instead of potentially negotiating a peace) or Klaus Fuchs (passing nuclear secrets to the soviets), or any of the others.
>>Spies from behind the Iron Curtain should have been ferreted out mercilessly, sent welcome baskets, and asked if there was anything we could do to make their stay more comfortable.
Spies from the Iron Curtain should have been banned from public office, exiled, or imprisoned, depending on the severity of their deeds. Since the CPUSA was part of the espionage apparatus of COMINTERN, that's what the HUAC was all about. It was not about persecuting an innocent minority party or harmless worker's rights group. They literally had political and military espionage as part of their charter. They could have all been exiled or shot for treason.
>>It's important to hold law enforcement accountable and I think video is a good first step.
Video is a good first step, but there is NO second step.
My family was friends with Sam Knott before he died, and he devoted his life to reforming corrupt practices and stopping cops that abuse their power (http://www.sandiegomagazine.com/media/San-Diego-Magazine/February-2004/The-Killer-Cop/), but it didn't make much of a difference in the end.
Basically, cops are above the law. It shouldn't be that way, but that's how it is.
A cop went speeding around my neighborhood at 55MPH (in a 25 zone) and ran over a guy, killing him. Not chasing anyone, just driving fast. Court gave him a slap on the wrist, and nothing else happened to him. Anyone else would have been tried with involuntary manslaughter.
Other friends have been abused by cops in various ways, and have fun dealing with the police complaints bureau (it's the one that suspiciously looks like a trash can next to the phone). At least there is one now - Sam found that there had been numerous complaints about the CHP officer that killed his daughter, but the police simply ignored them. At least they pretend to care now.
Most cops are good, but there's also some bad, and some ugly ones.
>>We had no business claiming to be any better than the Soviets as long as we had institutions with names like the "House Unamerican Activities Committee."
Are you pretending the USSR didn't infiltrate the US (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venona), or that the Community Party of America was anything but an arm of COMINTERN (with an attached espionage wing- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_USA#The_Third_Period_.281928.E2.80.931935.29)?
We were absolutely better (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor) than the USSR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov#Arrest_and_death) during this time period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge#Bukharin.27s_confession) and during any other time period.
Not that America is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but your statement putting us on moral parity with the communists is just painfully naive.
It's hard to say if America is more dictatorial today than in the past... you could make arguments either way, as in some areas we're much more free (the internet has seen to that) and in others less so (papers please).
Citation needed on the budget numbers.
Citation needed on the CIA/NEA link.
Citation needed on providing arms to "the rest of Central America" - especially since you apparently think that Colombia is in Central America. It is actually in South America.
>>Calling 911 and turning on speaker phone would also help.
Last time I dialed 911 on my cell phone I was on hold for 10 or 15 minutes.
>>The fun thing is that you can do this with photons which were gravitational lensed around both sides of a galaxy and *still* collapse the wave function. Your measurement instantly changes something which happened a billion years ago (the lensing).
Even weirder? You can undo the wavefunction collapse, so the photon that you were about to measure appears instead two billion light years away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser
Sorry, AC, you're trying to convince me of something that I've spent a long ass time studying (the cost of power).
I actually wrote part of the wikipedia page you just quoted to me. So, you know, thanks.
Estimates vary quite wildly by region and the person doing the estimation. Estimates can also involve a certain amount of crystal ball gazing - one of the reasons why some of the estimates instead of trying to predict the future, they look at costs of existing plants.
Go ahead and look at *all* the numbers on the page you just quoted to me, re-read them, and then tell me wind is cheaper than nuclear. The 90% capacity factor is US industrywide, BTW.
Does it really?
That's as bad as my bench saying "Improper use could cause serious damage - please consult with a doctor before using."
>>Judging by the labels the entire state of California seems to cause cancer :-D
Prop 65? One of the biggest jokes of a law, ever. We now have, as you say, spammed signs everywhere saying that the area may (or may not) contain cancer causing agents (of whose natural and severity is completely unknown). There's no penalty to putting up a sign even if you don't know if there's a cancer causing substance in the area, so most businesses do it to CYA. I asked once when I was working in an office what the chemicals were, precisely, and they had no idea.
Utterly stupid fucking law.
>>I've never quite understood this type of "single issue" consumer
While I was flying out of McCarran on USAirways, the plane next to mine caught fire. Was fun and scary to watch all the fire trucks come out and put out a fire on a (thankfully) empty plane. Those people didn't get home to Santa Barbara that night.
Then on my flight, a railing that was part of the luggage rack broke off during takeoff, and hit the face of the woman sitting behind me, bloodying her. The flight attendance ran up, said "Oh my goodness!" and pushed the railing back up into place. Which then fell and hit the woman in the face again.
That might make me a single issue consumer, but after that experience (or pair of experiences), I will only fly USAir as the last resort.
Well, to be fair, I've had lots of bad experiences with USAir, but that was the event that put it over the top for me.
As far as the checked baggage thing goes, it turns out it's costing taxpayers $250M a year in additional TSA fees (http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/03/04/carry-luggage-costing-taxpayers-tsa-millions-year/)
In other words, the entire thing is a boondoggle that not only doesn't make any sense, but also clogs up all the overhead bin space and delays flights. One guy sitting with me absolutely refused to gate check his bag after all the overhead bin space filled up, and they eventually had to just throw him off the flight.
>>Yes, I didn't know solid state drives were already hundreds of times faster than hard disks.
Heh, you're right. Consumer grade SSDs aren't hundreds of times faster than a HDD. Maybe one order of magnitude faster at sustained combined read/write (my SSD benched in at only 3x faster than my new HDD), but the real gain is in latency. Maybe that's what they meant by "faster". =)
>>Secondly, the grid *already* has to handle fluctuations.
Right. With coal, NG, or nuclear backstops.
It's not practical to build a 100% wind and solar grid, because the amount of overcapacity provisioning you have to do is pretty extreme. Variability in solar and wind plants is much much higher than at a coal or nuclear plant (which get a 90% capacity factor industry wide), and they run at much lower capacity factors than other power sources (around 10%-20%).
In other words, a 100MW solar plant is really a 10MW plant, but a 100MW nuclear plant is really a 90MW plant.
Solar is still one of the most expensive technologies around, even though it has been falling in price, but it's still an order of magnitude more expensive than coal.
On the issue of charter schools, you're an ignorant (and racist) prick if you think they don't take "brown" kids.
I've worked with charter schools in some of the poorest parts of the country and they're overwhelmingly filled with "brown" kids.
Your post is full of ignorance and FUD. I work with school districts all overvthe country, and there's a lot of heterogeneity when it comes to Unions. There are districts and states that Teachers Unions own, and some that they don't. Sometimes they work in conjunction with districts to improve education, and sometimes they're obstructionist assholes.
But never pretend their primary goal is improving the quality of education. Their goals are, in order: keeping teachers employed, raising teacher wages/benefits, and gathering and using political power.
They own the state of California. They literally told our legislators that "we put you in power, we can get you out just as easily." Watch the video on YouTube.
Teachers here in CA are immune to Social Security, getting a gold-plated retirement system instead, which includes allowing teachers to buy additional years of experience. Teachers in CA can start as high as $65k/year (for nine months of work a year) compared with the $20k-ish they make in states like South Carolina. (You think our cost of living is 300% higher?)
If it sounds like I'm picking on teacher specifically, I'm not. I love working with teachers and teaching them technology. It's all of the public unions and government wages in general that are the problem. Here in CA parole officers average $100k/year, and we have lifeguards making $200k/year in LA.
It is likely to never change as long as the foxes rule the henhouse. Democrats will bankrupt the state rather than cut wages.
>>Um, how old is this guy? A 30 yr old would be in his teens in the later part of the 90s, not exactly fiancee age with friends joining internet firms.
The internet bubble was circa 1999ish, which could put him at 18 years old at the time (assuming you read his age literally at 30). Plenty of companies were hiring anyone they could at the time that knew how to make a webpage or code. I had plenty of friends at the time that dropped out of college to work for companies like mp3.com. Paper millionaires for a while. Vesting sucks.
But if he is 38, that doesn't make him magically too old to tell what all the teens are doing. It's the generation that grew up with Ataris and Nintendos, and gaming is in our blood - we were raised with the notion that video games were just for kids, but that was just because our parents mainly didn't know what to do with them.
That said, as far as MMORPGs go, I get a bit of bile in my throat every time I think about playing WoW again. Lord, when they made people compete on hours spent to try to become high warlord of the horde, it was like a death sentence for anyone who seriously tried (and didn't have friends to hotseat the character). Pretending the game is anything but a pointless grind when it comes to PvP is just silly. At least raiders get new content every couple months, right? PvPers get one new map only once a year or two in the game. People are still grinding Warsong Gulch as we speak. It's crazy.
I did beta the new AOE MMORTS. I loved AOE1 and 2 (3 was... meh), and the game, while cartoonly, was basically a MMO version of those earlier games. Would have loved it, except in order to extend the number of "hours of gameplay" it forces you to fight 20 hours worth of battles with the intro units in each branch (archery, cavalry, boat, infantry) until you just want to throw something at them. It's like they heard that EVE had a way too crazy learning curve, and so they made the learning curve so gentle in AOEO (20 hour tutorial!) that people collapse from exhaustion before even unlocking 2/3rds of the units. But besides that, it's kind of fun.
I especially liked the "surprising" result that DARE doesn't work, even though that was, ironically enough, a duh result as well.
>>While I'm generally more in favor of a progressive income, capital gains, or property tax, I'm okay with a sales tax if it means paying for schools, police, and buses.
I like schools, buses and police, too. The issue is appropriate levels of pay. We pay far far higher wages for public employees in California than cost of living adjustments can account for.
Out of curiosity, how much do you think a prison guard should make here in California, on average?
>>Maybe, but there are teachers, school employees, government workers, law enforcement, and a large number of other people working on tax dollars that are definitely facing unemployment too due to the budget shortcomings
In California?
The state will eat itself first before it dares to lower the inflated salaries of its unionized employees. As the unions said to our legislators: "We put you in power, we can get you out of there." The teachers being fired are generally the new, non-tenured ones, who get pink slips every year and then re-hired near the start of the school year.
Unions are destroying our state, honestly. The cost of living is something like 15% higher than Texas (a state that bans public unions, you know, like FDR), but public union workers can make 200% what the equivalent worker in Texas makes. A parole officer in Texas averages $40k a year. A parole officer in California averages $100k. Think about that. That's more than a lot of pharmacists make, and they had to drop $100k just to get the PharmD after their name.
Whooooooooosh.
They don't need to "extend" anything. CA has laws on the books charging sales tax on anything bought outside of the state since the '30s.
It's called "Use Tax" because the fiction is that they're taxing the use of the item, not the sale. Oddly enough, the Use Tax is identical to your local sales tax rate.
They starting enforcing it for businesses about a year ago. Retroactive to 2007. California is a very business unfriendly state.
Coincidentally enough, I filed my Use Tax online for my corporation today. So if I sound bitter, it's from having to dig through four years of sales receipts to see if they paid CA sales tax or not.
I recently upgraded to a SSD from a old, full RAID0, and a new HDD as well.
Old RAID0: Read 92MB/s (12ms)
Hitachi HDS7230: Read 115MB/s, 16ms
SSD (C300-CTFDDAC064MAG): 301.13 MB/s combined, 360 MB/s read, 70MB/s write, 33 us
It's a pretty cheap SSD, too, but too small for any long term use. I bought it as a stopgap until the new generation of SSDs comes on the market. After a lot of dickering around with my upgrade to Sandy Bridge, I finally bit the bullet and switched to a SSD for Win7 and HDD as a data drive (which is fast, but also sucks since the SSD is too small to do anything with it), while keeping a cloned copy of my system ready for any old apps I need.
With no apps installed on the SSD, or any data on it, and daily backups, I'm not overly concerned about it dying on me, though it'll obviously be a PITA.