Cheers! =) My students are lots of fun also, so it's win-win.
I don't think that you need to go out and hire experts in all fields in order to fill out your staff pool. But putting an education student in the motivation and health section was stupid. I didn't mention it above, but it was similarly stupid putting a nursing student into the biographies section (she didn't read those books either, but spent her break times going through the relationships shelf in my section, which apparently escaped the notice of my PHB's). Their HR approach was to put people into areas according to moment to moment need, and then leave them there. When I was hired, there were two spots open in health & motivation, so that was where I was allocated and where I stayed. It's an approach to HR that's better suited to places like Walmart and McDonald's, and it's lazy.
This is one of the reasons why chain bookstores are dying.
Doesn't surprise me. I worked for a chain bookstore (not Borders) when I was at uni, and they put me in the Motivation and Health section. By the way, let me introduce myself, I'm a teacher who specialises in working with gifted kids, and one of the things that I'm really good at is picking good, relatively advanced books for young kids who are beyond the books that their librarians and teachers use for other children. I read a lot of kids and YA fiction, and textbooks and educational texts, of course, but also scifi, fantasy and historical fiction, as well as non-fiction books in a number of areas. Notice something missing? I don't fucking read Motivation or Health! I can't even take those fucking books seriously, let alone sell them!
This wouldn't have been a problem, if it weren't for the rigidity of the PHB's that ran the place. My role was to stand by a shelf, and only help people who needed help with that section. One of my colleagues' spot was to stand by the self-service information computer behind a shelf, and almost literally jump out at people if they were having trouble with the search functionality (which only googled the bookstore's public website). As much as possible, I wasn't to move, and I had to do things as quickly as possible. One day, I spent 20 minutes upselling ~$150 worth of photo books and Australian kids' books to a tourist and I got a formal warning for walking away from my section and leaving it in the hands of two of my colleagues.
Let's talk about my colleagues, though. There was a guy hired at the same time as me who I was speaking to one day... Me: "So, what books do you read?"; Him: "Oh, I don't."; Me: "You don't... Read books?"; Him: "Yeah, they're boring." Awesome. He was Employee of the Month at some point after I left. I haven't been back there in a while, but I think he's probably still working there.
Their buying policy was brilliant, also. They bought hundreds of copies of things that they thought fit with the Australian psyche, i.e., obsessed with sport. So we were always left with hundreds of copies of the latest ghost written biography of some cricketer that we could literally not give away in the end. These books were always such an albatross around our necks that our PHB's were insisting that we keep them on the shelves, and sending newer, more popular books to storage or to the warehouse. If you wanted one of those newer more interesting books? You have to wait for it to be retrieved (a couple of days, usually), but please take a heavily discounted the 3rd volume of Warwick Smythe's test cricket antics that he paid someone from South Africa to write.
I shouldn't complain too much though. The 50% employee discount was awesome. Most of the long term employees were great people. Some of the supervisors were genuinely cool people. I laugh as I remember back to thinking back over having to help people "find a book, it has like a blue cover and words, I think", or "choose a motivation book for me, I don't know which one to choose."
These book chains are dying because they're trying to do business as if nothing has changed. They're hiring the cheapest, dumbest possible labour when people are only willing to go to a bookstore and pay a bit more than they would at Amazon because they want to talk to someone knowledgeable and well-read about books.
The guy next door has Rick Astly blasting "on 11" 24/7, thus providing both sleep deprivation and loud music.
Can I really prosecute him for TORTURE?
Can you escape the noise by walking away? Or are you confined to your house in some way? Do you have the protection of local planning laws or do you live in some sort of anarchic community?
One of the root causes of the GFC was the short-term-profit-at-all-costs mentality of Banks, particularly US Banks. The toppling of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae et al. were what precipitated the round of guarantees given to banks worldwide to ensure that their banking systems didn't collapse. Governments reasoned that the interconnectedness of the modern worldwide banking systems meant that their banks were exposed. Hence Ireland's guarantee to its banks (and my country, Australia, did the same).
The subprime mortgage collapse was a situation that should not have been allowed to happen in a well regulated economy. Market regulations shuld have been in place to prevent banking institutions from operating with so many problematic debtors on their books. That they were allowed to do so (in amongst the rest of the problems with a deregulated financial system) was the object of the free market movement which puts profit in the short term ahead of long term viability and well ahead of societal benefit.
The public taking on the risks in this regard was a windfall for the financial system and the investors that back it and was still something that the free market movement had been wanting. Was the full costs of the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill borne by BP or by the public? Who profited more out of the Iraq War, Halliburton et al or the public? Who profits from the increased privatisation of every aspect of Western-style national governance, private investors or the public? When infrastructure has to be built in a "Public-Private Partnership" for Electricity generation/transmission or transport who bears the greater risk if it all just doesn't work, the "Private", or the "Public"? On and on, what we see is that free market means being able to excise oneself from responsibility. This is what free market advocates have been calling for since time immemorial; this is what "deregulation" means.
I had stupid amounts of freedom when I was a kid as well, with roughly the same basic rules (the only other two were "help each other for the common good" and "respect each other's rights and opinions"), and I believe that it was the best environment for me. I like to think that I've grown up to be a decent moral person. However, I don't believe that we can say that laws aren't a substitute for morals; laws exist because there are some basic rules that society expects people to follow, and unfortunately all people can't be expected to follow those basic rules.
So I'll compare myself with my sister. My sister spent most of her teenage life fucking herself up with whatever tobacco products, alcohol and drugs she could get her hands on. While she wasn't disrespectful, she flunked out of high school because she was basically a bludger and did no work. When people told her that she had to do some work (above what she wanted to do, ie, for the common good or her long-term good), she screamed and ranted and raved about her right to do whatever she wanted. In the abstract and long term, she broke all the rules by requiring the rest of the family to work harder to align themselves with the rules, but that didn't matter to her (or to my mother).
I believe strongly that, if our house had stricter rules (ie, curfews, no cigarettes/drugs/alcohol, etc.), then my sister would not have got away with the shit that she did. If you don't mind my saying so, I (and my other two brothers) were sensible enough to work within the rules, but my sister for whatever reason was not.
I think this is because people develop morals in the same way that they develop other characteristics (height, intelligence, etc.). We know that kids don't have the same moral sense as full grown adults, and we also know that not all adults develop to the same endpoint in respect to moral development (in the same way that not all adults are the same height or possessed of the same intelligence).
The guy to look to here is Kohlberg and his Stages of Moral Development. Unfortunately, some people only get so far in terms of their moral development as thinking "how can I do what I want and not be punished".
So, I have fewer problems with the idea of parents keeping tabs on their kids, so long as they're doing it properly (which is a whole different story.
Not that I know anything about this particular case, but this sentence...
Are you seriously suggesting that Police should always be truthful in their dealings? So they should tell drug traffickers that they're not interested in buying drugs for themselves, but may want to use it in a court case?
G'day. School Teacher and occasional University part-timer (in social sciences and education) here.
TLDR: Use a preapproved list of calculators and printed dictionaries and materials that they can use.
I advocate a blanket ban on electronic devices, besides a list of pre-approved calculators, during exams. Students should be allowed to bring with them writing implements, watch and printed dictionaries and that's it. Most obviously to prevent cheating, and for the reason you pointed out: that it's getting difficult to tell whether a device is connected to the outside world or not.
But secondly, because most of the handheld dictionaries in use by non-English speaking background students at university are rubbish and cause more problems for them (whether they know it or not) than they realise. I have had students at university level turn in essays with grammar and vocabulary use that looked like it had been fed through Google Translate multiple times in different languages before being put onto the page. They're certain that it's right and can sometimes, in fact, give me the original language version (which has happened a few times, but I know very little Chinese or Korean, so it was rather pointless), but the English version is barely readable.
Printed dictionaries are much more reputable and generally produced by people who have actually done some research in the area. There are some online dictionaries which are also quite good, but internet access isn't something I'd like for my students to have in the exam room. I'm sure you can ask around your staff about decent translation dictionaries and put them on an approved list.
As an aside, I think it's important that you teach your students not to rely on dictionaries (particularly the bullshit handheld dictionaries). If they're studying in a foreign language, then it's not unreasonable to expect them to gain some mastery in that language, particularly for the technical language (after all, you've been spouting it to them for weeks before the exams come around). Now, if they need support while they do that, then you can point them to the learning centre (or what have you) of your university.
I don't think greed is an actual issue. I would imagine that there are two distinct major camps of people that work for Raytheon and similar companies. People that feel that they are doing the right work, and people who just don't think about it at all.
Some people who work for these companies (a friend of mine included) genuinely feel that they are doing the right work. They've come to the ethical conclusion that Raytheon and similar companies are doing work that makes them and other people safer. Think 2nd Amendment types who scream about the need to have a personal arsenal of weapons with which to "defend" themselves. Not that I agree with these people, but it's a legitimate perspective.
Then there are people who just don't think. I would say that this is the minority of the people who work in the more intellectual ends of the military industry. You have to remember that half of people are below average, and it doesn't relate just to academic (or cognitive) intelligence. Socioaffective (or emotional and interpersonal) intelligence is also an important mental factor. These people view their work in the same way that all of the rest of us view our work, just something to do between 9am and 5pm every weekday.
Of course, there's variations on the theme, but I'd say that in the end 90% of people in the military industry can be categorised one way or the other.
I'm not sure how they tell ordinary ISP users. I had a similar sort of experience, though.
I used to work at a university, and one of my colleagues was bringing his home laptop in. One day, he couldn't get his computer to connect with anything so he rang up helpdesk and they told him that something was up with his computer. They sent around a support guy, who found that his son was running BitTorrent on his machine. People are stupid, teenagers are cluey, etc. etc. etc.
Some sort of paper notification before disconnecting him would have been a lot better in my (and his) opinion.
ALP-Right is the main backer for Julia. Those are the guys who rather purposefully don't want anything done about Climate Change (because it's too "controversial") and have been backing the Federal ALP's general move towards conservatism.
So those issues that caused the Australian public to generally move away from the ALP will continue to be issues for the ALP and voters will continue to desert them for favour of, particularly, the Greens. Look forward, also, to the Super Profits Tax being scaled back, as much as moving away from fixed price royalties to an actual percent-of-profit based tax system is the right way to go (and is supported by most of the public).
Julia wasn't exactly innocent in the ALP's shift to conservatism, either. She was the one pushing the MySchool website which props up private schools and other schools who focus more on achievement tests than they do on actually educating their children. She was also the one who tried to foment a war between parents and teachers over "poor" school results. It's your fault, Julia, because you are the one underfunding education.
The election coming up, the ALP will probably lose seats to the Greens in the Upper House and maybe even in the Lower House. They may even lose the election, and Julia won't do a damn thing about it.
The US spends more than most of the rest of the world combined, including China. What will China do if the US cuts 10% off his military budget? Absolutely nothing.
Sure, keep true insurance around for catastrophic events, but otherwise let each person decide how to spend their own money on their own regular health care.
This leads to people avoiding preventive care, which drives up costs in the long run.
Add to this the possibility of people being sick, and contagiously so, and not being able to do anything about it.
Oh and also the macroeconomic effects of the poor (i.e., unskilled or lowly skilled workers) having to either take time off from work or being ineffective in their work due to poor health.
The user-pays model is the worst possible model.
I think you're all missing the point here. The purpose of the net filter isn't to actually genuinely prevent access to those websites that are "evil". The purpose is to convince voters that the government is doing something about "evil" and thereby gain votes.
This political stance is part of the ALP's general move to social conservatism.
Unfortunately, this is the way that Australian politics is moving. We have a two party system, the ALP (Labour, notionally the "Left") and the Coalition (counterintuitively named Liberals and the country-oriented Nationals who are notionally the "Right"). The ALP is currently in government, but the balance of power is held in the Senate by one vote usually exercised by a couple of minor parties, Family First (ultra-right ultra-socially conservative), a couple of independents and the Greens (left wing progressive, but the government mostly refuses to negotiate with them). Usually it's down to the Family First Senator to decide whether a given piece of legislation passes the Senate or fails, and he's revelled in the power of his role. So the government has expended a lot of effort in wooing the Family First Senator, which has caused a slight move towards the right and towards social conservatism.
However, the ALP has apparently decided that the best way to get votes is to, as much as possible, be almost exactly like the Liberals. While they were ready to do something about Climate Change before the election, they have largely done nothing (because it's too hard). While they spoke about the importance of funding public options, such as public schools and hospitals and so on, they still haven't done anything about the massive and disparate amount of funding that is given to the private option. While they say that they say that they're against government misuse of public funds to advertise ahead of the upcoming election, several million dollars have been spent on exactly that purpose (noting that, in this case, I agree with the expenditure, but even so it is a Coalition thing to do).
Even on issues where you'd expect the ALP to be starkly different to the Liberals, nothing. Refugees are still being treated as lower forms of life, just as they were under the previous Coalition government. The ALP has gone out of its way to foment a war between itself and the Education unions by subjecting teachers to extraordinary public criticism (without actually putting up the funds and the political will to fix problems from above). Welfare recipients are still being hounded and stigmatised for the fact that they could possibly be cheating the system (even though the vast majority aren't) with no talk of improving the system and helping welfare recipients themselves to reduce their imposition on society. On and on and on, there is increasingly less difference between the ALP and the Liberals.
The Coalition has responded by going further and further towards the right. They've elected Tony Abbott as their leader, because the last leader had the gall to negotiate with the ALP on an carbon emissions trading scheme (which subsequently dropped like a stone in the now hostile Senate). Tony Abbott is one of the most conservative politicians currently representing Australia. He approaches politics from the perspective of his own highly religious Catholic upbringing and lifestyle, doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change and is really quite keen to return Australia to the 50's in respect to how we treat anyone who isn't an Anglo-Saxon white Male of upper-middle (or higher) socioeconomic background and being above the age of 35.
Unfortunately, the ALP's strategy is going to bite them in the ass. No Coalition voters have been wooed over to the ALP side, but, now that both parties are on the Right or the Far Right and well and truly entrenched in conservative politics, many former ALP voters are turning to the Greens or other alternative parties. The Greens now have a swing in their favour of between 7 and 9 percent, mostly taken from the ALP, and other smaller parties are enjoying smaller swings in their favour. It's likely that the Greens will hold, themselves, the balance of power in the Senate (because Family First aren't likely to have a Senator elected this time around) but we could have a situation where Greens could get electe
What do we expect when we (not the US, the entirety of the Western Hemisphere at the moment) have a corporate culture where spending the least possible, while still charging the most possible is the major determiner for success?
What bonuses (boni?) did BP management receive for bringing this impending disaster on us? Will they have to be paid back? Doubt it. Pat on the back, well done, we'll just fire some low-level workers to cover costs or just transfer them to the idiot customers (to which competitors to BP will just say "hooray", meet the price and pocket the higher profits).
Same situation for the toxic debt problem. Same situation for the rushed Iraq invasion. Same situation for most other environmental disasters.
That those "ogres" are going to get culled from the next generation. So hopefully within a few generations they should be nailing down a few basic shapes that are going to be "attractive".
Which is probably a decent way of doing it. If each of these pictures is treated like one individual, and if they use the ratings people plug in as a gauge for how likely these individuals are to have children, then they can build the next generation pretty simply. The next generation, then, should be "better".
Any time you work where you are producing intellectual property, you should insist on conditions (on paper) that allow you to retain rights where they are generated. If you have a brain that they want badly enough, they're not going to say no.
I do (admittedly I don't work with FOSS) and no employer has worried about it yet.
Title should be "*second* inquiry wastes more time and research energy legitimising continued intellectually bankrupt sceptic campaign against climate change science".
Why are we expending so much energy engaging with people who will not engage with the research, besides to nitpick? The more legitimacy we give to these idiots the more they gain credibility with the public, the more governments lose the political willpower to do anything whatsoever, the more we screw ourselves over.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheers! =) My students are lots of fun also, so it's win-win.
I don't think that you need to go out and hire experts in all fields in order to fill out your staff pool. But putting an education student in the motivation and health section was stupid. I didn't mention it above, but it was similarly stupid putting a nursing student into the biographies section (she didn't read those books either, but spent her break times going through the relationships shelf in my section, which apparently escaped the notice of my PHB's). Their HR approach was to put people into areas according to moment to moment need, and then leave them there. When I was hired, there were two spots open in health & motivation, so that was where I was allocated and where I stayed. It's an approach to HR that's better suited to places like Walmart and McDonald's, and it's lazy.
This is one of the reasons why chain bookstores are dying.
Doesn't surprise me. I worked for a chain bookstore (not Borders) when I was at uni, and they put me in the Motivation and Health section. By the way, let me introduce myself, I'm a teacher who specialises in working with gifted kids, and one of the things that I'm really good at is picking good, relatively advanced books for young kids who are beyond the books that their librarians and teachers use for other children. I read a lot of kids and YA fiction, and textbooks and educational texts, of course, but also scifi, fantasy and historical fiction, as well as non-fiction books in a number of areas. Notice something missing? I don't fucking read Motivation or Health! I can't even take those fucking books seriously, let alone sell them!
This wouldn't have been a problem, if it weren't for the rigidity of the PHB's that ran the place. My role was to stand by a shelf, and only help people who needed help with that section. One of my colleagues' spot was to stand by the self-service information computer behind a shelf, and almost literally jump out at people if they were having trouble with the search functionality (which only googled the bookstore's public website). As much as possible, I wasn't to move, and I had to do things as quickly as possible. One day, I spent 20 minutes upselling ~$150 worth of photo books and Australian kids' books to a tourist and I got a formal warning for walking away from my section and leaving it in the hands of two of my colleagues.
Let's talk about my colleagues, though. There was a guy hired at the same time as me who I was speaking to one day... Me: "So, what books do you read?"; Him: "Oh, I don't."; Me: "You don't... Read books?"; Him: "Yeah, they're boring." Awesome. He was Employee of the Month at some point after I left. I haven't been back there in a while, but I think he's probably still working there.
Their buying policy was brilliant, also. They bought hundreds of copies of things that they thought fit with the Australian psyche, i.e., obsessed with sport. So we were always left with hundreds of copies of the latest ghost written biography of some cricketer that we could literally not give away in the end. These books were always such an albatross around our necks that our PHB's were insisting that we keep them on the shelves, and sending newer, more popular books to storage or to the warehouse. If you wanted one of those newer more interesting books? You have to wait for it to be retrieved (a couple of days, usually), but please take a heavily discounted the 3rd volume of Warwick Smythe's test cricket antics that he paid someone from South Africa to write.
I shouldn't complain too much though. The 50% employee discount was awesome. Most of the long term employees were great people. Some of the supervisors were genuinely cool people. I laugh as I remember back to thinking back over having to help people "find a book, it has like a blue cover and words, I think", or "choose a motivation book for me, I don't know which one to choose."
These book chains are dying because they're trying to do business as if nothing has changed. They're hiring the cheapest, dumbest possible labour when people are only willing to go to a bookstore and pay a bit more than they would at Amazon because they want to talk to someone knowledgeable and well-read about books.
Can you escape the noise by walking away? Or are you confined to your house in some way? Do you have the protection of local planning laws or do you live in some sort of anarchic community?
Pffft.
One of the root causes of the GFC was the short-term-profit-at-all-costs mentality of Banks, particularly US Banks. The toppling of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae et al. were what precipitated the round of guarantees given to banks worldwide to ensure that their banking systems didn't collapse. Governments reasoned that the interconnectedness of the modern worldwide banking systems meant that their banks were exposed. Hence Ireland's guarantee to its banks (and my country, Australia, did the same).
The subprime mortgage collapse was a situation that should not have been allowed to happen in a well regulated economy. Market regulations shuld have been in place to prevent banking institutions from operating with so many problematic debtors on their books. That they were allowed to do so (in amongst the rest of the problems with a deregulated financial system) was the object of the free market movement which puts profit in the short term ahead of long term viability and well ahead of societal benefit.
The public taking on the risks in this regard was a windfall for the financial system and the investors that back it and was still something that the free market movement had been wanting. Was the full costs of the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill borne by BP or by the public? Who profited more out of the Iraq War, Halliburton et al or the public? Who profits from the increased privatisation of every aspect of Western-style national governance, private investors or the public? When infrastructure has to be built in a "Public-Private Partnership" for Electricity generation/transmission or transport who bears the greater risk if it all just doesn't work, the "Private", or the "Public"? On and on, what we see is that free market means being able to excise oneself from responsibility . This is what free market advocates have been calling for since time immemorial; this is what "deregulation" means.
I had stupid amounts of freedom when I was a kid as well, with roughly the same basic rules (the only other two were "help each other for the common good" and "respect each other's rights and opinions"), and I believe that it was the best environment for me. I like to think that I've grown up to be a decent moral person. However, I don't believe that we can say that laws aren't a substitute for morals; laws exist because there are some basic rules that society expects people to follow, and unfortunately all people can't be expected to follow those basic rules.
So I'll compare myself with my sister. My sister spent most of her teenage life fucking herself up with whatever tobacco products, alcohol and drugs she could get her hands on. While she wasn't disrespectful, she flunked out of high school because she was basically a bludger and did no work. When people told her that she had to do some work (above what she wanted to do, ie, for the common good or her long-term good), she screamed and ranted and raved about her right to do whatever she wanted. In the abstract and long term, she broke all the rules by requiring the rest of the family to work harder to align themselves with the rules, but that didn't matter to her (or to my mother).
I believe strongly that, if our house had stricter rules (ie, curfews, no cigarettes/drugs/alcohol, etc.), then my sister would not have got away with the shit that she did. If you don't mind my saying so, I (and my other two brothers) were sensible enough to work within the rules, but my sister for whatever reason was not.
I think this is because people develop morals in the same way that they develop other characteristics (height, intelligence, etc.). We know that kids don't have the same moral sense as full grown adults, and we also know that not all adults develop to the same endpoint in respect to moral development (in the same way that not all adults are the same height or possessed of the same intelligence).
The guy to look to here is Kohlberg and his Stages of Moral Development. Unfortunately, some people only get so far in terms of their moral development as thinking "how can I do what I want and not be punished".
So, I have fewer problems with the idea of parents keeping tabs on their kids, so long as they're doing it properly (which is a whole different story.
So... Around half of all Americans are of below average intelligence?
*holds up a marshmallow on a stick*
G'day != Guten Tag.
How you goin, mate != Wie geht es Ihnen
No worries != mach dir keine sorgen
WTF mates?
"They provided false information to the dealer."
Not that I know anything about this particular case, but this sentence...
Are you seriously suggesting that Police should always be truthful in their dealings? So they should tell drug traffickers that they're not interested in buying drugs for themselves, but may want to use it in a court case?
Seriously?
G'day. School Teacher and occasional University part-timer (in social sciences and education) here.
TLDR: Use a preapproved list of calculators and printed dictionaries and materials that they can use.
I advocate a blanket ban on electronic devices, besides a list of pre-approved calculators, during exams. Students should be allowed to bring with them writing implements, watch and printed dictionaries and that's it. Most obviously to prevent cheating, and for the reason you pointed out: that it's getting difficult to tell whether a device is connected to the outside world or not.
But secondly, because most of the handheld dictionaries in use by non-English speaking background students at university are rubbish and cause more problems for them (whether they know it or not) than they realise. I have had students at university level turn in essays with grammar and vocabulary use that looked like it had been fed through Google Translate multiple times in different languages before being put onto the page. They're certain that it's right and can sometimes, in fact, give me the original language version (which has happened a few times, but I know very little Chinese or Korean, so it was rather pointless), but the English version is barely readable.
Printed dictionaries are much more reputable and generally produced by people who have actually done some research in the area. There are some online dictionaries which are also quite good, but internet access isn't something I'd like for my students to have in the exam room. I'm sure you can ask around your staff about decent translation dictionaries and put them on an approved list.
As an aside, I think it's important that you teach your students not to rely on dictionaries (particularly the bullshit handheld dictionaries). If they're studying in a foreign language, then it's not unreasonable to expect them to gain some mastery in that language, particularly for the technical language (after all, you've been spouting it to them for weeks before the exams come around). Now, if they need support while they do that, then you can point them to the learning centre (or what have you) of your university.
I don't think greed is an actual issue. I would imagine that there are two distinct major camps of people that work for Raytheon and similar companies. People that feel that they are doing the right work, and people who just don't think about it at all.
Some people who work for these companies (a friend of mine included) genuinely feel that they are doing the right work. They've come to the ethical conclusion that Raytheon and similar companies are doing work that makes them and other people safer. Think 2nd Amendment types who scream about the need to have a personal arsenal of weapons with which to "defend" themselves. Not that I agree with these people, but it's a legitimate perspective.
Then there are people who just don't think. I would say that this is the minority of the people who work in the more intellectual ends of the military industry. You have to remember that half of people are below average, and it doesn't relate just to academic (or cognitive) intelligence. Socioaffective (or emotional and interpersonal) intelligence is also an important mental factor. These people view their work in the same way that all of the rest of us view our work, just something to do between 9am and 5pm every weekday.
Of course, there's variations on the theme, but I'd say that in the end 90% of people in the military industry can be categorised one way or the other.
I'm not sure how they tell ordinary ISP users. I had a similar sort of experience, though.
I used to work at a university, and one of my colleagues was bringing his home laptop in. One day, he couldn't get his computer to connect with anything so he rang up helpdesk and they told him that something was up with his computer. They sent around a support guy, who found that his son was running BitTorrent on his machine. People are stupid, teenagers are cluey, etc. etc. etc.
Some sort of paper notification before disconnecting him would have been a lot better in my (and his) opinion.
ALP-Right is the main backer for Julia. Those are the guys who rather purposefully don't want anything done about Climate Change (because it's too "controversial") and have been backing the Federal ALP's general move towards conservatism.
So those issues that caused the Australian public to generally move away from the ALP will continue to be issues for the ALP and voters will continue to desert them for favour of, particularly, the Greens. Look forward, also, to the Super Profits Tax being scaled back, as much as moving away from fixed price royalties to an actual percent-of-profit based tax system is the right way to go (and is supported by most of the public).
Julia wasn't exactly innocent in the ALP's shift to conservatism, either. She was the one pushing the MySchool website which props up private schools and other schools who focus more on achievement tests than they do on actually educating their children. She was also the one who tried to foment a war between parents and teachers over "poor" school results. It's your fault, Julia, because you are the one underfunding education.
The election coming up, the ALP will probably lose seats to the Greens in the Upper House and maybe even in the Lower House. They may even lose the election, and Julia won't do a damn thing about it.
I think you're entertaining a little bit of hyperbole there with your $100 trillion number.
As to 10%, that's about $63 billion a year, which is a good start (Click).
The US spends more than most of the rest of the world combined, including China. What will China do if the US cuts 10% off his military budget? Absolutely nothing.
Sure, keep true insurance around for catastrophic events, but otherwise let each person decide how to spend their own money on their own regular health care.
This leads to people avoiding preventive care, which drives up costs in the long run.
Add to this the possibility of people being sick, and contagiously so, and not being able to do anything about it. Oh and also the macroeconomic effects of the poor (i.e., unskilled or lowly skilled workers) having to either take time off from work or being ineffective in their work due to poor health. The user-pays model is the worst possible model.
I think you're all missing the point here. The purpose of the net filter isn't to actually genuinely prevent access to those websites that are "evil". The purpose is to convince voters that the government is doing something about "evil" and thereby gain votes.
This political stance is part of the ALP's general move to social conservatism.
Unfortunately, this is the way that Australian politics is moving. We have a two party system, the ALP (Labour, notionally the "Left") and the Coalition (counterintuitively named Liberals and the country-oriented Nationals who are notionally the "Right"). The ALP is currently in government, but the balance of power is held in the Senate by one vote usually exercised by a couple of minor parties, Family First (ultra-right ultra-socially conservative), a couple of independents and the Greens (left wing progressive, but the government mostly refuses to negotiate with them). Usually it's down to the Family First Senator to decide whether a given piece of legislation passes the Senate or fails, and he's revelled in the power of his role. So the government has expended a lot of effort in wooing the Family First Senator, which has caused a slight move towards the right and towards social conservatism.
However, the ALP has apparently decided that the best way to get votes is to, as much as possible, be almost exactly like the Liberals. While they were ready to do something about Climate Change before the election, they have largely done nothing (because it's too hard). While they spoke about the importance of funding public options, such as public schools and hospitals and so on, they still haven't done anything about the massive and disparate amount of funding that is given to the private option. While they say that they say that they're against government misuse of public funds to advertise ahead of the upcoming election, several million dollars have been spent on exactly that purpose (noting that, in this case, I agree with the expenditure, but even so it is a Coalition thing to do).
Even on issues where you'd expect the ALP to be starkly different to the Liberals, nothing. Refugees are still being treated as lower forms of life, just as they were under the previous Coalition government. The ALP has gone out of its way to foment a war between itself and the Education unions by subjecting teachers to extraordinary public criticism (without actually putting up the funds and the political will to fix problems from above). Welfare recipients are still being hounded and stigmatised for the fact that they could possibly be cheating the system (even though the vast majority aren't) with no talk of improving the system and helping welfare recipients themselves to reduce their imposition on society. On and on and on, there is increasingly less difference between the ALP and the Liberals.
The Coalition has responded by going further and further towards the right. They've elected Tony Abbott as their leader, because the last leader had the gall to negotiate with the ALP on an carbon emissions trading scheme (which subsequently dropped like a stone in the now hostile Senate). Tony Abbott is one of the most conservative politicians currently representing Australia. He approaches politics from the perspective of his own highly religious Catholic upbringing and lifestyle, doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change and is really quite keen to return Australia to the 50's in respect to how we treat anyone who isn't an Anglo-Saxon white Male of upper-middle (or higher) socioeconomic background and being above the age of 35.
Unfortunately, the ALP's strategy is going to bite them in the ass. No Coalition voters have been wooed over to the ALP side, but, now that both parties are on the Right or the Far Right and well and truly entrenched in conservative politics, many former ALP voters are turning to the Greens or other alternative parties. The Greens now have a swing in their favour of between 7 and 9 percent, mostly taken from the ALP, and other smaller parties are enjoying smaller swings in their favour. It's likely that the Greens will hold, themselves, the balance of power in the Senate (because Family First aren't likely to have a Senator elected this time around) but we could have a situation where Greens could get electe
What do we expect when we (not the US, the entirety of the Western Hemisphere at the moment) have a corporate culture where spending the least possible, while still charging the most possible is the major determiner for success?
What bonuses (boni?) did BP management receive for bringing this impending disaster on us? Will they have to be paid back? Doubt it. Pat on the back, well done, we'll just fire some low-level workers to cover costs or just transfer them to the idiot customers (to which competitors to BP will just say "hooray", meet the price and pocket the higher profits).
Same situation for the toxic debt problem. Same situation for the rushed Iraq invasion. Same situation for most other environmental disasters.
This is evident in every facet of our lives. In my industry (education), we're trying to pack more students into smaller spaces with fewer teachers. We're wondering why we're seeing things like lesser empathy in tertiary students... DUH.
That those "ogres" are going to get culled from the next generation. So hopefully within a few generations they should be nailing down a few basic shapes that are going to be "attractive". Which is probably a decent way of doing it. If each of these pictures is treated like one individual, and if they use the ratings people plug in as a gauge for how likely these individuals are to have children, then they can build the next generation pretty simply. The next generation, then, should be "better".
Any time you work where you are producing intellectual property, you should insist on conditions (on paper) that allow you to retain rights where they are generated. If you have a brain that they want badly enough, they're not going to say no. I do (admittedly I don't work with FOSS) and no employer has worried about it yet.
Title should be "*second* inquiry wastes more time and research energy legitimising continued intellectually bankrupt sceptic campaign against climate change science". Why are we expending so much energy engaging with people who will not engage with the research, besides to nitpick? The more legitimacy we give to these idiots the more they gain credibility with the public, the more governments lose the political willpower to do anything whatsoever, the more we screw ourselves over.