This. $2 is still $2. Why should I spend my $2 on something I am never going to use, just because the nanny state wants to nanny some other group of folks?
Then, if they're that cheap, have the people who might want to test themselves rather than guessing how drunk they are buy them and keep them in their cars. Leave those of us who manage to not drive drunk without them out of it.
No, it *is* different. No amount of caution can stop you from being in an auto accident, and having seatbelts in the car can save your life if you are.
It is very, very easy to not drive drunk. Why should the majority of us who manage to live our lives in such a way that we run no risk of driving drunk pay for breathalyzers?
How can they forbid ssh and still call themselves a university?
SSH'ing offsite is a basic prerequisite for all sorts of research in the physical sciences. It's an operation so basic that folks in physics don't even admit the possibility that someone would want to block it.
At my old university the public (no logon required) wifi was heavily port-filtered. They blocked port 110, for instance -- no POP mail. But they left open SSH, knowing that people relied on it to get work done.
The optimal price of the iPad hardware is less than what Apple is asking for it.
The optimal price of the iPad marketing, though, is about what Apple charges for it.
It's not just Apple that does this -- compare the price of name-brand and generic soda. People pay more for slick marketing and branding. That's what you get when you buy Apple: slick marketing and branding.
Wait, so the taxpayers should pay huge amounts of money to build walls with little doors in them at the sides of the platforms so that somebody who ought to know they they can get run over by a train doesn't get run over by a train?
I don't want to live in a world where we endeavour at great expense to make it *impossible* for you to commit a crime.
It does, but I still don't really agree. I don't think segregation is necessarily evil; I mean, nobody says that the existence of Chinatown or Little Italy in various cities is a great social ill. I've heard social pundits say that the reintegration of Harlem (as more white folks move in) is actually a *problem*, since it's eroding the unique culture of this area that was traditionally black. The difference is that the schools in Chinatown and Little Italy and Harlem probably aren't so bad, so nobody minds the fact that they are majority-minority.
If the white kids are all leaving because the school is terrible, then the two solutions that are fair to everyone are
1) fix the school 2) get the black kids to leave too.
I've just moved to Washington DC. It's a terrible terrible place for a lot of reasons, but they have a *huge* charter school population here; it's something like 40%, including a great many majority-black schools. I need to learn more about the charter system here, but it looks like the black kids are bailing on the failing public schools too. (Of course, that's not saying that much, since DC is majority black...)
The university I got my PhD at (large unselective state school) made instructor evaluations publically available. Turns out people who pay tuition directly are a little pickier than taxpayers.
Well, you can account for that. Turns out statistics is a pretty powerful tool.
If you're teaching LD kids, they're not going to learn as much as the kids of normal ability. Fine... but they still ought to be learning *something* measurable, right? (If not, then why are we paying you to teach them?)
Public schools have been ravaged by the charter system there. Why? Because charter schools segregate underprivledged students into the public school system. Unsurprisingly, charter schools are more white and come from higher socio-economic backgrounds.
If their charter system works on the same principle as others I'm familiar with (basically, anyone can attend for free, and if there are more students then places then there is a lottery), then why is this a bad thing?
Without charter schools, you have children from both parents who care and parents who don't care in the crappy public schools. With charter schools, the parents who care will send their kids to the charters (if they're better). The fact that the public schools lose their high achievers in the deal isn't their fault.
It is not the duty of more conscientious parents to send their children to school with the children of less conscientious parents just to serve as a good example, or to sacrifice their children's education on the altar of desegregation. Segregation by force or by law? Horrible, evil, awful, stamp it the hell out. Segregation by accident, because white parents are more likely to avail themselves of the opportunity to escape bad public schools? Totally different matter.
Penalizing poor-performing schools only works if you intend to actually kill them -- provide students with alternatives, and then cut off funding to such a degree that the kids leave.
From what I've seen of these shit schools, though, the problem isn't so much a lack of money as a lack of good people, as you mention. My mother taught for a while at an inner-city school. They had money for "technology" coming out the wazoo, and some federal grants given especially to poor schools... but most of the teachers and the principal were morons. Cutting off funding to the school won't help the kids there unless it induces them to leave. Firing the idiots would -- but then you have to fight the unions.
Why is racial segregation assumed a priori something to be avoided?
If you implement a voucher system, parents who care more about education will be more inclined to take advantage of those vouchers to move their children to better schools. This is a good thing, right? Parents can move their kids out of a bad school to a good one.
How does anything change if the kids who leave tend to be white and the kids who stay tend to be black? Nobody is discriminating on the basis of race (hell, the abstract of that study says so). The black kids can use the vouchers too, after all. Are you saying that we ought to force white kids to stay in a bad school just so the black kids who are there can have some white classmates?
Last summer I was between jobs. I could stand to incur about $5000 in unreimbursed medical expenses before I would have serious trouble (read: before the marginal-utility-of-money curve went seriously nonlinear), so I bought a catastrophic coverage policy with a deductible of $5000. This is how insurance is supposed to work -- you figure out what risk you can't bear yourself and pay someone else to bear it for you.
Such plans are going to be illegal soon under Obamacare.
Yes. If you have my credit card number, and obtained it by legal means (i.e. didn't steal my wallet), then the knowledge of it belongs to you. You can print it out and put it your refrigerator, and I don't care.
What you can't do is buy things with it. That's fraud. You also can't go post it on/b/, since any reasonable person would expect that doing so would lead to fraud, and would make you an accessory.
I want to know: at what point do TSA regulations apply?
Suppose I own an airplane. If I want to take my friend Bob up in my Cessna, I doubt the TSA is going to want to look up his butt or make him take his shoes off. Hell, I imagine I don't even have to let them know -- I just file a flight plan with my local airport and go.
Now, what if Bob pays me $50 to take him from one place to another. Then does the TSA have to look up his butt?
What if I make a point of giving anybody who pays me $50 a ride in my airplane?
What if I have a bigger airplane and carry people around ten at the time?
When do they start insisting on me following their rules?
So, an International Terrorist, say one of those Dirty Muslims, could make a HERF gun and run around frying tourists' passport chips, leaving them stranded in (say) Israel?
I believe that the right to leave a country is one of those rights that the UN has officially declared sacrosanct -- no matter who you are, or which country you're a citizen of (or if you're not a citizen of anywhere), you have the right to exit whatever country you're in (unless you've broken that country's laws). If you're a US citizen who wants to head to China, the US government can't stop you; only the Chinese government can.
Not according to that. The law says that it is a crime if anyone "fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales or lightens" coins.
You're not doing it for purposes of fraud, and really -- you're not doing any of those things. You're throwing it in the bin. It's still the same goddamn penny, and hasn't been altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened in any way. It's just in the bin.
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This. $2 is still $2. Why should I spend my $2 on something I am never going to use, just because the nanny state wants to nanny some other group of folks?
Then, if they're that cheap, have the people who might want to test themselves rather than guessing how drunk they are buy them and keep them in their cars. Leave those of us who manage to not drive drunk without them out of it.
No, it *is* different. No amount of caution can stop you from being in an auto accident, and having seatbelts in the car can save your life if you are.
It is very, very easy to not drive drunk. Why should the majority of us who manage to live our lives in such a way that we run no risk of driving drunk pay for breathalyzers?
How can they forbid ssh and still call themselves a university?
SSH'ing offsite is a basic prerequisite for all sorts of research in the physical sciences. It's an operation so basic that folks in physics don't even admit the possibility that someone would want to block it.
At my old university the public (no logon required) wifi was heavily port-filtered. They blocked port 110, for instance -- no POP mail. But they left open SSH, knowing that people relied on it to get work done.
The optimal price of the iPad hardware is less than what Apple is asking for it.
The optimal price of the iPad marketing, though, is about what Apple charges for it.
It's not just Apple that does this -- compare the price of name-brand and generic soda. People pay more for slick marketing and branding. That's what you get when you buy Apple: slick marketing and branding.
Not sure what you're referring to, but I remember looking at the ipad and saying "This is too expensive for what it does."
So, we need to reduce the corporate tax-rate so that "trickle-down" economics will let large companies like Apple invest in new business?
Instead these companies just hoard vast amounts of cash.
The right wing economist as so full of shit it you could only possibly vote republican if your either stupid or not following.
Obama just proposed a decrease in the US corporate tax rate, which is one of the highest in the world.
The day that Apple makes things cheaper I will eat my hat.
Wait, so the taxpayers should pay huge amounts of money to build walls with little doors in them at the sides of the platforms so that somebody who ought to know they they can get run over by a train doesn't get run over by a train?
I don't want to live in a world where we endeavour at great expense to make it *impossible* for you to commit a crime.
It does, but I still don't really agree. I don't think segregation is necessarily evil; I mean, nobody says that the existence of Chinatown or Little Italy in various cities is a great social ill. I've heard social pundits say that the reintegration of Harlem (as more white folks move in) is actually a *problem*, since it's eroding the unique culture of this area that was traditionally black. The difference is that the schools in Chinatown and Little Italy and Harlem probably aren't so bad, so nobody minds the fact that they are majority-minority.
If the white kids are all leaving because the school is terrible, then the two solutions that are fair to everyone are
1) fix the school
2) get the black kids to leave too.
I've just moved to Washington DC. It's a terrible terrible place for a lot of reasons, but they have a *huge* charter school population here; it's something like 40%, including a great many majority-black schools. I need to learn more about the charter system here, but it looks like the black kids are bailing on the failing public schools too. (Of course, that's not saying that much, since DC is majority black...)
The university I got my PhD at (large unselective state school) made instructor evaluations publically available. Turns out people who pay tuition directly are a little pickier than taxpayers.
Well, you can account for that. Turns out statistics is a pretty powerful tool.
If you're teaching LD kids, they're not going to learn as much as the kids of normal ability. Fine... but they still ought to be learning *something* measurable, right? (If not, then why are we paying you to teach them?)
Public schools have been ravaged by the charter system there. Why? Because charter schools segregate underprivledged students into the public school system. Unsurprisingly, charter schools are more white and come from higher socio-economic backgrounds.
If their charter system works on the same principle as others I'm familiar with (basically, anyone can attend for free, and if there are more students then places then there is a lottery), then why is this a bad thing?
Without charter schools, you have children from both parents who care and parents who don't care in the crappy public schools. With charter schools, the parents who care will send their kids to the charters (if they're better). The fact that the public schools lose their high achievers in the deal isn't their fault.
It is not the duty of more conscientious parents to send their children to school with the children of less conscientious parents just to serve as a good example, or to sacrifice their children's education on the altar of desegregation. Segregation by force or by law? Horrible, evil, awful, stamp it the hell out. Segregation by accident, because white parents are more likely to avail themselves of the opportunity to escape bad public schools? Totally different matter.
Penalizing poor-performing schools only works if you intend to actually kill them -- provide students with alternatives, and then cut off funding to such a degree that the kids leave.
From what I've seen of these shit schools, though, the problem isn't so much a lack of money as a lack of good people, as you mention. My mother taught for a while at an inner-city school. They had money for "technology" coming out the wazoo, and some federal grants given especially to poor schools... but most of the teachers and the principal were morons. Cutting off funding to the school won't help the kids there unless it induces them to leave. Firing the idiots would -- but then you have to fight the unions.
Why is racial segregation assumed a priori something to be avoided?
If you implement a voucher system, parents who care more about education will be more inclined to take advantage of those vouchers to move their children to better schools. This is a good thing, right? Parents can move their kids out of a bad school to a good one.
How does anything change if the kids who leave tend to be white and the kids who stay tend to be black? Nobody is discriminating on the basis of race (hell, the abstract of that study says so). The black kids can use the vouchers too, after all. Are you saying that we ought to force white kids to stay in a bad school just so the black kids who are there can have some white classmates?
Last summer I was between jobs. I could stand to incur about $5000 in unreimbursed medical expenses before I would have serious trouble (read: before the marginal-utility-of-money curve went seriously nonlinear), so I bought a catastrophic coverage policy with a deductible of $5000. This is how insurance is supposed to work -- you figure out what risk you can't bear yourself and pay someone else to bear it for you.
Such plans are going to be illegal soon under Obamacare.
How can a number belong to anyone?
The right to use a particular number for a particular purpose can belong to someone, but it is absurd to suggest that a number belongs to someone.
Yes. If you have my credit card number, and obtained it by legal means (i.e. didn't steal my wallet), then the knowledge of it belongs to you. You can print it out and put it your refrigerator, and I don't care.
What you can't do is buy things with it. That's fraud. You also can't go post it on /b/, since any reasonable person would expect that doing so would lead to fraud, and would make you an accessory.
I want to know: at what point do TSA regulations apply?
Suppose I own an airplane. If I want to take my friend Bob up in my Cessna, I doubt the TSA is going to want to look up his butt or make him take his shoes off. Hell, I imagine I don't even have to let them know -- I just file a flight plan with my local airport and go.
Now, what if Bob pays me $50 to take him from one place to another. Then does the TSA have to look up his butt?
What if I make a point of giving anybody who pays me $50 a ride in my airplane?
What if I have a bigger airplane and carry people around ten at the time?
When do they start insisting on me following their rules?
Yes, or at least its government is.
"The world will only be free when the last king has been hanged with the entrails of the last priest".
Yeah, it's a name, not a title, I know...
So, an International Terrorist, say one of those Dirty Muslims, could make a HERF gun and run around frying tourists' passport chips, leaving them stranded in (say) Israel?
I believe that the right to leave a country is one of those rights that the UN has officially declared sacrosanct -- no matter who you are, or which country you're a citizen of (or if you're not a citizen of anywhere), you have the right to exit whatever country you're in (unless you've broken that country's laws). If you're a US citizen who wants to head to China, the US government can't stop you; only the Chinese government can.
Not according to that. The law says that it is a crime if anyone "fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales or lightens" coins.
You're not doing it for purposes of fraud, and really -- you're not doing any of those things. You're throwing it in the bin. It's still the same goddamn penny, and hasn't been altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened in any way. It's just in the bin.
If I were the seller I'd make a huge deal out of the fact that, by playing these games, you can get me to round the price down.
Hell, I'll round down to the nearest *quarter* if you'll pay cash -- it's still cheaper than the 47 cent debit card fee.