Just because something's constitutional it's not necessarily a good idea, and in a government like ours the decision whether to do it or not ought to lie in the hands of the citizens.
Thank you -- finally a nation that treats everyone with respect, and figures that more information is better than less information since it lets people make more informed decisions.
What fraction of that 50% were suicides, and what fraction of those suicides would have killed themselves by another method were a firearm not available?
In Washington DC, jumping in front of trains is the preferred method.
I'm in NYC right now, visiting for a physics conference.
To an outsider, New Yorkers seem uniquely willing to deal with (and, when in charge, impose) authoritarian rules that people from elsewhere would chafe at. Don't do this; do this; everything in New York seems over-regulated. It's not just from the government; it's everywhere. I'm staying in a dormitory at Columbia University, and the rules on how guest passes work are quite asinine. The plenary talks at the conference have free bottled water and coffee provided (the conference organizers have paid Columbia's chosen caterer for this already), but bring in any of your own water bottles and it's a $1000 (!) fine. [This is different from the standard "no outside food" rule at restaurants, since they want you to buy their stuff; in this case the catering is all already paid for.]
I was also fortunate enough to get to perform in Carnegie Hall a few months ago with a choir I sing with. During our rehearsal, the conductor wanted her podium moved a few inches to get out of the way of a troupe of dancers sharing the stage. She wasn't allowed to move this simple block of wood three inches; someone had to go get a union stagehand, since it was made very clear to us: the union stagehands, by the terms of their contract, are the only ones allowed to touch anything, including things as mundane as music stands.
For whatever reason, New York is full of rules. Maybe some of them are necessary to keep eight million people crammed into this sardine can from hurting each other, but this has so conditioned the people here to obey unnecessary rules that people go along with it.
Frankly, if ISP's want to prevent overuse of their networks they should impose transfer caps. Within those caps it shouldn't matter whether I want to deliver my own bits or bits on behalf of someone else.
So what you're saying is that it's unfair to accomplish what you consider to be proper policy objectives of taxation using a tax code with one free parameter.
Fine, then. Make it two free parameters: a common one is "your tax is X% of your income minus Y". The point is that every free parameter in the tax code is an opportunity for corruption, and currently we have about eleventy billion.
You write:
A true progressive tax, at realistic rates and without any built in "favors" is what is needed.
The problem is that so long as politicians are able to build in favors, they will. If you rely on the honor of politicians to prevent corruption you're doomed.
If you have the X%+Y tax system outlined above, there are no special favors; for a given revenue level there is in fact only one degree of freedom, and then it's just the standard rich-vs-poor fight, which is far less vulnerable to capture by special interests than our current behemoth.
One resonant mode of the engine vibrating in its brackets happens to have a frequency... the same as the idle frequency of the engine. So, over time, the engine would shake itself loose and break the brackets.
It would get to a point where I'd have to rest my foot lightly on the pedal at stoplights to throw it out of resonance. Apparently it was a known problem with the things. When it got bad I'd take it in and get the mounts replaced, but it would come back after another few years.
I had one of the early ones, a '94 SL2. It was a great car and ran fine, although somewhere north of 115k miles when the odometer died the engine started randomly eating oil. I understand many of them from that era did the same.
Did I mention the odometer died? So did the gas gauge (intermittently). The water pump died when a thermostat malfunctioned and caused it to overheat. The AC died when a pressure sensor died and the compressor blew itself up.
Basically, it's a great car, except the engine's taste for oil and the random-ass failures of everything electronic in the whole damn car.
Oh, and you could unlock it with a screwdriver and start the engine with same. Mine disappeared and did a two-month stint bringing cocaine back from Mexico. (The police found it abandoned -- apparently the smugglers got fed up with driving stick, because they'd managed to break the mechanical linkage between the shifter and the transmission. Or maybe they wanted A/C in the desert -- amateurs. The cops told me to "go get it detailed and don't smell the white powder ground into the carpet.")
Many businesses have figured out a business model such that being nice to their customers aids in separating them from their money, because they tend to come back.
Men and women aren't *that* different. As a physics instructor, I can honestly say that my male and female students tend to be pretty much about the same. If you were to show me a solution to a problem, or code for a simulation, written by a student, I couldn't begin to guess whether the author was male or female.
Yes, there are some differences, but in most metrics those differences are very small compared to the variation within each group.
I can give those answers for the computational physics classes I've taught and the physics departments I've seen.
At my previous university, located in the Southwest in a town that is ~40% Hispanic, the physics department student body was perhaps half whites. There were no African-Americans or immigrants from Africa, and some fraction (10%?) of Hispanics*. There were quite a few East Asian immigrants, some Indian immigrants, and some Indian-Americans. There were more immigrants among graduate students than among undergraduates; the only Africans were a few Afrikaaners.
Thinking back to the "best and brightest" students that came through my computational physics course, they were roughly evenly split between men and women; most were white, with two good Hispanic students. Anecdotally, astronomy has many more women than physics, and the course was also taken by astronomers.
At my current university, located in an urban area that is 50% black, there is one black student in the physics program proper: an Ethiopian immigrant. (She is excellent.) There are a small number of black students in service courses; anecdotally, they tend to do worse than their peers, with one notable exception who is strong. There are no New World Hispanics that I can think of; there are two Spaniards. The graduate program has a great many Chinese, some Indians, and some Ukrainians (from these countries), along with white Americans.
So, basically: the people in physics courses (at least) include very few blacks, some Hispanics in Hispanic areas, and whites and Asians, with more Asian immigrants in graduate programs.
Or, perhaps, there are simply fewer women seeking positions in tech firms for whatever reason?
Perhaps women are being guided away from technical pursuits at an early age by the gender stereotypes of their parents and teachers. Perhaps they have freely chosen to do other things. Neither is Yahoo/Google's problem. There are plenty of scenarios where they're simply hiring qualified people who apply for positions, and less than half of those happen to be women.
Social networks are useful. It's about time we wrote and popularized a distributed one, hosted on our own machines rather than dependent on some group of folks to whom we are products, not customers.
Are there genuine sincere threats made on Twitter etc?
Someone who's being snarky tweets "So Imma go shoot the president now." Someone who's serious doesn't tweet about shooting the president, and instead goes and shoots him.
@leeharveyoswald didn't take out a classified ad asking for lawn chairs on the grassy knoll, after all.
... you have 15,000 students, and you're hoping to give them access to just some of the internet, in the hopes that they'll buy textbooks from whatever shitty overpriced group you've cut a deal with instead of Amazon?
Students have:
1) time 2) idealism 3) skills
and the combination of those three, if you piss them off, will rip you a new one. The techies will set up proxies to get around your bullshit (and they will succeed), the law students will sue you, and the business majors will set up a "white market" (not black at all!) reselling books to their peers for a small profit.
This is the same post everyone else is writing, because this is one of the few times that Slashdot's all saying the same thing: this is a fucking bad idea.
Because it's still okay for urbanites to make jokes about "those dumb West Virginians fucking their cousins" and refer to places like Missouri as "flyover country".
Slashdot Mirror
Just because something's constitutional it's not necessarily a good idea, and in a government like ours the decision whether to do it or not ought to lie in the hands of the citizens.
Thank you -- finally a nation that treats everyone with respect, and figures that more information is better than less information since it lets people make more informed decisions.
How is doing electronic voting any more complex to maintain and develop than setting up polling places, screwing around with ballots, etc.?
What fraction of that 50% were suicides, and what fraction of those suicides would have killed themselves by another method were a firearm not available?
In Washington DC, jumping in front of trains is the preferred method.
I'm in NYC right now, visiting for a physics conference.
To an outsider, New Yorkers seem uniquely willing to deal with (and, when in charge, impose) authoritarian rules that people from elsewhere would chafe at. Don't do this; do this; everything in New York seems over-regulated. It's not just from the government; it's everywhere. I'm staying in a dormitory at Columbia University, and the rules on how guest passes work are quite asinine. The plenary talks at the conference have free bottled water and coffee provided (the conference organizers have paid Columbia's chosen caterer for this already), but bring in any of your own water bottles and it's a $1000 (!) fine. [This is different from the standard "no outside food" rule at restaurants, since they want you to buy their stuff; in this case the catering is all already paid for.]
I was also fortunate enough to get to perform in Carnegie Hall a few months ago with a choir I sing with. During our rehearsal, the conductor wanted her podium moved a few inches to get out of the way of a troupe of dancers sharing the stage. She wasn't allowed to move this simple block of wood three inches; someone had to go get a union stagehand, since it was made very clear to us: the union stagehands, by the terms of their contract, are the only ones allowed to touch anything, including things as mundane as music stands.
For whatever reason, New York is full of rules. Maybe some of them are necessary to keep eight million people crammed into this sardine can from hurting each other, but this has so conditioned the people here to obey unnecessary rules that people go along with it.
This contradiction demonstrates in a nutshell why price controls on limited resources are silly.
Croquet is that game where you hit stuff with hammers, right? That's about like most urban areas' approach to parking enforcement.
If someone wants to send a bomb threat using someone else's wifi there is a Starbucks or a McDonalds on every corner.
Frankly, if ISP's want to prevent overuse of their networks they should impose transfer caps. Within those caps it shouldn't matter whether I want to deliver my own bits or bits on behalf of someone else.
So what you're saying is that it's unfair to accomplish what you consider to be proper policy objectives of taxation using a tax code with one free parameter.
Fine, then. Make it two free parameters: a common one is "your tax is X% of your income minus Y". The point is that every free parameter in the tax code is an opportunity for corruption, and currently we have about eleventy billion.
You write:
The problem is that so long as politicians are able to build in favors, they will. If you rely on the honor of politicians to prevent corruption you're doomed.
If you have the X%+Y tax system outlined above, there are no special favors; for a given revenue level there is in fact only one degree of freedom, and then it's just the standard rich-vs-poor fight, which is far less vulnerable to capture by special interests than our current behemoth.
s/this/any/
Oh, I forgot one more thing:
One resonant mode of the engine vibrating in its brackets happens to have a frequency ... the same as the idle frequency of the engine. So, over time, the engine would shake itself loose and break the brackets.
It would get to a point where I'd have to rest my foot lightly on the pedal at stoplights to throw it out of resonance. Apparently it was a known problem with the things. When it got bad I'd take it in and get the mounts replaced, but it would come back after another few years.
I had one of the early ones, a '94 SL2. It was a great car and ran fine, although somewhere north of 115k miles when the odometer died the engine started randomly eating oil. I understand many of them from that era did the same.
Did I mention the odometer died? So did the gas gauge (intermittently). The water pump died when a thermostat malfunctioned and caused it to overheat. The AC died when a pressure sensor died and the compressor blew itself up.
Basically, it's a great car, except the engine's taste for oil and the random-ass failures of everything electronic in the whole damn car.
Oh, and you could unlock it with a screwdriver and start the engine with same. Mine disappeared and did a two-month stint bringing cocaine back from Mexico. (The police found it abandoned -- apparently the smugglers got fed up with driving stick, because they'd managed to break the mechanical linkage between the shifter and the transmission. Or maybe they wanted A/C in the desert -- amateurs. The cops told me to "go get it detailed and don't smell the white powder ground into the carpet.")
Many businesses have figured out a business model such that being nice to their customers aids in separating them from their money, because they tend to come back.
Men and women aren't *that* different. As a physics instructor, I can honestly say that my male and female students tend to be pretty much about the same. If you were to show me a solution to a problem, or code for a simulation, written by a student, I couldn't begin to guess whether the author was male or female.
Yes, there are some differences, but in most metrics those differences are very small compared to the variation within each group.
This was my first guess, too. Lots of reasons why there might be a difference, many of them perfectly innocent.
How do you not know that when cellphones these days are advertised as having quad-core processors?
I can give those answers for the computational physics classes I've taught and the physics departments I've seen.
At my previous university, located in the Southwest in a town that is ~40% Hispanic, the physics department student body was perhaps half whites. There were no African-Americans or immigrants from Africa, and some fraction (10%?) of Hispanics*. There were quite a few East Asian immigrants, some Indian immigrants, and some Indian-Americans. There were more immigrants among graduate students than among undergraduates; the only Africans were a few Afrikaaners.
Thinking back to the "best and brightest" students that came through my computational physics course, they were roughly evenly split between men and women; most were white, with two good Hispanic students. Anecdotally, astronomy has many more women than physics, and the course was also taken by astronomers.
At my current university, located in an urban area that is 50% black, there is one black student in the physics program proper: an Ethiopian immigrant. (She is excellent.) There are a small number of black students in service courses; anecdotally, they tend to do worse than their peers, with one notable exception who is strong. There are no New World Hispanics that I can think of; there are two Spaniards. The graduate program has a great many Chinese, some Indians, and some Ukrainians (from these countries), along with white Americans.
So, basically: the people in physics courses (at least) include very few blacks, some Hispanics in Hispanic areas, and whites and Asians, with more Asian immigrants in graduate programs.
It's only prejudice if it comes at the expense of the wrong groups, don'tcha know?
Or, perhaps, there are simply fewer women seeking positions in tech firms for whatever reason?
Perhaps women are being guided away from technical pursuits at an early age by the gender stereotypes of their parents and teachers. Perhaps they have freely chosen to do other things. Neither is Yahoo/Google's problem. There are plenty of scenarios where they're simply hiring qualified people who apply for positions, and less than half of those happen to be women.
Social networks are useful. It's about time we wrote and popularized a distributed one, hosted on our own machines rather than dependent on some group of folks to whom we are products, not customers.
Are there genuine sincere threats made on Twitter etc?
Someone who's being snarky tweets "So Imma go shoot the president now." Someone who's serious doesn't tweet about shooting the president, and instead goes and shoots him.
@leeharveyoswald didn't take out a classified ad asking for lawn chairs on the grassy knoll, after all.
... you have 15,000 students, and you're hoping to give them access to just some of the internet, in the hopes that they'll buy textbooks from whatever shitty overpriced group you've cut a deal with instead of Amazon?
Students have:
1) time
2) idealism
3) skills
and the combination of those three, if you piss them off, will rip you a new one. The techies will set up proxies to get around your bullshit (and they will succeed), the law students will sue you, and the business majors will set up a "white market" (not black at all!) reselling books to their peers for a small profit.
This is the same post everyone else is writing, because this is one of the few times that Slashdot's all saying the same thing: this is a fucking bad idea.
In America "racial minority" means "black or Hispanic".
There's a deficit of Chinese people in football and Jews in growing soybeans but nobody really worries about that.
Because it's still okay for urbanites to make jokes about "those dumb West Virginians fucking their cousins" and refer to places like Missouri as "flyover country".