Sounds like it was originally from an H.G. Wells story, but it was popularized by this Simpson's episode, in which Homer releases the contents of an ant farm inside of a space station, leading the TV anchor to 1. conclude that giant space insects were invading and 2. vow his allegiance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
You need to consider behavior (I'm more diligent about paying my mortgage than saving money, as I expect most people are).
Also, in the early years of that 15-year mortgage, where you are spending $300 more to build $600 more in equity, the ROI is incomparable. Yes, it works out approximately similar over 30 years, assuming perfect savings, low mortgage interest, and consistent market return, but over 5-10 years (the average time of owning a home) I would bet that the 15-year is optimal nearly every time.
Not trying to pick a fight per se - just trying to clarify that there are lots of issues with this and many of the other pithy sayings of the pro-gun lobby. They are treated as axioms, but really all they do is correspond to an unproven ideology.
That said, I'm not saying I'm pro gun control. I'm really saying that I'm a proponent of evidence-based argument, and sci-fi books don't qualify as evidence.
Citation needed. There is no evidence that carrying lethal weapons makes a person more polite, or that the threat of death makes a person more polite. In fact, I would expect the opposite to be true. Keep in mind that your cherished phrase is pulled from a sci-fi book, from an author that also speculated about voting rights that could only be obtained through military service, unlimited basic income given freely to all, complex group marriages, and my favorite: the concept that the society shouldn't be able to go to war unless by popular vote, where any affirmative vote counts as signing up for the initial draft.
He has some interesting ideas, but they are fictional, and you shouldn't act as though they are facts.
You're just playing with semantics to try to make a point. Look at the definition:
An accident or a mishap is an incidental and unplanned event or circumstance, often with lack of intention or necessity.
Intention being the key here. Lots of people get shot with firearms where there was no intent or plan. Sure it might have been negligent to leave the handgun loaded which little Johnny then grabbed off the table and shot his Mom with, but Mom certainly didn't intend for that to happen, or plan it. She was irresponsible and unsafe, but to say that this wasn't an accident is to say that nothing is ever an accident.
Your point is a good one, but I take exception to redefining words to mean what we want them to. You can make your point without resorting to mangling the language.
You seem to suggest that putting responsibility on a person is a psychologically damaging thing. I disagree, and I think simple responsibilities are great and healthy at any age. This is a difficult situation, but these seizures might happen at most once or twice a year - are you really saying that the child can never be alone with her mother, ever, on the off chance that a seizure hits? Seizures would be potentially traumatic and scary, but there would be no way of sheltering her from them without taking such dramatic measures.
I've got a 2-year-old at home, and she would be perfectly capable of understanding "if Mommy falls down or gets hurt, push this button and Daddy will come help". This is certainly much better than crossing your fingers and hoping it won't happen again.
It's silly to say that it made more sense in the 60's and 70's than today, because nothing about the economics have changed, only the behavior of mortgage holders.
Even so, whether one is a better decision depends on the interest rates, the length of the mortgage, realtor fees, and what the market is doing. This calculator lets you figure it all out, and is actually a pretty impressive applet in terms of presenting information and allowing you to quickly get a grasp of all the variables in the problem: http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
The big thing that changes the equation the most IMO is going with a 15-year mortgage. Especially considering that rates are generally 1% lower on the shorter mortgage, it makes a dramatic difference in how your equity builds. For instance, on my home I could've taken a 30-year at 4.75% and paid $1100 a month, with maybe $100 of that going to principal. Instead, I'm paying $1400 a month on a 15-year @ 3.75% interest rate, with $700 going to principal every month. Think of it this way: would you pay $300 a month to get $600 more in equity every month?
Of course, the scenario changes as you get farther along in the mortgage, but conventional wisdom I've seen says that short mortgages are only for people who are intending to pay off a house and retire in it. Seems to me that short mortgages are best for anybody who doesn't like being a slave to the bank.
Interesting - I certainly think in general drug laws need to be revised because everything (smuggling, financing mexican cartels, imprisoning nonviolent offenders) seems to by dysfunctional. That said, that 62% is really a problem with drug laws, not SWAT teams. Useful statistics nonetheless.
... the numbers are in, and they are USED far more than is justified...
I'd love to see a citation on this. Anecdotally speaking, it doesn't seem to be the case where I'm at. For the record, my step dad has been on a SWAT team for quite some time, and while they spend a lot of time training, every team member is a normal police officer that only gets called to get on the SWAT gear for extraordinary circumstances.
Here are some real scenarios that happened recently in my area:
- An escaped convict manages to get a gun somehow, flees into a random neighborhood, broke into the first house he could, and took a teenage boy inside as his hostage. - Some nutjob in the suburbs finally snaps, gets out his hunting rifle, and starts taking potshots at his neighbors and anybody he sees wandering down the street. - The Aurora theater shooting. Even after apprehending the suspect, he had booby trapped his apartment. - Some asshole barricades himself in a hotel and takes his girlfriend as a hostage.
All of these are examples of exceptional circumstances that normal police are not prepared to deal with. In order, they were handled by SWAT snipers, a heavily armored SWAT team, a bomb squad, and the use of an explosive entry to disorient the suspect and rescue the hostage. All of those require specialized equipment and training. How else do you propose society ought to handle situations such as these?
Another would be landing a rocket on a small floating platform. We'll see how that plays out tonight.
That would be a very impressive display of controls algorithms, but not AI. You can build something doing essentially the same tasks with LEGO Mindstorms - taking sensor input, and using that to control physical motion. The only difference is that SpaceX has far more and far better sensors, has some very complicated and impressive intermediate math, and sends the output signals to rocket engines rather than electric motors.
Respondents formed more negative assessments of the risk and benefits of childhood vaccines as they became more conservative and identified more strongly with the Republican Party.
I think your problem might be that you think that liberals have a monopoly on shopping at Whole Foods and driving Priuses. My grandparents are the most anti-Democrat people I know, and they are Prius-driving health nuts that eat mostly vegetarian. There is an enormous population of conservative, anti-chemical evangelical church moms that are all about "natural remedies" and would be happy to ban dihydrogen monoxide based on the name alone.
Don't let me get in the way of your black and white partisan worldview, though.
I suppose it could be geographical - I'm in Colorado, home of evangelical strongholds but also the birthplace of the gluten free lifestyle. We've got a weird blend of vegan hippies in Boulder and church moms in Colorado Springs, I imagine embracing pseudoscience would be the one thing they could agree on.
Here's the correlation I see: Distrust biology, because Evolution. Distrust Astrophysicists, because Big Bang. Distrust Earth Scientists, because Global Warming.
Then, somebody comes along going against "mainstream" medicine - chiropractors, acupuncture, holistic healers, homeopathy, natural remedies, anti-vaxxers. They all similarly attack the established consensus among the scientific and medical community, which is just a small step from the existing tendencies of the religious right. It's the perfect partnership.
Most of the antivaxxers I know are more inclined towards the right. Some poster above commented with a link to a study confirming this statistically, but my anecdotal experience tells me that evangelical, organic, don't trust science OR government types are the primary culprits of this kind of thinking.
It really comes from a mix of ignorance and arrogance - people don't even know enough about science, medicine, or history to have a clue how wrong they are about every aspect of this decision. It's basically a textbook example of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
- oh no, they learned something 'bad': depending on your convictions, this may *really* be the driver of why you want to homeschool- you want to put blinkers on your kid and prevent them learning "inappropriate" things. Personally, I find this such an utterly unrealistic view that it's tragic. You can't lock your kid in the 19th century: the fact is that we live in a culture that is pluralistic, multicultural, and variegated - many times in ways that I'm personally uncomfortable with. But you can't build a bloody bubble around your kid and expect them to stay inside "for their own good".
Here's the thing: I don't really care about "bad" as in learning about sex, drugs, alcohol, whatever. I'm worried about "bad" as in picking up the attitude that you need to hide your identity to fit in, that knowledge and intelligence is something to be suppressed so you don't get singled out, and discovering that what happened on American Idol this week is far more important than whatever the hell the teacher is talking about. I know that, for myself, I started out as a bright, motivated, and intelligent kid in elementary school, and then started to discover that actually *giving a shit* was a great way to be singled out and made fun of. Around middle school, the acceptance of my friends and classmates became a lot more important to me than what my parents or teachers said, and I learned to be apathetic and intentionally started doing the bare minimum, so that I could blend in.
So yes, I want to protect my kids, but not from some kind of corrupting knowledge. It's more that I am acutely aware of how inane the interests and values are of the median child in the US, and I want to save my kids from abandoning their passions and talents for the sake of social acceptance. It is tough as a kid - for adults, we have all sorts of control over our social lives: we can change jobs, choose when and where we spend our free time, control our appearances, etc. As a kid, you have to dress in the clothes your parents buy for you, go to the school you are assigned to, sit next to and partner with the kids your teacher tells you to, and you really have very little means to exert control over any of those situations. Trying to adapt socially is one of the only options available to you, and if you end up with a bad school/class/teacher/friends things can get very ugly, very quickly. My wife taught for a number of years, and one of her students was being bullied so badly that she was becoming suicidal, and had developed a plan to kill herself. In 5th grade. Thanks to my wife's intervention, the bullying came to an end and now both the bullying student and the girl who was victimized keep in touch with her and are thriving, but with a different teacher the outcome could have been far different.
So, the point is, some parents want to protect their kids from getting religious/political/anatomical knowledge that isn't ideologically consistent with the parent's belief system. I don't really give a shit about that. I DO care very strongly about my kids being happy and successful people though, and much of my K-12 experience, as a former student and a former teacher, suggests that the "socialization" kids receive from their peers could very well produce the opposite result.
No, it really doesn't. More kids in CS just means they have less kids in shop, or whatever it is. On the whole, resource costs, teacher salaries, etc, it balances out.
Schools have X dollars to hire Y teachers for Z classrooms. It's isn't as easy as "let's add another section" when the existing CS classes fill. That CS teacher is already teaching as many classes as she's paid to teach, and likely there are already the number of students her union contract limits specify. The room is already in use the rest of the day. (Colleges, at least, get increased tuition payments when they add a section to a filled class. High schools do not.)
The situation isn't as you describe it. If a student enrolls in a CS class, that almost always means that there is a different class that the student is choosing not to take. Computer classes are often electives, so that means one less student in art, or gym, or music. In the short term, more interest in a class might mean some who want it don't get it, in the long term though, schools generally fit supply (number of teachers/sections) to demand (amount of student interest). Additionally, if more students enroll, the school gets more funding.
This has already been demonstrated by Title IX requirements. Schools have to provide "equal opportunity" for girls and boys in sports. In some cases that meant boys teams were cut. In others, money is being spent on girls sports that nobody really wants to play. In Oregon, that "opportunity" is measured by actual participation numbers. Nobody cares if the girls in a certain school district have no interest in sports, if a school doesn't have the right percentages of participation it is assumed they are violating the girls' rights and corrective action is required.
I don't think this is the ideal setup, but at the same time I can't say that I mind too much - IMO, schools place far too much emphasis on sports. Nobody runs assemblies and pep rallies for academic achievement - wouldn't that be more appropriate? Also, because sports are extracurricular, it is different from this scenario. When someone wants to play a sport, it just plain costs money. You aren't freeing up resources elsewhere (unless the student is opting out of a different sport). In this case, you would hope that the school could offer more sections of CS and less of Home Ec or whatever, and things balance on the whole.
The thing is, I think there are decent objections to this kind of push - I would rather see efforts to get rid of bias than efforts to bias things the other way. However, the fact that you have an axe to grind with liberals and try to turn this into more fuel for the partisan fire hurts your credibility. You come across less as a concerned citizen and more as someone who is trying to slot this cleanly into your preexisting ideology.
This shares the fundamental flaw of all rocket technology: the fact that any rocket has to carry and throw away a vast load of reaction mass... Not bicycles, cars, trains, ships, submarines, or airplanes.
Not sure if you are ignorant of physics, or indirectly clamoring for space elevator/railgun-esque space access. Either way - you have to use reaction mass at some point, because even if you have enough delta-v from another means you need to be able to maneuver in space, circularize your orbit, etc. Also, rockets are the only way anybody has ever gotten to space, ever, and for the foreseeable future they will continue to be our primary means of access.
No doubt that intelligence has been proven to be immensely valuable, after all it is the single factor that has led to the dominance of humans on Earth. My point, though, is that there are a lot of "local minima" where it isn't going to develop because it doesn't offer advantages in certain niches. It also does come at a hefty evolutionary price - we need a high level of activity and high caloric intake to support our brain's resources, and our young are helpless for many years after being born because that big old cranium has to be shrunk down a lot to pass through the birth canal. Compare to sharks: just enough brainpower to kill, eat and breed, and their young are completely independent from day one.
So the costs of intelligence can easily outweigh the advantages. You need a species that has the building blocks available for intelligence, evolutionary pressure that will give more intelligent members an advantage, and enough time between extinction events to give that time to do its work. If you want a civilization out of it, hope that the species is social, and has the dexterity for serious tool use. Octopi are seemingly very intelligent and have the appendages to be superior tool users to humans, but they have a short life span and are mostly solitary. Dolphins and pigs are considered highly intelligent, and are also social, but it is hard to imagine how they could become serious tool users.
Really, what I'm saying is that intelligence is by no means an inevitable consequence of evolution. We can look at many, many parts of our evolutionary history and see possibilities for reaching a dead-end or a local minima where incremental adaptations towards intelligence would be a disadvantage. I would not be surprised if we find life elsewhere in the universe and find that it is stuck endlessly in an era resembling that of the dinosaurs, or some other phase that resembles something out of our geological history more closely than it does our modern biosphere composed of a bunch of leftovers that happened to survive the last few extinction events.
Intelligence is essentially the ability for a species to drive their own adaptation, and do it far faster than mere biological evolution ever could. It certainly is immensely powerful. I don't think life inevitably trends that way though, because evolution doesn't really trend in any direction but that which allows a species to continue to reproduce.
Consider, if evolution tended to move towards higher intelligence, we would expect the oldest species to be the most intelligent. We would also expect to see anything that is universally advantageous evolving independently in different evolutionary lines, like flight developed in both birds and mammals. On the contrary, we see intelligence concentrated mostly in mammals (there are some fairly intelligent birds, but among fish, reptiles, and insects it is very rare). The very oldest species are some of the dumbest, simple but absurdly optimized for what they do (sharks, alligators).
Intelligence might be very powerful, but I think it really came out of the confluence of some very fortunate events. Consider the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous - dinosaurs were the dominant lifeform, and any creature that wanted to survive had to stay out of their way. Mammals developed their own niche by being small, furry, warm-blooded, and having the low-light vision (and attendant processing power) to avoid danger and get around at night. Things might have stayed right there, with small fidgety mammals and big dominant dinosaurs, except for the fact that whatever happened at the end of the Cretaceous killed off all the massive lifeforms while allowing small, warm-blooded things to thrive.
The point being, it is easy to imagine that a different evolutionary path would've made intelligence impossible, either because the basic building blocks never developed (warm blooded creatures with proportionally large brains and the appendages for tool use) or because the ecosystem didn't make it advantageous - advanced intelligence offers very little to already dominant creatures, which is why sharks have gotten by for millions of years without it. Thankfully, we got the ecological circumstances and evolutionary pressures we did, and we now have civilization to show for it.
Real life particle accelerators don't sound like a whole lot... there's the sound of the vacuum pumps and the hum of the cooling systems, but electromagnets themselves are pretty damn quiet for the most part. There unfortunately aren't many cool sci-fi sound effects associated with them.
However - the one at LBNL makes the pac-man "waka waka" noise when you click the button to open up the beam.
Teledesic and Iridium have run into problems in the past, but at least the Iridium network is currently up and running after some corporate shuffling, (satellite phones exist thanks to this) and the Iridium 2 constellation will begin deploying within the year.
At least part of the problem is that these things are essentially impossible to defend against. ICBMs, MIRVs, etc, are very hard to defend against, but in principle you could intercept every warhead with a missile or laser, and nullify an attack. Once you mechanically destroy a warhead, much of the threat is gone. With a kinetic weapon dropped from overhead, you have less time to detect and counteract the weapon, and even then, you are only going to stop it with something of equal or greater magnitude of energy. How do you stop a massive tungsten rod moving at 17,000 MPH or more? You could try to nuke it, if you are willing to set one off above your head. The best you could probably do is nudge the trajectory towards unpopulated areas, but you still have to detect, launch something, and close with this weapon before it impacts - which would probably be only a few minutes.
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Sounds like it was originally from an H.G. Wells story, but it was popularized by this Simpson's episode, in which Homer releases the contents of an ant farm inside of a space station, leading the TV anchor to 1. conclude that giant space insects were invading and 2. vow his allegiance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
You need to consider behavior (I'm more diligent about paying my mortgage than saving money, as I expect most people are).
Also, in the early years of that 15-year mortgage, where you are spending $300 more to build $600 more in equity, the ROI is incomparable. Yes, it works out approximately similar over 30 years, assuming perfect savings, low mortgage interest, and consistent market return, but over 5-10 years (the average time of owning a home) I would bet that the 15-year is optimal nearly every time.
Not trying to pick a fight per se - just trying to clarify that there are lots of issues with this and many of the other pithy sayings of the pro-gun lobby. They are treated as axioms, but really all they do is correspond to an unproven ideology.
That said, I'm not saying I'm pro gun control. I'm really saying that I'm a proponent of evidence-based argument, and sci-fi books don't qualify as evidence.
Citation needed. There is no evidence that carrying lethal weapons makes a person more polite, or that the threat of death makes a person more polite. In fact, I would expect the opposite to be true. Keep in mind that your cherished phrase is pulled from a sci-fi book, from an author that also speculated about voting rights that could only be obtained through military service, unlimited basic income given freely to all, complex group marriages, and my favorite: the concept that the society shouldn't be able to go to war unless by popular vote, where any affirmative vote counts as signing up for the initial draft.
He has some interesting ideas, but they are fictional, and you shouldn't act as though they are facts.
You're just playing with semantics to try to make a point. Look at the definition:
An accident or a mishap is an incidental and unplanned event or circumstance, often with lack of intention or necessity.
Intention being the key here. Lots of people get shot with firearms where there was no intent or plan. Sure it might have been negligent to leave the handgun loaded which little Johnny then grabbed off the table and shot his Mom with, but Mom certainly didn't intend for that to happen, or plan it. She was irresponsible and unsafe, but to say that this wasn't an accident is to say that nothing is ever an accident.
Your point is a good one, but I take exception to redefining words to mean what we want them to. You can make your point without resorting to mangling the language.
You seem to suggest that putting responsibility on a person is a psychologically damaging thing. I disagree, and I think simple responsibilities are great and healthy at any age. This is a difficult situation, but these seizures might happen at most once or twice a year - are you really saying that the child can never be alone with her mother, ever, on the off chance that a seizure hits? Seizures would be potentially traumatic and scary, but there would be no way of sheltering her from them without taking such dramatic measures.
I've got a 2-year-old at home, and she would be perfectly capable of understanding "if Mommy falls down or gets hurt, push this button and Daddy will come help". This is certainly much better than crossing your fingers and hoping it won't happen again.
It's silly to say that it made more sense in the 60's and 70's than today, because nothing about the economics have changed, only the behavior of mortgage holders.
Even so, whether one is a better decision depends on the interest rates, the length of the mortgage, realtor fees, and what the market is doing. This calculator lets you figure it all out, and is actually a pretty impressive applet in terms of presenting information and allowing you to quickly get a grasp of all the variables in the problem: http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
The big thing that changes the equation the most IMO is going with a 15-year mortgage. Especially considering that rates are generally 1% lower on the shorter mortgage, it makes a dramatic difference in how your equity builds. For instance, on my home I could've taken a 30-year at 4.75% and paid $1100 a month, with maybe $100 of that going to principal. Instead, I'm paying $1400 a month on a 15-year @ 3.75% interest rate, with $700 going to principal every month. Think of it this way: would you pay $300 a month to get $600 more in equity every month?
Of course, the scenario changes as you get farther along in the mortgage, but conventional wisdom I've seen says that short mortgages are only for people who are intending to pay off a house and retire in it. Seems to me that short mortgages are best for anybody who doesn't like being a slave to the bank.
Interesting - I certainly think in general drug laws need to be revised because everything (smuggling, financing mexican cartels, imprisoning nonviolent offenders) seems to by dysfunctional. That said, that 62% is really a problem with drug laws, not SWAT teams. Useful statistics nonetheless.
... the numbers are in, and they are USED far more than is justified...
I'd love to see a citation on this. Anecdotally speaking, it doesn't seem to be the case where I'm at. For the record, my step dad has been on a SWAT team for quite some time, and while they spend a lot of time training, every team member is a normal police officer that only gets called to get on the SWAT gear for extraordinary circumstances.
Here are some real scenarios that happened recently in my area:
- An escaped convict manages to get a gun somehow, flees into a random neighborhood, broke into the first house he could, and took a teenage boy inside as his hostage.
- Some nutjob in the suburbs finally snaps, gets out his hunting rifle, and starts taking potshots at his neighbors and anybody he sees wandering down the street.
- The Aurora theater shooting. Even after apprehending the suspect, he had booby trapped his apartment.
- Some asshole barricades himself in a hotel and takes his girlfriend as a hostage.
All of these are examples of exceptional circumstances that normal police are not prepared to deal with. In order, they were handled by SWAT snipers, a heavily armored SWAT team, a bomb squad, and the use of an explosive entry to disorient the suspect and rescue the hostage. All of those require specialized equipment and training. How else do you propose society ought to handle situations such as these?
Another would be landing a rocket on a small floating platform. We'll see how that plays out tonight.
That would be a very impressive display of controls algorithms, but not AI. You can build something doing essentially the same tasks with LEGO Mindstorms - taking sensor input, and using that to control physical motion. The only difference is that SpaceX has far more and far better sensors, has some very complicated and impressive intermediate math, and sends the output signals to rocket engines rather than electric motors.
Since it is apparently too onerous for you to search higher in the thread:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
FTFA:
Respondents formed more negative assessments of the risk and benefits of childhood vaccines as they became more conservative and identified more strongly with the Republican Party.
I think your problem might be that you think that liberals have a monopoly on shopping at Whole Foods and driving Priuses. My grandparents are the most anti-Democrat people I know, and they are Prius-driving health nuts that eat mostly vegetarian. There is an enormous population of conservative, anti-chemical evangelical church moms that are all about "natural remedies" and would be happy to ban dihydrogen monoxide based on the name alone.
Don't let me get in the way of your black and white partisan worldview, though.
Well at least we know that stupidity ignores political boundaries.
I suppose it could be geographical - I'm in Colorado, home of evangelical strongholds but also the birthplace of the gluten free lifestyle. We've got a weird blend of vegan hippies in Boulder and church moms in Colorado Springs, I imagine embracing pseudoscience would be the one thing they could agree on.
Here's the correlation I see: Distrust biology, because Evolution. Distrust Astrophysicists, because Big Bang. Distrust Earth Scientists, because Global Warming.
Then, somebody comes along going against "mainstream" medicine - chiropractors, acupuncture, holistic healers, homeopathy, natural remedies, anti-vaxxers. They all similarly attack the established consensus among the scientific and medical community, which is just a small step from the existing tendencies of the religious right. It's the perfect partnership.
Most of the antivaxxers I know are more inclined towards the right. Some poster above commented with a link to a study confirming this statistically, but my anecdotal experience tells me that evangelical, organic, don't trust science OR government types are the primary culprits of this kind of thinking.
It really comes from a mix of ignorance and arrogance - people don't even know enough about science, medicine, or history to have a clue how wrong they are about every aspect of this decision. It's basically a textbook example of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
- oh no, they learned something 'bad': depending on your convictions, this may *really* be the driver of why you want to homeschool- you want to put blinkers on your kid and prevent them learning "inappropriate" things. Personally, I find this such an utterly unrealistic view that it's tragic. You can't lock your kid in the 19th century: the fact is that we live in a culture that is pluralistic, multicultural, and variegated - many times in ways that I'm personally uncomfortable with. But you can't build a bloody bubble around your kid and expect them to stay inside "for their own good".
Here's the thing: I don't really care about "bad" as in learning about sex, drugs, alcohol, whatever. I'm worried about "bad" as in picking up the attitude that you need to hide your identity to fit in, that knowledge and intelligence is something to be suppressed so you don't get singled out, and discovering that what happened on American Idol this week is far more important than whatever the hell the teacher is talking about. I know that, for myself, I started out as a bright, motivated, and intelligent kid in elementary school, and then started to discover that actually *giving a shit* was a great way to be singled out and made fun of. Around middle school, the acceptance of my friends and classmates became a lot more important to me than what my parents or teachers said, and I learned to be apathetic and intentionally started doing the bare minimum, so that I could blend in.
So yes, I want to protect my kids, but not from some kind of corrupting knowledge. It's more that I am acutely aware of how inane the interests and values are of the median child in the US, and I want to save my kids from abandoning their passions and talents for the sake of social acceptance. It is tough as a kid - for adults, we have all sorts of control over our social lives: we can change jobs, choose when and where we spend our free time, control our appearances, etc. As a kid, you have to dress in the clothes your parents buy for you, go to the school you are assigned to, sit next to and partner with the kids your teacher tells you to, and you really have very little means to exert control over any of those situations. Trying to adapt socially is one of the only options available to you, and if you end up with a bad school/class/teacher/friends things can get very ugly, very quickly. My wife taught for a number of years, and one of her students was being bullied so badly that she was becoming suicidal, and had developed a plan to kill herself. In 5th grade. Thanks to my wife's intervention, the bullying came to an end and now both the bullying student and the girl who was victimized keep in touch with her and are thriving, but with a different teacher the outcome could have been far different.
So, the point is, some parents want to protect their kids from getting religious/political/anatomical knowledge that isn't ideologically consistent with the parent's belief system. I don't really give a shit about that. I DO care very strongly about my kids being happy and successful people though, and much of my K-12 experience, as a former student and a former teacher, suggests that the "socialization" kids receive from their peers could very well produce the opposite result.
No, it really doesn't. More kids in CS just means they have less kids in shop, or whatever it is. On the whole, resource costs, teacher salaries, etc, it balances out.
Schools have X dollars to hire Y teachers for Z classrooms. It's isn't as easy as "let's add another section" when the existing CS classes fill. That CS teacher is already teaching as many classes as she's paid to teach, and likely there are already the number of students her union contract limits specify. The room is already in use the rest of the day. (Colleges, at least, get increased tuition payments when they add a section to a filled class. High schools do not.)
The situation isn't as you describe it. If a student enrolls in a CS class, that almost always means that there is a different class that the student is choosing not to take. Computer classes are often electives, so that means one less student in art, or gym, or music. In the short term, more interest in a class might mean some who want it don't get it, in the long term though, schools generally fit supply (number of teachers/sections) to demand (amount of student interest). Additionally, if more students enroll, the school gets more funding.
This has already been demonstrated by Title IX requirements. Schools have to provide "equal opportunity" for girls and boys in sports. In some cases that meant boys teams were cut. In others, money is being spent on girls sports that nobody really wants to play. In Oregon, that "opportunity" is measured by actual participation numbers. Nobody cares if the girls in a certain school district have no interest in sports, if a school doesn't have the right percentages of participation it is assumed they are violating the girls' rights and corrective action is required.
I don't think this is the ideal setup, but at the same time I can't say that I mind too much - IMO, schools place far too much emphasis on sports. Nobody runs assemblies and pep rallies for academic achievement - wouldn't that be more appropriate? Also, because sports are extracurricular, it is different from this scenario. When someone wants to play a sport, it just plain costs money. You aren't freeing up resources elsewhere (unless the student is opting out of a different sport). In this case, you would hope that the school could offer more sections of CS and less of Home Ec or whatever, and things balance on the whole.
The thing is, I think there are decent objections to this kind of push - I would rather see efforts to get rid of bias than efforts to bias things the other way. However, the fact that you have an axe to grind with liberals and try to turn this into more fuel for the partisan fire hurts your credibility. You come across less as a concerned citizen and more as someone who is trying to slot this cleanly into your preexisting ideology.
This shares the fundamental flaw of all rocket technology: the fact that any rocket has to carry and throw away a vast load of reaction mass... Not bicycles, cars, trains, ships, submarines, or airplanes.
Not sure if you are ignorant of physics, or indirectly clamoring for space elevator/railgun-esque space access. Either way - you have to use reaction mass at some point, because even if you have enough delta-v from another means you need to be able to maneuver in space, circularize your orbit, etc. Also, rockets are the only way anybody has ever gotten to space, ever, and for the foreseeable future they will continue to be our primary means of access.
No doubt that intelligence has been proven to be immensely valuable, after all it is the single factor that has led to the dominance of humans on Earth. My point, though, is that there are a lot of "local minima" where it isn't going to develop because it doesn't offer advantages in certain niches. It also does come at a hefty evolutionary price - we need a high level of activity and high caloric intake to support our brain's resources, and our young are helpless for many years after being born because that big old cranium has to be shrunk down a lot to pass through the birth canal. Compare to sharks: just enough brainpower to kill, eat and breed, and their young are completely independent from day one.
So the costs of intelligence can easily outweigh the advantages. You need a species that has the building blocks available for intelligence, evolutionary pressure that will give more intelligent members an advantage, and enough time between extinction events to give that time to do its work. If you want a civilization out of it, hope that the species is social, and has the dexterity for serious tool use. Octopi are seemingly very intelligent and have the appendages to be superior tool users to humans, but they have a short life span and are mostly solitary. Dolphins and pigs are considered highly intelligent, and are also social, but it is hard to imagine how they could become serious tool users.
Really, what I'm saying is that intelligence is by no means an inevitable consequence of evolution. We can look at many, many parts of our evolutionary history and see possibilities for reaching a dead-end or a local minima where incremental adaptations towards intelligence would be a disadvantage. I would not be surprised if we find life elsewhere in the universe and find that it is stuck endlessly in an era resembling that of the dinosaurs, or some other phase that resembles something out of our geological history more closely than it does our modern biosphere composed of a bunch of leftovers that happened to survive the last few extinction events.
Intelligence is essentially the ability for a species to drive their own adaptation, and do it far faster than mere biological evolution ever could. It certainly is immensely powerful. I don't think life inevitably trends that way though, because evolution doesn't really trend in any direction but that which allows a species to continue to reproduce.
Consider, if evolution tended to move towards higher intelligence, we would expect the oldest species to be the most intelligent. We would also expect to see anything that is universally advantageous evolving independently in different evolutionary lines, like flight developed in both birds and mammals. On the contrary, we see intelligence concentrated mostly in mammals (there are some fairly intelligent birds, but among fish, reptiles, and insects it is very rare). The very oldest species are some of the dumbest, simple but absurdly optimized for what they do (sharks, alligators).
Intelligence might be very powerful, but I think it really came out of the confluence of some very fortunate events. Consider the extinction event that ended the Cretaceous - dinosaurs were the dominant lifeform, and any creature that wanted to survive had to stay out of their way. Mammals developed their own niche by being small, furry, warm-blooded, and having the low-light vision (and attendant processing power) to avoid danger and get around at night. Things might have stayed right there, with small fidgety mammals and big dominant dinosaurs, except for the fact that whatever happened at the end of the Cretaceous killed off all the massive lifeforms while allowing small, warm-blooded things to thrive.
The point being, it is easy to imagine that a different evolutionary path would've made intelligence impossible, either because the basic building blocks never developed (warm blooded creatures with proportionally large brains and the appendages for tool use) or because the ecosystem didn't make it advantageous - advanced intelligence offers very little to already dominant creatures, which is why sharks have gotten by for millions of years without it. Thankfully, we got the ecological circumstances and evolutionary pressures we did, and we now have civilization to show for it.
Real life particle accelerators don't sound like a whole lot... there's the sound of the vacuum pumps and the hum of the cooling systems, but electromagnets themselves are pretty damn quiet for the most part. There unfortunately aren't many cool sci-fi sound effects associated with them.
However - the one at LBNL makes the pac-man "waka waka" noise when you click the button to open up the beam.
Teledesic and Iridium have run into problems in the past, but at least the Iridium network is currently up and running after some corporate shuffling, (satellite phones exist thanks to this) and the Iridium 2 constellation will begin deploying within the year.
What's wrong with the Rod From God idea anyway?
At least part of the problem is that these things are essentially impossible to defend against. ICBMs, MIRVs, etc, are very hard to defend against, but in principle you could intercept every warhead with a missile or laser, and nullify an attack. Once you mechanically destroy a warhead, much of the threat is gone. With a kinetic weapon dropped from overhead, you have less time to detect and counteract the weapon, and even then, you are only going to stop it with something of equal or greater magnitude of energy. How do you stop a massive tungsten rod moving at 17,000 MPH or more? You could try to nuke it, if you are willing to set one off above your head. The best you could probably do is nudge the trajectory towards unpopulated areas, but you still have to detect, launch something, and close with this weapon before it impacts - which would probably be only a few minutes.