You start a more then a mile north of the South Pole. Specifically, you are 1 mile north of the latitude where there's only 1 mile of West before you're back where you started. You walk one mile South from Point A to Point B, then you walk 1 mile West and you are now back at Point B. 1 Mile North puts you back at Point A.
And I swear I figured that out before I read several dozen comments outlining that scenario already.
From the context of the rest of the conversation I can almost always figure out what a stupid Slashdot comment meant.
OTOH, tweets are virtually impossible for me to parse, because everyone's using lots of pronouns to stay under 140 characters, and "twitter threads" really don't show me "ok this guy was responding to this tweet, which was a response to that tweet, which was a response to something that chick said, so the 'she' in this last tweet is probably that chick..."
For example, every time I go to Fivethirtyeight.com there's a list of tweets the Fivethirtyeight authors are making. I can generally figure out what half of them mean. Today it's up to 3/4 or so, because Enten just sent out a barrage of 6 on the same topic and one of them said "this is the topic I am talking about," rather then the twitter-user's traditional reliance on everyone knowing precisely what they're talking about right now, and therefore not including any context becsides a timestamp and the twitter handles of the people they're interacting with.
This will probably be incredibly useful for a small set of users (ie: twitter addicts who get the lingo; marketers figuring out everything said about their boss, etc.) and be completely useless for damn near anyone else.
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the ability to innovate and change it. They aren't always first movers, but they DO bring innovation and of course profits to any segment they enter.
The magic is in saying "NO" to doing things that don't make sense... entering a crowded, unimaginative, razor-thin margin, mature TV market doesn't make sense for Apple. That's why they said no.... No more, no less.
My company declines jobs and new markets all the time. We run some quick numbers and make a decision on whether it makes sense to take on X risk for Y% margin. Nobody calls us "magic".
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the potential to charge $1 for a lime that everyone else is selling for 50 cents.
Which only tend to work when the thing everyone else is selling is clearly a POS for 90% of use-cases. Pre-iPod MP3 players had better specs then the iPod, but no good way to deal with the music you had on them. Pre-iPhone smartphones had better specs, but were incredibly bulky and wasted something like have their screen space with a huge keyboard. Don't get me wrong. My favorite smartphone ever was a Treo 650, and the runners-up are Blackberrys, but for the vast majority of the public an all-thouchscreen model with much better software integration is much superior.
Even the first Mac had demonstrably worse specs then most competitors, a terrible OS (the GUI took up lots of RAM, and there was only 128 KB with a KB, so there was no room for memory protection or multitasking); but it also had the only GUI available on a machine that wasn't intended to be a scientific workstation. And for a huge number of people it doesn't matter what features you have in your CLI OS because they can;t figure out how to use the damn thing.
That kind of advantage just doesn't exist with TVs.
That's a very interesting-looking series, sadly I will not have the time to read it before this discussion is archived. But it will go in the to-read list. The concept of humans as race with drawbacks is fascinating to me, because in every SciFi universe I've read we are by definition average and the point of the aliens is to talk about whichever exaggerated human characteristic they're supposed to represent.
And Slashdot will certainly have more stories like this in the future, so we'll be able to talk about it then.
So a private company, canceling the property rights of landowners for a mixture of political reasons and personal greed, is by definition the highest and best use of the river water.
But the government, choosing to do so through a process that includes opportunities for all sides to make their case (ie: "lobbying") and does not involve directly enriching anyone who makes the decisions, would be illegitimate?
The more I hear limited-government activists talk, the less I believe in their connection to reality.
So figuring out what secretive people are doing is really hard, because they're (you know) secretive and shit; therefore we should never trust what anyone who works in the field says about the field?
FYI: actual intelligence officers didn't miss the boat on Iraq's WMD. Their boss was convinced by a con-man telling him what he wanted to hear, and their job is to back up the President. They didn't know 9-11 was going to happen the way it did, but it was pretty clear something was going to be tried by Bin Laden.
"No correlation" means you get admitted at the same rate as everyone else because your application is the same as everyone else. Asian Americans make up 20% of Harvard admissions and roughly 6% of the population.
Which means that Harvard is telling the world Asians are 133% more qualified then everyone else. So you just proved that they should admit less Asians, not more, because you showed that Asians are just as qualified rather then showing they're 250% qualified.
The Courts currently require warrants for this kind of testing. They may in future change their minds, and say it's an extension of non-warrant-requiring fingerprint tests, but that ruling has not happened.
Moreover, as I pointed out (and you completely ignored), if the cops have a coke-using informant whose willing to fake evidence against you they really truly have no need for this test. They can get their warrant, plant their evidence, and fuck you over just based on the guy's word.
Keep in mind that your targeted individual can't be tested without a warrant, no matter what the coke-using informant does to the cup. They could probably get a warrant if the coke-using informant says the target is a junkie, but the test isn't actually proof of anything illegal (remember: using drugs is technically legal, it's possessing them before you've taken them that's the problem). They might be able to use to get a warrant for the target's house, and plant some drugs or something in the toilet; but the informant's word the target had drugs would probably be enough for that too.
In other words, this test is not gonna make the drug war worse.
A private companys is by definition not managing things so that the people get the best use of their resource, it's managing things so that it's owners personal well-being is maximized. That could mean either a) maximizing revenue in the short term by ignoring long-term planning, b) finding ways to put competitors to the owners out of business, and/or c) engaging in the owners ideological hobby horse.
It is by definition less transparent then the government because private corporations only have disclosure requirements if they're publicly traded, and since there's no Congress to keep them honest they're notorious for shading things.
For example, let's say the owners decide that global warming is a great threat to their business, and therefore decide to dramatically cut the water allocation to anyone who is using it to raise cattle. Which will incidentally create a huge allocation that the largest shareholder's tomato farm could use. Depending on the exact wording of the contract the ranchers could lose their entire allocation immediately. They're definitely screwed whenever the next contract is negotiated.
The minutes of the meeting where the decision was made can't be FOIA'd because they are private records. Information on whether the company is telling the truth that the tomato farm is paying more then the ranchers is impossible to get without a lawsuit, which may (or may not) be possible under the exact text of the relevant contract, and won't help them anyway because cattle need water every day and they ain't getting none during the lawsuit. You've established there's no Federal legislation in this at all, which means Congress can bitch/moan/and actually do jack-squat.
I'd guess that intellectually they know Dubya got into Yale, but they got here by being perfect in school and hitting that test score exactly, and so they moved heaven and earth so their kid could hit the test score; and everyone went "gee, another guy named Singh with a perfect GPA, a 2300 SAT, and a whole bunch of clubs which are all known to be helpful on college applications, but absolutely no personality of his own; why don't we let him attend a state school where they don't already have 15 of those."
That would suck as a parent, particularly if your life experience back in India is that the best guy from a the equivalent second-tier-public-school has a worse career then their equivalent of Harvard.
They can look at someone whose application is absolutely perfect, with great test scores, a 5.0 GPA (note: I have never met a person with a soul who got a 5.0), has numerous clubs listed that were clearly selected mostly because they're the kinds of club that one joins if one wants to get into Harvard, has a bland and uninformative but objectively perfect essay, etc. and conclude this person is a boring-ass-motherfucker with no personality outside of his/her mother's insistence he/she do well in school and say "fuck that guy" in favor of the person who got a 3.8 and wrote an essay about how they want to get into Harvard because they really fucking hate helping mom at the store.
Statistically speaking the former are almost certainly either a) Asian American or b) Indian American. There isn't enough info to tell the race of the latter guy.
Homeowner's associations aren't for-profit. And it'd be very hard for anyone who didn't read the actual case law to know the difference between them and a governmental body that happens to be totally unbound by the Constitution.
A for-profit River authority would be even more subject to lobbying and crony capitalism then the Feds, because you could simply buy the organization and use it to put your rivals out of business.
Strictly speaking my parents actually used pre-school to get me and my sister into a very good University.
We lived in Detroit, and the school options were a) shitty neighborhood schools, b) expensive private schools, and c) a K-8 magnet School called Golightly that always had a waiting list. But the Wayne State University pre-school (which happened to be in the Projects) had a direct pipe-line to Golightly.
So we went to pre-school in the Projects, my mom swears she only had to duck and cover due to gunfire once, and we got into Golightly. Which prepared us for Detroit's magnet High School placement test, and the magnet High Schools have such a good reputation with the University of Michigan that it's quite easy to get admitted if you have a decent GPA and acceptable test scores. Kirsten actually ended up being paid to go there because tuition was covered by a Wade McCree scholarship, room and board was covered by the 529 they'd bought when she was three to pay for tuition at an in-stste-school; and the Drama department loved her so much they were giving her a couple grand scholarship.
Altho to be fair, I'm pretty sure the entire reason we were living in Detroit was to avoid people like your neighbors. They sound quite punchable.
They have her essay. They have the rest of her application, which will include her after-school activities. They know the name and reputation of her High School. Most High Schools with 8 AP classes are not the kind of place where mom allows you to work after-school to make money. In quite a few cases they will have spoken with the counselor at that High School. I went to a less selective school, and they actually sent an admissions officer to my High School to interview kids in person. So they don't know 100%, but they can make a damn good guess.
They probably get it wrong sometimes, but they get it less wrong then they would if they just created a computer algorithm and put raw numbers into it.
That's actually the point of the "holistic" policies they're suing to over-turn.
The problem is that the race of people who a) really know how to game the system to get the best college application possible and b) actually do so is overwhelmingly Asian. Plenty of white people know how, but the Asian 5-6% really includes a lot of people who treat their kid's High School career like a min/maxed D&D character. Except they don't let the kid play D&D because that doesn't look good on a college application.
OTOH, the race of the class you need to give help, because their Mom doesn't actually know she should be planning for college in the 8th grade, is overwhelmingly not-Asian. It's probably plurality white (there are so many white people in this country it's hard for anything to not be majority white), but there's a lot of blacks and hispanics in there too.
So class-based affirmative action is not much different in outcome to discriminating against all Asians. And if you're the mom who just devoted 5-6 years to making your child miserable so he could get into fucking Harvard, you're not gonna be happy that a) you managed to hit all the numeric targets necessary, while b) you did not get in because they decided the smartest working class Mexican kid from Texas would be a better fit then the 37th-smartest John Park from Sausalito.
Pretty much my entire High School class got into U of Michigan under an older version of Affirmative Action that allowed for explicit racial preferences. You actually got points for being black, or being a white kid who went to a mostly black school (which nobody talks about, because of course I -- white boy Nick Benjamin -- got points to go to the University of Michigan, but black chicks named 'Toya clearly had no moral right to such a thing). We did fine. The black kids actually did better then the white kids. And by white kids I mean me and April, because Jessica went to MSU.
The black kids who fail are not the ones who end up in highly selective schools, and spend their entire fucking careers convincing half-oinformed white people that they aren't "affirmative Action hires;". They're the ones who end up in part-time programs and are struggling to balance work, their studies, and a kid.
The thing you have to worry about in those cases is that you get a University where every single fucking kid is part of the upper middle class. Why?
Because they're the people who enter 9th grade thinking about how everything the kid does will look on a college application. They're the people who find out that the only way to get all the AP classes at this particular High School is take this particular Honors Course Freshman year, and use the prerequisite to take two more Sophomore year, which qualify for three AP classes and two honors classes Junior year, and senior year you only take four classes because what kind of moron would destroy their GPA by taking Gym?
Or test time. Who do you think schedules a PSAT, then gets their kid to the first possible SAT as a practice, then hires a coach to make sure the kid's weak spots get addressed, then repeats until the right score hits?
The answer is quite simple: somebody who has no fucking clue what the first day of deer season is because they don't like guns and they're not too cool with eating meat.
Affirmative action is what t says it is; instead of passively assuming that civil rights makes people equal overnight, there needed to be an active response to try and make things equal.
Meanwhile, those of us who came of age having nothing whatsoever to do with slavery or Jim Crow are disadvantaged because of the crimes of yesteryear. Corruption of blood is antithetical to American values. So is ignoring both the letter and spirit of the Equal Protection Clause. The only people who advocate in favor of Affirmative Action are those that believe the "original sin" is being born with a low melanin count.
Don't give a shit about the melanin count. It's actually illegal to give a shit about melanin count in a quantifiable sense.
Do give a shit that folks like Mitt Romney can arrange it so their kids maximize their SAT scores and GPAs, while using their superior knowledge of the college admissions process to ensure that when their kid spends a couple months obsessed with silly-ass hobby it's something that colleges give points for (ie: computer programming) rather then something they consider more suited to the hoi polloi (ie: learning to be a car mechanic).
Most Affirmative Action programs that have survived the court system look at the "whole student," so that a kid from a school system that has no AP classes doesn't get penalized for not having those classes, particularly compared to the kid whose Mom got them above 4.0 by refusing to let little Timmy take anything but the 5 AP classes offered his senior year. They look at the numbers, but they are allowed to consider the fact that, yes, little Timmy has GPA and test scores in the top 4%, but compared to his actual peers at $50k a year Prep Schools he's more like 12th percentile. OTOH Billy Bob from West Virginia was top in his class, spent time doing things that look shitty on a college resume (like hunting and car races), and he still got a test score in the top 5%.
Billy Bob could be taught to be the smartest man in the country. Timmy from Prep School is gonna be lucky if he turns into Dubya.
By the by, since TFA is about Asian-Americans, perhaps you'd care to explain why that group has done so well for itself? They were rounded up and put into camps within recent memory, to say nothing of the racially biased immigration laws of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, or the more subtle racism directed towards their group even into modern times.
Here's another inconvenient truth for you: The biggest predictor of success in life isn't how much money your family has or what your melanin count is. It's whether or not you come from a two parent household. That Tea Party zealot known as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed this out decades ago but was completely ignored by the policymakers of the day. Government can't compel people to stay in relationships (nor should it try) but it could provide mechanisms to remove some of the stresses of American society on families.
The problem with that is that nobody wants to marry a working class guy with a part-time gig in retail, but nobody wants to give working-class guys without a very nice degree and some good networking skills any other type of job.
If they try to get ahead by getting that college education, some Tiger Mother will notice their mother didn't make their applications 100% perfect, and sue the school for racial discrimination because the white/asian-types who have perfect apps are racially different then the black-Latin-white types who make up the working class.
Note that the obvious solution (having Harvard accept lots more kids) is untenable because part of the USNews college ranking formula is how many kids they say no to.
We could start with a decent family leave system (something half as good as the Nordic Countries and/or Canada) that would actually enable both parents
If you're looking for the kid whose actual talent level is top 1%, then a valedictorian from a school with few AP classes, whose SAT score is low because he had to spend his off-hours working at his dad's gas station is a really good bet. Especially if he got a 95th percentile on the test. You know he didn't spend 20 hours a week with an SAT coach. He's probably actually a lot better then 95th percentile.
OTOH a rich tiger daughter, whose mother insisted she take 8 AP classes, was not allowed to do any extracurricular activities that don't add mondo points to the student-selection algorithm (ie: classical violin rather then rock guitar), and got 96th percentile. You know she did spend 20 hours a week with an SAT coach. Let's just say she's probably not gonna do better then 96th percentile in real life.
But any criteria solely for accepting applicants based on points, GPA, test scores, etc. is gonna result in her getting in 100% of the time.
If it's a for-profit entity you've just sold the water on the Colorado river to a bunch of shareholders, which not good.
If it's a non-profit it has to be one with a Federal charter, because it's operating in multiple states. It's got a remit that includes law enforcement actions because it's deciding who gets to use river water. Many, many hated Federal Agencies are not that different in structure then this. For example, there would be very little difference between this and the FCC.
The series doesn't stop there. By book nine ("Ashes of Victory") he's advanced them to WW2-style carrier combat. He's also added some things that have very little modern real life analogue (pod-laying dreadnoughts, for example).
But a big part of the series appeal is to folks who are interested in military history. I sincerely doubt that anyone else has based an entire Star Empire on references to a mid-18th century monarch of a country that does not currently exist, yet he turned Frederick the Great of Prussia into the Andaman Empire. And the background even made some sense.
I said nothing about how the Feds manage the water. It could be a bureaucratic process. It could be private property rights.
If it's private property rights, then it's not "the feds managing the water". The feds may (or may not) be involved in enforcing those private property rights, but the management decisions are taken out of their hands.
That's important because it is the management, i.e., decisions about who may pollute and who may use the resources, that is subject to massive lobbying and crony capitalism and that government is incapable of performing well.
If it's private property rights that means a Court. The only Court that can adjudicate when a rancher from Colorado is screwing as rancher from Utah by taking too much water is the 10th Circuit.
No, it actually means two courts and three private parties: the party taking the water, the party who bought the water, and the party who owns the water. The owner of the water is in breach of contract with the rancher in Utah, and the victim of theft at the hands of the rancher from Colorado. All of this can be handled with simple property law in state courts.
Bullshit. Let's say you set up this system and there's a drought year. There's less water then has been sold on the private market.
The Court in Utah can't have jurisdiction over a theft that took place in Colorado, and can't force a Colorado rancher to appear. The Judge in Colorado is subject to retention elections. He isn't gonna rule farmer Bob is evil for taking his full allocation.
But even that's assuming a Federal rule of some sort. Why? Because to sue for property rights you have to establish standing, that means you have to show that there's a very concrete dispute between you (and only you) and your opponent (and only him). If you;re one of 300 farmers in Utah with a cut of the river, and one of 200 farmers in Colorado is taking more of his cut then he should, that's a harm shared by 300 farmers in Utah and everyone downstream of that guy in Colorado. Under current private property law you do not have the right to sue. So no, under state private property law you cannot deal with water rights on the Colorado River.
There needs to be a Federal rule (probably a statute), disputes need to be resolvable in Federal Court, and the Federal Marshal's service has to enforce the rulings.
The only SciFi franchise I'm familiar with that has sensibly designed ships is the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. This is because it's a book series (so there's no graphic artist trying to make the good guy ships a beautiful white fleet with wings like birds, and the bad guy ships industrial contraptions that are some hideous shade of orange), but it's mostly because he specifically designed the physics of his universe around the military tactics he wanted.
Just because it's a nice place to live doesn't mean it's not insane. Uruguay manages to have all of Argentina's advantages without the BS exchange rate mechanisms, frequent fights with foreign businesses, etc.
As for social mobility, you're taking a very middle class view of both opportunity and poverty. The working class of Mexico did not have a lot of opportunities to work for a maquiladora prior to NAFTA. Now they've got those opportunities. The ones who don't want to do that can just do what their parents did, but make more money at it because you've got customers from the maquiladoras. Yeah Mexico's poverty rate is astronomical (45.5% according to google), but it's dropping (it was above 46% last year) because you have economic growth. Argentina's is lower, but is virtually impossible to quantify because government statistics are not trustworthy. It's probably above 20%.
Basically what's happened is that in about 1900 the Argentines had a great thing. They were rich. They had no troublesome ethnic or racial minorities (much of Mexico's impoverished 45.5% are descendants of what America would call Native Americans) to complicate their economic situation. And they've managed to maintain that. Meanwhile most of their neighbors, and even many countries that were desperately poor in 1913 (Italy is the most often mentioned, but all of Eastern and Central Europe was poorer then Argentina then, and France and Germany were both comparable to Argentina in per capita terms) have managed to catch up.
Slashdot Mirror
You start a more then a mile north of the South Pole. Specifically, you are 1 mile north of the latitude where there's only 1 mile of West before you're back where you started. You walk one mile South from Point A to Point B, then you walk 1 mile West and you are now back at Point B. 1 Mile North puts you back at Point A.
And I swear I figured that out before I read several dozen comments outlining that scenario already.
From the context of the rest of the conversation I can almost always figure out what a stupid Slashdot comment meant.
OTOH, tweets are virtually impossible for me to parse, because everyone's using lots of pronouns to stay under 140 characters, and "twitter threads" really don't show me "ok this guy was responding to this tweet, which was a response to that tweet, which was a response to something that chick said, so the 'she' in this last tweet is probably that chick..."
For example, every time I go to Fivethirtyeight.com there's a list of tweets the Fivethirtyeight authors are making. I can generally figure out what half of them mean. Today it's up to 3/4 or so, because Enten just sent out a barrage of 6 on the same topic and one of them said "this is the topic I am talking about," rather then the twitter-user's traditional reliance on everyone knowing precisely what they're talking about right now, and therefore not including any context becsides a timestamp and the twitter handles of the people they're interacting with.
This will probably be incredibly useful for a small set of users (ie: twitter addicts who get the lingo; marketers figuring out everything said about their boss, etc.) and be completely useless for damn near anyone else.
Because they have half a clue ...
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the ability to innovate and change it. They aren't always first movers, but they DO bring innovation and of course profits to any segment they enter.
The magic is in saying "NO" to doing things that don't make sense... entering a crowded, unimaginative, razor-thin margin, mature TV market doesn't make sense for Apple. That's why they said no.... No more, no less.
My company declines jobs and new markets all the time. We run some quick numbers and make a decision on whether it makes sense to take on X risk for Y% margin. Nobody calls us "magic".
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the potential to charge $1 for a lime that everyone else is selling for 50 cents.
Which only tend to work when the thing everyone else is selling is clearly a POS for 90% of use-cases. Pre-iPod MP3 players had better specs then the iPod, but no good way to deal with the music you had on them. Pre-iPhone smartphones had better specs, but were incredibly bulky and wasted something like have their screen space with a huge keyboard. Don't get me wrong. My favorite smartphone ever was a Treo 650, and the runners-up are Blackberrys, but for the vast majority of the public an all-thouchscreen model with much better software integration is much superior.
Even the first Mac had demonstrably worse specs then most competitors, a terrible OS (the GUI took up lots of RAM, and there was only 128 KB with a KB, so there was no room for memory protection or multitasking); but it also had the only GUI available on a machine that wasn't intended to be a scientific workstation. And for a huge number of people it doesn't matter what features you have in your CLI OS because they can;t figure out how to use the damn thing.
That kind of advantage just doesn't exist with TVs.
That's a very interesting-looking series, sadly I will not have the time to read it before this discussion is archived. But it will go in the to-read list. The concept of humans as race with drawbacks is fascinating to me, because in every SciFi universe I've read we are by definition average and the point of the aliens is to talk about whichever exaggerated human characteristic they're supposed to represent.
And Slashdot will certainly have more stories like this in the future, so we'll be able to talk about it then.
So a private company, canceling the property rights of landowners for a mixture of political reasons and personal greed, is by definition the highest and best use of the river water.
But the government, choosing to do so through a process that includes opportunities for all sides to make their case (ie: "lobbying") and does not involve directly enriching anyone who makes the decisions, would be illegitimate?
The more I hear limited-government activists talk, the less I believe in their connection to reality.
So figuring out what secretive people are doing is really hard, because they're (you know) secretive and shit; therefore we should never trust what anyone who works in the field says about the field?
FYI: actual intelligence officers didn't miss the boat on Iraq's WMD. Their boss was convinced by a con-man telling him what he wanted to hear, and their job is to back up the President. They didn't know 9-11 was going to happen the way it did, but it was pretty clear something was going to be tried by Bin Laden.
You're doing the wrong math.
"No correlation" means you get admitted at the same rate as everyone else because your application is the same as everyone else. Asian Americans make up 20% of Harvard admissions and roughly 6% of the population.
Which means that Harvard is telling the world Asians are 133% more qualified then everyone else. So you just proved that they should admit less Asians, not more, because you showed that Asians are just as qualified rather then showing they're 250% qualified.
You're getting ahead of yourself.
The Courts currently require warrants for this kind of testing. They may in future change their minds, and say it's an extension of non-warrant-requiring fingerprint tests, but that ruling has not happened.
Moreover, as I pointed out (and you completely ignored), if the cops have a coke-using informant whose willing to fake evidence against you they really truly have no need for this test. They can get their warrant, plant their evidence, and fuck you over just based on the guy's word.
Keep in mind that your targeted individual can't be tested without a warrant, no matter what the coke-using informant does to the cup. They could probably get a warrant if the coke-using informant says the target is a junkie, but the test isn't actually proof of anything illegal (remember: using drugs is technically legal, it's possessing them before you've taken them that's the problem). They might be able to use to get a warrant for the target's house, and plant some drugs or something in the toilet; but the informant's word the target had drugs would probably be enough for that too.
In other words, this test is not gonna make the drug war worse.
A private companys is by definition not managing things so that the people get the best use of their resource, it's managing things so that it's owners personal well-being is maximized. That could mean either a) maximizing revenue in the short term by ignoring long-term planning, b) finding ways to put competitors to the owners out of business, and/or c) engaging in the owners ideological hobby horse.
It is by definition less transparent then the government because private corporations only have disclosure requirements if they're publicly traded, and since there's no Congress to keep them honest they're notorious for shading things.
For example, let's say the owners decide that global warming is a great threat to their business, and therefore decide to dramatically cut the water allocation to anyone who is using it to raise cattle. Which will incidentally create a huge allocation that the largest shareholder's tomato farm could use. Depending on the exact wording of the contract the ranchers could lose their entire allocation immediately. They're definitely screwed whenever the next contract is negotiated.
The minutes of the meeting where the decision was made can't be FOIA'd because they are private records. Information on whether the company is telling the truth that the tomato farm is paying more then the ranchers is impossible to get without a lawsuit, which may (or may not) be possible under the exact text of the relevant contract, and won't help them anyway because cattle need water every day and they ain't getting none during the lawsuit. You've established there's no Federal legislation in this at all, which means Congress can bitch/moan/and actually do jack-squat.
I'd guess that intellectually they know Dubya got into Yale, but they got here by being perfect in school and hitting that test score exactly, and so they moved heaven and earth so their kid could hit the test score; and everyone went "gee, another guy named Singh with a perfect GPA, a 2300 SAT, and a whole bunch of clubs which are all known to be helpful on college applications, but absolutely no personality of his own; why don't we let him attend a state school where they don't already have 15 of those."
That would suck as a parent, particularly if your life experience back in India is that the best guy from a the equivalent second-tier-public-school has a worse career then their equivalent of Harvard.
They can't do that. Literally. It's illegal.
They can look at someone whose application is absolutely perfect, with great test scores, a 5.0 GPA (note: I have never met a person with a soul who got a 5.0), has numerous clubs listed that were clearly selected mostly because they're the kinds of club that one joins if one wants to get into Harvard, has a bland and uninformative but objectively perfect essay, etc. and conclude this person is a boring-ass-motherfucker with no personality outside of his/her mother's insistence he/she do well in school and say "fuck that guy" in favor of the person who got a 3.8 and wrote an essay about how they want to get into Harvard because they really fucking hate helping mom at the store.
Statistically speaking the former are almost certainly either a) Asian American or b) Indian American. There isn't enough info to tell the race of the latter guy.
Homeowner's associations aren't for-profit. And it'd be very hard for anyone who didn't read the actual case law to know the difference between them and a governmental body that happens to be totally unbound by the Constitution.
A for-profit River authority would be even more subject to lobbying and crony capitalism then the Feds, because you could simply buy the organization and use it to put your rivals out of business.
Strictly speaking my parents actually used pre-school to get me and my sister into a very good University.
We lived in Detroit, and the school options were a) shitty neighborhood schools, b) expensive private schools, and c) a K-8 magnet School called Golightly that always had a waiting list. But the Wayne State University pre-school (which happened to be in the Projects) had a direct pipe-line to Golightly.
So we went to pre-school in the Projects, my mom swears she only had to duck and cover due to gunfire once, and we got into Golightly. Which prepared us for Detroit's magnet High School placement test, and the magnet High Schools have such a good reputation with the University of Michigan that it's quite easy to get admitted if you have a decent GPA and acceptable test scores. Kirsten actually ended up being paid to go there because tuition was covered by a Wade McCree scholarship, room and board was covered by the 529 they'd bought when she was three to pay for tuition at an in-stste-school; and the Drama department loved her so much they were giving her a couple grand scholarship.
Altho to be fair, I'm pretty sure the entire reason we were living in Detroit was to avoid people like your neighbors. They sound quite punchable.
They have her essay. They have the rest of her application, which will include her after-school activities. They know the name and reputation of her High School. Most High Schools with 8 AP classes are not the kind of place where mom allows you to work after-school to make money. In quite a few cases they will have spoken with the counselor at that High School. I went to a less selective school, and they actually sent an admissions officer to my High School to interview kids in person. So they don't know 100%, but they can make a damn good guess.
They probably get it wrong sometimes, but they get it less wrong then they would if they just created a computer algorithm and put raw numbers into it.
That's actually the point of the "holistic" policies they're suing to over-turn.
The problem is that the race of people who a) really know how to game the system to get the best college application possible and b) actually do so is overwhelmingly Asian. Plenty of white people know how, but the Asian 5-6% really includes a lot of people who treat their kid's High School career like a min/maxed D&D character. Except they don't let the kid play D&D because that doesn't look good on a college application.
OTOH, the race of the class you need to give help, because their Mom doesn't actually know she should be planning for college in the 8th grade, is overwhelmingly not-Asian. It's probably plurality white (there are so many white people in this country it's hard for anything to not be majority white), but there's a lot of blacks and hispanics in there too.
So class-based affirmative action is not much different in outcome to discriminating against all Asians. And if you're the mom who just devoted 5-6 years to making your child miserable so he could get into fucking Harvard, you're not gonna be happy that a) you managed to hit all the numeric targets necessary, while b) you did not get in because they decided the smartest working class Mexican kid from Texas would be a better fit then the 37th-smartest John Park from Sausalito.
Pretty much my entire High School class got into U of Michigan under an older version of Affirmative Action that allowed for explicit racial preferences. You actually got points for being black, or being a white kid who went to a mostly black school (which nobody talks about, because of course I -- white boy Nick Benjamin -- got points to go to the University of Michigan, but black chicks named 'Toya clearly had no moral right to such a thing). We did fine. The black kids actually did better then the white kids. And by white kids I mean me and April, because Jessica went to MSU.
The black kids who fail are not the ones who end up in highly selective schools, and spend their entire fucking careers convincing half-oinformed white people that they aren't "affirmative Action hires;". They're the ones who end up in part-time programs and are struggling to balance work, their studies, and a kid.
The thing you have to worry about in those cases is that you get a University where every single fucking kid is part of the upper middle class. Why?
Because they're the people who enter 9th grade thinking about how everything the kid does will look on a college application. They're the people who find out that the only way to get all the AP classes at this particular High School is take this particular Honors Course Freshman year, and use the prerequisite to take two more Sophomore year, which qualify for three AP classes and two honors classes Junior year, and senior year you only take four classes because what kind of moron would destroy their GPA by taking Gym?
Or test time. Who do you think schedules a PSAT, then gets their kid to the first possible SAT as a practice, then hires a coach to make sure the kid's weak spots get addressed, then repeats until the right score hits?
The answer is quite simple: somebody who has no fucking clue what the first day of deer season is because they don't like guns and they're not too cool with eating meat.
Affirmative action is what t says it is; instead of passively assuming that civil rights makes people equal overnight, there needed to be an active response to try and make things equal.
Meanwhile, those of us who came of age having nothing whatsoever to do with slavery or Jim Crow are disadvantaged because of the crimes of yesteryear. Corruption of blood is antithetical to American values. So is ignoring both the letter and spirit of the Equal Protection Clause. The only people who advocate in favor of Affirmative Action are those that believe the "original sin" is being born with a low melanin count.
Don't give a shit about the melanin count. It's actually illegal to give a shit about melanin count in a quantifiable sense.
Do give a shit that folks like Mitt Romney can arrange it so their kids maximize their SAT scores and GPAs, while using their superior knowledge of the college admissions process to ensure that when their kid spends a couple months obsessed with silly-ass hobby it's something that colleges give points for (ie: computer programming) rather then something they consider more suited to the hoi polloi (ie: learning to be a car mechanic).
Most Affirmative Action programs that have survived the court system look at the "whole student," so that a kid from a school system that has no AP classes doesn't get penalized for not having those classes, particularly compared to the kid whose Mom got them above 4.0 by refusing to let little Timmy take anything but the 5 AP classes offered his senior year. They look at the numbers, but they are allowed to consider the fact that, yes, little Timmy has GPA and test scores in the top 4%, but compared to his actual peers at $50k a year Prep Schools he's more like 12th percentile. OTOH Billy Bob from West Virginia was top in his class, spent time doing things that look shitty on a college resume (like hunting and car races), and he still got a test score in the top 5%.
Billy Bob could be taught to be the smartest man in the country. Timmy from Prep School is gonna be lucky if he turns into Dubya.
By the by, since TFA is about Asian-Americans, perhaps you'd care to explain why that group has done so well for itself? They were rounded up and put into camps within recent memory, to say nothing of the racially biased immigration laws of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, or the more subtle racism directed towards their group even into modern times.
Here's another inconvenient truth for you: The biggest predictor of success in life isn't how much money your family has or what your melanin count is. It's whether or not you come from a two parent household. That Tea Party zealot known as Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed this out decades ago but was completely ignored by the policymakers of the day. Government can't compel people to stay in relationships (nor should it try) but it could provide mechanisms to remove some of the stresses of American society on families.
The problem with that is that nobody wants to marry a working class guy with a part-time gig in retail, but nobody wants to give working-class guys without a very nice degree and some good networking skills any other type of job.
If they try to get ahead by getting that college education, some Tiger Mother will notice their mother didn't make their applications 100% perfect, and sue the school for racial discrimination because the white/asian-types who have perfect apps are racially different then the black-Latin-white types who make up the working class.
Note that the obvious solution (having Harvard accept lots more kids) is untenable because part of the USNews college ranking formula is how many kids they say no to.
We could start with a decent family leave system (something half as good as the Nordic Countries and/or Canada) that would actually enable both parents
Depends on what you mean by qualified.
If you're looking for the kid whose actual talent level is top 1%, then a valedictorian from a school with few AP classes, whose SAT score is low because he had to spend his off-hours working at his dad's gas station is a really good bet. Especially if he got a 95th percentile on the test. You know he didn't spend 20 hours a week with an SAT coach. He's probably actually a lot better then 95th percentile.
OTOH a rich tiger daughter, whose mother insisted she take 8 AP classes, was not allowed to do any extracurricular activities that don't add mondo points to the student-selection algorithm (ie: classical violin rather then rock guitar), and got 96th percentile. You know she did spend 20 hours a week with an SAT coach. Let's just say she's probably not gonna do better then 96th percentile in real life.
But any criteria solely for accepting applicants based on points, GPA, test scores, etc. is gonna result in her getting in 100% of the time.
So who is this mysterious third "private party"?
If it's a for-profit entity you've just sold the water on the Colorado river to a bunch of shareholders, which not good.
If it's a non-profit it has to be one with a Federal charter, because it's operating in multiple states. It's got a remit that includes law enforcement actions because it's deciding who gets to use river water. Many, many hated Federal Agencies are not that different in structure then this. For example, there would be very little difference between this and the FCC.
The series doesn't stop there. By book nine ("Ashes of Victory") he's advanced them to WW2-style carrier combat. He's also added some things that have very little modern real life analogue (pod-laying dreadnoughts, for example).
But a big part of the series appeal is to folks who are interested in military history. I sincerely doubt that anyone else has based an entire Star Empire on references to a mid-18th century monarch of a country that does not currently exist, yet he turned Frederick the Great of Prussia into the Andaman Empire. And the background even made some sense.
If it's private property rights, then it's not "the feds managing the water". The feds may (or may not) be involved in enforcing those private property rights, but the management decisions are taken out of their hands.
That's important because it is the management, i.e., decisions about who may pollute and who may use the resources, that is subject to massive lobbying and crony capitalism and that government is incapable of performing well.
No, it actually means two courts and three private parties: the party taking the water, the party who bought the water, and the party who owns the water. The owner of the water is in breach of contract with the rancher in Utah, and the victim of theft at the hands of the rancher from Colorado. All of this can be handled with simple property law in state courts.
Bullshit. Let's say you set up this system and there's a drought year. There's less water then has been sold on the private market.
The Court in Utah can't have jurisdiction over a theft that took place in Colorado, and can't force a Colorado rancher to appear. The Judge in Colorado is subject to retention elections. He isn't gonna rule farmer Bob is evil for taking his full allocation.
But even that's assuming a Federal rule of some sort. Why? Because to sue for property rights you have to establish standing, that means you have to show that there's a very concrete dispute between you (and only you) and your opponent (and only him). If you;re one of 300 farmers in Utah with a cut of the river, and one of 200 farmers in Colorado is taking more of his cut then he should, that's a harm shared by 300 farmers in Utah and everyone downstream of that guy in Colorado. Under current private property law you do not have the right to sue. So no, under state private property law you cannot deal with water rights on the Colorado River.
There needs to be a Federal rule (probably a statute), disputes need to be resolvable in Federal Court, and the Federal Marshal's service has to enforce the rulings.
The only SciFi franchise I'm familiar with that has sensibly designed ships is the Honor Harrington series by David Weber. This is because it's a book series (so there's no graphic artist trying to make the good guy ships a beautiful white fleet with wings like birds, and the bad guy ships industrial contraptions that are some hideous shade of orange), but it's mostly because he specifically designed the physics of his universe around the military tactics he wanted.
Just because it's a nice place to live doesn't mean it's not insane. Uruguay manages to have all of Argentina's advantages without the BS exchange rate mechanisms, frequent fights with foreign businesses, etc.
As for social mobility, you're taking a very middle class view of both opportunity and poverty. The working class of Mexico did not have a lot of opportunities to work for a maquiladora prior to NAFTA. Now they've got those opportunities. The ones who don't want to do that can just do what their parents did, but make more money at it because you've got customers from the maquiladoras. Yeah Mexico's poverty rate is astronomical (45.5% according to google), but it's dropping (it was above 46% last year) because you have economic growth. Argentina's is lower, but is virtually impossible to quantify because government statistics are not trustworthy. It's probably above 20%.
Basically what's happened is that in about 1900 the Argentines had a great thing. They were rich. They had no troublesome ethnic or racial minorities (much of Mexico's impoverished 45.5% are descendants of what America would call Native Americans) to complicate their economic situation. And they've managed to maintain that. Meanwhile most of their neighbors, and even many countries that were desperately poor in 1913 (Italy is the most often mentioned, but all of Eastern and Central Europe was poorer then Argentina then, and France and Germany were both comparable to Argentina in per capita terms) have managed to catch up.