Because energy costs, over time, add up to a lot of money. It doesn't cost very much to paint your walls any color you want. Investing in easily-changed cosmetic crap rather than looking at things which cost a lot more money to change is shortsighted and stupid.
That's odd. I'll admit, it's been many years since I read the Rama series, but I thought by the time the kids had more-or-less grown up, they had split up the "family", with Simone staying with the Michael dude at the alien base, and the wife and husband taking bratty Katie on the reconfigured ship back to Earth, where they'd pick up a bunch of scumbags and Katie would become some mob boss's sex toy, who she'd then murder and then kill herself. Those books were really depressing after they met the aliens, really; I wish they had just stuck with them staying on the ship and raising an unconventional family there.
As for the menage-a-trois, I don't remember that either; it would have been a lot better. Instead, the Michael dude was really religious, and the husband was an overly jealous engineer who couldn't handle his wife sleeping with him even though he intellectually agreed to it. So the woman went and got naked with Michael so they could make a new kid, but then their first daughter Simone threw a fit about something or another and she came out to yell at her, but forgot to put any clothes on, and her husband got all upset about this. It was about this point the engineer guy took off, not to be seen again for 2 years, though it turned out some spider-aliens had grabbed him and done experiments on him.
>Riker got to nail their boss's hot daughter. Yeah, I saw that one recently. She was hot.
Yep, Riker was the man. It's too bad they never made any more good Star Trek series after that. Or heck, any sci-fi in that vein. I've gotten rather tired of sci-fi always being so bleak and dystopian; I miss the (totally unrealistic) optimism of Star Trek. I already know humanity is fucked; I see it every day when I read the news and see something else about the TSA setting up checkpoints across the country or something like that. I don't need more sci-fi predictions of societal disaster when I can read about it on any news blog.
Huh? I don't remember that part. What I remember is there was one woman, her husband, and some other dude. They wanted to reproduce, but to have children who'd be able to reproduce with each other better, they decided she needed to have kids with both her husband and the other dude. I don't remember the conversations about the future generations though. However, if you only have 3 people, how else are you going to do it? The whole monogamy thing breaks down when there's a tiny population. ST:TNG even had an episode about that (the one where the colony of uptight clones had to merge with the colony of drunken Irish people and Riker got to nail their boss's hot daughter.).
See, the lucky ones with all the $$$ leave, and leave behind a festering blight of poverty and crime instead of solving the problems.
I'm sorry, I don't see how it's possible to solve the problem of urban noise any time soon, not without some serious active noise cancellation technology (which is bound not to work well as you walk around your urban apartment). The biggest problem is cars and trucks. If we switched to something like SkyTran and most people gave up their cars as a result, then that'd cut down noise a lot, but there doesn't seem to be very much movement towards any public transit these days. Electric cars will help a fair amount, but a lot of noise is not from engines, but from tires, and it looks like it might be quite a while until everyone's driving an EV. There's nothing you can do about loud stereos. And the Harley riders will never give up their muffler-less gas-burning contraptions. And there's also nothing you can do about horn honking.
Cities are noisy by nature, so if noise is a problem, leaving it behind in a "festering blight of poverty and crime" is the only solution, though I don't see how noise and crime are linked. Manhattan is noisy as heck (people seem to honk their horns there more than any other American city), yet it's probably the most crime-free large city district in the country.
There is a medium: debris, the space-time continuum. The OP has a good point: if a ship's engines eject a bunch of crap, and that crap hits your ship, then you're going to hear it. Also, this is really unknown, but if a "warp drive" capable ship is warping the continuum, who knows, maybe "gravity waves" or whatever will produce some kind of sound in your ship too.
You sound like someone with issues. I never said it was perfectly OK for a 20-something female teacher to have sex with a 15-year-old boy, but there's a world of difference between that and anyone having sexual contact with an 8-year-old. If you disagree with that, then maybe you should get psychological help.
What annoys me the most about the H1B stuff is that it takes advantage of the disparity in availability of tech talent between different nations, so you wind up with a bunch of fat-ass American managers managing a bunch of non-American tech talent. I'd rather see the tech talent work for people in their own countries, even if that still means their products and services are imported here, because this is just propping up a bunch of useless asshole American MBAs. Management and workers are supposed to work together, and when there's not enough willing workers, the management should either have to adapt to the situation (like raising pay rates, drastically if necessary), or die. But this situation allows the American MBAs to continue on, without the American workers. I'd rather see Indian and Chinese managers succeed with their own workers, and American managers living on the streets. I want to see American industry reap what it's sown.
No, it's to let the chips fall where they may. You can't change a society single-handed, especially when it's one as broken as ours. It's not just a few people here and there, it's most of the population that has this attitude. Trying to change things would be like trying to change an Islamic society's attitude towards women; you're just going to get yourself killed. The change will take generations to happen.
I think it might vary by industry actually. My wife's last profession was as an assistant in the legal field, and while she had some good friends there, a lot of the women were "evil backstabbing bitches". Before that, she was in the Air Force, and didn't have that problem at all there, and her current field has a few but not nearly as many as in the legal field.
Different professions attract different personalities.
As for your Girl Power thing and screwing everyone else for your own benefit, you don't stereotypically hear that much with men; there, it's usually some asshole boss screwing his underlings, but the underlings don't screw each other. With the stereotypical women we're talking about, it's not bosses screwing their underlings over as much as it is underlings sabotaging each other.
Um, yes, they can. If you'd read about some of the things Catholic priests did to small boys, you'd know that their molestation is mainly touching, fondling, etc. Women can do that just as well as men; women have hands, after all. But women seem to have zero attraction to prepubescent children, unlike men.
The kids can survive without them, and the people who would be the role models are better off avoiding these jobs, for their own safety and long-term well-being. If society doesn't survive because of this, that's fine, the society doesn't deserve to survive.
Seriously, what man in his right mind would enter a profession like this? Everyone around him will be looking at him like he's a child predator. He'll be a pariah. Why should anyone take that on?
This is all generalization of course, but I disagree.
Yes, we do hear of female schoolteachers having sex with their male students. But in most of these cases, it's a 20-something teacher with boys who are at least 15 years old, frequently something like a 17-year-old boy and a 25-year-old teacher. There really isn't that much of an age gap, and the boy(s) in question is well past puberty and almost a legal adult. But when was the last time you heard of a woman molesting a pre-pubescent boy? I don't think I've ever heard of such a thing, ever. But this happens all the time with men; they frequently molest prepubescent boys and girls (esp. if they're Catholic priests). Both men and women get sexually involved with older teenagers of the opposite sex; this really isn't that rare, and I think it's a problem that our society and laws don't seem to draw that much of a distinction between post-pubescent and pre-pubescent children. I'm not saying it should be OK for a 50-year-old dude to talk a 17-year-old girl into sex, but there's a big difference between that and him molesting a 9-year-old girl. The 17-year-old is bigger, stronger, can defend herself, is nearly an adult and understands sex (and probably isn't even a virgin these days) and is much more likely to be able to handle the situation; she's not utterly defenseless like the 9-year-old. And it's (remotely) possible the 17-year-old was consenting; this concept is utterly ridiculous in the case of the 9-year-old.
So no, men don't have a monopoly on the predation of all minors, but I think they do have a monopoly on the predation of prepubescent minors.
The lack of females in engineering school and career is a huge problem, and it needs to be resolved.
No, it doesn't. It's a self-correcting problem. Women are actively avoiding the field for various reasons, probably including 1) too much sexism and sexual harassment in the field (there's been lots of articles on Slashdot about this over the past year or so), 2) poor pay compared to the effort needed to get a degree and maintain a job in the field, 3) generally crappy profession, with poor job security, rampant ageism, and shit like job postings requiring 15 years of experience in a language that's only existed for 5. Any woman smart enough to do engineering would be better off in another field, like medicine (or veterinary medicine, a big favorite among women), law, finance, etc. So what we end up with in engineering and CS is the only people that stay there are socially-awkward men who don't think they could succeed in those other jobs because they require more social skills that sitting in a cubicle at a computer all day. But that's not enough people for the tech industry to thrive, so they constantly whine that they need more H1Bs. I say cut off the H1B program altogether; if we can't make these careers interesting to our own citizens, then these companies don't need workers. Let the industry die.
Unfortunately, I think this may be a big part of it. A lot of women seem to have a big problem with trying to hurt other women in the workplace out of jealousy, and prettier women get it much worse.
Re:That's funny right there
on
Sexism In Science
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· Score: 3, Interesting
My wife complains about other women in the workplace far more than about men. According to her, a large contingent of women in the workplace are backstabbing jezebels, and she'd much rather work with men. Every once in a while, there's some freak of a man who bothers her (usually some creep who can't seem to understand that she's not interested in some fat, ugly old man and wants to put his hands all over her; the fact that she's married doesn't seem to be a factor for these men). But they're rare, a small, small portion of the total number of men she meets. But with women, it's more like half of them are evil bitches trying to hurt her somehow to improve their own position.
No, these kids don't need male role models at all. Men teaching young children are going to be perceived as possible sexual predators, and are in a lot of danger as unfounded accusations can ruin their lives (and this has happened many times in fact). It's better for men to avoid this field altogether. Will this be bad for society in the long term? Of course, but we reap what we sow. We don't deserve to survive as a society if we can't figure out how to fix this problem of pedophilia-phobia, and I don't see it ever being fixed.
Actually, there's a fair number of people who send their kids to Catholic schools who aren't even Catholic.
I went to Catholic middle school, and I really don't remember a lot of religious education. Maybe it's changed. I do remember having to go to Mass once in a while, but as middle-schoolers, we just sat there and didn't really know what was going on.
Education should be a right, not a privilege, of living in an advanced society. Kids shouldn't get thrown out and left without an education because they didn't fit in or were holding back other kids; they need to be trained to live in modern society, even if their stupid parents aren't doing their parts.
The answer is to have tiered education, the way the Germans do it. Kids that are troublemakers get put in special classes with other dolts, which are run by teachers trained to deal with them. They're not going to learn at the level of the smart kids, who are elsewhere in their own classes, but they'll learn something, even if it's discipline. The problem our country largely has is "mainstreaming": we want to treat everyone like equals, when they simply aren't. Parents get all pissed off when little Johnny gets held back a grade or put in a "special" class, so for decades we've been trying to stick all kids together in the same class, even when they don't learn at the same rate and some are troublemakers and need special attention. Get rid of mainstreaming and many of your problems will disappear.
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Because energy costs, over time, add up to a lot of money. It doesn't cost very much to paint your walls any color you want. Investing in easily-changed cosmetic crap rather than looking at things which cost a lot more money to change is shortsighted and stupid.
That's odd. I'll admit, it's been many years since I read the Rama series, but I thought by the time the kids had more-or-less grown up, they had split up the "family", with Simone staying with the Michael dude at the alien base, and the wife and husband taking bratty Katie on the reconfigured ship back to Earth, where they'd pick up a bunch of scumbags and Katie would become some mob boss's sex toy, who she'd then murder and then kill herself. Those books were really depressing after they met the aliens, really; I wish they had just stuck with them staying on the ship and raising an unconventional family there.
As for the menage-a-trois, I don't remember that either; it would have been a lot better. Instead, the Michael dude was really religious, and the husband was an overly jealous engineer who couldn't handle his wife sleeping with him even though he intellectually agreed to it. So the woman went and got naked with Michael so they could make a new kid, but then their first daughter Simone threw a fit about something or another and she came out to yell at her, but forgot to put any clothes on, and her husband got all upset about this. It was about this point the engineer guy took off, not to be seen again for 2 years, though it turned out some spider-aliens had grabbed him and done experiments on him.
>Riker got to nail their boss's hot daughter.
Yeah, I saw that one recently. She was hot.
Yep, Riker was the man. It's too bad they never made any more good Star Trek series after that. Or heck, any sci-fi in that vein. I've gotten rather tired of sci-fi always being so bleak and dystopian; I miss the (totally unrealistic) optimism of Star Trek. I already know humanity is fucked; I see it every day when I read the news and see something else about the TSA setting up checkpoints across the country or something like that. I don't need more sci-fi predictions of societal disaster when I can read about it on any news blog.
Huh? I don't remember that part. What I remember is there was one woman, her husband, and some other dude. They wanted to reproduce, but to have children who'd be able to reproduce with each other better, they decided she needed to have kids with both her husband and the other dude. I don't remember the conversations about the future generations though. However, if you only have 3 people, how else are you going to do it? The whole monogamy thing breaks down when there's a tiny population. ST:TNG even had an episode about that (the one where the colony of uptight clones had to merge with the colony of drunken Irish people and Riker got to nail their boss's hot daughter.).
Wrong. Headphones DO block noise, if they look like these.
No, earbuds don't block noise, but those aren't "headphones".
Buyers are stupid; the main thing they look at is price per square foot, and location, and maybe cosmetic stuff like granite counters.
Calling yourself "civilized" doesn't make it so.
See, the lucky ones with all the $$$ leave, and leave behind a festering blight of poverty and crime instead of solving the problems.
I'm sorry, I don't see how it's possible to solve the problem of urban noise any time soon, not without some serious active noise cancellation technology (which is bound not to work well as you walk around your urban apartment). The biggest problem is cars and trucks. If we switched to something like SkyTran and most people gave up their cars as a result, then that'd cut down noise a lot, but there doesn't seem to be very much movement towards any public transit these days. Electric cars will help a fair amount, but a lot of noise is not from engines, but from tires, and it looks like it might be quite a while until everyone's driving an EV. There's nothing you can do about loud stereos. And the Harley riders will never give up their muffler-less gas-burning contraptions. And there's also nothing you can do about horn honking.
Cities are noisy by nature, so if noise is a problem, leaving it behind in a "festering blight of poverty and crime" is the only solution, though I don't see how noise and crime are linked. Manhattan is noisy as heck (people seem to honk their horns there more than any other American city), yet it's probably the most crime-free large city district in the country.
Are you sure Mr. Lee did any writing on the characters? I thought Lee was some kind of scientist, so maybe that's the part he worked on.
Weird that he doesn't have any photos on either Wikipedia or IMDB.
There is a medium: debris, the space-time continuum. The OP has a good point: if a ship's engines eject a bunch of crap, and that crap hits your ship, then you're going to hear it. Also, this is really unknown, but if a "warp drive" capable ship is warping the continuum, who knows, maybe "gravity waves" or whatever will produce some kind of sound in your ship too.
You sound like someone with issues. I never said it was perfectly OK for a 20-something female teacher to have sex with a 15-year-old boy, but there's a world of difference between that and anyone having sexual contact with an 8-year-old. If you disagree with that, then maybe you should get psychological help.
What annoys me the most about the H1B stuff is that it takes advantage of the disparity in availability of tech talent between different nations, so you wind up with a bunch of fat-ass American managers managing a bunch of non-American tech talent. I'd rather see the tech talent work for people in their own countries, even if that still means their products and services are imported here, because this is just propping up a bunch of useless asshole American MBAs. Management and workers are supposed to work together, and when there's not enough willing workers, the management should either have to adapt to the situation (like raising pay rates, drastically if necessary), or die. But this situation allows the American MBAs to continue on, without the American workers. I'd rather see Indian and Chinese managers succeed with their own workers, and American managers living on the streets. I want to see American industry reap what it's sown.
No, it's to let the chips fall where they may. You can't change a society single-handed, especially when it's one as broken as ours. It's not just a few people here and there, it's most of the population that has this attitude. Trying to change things would be like trying to change an Islamic society's attitude towards women; you're just going to get yourself killed. The change will take generations to happen.
I think it might vary by industry actually. My wife's last profession was as an assistant in the legal field, and while she had some good friends there, a lot of the women were "evil backstabbing bitches". Before that, she was in the Air Force, and didn't have that problem at all there, and her current field has a few but not nearly as many as in the legal field.
Different professions attract different personalities.
As for your Girl Power thing and screwing everyone else for your own benefit, you don't stereotypically hear that much with men; there, it's usually some asshole boss screwing his underlings, but the underlings don't screw each other. With the stereotypical women we're talking about, it's not bosses screwing their underlings over as much as it is underlings sabotaging each other.
Um, yes, they can. If you'd read about some of the things Catholic priests did to small boys, you'd know that their molestation is mainly touching, fondling, etc. Women can do that just as well as men; women have hands, after all. But women seem to have zero attraction to prepubescent children, unlike men.
The kids can survive without them, and the people who would be the role models are better off avoiding these jobs, for their own safety and long-term well-being. If society doesn't survive because of this, that's fine, the society doesn't deserve to survive.
Seriously, what man in his right mind would enter a profession like this? Everyone around him will be looking at him like he's a child predator. He'll be a pariah. Why should anyone take that on?
This is all generalization of course, but I disagree.
Yes, we do hear of female schoolteachers having sex with their male students. But in most of these cases, it's a 20-something teacher with boys who are at least 15 years old, frequently something like a 17-year-old boy and a 25-year-old teacher. There really isn't that much of an age gap, and the boy(s) in question is well past puberty and almost a legal adult. But when was the last time you heard of a woman molesting a pre-pubescent boy? I don't think I've ever heard of such a thing, ever. But this happens all the time with men; they frequently molest prepubescent boys and girls (esp. if they're Catholic priests). Both men and women get sexually involved with older teenagers of the opposite sex; this really isn't that rare, and I think it's a problem that our society and laws don't seem to draw that much of a distinction between post-pubescent and pre-pubescent children. I'm not saying it should be OK for a 50-year-old dude to talk a 17-year-old girl into sex, but there's a big difference between that and him molesting a 9-year-old girl. The 17-year-old is bigger, stronger, can defend herself, is nearly an adult and understands sex (and probably isn't even a virgin these days) and is much more likely to be able to handle the situation; she's not utterly defenseless like the 9-year-old. And it's (remotely) possible the 17-year-old was consenting; this concept is utterly ridiculous in the case of the 9-year-old.
So no, men don't have a monopoly on the predation of all minors, but I think they do have a monopoly on the predation of prepubescent minors.
The lack of females in engineering school and career is a huge problem, and it needs to be resolved.
No, it doesn't. It's a self-correcting problem. Women are actively avoiding the field for various reasons, probably including 1) too much sexism and sexual harassment in the field (there's been lots of articles on Slashdot about this over the past year or so), 2) poor pay compared to the effort needed to get a degree and maintain a job in the field, 3) generally crappy profession, with poor job security, rampant ageism, and shit like job postings requiring 15 years of experience in a language that's only existed for 5. Any woman smart enough to do engineering would be better off in another field, like medicine (or veterinary medicine, a big favorite among women), law, finance, etc. So what we end up with in engineering and CS is the only people that stay there are socially-awkward men who don't think they could succeed in those other jobs because they require more social skills that sitting in a cubicle at a computer all day. But that's not enough people for the tech industry to thrive, so they constantly whine that they need more H1Bs. I say cut off the H1B program altogether; if we can't make these careers interesting to our own citizens, then these companies don't need workers. Let the industry die.
Unfortunately, I think this may be a big part of it. A lot of women seem to have a big problem with trying to hurt other women in the workplace out of jealousy, and prettier women get it much worse.
My wife complains about other women in the workplace far more than about men. According to her, a large contingent of women in the workplace are backstabbing jezebels, and she'd much rather work with men. Every once in a while, there's some freak of a man who bothers her (usually some creep who can't seem to understand that she's not interested in some fat, ugly old man and wants to put his hands all over her; the fact that she's married doesn't seem to be a factor for these men). But they're rare, a small, small portion of the total number of men she meets. But with women, it's more like half of them are evil bitches trying to hurt her somehow to improve their own position.
It's not just the media, it's all of our society. The media is just catering to our societal attitudes.
No, these kids don't need male role models at all. Men teaching young children are going to be perceived as possible sexual predators, and are in a lot of danger as unfounded accusations can ruin their lives (and this has happened many times in fact). It's better for men to avoid this field altogether. Will this be bad for society in the long term? Of course, but we reap what we sow. We don't deserve to survive as a society if we can't figure out how to fix this problem of pedophilia-phobia, and I don't see it ever being fixed.
Screw management, someone smart enough for engineering can go into medicine instead and make far more money.
Actually, there's a fair number of people who send their kids to Catholic schools who aren't even Catholic.
I went to Catholic middle school, and I really don't remember a lot of religious education. Maybe it's changed. I do remember having to go to Mass once in a while, but as middle-schoolers, we just sat there and didn't really know what was going on.
Education should be a right, not a privilege, of living in an advanced society. Kids shouldn't get thrown out and left without an education because they didn't fit in or were holding back other kids; they need to be trained to live in modern society, even if their stupid parents aren't doing their parts.
The answer is to have tiered education, the way the Germans do it. Kids that are troublemakers get put in special classes with other dolts, which are run by teachers trained to deal with them. They're not going to learn at the level of the smart kids, who are elsewhere in their own classes, but they'll learn something, even if it's discipline. The problem our country largely has is "mainstreaming": we want to treat everyone like equals, when they simply aren't. Parents get all pissed off when little Johnny gets held back a grade or put in a "special" class, so for decades we've been trying to stick all kids together in the same class, even when they don't learn at the same rate and some are troublemakers and need special attention. Get rid of mainstreaming and many of your problems will disappear.