Python is a model of syntactic stringency compared to Ruby. In Ruby, you can call object.method() or object.method and achieve the same results. The parentheses are only necessary if you want the arguments to extend beyond a single line. A looping block can be demarcated in any of several ways:
for i in 1..30 do
print i end
(1..30).each do |i|
print i end
(1..30).each{ |i|
print i end
And probably a few others I've forgotten. Even more insane, you can throw an if/unless test at the beginning or end of a statement or block. In Rails, a popular way of passing arguments is to say "arg1, arg2, { dictionary for arg3 }" and then allow the dictionary to be written implicitly (without the surrounding braces). So it looks like "arg1, arg2, arg3=>val3, arg4=>val4, arg5=>val5".
If it sounds awful and revolting, it really isn't. I've found both Ruby and Python lead to extremely readable code. You're entitled to disagree, but think about this: The semicolons are there to make life easy for the compiler, not for you. I think Python especially latched onto something brilliant when they decided that the compiler derive the program structure from the exact same cues that human programmers do.
I'm not a republican by any means, but I do think that at least a portion of the responsibility for those that died during Katrina... lies with those that died in Katrina.
No, it sounds like you're a libertarian, which only distinguishes you from the Republicans when we're talking about government legislation against unusual sexual fetishes. When it comes to contempt for the poor, I've never seen a distinction between the two philosophies.
Your "failure of our civilization" strikes me as nonsensical, like saying that multicellular organisms are in moral decline. After all, how many of the cells in the human body can survive on their own? None. The cells in your muscle tissue expect to be able to go through their lives, just contracting and releasing, while all their nutrition is simply brought to them. Your neurons just want to spend all day firing, never giving a thought to how they'd hunt down food and reproduce if the rest of the body didn't come through for them.
I don't care what individual contingency plans people have. If society collapses, so that groceries no longer get to the store, most of us will die. There simply won't be enough to go around. Disaster prevention, mitigation, and recovery are best handled by society as a whole.
You spin a good story, and no doubt it's basically true. But I've got a real beef with the whole "stop whining and make your own opportunities" crowd. It's the party line being toed by a large number of people whose primary goal is to blame the poor for their sorry lot in life, so they don't have to feel guilty about all the crap that goes on. It also flies in the face of all evidence to think that human beings have a great deal of control over their personal characteristics. A very large fraction of our personality traits are genetic. For example, children of violent parents are unusually likely to be violent themselves, even when adopted at birth into some other family.
Some people have incredible self-discipline, a solid work ethic, and the ability to delay gratification. Your story would indicate that you do, because you succeeded where most of your peers probably failed. But it's an insult to your peers, an insult to reason, and an insult to everyone who works to bring fairness into the world, to claim that anyone else could have done the exact same thing in your situation.
Okay, that last bit was a bit much with the histrionics. But the basic premise that you're supporting (whether by accident or design) is that it doesn't matter how unfair the world is, so long as the occasional superstar has the wherewithal to claw his way from poor bastard to rich bastard. For my part, if people don't have the discipline to make the best choices for themselves, I still want to see them lead happy and fulfilled lives. Moreover, I'm happy to put my taxes where my mouth is, and fund the social programs that might help them.
Hell, they've done studies correlating a three-year-old's ability to put off eating a marshmallow with his or her future success in life. That seems like a strong indication that there is something inborn being measured, and that we shouldn't be willing to condemn all who fail to live up to our expectations.
I'm well aware of the wealth of material available. I listed quite a few. But look at any "mostly infringing" site, and you'll also find large quantities being heavily transferred. While it's hard to judge, my suspicion remains that infringing content consumes most of the actual bandwidth (based solely on a quick comparison of websites and a bit of understanding of human nature). If you want to disagree with me in a convincing way, you need to do more than point to "a wealth of legitimate uses." You can list such sites for hours, and explain how everyone you know only downloads legitimate content, and continue to remain unconvincing. The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
I question your numbers. I doubt legitimate content "dwarfs" infringing content, in either amount available or traffic. Yes there is a lot of legal stuff out there, and I appreciate the link. But if you threw together all the copies of SXSW, Linux isos, stuff from Internet Archive, copies of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg... I'd guess it comes close to 20% of all torrent traffic.
It's good to recognize that there's lots of legitimate use going on right now, but there's no need to exaggerate.
Hmmm. I tried to post this by hitting Ctrl-x Ctrl-s. Emacs is really getting to me.
There are quite a few (relatively cheap) places that will host Rails apps, and if you're doing something substantial enough that you can justify renting out your own box at an ISP, then it's not a problem either.
The tricky middle ground is the one where someone is happy with their current ISP setup, but would like to add a Rails app. Then you have to decide whether the language is promising enough to justify a change. Usually, it doesn't, so people go back to what they were doing before.
Me, I've got my own little box and a very understanding ISP. I'm happy.
I'm in the middle of writing a fairly substantial website in Rails. The first iteration of the site, everyone could do everything to every bit of data. The second version? I added one line of code to the parent of my controllers:
The authorized? function redirects users to the login page if they're not already logged in. So the result is, it's trivial to add validation code before every single action that makes changes to the database. If I want to add a function that validates that the person making changes is the person who owns the object being changed, that's one more function and one more line of code. I haven't done it, because it's supposed to be a collaboration tool where people are encouraged to edit each others' work.
You can do similar things to the models, defining actions and checks that have to happen before a database entry can be changed.
I'm really not seeing the point of your rant. If you want security on Rails, it's easy to go from zero security to total lockdown, then back off until the app is functional.
Seminary classes aren't mandated, and from the school's point of view, it's just "release time", where kids are released from normal classes to do some other structured activity. I don't remember the rules on which activities qualify for release time and which don't.
Having said that, there are schools where Mormons so predominate, that lots of non-Mormon kids attend seminary to fit in and be with their friends. Worse, when there are only a handful of kids in a school who don't attend seminary, everyone knows who they are. It's a lonely feeling for them.
I'm not going to argue that the current education system doesn't need a major overhaul. It's expensive, it does a terrible job of teaching critical thinking skills, and the kids are bored out of their minds. The whole thing needs a major overhaul, starting with a major scaling back of administration costs, better salaries to attract more competent teachers, and a much more modern system for testing children's competencies. All those days filling out bubble sheets. Ick.
I don't know how to answer your distrust of government. Sometimes I'm not even able to answer my own. Any public institution becomes dangerous when a dictator comes to power. However, I believe a widely educated population does act as a check on that sort of abuse, and I'm still not convinced that there is a pure free-market solution for making that happen.
The government I'm often defending around here isn't the government we actually have. It's some mythical creature of my own fantasies, that tries to be fair, efficient, responsible, and accountable. I believe it's possible to have such institutions, in both the public and private sector. But I'm dangerous when I lose sight of the fact that they are uncommon if they exist at all (which I'm prone to do when I hear people shouting about how the only good government is a dead government).
Your faith in your corporate overlords is disturbing. Why would they care about educating the youth of America, when they can get educated Indian and Chinese without paying a cent towards educating them? Perhaps, their consciences will make them care? Or are you putting your hope in their loyalty towards the American Worker?
You're absolutely right: businesses in America need brains. But given the choice between growing them locally and bribing Congress to raise the number of H1B visas, which do you think they'll decide is cheaper?
No, don't expect more than a pittance in voluntary education funding from the private sector.
We're not getting our asses handed to us by free-market private schools in other countries, but by their public education systems (name me a counterexample, please). Therefore, claiming that it's our inability to properly embrace free-market education that is leaving us at a competitive disadvantage is dishonest. Parochial schools (besides being a breeding ground for right-wing nutjobs) are doubtless less efficient than you claim. First, they have no obligation to educate every child that comes to them, and there is no obvious way to compare test scores when the school has the right to expel all the dumb kids. Second, you're claiming they can do the same job on 1/10th the budget, which is absurd. Utah spends about $5000/student, and I've never seen any private school anywhere advertise a tuition of $500/year. Again, feel free to show me a counterexample.
In other news, they're working on a bill requiring teachers to say that evolution is just one among many theories. They're working on a bill to ban gay/straight alliance clubs from high schools. They've decided that Utah's future economic growth depends heavily on new roads, but not at all on education.
Every morning, my local public radio station does a legislative summary from the non-partisan League of Women Voters. A good day is one when I only have four or five stomach-clenching moments of impotent rage. Our legislators are not reasonable, not competent, and not listening to anything but the "still small voice" that they think is the Holy Spirit talking directly into their miniscule brains.
Good response letter from the Salt Lake City Weekly: (scroll down to "Gamers Know Reality"). At least a few of us still have some sense. Just nowhere near a voting majority.
You make it sound like I'm just a poor sap who read the preamble to the Constitution and misunderstood horribly. Quite the contrary, I sincerely believe that sometimes the best way for the government to "promote the general welfare" is to actually provide welfare.
I already answered your claim that private charity will make up any shortfall. Sure, if a person has more money, they're likely to drop some small fraction of their increase on schooling for the poor. But what fraction? 5%? 10%? You don't really think that the person who just had his property taxes slashed by $1200 a year is going to turn around and give most of that to schooling for the poor, do you? Or do you believe that the public education system wastes 95% of its money, so the 5% will be sufficient? Either way, you sound like you're living deep in some fantasy land.
Nor do I believe your blanket statement, "The government stinks at providing services." The free market is generally more efficient, I'll agree, but it's only good at filling the needs of those who have the money to make it worth the free market's time. Public education isn't that sort of situation, not for the poor.
You come back with a specific proposal for making the public education system leaner, more responsive, and more effective (there are plenty out there), I'm all ears. But enough of this hand-waving "the free market will take care of everything" mentality. It's just uninformed demagoguery.
Transparency is great. Is this the way to go about it, though? It depends on which documents they released. If they provided all relevant documentation, then I don't much care whether they violated some Brussels policy. But if they only released their defense, while their opponents are still obligated to keep the "evidence for the prosecution" under wraps, then it's hardly a blow for transparency in government.
All I can find is "Microsoft's Response to the European Commission," so I don't think I'm far off the mark. I hope the EC releases their side of things as well, so we can get both sides, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft (like most major orgs) thinks transparency is something you use when it's to your advantage. That means that either they believe in their case, or they believe the EC won't release counter-documentation.
You did exactly what I assumed you would do. Your basic message is, "having lost access to public education, the poor would pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and find ways to educate their children. Anyone who doesn't, well, it's due to their own poor choices, so somehow that's okay." It really isn't. If a child cannot get an education because of her parents' irresponsible and self-destructive choices, then she is being punished for something entirely beyond her control. That is wrong, and it's bad for society.
Right now, there are millions of people out there trying to support families on minimum wage or near-minimum wage jobs. By the time they budget for the absolute necessities of life, there is nothing left. Asking them to cough up an additional four or five thousand dollars to get three kids educated at the local "Learnin' R Us" is unrealistic. Your belief that no Americans are really "wage slaves" is also unrealistic. It happens all the time, in every city.
The fact is, educating millions of poor children costs a lot of money. Right now, the money for even our current, underfunded education system comes from property taxes. If the government got out of the business of providing that service, what do you think the businesses who receive the tax break will do?
A) Give the money to educational charities. B) Pass the money on to their workers, allowing them to make up the shortfall and fund their kids' educations. C) Send their own kid to Stanford instead of an in-state college?
Now, which of the three is best for society? Having a well-funded educational system for the poor is far, far more valuable than giving a few people an exceptional education rather than a merely excellent one. As far as I'm concerned, a government has three responsibilities: to protect the lives and rights of its people, to "promote the general welfare" by providing assistance to the poor, and to act on behalf of its citizens in providing services that will benefit everyone, when those services would not be sufficiently provided by a free market. Public education is one of those things that simply will not be sufficiently funded without government support. If you don't have children, you won't fund education (despite the obvious long-term benefits). If you do have children, you'll spend whatever you can on their education. So rich children get outstanding educations. Middle-class kids get decent educations. Poor kids get crappy-to-none. That is a crappy system for those who believe all children should have equal access to education, as well as for those who believe that educational resources ought to be spent based on a child's demonstrated ability to benefit.
Education is a societal good. An educated citizenry benefits all of society. Therefore, everyone in society ought to cough up. If the rich or deeply religious want to opt out and give their children an education more to their tastes, they can pay for private school, but they shouldn't be able to siphon money away from the public system to do it. We don't subsidize people who opt out of the public water system by buying bottled water, do we?
I wish you'd stop calling it a "classically liberal" society, because as ingratiating as the label may be to liberals, it's really just a codeword for "dog-eat-dog libertarian hellhole." A modern liberal society is as superior to a libertarian society as a libertarian society is to an authoritarian monarchy or a dictatorship.
You're going to send them a link to goatse, aren't you?
C'mon, now you've got us all curious. If it's really a brilliant idea, then why is there harm in letting it be known? If Google doesn't do it, someone else might.
Think about it: unfettered capitalism is a system ideally suited to fulfilling the needs of people who have money. If you don't have money, capitalism doesn't give a crap about you, except insofar as it needs to protect itself from people who would try to steal its stuff.
So imagine you're a poor person, who doesn't have good prospects for changing that fact, but does have a kid. That kid needs to be educated to make him useful to society. Because he's your kid, you naturally have a desire to see him educated, so he lives a more prosperous life than you did. But you're ill-equipped to provide a good education yourself, and you don't have the money to convince anyone else to provide him with a good education. So you and the kid are both SOL, destined to toil in the sugar mines until you give out.
But in a democracy, you and the millions of people like you can elect people who will try to fulfill your basic needs. Even if you've got nothing else in the world, you've got a vote, and that means you still have a say.
My analysis is sophomoric, I know. But explain to me how, in the absence of a public school system, millions of poverty-stricken children would be educated? And don't come back with some touching story about some poor coal-miner dad using his last buck to buy science books for his freckle-faced kid, then reading them together by candlelight. The reason they call it "beating the odds" is because for every person who makes it, ninety-nine fail. I want something systematic, that will reach every child who has a remote chance of benefitting from an education. Or come back with a diatribe about home-schooling, "unschooling", or how public education is an ineffective warehouse for children. But for God's sake, no freckle-faced kids.
So? We've all held shit jobs. But we haven't all had shit lives.
The absolute best predictor of a person's economic status as an adult is the economic status of their parents. Most of the economic mobility reported in the U.S. is a statistical artifact caused by the college-age children of middle and upper classers living poor for a few years before getting high-paying jobs.
While I respect and congratulate you for your rise up the socioeconomic ladder, your success is not a good indicator of what is possible for most working poor.
Oh, yeah? Well, you should go read everything ever written by Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, and Terry Pratchett, and then come back and refute their points.
It's really, really, really bad form to jump into an Internet discussion (with a shelf life of days or even hours), demanding that your opponent read an entire book before he is qualified to respond to you. If you're too lazy to find a relatively short, well-written article that summarizes the position you want your opponent to engage, why should your opponent invest the energy of reading an entire frakking book?
Sooo.... non-profits are evil because they get guilt-ridden rich white kids working for homeless shelters rather than kicking around plotting the inevitable Revolution?
Sorry, the article isn't making a whole lot of sense to me. The cynical conclusion I'm drawing is, "non-profits that actually accomplish some good are just staving off the violent overthrow of our capitalist overlords, which is bad." As a borderline pinko myself, I don't think much of her line of reasoning.
The Cato Institute also fought wind power by pointing out the terrible, just terrible carnage the turbines would wreak on bird populations. This marked the absolute first time they've ever tried to pretend they gave a crap about the environment.
I don't trust the Cato Institute, or any other agenda-driven "groupthink-tank" to perform the research first, then draw the conclusions. This study seems no different.*
* Note: I wrote that statement before I actually read the study. Which is an absurd, biased way to go about researching a topic, and the exact sort of thing the Cato Institute pulls. The "study" (more of a survey, really) is sometimes blatantly obvious ("Oh, gee, people are more prosperous when the government protects the private property rights of individuals, rather than robbing them blind or standing idly by while rampaging mobs do the same.") At other points, it seems economically naive, only devoting one dismissive paragraph about externalized costs (which amounts to a refusal to engage the primary justification for government regulations) and expending zero effort distinguishing between physical and intellectual property.
The survey also frequently exhibits the intense desire to jump to tasty conclusions without providing support. Their desire for less government regulation is obvious, even though they never distinguish between the security and extent of private property rights. After all, there is no guarantee that loosening a given restriction on property rights will lead to better economic decision making by owners, but it is certain that they'll make better decisions if they're secure in the knowledge that whatever rights they have today will also exist tomorrow.
Certainly, the fastest road to prosperity for a given country is for it to have a government which works for the people, protecting their lives and property. But despite our agreement on that front, I can hardly step aside and let you quote the Cato Institute as though it were a respectable institution not run by right-wing nitwits who think the only good government is a dead government.
The inspiration/perspiration quote comes from Thomas Edison. Nikolai Tesla had a few words for Edison's approach to discovery:
"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search...."
"I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor. (New York Times, October 19, 1931.)"
I agree with him. If 99% of your success comes from perspiration, it's time to step back and do some more thinking.
As to the greater point: It's a game. The game is designed in a certain way, and when and how you are rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment depends entirely on how you work within the framework of the game. They could have set the game up to reward massive amounts of time, particularly quick thumbs, social abilities, the ability to solve difficult mental problems, or the ability to predict and manipulate the economy. WoW has elements of each, but the point is, there is no refutation to the article. He's saying that the game rewards particular behaviors, and he doesn't like it. While he tries to turn it into something greater than his personal opinion, he never succeeds. He should just stick with the games that reward him in his preferred way.
If--as you suggest--the people who want to hack OSX to run on non-Mac hardware are such cheap bastards that they won't even cough up a hundred bucks for an OS, what does Apple lose if they succeed? A customer who would have gone on to purchase tens of thousands of dollars worth of Apple hardware and software? Nope. They lose the opportunity to have someone pirating OSX instead of installing Ubuntu.
If you can't get money out of a person, then by definition they're not part of your market. So why worry about them? For the rest of us, having OSX available on vanilla Intel computers would be great advertising for Mac hardware. This is especially true when you consider the state of drivers for OSX on unsupported hardware. It would be years before anyone could run their OS without wistfully thinking how good life would be if they had hardware that cooperated.
You really should read the book, though. It's definitely more reasonable than it appears at first blush. Part of the proposed system is that anyone can watch any camera, but anyone can also see who else is watching any camera. So if someone wants to use the system to stalk you, you've got some early warning.
Brin is also very big on forcing all sorts of transparency on government and law enforcement. For example, cops would have to wear cameras whenever they were on duty, and anyone could watch those. Thus it would be difficult for any cop to go on a power trip. All communications of elected officials would be open to public scrutiny.
The thing is, the technology is slowly becoming available for a wealthy enough organization (government, business, etc.) to find out whatever they want about whoever they want. Cameras are getting smaller, cheaper, and more mobile. Databases compile huge amounts of data, and we're constantly discovering new ways to draw conclusions from that data. Brin's fear is that, like it or not, privacy will be dead in fifty years. The only question is, can we salvage our freedom in an age of zero privacy? Brin thinks that complete transparency is the only way to make that happen, and the worst option is to have a government where it can find out everything it wants about you, but you can't find a damned thing out about it.
In short our choice is between a society where the government uses surveillance to control its people, or one where the people use serveillance to control their government. Given that choice, Brin's ideas make a helluvalotta sense.
'Scuse me, but nothing in the article mentioned any messes left to be cleaned up. If that happens, it's covered by *real* laws, not the fake laws rolling around in the heads of a bunch of undertrained, glorified mall cops. The fact that they were trying to enforce laws they obviously haven't been trained to understand should be enough for you to withdraw your support for their actions.
Further, calling anyone who views porn a "pervert" is misinformed and inflammatory. Webster defines perversion as "any abberant sexual practice." A solid majority of people use pornography, and 38% of people find nothing wrong with porn. If more than ten percent of people are doing something, you really have to abuse the English language to call it "abberant".
Libraries are gateways to all manner of information, and it's not up to you or any other self-appointed thought police to determine which information people should be looking at. You don't get to look over people's shoulders to determine whether their behavior meets with your approval.
Slashdot Mirror
If it sounds awful and revolting, it really isn't. I've found both Ruby and Python lead to extremely readable code. You're entitled to disagree, but think about this: The semicolons are there to make life easy for the compiler, not for you. I think Python especially latched onto something brilliant when they decided that the compiler derive the program structure from the exact same cues that human programmers do.
Your "failure of our civilization" strikes me as nonsensical, like saying that multicellular organisms are in moral decline. After all, how many of the cells in the human body can survive on their own? None. The cells in your muscle tissue expect to be able to go through their lives, just contracting and releasing, while all their nutrition is simply brought to them. Your neurons just want to spend all day firing, never giving a thought to how they'd hunt down food and reproduce if the rest of the body didn't come through for them.
I don't care what individual contingency plans people have. If society collapses, so that groceries no longer get to the store, most of us will die. There simply won't be enough to go around. Disaster prevention, mitigation, and recovery are best handled by society as a whole.
You spin a good story, and no doubt it's basically true. But I've got a real beef with the whole "stop whining and make your own opportunities" crowd. It's the party line being toed by a large number of people whose primary goal is to blame the poor for their sorry lot in life, so they don't have to feel guilty about all the crap that goes on. It also flies in the face of all evidence to think that human beings have a great deal of control over their personal characteristics. A very large fraction of our personality traits are genetic. For example, children of violent parents are unusually likely to be violent themselves, even when adopted at birth into some other family.
Some people have incredible self-discipline, a solid work ethic, and the ability to delay gratification. Your story would indicate that you do, because you succeeded where most of your peers probably failed. But it's an insult to your peers, an insult to reason, and an insult to everyone who works to bring fairness into the world, to claim that anyone else could have done the exact same thing in your situation.
Okay, that last bit was a bit much with the histrionics. But the basic premise that you're supporting (whether by accident or design) is that it doesn't matter how unfair the world is, so long as the occasional superstar has the wherewithal to claw his way from poor bastard to rich bastard. For my part, if people don't have the discipline to make the best choices for themselves, I still want to see them lead happy and fulfilled lives. Moreover, I'm happy to put my taxes where my mouth is, and fund the social programs that might help them.
Hell, they've done studies correlating a three-year-old's ability to put off eating a marshmallow with his or her future success in life. That seems like a strong indication that there is something inborn being measured, and that we shouldn't be willing to condemn all who fail to live up to our expectations.
I'm well aware of the wealth of material available. I listed quite a few. But look at any "mostly infringing" site, and you'll also find large quantities being heavily transferred. While it's hard to judge, my suspicion remains that infringing content consumes most of the actual bandwidth (based solely on a quick comparison of websites and a bit of understanding of human nature). If you want to disagree with me in a convincing way, you need to do more than point to "a wealth of legitimate uses." You can list such sites for hours, and explain how everyone you know only downloads legitimate content, and continue to remain unconvincing. The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
I question your numbers. I doubt legitimate content "dwarfs" infringing content, in either amount available or traffic. Yes there is a lot of legal stuff out there, and I appreciate the link. But if you threw together all the copies of SXSW, Linux isos, stuff from Internet Archive, copies of Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg... I'd guess it comes close to 20% of all torrent traffic.
It's good to recognize that there's lots of legitimate use going on right now, but there's no need to exaggerate.
Hmmm. I tried to post this by hitting Ctrl-x Ctrl-s. Emacs is really getting to me.
I bow before your masterful buzzword-fu. You must have great hair. Will you teach me to leverage my competitive synergies?
There are quite a few (relatively cheap) places that will host Rails apps, and if you're doing something substantial enough that you can justify renting out your own box at an ISP, then it's not a problem either.
The tricky middle ground is the one where someone is happy with their current ISP setup, but would like to add a Rails app. Then you have to decide whether the language is promising enough to justify a change. Usually, it doesn't, so people go back to what they were doing before.
Me, I've got my own little box and a very understanding ISP. I'm happy.
I'm in the middle of writing a fairly substantial website in Rails. The first iteration of the site, everyone could do everything to every bit of data. The second version? I added one line of code to the parent of my controllers:
:authorized? :except => ['show', 'list', 'index']
before_filter
The authorized? function redirects users to the login page if they're not already logged in. So the result is, it's trivial to add validation code before every single action that makes changes to the database. If I want to add a function that validates that the person making changes is the person who owns the object being changed, that's one more function and one more line of code. I haven't done it, because it's supposed to be a collaboration tool where people are encouraged to edit each others' work.
You can do similar things to the models, defining actions and checks that have to happen before a database entry can be changed.
I'm really not seeing the point of your rant. If you want security on Rails, it's easy to go from zero security to total lockdown, then back off until the app is functional.
Seminary classes aren't mandated, and from the school's point of view, it's just "release time", where kids are released from normal classes to do some other structured activity. I don't remember the rules on which activities qualify for release time and which don't.
Having said that, there are schools where Mormons so predominate, that lots of non-Mormon kids attend seminary to fit in and be with their friends. Worse, when there are only a handful of kids in a school who don't attend seminary, everyone knows who they are. It's a lonely feeling for them.
I'm not going to argue that the current education system doesn't need a major overhaul. It's expensive, it does a terrible job of teaching critical thinking skills, and the kids are bored out of their minds. The whole thing needs a major overhaul, starting with a major scaling back of administration costs, better salaries to attract more competent teachers, and a much more modern system for testing children's competencies. All those days filling out bubble sheets. Ick.
I don't know how to answer your distrust of government. Sometimes I'm not even able to answer my own. Any public institution becomes dangerous when a dictator comes to power. However, I believe a widely educated population does act as a check on that sort of abuse, and I'm still not convinced that there is a pure free-market solution for making that happen.
The government I'm often defending around here isn't the government we actually have. It's some mythical creature of my own fantasies, that tries to be fair, efficient, responsible, and accountable. I believe it's possible to have such institutions, in both the public and private sector. But I'm dangerous when I lose sight of the fact that they are uncommon if they exist at all (which I'm prone to do when I hear people shouting about how the only good government is a dead government).
Your faith in your corporate overlords is disturbing. Why would they care about educating the youth of America, when they can get educated Indian and Chinese without paying a cent towards educating them? Perhaps, their consciences will make them care? Or are you putting your hope in their loyalty towards the American Worker?
You're absolutely right: businesses in America need brains. But given the choice between growing them locally and bribing Congress to raise the number of H1B visas, which do you think they'll decide is cheaper?
No, don't expect more than a pittance in voluntary education funding from the private sector.
We're not getting our asses handed to us by free-market private schools in other countries, but by their public education systems (name me a counterexample, please). Therefore, claiming that it's our inability to properly embrace free-market education that is leaving us at a competitive disadvantage is dishonest. Parochial schools (besides being a breeding ground for right-wing nutjobs) are doubtless less efficient than you claim. First, they have no obligation to educate every child that comes to them, and there is no obvious way to compare test scores when the school has the right to expel all the dumb kids. Second, you're claiming they can do the same job on 1/10th the budget, which is absurd. Utah spends about $5000/student, and I've never seen any private school anywhere advertise a tuition of $500/year. Again, feel free to show me a counterexample.
In other news, they're working on a bill requiring teachers to say that evolution is just one among many theories. They're working on a bill to ban gay/straight alliance clubs from high schools. They've decided that Utah's future economic growth depends heavily on new roads, but not at all on education.
Every morning, my local public radio station does a legislative summary from the non-partisan League of Women Voters. A good day is one when I only have four or five stomach-clenching moments of impotent rage. Our legislators are not reasonable, not competent, and not listening to anything but the "still small voice" that they think is the Holy Spirit talking directly into their miniscule brains.
Good response letter from the Salt Lake City Weekly: (scroll down to "Gamers Know Reality"). At least a few of us still have some sense. Just nowhere near a voting majority.
You make it sound like I'm just a poor sap who read the preamble to the Constitution and misunderstood horribly. Quite the contrary, I sincerely believe that sometimes the best way for the government to "promote the general welfare" is to actually provide welfare.
I already answered your claim that private charity will make up any shortfall. Sure, if a person has more money, they're likely to drop some small fraction of their increase on schooling for the poor. But what fraction? 5%? 10%? You don't really think that the person who just had his property taxes slashed by $1200 a year is going to turn around and give most of that to schooling for the poor, do you? Or do you believe that the public education system wastes 95% of its money, so the 5% will be sufficient? Either way, you sound like you're living deep in some fantasy land.
Nor do I believe your blanket statement, "The government stinks at providing services." The free market is generally more efficient, I'll agree, but it's only good at filling the needs of those who have the money to make it worth the free market's time. Public education isn't that sort of situation, not for the poor.
You come back with a specific proposal for making the public education system leaner, more responsive, and more effective (there are plenty out there), I'm all ears. But enough of this hand-waving "the free market will take care of everything" mentality. It's just uninformed demagoguery.
Transparency is great. Is this the way to go about it, though? It depends on which documents they released. If they provided all relevant documentation, then I don't much care whether they violated some Brussels policy. But if they only released their defense, while their opponents are still obligated to keep the "evidence for the prosecution" under wraps, then it's hardly a blow for transparency in government.
All I can find is "Microsoft's Response to the European Commission," so I don't think I'm far off the mark. I hope the EC releases their side of things as well, so we can get both sides, but I'm pretty sure Microsoft (like most major orgs) thinks transparency is something you use when it's to your advantage. That means that either they believe in their case, or they believe the EC won't release counter-documentation.
You did exactly what I assumed you would do. Your basic message is, "having lost access to public education, the poor would pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and find ways to educate their children. Anyone who doesn't, well, it's due to their own poor choices, so somehow that's okay." It really isn't. If a child cannot get an education because of her parents' irresponsible and self-destructive choices, then she is being punished for something entirely beyond her control. That is wrong, and it's bad for society.
Right now, there are millions of people out there trying to support families on minimum wage or near-minimum wage jobs. By the time they budget for the absolute necessities of life, there is nothing left. Asking them to cough up an additional four or five thousand dollars to get three kids educated at the local "Learnin' R Us" is unrealistic. Your belief that no Americans are really "wage slaves" is also unrealistic. It happens all the time, in every city.
The fact is, educating millions of poor children costs a lot of money. Right now, the money for even our current, underfunded education system comes from property taxes. If the government got out of the business of providing that service, what do you think the businesses who receive the tax break will do?
A) Give the money to educational charities.
B) Pass the money on to their workers, allowing them to make up the shortfall and fund their kids' educations.
C) Send their own kid to Stanford instead of an in-state college?
Now, which of the three is best for society? Having a well-funded educational system for the poor is far, far more valuable than giving a few people an exceptional education rather than a merely excellent one. As far as I'm concerned, a government has three responsibilities: to protect the lives and rights of its people, to "promote the general welfare" by providing assistance to the poor, and to act on behalf of its citizens in providing services that will benefit everyone, when those services would not be sufficiently provided by a free market. Public education is one of those things that simply will not be sufficiently funded without government support. If you don't have children, you won't fund education (despite the obvious long-term benefits). If you do have children, you'll spend whatever you can on their education. So rich children get outstanding educations. Middle-class kids get decent educations. Poor kids get crappy-to-none. That is a crappy system for those who believe all children should have equal access to education, as well as for those who believe that educational resources ought to be spent based on a child's demonstrated ability to benefit.
Education is a societal good. An educated citizenry benefits all of society. Therefore, everyone in society ought to cough up. If the rich or deeply religious want to opt out and give their children an education more to their tastes, they can pay for private school, but they shouldn't be able to siphon money away from the public system to do it. We don't subsidize people who opt out of the public water system by buying bottled water, do we?
I wish you'd stop calling it a "classically liberal" society, because as ingratiating as the label may be to liberals, it's really just a codeword for "dog-eat-dog libertarian hellhole." A modern liberal society is as superior to a libertarian society as a libertarian society is to an authoritarian monarchy or a dictatorship.
You're going to send them a link to goatse, aren't you?
C'mon, now you've got us all curious. If it's really a brilliant idea, then why is there harm in letting it be known? If Google doesn't do it, someone else might.
Pleeeeeeeeez???? I'll give you a cookie!
I think it's pretty naive to think otherwise.
Think about it: unfettered capitalism is a system ideally suited to fulfilling the needs of people who have money. If you don't have money, capitalism doesn't give a crap about you, except insofar as it needs to protect itself from people who would try to steal its stuff.
So imagine you're a poor person, who doesn't have good prospects for changing that fact, but does have a kid. That kid needs to be educated to make him useful to society. Because he's your kid, you naturally have a desire to see him educated, so he lives a more prosperous life than you did. But you're ill-equipped to provide a good education yourself, and you don't have the money to convince anyone else to provide him with a good education. So you and the kid are both SOL, destined to toil in the sugar mines until you give out.
But in a democracy, you and the millions of people like you can elect people who will try to fulfill your basic needs. Even if you've got nothing else in the world, you've got a vote, and that means you still have a say.
My analysis is sophomoric, I know. But explain to me how, in the absence of a public school system, millions of poverty-stricken children would be educated? And don't come back with some touching story about some poor coal-miner dad using his last buck to buy science books for his freckle-faced kid, then reading them together by candlelight. The reason they call it "beating the odds" is because for every person who makes it, ninety-nine fail. I want something systematic, that will reach every child who has a remote chance of benefitting from an education. Or come back with a diatribe about home-schooling, "unschooling", or how public education is an ineffective warehouse for children. But for God's sake, no freckle-faced kids.
So? We've all held shit jobs. But we haven't all had shit lives.
The absolute best predictor of a person's economic status as an adult is the economic status of their parents. Most of the economic mobility reported in the U.S. is a statistical artifact caused by the college-age children of middle and upper classers living poor for a few years before getting high-paying jobs.
While I respect and congratulate you for your rise up the socioeconomic ladder, your success is not a good indicator of what is possible for most working poor.
Oh, yeah? Well, you should go read everything ever written by Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, and Terry Pratchett, and then come back and refute their points.
It's really, really, really bad form to jump into an Internet discussion (with a shelf life of days or even hours), demanding that your opponent read an entire book before he is qualified to respond to you. If you're too lazy to find a relatively short, well-written article that summarizes the position you want your opponent to engage, why should your opponent invest the energy of reading an entire frakking book?
Just answer me that one, simple question.
Sooo.... non-profits are evil because they get guilt-ridden rich white kids working for homeless shelters rather than kicking around plotting the inevitable Revolution?
Sorry, the article isn't making a whole lot of sense to me. The cynical conclusion I'm drawing is, "non-profits that actually accomplish some good are just staving off the violent overthrow of our capitalist overlords, which is bad." As a borderline pinko myself, I don't think much of her line of reasoning.
The Cato Institute also fought wind power by pointing out the terrible, just terrible carnage the turbines would wreak on bird populations. This marked the absolute first time they've ever tried to pretend they gave a crap about the environment.
I don't trust the Cato Institute, or any other agenda-driven "groupthink-tank" to perform the research first, then draw the conclusions. This study seems no different.*
* Note: I wrote that statement before I actually read the study. Which is an absurd, biased way to go about researching a topic, and the exact sort of thing the Cato Institute pulls. The "study" (more of a survey, really) is sometimes blatantly obvious ("Oh, gee, people are more prosperous when the government protects the private property rights of individuals, rather than robbing them blind or standing idly by while rampaging mobs do the same.") At other points, it seems economically naive, only devoting one dismissive paragraph about externalized costs (which amounts to a refusal to engage the primary justification for government regulations) and expending zero effort distinguishing between physical and intellectual property.
The survey also frequently exhibits the intense desire to jump to tasty conclusions without providing support. Their desire for less government regulation is obvious, even though they never distinguish between the security and extent of private property rights. After all, there is no guarantee that loosening a given restriction on property rights will lead to better economic decision making by owners, but it is certain that they'll make better decisions if they're secure in the knowledge that whatever rights they have today will also exist tomorrow.
Certainly, the fastest road to prosperity for a given country is for it to have a government which works for the people, protecting their lives and property. But despite our agreement on that front, I can hardly step aside and let you quote the Cato Institute as though it were a respectable institution not run by right-wing nitwits who think the only good government is a dead government.
I agree with him. If 99% of your success comes from perspiration, it's time to step back and do some more thinking.
As to the greater point: It's a game. The game is designed in a certain way, and when and how you are rewarded with a feeling of accomplishment depends entirely on how you work within the framework of the game. They could have set the game up to reward massive amounts of time, particularly quick thumbs, social abilities, the ability to solve difficult mental problems, or the ability to predict and manipulate the economy. WoW has elements of each, but the point is, there is no refutation to the article. He's saying that the game rewards particular behaviors, and he doesn't like it. While he tries to turn it into something greater than his personal opinion, he never succeeds. He should just stick with the games that reward him in his preferred way.
If--as you suggest--the people who want to hack OSX to run on non-Mac hardware are such cheap bastards that they won't even cough up a hundred bucks for an OS, what does Apple lose if they succeed? A customer who would have gone on to purchase tens of thousands of dollars worth of Apple hardware and software? Nope. They lose the opportunity to have someone pirating OSX instead of installing Ubuntu.
If you can't get money out of a person, then by definition they're not part of your market. So why worry about them? For the rest of us, having OSX available on vanilla Intel computers would be great advertising for Mac hardware. This is especially true when you consider the state of drivers for OSX on unsupported hardware. It would be years before anyone could run their OS without wistfully thinking how good life would be if they had hardware that cooperated.
You really should read the book, though. It's definitely more reasonable than it appears at first blush. Part of the proposed system is that anyone can watch any camera, but anyone can also see who else is watching any camera. So if someone wants to use the system to stalk you, you've got some early warning.
Brin is also very big on forcing all sorts of transparency on government and law enforcement. For example, cops would have to wear cameras whenever they were on duty, and anyone could watch those. Thus it would be difficult for any cop to go on a power trip. All communications of elected officials would be open to public scrutiny.
The thing is, the technology is slowly becoming available for a wealthy enough organization (government, business, etc.) to find out whatever they want about whoever they want. Cameras are getting smaller, cheaper, and more mobile. Databases compile huge amounts of data, and we're constantly discovering new ways to draw conclusions from that data. Brin's fear is that, like it or not, privacy will be dead in fifty years. The only question is, can we salvage our freedom in an age of zero privacy? Brin thinks that complete transparency is the only way to make that happen, and the worst option is to have a government where it can find out everything it wants about you, but you can't find a damned thing out about it.
In short our choice is between a society where the government uses surveillance to control its people, or one where the people use serveillance to control their government. Given that choice, Brin's ideas make a helluvalotta sense.
'Scuse me, but nothing in the article mentioned any messes left to be cleaned up. If that happens, it's covered by *real* laws, not the fake laws rolling around in the heads of a bunch of undertrained, glorified mall cops. The fact that they were trying to enforce laws they obviously haven't been trained to understand should be enough for you to withdraw your support for their actions.
Further, calling anyone who views porn a "pervert" is misinformed and inflammatory. Webster defines perversion as "any abberant sexual practice." A solid majority of people use pornography, and 38% of people find nothing wrong with porn. If more than ten percent of people are doing something, you really have to abuse the English language to call it "abberant".
Libraries are gateways to all manner of information, and it's not up to you or any other self-appointed thought police to determine which information people should be looking at. You don't get to look over people's shoulders to determine whether their behavior meets with your approval.