If Facebook and associates broke the law, then they should be held accountable for breaking the law, regardless of what anyone thinks of the people who bought the stock.
It seems more likely that one of Microsoft's PR firms has a subscription, and an employee (of the PR firm) created a new account to post a ready-made astroturf response.
Which is a problem. If that kind of discrimination is still a real problem in US (is it?), then it should be plainly illegal to deny this kind of thing to anyone without a good reason, regardless of whether they belong to a "protected class" or not.
Are you really this stupid? Do you expect business owners to accept that "you don't have the money to pay for this" is no longer an acceptable reason to deny providing service?
Frankly, the very term "protected class" is a slap in the face of equality.
Except everyone belongs to multiple "protected classes" because everyone has a race, everyone has a gender, and everyone has a sexual orientation. Now the protection may seem more like a joke to white middle-class heterosexual males who very rarely need any such protection, but the protections apply to everyone equally even to those who don't seem to need it very often.
No, not really. And despite the number of highly emotional words you posted, there was only one rational idea you gave me to respond to, so...
I'm just pointing out that you can argue that technically the news section of Fox News isn't really that biased, but that's not what most people see when they watch "Fox News". There's only about 8 hours of news programming on what it allegedly a 24 hour news channel, and if I remember correctly none of them are among the most watched hours of the channel.
How exactly is that different from other large networks stringently blacking out any official posture of credence toward climate disaster skepticism?
Well, firstly because that actually happened and secondly "climate disaster scepticism" isn't a real thing. Would you care to try to invent something more plausible to pretend that both sides are equally bad?
He's about as responsible as an actual Mafiaa boss. From what I've heard he made sure to never directly order anything illegal, he'd give general directions but if you didn't do exactly what he wanted you to do without complaint, you'd end up out on your ass faster than you could say "You want me to do what?".
He's quite responsible for building what appears to be a media empire founded on breaking the law whenever it was convenient. I don't expect Rupert will ever face charges, he'll be allowed to escape because of the ambiguity of his orders and in deference to his age and alleged infirmity.
Do you ever feel like your fighting a loosing cause like you're saying "other than all the hookers, hitmen, and bookies who testified against him, do you have any real evidence that my client isn't really a legitimate businessman". The majority of the content of "Fox News" isn't news, it's commentary. And even the news is subject to political manipulation, for example the infamous "no positive mentions of Global Warming allowed" memo. Then there's instances of Fox's "News" people using the commentators as unnamed sources for stories add a blatant and often obvious biasing of news coverage and stories with the laughable slogan "Fair and Balanced" and you look like you're defending a complete scum bag on technicalities. You could be technically correct, but I doubt anyone cares since you're essentially wrong.
Fox News is only a small part of the Murdoch hydra. By itself it wouldn't be terrible, but when you have the other heads all pretending to be independent but spouting the same lies, you have a right-wing propaganda machine that is helping to ruin America, the U.K, Australia and Canada. Rupert Murdoch should be a shining example to communists, dictators and terrorists all over the world, because he is so much more effective at destroying Liberal Democracies than they are.
Bear with me for a second here. What if the rest of the media appears to be on the Democratic party's side because the Republican party is actually insane? What if Fox News is a major factor in the the Republican descent into madness? Think for a moment about who the biggest names in the Republican party are, don't they sound like Beck, Hannity, O'Reiley and Palin? What do these people have in common? They all work for Rupert Murdoch and they're seem to be the ones pushing the Republican agenda. They're become the public face of the party, more so than even the politicians. Romney's their bitch and he'll do what they tell people he should do on their TV and radio shows. Frankly I have a hard time naming any influential Republicans who aren't closely tied to Fox News, Rupert Murdoch or News International.
A final thought: If Rupert Murdoch and News International controls the Republican party through their on air personalities, how could any other news organisation be anything but against them in comparison?
Why? What technology company doesn't already produce new models every year? How many technology companies are selling the exact same product 5 years later. Media company in particular have front loaded income of their productions, they make more money in the first year than they make in any subsequent year. Mathematically, anything longer than 15 years costs society money to subsidise nothing. 5 years might be too short, but I'm pretty sure that the average book, movie, or song will collect more than 50% of it's lifetime earnings in 5 years (It's 98% at 15 years).
Mathematically, 15 years is probably overly generous for copyright. On average all copyright works have extracted 98% of their total revenue in their first 15 years. Every year beyond 15 provides a smaller slice of that remaining 2%. Essentially any protection beyond 15 years costs society more to police copyrights than it will ever generate in economic returns.
It might be better to apply "trade secret" protection to these items before they are released. There seems to be little reason why for pharmaceuticals (for example), the FDA approval of a drug couldn't automatically trigger the granting of a (previously approved) patent on the pharmaceutical. So in effect the company applies for a patent on a drug that is in clinical trials, the patent is reviewed and is conditionally granted pending the conclusion of clinical trials or rejected as per normal procedure. In between the conditional granting and FDA approval the patent is embargoed and has no effect.
Do you understand that your statements are pointless nitpicking? Does it look like I'm trying to do science here? Did I accidentally submit my comment to a peer reviewed journal? I'm not trying to pretend I'm a scientist, I'm pointing out that the experts are in near unanimous agreement on the facts of the matter. An argument from authority requires two things to be legitimate: that the authority is a legitimate expert on the subject and that a consensus exists among legitimate experts on the matter under discussion. When the experts who were hired specifically to disagree with the consensus end up agreeing with it, that's strong evidence that the consensus hasn't "been proven false over and over again".
There are plenty of scientific arguments to be made, but I was responding to psychotic ranting from a nut job. Why spend time citing studies he'll never read and posting facts he won't believe? My rebuttal was succinct and to the point.
The union may or may not be staffed by former teachers, but the union does represent the teachers. And in my experience, most teachers strongly support their unions. Getting rid of the union would effectively deprive the teachers of a voice in education and it would leave virtually all of the decisions in the hands of administrators. It's curious that you would see more power transferred to a government you don't seem to overly trust.
I agree that any saying global warming is "going to destroy the world" is going way overboard. However, the human influence on the climate can't be denied. According to measurements of natural drivers and anthropogenic ones, humans are causing more than 100% of the observed warming over the past 50 years. During that time, the natural factors have been net acting in a cooling direction, that means that all of the observed warming is caused by human activity.
So humans are doing it, the solution is a matter of paying less now to mitigate the effects, or paying more later to deal with the effects while risking additional unknown potential feedback events. By allowing the industrial terraforming of the earth to run unchecked and unsupervised, the primary risks are famine, pestilence and war. By altering the climate patterns on this planet we could potentially render some of the world's most important crop land into marginally productive or barren land, and of course we already be pushing the oceans towards a massive fish stock collapse through a combination of overfishing and acidification from CO2 emissions. It could take decades to replace that lost food production, during which time, millions could starve. We also risk the spread of tropical and subtropical diseases into formerly temperate areas, we're already seeing some climate related changes in disease propagation. Of course, the biggest threat is likely war over diminished resources. If China ends up with a billion starving people, do you think they won't attack neighbours that have resources that could (even temporarily) help to feed those people?
We won't destroy the world or even humanity, but we could cause a lot of human suffering. The conservative principle says we should stabilise and then slowly reduce the amount of pollution (including CO2 emissions) that we are producing. The biggest threats are not from climate change but from rapid climate change. Plants and animals need time to adapt to change or we may cause another great extinction. It takes nature thousands of years to recover from an extinction event, I doubt humanity is prepared to wait that long for a solution.
No, he got the point. He was accusing you of being disingenuous because there's a trend of people just like you claiming "we don't know" and therefore "we shouldn't do anything". Of course, they're the exact same people who said "I have proof it's not happening!...but I left it in my other pants" and "Don't believe the scientists they're all religious fools!". The way you phrased your questions made it obvious that you were only asking them for rhetorical purposes. It certainly looked like you'd already decided what the answers are and were indicating you had no interest in anything that might contradict your views. I would suggest using questions that less obviously one-sided next time. If you don't phrase them in a way that dictates the answer, most people won't assume you're an idiot with an agenda.
"How much does human activity play a part in this?"
Over the last decade it's about 108% human causes. Natural causes have had a net negative effect, and so the human effect has had to overcome a natural cooling trend and warming has continued warming at a slightly slower pace. Surface temperatures appear to have been mostly stable because most of the warming is currently being pushed into the ocean (which continues to warm). This is because the last decade has been dominated by La Nina events. If you look at trends lines categorized by ENSO state (El Nino, La Nina or neutral) much of the short term noise is cancelled out of the resulting graphs showing a clear rising trend in temperatures.
It's that if the issue requires a global response — whatever the cause — then it necessarily must be a global response, not just First World nations sacrificing their entire economic and energy base, thus removing any influence they may have over the issue, leaving "China and India" to create that "world of shit" to which you refer even more quickly.
Of course, there are other options besides "do nothing" and "stop doing anything". A measured response might include, for example, imposing a carbon tax, and then taxing imports at the same rate. That would allow for reductions in emissions without allowing China and India to swamp America with "cheap shit" that breaks the rules.
Actually, none of the Tenets of AGW have been "proven false". You get modded down for being a trolling doucebag. Given that even the "sceptical scientists" hired by the Koch brother to "once and for pove that global warming isn't happening" found that, actually, yes global warming is happening at pretty much exactly the rate the "alarmists" have been saying, you're just delusional.
Every major sceintific organization in the world accepts that global warming is occuring, the past decade was the warmest on record. What could possibly make you believe that it had proven false?
People's interests differ. Some people like to tinker and/or express themselves in ways that are often rather incompatible with dense urban living.
Your arguments are counter-productive. You should be all for dense urban environments as long as people are required to live there, which they won't likely be in the lifespan of anyone currently alive. You see the more people are living in the dense urban environments the fewer people are living in sprawling suburbs which is win-win for you. Fewer people living where you want to live means less competition and lower costs for you.
In dense housing, there's no place to have a substantial garden and/or orchard if you like to grow food.
That's not actually true. There has been a big rise in urban gardening where certain public property is being turned into gardening centers. Most tower buildings could, in theory, have their roofs turned into garden, for example.
In dense housing, there's little place for making stuff of any size and/or have multiple maker projects active
Presumably this isn't true either, if there are other people who share your interests, you could form a co-operative and pool resources to make a builder space, or more likely if it's likely to be profitable someone else will start a business to provide you with the tools and the space. Why go and buy a new lathe when renting it for a few hours is cheaper (or pay a monthly membership to you local makers club).
Ultimately we will need to limit, either explicitly or via evolving of cultural attitudes, world population.
That appears to be a problem which will probably solve itself within the century as long as birth rates continue to fall.
Those are your exact words. Since teachers unions are effectively the teachers, you are therefore saying that the teachers are the problem and administrators are the solution because removing the union's protection of teachers is effectively giving the administration free rein. Is that what you really mean? That politicians and bureaucrats know better than teachers?
My point, which you ignored, is that the problem probably isn't the teachers, it is the poor relationship between administration and teachers that causes the unions to be overly protective of all teachers under their purview. If there's a history of politically motivated firings the union isn't going to go along with any firings because they won't believe the administration's accusations.
Inner city schools tend to have a much higher proportion of poor and immigrant children. With many poor parents working multiple part time jobs they are less available to teach their own children outside of school hours and language problems may impede the children's performance on standardised tests. Meanwhile in a middle class mostly white prosperous neighbour hood, none of those problems may be present in any significant degree.
The amount of money that needs to be spent is proportional to the problems that must be overcome.
Well the unions are made up of teachers, so obviously the problem with schools is the teachers. The solution must be to get rid of all the teachers and surely grades will improve? Unions may or may not be part of the problem, but they're hardly *the* problem. Most teachers want their students to succeed. It reflects well on them and means one of the largest choices they've ever made in their life has actual meaning.
Unions are probably part of the problem, but it's more likely to actually be the poor relationship between the school administration and the union and it generally takes two sides to feud. Of course, that relationship might be soured by a lack of resources provided to the school by the region or state.
I think this one has to be laid at the feet of progressives rather than liberals (the groups overlap but aren't identical). Self-esteem was supposed to more important than learning the facts. However, it appears that these self-esteem programs were based on flawed research. The original research indicated that self-esteem was highly correlated to success, I'm not sure how it got turned into self-esteem causes success (rather than success causes self-esteem), but that was the conclusion pushed by the author. This is a case of progressives seizing on a new, unproven, idea and it turning out to be wrong.
Those numbers are do not agree with Apples own numbers in the same report. It appears they actually paid somewhere between 10% and 18% not 24% (the 24% is technically not a lie because the percentages are based on money they set aside to pay potential taxes at some point in the hypothetical future). However, it is difficult to determine what the actual rate was because Apple reports taxes paid in a year, not taxes paid for a year. The difference is that in each year they pay taxes to the federal government based on the previous years profits and the difference between the tax bill of 2 years ago and the tax bill of 1 year ago. Additionally the reported tax paid is the total tax paid to every government in that year. So it includes U.S. state taxes, and foreign governments.
That's pretty much it. According to Daniel H. Pink, (author of Drive) these types of systems can actually make work less fulfilling in the long run and can actually interfere with the proper performance of any job involving thought. They're pretty good at motivating repetitious tasks (like factory work), however, for work that involves creativity, the rewards can actually reduce quality and productivity by focus the employees on earning the points instead of doing the work. The book mostly deals with monetary rewards, but I think a known point system is fairly similar to monetary awards. Although, I suppose the points might be less desirable and thus burn out the employees a little slower than the cash rewards do.
It's not the change, it's the rate of change. Think of it this way, would you rather slow your car from highway speeds by applying the brakes or hitting a brick wall?
The primary uncertainties include not knowing for sure how well our staple crops will adapt to new climate conditions, how populations will adapt to higher sea levels, and how ocean acidification will affect fisheries. It took thousands of years to domesticate and adapt crops to our current conditions. If there's a serious decline in crop productivity how long will it take us to fix the problem?
It's not hysteria, for the mainstream of climate science it's about judicious appraisal of risks. We know there are significant costs and risks associated with climate change. The economic analysis I've seen indicates that the cost to avert climate change will be between 1/7th to 1/14th of the cost to deal with the consequences over the next century.
The issues are related. It appears that loss of Arctic sea ice over the last decade has weakened the Arctic air currents which normally push warm air east towards Europe. This means that while Canada and the U.S. had a record shattering warm winter (due to a standing pattern of warm air from the Gulf), Europe had an unusually cold winter (due to a standing pattern of cold Arctic air). The weakness of the winds that would normally break up each system is a change driven by Global Warming.
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If Facebook and associates broke the law, then they should be held accountable for breaking the law, regardless of what anyone thinks of the people who bought the stock.
It seems more likely that one of Microsoft's PR firms has a subscription, and an employee (of the PR firm) created a new account to post a ready-made astroturf response.
Which is a problem. If that kind of discrimination is still a real problem in US (is it?), then it should be plainly illegal to deny this kind of thing to anyone without a good reason, regardless of whether they belong to a "protected class" or not.
Are you really this stupid? Do you expect business owners to accept that "you don't have the money to pay for this" is no longer an acceptable reason to deny providing service?
Frankly, the very term "protected class" is a slap in the face of equality.
Except everyone belongs to multiple "protected classes" because everyone has a race, everyone has a gender, and everyone has a sexual orientation. Now the protection may seem more like a joke to white middle-class heterosexual males who very rarely need any such protection, but the protections apply to everyone equally even to those who don't seem to need it very often.
No, not really. And despite the number of highly emotional words you posted, there was only one rational idea you gave me to respond to, so...
I'm just pointing out that you can argue that technically the news section of Fox News isn't really that biased, but that's not what most people see when they watch "Fox News". There's only about 8 hours of news programming on what it allegedly a 24 hour news channel, and if I remember correctly none of them are among the most watched hours of the channel.
How exactly is that different from other large networks stringently blacking out any official posture of credence toward climate disaster skepticism?
Well, firstly because that actually happened and secondly "climate disaster scepticism" isn't a real thing. Would you care to try to invent something more plausible to pretend that both sides are equally bad?
He's about as responsible as an actual Mafiaa boss. From what I've heard he made sure to never directly order anything illegal, he'd give general directions but if you didn't do exactly what he wanted you to do without complaint, you'd end up out on your ass faster than you could say "You want me to do what?".
He's quite responsible for building what appears to be a media empire founded on breaking the law whenever it was convenient. I don't expect Rupert will ever face charges, he'll be allowed to escape because of the ambiguity of his orders and in deference to his age and alleged infirmity.
Do you ever feel like your fighting a loosing cause like you're saying "other than all the hookers, hitmen, and bookies who testified against him, do you have any real evidence that my client isn't really a legitimate businessman". The majority of the content of "Fox News" isn't news, it's commentary. And even the news is subject to political manipulation, for example the infamous "no positive mentions of Global Warming allowed" memo. Then there's instances of Fox's "News" people using the commentators as unnamed sources for stories add a blatant and often obvious biasing of news coverage and stories with the laughable slogan "Fair and Balanced" and you look like you're defending a complete scum bag on technicalities. You could be technically correct, but I doubt anyone cares since you're essentially wrong.
Fox News is only a small part of the Murdoch hydra. By itself it wouldn't be terrible, but when you have the other heads all pretending to be independent but spouting the same lies, you have a right-wing propaganda machine that is helping to ruin America, the U.K, Australia and Canada. Rupert Murdoch should be a shining example to communists, dictators and terrorists all over the world, because he is so much more effective at destroying Liberal Democracies than they are.
Bear with me for a second here. What if the rest of the media appears to be on the Democratic party's side because the Republican party is actually insane? What if Fox News is a major factor in the the Republican descent into madness? Think for a moment about who the biggest names in the Republican party are, don't they sound like Beck, Hannity, O'Reiley and Palin? What do these people have in common? They all work for Rupert Murdoch and they're seem to be the ones pushing the Republican agenda. They're become the public face of the party, more so than even the politicians. Romney's their bitch and he'll do what they tell people he should do on their TV and radio shows. Frankly I have a hard time naming any influential Republicans who aren't closely tied to Fox News, Rupert Murdoch or News International.
A final thought: If Rupert Murdoch and News International controls the Republican party through their on air personalities, how could any other news organisation be anything but against them in comparison?
Why? What technology company doesn't already produce new models every year? How many technology companies are selling the exact same product 5 years later. Media company in particular have front loaded income of their productions, they make more money in the first year than they make in any subsequent year. Mathematically, anything longer than 15 years costs society money to subsidise nothing. 5 years might be too short, but I'm pretty sure that the average book, movie, or song will collect more than 50% of it's lifetime earnings in 5 years (It's 98% at 15 years).
Mathematically, 15 years is probably overly generous for copyright. On average all copyright works have extracted 98% of their total revenue in their first 15 years. Every year beyond 15 provides a smaller slice of that remaining 2%. Essentially any protection beyond 15 years costs society more to police copyrights than it will ever generate in economic returns.
It might be better to apply "trade secret" protection to these items before they are released. There seems to be little reason why for pharmaceuticals (for example), the FDA approval of a drug couldn't automatically trigger the granting of a (previously approved) patent on the pharmaceutical. So in effect the company applies for a patent on a drug that is in clinical trials, the patent is reviewed and is conditionally granted pending the conclusion of clinical trials or rejected as per normal procedure. In between the conditional granting and FDA approval the patent is embargoed and has no effect.
Do you understand that your statements are pointless nitpicking? Does it look like I'm trying to do science here? Did I accidentally submit my comment to a peer reviewed journal? I'm not trying to pretend I'm a scientist, I'm pointing out that the experts are in near unanimous agreement on the facts of the matter. An argument from authority requires two things to be legitimate: that the authority is a legitimate expert on the subject and that a consensus exists among legitimate experts on the matter under discussion. When the experts who were hired specifically to disagree with the consensus end up agreeing with it, that's strong evidence that the consensus hasn't "been proven false over and over again".
There are plenty of scientific arguments to be made, but I was responding to psychotic ranting from a nut job. Why spend time citing studies he'll never read and posting facts he won't believe? My rebuttal was succinct and to the point.
The union may or may not be staffed by former teachers, but the union does represent the teachers. And in my experience, most teachers strongly support their unions. Getting rid of the union would effectively deprive the teachers of a voice in education and it would leave virtually all of the decisions in the hands of administrators. It's curious that you would see more power transferred to a government you don't seem to overly trust.
I agree that any saying global warming is "going to destroy the world" is going way overboard. However, the human influence on the climate can't be denied. According to measurements of natural drivers and anthropogenic ones, humans are causing more than 100% of the observed warming over the past 50 years. During that time, the natural factors have been net acting in a cooling direction, that means that all of the observed warming is caused by human activity.
So humans are doing it, the solution is a matter of paying less now to mitigate the effects, or paying more later to deal with the effects while risking additional unknown potential feedback events. By allowing the industrial terraforming of the earth to run unchecked and unsupervised, the primary risks are famine, pestilence and war. By altering the climate patterns on this planet we could potentially render some of the world's most important crop land into marginally productive or barren land, and of course we already be pushing the oceans towards a massive fish stock collapse through a combination of overfishing and acidification from CO2 emissions. It could take decades to replace that lost food production, during which time, millions could starve. We also risk the spread of tropical and subtropical diseases into formerly temperate areas, we're already seeing some climate related changes in disease propagation. Of course, the biggest threat is likely war over diminished resources. If China ends up with a billion starving people, do you think they won't attack neighbours that have resources that could (even temporarily) help to feed those people?
We won't destroy the world or even humanity, but we could cause a lot of human suffering. The conservative principle says we should stabilise and then slowly reduce the amount of pollution (including CO2 emissions) that we are producing. The biggest threats are not from climate change but from rapid climate change. Plants and animals need time to adapt to change or we may cause another great extinction. It takes nature thousands of years to recover from an extinction event, I doubt humanity is prepared to wait that long for a solution.
Talk about missing the point.
No, he got the point. He was accusing you of being disingenuous because there's a trend of people just like you claiming "we don't know" and therefore "we shouldn't do anything". Of course, they're the exact same people who said "I have proof it's not happening! ...but I left it in my other pants" and "Don't believe the scientists they're all religious fools!". The way you phrased your questions made it obvious that you were only asking them for rhetorical purposes. It certainly looked like you'd already decided what the answers are and were indicating you had no interest in anything that might contradict your views. I would suggest using questions that less obviously one-sided next time. If you don't phrase them in a way that dictates the answer, most people won't assume you're an idiot with an agenda.
"How much does human activity play a part in this?"
Over the last decade it's about 108% human causes. Natural causes have had a net negative effect, and so the human effect has had to overcome a natural cooling trend and warming has continued warming at a slightly slower pace. Surface temperatures appear to have been mostly stable because most of the warming is currently being pushed into the ocean (which continues to warm). This is because the last decade has been dominated by La Nina events. If you look at trends lines categorized by ENSO state (El Nino, La Nina or neutral) much of the short term noise is cancelled out of the resulting graphs showing a clear rising trend in temperatures.
It's that if the issue requires a global response — whatever the cause — then it necessarily must be a global response, not just First World nations sacrificing their entire economic and energy base, thus removing any influence they may have over the issue, leaving "China and India" to create that "world of shit" to which you refer even more quickly.
Of course, there are other options besides "do nothing" and "stop doing anything". A measured response might include, for example, imposing a carbon tax, and then taxing imports at the same rate. That would allow for reductions in emissions without allowing China and India to swamp America with "cheap shit" that breaks the rules.
Actually, none of the Tenets of AGW have been "proven false". You get modded down for being a trolling doucebag. Given that even the "sceptical scientists" hired by the Koch brother to "once and for pove that global warming isn't happening" found that, actually, yes global warming is happening at pretty much exactly the rate the "alarmists" have been saying, you're just delusional.
Every major sceintific organization in the world accepts that global warming is occuring, the past decade was the warmest on record. What could possibly make you believe that it had proven false?
People's interests differ. Some people like to tinker and/or express themselves in ways that are often rather incompatible with dense urban living.
Your arguments are counter-productive. You should be all for dense urban environments as long as people are required to live there, which they won't likely be in the lifespan of anyone currently alive. You see the more people are living in the dense urban environments the fewer people are living in sprawling suburbs which is win-win for you. Fewer people living where you want to live means less competition and lower costs for you.
In dense housing, there's no place to have a substantial garden and/or orchard if you like to grow food.
That's not actually true. There has been a big rise in urban gardening where certain public property is being turned into gardening centers. Most tower buildings could, in theory, have their roofs turned into garden, for example.
In dense housing, there's little place for making stuff of any size and/or have multiple maker projects active
Presumably this isn't true either, if there are other people who share your interests, you could form a co-operative and pool resources to make a builder space, or more likely if it's likely to be profitable someone else will start a business to provide you with the tools and the space. Why go and buy a new lathe when renting it for a few hours is cheaper (or pay a monthly membership to you local makers club).
Ultimately we will need to limit, either explicitly or via evolving of cultural attitudes, world population.
That appears to be a problem which will probably solve itself within the century as long as birth rates continue to fall.
A riot is generally not something you easily mistake for an orderly protest.
Really? Fire two cans of tear gas into an orderly protest and I'd bet it looks exactly like a riot.
The Unions are the problem that stop advancement.
Those are your exact words. Since teachers unions are effectively the teachers, you are therefore saying that the teachers are the problem and administrators are the solution because removing the union's protection of teachers is effectively giving the administration free rein. Is that what you really mean? That politicians and bureaucrats know better than teachers?
My point, which you ignored, is that the problem probably isn't the teachers, it is the poor relationship between administration and teachers that causes the unions to be overly protective of all teachers under their purview. If there's a history of politically motivated firings the union isn't going to go along with any firings because they won't believe the administration's accusations.
Inner city schools tend to have a much higher proportion of poor and immigrant children. With many poor parents working multiple part time jobs they are less available to teach their own children outside of school hours and language problems may impede the children's performance on standardised tests. Meanwhile in a middle class mostly white prosperous neighbour hood, none of those problems may be present in any significant degree.
The amount of money that needs to be spent is proportional to the problems that must be overcome.
Well the unions are made up of teachers, so obviously the problem with schools is the teachers. The solution must be to get rid of all the teachers and surely grades will improve? Unions may or may not be part of the problem, but they're hardly *the* problem. Most teachers want their students to succeed. It reflects well on them and means one of the largest choices they've ever made in their life has actual meaning.
Unions are probably part of the problem, but it's more likely to actually be the poor relationship between the school administration and the union and it generally takes two sides to feud. Of course, that relationship might be soured by a lack of resources provided to the school by the region or state.
I think this one has to be laid at the feet of progressives rather than liberals (the groups overlap but aren't identical). Self-esteem was supposed to more important than learning the facts. However, it appears that these self-esteem programs were based on flawed research. The original research indicated that self-esteem was highly correlated to success, I'm not sure how it got turned into self-esteem causes success (rather than success causes self-esteem), but that was the conclusion pushed by the author. This is a case of progressives seizing on a new, unproven, idea and it turning out to be wrong.
Those numbers are do not agree with Apples own numbers in the same report. It appears they actually paid somewhere between 10% and 18% not 24% (the 24% is technically not a lie because the percentages are based on money they set aside to pay potential taxes at some point in the hypothetical future). However, it is difficult to determine what the actual rate was because Apple reports taxes paid in a year, not taxes paid for a year. The difference is that in each year they pay taxes to the federal government based on the previous years profits and the difference between the tax bill of 2 years ago and the tax bill of 1 year ago. Additionally the reported tax paid is the total tax paid to every government in that year. So it includes U.S. state taxes, and foreign governments.
That's pretty much it. According to Daniel H. Pink, (author of Drive) these types of systems can actually make work less fulfilling in the long run and can actually interfere with the proper performance of any job involving thought. They're pretty good at motivating repetitious tasks (like factory work), however, for work that involves creativity, the rewards can actually reduce quality and productivity by focus the employees on earning the points instead of doing the work. The book mostly deals with monetary rewards, but I think a known point system is fairly similar to monetary awards. Although, I suppose the points might be less desirable and thus burn out the employees a little slower than the cash rewards do.
It's not the change, it's the rate of change. Think of it this way, would you rather slow your car from highway speeds by applying the brakes or hitting a brick wall?
The primary uncertainties include not knowing for sure how well our staple crops will adapt to new climate conditions, how populations will adapt to higher sea levels, and how ocean acidification will affect fisheries. It took thousands of years to domesticate and adapt crops to our current conditions. If there's a serious decline in crop productivity how long will it take us to fix the problem?
It's not hysteria, for the mainstream of climate science it's about judicious appraisal of risks. We know there are significant costs and risks associated with climate change. The economic analysis I've seen indicates that the cost to avert climate change will be between 1/7th to 1/14th of the cost to deal with the consequences over the next century.
The issues are related. It appears that loss of Arctic sea ice over the last decade has weakened the Arctic air currents which normally push warm air east towards Europe. This means that while Canada and the U.S. had a record shattering warm winter (due to a standing pattern of warm air from the Gulf), Europe had an unusually cold winter (due to a standing pattern of cold Arctic air). The weakness of the winds that would normally break up each system is a change driven by Global Warming.