> I believe that as people see it, they realize that it's not just a few incidents, but terrorism has always been around, but that we (as a country) have always prevailed.
Odd that they don't mention in the exhibit details about the acts of terrorism that helped get the nation started. The act that springs immediately to mind is the Boston Tea Party, although I'm sure it's not that hard to find other stuff to consider. The Sons of Liberty were responsible for quite a few such things, and yet the exhibit seems strangely silent on them.
> Which makes the US responsible for the largest ever terrorist attack in human history - the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Um, if you're considering those two acts in this light, then you must also include other acts of war against civilians. In numbers and in impact, for example, the Holocaust far exceeds those two bombings. So does virtually everything that Stalin ever did. Also see Japan's history as regards China.
> The only thing the PC's got a leg up on, now, is moddability, and with the likes of XBL, how long can we expect that to last, maybe this generation?
Oddly, the leg up my computer has over a console is the office suite. And the Internet. And email. And so on. The reason PC games aren't going to die is that the console can't substitute for a PC. Therefore, people will continue to have PCs in their houses, and therefore games will continue to be made for them. I certainly can't give up my computer in favor of a console, and if a game comes out for the PC that I like, I'll get it. Even with games that can port to console relatively simply, I'm going to choose my format based on my preferred venue. For example, even if Myst came out on a console (and the interface for that game would be just fine for a controller), I'd still prefer to play it sitting in a chair to my couch. Examples the other way also work, but that's not so relevant to the parent.
I'm not going to agree with your assessment but I understand the frustration. In going through the original Myst, each of the ages was compartmentalized, and solutions to the puzzles were sprinkled around the age. That made it possible to solve the ages as you encountered them, without concern about hints from other ages that you may or may not have encountered. The only exception I found to this was the sounds that made the tram in the Selenitic Age easier to navigate (the practice rotator in the Mechanical Age used the sounds for directional cues, and the sounds told you which way to rotate the tram car at the junctions). Other than that, everything needed to solve a puzzle in an age was nearby.
Not so in Riven. Solutions to puzzles were often scattered across several locations, and so you could encounter a puzzle with no idea how to solve it until much later. That said, all of the clues were there, so you didn't need a strategy guide (and in fact I didn't ever use one). For example, the balls that indicated the order to push down animal stones to access Tay (the Moiety age) were strewn across most of the islands of Riven, but you just needed persistence and a bit a luck to find them without a lot of puzzle solving (unless you count gaining access to remote locations like Gehn's workshop as a puzzle). Sure, it was very tough to find them all, but then that's part of the game. Riven required the player to expend a lot more effort simply exploring than Myst did, but again that's the nature of puzzle games, isn't it?
> What if you are standing close by some fellow planning on blowing the plane out of the sky, and you are first in line at the Mass-Spectrometer? In all the brew-haha of you getting tackled/cuffed/cavity-searched, the terror monger walks right in...
Small comfort, but you'll be safely on the ground in a jail cell when the bomb does go off...
> Sorry, but if they believe a 911 call came from within your home, they have probable cause to enter.
Don't try to BS your way through police procedure. If the officer could reasonably claim proabable cause, she'd simply have done so and gone inside without needing to ask. The fact that she did ask indicates that she didn't think she could stand on probable cause.
Your analogy is unsound, because parenting is only like the government until you separate it, at which point the analogy no longer applies. If the lunch lady truly took the position of the executive branch, she'd have veto power over the parents' decisions, whereas in this case she's more in the role of police officer, who doesn't get any say in choosing the laws to enforce.
> Among other things, the system is far too beurocratic, not taking into account that compromises, etc. must be made. If a kid, for example, does the dishes for a week, perhaps he should be treated with a pizza. Instead of putting this on the list, however, wouldn't it just be easier to give him money?
Firstly, compromises "must" not be made. Parents can choose to compromise, but unlike within the government they are not required to compromise if they don't want to. They can say "no exceptions for good behavior" and nobody, not the child nor the lunch lady, can change it. Secondly, ease of change is not the responsibility of the program. If ease of change is the primary goal, then the parents would simply not sign up for the program. The fact that using the program requires the parent to change the list when they change their minds about allowing Junior to buy something at school is the parent's problem.
> The US government does not have this trust in their Exeutive Branch, but the US family should. When the government does that job, it makes the family an extension of the government's policies, and I'm sure that you can agree that this is not good.
You've got it backwards. When this happens as it does with this policy, the government becomes an extension of the family, not the other way around, since the choice falls by default and in all non-default cases to the parents. In the presence of parental direction, the agent follows it. In the absence of parental direction, the agent does nothing. There's nothing in that plan of action that puts any parenting power in the hands of the government. They're just enforcing the directives of the parents.
> Of course, we all know they're really not, but it won't stop irresponsible parents from blaming the system when it turns out their kids have been sneaking junk food on their way home from school. "But we ticked the box! It's your duty to make sure our kids eat properly!"
It's not irrational to think that parents who would do this would blame the system in the absence of this particular program, because parents who would use this without any reinforcement at home are the kind who will tend to try to push the blame outward in any case. That's not damning enough to invalidate the program for those who would use it properly.
> Sometimes I feel like I am the only one who sees these things.
I hate to be pedantic, but if you don't do a better job writing nobody ever will see it, because most of this screed is incomprehensible. I suggest you concentrate on getting your communication skills up to par, because (although it's entirely unfair) nobody will take you seriously if you can't assemble your thoughts better than this. You write like an emo 12-year-old, and if you want to take that as a simple insult instead of something that would suggest improvement, feel free.
> Furthermore, since she represents the food department of the public school, which is a government institution, one can make an argument that this is another way in which the government is parenting our children. This time, they ``represent the parents'' by saying no.
One could make that argument if one didn't care if one looked foolish. Since the "government" doesn't do this by default, but instead only by direct parent request and under complete parent direction, your argument falls apart. No direct decision about the child's diet is made by any government agent, so no reasonable argument can be made that the government is doing the parenting.
> But I don't think totally forbidding something like junk food from a child is correct parenting, or a reasonable limit.
Um, forbidding a kid from buying certain items from a school lunch counter does not necessarily mean disallowing it entirely. Perhaps you only want your kid to have one ice cream sandwich in a day, so he gets it after school (or after dinner). Again and again, I see people howling about how this is a method of controlling kids, and yet every one of them uses it to assume that the parent involved will abuse it to ridiculous lengths. Why is that? Parents who are super-controlling will do that sort of thing in the absence of this, parents who use it as a stand-in for good nutrition education will find it ineffective, and parents who are decent parents will use it as a part of a fuller parenting process. This tool doesn't make good parents go bad, so why do so many say it will?
> I agree they need some guidance . But there are different approaches to it . If you tell your childeren why something is bad , explain the consequences and let them take responsibility for it , you will teach them more than you will by simply disallowing them to do it.
I fail to see why these two things are mutually exclusive. This service is useful for those kids who have been taught properly and still get the foods that aren't good for them. As one of the previous threads wrote, kids will be kids, and some kids will go for the junk food even after they're made aware of the consequences. Oversight is part of the toolset one uses to determine how much autonomy kids can handle. Some kids will respond to the advice, but if not then parental regulation is not out of order. Think on this: some kids will drive safely when they're taught to drive, and some kids will drive dangerously even after they've been taught properly. Taking away the keys shouldn't be the first step, but it's certainly reasonable that it's one of the steps down the road (pun intended).
OK, although I'll point out AdBlock too, since it's good tool to have and would solve the problem you described, the ban wasn't a ban from accessing Facebook. The ban was that athletes at the school were forbidden to have Facebook profiles.
> Actually, the OP didn't respond so I'm not sure how your psychic powers determined he "demonstrated that he was not going to show him any class".
The fact that the OP would imply irrational threats of personal legal action is quite enough indication that he's not going to show any class to someone who calls him out on it. Therefore, operating under the assumption that the OP will continue in his crass behavior does not constitute hypocrisy.
> Why can't we just get a plain vanilla install of the OS anymore?
Dell takes money from many companies that pay to have Dell preinstall things on new computers. If Dell doesn't preinstall stuff, they're breaking contract with all of those companies. Therefore, Dell won't install a "clean" setup even if you ask, because they've already been paid to stuff the box.
> Well, not exactly. Think about it. There was a time in our nation's history where a high-school education was above average. Then, as more people began earning a high-school education, it became the standard, rather than the exception. Now, a four-year degree from college is the norm. How many *good* jobs are available with only a high-school diploma on your resume?
This is a very good point, but it fails relevance. Sure, this is true of the U.S., but the discussion focuses on China, and China hasn't gotten to that part of the curve.
Let me address your points in order of approach, since you make a point but your order makes it hard to rebut.
> So this whole article should be more about the lengths to which lazy Chinese go in order to avoid studying and still go to college.
I find it tough to believe that it's laziness that drives someone to cheat in such a way as to require surgery to correct it. Competition in China for slots in universities is extreme (the article itself addresses this if you demand my source) and this is an indicator that more people want the slots than there are slots to provide. You comment:
Almost in all cases you cannot just remove the reason why people are driven towards cheating so the solution would have to involve some change in the way people think.
I'd say that the change needed is to convince people that they can get an education without cheating, and the only realistic way to do that is to increase the number of slots in the universities.
> Yes China is growing economically really fast but 50,000 - 100,000 more graduates each year would put some serious strain on the economy ( education in China is paid for by the government ).
I'd say this is a relatively easy problem to solve, except for the fact that China's government is run by oppressive idealogues. There's nothing in the function of a university that requires that it be funded or run by the government, but good luck trying to get a private university established there. Therefore, the government itself is being a limiting factor. The upshot of this is that there's going to be very little the government can do to prevent cheating, then.
> Unless there is a shortage of a specialist of a certain kind ( and this is not te case in most countries ) them producing even 1000 more specialist ( read graduates from a given major if you wish ) would create unemployment and hence would devalue the preexisting workers.
This would seem to make sense, but frankly that's not how higher education works. To be blunt, a degree is more than the major it supports. Sure, your major specifies what you concentrated on, but I learned a lot more in college than just the scope of my degree, and that degree qualified me to be able to do a wide range of jobs. For some majors that's not as likely, but for some it is. Given the choice between a community college education and no college education at all, you'd be hard pressed to convince me I'd be better off with the latter, even if I end up as a carpenter.
> There is a lot more than free markets working here and the Chinese educational system is nothing like the American one.
I fail to see that this is a good thing. Their model seems to have a problem that ours doesn't. If the government is afraid to fix it, they don't have a lot of room to bitch about the problems that fear causes them.
> Ah... no. Printing money can cripple an economy.
Incorrect. You'll notice several things in my comment. First is that I did in fact separate printing money from creating monetary value, so you can claim it to be semantic nit-picking but I did address his real point, not the point of printing money. Second, the amount of printed money in the economy relative to the amount of actual money (the value of M1) is vanishingly small, so you'd have to print an appalling amount of it before it would start to have any real effect on the economy, and doling out economic value does cause inflation, but then that was covered by the first point.
I forgot that some nitwit will always come to the table with an absolutely irrational edge case that disproves the statement for that single case, and then argue that this means the whole thing falls apart. Sure, printing five billion dollar bills and giving it to one person will indeed severely unbalance the economy, but then it's not the printing of the money that's the problem, eh? It's handing five billion dollars to someone out of the blue sky that causes the problem. If that money got printed but then was only handed to people with claim to it (say, mailing out cash for tax refunds instead of checks), then it would have precisely zero effect on the economy, just as I claimed. So go away until you've decided not to be a nitwit about it any more.
> and where do they find the stafff for trippling there university system overnight?
You know, I went back through my reply in great detail, and try as I might I can't find where I mentioned "overnight" anywhere in it. Could you point it out for me please, or are you busying yourself looking for the medication for that jerking knee?
Printing money (what you really mean is inventing monetary value, since physically printing money doesn't do anything to the economy) requires that you devalue the monetary value you currently have, since the money supply represents a "set amount" of value, and forcing it around to more people cuts into the value of what each unit holds. The same is not true of univeristies. That is, we're very far from the situation where opening another univeristy will so crowd the market for higher education that the value of an education will decline due to the presence of more of them. Therefore, your analogy is false, because it's based on a bad assumption about marginal value. They should consider opening more schools so more of their people can get a higher education without resorting to cheating.
> I can just say "Look, this job requires you to do X hours of work, after the close of the business day. Everyone in this position, in my company, does it. If you don't want to do it, you're fired."
I'm with you on this. Home work is a bad example of the problem he's pointing out.
> This isn't a school talking about simple disrespect: they're talking about already prohibited behavior. If you engage in prohibited behavior, you're subject to appropriate punishment. Frankly, so long as they dont violate the law in looking for evidence of such behavior, what basis is there to preclude the schools from doing it?
Sorry, but you jumped the rails here. The relevant part from TFA is:
The board of Community High School District 128 voted unanimously on Monday to require that all students participating in extracurricular activities sign a pledge agreeing that evidence of "illegal or inappropriate" behavior posted on the Internet could be grounds for disciplinary action.
Notice the inclusion of "inappropriate" in the wording. That's where the agreement oversteps its proper bounds. They specifically aren't talking about already prohibited behavior, and I'm left to wonder where "inappropriate" is defined in any meaningful way. The school looking at students' MySpace postings doesn't violate any rules, and they can surf to their heart's content. It's the moment they decide to enforce discipline for something that's not illegal but is what they define as "inappropriate" that they take a role they have no right to take. Functionally, it would be like my neighbor reading my blog, finding out I look at porn, and firing me from my job. The school administration has no right to punish their student body for non-illegal acts or words that are published off school grounds and outside school hours, and furthermore they have no basis for compelling students to sign a contract stating acceptance of such foolishness. If my kid's school sent home a "pledge" concerning what sort of sleepwear he could wear to bed, I'd treat it the same way.
Well, there's a problem with that. It's not illegal in all cases for a high school student to drink alcohol, so such a pledge covers activity that's not criminal. For example, a parent can give a 15-year-old child a glass of champagne to toast the New Year, and it's perfectly legal to do so. This pledge would "forbid" that activity, and if a coach learned about the (perfectly legal) behavior, he could eject the student from an athletic team because of it, by waving the contract. That's just flat-out wrong, since it's the coach essentially trumping the wishes of a parent, which is wholly inappropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
> I believe that as people see it, they realize that it's not just a few incidents, but terrorism has always been around, but that we (as a country) have always prevailed.
Odd that they don't mention in the exhibit details about the acts of terrorism that helped get the nation started. The act that springs immediately to mind is the Boston Tea Party, although I'm sure it's not that hard to find other stuff to consider. The Sons of Liberty were responsible for quite a few such things, and yet the exhibit seems strangely silent on them.
Virg
> Which makes the US responsible for the largest ever terrorist attack in human history - the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Um, if you're considering those two acts in this light, then you must also include other acts of war against civilians. In numbers and in impact, for example, the Holocaust far exceeds those two bombings. So does virtually everything that Stalin ever did. Also see Japan's history as regards China.
Next time log in, coward.
Virg
> The only thing the PC's got a leg up on, now, is moddability, and with the likes of XBL, how long can we expect that to last, maybe this generation?
Oddly, the leg up my computer has over a console is the office suite. And the Internet. And email. And so on. The reason PC games aren't going to die is that the console can't substitute for a PC. Therefore, people will continue to have PCs in their houses, and therefore games will continue to be made for them. I certainly can't give up my computer in favor of a console, and if a game comes out for the PC that I like, I'll get it. Even with games that can port to console relatively simply, I'm going to choose my format based on my preferred venue. For example, even if Myst came out on a console (and the interface for that game would be just fine for a controller), I'd still prefer to play it sitting in a chair to my couch. Examples the other way also work, but that's not so relevant to the parent.
Virg
I'm not going to agree with your assessment but I understand the frustration. In going through the original Myst, each of the ages was compartmentalized, and solutions to the puzzles were sprinkled around the age. That made it possible to solve the ages as you encountered them, without concern about hints from other ages that you may or may not have encountered. The only exception I found to this was the sounds that made the tram in the Selenitic Age easier to navigate (the practice rotator in the Mechanical Age used the sounds for directional cues, and the sounds told you which way to rotate the tram car at the junctions). Other than that, everything needed to solve a puzzle in an age was nearby.
Not so in Riven. Solutions to puzzles were often scattered across several locations, and so you could encounter a puzzle with no idea how to solve it until much later. That said, all of the clues were there, so you didn't need a strategy guide (and in fact I didn't ever use one). For example, the balls that indicated the order to push down animal stones to access Tay (the Moiety age) were strewn across most of the islands of Riven, but you just needed persistence and a bit a luck to find them without a lot of puzzle solving (unless you count gaining access to remote locations like Gehn's workshop as a puzzle). Sure, it was very tough to find them all, but then that's part of the game. Riven required the player to expend a lot more effort simply exploring than Myst did, but again that's the nature of puzzle games, isn't it?
Virg
> What if you are standing close by some fellow planning on blowing the plane out of the sky, and you are first in line at the Mass-Spectrometer? In all the brew-haha of you getting tackled/cuffed/cavity-searched, the terror monger walks right in...
Small comfort, but you'll be safely on the ground in a jail cell when the bomb does go off...
Virg
> Sorry, but if they believe a 911 call came from within your home, they have probable cause to enter.
Don't try to BS your way through police procedure. If the officer could reasonably claim proabable cause, she'd simply have done so and gone inside without needing to ask. The fact that she did ask indicates that she didn't think she could stand on probable cause.
Virg
Your analogy is unsound, because parenting is only like the government until you separate it, at which point the analogy no longer applies. If the lunch lady truly took the position of the executive branch, she'd have veto power over the parents' decisions, whereas in this case she's more in the role of police officer, who doesn't get any say in choosing the laws to enforce.
> Among other things, the system is far too beurocratic, not taking into account that compromises, etc. must be made. If a kid, for example, does the dishes for a week, perhaps he should be treated with a pizza. Instead of putting this on the list, however, wouldn't it just be easier to give him money?
Firstly, compromises "must" not be made. Parents can choose to compromise, but unlike within the government they are not required to compromise if they don't want to. They can say "no exceptions for good behavior" and nobody, not the child nor the lunch lady, can change it. Secondly, ease of change is not the responsibility of the program. If ease of change is the primary goal, then the parents would simply not sign up for the program. The fact that using the program requires the parent to change the list when they change their minds about allowing Junior to buy something at school is the parent's problem.
> The US government does not have this trust in their Exeutive Branch, but the US family should. When the government does that job, it makes the family an extension of the government's policies, and I'm sure that you can agree that this is not good.
You've got it backwards. When this happens as it does with this policy, the government becomes an extension of the family, not the other way around, since the choice falls by default and in all non-default cases to the parents. In the presence of parental direction, the agent follows it. In the absence of parental direction, the agent does nothing. There's nothing in that plan of action that puts any parenting power in the hands of the government. They're just enforcing the directives of the parents.
Virg
> Of course, we all know they're really not, but it won't stop irresponsible parents from blaming the system when it turns out their kids have been sneaking junk food on their way home from school. "But we ticked the box! It's your duty to make sure our kids eat properly!"
It's not irrational to think that parents who would do this would blame the system in the absence of this particular program, because parents who would use this without any reinforcement at home are the kind who will tend to try to push the blame outward in any case. That's not damning enough to invalidate the program for those who would use it properly.
Virg
> Sometimes I feel like I am the only one who sees these things.
I hate to be pedantic, but if you don't do a better job writing nobody ever will see it, because most of this screed is incomprehensible. I suggest you concentrate on getting your communication skills up to par, because (although it's entirely unfair) nobody will take you seriously if you can't assemble your thoughts better than this. You write like an emo 12-year-old, and if you want to take that as a simple insult instead of something that would suggest improvement, feel free.
Virg
> Face it, childhood obesity is a *massive* problem in the United States.
A healthy post, indeed. A Full day's supply of irony.
Virg
> Furthermore, since she represents the food department of the public school, which is a government institution, one can make an argument that this is another way in which the government is parenting our children. This time, they ``represent the parents'' by saying no.
One could make that argument if one didn't care if one looked foolish. Since the "government" doesn't do this by default, but instead only by direct parent request and under complete parent direction, your argument falls apart. No direct decision about the child's diet is made by any government agent, so no reasonable argument can be made that the government is doing the parenting.
Virg
> But I don't think totally forbidding something like junk food from a child is correct parenting, or a reasonable limit.
Um, forbidding a kid from buying certain items from a school lunch counter does not necessarily mean disallowing it entirely. Perhaps you only want your kid to have one ice cream sandwich in a day, so he gets it after school (or after dinner). Again and again, I see people howling about how this is a method of controlling kids, and yet every one of them uses it to assume that the parent involved will abuse it to ridiculous lengths. Why is that? Parents who are super-controlling will do that sort of thing in the absence of this, parents who use it as a stand-in for good nutrition education will find it ineffective, and parents who are decent parents will use it as a part of a fuller parenting process. This tool doesn't make good parents go bad, so why do so many say it will?
Virg
> I agree they need some guidance . But there are different approaches to it . If you tell your childeren why something is bad , explain the consequences and let them take responsibility for it , you will teach them more than you will by simply disallowing them to do it.
I fail to see why these two things are mutually exclusive. This service is useful for those kids who have been taught properly and still get the foods that aren't good for them. As one of the previous threads wrote, kids will be kids, and some kids will go for the junk food even after they're made aware of the consequences. Oversight is part of the toolset one uses to determine how much autonomy kids can handle. Some kids will respond to the advice, but if not then parental regulation is not out of order. Think on this: some kids will drive safely when they're taught to drive, and some kids will drive dangerously even after they've been taught properly. Taking away the keys shouldn't be the first step, but it's certainly reasonable that it's one of the steps down the road (pun intended).
Virg
OK, although I'll point out AdBlock too, since it's good tool to have and would solve the problem you described, the ban wasn't a ban from accessing Facebook. The ban was that athletes at the school were forbidden to have Facebook profiles.
Carry on.
Virg
> Actually, the OP didn't respond so I'm not sure how your psychic powers determined he "demonstrated that he was not going to show him any class".
The fact that the OP would imply irrational threats of personal legal action is quite enough indication that he's not going to show any class to someone who calls him out on it. Therefore, operating under the assumption that the OP will continue in his crass behavior does not constitute hypocrisy.
Next time log in, coward.
Virg
This isn't hypocrisy.
The person he called an idiot had already demonstrated that he was not going to show him any class, and so his maxim stopped being applicable.
Virg
> Why can't we just get a plain vanilla install of the OS anymore?
Dell takes money from many companies that pay to have Dell preinstall things on new computers. If Dell doesn't preinstall stuff, they're breaking contract with all of those companies. Therefore, Dell won't install a "clean" setup even if you ask, because they've already been paid to stuff the box.
Carry on.
Virg
> Well, not exactly. Think about it. There was a time in our nation's history where a high-school education was above average. Then, as more people began earning a high-school education, it became the standard, rather than the exception. Now, a four-year degree from college is the norm. How many *good* jobs are available with only a high-school diploma on your resume?
This is a very good point, but it fails relevance. Sure, this is true of the U.S., but the discussion focuses on China, and China hasn't gotten to that part of the curve.
Virg
> So this whole article should be more about the lengths to which lazy Chinese go in order to avoid studying and still go to college.
I find it tough to believe that it's laziness that drives someone to cheat in such a way as to require surgery to correct it. Competition in China for slots in universities is extreme (the article itself addresses this if you demand my source) and this is an indicator that more people want the slots than there are slots to provide. You comment:I'd say that the change needed is to convince people that they can get an education without cheating, and the only realistic way to do that is to increase the number of slots in the universities.
> Yes China is growing economically really fast but 50,000 - 100,000 more graduates each year would put some serious strain on the economy ( education in China is paid for by the government ).
I'd say this is a relatively easy problem to solve, except for the fact that China's government is run by oppressive idealogues. There's nothing in the function of a university that requires that it be funded or run by the government, but good luck trying to get a private university established there. Therefore, the government itself is being a limiting factor. The upshot of this is that there's going to be very little the government can do to prevent cheating, then.
> Unless there is a shortage of a specialist of a certain kind ( and this is not te case in most countries ) them producing even 1000 more specialist ( read graduates from a given major if you wish ) would create unemployment and hence would devalue the preexisting workers.
This would seem to make sense, but frankly that's not how higher education works. To be blunt, a degree is more than the major it supports. Sure, your major specifies what you concentrated on, but I learned a lot more in college than just the scope of my degree, and that degree qualified me to be able to do a wide range of jobs. For some majors that's not as likely, but for some it is. Given the choice between a community college education and no college education at all, you'd be hard pressed to convince me I'd be better off with the latter, even if I end up as a carpenter.
> There is a lot more than free markets working here and the Chinese educational system is nothing like the American one.
I fail to see that this is a good thing. Their model seems to have a problem that ours doesn't. If the government is afraid to fix it, they don't have a lot of room to bitch about the problems that fear causes them.
Virg
> Ah... no. Printing money can cripple an economy.
Incorrect. You'll notice several things in my comment. First is that I did in fact separate printing money from creating monetary value, so you can claim it to be semantic nit-picking but I did address his real point, not the point of printing money. Second, the amount of printed money in the economy relative to the amount of actual money (the value of M1) is vanishingly small, so you'd have to print an appalling amount of it before it would start to have any real effect on the economy, and doling out economic value does cause inflation, but then that was covered by the first point.
Virg
I forgot that some nitwit will always come to the table with an absolutely irrational edge case that disproves the statement for that single case, and then argue that this means the whole thing falls apart. Sure, printing five billion dollar bills and giving it to one person will indeed severely unbalance the economy, but then it's not the printing of the money that's the problem, eh? It's handing five billion dollars to someone out of the blue sky that causes the problem. If that money got printed but then was only handed to people with claim to it (say, mailing out cash for tax refunds instead of checks), then it would have precisely zero effect on the economy, just as I claimed. So go away until you've decided not to be a nitwit about it any more.
Virg
> and where do they find the stafff for trippling there university system overnight?
You know, I went back through my reply in great detail, and try as I might I can't find where I mentioned "overnight" anywhere in it. Could you point it out for me please, or are you busying yourself looking for the medication for that jerking knee?
Virg
Printing money (what you really mean is inventing monetary value, since physically printing money doesn't do anything to the economy) requires that you devalue the monetary value you currently have, since the money supply represents a "set amount" of value, and forcing it around to more people cuts into the value of what each unit holds. The same is not true of univeristies. That is, we're very far from the situation where opening another univeristy will so crowd the market for higher education that the value of an education will decline due to the presence of more of them. Therefore, your analogy is false, because it's based on a bad assumption about marginal value. They should consider opening more schools so more of their people can get a higher education without resorting to cheating.
Virg
I'm with you on this. Home work is a bad example of the problem he's pointing out.
> This isn't a school talking about simple disrespect: they're talking about already prohibited behavior. If you engage in prohibited behavior, you're subject to appropriate punishment. Frankly, so long as they dont violate the law in looking for evidence of such behavior, what basis is there to preclude the schools from doing it?
Sorry, but you jumped the rails here. The relevant part from TFA is:Notice the inclusion of "inappropriate" in the wording. That's where the agreement oversteps its proper bounds. They specifically aren't talking about already prohibited behavior, and I'm left to wonder where "inappropriate" is defined in any meaningful way. The school looking at students' MySpace postings doesn't violate any rules, and they can surf to their heart's content. It's the moment they decide to enforce discipline for something that's not illegal but is what they define as "inappropriate" that they take a role they have no right to take. Functionally, it would be like my neighbor reading my blog, finding out I look at porn, and firing me from my job. The school administration has no right to punish their student body for non-illegal acts or words that are published off school grounds and outside school hours, and furthermore they have no basis for compelling students to sign a contract stating acceptance of such foolishness. If my kid's school sent home a "pledge" concerning what sort of sleepwear he could wear to bed, I'd treat it the same way.
Virg
Well, there's a problem with that. It's not illegal in all cases for a high school student to drink alcohol, so such a pledge covers activity that's not criminal. For example, a parent can give a 15-year-old child a glass of champagne to toast the New Year, and it's perfectly legal to do so. This pledge would "forbid" that activity, and if a coach learned about the (perfectly legal) behavior, he could eject the student from an athletic team because of it, by waving the contract. That's just flat-out wrong, since it's the coach essentially trumping the wishes of a parent, which is wholly inappropriate.
Virg