Get real. Just look at other nations and how they handle their education systems. It is precisely because there is so much profit motive involved that things are the worst anywhere in the [first] world.
The US has the best higher education system in the world. Others aren't even remotely close. The US is also near the top sending people to university, and has one of the highest percentage of university graduates in the workforce.
The reason US higher education costs are rising so fast is because people are both able and willing to pay it. They are able to pay it because a lot of people are pretty well off, and those who aren't well off are being subsidized by the tax payer. And they are willing to pay so much money because it pays off for them. So you have high demand and lots of money sloshing around, and prices rise.
And for all the belly-aching, $50000-$100000 for a college education is not too much, given how much a good college education advances your career. If you can't recoup that investment, you really shouldn't go to college in the first place.
Simple. We talk about supply and demand as key factors in the free market. But in cases where there is unlimited demand there is massive exploitation by business unless regulation is present. Take power for example. Most states understand that power has unlimited demand and that utilities must be regulated.
Good grief, I have never heard such utter and complete nonsense.
There is a limited supply of good universities and good professors, there is an extremely high demand, and the entire process is subsidized extensively by tax payers through loans, grants, and other transfers.
Yes, this is just like the housing bubble (and health care): government decides it wants more of something, so it throws tons of taxpayer money at the market and prices rise because everybody is now competing for the same limited resources with more money.
The NSA shouldn't be able to do any of these searches on US citizens in the US at all. None, zero. Law enforcement in the US must comply with the Constitution, and any access to personal and private information of US citizens should be individually authorized by a judge based on specific evidence.
If you give two weeks notice, it means that they pay your for two more weeks, and you are at their disposal for two more weeks to help with the transition if they want you to. If they escort you off the property sooner, you get two weeks paid vacation. Seems like you really don't lose anything either way.
The fact that the need motorized transport to get around is indicative of an inherently inefficient and environmentally-unfriendly lifestyle.
No, it's a sign of poor city planning and poor politics. The cities in the valley are governed by suburbanites who do everything in their power to stop the kind of edgy urban culture that some young techies like. SF, on the other hand, is so full of red tape and so expensive that big tech companies would be foolish to locate there. So what do people do? They live where they want to live, work where they can work, and deal with the b.s. it takes to make it all work. The problem isn't techies, the problem is that city planners in all these cities are trying to impose their preferred lifestyles on the population.
SF residents already pay real estate and state income taxes, which is supposed to pay for the infrastructure supporting their individual cars. If they choose to use company-provided buses, they are saving both the city and the state a great deal of money in terms of road infrastructure and environmental costs.
This is a huge win for both SF and CA, and the fact that anybody criticizes this shows you how broken California politics has become.
They might be paying for the bus, but they sure as hell aren't paying for the roads, police, traffic signals, air quality and services they need to run them.
The people commuting from SF to Silicon Valley are paying for the roads, police, traffic signals, air quality and services, and they are paying some of the highest income and real estate taxes in the nations for that. In fact, SF residents paid for using their own car and the infrastructure that using their own car would require. In addition, they subsidize SF's lousy public transit. Sharing rides using corporate buses reduces the cost and impact relative to what SF residents have already paid for and have a right to use.
The real world is that public transit between SF and the peninsula sucks badly: it's slow, dirty, and inconvenient. You can't realistically commute from SF to SV by public transit unless you want to spend four hours doing it. So, the only real-world choice people used to have is to commute in their own cars. But that causes congestion, both in SF and on the highways. And now when tech companies spend a boatload of money trying to relieve the congestion and making life better for everybody, they are accused of "insulating" their employees. SF needs to stop whining and fix its transit system.
And, yeah, SF used to be a dirty, run-down, but cheap place to live, full sailors, social outcasts, non-conformists, weird artists, and recreational drug users, with a barely functioning city government. That had its charms. But people can't recapture that past and you can't preserve it by government decree. Until SF accepts that it has become an expensive city for the well-off, it will continue to be dysfunctional, and it will continue to be an overpriced dump. I used to live in SF but moved away; living there stopped being much fun, and it was way too expensive for the low quality of life it offered.
I have no problem with the German government trying to spy on me. Why? Because the German government has no jurisdiction over me. German state security can't appear on my doorstep and arrest me, no matter how much Merkel or her minions may disapprove of me.
I do have a problem with the US government spying on me, because DHS and DEA can appear on my doorstep and make my life miserable if they don't like me or want to enrich themselves or find it useful for some other reason, circumventing the justice system and the rule of law.
Obama made restoring privacy and the rule of law a key point of his presidential bid, and it has turned out to be complete lies.
The only places where 280 doesn't run through populated areas is the stretch between Redwood City and Palo Alto. And there, you could simply route the tube a little to the east; it doesn't have to follow 280 slavishly. Such a plan would also give a nice second public transit corridor as an alternative to Caltrain.
(You could also put the tubes on stilts in the bay.)
Did the CFAA drafters really mean to criminalize ToS violations, for example?
I don't see how that is relevant here. Swartz evaded attempts to remove him from the network and he installed hardware on a physical network on private property. Neither of those is a ToS violation, it's gaining access illegally. The copying itself also wasn't just a ToS violation, it was a criminal copyright violation (but he wasn't even charged with that AFAIK).
CFAA is far too vague and far too expansive. But Swartz would have run afoul of pretty much any computer fraud statute.
The US military has always been an exception constitutionally guarantee rights. You give up your rights when you join.
Furthermore, if you badmouth the company you work for, they can certainly fire you. Freedom to choose who to associate with at your business is just as much an essential freedom as free speech.
The real problem is that government employment creates a special category of employees, where rights, interests, and obligations conflict much more than in private sector employment. The solution to that problem is to minimize government employment as much as possible. Civil servants are a necessary evil that we should have as little of as possible.
Unless you willing to go underground, there's no where to build it, and they already a rail line from SJ to SF - CalTrain.
There is plenty of room going down 280, not to mention all the public lands adjacent to it.
I don't think there would be enough traffic to justify a SF to Sacramento only route.
I don't think there is enough traffic to justify any of these investments. Los Angeles to San Francisco has 3 million passengers a year; at a cost of 12 billion or more (and that's what hyperloop is realistically going to cost) plus operating costs, that's going to take a long time to pay back, and it probably would never pay for itself. It would be useless since it wouldn't be relieving congestion. (High speed rail is even worse.)
For the SF-Sac or SF-SJ routes, public transit would at least relieve some road traffic. And with systems like hyperloop, you can have stops all the way along the track, so people can board and exit at intermediate locations without holding up traffic.
First of all, we can't put useful bounds on rogue planets at all; they are very hard to detect. Second, your reasoning still assumes that there is a single mechanism and that galaxies are largely all the same. We don't even know the rotation curve of our own galaxy very well; our local observations might simply not apply to most other galaxies. And different galaxies may have different kinds of dark matter.
All it says is that it has mass (is matter) and doesn't interact electromagnetically, which is indeed what we observe. Modifying the laws of gravity doesn't seem to cut it, so I fail to see what further assumptions "dark matter" imposes.
It presumes that we are talking about a single phenomenon and that our interpretation of our measurements is correct and consistent. I think it's more likely that "dark matter" as a single phenomenon doesn't even exist. A combination of modifying the laws of gravity, correcting measurements, and various forms of baryonic matter could well explain all the observations, without the need for any kind of exotic new particles. Also see the AC response.
I strongly disagree. We simply don't know what is causing these effects, and anybody who assigns probabilities to such speculations is a charlatan, not a scientist.
As for your question regarding exotic matter and dust, the opinion for many decades was that dust was the answer. That opinion has been replaced with exotic matter over time, for extremely good reasons which you apparently don't yet understand.
"Extremely good reasons" is not the same as proof. And there are other possibilities, like large numbers of rogue planets, or multiple different mechanisms explaining different phenomena.
Don't get me wrong: weakly interacting dark matter is plausible, but until there is independent, direct evidence and observation, it remains just plausible speculation.
But we do find it empirically. There is extra mass there, affecting other objects. We can detect it through it's gravitation, just not through light. It's a very strong signal, for example in the rotation velocity of galaxies.
There are unexplained gravitational effects, but that's all we really know. The idea that they are due to a single mechanism based on weakly interacting dark matter requires additional assumptions, foremost the assumption that all these effects have a single common explanation.
Weakly interacting "dark matter" is certainly a plausible explanation, but that's all it is for now. There is no actual direct evidence for it. The honest thing to do would be to choose a more neutral name than "dark matter" until we have direct evidence for some mechanism.
The existing system is already riddled with abuse of power, corruption and arbitrary enforcement, and you're apparently quite content with that.
Those are the consequences of the kinds of policies you advocate: giving prosecutors and police too much discretion and power. People like you are the cause of the problem.
You are assuming a direct correlation between carbon emissions and GDP that does not exist. [...] If you plot this, you do indeed get a correlation (R=0.75 for the G7 alone, 0.61 with Australia).
So, in different words, the correlation I assume exists even such a simplistic analysis.
CO2/capita in the U.S. has been flat since 1990 while GDP/capita has nearly doubled.
Imagine that. And all that without any kind of effective government regulation or intervention. Yet, you claim that the market alone is incapable of solving these problems.
Furthermore, the increase in standard of living since 1980 has been driven in large part by advances in computing, which will not go away if fossil fuels are restricted. (Unless your router runs on gasoline?)
What do you think computers are powered by?
As for Silicon Valley, I work in the semiconductor industry and I can tell you that semiconductor companies A) do not burn coal in their fabs, and B) are (somewhat) advanced when it comes to environmental friendliness to begin with.
Your industry makes one of the most energy-intensive products ever created. The carbon emissions that go into a wafer aren't just for the chip itself, it's for all the machinery needed to create it, the people needed to support that, the mining and extraction for all the rare elements used in the creation of the chips and the machinery, etc. The reason you don't see most of the destruction your industry wreaks on the environment is that most of the dirty and ugly stuff has been outsourced to overseas, so you can wallow in the illusion that you create a clean, environmentally friendly product.
Here's average CO2 emissions in tons per capita [wikipedia.org] for each of the G7 nations (plus Australia for fun) in 2006, the last year before the financial crisis: [...] But note that it's pretty shallow, and there's a huge variability in carbon emissions. The U.K. has less than half the CO2/capita of the U.S. despite GDP/capita being only 10% lower.
Well, and that's where such simplistic analyses break down: the US has a lot more energy-intensive industries, while the UK (and much of the rest of Europe) simply exports their carbon emissions to China and other nations. A per-nation analysis ultimately isn't a valid analysis. I simply gave nations as an illustration of the orders of magnitude we are talking about.
The burden of proof is on you that the policies you advocate are effective, won't harm the economy, and will actually be more effective than letting the market take care of the problem. Until you do, nobody in their right mind should support any kind of climate change legislation, carbon tax, etc.
Instead, what we do know is (you observed it yourself) that without any kind of government intervention, industries naturally become more energy efficient and less carbon intensive.
The other aspect of the judicial system is the prosecutor - the prosecutor chooses which cases are worth prosecuting. That should include an analysis of the moral dimension of the crime.
No, it absolutely should not. Prosecutors are there to bring criminals to justice, not to opine on morality. I'm sorry, but I have to tell you: I consider your view of the justice system to be fundamentally wrong and immoral. Your approach leads to abuse of power, corruption, and arbitrary enforcement. Fortunately, the US justice system does not work the way you want it to, and I hope it never will.
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They are both a waste of money.
The US has the best higher education system in the world. Others aren't even remotely close. The US is also near the top sending people to university, and has one of the highest percentage of university graduates in the workforce.
The reason US higher education costs are rising so fast is because people are both able and willing to pay it. They are able to pay it because a lot of people are pretty well off, and those who aren't well off are being subsidized by the tax payer. And they are willing to pay so much money because it pays off for them. So you have high demand and lots of money sloshing around, and prices rise.
And for all the belly-aching, $50000-$100000 for a college education is not too much, given how much a good college education advances your career. If you can't recoup that investment, you really shouldn't go to college in the first place.
Good grief, I have never heard such utter and complete nonsense.
There is a limited supply of good universities and good professors, there is an extremely high demand, and the entire process is subsidized extensively by tax payers through loans, grants, and other transfers.
Yes, this is just like the housing bubble (and health care): government decides it wants more of something, so it throws tons of taxpayer money at the market and prices rise because everybody is now competing for the same limited resources with more money.
The NSA shouldn't be able to do any of these searches on US citizens in the US at all. None, zero. Law enforcement in the US must comply with the Constitution, and any access to personal and private information of US citizens should be individually authorized by a judge based on specific evidence.
If you give two weeks notice, it means that they pay your for two more weeks, and you are at their disposal for two more weeks to help with the transition if they want you to. If they escort you off the property sooner, you get two weeks paid vacation. Seems like you really don't lose anything either way.
That's because you are an obedient, brainwashed little nationalist German who can't even read or understand the posting he is responding to.
No, it's a sign of poor city planning and poor politics. The cities in the valley are governed by suburbanites who do everything in their power to stop the kind of edgy urban culture that some young techies like. SF, on the other hand, is so full of red tape and so expensive that big tech companies would be foolish to locate there. So what do people do? They live where they want to live, work where they can work, and deal with the b.s. it takes to make it all work. The problem isn't techies, the problem is that city planners in all these cities are trying to impose their preferred lifestyles on the population.
SF residents already pay real estate and state income taxes, which is supposed to pay for the infrastructure supporting their individual cars. If they choose to use company-provided buses, they are saving both the city and the state a great deal of money in terms of road infrastructure and environmental costs.
This is a huge win for both SF and CA, and the fact that anybody criticizes this shows you how broken California politics has become.
The people commuting from SF to Silicon Valley are paying for the roads, police, traffic signals, air quality and services, and they are paying some of the highest income and real estate taxes in the nations for that. In fact, SF residents paid for using their own car and the infrastructure that using their own car would require. In addition, they subsidize SF's lousy public transit. Sharing rides using corporate buses reduces the cost and impact relative to what SF residents have already paid for and have a right to use.
The real world is that public transit between SF and the peninsula sucks badly: it's slow, dirty, and inconvenient. You can't realistically commute from SF to SV by public transit unless you want to spend four hours doing it. So, the only real-world choice people used to have is to commute in their own cars. But that causes congestion, both in SF and on the highways. And now when tech companies spend a boatload of money trying to relieve the congestion and making life better for everybody, they are accused of "insulating" their employees. SF needs to stop whining and fix its transit system.
And, yeah, SF used to be a dirty, run-down, but cheap place to live, full sailors, social outcasts, non-conformists, weird artists, and recreational drug users, with a barely functioning city government. That had its charms. But people can't recapture that past and you can't preserve it by government decree. Until SF accepts that it has become an expensive city for the well-off, it will continue to be dysfunctional, and it will continue to be an overpriced dump. I used to live in SF but moved away; living there stopped being much fun, and it was way too expensive for the low quality of life it offered.
I have no problem with the German government trying to spy on me. Why? Because the German government has no jurisdiction over me. German state security can't appear on my doorstep and arrest me, no matter how much Merkel or her minions may disapprove of me.
I do have a problem with the US government spying on me, because DHS and DEA can appear on my doorstep and make my life miserable if they don't like me or want to enrich themselves or find it useful for some other reason, circumventing the justice system and the rule of law.
Obama made restoring privacy and the rule of law a key point of his presidential bid, and it has turned out to be complete lies.
The only places where 280 doesn't run through populated areas is the stretch between Redwood City and Palo Alto. And there, you could simply route the tube a little to the east; it doesn't have to follow 280 slavishly. Such a plan would also give a nice second public transit corridor as an alternative to Caltrain.
(You could also put the tubes on stilts in the bay.)
I don't see how that is relevant here. Swartz evaded attempts to remove him from the network and he installed hardware on a physical network on private property. Neither of those is a ToS violation, it's gaining access illegally. The copying itself also wasn't just a ToS violation, it was a criminal copyright violation (but he wasn't even charged with that AFAIK).
CFAA is far too vague and far too expansive. But Swartz would have run afoul of pretty much any computer fraud statute.
The US military has always been an exception constitutionally guarantee rights. You give up your rights when you join.
Furthermore, if you badmouth the company you work for, they can certainly fire you. Freedom to choose who to associate with at your business is just as much an essential freedom as free speech.
The real problem is that government employment creates a special category of employees, where rights, interests, and obligations conflict much more than in private sector employment. The solution to that problem is to minimize government employment as much as possible. Civil servants are a necessary evil that we should have as little of as possible.
There is plenty of room going down 280, not to mention all the public lands adjacent to it.
I don't think there is enough traffic to justify any of these investments. Los Angeles to San Francisco has 3 million passengers a year; at a cost of 12 billion or more (and that's what hyperloop is realistically going to cost) plus operating costs, that's going to take a long time to pay back, and it probably would never pay for itself. It would be useless since it wouldn't be relieving congestion. (High speed rail is even worse.)
For the SF-Sac or SF-SJ routes, public transit would at least relieve some road traffic. And with systems like hyperloop, you can have stops all the way along the track, so people can board and exit at intermediate locations without holding up traffic.
Building a hyperloop from San Francisco to Sacramento, or San Francisco to San Jose, would be useful and much shorter and cheaper.
First of all, we can't put useful bounds on rogue planets at all; they are very hard to detect. Second, your reasoning still assumes that there is a single mechanism and that galaxies are largely all the same. We don't even know the rotation curve of our own galaxy very well; our local observations might simply not apply to most other galaxies. And different galaxies may have different kinds of dark matter.
It presumes that we are talking about a single phenomenon and that our interpretation of our measurements is correct and consistent. I think it's more likely that "dark matter" as a single phenomenon doesn't even exist. A combination of modifying the laws of gravity, correcting measurements, and various forms of baryonic matter could well explain all the observations, without the need for any kind of exotic new particles. Also see the AC response.
I strongly disagree. We simply don't know what is causing these effects, and anybody who assigns probabilities to such speculations is a charlatan, not a scientist.
"Extremely good reasons" is not the same as proof. And there are other possibilities, like large numbers of rogue planets, or multiple different mechanisms explaining different phenomena.
Don't get me wrong: weakly interacting dark matter is plausible, but until there is independent, direct evidence and observation, it remains just plausible speculation.
There are unexplained gravitational effects, but that's all we really know. The idea that they are due to a single mechanism based on weakly interacting dark matter requires additional assumptions, foremost the assumption that all these effects have a single common explanation.
Weakly interacting "dark matter" is certainly a plausible explanation, but that's all it is for now. There is no actual direct evidence for it. The honest thing to do would be to choose a more neutral name than "dark matter" until we have direct evidence for some mechanism.
Those are the consequences of the kinds of policies you advocate: giving prosecutors and police too much discretion and power. People like you are the cause of the problem.
So, in different words, the correlation I assume exists even such a simplistic analysis.
Imagine that. And all that without any kind of effective government regulation or intervention. Yet, you claim that the market alone is incapable of solving these problems.
What do you think computers are powered by?
Your industry makes one of the most energy-intensive products ever created. The carbon emissions that go into a wafer aren't just for the chip itself, it's for all the machinery needed to create it, the people needed to support that, the mining and extraction for all the rare elements used in the creation of the chips and the machinery, etc. The reason you don't see most of the destruction your industry wreaks on the environment is that most of the dirty and ugly stuff has been outsourced to overseas, so you can wallow in the illusion that you create a clean, environmentally friendly product.
Well, and that's where such simplistic analyses break down: the US has a lot more energy-intensive industries, while the UK (and much of the rest of Europe) simply exports their carbon emissions to China and other nations. A per-nation analysis ultimately isn't a valid analysis. I simply gave nations as an illustration of the orders of magnitude we are talking about.
The burden of proof is on you that the policies you advocate are effective, won't harm the economy, and will actually be more effective than letting the market take care of the problem. Until you do, nobody in their right mind should support any kind of climate change legislation, carbon tax, etc.
Instead, what we do know is (you observed it yourself) that without any kind of government intervention, industries naturally become more energy efficient and less carbon intensive.
No, it absolutely should not. Prosecutors are there to bring criminals to justice, not to opine on morality. I'm sorry, but I have to tell you: I consider your view of the justice system to be fundamentally wrong and immoral. Your approach leads to abuse of power, corruption, and arbitrary enforcement. Fortunately, the US justice system does not work the way you want it to, and I hope it never will.
I have never seen any evidence that the CIA engages in industrial espionage. You're fabricating your claim.