Fair enough...perhaps 'severe' was a little harsh.
However, arguing that our unemployment levels aren't that bad doesn't do much to dispel the argument that our education system is helping to keep people out of the workforce.
While the idea is vaguely outlined in both of those books, it is explored in greater detail in My Ishmael. In it, Quinn goes on to explain that another significant goal of the educational system is to keep young people out of the workforce. If young adults started flooding the blue-collar job market (as they certainly would if compulsory education weren't the law), we'd have an even more severe unemployment problem than we do currently.
It's nice to see that a person as public and respected as Gatto is starting to say these things.
...and security (personal and 'job') and personal satisfaction and in having a real place in one's community.
At the risk of going wildly off-topic, I'd enourage anybody who views my claim with skepticism to pick up My Ishmael or Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn. His other, related, books (such as Ishmael, The Story Of B) are excellent, but these two focus more on the fallacy of money as wealth, and where that's led our culture. If you don't want to spend the money on either of them, inquire at your local library.
Believe it or not, but there are still plenty of places left in the world where people can rely on themselves and each other to supply the necessities. It doesn't always take money to get fed (certainly you've heard of gardens and private ownership of animals?), have clothing, and have 'proper' housing. Sometimes all it takes is a community effort, or trading with somebody who has what you need.
I'd argue that people living in such an environment are substantially more wealthy than you and I are.
Is he the same Bruce Sterling that hung about on several of the popular MUDs around 1990 (under the moniker Sir Bruce Sterling), by any chance?
(Yes, yes...I know he's a famous author, but I've tried my best to believe that SBS, as we often referred to him, couldn't possibly have had what it took to write a novel.)
...and if you have a Palm device, you can build your own tilt sensor (either as a dongle or installed internally, depending on your model) with the information here.
There's a library for the dongle, a hack to 'map' tilt motions to the hard scroll keys, and a pretty cool game called Mulg (which works even without the sensor).
First, I disagree that the lack of a vote is a vote against the current system. That's totally ignoring two distinct possibilities:
Non-voting citizens are merely apathetic
Non-voting citizens are deliberately putting the power to determine the composition of the government in the hands of better-informed people who do feel comfortable enough casting a vote
Getting people to vote for the sake of having them vote will only result in results that are made by the uninformed and uncaring, which is a worse situation by far than having low voter turnout!
That's a problem? I think you're mistaken. Why should any effort be made to involve people in a political process in which they have no interest?
Not voting is as much a right as voting. The fact that the US has dismal voter turnout only indicates to me that the general population feels disenfranchised and powerless.
The only way to get more people to vote is to make them feel empowered, and that should be the real goal. Higher voter turnout, then, would merely be a nice side-effect.
Balance? It seems like it just exacerbates the problem.
A $50 Windows license will accelerate the adoption of Windows, further entrenching their position as a de facto monopoly. A $100,000 license to use communication protocols will decelerate third-party adoption of those protocols, leaving Microsoft the only company able to make effective, profitable use of them.
Wonderful. I suppose Project Wildfire will be activated shortly, following the mysterious death of all but two people (a baby and an old man) living in a desert town somewhere...
I'm looking at doing just that with my newly-acquired Sony DCR-TRV240 Digital8 camcorder. It has component inputs and a firewire connection, and appears to be able to do A/D conversion on the fly. I know I can record onto a Hi8 tape and then transfer to a PC, but I haven't had the chance to pass the signal straight through yet.
I'm sure it's a little more expensive than a video-card solution, but it's also a little more capable...
Life doesn't cost money--we've made it so we're in the habit of paying for the things we need. Services only cost money until the service provider asks that he or she be given something that's more directly necessary, or desirable.
Don't confuse economics (the 'science' of managing scarcity) with money.
Finally, go look at Daniel Quinn's 'Beyond Civilization' for a little insight into how we can (and why we should) stop thinking in terms of the old ways (which really are tremendously new).
Those would be SHAM (or Sliced HAM) pictures, I believe. I remember downloading and viewing JPG files with a SHAM viewer on my A500. Those were the days...
As much as all of you appear to enjoy making fun of this comment, it contains a lot of truth.
Texas has had a standardized test in place for several years, and the only real effect that I've seen is that schools are tending to focus more and more on teaching TO the test. If I remember correctly, at least one school district was in a heap of trouble a few years ago because they falsified their TAAS test results. It's more important to them that their schools score well on the test than it is for them to crank out well-educated kids.
My wife, a teacher-in-training, just witnessed two weeks of in-class non-learning. These kids had already taken their TAAS test and knew that nothing they did would affect their grades. One might expect this kind of behavior out of high-school-age children, but these kids were in the 4th grade.
It sounds like this device does exactly what the Dummynet feature in FreeBSD (and others, possibly?) does. I've been throttling back NNTP grabs by Leafnode, big downloads, and so on for a while now, to keep my WAN connection from being flooded.
You said: Meat is also cruel to people. If people stopped eating meat and feeding grain to animals, there would be enough food to feed the world.
Huh? There's obviously enough food available to feed the world already. Witness the ever-increasing population. The simple truth is that people are made of food. Just enough food means no population increase. Likewise, too much food means it's possible for the population to increase, which it's done since time immemorial. If you want everybody fed, perhaps you should try showing the hungry how to be self-sufficient, or making food distribution a little easier.
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Where are already-beleaguered school districts going to find the money to pay teachers overtime?
Bob the Angry Flower's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots
However, arguing that our unemployment levels aren't that bad doesn't do much to dispel the argument that our education system is helping to keep people out of the workforce.
It's nice to see that a person as public and respected as Gatto is starting to say these things.
...and security (personal and 'job') and personal satisfaction and in having a real place in one's community.
At the risk of going wildly off-topic, I'd enourage anybody who views my claim with skepticism to pick up My Ishmael or Beyond Civilization by Daniel Quinn. His other, related, books (such as Ishmael, The Story Of B) are excellent, but these two focus more on the fallacy of money as wealth, and where that's led our culture. If you don't want to spend the money on either of them, inquire at your local library.
Believe it or not, but there are still plenty of places left in the world where people can rely on themselves and each other to supply the necessities. It doesn't always take money to get fed (certainly you've heard of gardens and private ownership of animals?), have clothing, and have 'proper' housing. Sometimes all it takes is a community effort, or trading with somebody who has what you need.
I'd argue that people living in such an environment are substantially more wealthy than you and I are.
I have a sneaking suspicion that I have, as well.
Is he the same Bruce Sterling that hung about on several of the popular MUDs around 1990 (under the moniker Sir Bruce Sterling), by any chance?
(Yes, yes...I know he's a famous author, but I've tried my best to believe that SBS, as we often referred to him, couldn't possibly have had what it took to write a novel.)
Certainly the fans already in your PC generate a magnetic field, no? That's how electric motors operate.
There's a library for the dongle, a hack to 'map' tilt motions to the hard scroll keys, and a pretty cool game called Mulg (which works even without the sensor).
That would be Night Of The Comet, I believe.
Check Snopes for the lowdown...
- Non-voting citizens are merely apathetic
- Non-voting citizens are deliberately putting the power to determine the composition of the government in the hands of better-informed people who do feel comfortable enough casting a vote
Getting people to vote for the sake of having them vote will only result in results that are made by the uninformed and uncaring, which is a worse situation by far than having low voter turnout!Not voting is as much a right as voting. The fact that the US has dismal voter turnout only indicates to me that the general population feels disenfranchised and powerless.
The only way to get more people to vote is to make them feel empowered, and that should be the real goal. Higher voter turnout, then, would merely be a nice side-effect.
Balance? It seems like it just exacerbates the problem.
A $50 Windows license will accelerate the adoption of Windows, further entrenching their position as a de facto monopoly. A $100,000 license to use communication protocols will decelerate third-party adoption of those protocols, leaving Microsoft the only company able to make effective, profitable use of them.
I wholeheartedly recommend Hurrah for Zope-friendly web hosting. The pricing isn't bad, service is great, and their servers seem to be pretty snappy.
Indeed. Converted with the Gimp at compression level 6, this 429,319 byte image shrinks to a mere 40,714.
Not bad, for a 24-bit non-lossy image format.
--- Chris
I direct your attention to GnuCash.
I've never used it, but it certainly seems like a worthy contender.
Wonderful. I suppose Project Wildfire will be activated shortly, following the mysterious death of all but two people (a baby and an old man) living in a desert town somewhere...
Perhaps this time they won't hire any epileptics.
My explanation for lower sales: '18' just isn't as good an album as his others.
Compared to 'Play', it's just bland and boring.
I'm looking at doing just that with my newly-acquired Sony DCR-TRV240 Digital8 camcorder. It has component inputs and a firewire connection, and appears to be able to do A/D conversion on the fly. I know I can record onto a Hi8 tape and then transfer to a PC, but I haven't had the chance to pass the signal straight through yet.
I'm sure it's a little more expensive than a video-card solution, but it's also a little more capable...
--- Chris
Bah!
Life doesn't cost money--we've made it so we're in the habit of paying for the things we need. Services only cost money until the service provider asks that he or she be given something that's more directly necessary, or desirable.
Don't confuse economics (the 'science' of managing scarcity) with money.
Finally, go look at Daniel Quinn's 'Beyond Civilization' for a little insight into how we can (and why we should) stop thinking in terms of the old ways (which really are tremendously new).
--- Chris
Those would be SHAM (or Sliced HAM) pictures, I believe. I remember downloading and viewing JPG files with a SHAM viewer on my A500. Those were the days...
As much as all of you appear to enjoy making fun of this comment, it contains a lot of truth.
Texas has had a standardized test in place for several years, and the only real effect that I've seen is that schools are tending to focus more and more on teaching TO the test. If I remember correctly, at least one school district was in a heap of trouble a few years ago because they falsified their TAAS test results. It's more important to them that their schools score well on the test than it is for them to crank out well-educated kids.
My wife, a teacher-in-training, just witnessed two weeks of in-class non-learning. These kids had already taken their TAAS test and knew that nothing they did would affect their grades. One might expect this kind of behavior out of high-school-age children, but these kids were in the 4th grade.
What does THAT say about these kinds of tests?
--- Chris
It sounds like this device does exactly what the Dummynet feature in FreeBSD (and others, possibly?) does. I've been throttling back NNTP grabs by Leafnode, big downloads, and so on for a while now, to keep my WAN connection from being flooded.
Of course, it doesn't exactly run on Windows...
--- Chris
Meat is also cruel to people. If people stopped eating meat and feeding grain to animals, there would be enough food to feed the world.
Huh? There's obviously enough food available to feed the world already. Witness the ever-increasing population. The simple truth is that people are made of food. Just enough food means no population increase. Likewise, too much food means it's possible for the population to increase, which it's done since time immemorial. If you want everybody fed, perhaps you should try showing the hungry how to be self-sufficient, or making food distribution a little easier.
Try again.
--- Chris