Do this the right way, and they'll put themselves through college, as did a close friend of mine from high school.
Um, yeah. If your grades are good, but you and your parents are flat broke, you may be eligible for need-based financial aid. Either that, or you attend a state school that is generously subsidized by taxpayers. This is how people "put themselves through college." No one puts themselves through college paying the full retail price by working at McDonald's. A truthful financial literacy class would help you understand why.
Here you demonstrate the problem graduates of elite universities deal with in the job market. Unless you go straight from university to an investment bank or Google, 95 percent of the people you deal with are not graduates of elite universities. And most of them fervently want to believe they are just as competent as you. Despite the fact that you busted your ass academically for 16+ years, while they may or may not have.
I mean, there are some very competent graduates of 2nd tier state schools. But there are also a lot of people who just went through the motions and were churned out of the system. You can't really do that and get through an Ivy-caliber school. Graduates of lesser schools don't want to acknowledge this, and treat all four-year degrees the same.
Carbon monoxide. You never experience the panic of suffocation, which is brought about by the build-up of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. You start to feel kind of loopy, experience a state of euphoria, then go to sleep and never wake up.
We don't use this method because supporters of the death penalty want the condemned to suffer.
Well, that's what I gleaned from this BBC documentary on the death penalty, "How to Kill a Human Being."
$2.99 to rent a film for 3 days is a fucking rip off? You lost me there. I would add, the timer on the three-day period doesn't start until you start watching the movie (on Amazon, at least.) You have a month to start watching the movie.
And if the kids are going to watch Despicable Me (for instance) hundreds of times, yes, the studios and distributor clearly *would* lose money by not offering a "buy" vs "rent" scenario. $10 to stream Despicable Me (in SD) as many times as you want! Now clearly this is a value judgment. I can't tell you you're wrong for how you feel about that. But clearly, a lot of people find that reasonable. As someone who lived through the '80s and '90s, and paid $4 to rent a VHS tape at Blockbuster, then often paid an extra $2 a day in late fees on top of that, I find it a hell of a deal. To me, it's not worth pirating a movie to save $2.99.
A bit of a digression though. The issue with Game of Thrones is that you *can't* stream recent episodes for a fee. You have to have a costly cable subscription. Different kettle of fish, which is why the show is so pirated.
Yep. Facebook became less fun the second my parents friended me. And I'm in my 40s! Oh sure I could block them, along with all my uncool relatives. But c'mon, they're still my family. I don't want to do anything so drastic, even if it means I'm deluged with status updates that are less interesting than when I was connected only to my closest peer group.
Moreover, for me it was all about reconnecting with friends in distant places, people I hadn't heard from in 10 years or more. What's the appeal for a teenager? For the majority of them, their friends mostly live within a 10-mile radius. They're not so concerned with whatever happened to that boy who moved away in the second grade.
Oh, and there's Words with Friends. I think the kids are into different sorts of online gaming, however.
Apple has been in *Cupertino* since the '70s. The buses are a relatively recent development. Before the buses, you'd have to be a die-hard city person to make the 50-mile commute every day in your own car or (God forbid) via Muni, Caltrain, and employer-provided shuttle.
Full disclosure: I have commuted to Cupertino via Muni, Caltrain, and shuttle. Yes, Cupertino sucks that bad as a place to live.
The fact that the traders count milliseconds is proof that they are just scam artists. Parasites, producing nothing of value. High-speed trading is nothing but a mechanism for funneling money to the rich from everyone else.
What "far left" positions has the Democratic party taken? The Affordable Care Act is essentially what the Republicans were proposing for health care reform 20 years ago.
As a former print / online journalist who quit the business because he didn't want to take a second job at Denny's to pay the bills, I'll venture a guess that most of these "elite bloggers" would welcome the opportunity to work at an organization that can afford to pay them what they're worth and provide them the resources to do their jobs.
Whether Bezos will offer that remains to be seen. He certainly could afford to do so, if he chose.
On the other hand, Amazon isn't exactly a shining beacon of progressive business and labor practices.
On the other hand, plenty of plutocrats who were not exactly friendly with organized labor have run journalistic enterprises that did MOSTLY good work. I can't think of a single newspaper of record in the United States that doesn't side with the business side of any labor issue, or with the establishment in general.
If you live and work in San Francisco and DRIVE to your job, you're a dick. If you also think that people working at tech startups with fewer than 50 employees are a significant proportion of tech workers, you're dick * 2.
Hey, I get it, I drove to my tech job at a SF Internet startup during Dotcom 1.0. Just passing along some things I've learned.
Same as in Silicon Valley: Proximity to capital. People who fund startups like to keep physical tabs on them. In later stages, they can move operations out to North Carolina and China and other hell holes where land and labor are cheap. But during the incubation phase, the billionaires like to keep their fledgling businesses in their backyard.
Well, anything above $5.25 million. Anything below that is *tax free*. That's a pretty sweet deal, considering how much tax you'd pay if you had to actually work for that money.
But the tax structure is only a secondary factor in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The primary factor is that wealth accumulates in the hands of those who control the means of production, and we've let the balance between capital and labor get too far out of whack. It's only going to get worse as technology advances. As machines get more efficient, the value of human labor is diluted. The free market value of some forms of labor has already fallen below what people need to live with dignity. We need government to intervene in the economy so that the distribution is more even, if not completely equal. A cap on income and wealth might be a good thing, but I think it is more important to set a floor that no one is allowed to fall beneath.
That's fine in your 20s, but eventually you need health insurance and a retirement plan. And if you live some place where $16k a year is livable, you'll probably also need a car.
Baby Boomers are *supposed* to gobble up the Social Security trust fund! The reason the trust fund was created in the first place was to pre-fund the retirement of the Baby Boomers!
Believe it or not, people didn't just discover the Baby Boom last week. The actuaries of yesteryear were not complete morons. Changing demographics were built into Social Security from its inception.
The AP has really deteriorated. Shame on them for publishing this scare-mongering, disingenuous piece worthy of Fox News.
If by "nuking" the moon, you mean completely obliterating it like some James Bond villain and screwing up our tides, don't be ridiculous. That isn't even within our capability.
They proposed detonating a nuclear device on the moon. So what? Aside from the needless complexity and expense, how is nuking a lifeless rock outside of Earth's atmosphere worse than than nuking the Bikini Atoll, or the desert in New Mexico?
That said, I don't understand what advantage they thought they would gain by having missile bases on the moon.
Feh. The Bible is merely one collection of texts out of Greco-Roman classical antiquity, and not the most influential among them. It is certainly not the work on which Plato, Aristotle, or Homer based their works. And are you discounting the entirety of the pre-Christian Roman Empire's contribution? Because a lot of people would consider that the basis of Western civilization and morality.
there has to be a better solution to a cultural problem than increasing your crime rate and turning it into an ugly, smelly concrete jungle.
At what point did I describe Evanston, IL as a crime-ridden, ugly, smelly concrete jungle? It's a nice suburb where you can have your car and your yard but it's also not too sprawly. Problem is we don't build them like that any more.
driving is not that awful of a soul crushing experience, either. The drive is frankly not very important or noteworthy compared to the destination.
It's not the driving, so much as it is all the stuff that has to be wiped out to make room for huge freeways and parking lots. But it's also the driving. When you have a highly populated area where everyone drives, you get sprawl, and with sprawl comes longer commutes. It is not uncommon to have longer than an hour commute in the Bay Area. Two hours a day in traffic isn't soul crushing? Maybe you've just never experienced anything better.
Soul crushing is urban, like your neighbor's kid was in the crossfire got shot and died, or your car/house/garage was broken into for the fifth time, or you were mugged again, etc.
WTF are you talking about? Have you spent any significant time in San Francisco? We're not all living The Wire out here. I lived there more than a decade and never experienced any violent crime. There is some bad shit going down in the Bayview / Hunters Point area, but in 10 years I never went anywhere near there. My experience in the Richmond District is about as far removed from urban gangbanging as any suburbanite's.
Hey the Sunset is a happening place! 9th and Irving.
I would expect someone who grew up in the city to figure out how to get from Lake Merced or wherever to the part of town where there is stuff going on. You don't find yourself in the ghost town part of San Francisco by accident--the locals have to work really, really hard to keep fun stuff from infiltrating.
Evanston, IL, is a pre-WWII suburb where you can take the El into Chicago, and can walk to the park, to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bookstore. There is a mix of detached single-family homes and apartment buildings.
The suburb where I grew up in California is 30 miles outside of Sacramento. You can walk to... well you can walk to another house. If you want to go anywhere else, you have to drive. Most people commute more than 45 minutes to work. There is a mix of large detached single-family homes and larger detached single-family homes. (Because the locals will scream bloody murder if anyone attempts to build apartment buildings. Something about "property values" and making the community accessible to skeezy people such as singles, childless couples, and people who can't qualify for a mortgage.)
If you grew up in a suburb like Evanston, I understand where you're coming from. If you grew up in a place like I did and loved it, I must conclude you do not have a soul to be crushed.
I just have to make sure... you're talking about San Francisco, right? I lived there for more than a decade and never felt particularly unsafe, so I'm not sure what city you're talking about with this "extremely high crime."
no parking so only locals are allowed
This seems to be what your complaint really boils down to. Just take transit. Eventually you might find you prefer a 20-minute bus ride to an hour commute from some soul-crushing suburb, and you will start to appreciate the urban amenities that are available to you that are impossible for a car-dependent suburb to offer.
Lost in these articles about all the virtues of areas outside Silicon Valley is the fact that the capitalization of Silicon Valley venture capital firms is an order of magnitude larger than the nearest competitors in New York City and Boston. Nowhere is even close when it comes to throwing money at startups. Where does Phoenix rate? It doesn't. If someone has a brilliant startup in Phoenix, and they manage to wrangle some venture capital, the first thing their investors will do is move them to Silicon Valley so they can keep tabs on them.
If I need information about something, I go to Wikipedia before I go to the "official" website. That tells you all you need to know. Wikipedia provides the information you want without a lot of cruft. Nothing ugly about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Do this the right way, and they'll put themselves through college, as did a close friend of mine from high school.
Um, yeah. If your grades are good, but you and your parents are flat broke, you may be eligible for need-based financial aid. Either that, or you attend a state school that is generously subsidized by taxpayers. This is how people "put themselves through college." No one puts themselves through college paying the full retail price by working at McDonald's. A truthful financial literacy class would help you understand why.
Here you demonstrate the problem graduates of elite universities deal with in the job market. Unless you go straight from university to an investment bank or Google, 95 percent of the people you deal with are not graduates of elite universities. And most of them fervently want to believe they are just as competent as you. Despite the fact that you busted your ass academically for 16+ years, while they may or may not have.
I mean, there are some very competent graduates of 2nd tier state schools. But there are also a lot of people who just went through the motions and were churned out of the system. You can't really do that and get through an Ivy-caliber school. Graduates of lesser schools don't want to acknowledge this, and treat all four-year degrees the same.
Carbon monoxide. You never experience the panic of suffocation, which is brought about by the build-up of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. You start to feel kind of loopy, experience a state of euphoria, then go to sleep and never wake up.
We don't use this method because supporters of the death penalty want the condemned to suffer.
Well, that's what I gleaned from this BBC documentary on the death penalty, "How to Kill a Human Being."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BY3Trq5qOk
$2.99 to rent a film for 3 days is a fucking rip off? You lost me there. I would add, the timer on the three-day period doesn't start until you start watching the movie (on Amazon, at least.) You have a month to start watching the movie.
And if the kids are going to watch Despicable Me (for instance) hundreds of times, yes, the studios and distributor clearly *would* lose money by not offering a "buy" vs "rent" scenario. $10 to stream Despicable Me (in SD) as many times as you want! Now clearly this is a value judgment. I can't tell you you're wrong for how you feel about that. But clearly, a lot of people find that reasonable. As someone who lived through the '80s and '90s, and paid $4 to rent a VHS tape at Blockbuster, then often paid an extra $2 a day in late fees on top of that, I find it a hell of a deal. To me, it's not worth pirating a movie to save $2.99.
A bit of a digression though. The issue with Game of Thrones is that you *can't* stream recent episodes for a fee. You have to have a costly cable subscription. Different kettle of fish, which is why the show is so pirated.
Yep. Facebook became less fun the second my parents friended me. And I'm in my 40s! Oh sure I could block them, along with all my uncool relatives. But c'mon, they're still my family. I don't want to do anything so drastic, even if it means I'm deluged with status updates that are less interesting than when I was connected only to my closest peer group.
Moreover, for me it was all about reconnecting with friends in distant places, people I hadn't heard from in 10 years or more. What's the appeal for a teenager? For the majority of them, their friends mostly live within a 10-mile radius. They're not so concerned with whatever happened to that boy who moved away in the second grade.
Oh, and there's Words with Friends. I think the kids are into different sorts of online gaming, however.
Apple has been in *Cupertino* since the '70s. The buses are a relatively recent development. Before the buses, you'd have to be a die-hard city person to make the 50-mile commute every day in your own car or (God forbid) via Muni, Caltrain, and employer-provided shuttle.
Full disclosure: I have commuted to Cupertino via Muni, Caltrain, and shuttle. Yes, Cupertino sucks that bad as a place to live.
The fact that the traders count milliseconds is proof that they are just scam artists. Parasites, producing nothing of value. High-speed trading is nothing but a mechanism for funneling money to the rich from everyone else.
Pass single-payer, as we should have done in the first place, and send everyone to medicare.gov.
What "far left" positions has the Democratic party taken? The Affordable Care Act is essentially what the Republicans were proposing for health care reform 20 years ago.
As a former print / online journalist who quit the business because he didn't want to take a second job at Denny's to pay the bills, I'll venture a guess that most of these "elite bloggers" would welcome the opportunity to work at an organization that can afford to pay them what they're worth and provide them the resources to do their jobs.
Whether Bezos will offer that remains to be seen. He certainly could afford to do so, if he chose.
On the other hand, Amazon isn't exactly a shining beacon of progressive business and labor practices.
On the other hand, plenty of plutocrats who were not exactly friendly with organized labor have run journalistic enterprises that did MOSTLY good work. I can't think of a single newspaper of record in the United States that doesn't side with the business side of any labor issue, or with the establishment in general.
If you live and work in San Francisco and DRIVE to your job, you're a dick. If you also think that people working at tech startups with fewer than 50 employees are a significant proportion of tech workers, you're dick * 2.
Hey, I get it, I drove to my tech job at a SF Internet startup during Dotcom 1.0. Just passing along some things I've learned.
Same as in Silicon Valley: Proximity to capital. People who fund startups like to keep physical tabs on them. In later stages, they can move operations out to North Carolina and China and other hell holes where land and labor are cheap. But during the incubation phase, the billionaires like to keep their fledgling businesses in their backyard.
Well, anything above $5.25 million. Anything below that is *tax free*. That's a pretty sweet deal, considering how much tax you'd pay if you had to actually work for that money.
But the tax structure is only a secondary factor in the gap between the haves and the have-nots. The primary factor is that wealth accumulates in the hands of those who control the means of production, and we've let the balance between capital and labor get too far out of whack. It's only going to get worse as technology advances. As machines get more efficient, the value of human labor is diluted. The free market value of some forms of labor has already fallen below what people need to live with dignity. We need government to intervene in the economy so that the distribution is more even, if not completely equal. A cap on income and wealth might be a good thing, but I think it is more important to set a floor that no one is allowed to fall beneath.
That's fine in your 20s, but eventually you need health insurance and a retirement plan. And if you live some place where $16k a year is livable, you'll probably also need a car.
Baby Boomers are *supposed* to gobble up the Social Security trust fund! The reason the trust fund was created in the first place was to pre-fund the retirement of the Baby Boomers!
Believe it or not, people didn't just discover the Baby Boom last week. The actuaries of yesteryear were not complete morons. Changing demographics were built into Social Security from its inception.
The AP has really deteriorated. Shame on them for publishing this scare-mongering, disingenuous piece worthy of Fox News.
If by "nuking" the moon, you mean completely obliterating it like some James Bond villain and screwing up our tides, don't be ridiculous. That isn't even within our capability.
They proposed detonating a nuclear device on the moon. So what? Aside from the needless complexity and expense, how is nuking a lifeless rock outside of Earth's atmosphere worse than than nuking the Bikini Atoll, or the desert in New Mexico?
That said, I don't understand what advantage they thought they would gain by having missile bases on the moon.
Feh. The Bible is merely one collection of texts out of Greco-Roman classical antiquity, and not the most influential among them. It is certainly not the work on which Plato, Aristotle, or Homer based their works. And are you discounting the entirety of the pre-Christian Roman Empire's contribution? Because a lot of people would consider that the basis of Western civilization and morality.
there has to be a better solution to a cultural problem than increasing your crime rate and turning it into an ugly, smelly concrete jungle.
At what point did I describe Evanston, IL as a crime-ridden, ugly, smelly concrete jungle? It's a nice suburb where you can have your car and your yard but it's also not too sprawly. Problem is we don't build them like that any more.
driving is not that awful of a soul crushing experience, either. The drive is frankly not very important or noteworthy compared to the destination.
It's not the driving, so much as it is all the stuff that has to be wiped out to make room for huge freeways and parking lots. But it's also the driving. When you have a highly populated area where everyone drives, you get sprawl, and with sprawl comes longer commutes. It is not uncommon to have longer than an hour commute in the Bay Area. Two hours a day in traffic isn't soul crushing? Maybe you've just never experienced anything better.
Soul crushing is urban, like your neighbor's kid was in the crossfire got shot and died, or your car/house/garage was broken into for the fifth time, or you were mugged again, etc.
WTF are you talking about? Have you spent any significant time in San Francisco? We're not all living The Wire out here. I lived there more than a decade and never experienced any violent crime. There is some bad shit going down in the Bayview / Hunters Point area, but in 10 years I never went anywhere near there. My experience in the Richmond District is about as far removed from urban gangbanging as any suburbanite's.
Hey the Sunset is a happening place! 9th and Irving.
I would expect someone who grew up in the city to figure out how to get from Lake Merced or wherever to the part of town where there is stuff going on. You don't find yourself in the ghost town part of San Francisco by accident--the locals have to work really, really hard to keep fun stuff from infiltrating.
There are suburbs and there are suburbs.
Evanston, IL, is a pre-WWII suburb where you can take the El into Chicago, and can walk to the park, to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bookstore. There is a mix of detached single-family homes and apartment buildings.
The suburb where I grew up in California is 30 miles outside of Sacramento. You can walk to... well you can walk to another house. If you want to go anywhere else, you have to drive. Most people commute more than 45 minutes to work. There is a mix of large detached single-family homes and larger detached single-family homes. (Because the locals will scream bloody murder if anyone attempts to build apartment buildings. Something about "property values" and making the community accessible to skeezy people such as singles, childless couples, and people who can't qualify for a mortgage.)
If you grew up in a suburb like Evanston, I understand where you're coming from. If you grew up in a place like I did and loved it, I must conclude you do not have a soul to be crushed.
I just have to make sure... you're talking about San Francisco, right? I lived there for more than a decade and never felt particularly unsafe, so I'm not sure what city you're talking about with this "extremely high crime."
no parking so only locals are allowed
This seems to be what your complaint really boils down to. Just take transit. Eventually you might find you prefer a 20-minute bus ride to an hour commute from some soul-crushing suburb, and you will start to appreciate the urban amenities that are available to you that are impossible for a car-dependent suburb to offer.
I grew up in San Fran and let me tell you, after hours its a ghost town,
Huh? You might want to travel outside a 3-block radius of the Transamerica building.
Lost in these articles about all the virtues of areas outside Silicon Valley is the fact that the capitalization of Silicon Valley venture capital firms is an order of magnitude larger than the nearest competitors in New York City and Boston. Nowhere is even close when it comes to throwing money at startups. Where does Phoenix rate? It doesn't. If someone has a brilliant startup in Phoenix, and they manage to wrangle some venture capital, the first thing their investors will do is move them to Silicon Valley so they can keep tabs on them.
If I need information about something, I go to Wikipedia before I go to the "official" website. That tells you all you need to know. Wikipedia provides the information you want without a lot of cruft. Nothing ugly about that.