I am sure that the fact that it is still possible for a person to grow up poor and with determination and hard work become rich is something that you either do not believe in or something that you do not believe happens.
It's not belief or disbelief. It's evidence. It happens very very rarely that a poor person becomes rich. And when it does happen, it is even more rarely due to determination and hard work. A poor person has no money to spend on education. To a poor person determination and hard work still mean a minimum wage job.
But of course, that's inherent in the capitalistic system. Capitalism is a system where you can become wealthy on the determination and hard work of others. Personal determination and hard work won't make you wealthy, they'll make your boss's boss wealthy.
And once wealth has been achieved, wealth breeds wealth. Once you're in the investor class, you pay other people to make money for you off of the labor of others.
If you a born into a poor family, the ways in which you can become rich are very limited.
1) You can have or develop a rare talent that is valuable. You can become a famous musician, singer, or athlete. But the problem with rare talents is that they are rare. I could never become a singer or professional wide receiver, regardless of the quality of the person who attempted to train me. I do have natural talents. But if I had been born into a poor family or even a lower middle class family, I would have never become a research physicist, because the resources I needed in order to become one would have been missing. And if I hadn't started on this path at about age nine, it would have been out of reach. You know what to the smart poor kids in an inner city Headstart program? They get ignored, because they don't need attention every second. That pretty much continues into elementary school and beyond. They learn pretty early that it doesn't pay to be smart.
2) You can marry into a wealthy family. This is a lot harder than you might think because the wealthy segregate themselves from the poor. So again, this option is reserved for the rich.
3) Be in the right place at the right time. Also hard if you're poor. But if you're already rich you can buy your way through business school and get an executive position at a start up and make millions for doing very little.
Along with the lack of upward mobility, there's little downward mobility. If you're Donald Trump, you can cancel a billion dollars in debt through bankruptcy, not have a penny to your name, and the next day walk into a bank to ask for a $10 million dollar loan, and they'll give it to you. Because you're a member or the rich club, even though you're poor. If you're poor, the same bank will charge you $50 a month in fees because you aren't maintaining a $15K combined balance. That is, if they let your shabby ass through the door in the first place.
But as I've said, I'm reasonably rich. I come from an upper middle class family. I married into an upper middle class family. I don't personally know any billionaires, but I do know people with 7 to 8 figure net worth, and I've met people with 9 figure net worth. What they all have in common is significant inherited wealth, with the exception of one person who was in the right place at the right time to earn millions on a job that should have paid $50k/yr. Now that he's earned millions and eluded the SEC, he can get jobs that pay in the millions. (Actually he had significant inherited wealth, too). All these people come from upper class or upper middle class backgrounds. I don't know any wealthy people who were once poor. Do you?
There's a reason Thomas Jefferson thought inherited wealth was dangerous to the Republic. There's a reason Adam Smith thought the idea of inherited wealth was absurd other than as a means to care for dependents who could not earn money on their own.
As a matter of curiousity, could someone please answer why Unix and the various derivatives are still so strong?
I think that initially the primary strength of Unix was fork(). It allowed incredibly easy process creation and management. The file system was also incredible. Continued popularity was due to its penetration of the university market followed eventually by the availability of open source versions.
Of course not. For my 2TB NAS, I rotate back ups to a bunch of 1TB hot swappable drives in a USB enclosure formatted XFS. A rule of thumb for personal use is "plan to spend as much on backups as you did on your computer (over the lifetime of the computer)."
Which is better than the standard at work, which is, "plan to spend as much on a years' worth of backups as you did on the computer." For some of the larger disk arrays it's more like "plan to spend as much on a single full backup as you did on the computer." And that's for internal backup. Off site commercial backup is four to ten times as expensive as that.
Did you try Easy Tether (it's in the Market)? The Milestone is the same as the Droid, and Easy Tether works fine for me. But I use it as a tether, not a wifi access point.
However, the most extensive check was for volunteering at the YMCA.
Mine was for teaching an Astronomy course at a community college. Fingerprints, photos, and various criminal record, background and credit checks that I got to pay for. All for $125 a week in salary. (And they say public employees are so much better paid than private employees.) And after that: no ID, no guards, no security. Anyone could just walk off the street and into my classroom (which was fine with me).
No. In this case, the window is already broken. The question here is whether you pay $50 in shipping to get a $25 window from Taiwan, or $75 to get a locally made window.
Are you ready to concede, that the FCC should not to be in charge of regulating the internet?..or do you need the FCC to fuck you over a couple more times before you will listen?
You are drawing exactly the wrong conclusion. In this case, the FCC is letting Comcast fuck us over. If the FCC is not in charge of regulating the internet, everyone with money and power will be able to fuck us over. At least with net neutrality regulation, they'll at least have to ask the FCC before they do it. It's not the best possible world, but it's better than the one we get without net neutrality.
Hulu will disappear once NBC and the other Comcast properties pull their content. Soon it will be comcast.com for Comcast subscribers and a pay-per-episode model for everyone else.
2012 the year of the cable only or PPV olympics then in 2014 EPSN or fox get's them.
I've been wondering for quite a while anyone would watch the Olympics. Are they really that interested in how much the death of the bronze medal winner's great grandmother affected his childhood? I really don't care if Michael Phelp's socks make his feet itch. Personally I hope that they go PPV and nobody pays.
I've assume a smooth distribution over the n-volume where life can be supported, which is not the same as random. I've also assumed the range of allowed values is larger than the n-volume.
At this point there isn't any reason to believe that such quantities are not random. If some are not random then the n-sphere dimensionality is reduced by one for each non-random fundamental constant, but the same principle applies.
Supernova every 10 years? But we haven't seen one in 400? Seriously, you've got your atmosphere getting blown off distance wrong. 30 light years would be ample distance for an atmosphere to survive.
If you're going to quote numbers please have the article you're quoting in front of you.
As I said, government run health care is a great reason to be a public employee. It's not worth significantly more than a private health plan, though.
Education loan repayment
Applies to only about 0.1% of federal employees.
Continuing education
Federal CE benefits are pretty well restricted to the same titles that would get CE benefits if privately employed. (i.e. health care, legal, scientific)
Unrivaled job security
Until you add in the uncertainly of federal funding. Layoffs are not uncommon.
Short hours
Yep, most federal employees are prevented by law from working more than 40 hours a week. But few work less unless they are part time.
Flexible scheduling
Depends upon the title. Janitors and receptionists don't get flexible scheduling, nor do nurses and doctors. Scientists and engineers, maybe.
Capless leave accrual
Whether this benefit is valuable depends upon whether private employees lose their leave rather than use it.
Top retirement benefits.
Yes, many public employees still have defined benefit plans. I doubt that will continue much longer.
At upper levels, salaries exceed almost any private sector counterpart in addition to the benefits you will find in almost no other non-executive compensation package.
That is most certainly not true. Are you comparing executive level public jobs (i.e. NASA Administrator) with non-executive level private jobs?
So the moral of the story is... kill all the poor people?
No. You'd never be able to get them all. A better moral is "When times are bad is when you should probably be most concerned about the welfare of the poor." But given you think the poor are lazy bastards and criminals, it's probably not worth my effort to save you.
"The Rich" can always organize, and hire enough of "the poor" to oppress the remainder.
I'll be sure to tell that to the next Romanov I see. Marie Antoinette was a big fan of that idea, too. Abuse the poor at your own risk.
slightly more to the edge wouldn't be habitable, anywhere (and by "near" we mean "within 10000 lightyears) of a supernova event is not habitable, so life is not possible in things like "stellar nurseries"
10000 light years? No. Supernovae are survivable events (for life, not necessarily civilization) even at a few dozen light years. Life might be able to survive as close as a few light years from a Supernova.
A lot of the other things you are saying are wrong, too. But I just picked this one.
I've argued that the universe is, and should be poorly tuned for life. Think of it this way, if there is a range of possible values of the fundamental constants we can assume that there is a single point in a n-dimensional space (where n is the number of fundamental constants) which is the "best possible values for life". Surrounding it is a volume of possible values where life is possible. Most of that volume is closer to the edge at which life becomes impossible than it is to the center. The larger the number of fundamental constants the worse it becomes. 3/4 of the area of a circular disk (a 2-sphere) is closer to the edge than to the center. 7/8 of the volume of a sphere (a 3-sphere) is closer to the edge than the center. 15/16th of a 4-sphere, and so on.
So it really comes down to how many truly fundamental constants there are. 6? In which case the chance would be 63/64 that we are in a poorly tuned universe.
Even better than that we have a multidimensional integrator that can take into account the effects of drag on a trajectory. Its hard to imaging a sport involving throwing or hitting flying objects that would be possible without this instinct. Our ancestors probably would have died out before they reached the savannas without it.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to change your signature to reflect the fact that Slashdot 3.0 sucks.
I am sure that the fact that it is still possible for a person to grow up poor and with determination and hard work become rich is something that you either do not believe in or something that you do not believe happens.
It's not belief or disbelief. It's evidence. It happens very very rarely that a poor person becomes rich. And when it does happen, it is even more rarely due to determination and hard work. A poor person has no money to spend on education. To a poor person determination and hard work still mean a minimum wage job.
But of course, that's inherent in the capitalistic system. Capitalism is a system where you can become wealthy on the determination and hard work of others. Personal determination and hard work won't make you wealthy, they'll make your boss's boss wealthy.
And once wealth has been achieved, wealth breeds wealth. Once you're in the investor class, you pay other people to make money for you off of the labor of others.
If you a born into a poor family, the ways in which you can become rich are very limited.
1) You can have or develop a rare talent that is valuable. You can become a famous musician, singer, or athlete. But the problem with rare talents is that they are rare. I could never become a singer or professional wide receiver, regardless of the quality of the person who attempted to train me. I do have natural talents. But if I had been born into a poor family or even a lower middle class family, I would have never become a research physicist, because the resources I needed in order to become one would have been missing. And if I hadn't started on this path at about age nine, it would have been out of reach. You know what to the smart poor kids in an inner city Headstart program? They get ignored, because they don't need attention every second. That pretty much continues into elementary school and beyond. They learn pretty early that it doesn't pay to be smart.
2) You can marry into a wealthy family. This is a lot harder than you might think because the wealthy segregate themselves from the poor. So again, this option is reserved for the rich.
3) Be in the right place at the right time. Also hard if you're poor. But if you're already rich you can buy your way through business school and get an executive position at a start up and make millions for doing very little.
Along with the lack of upward mobility, there's little downward mobility. If you're Donald Trump, you can cancel a billion dollars in debt through bankruptcy, not have a penny to your name, and the next day walk into a bank to ask for a $10 million dollar loan, and they'll give it to you. Because you're a member or the rich club, even though you're poor. If you're poor, the same bank will charge you $50 a month in fees because you aren't maintaining a $15K combined balance. That is, if they let your shabby ass through the door in the first place.
But as I've said, I'm reasonably rich. I come from an upper middle class family. I married into an upper middle class family. I don't personally know any billionaires, but I do know people with 7 to 8 figure net worth, and I've met people with 9 figure net worth. What they all have in common is significant inherited wealth, with the exception of one person who was in the right place at the right time to earn millions on a job that should have paid $50k/yr. Now that he's earned millions and eluded the SEC, he can get jobs that pay in the millions. (Actually he had significant inherited wealth, too). All these people come from upper class or upper middle class backgrounds. I don't know any wealthy people who were once poor. Do you?
There's a reason Thomas Jefferson thought inherited wealth was dangerous to the Republic. There's a reason Adam Smith thought the idea of inherited wealth was absurd other than as a means to care for dependents who could not earn money on their own.
As a matter of curiousity, could someone please answer why Unix and the various derivatives are still so strong?
I think that initially the primary strength of Unix was fork(). It allowed incredibly easy process creation and management. The file system was also incredible. Continued popularity was due to its penetration of the university market followed eventually by the availability of open source versions.
It would have been much funnier if you actually let go and spewed all over your basement and then rolled around in it!
He does that every night. Then he turns on Glen Beck and revels in the stink.
You'd need 13 megawatts of solar cells to run it. Might be out of your price range.
I'm surprised that it survived that long without power. It must be a very simple payload (i.e. no batteries, just solar cells and a transmitter)
Of course not. For my 2TB NAS, I rotate back ups to a bunch of 1TB hot swappable drives in a USB enclosure formatted XFS. A rule of thumb for personal use is "plan to spend as much on backups as you did on your computer (over the lifetime of the computer)."
Which is better than the standard at work, which is, "plan to spend as much on a years' worth of backups as you did on the computer." For some of the larger disk arrays it's more like "plan to spend as much on a single full backup as you did on the computer." And that's for internal backup. Off site commercial backup is four to ten times as expensive as that.
Did you try Easy Tether (it's in the Market)? The Milestone is the same as the Droid, and Easy Tether works fine for me. But I use it as a tether, not a wifi access point.
No you not.
However, the most extensive check was for volunteering at the YMCA.
Mine was for teaching an Astronomy course at a community college. Fingerprints, photos, and various criminal record, background and credit checks that I got to pay for. All for $125 a week in salary. (And they say public employees are so much better paid than private employees.) And after that: no ID, no guards, no security. Anyone could just walk off the street and into my classroom (which was fine with me).
Welcome to the post 9/11 world.
Agreed. I should have said tuned for our variety of life. There could be several islands of life friendliness in this sea of fundamental constants.
No. In this case, the window is already broken. The question here is whether you pay $50 in shipping to get a $25 window from Taiwan, or $75 to get a locally made window.
Are you ready to concede, that the FCC should not to be in charge of regulating the internet? ..or do you need the FCC to fuck you over a couple more times before you will listen?
You are drawing exactly the wrong conclusion. In this case, the FCC is letting Comcast fuck us over. If the FCC is not in charge of regulating the internet, everyone with money and power will be able to fuck us over. At least with net neutrality regulation, they'll at least have to ask the FCC before they do it. It's not the best possible world, but it's better than the one we get without net neutrality.
Hulu will disappear once NBC and the other Comcast properties pull their content. Soon it will be comcast.com for Comcast subscribers and a pay-per-episode model for everyone else.
now I will have to get the darn near 80$ a month package to watch ... um ... hm the office or 30Rock? nah that is on hulu,
You mean it was on hulu. Now it will be on comcast.com for Comcast subscribers, or you can pay the $5 an episode at itunes.
2012 the year of the cable only or PPV olympics then in 2014 EPSN or fox get's them.
I've been wondering for quite a while anyone would watch the Olympics. Are they really that interested in how much the death of the bronze medal winner's great grandmother affected his childhood? I really don't care if Michael Phelp's socks make his feet itch. Personally I hope that they go PPV and nobody pays.
If you actually care, the information is pretty easily available from authoritative sources.
Authoritative... Such as?
It's also pretty plain where you're coming from, and that any information not coming from Glen Beck's mouth can be ignored.
I've assume a smooth distribution over the n-volume where life can be supported, which is not the same as random. I've also assumed the range of allowed values is larger than the n-volume.
At this point there isn't any reason to believe that such quantities are not random. If some are not random then the n-sphere dimensionality is reduced by one for each non-random fundamental constant, but the same principle applies.
Supernova every 10 years? But we haven't seen one in 400? Seriously, you've got your atmosphere getting blown off distance wrong. 30 light years would be ample distance for an atmosphere to survive.
If you're going to quote numbers please have the article you're quoting in front of you.
FEHB
As I said, government run health care is a great reason to be a public employee. It's not worth significantly more than a private health plan, though.
Education loan repayment
Applies to only about 0.1% of federal employees.
Continuing education
Federal CE benefits are pretty well restricted to the same titles that would get CE benefits if privately employed. (i.e. health care, legal, scientific)
Unrivaled job security
Until you add in the uncertainly of federal funding. Layoffs are not uncommon.
Short hours
Yep, most federal employees are prevented by law from working more than 40 hours a week. But few work less unless they are part time.
Flexible scheduling
Depends upon the title. Janitors and receptionists don't get flexible scheduling, nor do nurses and doctors. Scientists and engineers, maybe.
Capless leave accrual
Whether this benefit is valuable depends upon whether private employees lose their leave rather than use it.
Top retirement benefits.
Yes, many public employees still have defined benefit plans. I doubt that will continue much longer.
At upper levels, salaries exceed almost any private sector counterpart in addition to the benefits you will find in almost no other non-executive compensation package.
That is most certainly not true. Are you comparing executive level public jobs (i.e. NASA Administrator) with non-executive level private jobs?
So the moral of the story is ... kill all the poor people?
No. You'd never be able to get them all. A better moral is "When times are bad is when you should probably be most concerned about the welfare of the poor." But given you think the poor are lazy bastards and criminals, it's probably not worth my effort to save you.
"The Rich" can always organize, and hire enough of "the poor" to oppress the remainder.
I'll be sure to tell that to the next Romanov I see. Marie Antoinette was a big fan of that idea, too. Abuse the poor at your own risk.
slightly more to the edge wouldn't be habitable, anywhere (and by "near" we mean "within 10000 lightyears) of a supernova event is not habitable, so life is not possible in things like "stellar nurseries"
10000 light years? No. Supernovae are survivable events (for life, not necessarily civilization) even at a few dozen light years. Life might be able to survive as close as a few light years from a Supernova.
A lot of the other things you are saying are wrong, too. But I just picked this one.
I've argued that the universe is, and should be poorly tuned for life. Think of it this way, if there is a range of possible values of the fundamental constants we can assume that there is a single point in a n-dimensional space (where n is the number of fundamental constants) which is the "best possible values for life". Surrounding it is a volume of possible values where life is possible. Most of that volume is closer to the edge at which life becomes impossible than it is to the center. The larger the number of fundamental constants the worse it becomes. 3/4 of the area of a circular disk (a 2-sphere) is closer to the edge than to the center. 7/8 of the volume of a sphere (a 3-sphere) is closer to the edge than the center. 15/16th of a 4-sphere, and so on.
So it really comes down to how many truly fundamental constants there are. 6? In which case the chance would be 63/64 that we are in a poorly tuned universe.
Even better than that we have a multidimensional integrator that can take into account the effects of drag on a trajectory. Its hard to imaging a sport involving throwing or hitting flying objects that would be possible without this instinct. Our ancestors probably would have died out before they reached the savannas without it.
"Climategate" was a non-scandal. Totally manufactured by the right wing media. You should choose more trustworthy sources.