The problem here is that in most of Haiti there's no power. The obvious answer may be to just burn wood, which is why the entire country has already been denuded of trees. You can actually see their border with the Dominican Republic from space because one side has trees, and the other doesn't.
To be fair, the minimum wage back then was the equivalent of about $9 an hour today. Plus you didn't have to have a degree to get a much higher-paying white-collar job, like you do now. In the early 70's my parents bought a house while working part-time office jobs and putting themselves through full-time gradute school and taking care of a small child. Try that trick now.
Wait...I forget. Which economic injustice were we complaining about here?
Re:Students have to take some of the responsibilit
on
The College-Loan Scandal
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I read about this all the time and wonder to myself, "Who is their right mind goes 100k in debt for school?".
In its most recent survey of college pricing, the College Board reports that a "moderate" college budget for an in-state public college for the 2012–2013 academic year averaged $22,261. A moderate budget at a private college averaged $43,289.
OK. A little math here: A "moderate" cost for 4 years at a state school (not counting inflation, which makes this a joke really): $89,000. "Moderate" cost for 4 years at a private college: $173,000.
So who goes into 100K kind of debt for school? It looks like pretty much everyone who doesn't have family resources to fall back on.
Actually, I'd like to see numbers on this, but presumably even professional athletes spend much more time at rest than they do exerting themselves. Thus they'd put out a lower number of heart beats a day than a couch potato. However, when a heart gets closer to the end of its duty cycle, perhaps the extra strain from a good workout might induce a failure early...
Two decades or so ago, I read an article in Scientific American that bascially said biological organs have a maximum "cycle duty". In other words, humming-bird hearts and human hearts get pretty much same number of beats before they wear out, but since their hearts beat 1260 times a minute instead of 70, they only live 5 years instead of 90.
Now, this is clearly a simplistic view of anatomy. However, if he's onto something, then you'd expect people who regularly raise their heart rates (eg: with large daily caffine intakes), to live a bit shorter lives than everyone else on average.
This is actually, this is a quite fair point. I was trying to point out that as far as the peoples in question are concerned, they don't look a thing like each other. However, non-Indians have a tendency to see the native people of the entire continent as one big race with some kind of monolithic nature-based culture.
That isn't an easy concept to get across w/o going into TL;DR-land, so I used that pithy one-sentence shorthand. It works pretty well in person, where people can see that nobody in the room is more melanin-deprived than I. I should have been a wee bit more careful how I phrased it in print.
FYI: Crow is also a Siouan language, so they were really just a related tribe that wasn't part of those big three nations. However, Blackfoot is indeed non-siouan (Alagonquian to be exact)
Thats funny, I thought the Apaches and Commanches were offshoots of the Sioux
Uh, no. Apaches and Commanches are quite unrelated to the Sioux (and each other), much like, say Chinese, Turks, and Tai (even though all those folks live on the same continent too). Apache is a Na-Dene language, most of the other speakers of which live in Alaska and the NW of Canada. Commanche speak a Uto-Aztecan language, all of whose speakers originally hail from either the Wetern US or NW Mexico.
The Siouan languages and cultures, by contrast were found in the central USA, roughly in the Mississippi watershed (with a couple of prominent exceptions in what is now New England). And yes, they were quite different peoples. Siouxans lived on riverbanks and were basically a settled farming people before Europeans came with their diseases and horses, making Buffalo hunting a more profitable living.
The Apache and Commanche OTOH were hunters from way back (in the Apache's case, living a bit more off of raiding nearby settled communities as well). The introduction of horses basically turned them into the New World's equivalent of the Mongols and early Turks.
They may look similar to the melanin-deprived, but they are very, very different.
I'm thinking, "Why does one Datacenter have the power to give away control of the entire Internet, why on earth did they pick Navajo to give it to, and what did that unlucky 30% do to get left out of this sweet deal?"
Its a old newspaper trick (perfected IMHO by The Register), to use purposely confusing titles to induce the reader to read at least a bit of the article to figure out what's going on. In this case, two sentences in all was made clear, but by then I was reading. Bravo, Editors!
Umm...dude, get real. The article is about new laws applying to all NGO's, and starts with a gigantic image of a State Department sign. The implication couldn't be clearer. There's only one place where it ever uses talks about a subset of NGO's rather than all of them, and that is just to tell how all supposedly innocent (iow: Russian) NGO's get corrupted by the State Department.
If 50 million Americans were protesting in the streets demanding that Obama (or Bush) to be removed from office, and as a response Obama (or Bush) then held a 5 hour television broadcast declaring that he will not only not be leaving office but that additionally that the constitution will never apply to him, then I damn well expect the American military to do the same thing.
This. Here.
The problem in Egypt was that the ruling party changed the constitution so that there was no way to get rid of the official leadership if they didn't want to go. Any country that doesn't provide a peaceful means for the people to replace the government, gaurantees that it will be done by force one day.
For many countries this may take a while, but in Egypt the people had just replaced a dictator a year earlier. They were still organized, and the memories of those who died for Democracy were still fresh. There's no way you could expect any result other than a massive public uprising. When even this didn't move those in charge, the die was cast.
I see you don't have Russia Today on your list. Check it out. If you haven't heard stuff like this direct from the lips of real live (intelligent edcuated) Russians, my guess is that the topic just hasn't come up.
I really doubt any Russians would claim "all" NGO's are penetrated by the CIA, that's something you yourself just made up right now. But some of them? That's reality, not propaganda
See this is exactly what I'm talking about. It sounds crazy if you don't live in their media environment, but they do in fact claim that. Yes, in Russian Universe, every NGO is a state department front for regime change and American takeover of the country. This is why they have been cracking down on seemingly innocuous little NGOs for years; they view them all as a threat. Every single one. Read this Russian article if you don't believe me.
Your original statement "they basically live in an entirely different universe than everyone else " betrayed your underlying assumption that YOUR own universe is the "true" one in your mind
Nope. All that says is that if one were to draw a Venn diagram of "universes", the circle representing theirs would not intersect anyone else's circle much at all. It does not say there are only two circles on the Venn diagram, nor does it say that any circle is any better than any other. Please don't add in stuff that I didn't say.
That was that "Fox News" universe I was talking about. Check out a recent interview with Cheney sometime (if you have the stomach for it). He's still insisting the WMDs were really there somewhere, and they just failed to find them. These aren't "lies" exactly, because he honestly, fervently believes this stuff. As I said, different universe.
And how do you know that it's the Russians that are wrong, and not you?
I'm not claiming "right" (whatever that is) is on my side. That's precisely why I used the metaphor of universes.
I will however, postulate that the true universe, if such a thing exists, is a very complex place. If yours has one deus ex machina that is responsible for everything (or at least everything bad) that happens, it is clearly pretty damn far off of true. Just a nice rule of thumb for you, whatever country you live in and whatever view of the world you chose to embrace.
The modern Russian media is if anything worse than the old Pravda was. If you've recently had the pleasure of trying to have a political discussion with a Russian national, you'll notice quickly that they basically live in an entirely different universe than everyone else. Seriously, day-long Fox News viewers are well-grounded in reality compared to these folks.
In the Russian universe, the driving force behind everything is the USA. Literally everything, even stuff your typical American would claim to neither know nor give a shit about. The entire Arab Spring was started and driven by outside USA agitators. All those protestors you see on TV? All fakes (or paid US agents). They'll do the same in Russia too, given half the chance. You see, NGO's are also all CIA organizations acting to overthrow governments. Thus attacking NGO's is a patriot's duty.
It'll be fun when they start trying to seriously peddle this stuff in the West. I'd laugh it off as clearly unbelievable, but I used to do that with the 700 Club when it started on TV too. Some people bought it, and that made it important, no matter how clearly silly it all was.
For that reason I'd actually advocate taking in some Russian media, just so their behavior will start to make some sense to you. Syrians, wonder why Russia works so hard to keep your local tyrant in power? The answer's there. Americans, wonder what Russians seem to have against anything at all your country publicly seems to want? The answer's there too.
The air itself in the tube isn't really moving. The tube is kept at a partial vacuum, but it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum.
Sounds like those pneumatic tubes they have at some banks and pharmacies.
When I was a little kid in the 70's waiting with my mom at the bank drive-through, I used to wonder why nobody tried using those for mass-transit. Nice to see somebody's finally looking into it.:-)
I'm pretty pro union, but this union voted for unemployment, rather than a concession
Yes they did. I saw an interview with one of the Union members asked about this. The well-paid TV talking heads clearly didn't understand how someone could vote themselves out of a job.
The response was essentially, "Yes, I have a good job now that is worth saving. However, the job they are trying to get me to conceed down to is not that job. The new job they want me to have is a crappy job that I could go out and get anywhere."
So in effect, their jobs were dead already. That was not their choice, it was management's. The only choice they had was to try to slow it down by fighting against it, which is what they did.
Given that it was a computer talking about its preferences, I really don't see it. Computers don't have genders, which to me adds extra layers to these jokes that wouldn't be there if a gendered human was delivering them.
There shouldn't really be any sexual meaning at all in there, unless you brought it in there yourself. So if you saw misogyny in there, you are reading those jokes a lot differently than I am. Nothing nessecarily wrong with that, but its *you* who did it, not the computer.
And your evidence that she wouldn't have done the exact same thing without the beneift of the cellphone is? My wife caused 2 t-bone crashes in her first 10 years of driving in just exactly that way, and had no cellphone. Don't blame the phone, blame the person operating the vehicle.
Talking and texting while driving was made illegal. Accident rates didn't change. That doesn't say anything about how dangerous it is to talk or text while driving. Instead, it just says that the law is sporadically enforced, if at all, and universally ignored by drivers. Accident rates didn't change because talking/texting while driving rates also didn't change.
You may be right (or wrong), but that doesn't change the fact that the laws aren't proving helpful. In the meantime, I feel like I can't use legally my phone as a GPS device, even though it works just fine for that with Google Maps going on it, because of the way these dumbass laws are worded. So basically what we are left with is "The Garmin Market Protection Act".
As someone who has been driving since the early 80's, I can confidently tell you that those people existed, and drove just as crappily and just that way, before they ever got their cellphones.
If a person doesn't want to pay attention to their driving, they won't. Taking their phone away from them won't magically make them more responsible.
We helped push Mubarak out when it became obvious that he was going to go"
No you didn't, the people of Egypt and their military did.
...
You barely even helped. Apart from some initial cruise missiles and some...
This right here is exactly what I'm talking about. You're proving my point wonderfully. We did just enough that to ensure that things went the right way, but not enough to put our fingerprints all over everything. The Libyans can righly claim that the revoultion was theirs, not the USA's, and so can the Egyptians. This is precicely the kind of foriegn intervention the USA should be doing: no more than absolutely nessecary, but no less either.
I'll admit it isn't a huge jump from that philosopy to today's "we just do absolutely nothing but complain about foriegn leaders", but it is certianly a qualitative difference. Try asking a Syrian refugee if you don't see it.
I'm currently writing some code to talk to a 20 year old Concurrent Unix machine, so that we can upgrade the operator station. The disks are starting to die on our old SunOS Spark operator stations.
The interface we have to use is an even older piece of hardware called a DR-11W. My understanding is that PDP-11's used to use it as their printer port back in the '70's. Apparently that's the hardware that was in use when this whole system was first designed. However, this system still serves its purpose, in the process making my company a lot of money.
So please, tell me again how rediculous it is to expect someone to support software for more than ten whole years. I'm listening. Honest.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is that in most of Haiti there's no power. The obvious answer may be to just burn wood, which is why the entire country has already been denuded of trees. You can actually see their border with the Dominican Republic from space because one side has trees, and the other doesn't.
To be fair, the minimum wage back then was the equivalent of about $9 an hour today. Plus you didn't have to have a degree to get a much higher-paying white-collar job, like you do now. In the early 70's my parents bought a house while working part-time office jobs and putting themselves through full-time gradute school and taking care of a small child. Try that trick now.
Wait...I forget. Which economic injustice were we complaining about here?
I read about this all the time and wonder to myself, "Who is their right mind goes 100k in debt for school?".
From Collegedata.com:
In its most recent survey of college pricing, the College Board reports that a "moderate" college budget for an in-state public college for the 2012–2013 academic year averaged $22,261. A moderate budget at a private college averaged $43,289.
OK. A little math here: A "moderate" cost for 4 years at a state school (not counting inflation, which makes this a joke really): $89,000. "Moderate" cost for 4 years at a private college: $173,000. So who goes into 100K kind of debt for school? It looks like pretty much everyone who doesn't have family resources to fall back on.
Actually, I'd like to see numbers on this, but presumably even professional athletes spend much more time at rest than they do exerting themselves. Thus they'd put out a lower number of heart beats a day than a couch potato. However, when a heart gets closer to the end of its duty cycle, perhaps the extra strain from a good workout might induce a failure early...
Two decades or so ago, I read an article in Scientific American that bascially said biological organs have a maximum "cycle duty". In other words, humming-bird hearts and human hearts get pretty much same number of beats before they wear out, but since their hearts beat 1260 times a minute instead of 70, they only live 5 years instead of 90.
Now, this is clearly a simplistic view of anatomy. However, if he's onto something, then you'd expect people who regularly raise their heart rates (eg: with large daily caffine intakes), to live a bit shorter lives than everyone else on average.
This is actually, this is a quite fair point. I was trying to point out that as far as the peoples in question are concerned, they don't look a thing like each other. However, non-Indians have a tendency to see the native people of the entire continent as one big race with some kind of monolithic nature-based culture.
That isn't an easy concept to get across w/o going into TL;DR-land, so I used that pithy one-sentence shorthand. It works pretty well in person, where people can see that nobody in the room is more melanin-deprived than I. I should have been a wee bit more careful how I phrased it in print.
FYI: Crow is also a Siouan language, so they were really just a related tribe that wasn't part of those big three nations. However, Blackfoot is indeed non-siouan (Alagonquian to be exact)
Thats funny, I thought the Apaches and Commanches were offshoots of the Sioux
Uh, no. Apaches and Commanches are quite unrelated to the Sioux (and each other), much like, say Chinese, Turks, and Tai (even though all those folks live on the same continent too). Apache is a Na-Dene language, most of the other speakers of which live in Alaska and the NW of Canada. Commanche speak a Uto-Aztecan language, all of whose speakers originally hail from either the Wetern US or NW Mexico.
The Siouan languages and cultures, by contrast were found in the central USA, roughly in the Mississippi watershed (with a couple of prominent exceptions in what is now New England). And yes, they were quite different peoples. Siouxans lived on riverbanks and were basically a settled farming people before Europeans came with their diseases and horses, making Buffalo hunting a more profitable living.
The Apache and Commanche OTOH were hunters from way back (in the Apache's case, living a bit more off of raiding nearby settled communities as well). The introduction of horses basically turned them into the New World's equivalent of the Mongols and early Turks.
They may look similar to the melanin-deprived, but they are very, very different.
I'm thinking, "Why does one Datacenter have the power to give away control of the entire Internet, why on earth did they pick Navajo to give it to, and what did that unlucky 30% do to get left out of this sweet deal?"
Its a old newspaper trick (perfected IMHO by The Register), to use purposely confusing titles to induce the reader to read at least a bit of the article to figure out what's going on. In this case, two sentences in all was made clear, but by then I was reading. Bravo, Editors!
Umm...dude, get real. The article is about new laws applying to all NGO's, and starts with a gigantic image of a State Department sign. The implication couldn't be clearer. There's only one place where it ever uses talks about a subset of NGO's rather than all of them, and that is just to tell how all supposedly innocent (iow: Russian) NGO's get corrupted by the State Department.
If 50 million Americans were protesting in the streets demanding that Obama (or Bush) to be removed from office, and as a response Obama (or Bush) then held a 5 hour television broadcast declaring that he will not only not be leaving office but that additionally that the constitution will never apply to him, then I damn well expect the American military to do the same thing.
This. Here.
The problem in Egypt was that the ruling party changed the constitution so that there was no way to get rid of the official leadership if they didn't want to go. Any country that doesn't provide a peaceful means for the people to replace the government, gaurantees that it will be done by force one day.
For many countries this may take a while, but in Egypt the people had just replaced a dictator a year earlier. They were still organized, and the memories of those who died for Democracy were still fresh. There's no way you could expect any result other than a massive public uprising. When even this didn't move those in charge, the die was cast.
I see you don't have Russia Today on your list. Check it out. If you haven't heard stuff like this direct from the lips of real live (intelligent edcuated) Russians, my guess is that the topic just hasn't come up.
I really doubt any Russians would claim "all" NGO's are penetrated by the CIA, that's something you yourself just made up right now. But some of them? That's reality, not propaganda
See this is exactly what I'm talking about. It sounds crazy if you don't live in their media environment, but they do in fact claim that. Yes, in Russian Universe, every NGO is a state department front for regime change and American takeover of the country. This is why they have been cracking down on seemingly innocuous little NGOs for years; they view them all as a threat. Every single one. Read this Russian article if you don't believe me.
Your original statement "they basically live in an entirely different universe than everyone else " betrayed your underlying assumption that YOUR own universe is the "true" one in your mind
Nope. All that says is that if one were to draw a Venn diagram of "universes", the circle representing theirs would not intersect anyone else's circle much at all. It does not say there are only two circles on the Venn diagram, nor does it say that any circle is any better than any other. Please don't add in stuff that I didn't say.
That was that "Fox News" universe I was talking about. Check out a recent interview with Cheney sometime (if you have the stomach for it). He's still insisting the WMDs were really there somewhere, and they just failed to find them. These aren't "lies" exactly, because he honestly, fervently believes this stuff. As I said, different universe.
And how do you know that it's the Russians that are wrong, and not you?
I'm not claiming "right" (whatever that is) is on my side. That's precisely why I used the metaphor of universes.
I will however, postulate that the true universe, if such a thing exists, is a very complex place. If yours has one deus ex machina that is responsible for everything (or at least everything bad) that happens, it is clearly pretty damn far off of true. Just a nice rule of thumb for you, whatever country you live in and whatever view of the world you chose to embrace.
The modern Russian media is if anything worse than the old Pravda was. If you've recently had the pleasure of trying to have a political discussion with a Russian national, you'll notice quickly that they basically live in an entirely different universe than everyone else. Seriously, day-long Fox News viewers are well-grounded in reality compared to these folks.
In the Russian universe, the driving force behind everything is the USA. Literally everything, even stuff your typical American would claim to neither know nor give a shit about. The entire Arab Spring was started and driven by outside USA agitators. All those protestors you see on TV? All fakes (or paid US agents). They'll do the same in Russia too, given half the chance. You see, NGO's are also all CIA organizations acting to overthrow governments. Thus attacking NGO's is a patriot's duty.
It'll be fun when they start trying to seriously peddle this stuff in the West. I'd laugh it off as clearly unbelievable, but I used to do that with the 700 Club when it started on TV too. Some people bought it, and that made it important, no matter how clearly silly it all was.
For that reason I'd actually advocate taking in some Russian media, just so their behavior will start to make some sense to you. Syrians, wonder why Russia works so hard to keep your local tyrant in power? The answer's there. Americans, wonder what Russians seem to have against anything at all your country publicly seems to want? The answer's there too.
The air itself in the tube isn't really moving. The tube is kept at a partial vacuum, but it doesn't have to be a perfect vacuum.
Sounds like those pneumatic tubes they have at some banks and pharmacies.
When I was a little kid in the 70's waiting with my mom at the bank drive-through, I used to wonder why nobody tried using those for mass-transit. Nice to see somebody's finally looking into it. :-)
I'm pretty pro union, but this union voted for unemployment, rather than a concession
Yes they did. I saw an interview with one of the Union members asked about this. The well-paid TV talking heads clearly didn't understand how someone could vote themselves out of a job.
The response was essentially, "Yes, I have a good job now that is worth saving. However, the job they are trying to get me to conceed down to is not that job. The new job they want me to have is a crappy job that I could go out and get anywhere."
So in effect, their jobs were dead already. That was not their choice, it was management's. The only choice they had was to try to slow it down by fighting against it, which is what they did.
Given that it was a computer talking about its preferences, I really don't see it. Computers don't have genders, which to me adds extra layers to these jokes that wouldn't be there if a gendered human was delivering them.
There shouldn't really be any sexual meaning at all in there, unless you brought it in there yourself. So if you saw misogyny in there, you are reading those jokes a lot differently than I am. Nothing nessecarily wrong with that, but its *you* who did it, not the computer.
And your evidence that she wouldn't have done the exact same thing without the beneift of the cellphone is? My wife caused 2 t-bone crashes in her first 10 years of driving in just exactly that way, and had no cellphone. Don't blame the phone, blame the person operating the vehicle.
Talking and texting while driving was made illegal. Accident rates didn't change. That doesn't say anything about how dangerous it is to talk or text while driving. Instead, it just says that the law is sporadically enforced, if at all, and universally ignored by drivers. Accident rates didn't change because talking/texting while driving rates also didn't change.
You may be right (or wrong), but that doesn't change the fact that the laws aren't proving helpful. In the meantime, I feel like I can't use legally my phone as a GPS device, even though it works just fine for that with Google Maps going on it, because of the way these dumbass laws are worded. So basically what we are left with is "The Garmin Market Protection Act".
As someone who has been driving since the early 80's, I can confidently tell you that those people existed, and drove just as crappily and just that way, before they ever got their cellphones.
If a person doesn't want to pay attention to their driving, they won't. Taking their phone away from them won't magically make them more responsible.
We helped push Mubarak out when it became obvious that he was going to go" No you didn't, the people of Egypt and their military did.
...
You barely even helped. Apart from some initial cruise missiles and some ...
This right here is exactly what I'm talking about. You're proving my point wonderfully. We did just enough that to ensure that things went the right way, but not enough to put our fingerprints all over everything. The Libyans can righly claim that the revoultion was theirs, not the USA's, and so can the Egyptians. This is precicely the kind of foriegn intervention the USA should be doing: no more than absolutely nessecary, but no less either.
I'll admit it isn't a huge jump from that philosopy to today's "we just do absolutely nothing but complain about foriegn leaders", but it is certianly a qualitative difference. Try asking a Syrian refugee if you don't see it.
I'm currently writing some code to talk to a 20 year old Concurrent Unix machine, so that we can upgrade the operator station. The disks are starting to die on our old SunOS Spark operator stations.
The interface we have to use is an even older piece of hardware called a DR-11W. My understanding is that PDP-11's used to use it as their printer port back in the '70's. Apparently that's the hardware that was in use when this whole system was first designed. However, this system still serves its purpose, in the process making my company a lot of money.
So please, tell me again how rediculous it is to expect someone to support software for more than ten whole years. I'm listening. Honest.