This works very well for the medical industry, because without their strict licensing practices we could be flooded with foreign doctors just like we are with H1Bs.
Sensible argument but completely wrong regarding the medical field. The US medical system is flooded with foreign doctors (with some exceptions, mostly in the highest earning specialties).
There is some bias towards the US-trained doctors, but not much; after all, no matter where you graduated the Medical School, you still have to pass the USMLE tests, go through a residency and obtain a Medical License.
There are certification steps necessary for doctors with foreign medical degrees to practice medicine in the US. This includes ECFMG Certification and state licensing. The medical industry does not completely block all foreign doctors, but it limits the numbers of incoming physicians in the same way that it restricts the number of incoming medical residencies.
The point I took away from this article is not that there is not a shortage of capable works. Instead, it's a shortage of capable workers willing to work at the salaries and rates being offered.
The full answer is that there is a shortage of capable workers willing to work at the salaries and rates necessary to keep the jobs in this country. The US had a huge head start in the IT field because most of this technology was invented here, but the benefit of that is slowly dwindling. It is similar to the manufacturing benefits we had when automation pioneers like Ford invented their processes in the US. But we are in a global marketplace so eventually all fields need to justify their compensation on a global scale.
If your position does not require a large amount of soft skills (which often don't transfer well between cultures), then you are unlikely to be shielded from global competition. And unlike Wall Street guys, corporate executives, sales, etc, most STEM jobs do not require too many soft skills. Technical skills transfer to other cultures very well so it is quite easy to transfer these. There are still plenty communication costs involved in off-shoring tech jobs, which is why STEM workers still make many times higher salaries in the US than in developing countries, but global pressure still suppresses wages.
The only way to really insulate more technical fields is through state sanctioned monopolistic practices such as unions. This works very well for the medical industry, because without their strict licensing practices we could be flooded with foreign doctors just like we are with H1Bs. It may not be a bad idea to at least create a licensing body for industries such as software development, but that could still limit technological progress.
The unfortunate truth is that in the case of STEM fields, what is best for these employees is not what is best for the country overall. Encouraging more people to go into slightly lower paying STEM jobs instead of banking, financing, law, etc. will help our country compete globally, even though it hurts the individual employees choosing lower compensating fields. The cheaper that we can build our IT infrastructure the better our economy can compete globally.
Luckily STEM workers are still very well paid. While I may be making over $200k per year if I had went into finance, I am perfectly happy with my low six digit salary in the midwest.
[The Cigarette Industry] fought tooth and nail to hide, obfuscate, deny, gloss over, etc... the truth. And in the end, they REALLY got it in the ass because of their actions.
In 2010, the combined profits of the six leading tobacco companies was U.S. $35.1 billion, equal to the combined profits of Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and McDonald’s in the same year. (Tobacco Industry Profits) It looks like the tobacco industry is doing just fine. They made a lot of money while manipulating public perception, and they are making a lot of money after losing that battle. By holding out and making as much profits as they could for as long as they could, it doesn't look like they sacrificed their future profitability at all.
So you are saying if someone should happen to get lucky that the state should take it away from them because it's not you?
No, he is saying that if someone should happen to get lucky then that person should still pay a portion of it back to the society that helped allow them to be lucky. If I won $10 million I sure wouldn't complain about paying $4 million in taxes. I don't complain about spending over $50k in taxes each year either, because I am also lucky enough to live in a large house with great schools and can buy almost anything I want within reason. I wouldn't have any of this without the society that I am giving back to, no matter how hard I may have worked for it.
It's not only the super rich that inherit things. Farms that have been in families for generations are being sold off to pay the taxes when the farmer tries to pass it to his children. These farms may have millions of dollars in the equipment alone so the state sees these kids as inheriting millions of dollars. These are not "lottery" winners. These are people that have worked a farm their entire lives only to have it ripped from their hands because of class-envy assholes like you think they are getting away with something. How 'bout trying to mind your own damn business for a change.
What does it matter if inherited wealth is land or just stock in a company? Oh the poor children just inherited a $10 million farm and can't pay the taxes. Give me a break; take your $6 million payout and say thank you. This isn't the 1800s. If you can't afford to live in the same area your parents lived in, you move. If wealthy people want their kids to be better off, teach them to become productive members of society like they were. Most people in the US do not want a feudal society where wealth continues to accumulate unabated.
I would be surprised if someone like Rush Limbaugh hasn't said something similar about Russia on their US based cable/radio news programs in the past few weeks. I'm sure both of our nations have their own crackpot news agencies.
My second semester database class consisted of just these four assignments: 1) Create a Database, 2) Create a Table, 3) Create Foreign Key Relationships, 4) Load Data into the Tables, 5) Create a Report.
Apparently they didn't require very good counting skills either.
My counting was just fine (see the numbers properly progressing from 1 to 5). My problem was inconsistencies in my writing, caused by remembering the fifth assignment while writing my comment but not properly revising the previous statement.
While this sounds like posturing that would never actually get passed, I really I hope I am wrong. I went to the University of Phoenix because I was working full time and night program CS degrees at real schools simply did not exist 5 years ago. I knew then that I would only pay for the degree if I was planning on getting a Masters degree at a real school right after. I even called two local schools to ensure they would admit graduate students with UoP undergrad degrees. (BTW, I am in my last semester of my Masters program now)
My UoP degree definitely helped with my career, but only because I was an experienced software developer long before I enrolled. It only helped because of ridiculous HR requirements for applicants with degrees only. The education was atrocious. My second semester database class consisted of just these four assignments: 1) Create a Database, 2) Create a Table, 3) Create Foreign Key Relationships, 4) Load Data into the Tables, 5) Create a Report. They even gave us the commands so all we needed to do was paste them into the console. This may be the most egregious example of the poor curriculum I can think of, but the rest of it was almost as bad.
My fellow students who didn't already know the material were struggling to understand it with no help in sight. I would help them on the forums and over emails, but I knew they would never get the necessary instruction to ever get hired in this field, let alone keep any job they weaseled their way into. It was really sad that they were spending potentially over $50k for a worthless degree. I never said anything to them because I did not want to risk being kicked out after spending so much money.
I hope the government really does start to do something. This problem was primarily caused by real universities that do not offer sufficient night programs for adult students, but it has progressed to the point where government intervention is necessary. These online schools really could provide decent educations if they were forced to. If their programs were decent they would fill a very large void in our country's education system, but in their current form they are nothing more than a parasite.
It's a disaster. It's pushing the majority of young children far too hard for their age
After reading a great deal about the countries who are improving their schools (in preparation for the schooling of my child), I don't think anyone should claim that our children are being pushed too hard. While we don't need to start pushing our children as hard as the South Koreans, our children are capable of far more than our schools give them credit for. But one reason it is hard to push our children to succeed is that they have parents at home validating that they don't even need to try and rise to the occasion.
Based on my experience with cousins and one of my brothers, I can in some small way empathize for parents who first understand that their "bright" 3rd graders are turning into average 6th graders. Different children hit the limits of their natural ability at different times (even the very bright ones will hit it sometime in college if they push themselves). Successful parents are able to push their kids to excel beyond their natural abilities (my wife's parents did that very well with her), but the poor parents just blame the school system or society.
I like how you assume she only does arithmetic. IT's that kind of ingrained cultural bias the article is talking about. Nothing in the sentence say arithmetic.
Uh, are you reading the same post that I am? All he mentioned was arithmetic:
My wife claims she is 'bad at math'. Yet she is a freeking human calculator and can figure most math out to 3 to 4 decimal digits in her head.
You do know what word arithmetic means right? In truth even calling it arithmetic isn't that accurate, it is better defined as elementary arithmetic (performing the four basic operations on real numbers).
My wife claims she is 'bad at math'. Yet she is a freeking human calculator and can figure most math out to 3 to 4 decimal digits in her head.
No conundrum, no contradiction. She's good at arithmetic.
No conundrum huh? She also figures out formulas then says 'I thought everyone could do that'. We teach people to think they are 'bad at math'. What we dont teach is 'practice makes perfect'. I think if I showed her linear algebra she would be doing some cool stuff. In fact I think I will.
Yes, there was no conundrum in your previous post. You may have just added additional information that creates a conundrum now, but nothing in your original post would lead anyone to believe your wife is as good at algebra / calculus / logic as she is at arithmetic.
In my experience women are actually *much* better at math than guys.
Growing up all the dudes had C/D's the girls all had A/B's. So I am not sure where 'bad at math' comes from.
Since almost everyone is bad at math, no one thinks about the vast majority of students who struggled with math class. They only remember the students who excelled at math. And for mostly cultural and perhaps some minor biological reasons, most of them are usually boys. So when people think of which gender is bad at math, they think of girls only because most of the very best math students they knew were boys. They don't think of the fact that the average math scores of the girls may have been higher than the average math scores of the boys.
Most people who are good at math also have very little ability to teach it, because it comes so naturally to them.
While many people think this, I doubt it is true. Math always came very naturally to me, and I was self taught in algebra and calculus years before either was taught to me in school (my parents weren't good at math, but they bought me used high school text books). But I always excelled at teaching math to others.
Once I started tutoring calculus I did have to approach teaching in a very different way. It was becoming too complex to teach easily, but I couldn't teach in the same way I learned because it came naturally to me. But because I understood the material so thoroughly, I was able to break the process down to a level where I could identify where the student's weaknesses were. This also happens to be the reason I actually started showing my work (which I always fought teachers on), just so I could help show other students how they could work through the problem in a similar way. If I skipped steps in my head it was too hard to explain things to them.
People who were never good at math probably got through school with tips and tricks from teachers. Often their knowledge of calculus ended with the power rule. These tactics help students get Bs on their tests, but they do not help build understanding. Someone like this will have a very hard time teaching anyone whose difficulties are even slightly different than their own (other than perhaps teaching them how to do shortcuts that don't teach anything but how to get through the class).
From my experience, most struggles that students have in math actually stem from a lack of prerequisite skills they never learned properly. Once I identified difficulties with Algebra and sometimes topics as basic as fractions, the problems they had with calculus started to melt away. The other major struggle was that students were never taught how to approach math properly, in a methodical way of breaking the problem down into smaller parts and solving them in steps.
I am obviously a big proponent of every student having a few tutors throughout their schooling to fill in the cracks and build a better foundation of knowledge to build on.
My interpretation is that there is enough confidence from the scientific community for anyone who is not a scientist researching the topic to accept the current understanding as fact. It doesn't mean they should think it is a fact, just that they should lead their life and form opinions based on the assumption that it is a fact.
Research should of course continue, probably until the end of time, but at a certain point the general population should no longer question the findings. They simply are not trained enough to form an opinion that differs from the general consensus.
Of all the economic statistics, the unemployment rate is the easiest to understand.
Well, I'm not sure if it is easier to understand than GDP, but yes it is pretty simple. But understanding what unemployment statistics say about the economy is not easy at all. And it is highly politicized. The manner in which unemployment is calculated has changed in the past (by Clinton in 1994 the last time), and it conveniently removed 4 million people from the monthly tally. We also have 6 different calculations for unemployment, and governments obviously only want to talk about U3 because it will always be the most flattering to whoever is in power.
Just because governments have been using the same political fiction for decades doesn't make it any less of a fiction.
Condemning the lifestyle of a man who lived in the 16th century (especially by modern standards) is pedantic. It's neither helping or caring for the dead person.
It was only brought up (by someone other than me) because someone was using Newton as an example of a brilliant scientist who was also religious. If you are going to try to use that argument to give validity to the idea that science and religion can coexist, you must also be prepared to defend that science and alchemy can coexist (along with defending the other crazy ideas Newton had).
The whole point of bringing up just how many crazy beliefs Newton had is to point out that in the context of the 16th century they weren't that crazy. Just like being a religious scientist in the 16th century isn't as silly as it is today. It isn't meant to discredit him in any way.
Any creed that requires the indoctrination of children for its survival is suspect.
Actually any creed that takes the effort to indoctrinate their children has a far greater likelihood of surviving the test of time. Look at how long today's religions have stuck around even after inventions like the printing press and discoveries like evolution. Even in today's society, it is the religions that are least flexible in their beliefs that are growing the fastest. More liberal religions are losing people in droves, mostly because they make the mistake of allowing children to form their own beliefs.
And in today's world, people who are able to form their own beliefs are very unlikely to stay religious.
So you're the arbiter of Newton's life choices. Seriously, grow up.
Get over yourself. Newton is arguably the smartest man to have ever lived, but he still had serious issues. If he lived in modern times, anyone who cared about him would have done their best to help him with his poor life choices. Helping people who have serious problems is not controlling, it is caring.
I walk up to a pregnant woman, stab her in the gut, kill the 'foetus'. I should only be charged with assault (or possibly attempted murder). Right?
Our legal system treats intent as an important concept. If the woman's intent is to keep the fetus until birth, then killing that fetus is considered murder. Once she no longer has that intent (which cannot be conclusively proven until she performs the procedure) then there is no loss of human life because their was no intent to create a human being.
And as far as I know, it is still only considered murder once the baby is old enough to survive outside its mother (with the aid of modern technology). I can't speak for all jurisdictions, but someone will usually only be charged with double murder if the pregnancy is in its last month.
Gay marriage a matter of human rights, just like mixed-race marriages were 40 years ago.
Nope nope nope. Marriage isn't a right - and is only wrapped up in politics because certain benefits are bestowed upon those who sign a contract stating they will be together for life. This would be such a non-issue if those benefits were no longer tied to marriage but to a binding contract that grants one person of your choosing those benefits. At what point do you say that denying marriage among multiple adults is an abuse of human rights, or what about brothers and sisters? How about your children or grand children? If we're going to throw out the whole foundation of morals based on religious beliefs - let's at least commit 100%.
Nope nope nope. Marriage is wrapped up in politics because it is a secular institution. Various religious organizations have placed additional spiritual meaning on it throughout the centuries, but it is at its core simply a legal recognition by society that a couple has formed a family. Just because the government allows religious figures to perform legally binding marriages does not mean that it is a religious institution. Judges with no religious affiliation marry people every day. My atheist brother in law married my wife and I (they are very close) and we are no less married than anyone married by a priest.
Okay, can you point me to some products that are described as meat and yet contain primarily fish? If you bought "meatballs" and found that they were made out of tuna, I imagine that you would be both surprised and shocked.
Truth is there are many places where Meat is used to just mean cow. The American Heart Administration has guidelines for Meat, Poultry, and Fish, so in this case they don't even consider chicken to be meat. But this is mostly a byproduct of Jewish traditions regarding what animals are considered clean. Since we have gained a better understanding of species differentiation, Rabbis have decided to consider chicken to be meat (even though it isn't a mammal), but fish is not. These strange religious rules are responsible for many people making a distinction between different types of animal flesh.
I'd like to argue this point further, but you're just wrong. Fish is a different category to meat.
There are sub-definitions of "meat" that do no include fish, just as there are sub-definitions of meat that include fruit. The word "meat" can even be used to describe non-food items.
But the standard Merriam-Webster definition of Meat is "the flesh of an animal used as food".
Not exactly. Typically, meat means the flesh of a mammal or bird. Every shop/restaurant I've been in has quite clearly separated meat and fish (except for the obvious surf'n'turf meals). After all, you wouldn't say "meat is fish" would you?
Fish is most definitely meat. Meat means the flesh of an animal. Some vegetarians are okay with eating fish though, and they are called pescetarians. Just because restaurants often put them in a different section doesn't mean it isn't meat. Many menus do the same thing to their steak section as well.
And what is that crap about you not saying "meat is fish"? I wouldn't say "meat is steak" or "meat is pork" either. This is just because fish, steak, pork, etc. are all subsets of meat. I wouldn't say "cars are hondas" either.
Actually, all of the women I have dated have been like that. For that matter most of the women I know are like that. The ones you describe are more creations of men in internet forums telling other men how women are.
While anyone saying women never pay is being ridiculous, so is anyone saying most women pay their own way while dating. The first site that popped up in a Google search showed that 83% of women either don't offer to pay or only offer with the expectation that the offer will be turned down. Unless you are using a dating site while filtering on liberal women, or dating inside a small circle of friends with a very liberal mindset, it is unlikely that you are going to come across many women who are willing to assist with paying for early dates. After a month or so women are far more likely to help start paying, but that usually only starts once a strong relationship has begun.
That said, women also spend far more money preparing for those dates. When you include things like makeup, hair maintenance, clothes, etc. I would be surprised if men actually pay more money overall during the dating process.
In STEM for example, there is a huge push over "WE NEED TO HIRE MORE FEMALE STEM WORKERS". This is of course, absurd. The STEM industry doesn't need more women anymore than it needs more men. STEM needs more qualified human beings capable of doing the job.
In many societies including Canada and the US, starting at a young age, men and women are encouraged to go down certain career paths.
You basically gave the exact reason why wanting to create more female STEM workers is not absurd. You admit we want more qualified human beings capable of doing the job. Then you admit we encourage women into certain career paths. So if we are guiding women into non-STEM careers, we are removing a large portion of the population from the training necessary to be capable of doing STEM jobs. That is the problem our society is trying to solve by creating more female STEM workers.
We will almost certainly never achieve parity because women will probably always be their children's primary care givers in the majority of cases, but many people thing more progress can be made.
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This works very well for the medical industry, because without their strict licensing practices we could be flooded with foreign doctors just like we are with H1Bs.
Sensible argument but completely wrong regarding the medical field. The US medical system is flooded with foreign doctors (with some exceptions, mostly in the highest earning specialties).
There is some bias towards the US-trained doctors, but not much; after all, no matter where you graduated the Medical School, you still have to pass the USMLE tests, go through a residency and obtain a Medical License.
There are certification steps necessary for doctors with foreign medical degrees to practice medicine in the US. This includes ECFMG Certification and state licensing. The medical industry does not completely block all foreign doctors, but it limits the numbers of incoming physicians in the same way that it restricts the number of incoming medical residencies.
The point I took away from this article is not that there is not a shortage of capable works. Instead, it's a shortage of capable workers willing to work at the salaries and rates being offered.
The full answer is that there is a shortage of capable workers willing to work at the salaries and rates necessary to keep the jobs in this country. The US had a huge head start in the IT field because most of this technology was invented here, but the benefit of that is slowly dwindling. It is similar to the manufacturing benefits we had when automation pioneers like Ford invented their processes in the US. But we are in a global marketplace so eventually all fields need to justify their compensation on a global scale.
If your position does not require a large amount of soft skills (which often don't transfer well between cultures), then you are unlikely to be shielded from global competition. And unlike Wall Street guys, corporate executives, sales, etc, most STEM jobs do not require too many soft skills. Technical skills transfer to other cultures very well so it is quite easy to transfer these. There are still plenty communication costs involved in off-shoring tech jobs, which is why STEM workers still make many times higher salaries in the US than in developing countries, but global pressure still suppresses wages.
The only way to really insulate more technical fields is through state sanctioned monopolistic practices such as unions. This works very well for the medical industry, because without their strict licensing practices we could be flooded with foreign doctors just like we are with H1Bs. It may not be a bad idea to at least create a licensing body for industries such as software development, but that could still limit technological progress.
The unfortunate truth is that in the case of STEM fields, what is best for these employees is not what is best for the country overall. Encouraging more people to go into slightly lower paying STEM jobs instead of banking, financing, law, etc. will help our country compete globally, even though it hurts the individual employees choosing lower compensating fields. The cheaper that we can build our IT infrastructure the better our economy can compete globally.
Luckily STEM workers are still very well paid. While I may be making over $200k per year if I had went into finance, I am perfectly happy with my low six digit salary in the midwest.
[The Cigarette Industry] fought tooth and nail to hide, obfuscate, deny, gloss over, etc ... the truth. And in the end, they REALLY got it in the ass because of their actions.
In 2010, the combined profits of the six leading tobacco companies was U.S. $35.1 billion, equal to the combined profits of Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and McDonald’s in the same year. (Tobacco Industry Profits) It looks like the tobacco industry is doing just fine. They made a lot of money while manipulating public perception, and they are making a lot of money after losing that battle. By holding out and making as much profits as they could for as long as they could, it doesn't look like they sacrificed their future profitability at all.
So you are saying if someone should happen to get lucky that the state should take it away from them because it's not you?
No, he is saying that if someone should happen to get lucky then that person should still pay a portion of it back to the society that helped allow them to be lucky. If I won $10 million I sure wouldn't complain about paying $4 million in taxes. I don't complain about spending over $50k in taxes each year either, because I am also lucky enough to live in a large house with great schools and can buy almost anything I want within reason. I wouldn't have any of this without the society that I am giving back to, no matter how hard I may have worked for it.
It's not only the super rich that inherit things. Farms that have been in families for generations are being sold off to pay the taxes when the farmer tries to pass it to his children. These farms may have millions of dollars in the equipment alone so the state sees these kids as inheriting millions of dollars. These are not "lottery" winners. These are people that have worked a farm their entire lives only to have it ripped from their hands because of class-envy assholes like you think they are getting away with something. How 'bout trying to mind your own damn business for a change.
What does it matter if inherited wealth is land or just stock in a company? Oh the poor children just inherited a $10 million farm and can't pay the taxes. Give me a break; take your $6 million payout and say thank you. This isn't the 1800s. If you can't afford to live in the same area your parents lived in, you move. If wealthy people want their kids to be better off, teach them to become productive members of society like they were. Most people in the US do not want a feudal society where wealth continues to accumulate unabated.
I would be surprised if someone like Rush Limbaugh hasn't said something similar about Russia on their US based cable/radio news programs in the past few weeks. I'm sure both of our nations have their own crackpot news agencies.
My second semester database class consisted of just these four assignments: 1) Create a Database, 2) Create a Table, 3) Create Foreign Key Relationships, 4) Load Data into the Tables, 5) Create a Report.
Apparently they didn't require very good counting skills either.
My counting was just fine (see the numbers properly progressing from 1 to 5). My problem was inconsistencies in my writing, caused by remembering the fifth assignment while writing my comment but not properly revising the previous statement.
While this sounds like posturing that would never actually get passed, I really I hope I am wrong. I went to the University of Phoenix because I was working full time and night program CS degrees at real schools simply did not exist 5 years ago. I knew then that I would only pay for the degree if I was planning on getting a Masters degree at a real school right after. I even called two local schools to ensure they would admit graduate students with UoP undergrad degrees. (BTW, I am in my last semester of my Masters program now)
My UoP degree definitely helped with my career, but only because I was an experienced software developer long before I enrolled. It only helped because of ridiculous HR requirements for applicants with degrees only. The education was atrocious. My second semester database class consisted of just these four assignments: 1) Create a Database, 2) Create a Table, 3) Create Foreign Key Relationships, 4) Load Data into the Tables, 5) Create a Report. They even gave us the commands so all we needed to do was paste them into the console. This may be the most egregious example of the poor curriculum I can think of, but the rest of it was almost as bad.
My fellow students who didn't already know the material were struggling to understand it with no help in sight. I would help them on the forums and over emails, but I knew they would never get the necessary instruction to ever get hired in this field, let alone keep any job they weaseled their way into. It was really sad that they were spending potentially over $50k for a worthless degree. I never said anything to them because I did not want to risk being kicked out after spending so much money.
I hope the government really does start to do something. This problem was primarily caused by real universities that do not offer sufficient night programs for adult students, but it has progressed to the point where government intervention is necessary. These online schools really could provide decent educations if they were forced to. If their programs were decent they would fill a very large void in our country's education system, but in their current form they are nothing more than a parasite.
It's a disaster. It's pushing the majority of young children far too hard for their age
After reading a great deal about the countries who are improving their schools (in preparation for the schooling of my child), I don't think anyone should claim that our children are being pushed too hard. While we don't need to start pushing our children as hard as the South Koreans, our children are capable of far more than our schools give them credit for. But one reason it is hard to push our children to succeed is that they have parents at home validating that they don't even need to try and rise to the occasion.
Based on my experience with cousins and one of my brothers, I can in some small way empathize for parents who first understand that their "bright" 3rd graders are turning into average 6th graders. Different children hit the limits of their natural ability at different times (even the very bright ones will hit it sometime in college if they push themselves). Successful parents are able to push their kids to excel beyond their natural abilities (my wife's parents did that very well with her), but the poor parents just blame the school system or society.
I like how you assume she only does arithmetic.
IT's that kind of ingrained cultural bias the article is talking about. Nothing in the sentence say arithmetic.
Uh, are you reading the same post that I am? All he mentioned was arithmetic:
My wife claims she is 'bad at math'. Yet she is a freeking human calculator and can figure most math out to 3 to 4 decimal digits in her head.
You do know what word arithmetic means right? In truth even calling it arithmetic isn't that accurate, it is better defined as elementary arithmetic (performing the four basic operations on real numbers).
No conundrum, no contradiction. She's good at arithmetic.
No conundrum huh? She also figures out formulas then says 'I thought everyone could do that'. We teach people to think they are 'bad at math'. What we dont teach is 'practice makes perfect'. I think if I showed her linear algebra she would be doing some cool stuff. In fact I think I will.
Yes, there was no conundrum in your previous post. You may have just added additional information that creates a conundrum now, but nothing in your original post would lead anyone to believe your wife is as good at algebra / calculus / logic as she is at arithmetic.
In my experience women are actually *much* better at math than guys.
Growing up all the dudes had C/D's the girls all had A/B's. So I am not sure where 'bad at math' comes from.
Since almost everyone is bad at math, no one thinks about the vast majority of students who struggled with math class. They only remember the students who excelled at math. And for mostly cultural and perhaps some minor biological reasons, most of them are usually boys. So when people think of which gender is bad at math, they think of girls only because most of the very best math students they knew were boys. They don't think of the fact that the average math scores of the girls may have been higher than the average math scores of the boys.
Most people who are good at math also have very little ability to teach it, because it comes so naturally to them.
While many people think this, I doubt it is true. Math always came very naturally to me, and I was self taught in algebra and calculus years before either was taught to me in school (my parents weren't good at math, but they bought me used high school text books). But I always excelled at teaching math to others.
Once I started tutoring calculus I did have to approach teaching in a very different way. It was becoming too complex to teach easily, but I couldn't teach in the same way I learned because it came naturally to me. But because I understood the material so thoroughly, I was able to break the process down to a level where I could identify where the student's weaknesses were. This also happens to be the reason I actually started showing my work (which I always fought teachers on), just so I could help show other students how they could work through the problem in a similar way. If I skipped steps in my head it was too hard to explain things to them.
People who were never good at math probably got through school with tips and tricks from teachers. Often their knowledge of calculus ended with the power rule. These tactics help students get Bs on their tests, but they do not help build understanding. Someone like this will have a very hard time teaching anyone whose difficulties are even slightly different than their own (other than perhaps teaching them how to do shortcuts that don't teach anything but how to get through the class).
From my experience, most struggles that students have in math actually stem from a lack of prerequisite skills they never learned properly. Once I identified difficulties with Algebra and sometimes topics as basic as fractions, the problems they had with calculus started to melt away. The other major struggle was that students were never taught how to approach math properly, in a methodical way of breaking the problem down into smaller parts and solving them in steps.
I am obviously a big proponent of every student having a few tutors throughout their schooling to fill in the cracks and build a better foundation of knowledge to build on.
My interpretation is that there is enough confidence from the scientific community for anyone who is not a scientist researching the topic to accept the current understanding as fact. It doesn't mean they should think it is a fact, just that they should lead their life and form opinions based on the assumption that it is a fact.
Research should of course continue, probably until the end of time, but at a certain point the general population should no longer question the findings. They simply are not trained enough to form an opinion that differs from the general consensus.
Of all the economic statistics, the unemployment rate is the easiest to understand.
Well, I'm not sure if it is easier to understand than GDP, but yes it is pretty simple. But understanding what unemployment statistics say about the economy is not easy at all. And it is highly politicized. The manner in which unemployment is calculated has changed in the past (by Clinton in 1994 the last time), and it conveniently removed 4 million people from the monthly tally. We also have 6 different calculations for unemployment, and governments obviously only want to talk about U3 because it will always be the most flattering to whoever is in power.
Just because governments have been using the same political fiction for decades doesn't make it any less of a fiction.
Condemning the lifestyle of a man who lived in the 16th century (especially by modern standards) is pedantic. It's neither helping or caring for the dead person.
It was only brought up (by someone other than me) because someone was using Newton as an example of a brilliant scientist who was also religious. If you are going to try to use that argument to give validity to the idea that science and religion can coexist, you must also be prepared to defend that science and alchemy can coexist (along with defending the other crazy ideas Newton had).
The whole point of bringing up just how many crazy beliefs Newton had is to point out that in the context of the 16th century they weren't that crazy. Just like being a religious scientist in the 16th century isn't as silly as it is today. It isn't meant to discredit him in any way.
Any creed that requires the indoctrination of children for its survival is suspect.
Actually any creed that takes the effort to indoctrinate their children has a far greater likelihood of surviving the test of time. Look at how long today's religions have stuck around even after inventions like the printing press and discoveries like evolution. Even in today's society, it is the religions that are least flexible in their beliefs that are growing the fastest. More liberal religions are losing people in droves, mostly because they make the mistake of allowing children to form their own beliefs.
And in today's world, people who are able to form their own beliefs are very unlikely to stay religious.
So you're the arbiter of Newton's life choices. Seriously, grow up.
Get over yourself. Newton is arguably the smartest man to have ever lived, but he still had serious issues. If he lived in modern times, anyone who cared about him would have done their best to help him with his poor life choices. Helping people who have serious problems is not controlling, it is caring.
I walk up to a pregnant woman, stab her in the gut, kill the 'foetus'. I should only be charged with assault (or possibly attempted murder). Right?
Our legal system treats intent as an important concept. If the woman's intent is to keep the fetus until birth, then killing that fetus is considered murder. Once she no longer has that intent (which cannot be conclusively proven until she performs the procedure) then there is no loss of human life because their was no intent to create a human being.
And as far as I know, it is still only considered murder once the baby is old enough to survive outside its mother (with the aid of modern technology). I can't speak for all jurisdictions, but someone will usually only be charged with double murder if the pregnancy is in its last month.
Gay marriage a matter of human rights, just like mixed-race marriages were 40 years ago.
Nope nope nope. Marriage isn't a right - and is only wrapped up in politics because certain benefits are bestowed upon those who sign a contract stating they will be together for life. This would be such a non-issue if those benefits were no longer tied to marriage but to a binding contract that grants one person of your choosing those benefits. At what point do you say that denying marriage among multiple adults is an abuse of human rights, or what about brothers and sisters? How about your children or grand children? If we're going to throw out the whole foundation of morals based on religious beliefs - let's at least commit 100%.
Nope nope nope. Marriage is wrapped up in politics because it is a secular institution. Various religious organizations have placed additional spiritual meaning on it throughout the centuries, but it is at its core simply a legal recognition by society that a couple has formed a family. Just because the government allows religious figures to perform legally binding marriages does not mean that it is a religious institution. Judges with no religious affiliation marry people every day. My atheist brother in law married my wife and I (they are very close) and we are no less married than anyone married by a priest.
Okay, can you point me to some products that are described as meat and yet contain primarily fish? If you bought "meatballs" and found that they were made out of tuna, I imagine that you would be both surprised and shocked.
How about Crab Meat? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Truth is there are many places where Meat is used to just mean cow. The American Heart Administration has guidelines for Meat, Poultry, and Fish, so in this case they don't even consider chicken to be meat. But this is mostly a byproduct of Jewish traditions regarding what animals are considered clean. Since we have gained a better understanding of species differentiation, Rabbis have decided to consider chicken to be meat (even though it isn't a mammal), but fish is not. These strange religious rules are responsible for many people making a distinction between different types of animal flesh.
I'd like to argue this point further, but you're just wrong. Fish is a different category to meat.
There are sub-definitions of "meat" that do no include fish, just as there are sub-definitions of meat that include fruit. The word "meat" can even be used to describe non-food items.
But the standard Merriam-Webster definition of Meat is "the flesh of an animal used as food".
Not exactly. Typically, meat means the flesh of a mammal or bird. Every shop/restaurant I've been in has quite clearly separated meat and fish (except for the obvious surf'n'turf meals). After all, you wouldn't say "meat is fish" would you?
Fish is most definitely meat. Meat means the flesh of an animal. Some vegetarians are okay with eating fish though, and they are called pescetarians. Just because restaurants often put them in a different section doesn't mean it isn't meat. Many menus do the same thing to their steak section as well.
And what is that crap about you not saying "meat is fish"? I wouldn't say "meat is steak" or "meat is pork" either. This is just because fish, steak, pork, etc. are all subsets of meat. I wouldn't say "cars are hondas" either.
You're not a vegetarian, you're an omnivore who has chosen to avoid meats.
Uh, you just defined what a vegetarian is. He isn't claiming to be a herbivore.
Actually, all of the women I have dated have been like that. For that matter most of the women I know are like that. The ones you describe are more creations of men in internet forums telling other men how women are.
While anyone saying women never pay is being ridiculous, so is anyone saying most women pay their own way while dating. The first site that popped up in a Google search showed that 83% of women either don't offer to pay or only offer with the expectation that the offer will be turned down. Unless you are using a dating site while filtering on liberal women, or dating inside a small circle of friends with a very liberal mindset, it is unlikely that you are going to come across many women who are willing to assist with paying for early dates. After a month or so women are far more likely to help start paying, but that usually only starts once a strong relationship has begun.
That said, women also spend far more money preparing for those dates. When you include things like makeup, hair maintenance, clothes, etc. I would be surprised if men actually pay more money overall during the dating process.
In STEM for example, there is a huge push over "WE NEED TO HIRE MORE FEMALE STEM WORKERS". This is of course, absurd. The STEM industry doesn't need more women anymore than it needs more men. STEM needs more qualified human beings capable of doing the job.
In many societies including Canada and the US, starting at a young age, men and women are encouraged to go down certain career paths.
You basically gave the exact reason why wanting to create more female STEM workers is not absurd. You admit we want more qualified human beings capable of doing the job. Then you admit we encourage women into certain career paths. So if we are guiding women into non-STEM careers, we are removing a large portion of the population from the training necessary to be capable of doing STEM jobs. That is the problem our society is trying to solve by creating more female STEM workers.
We will almost certainly never achieve parity because women will probably always be their children's primary care givers in the majority of cases, but many people thing more progress can be made.