Airlines could do a lot to reduce carbon emissions, and also encourage better public health, by requiring passengers at checkin to stand on a large weighing platform along with their bags, and pay for the total weight. I strenuously object to subsidising the fares of obese people.
The rule at the airlines is now that if you can't comfortably fit in your own seat without spilling over, then you have to buy two tickets. The seats are small enough that, I can assure you, if you do fit in them, then you're not costing them anything extra if you're heavy, because you can't be that heavy and fit. It used to be that if the flight wasn't full, they didn't care... they'd just let you take two seats, and they'd even give a passenger a seat-belt extender if needed. But those days are gone. The post 9/11 era is reality, and they're going to put as many people in that plane as they can, and squeeze every single dime out of them. And while people complain about that, frankly, it's the only way they're making any money. The checked-baggage fee was the difference between a profit and a loss for Southwest airlines last quarter.
And yes, I see this all the time, working at an airport.
It's called progressive taxation, and it's been a foundational principal of our tax system since the income tax was invented. And that's as it should be.
Absolutely not. Thinking like yours is one of the reasons Americans fought so hard against a income tax in the first place. You have this screwed up idea that because someone makes more money than you do, that somehow, you deserve some of it.
Just how much of what another man earns is your "fair share"?
"Bush couldn't read the words, even *with* the teleprompter."
That's utterly stupid. Fine, you hate George W. Bush. We get it. But knock off the "he was too stupid to speak" meme. It's bullshit, and you know it. Do you actually listen to speeches from other presidents? Bush's performance in public speaking is no worse than LBJ or Truman or Bush the Elder, and at times even, Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter couldn't pronounce "nuclear" either.
Replace a plutocracy with a more socialist-minded system, ask cubans, chinese, russians, and many other nations how well that shit worked out for them.
Yeah, ask those poor Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finish, Icelandic and mostly ask the French. Poor lost souls. Oh the humanity.
And every one of your examples are backpeddling from the social democrat model... some more than others. Every single one of them are cutting budgets, benefits, and freeing up their markets. Even Sweden refused to get involved in the sale of Volvo. They wanted to leave it strictly to the market.
None of them are ever going to be the wide-open economy that we had, and will have again. But they've also largely decided that they may have overdid it on the safety net. Someone has to pay for that stuff, after all.
"Freedom of the press only applies to the press that the government can directly or indirectly influence and control."
Freedom of the press doesn't include access to classified documents. Even free governments have to keep some things secret for a time. Anyone that honestly doesn't believe this should never be given authority over American lives.
When the system for legislation gets so confusing that not even the people passing the bills can keep it straight, I think it shows that there is some fundamental flaw in the system, or it didn't scale well or something.
Do we have to go back to Schoolhouse Rock?
I've been looking at the constitutions of other countries, past and present, and ironically, I think the best solution to this was actually included in the Confederate constitution during the Civil War. They banned the practice of sneaking in pet projects on the back of a bigger ones:
"Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title."
Keeping legislation to one topic both simplifies the process and eliminates logrolling, at least outright. If we were to vote on a new round of amendments to the Constitution, this would be near the top of my list. I'm so tired of reading about a slew of pet projects on the back of a bill completely unrelated to the subject... things like grants for local agencies tucked into a defense bill.
Clue: We don't give a shit what the rest of the world thinks. He's out of touch with mainstream America, and that's all that counts.
Thanks for playing.
You're being hammed with troll mods, but you're mostly correct. The country... most of it, anyway... really doesn't give a rats ass what the rest of the world thinks. "Passing the Global Test" just doesn't concern us all that much. There are more George Bush's than John Kerry's in America. Just the way it is. Our independence is important to us, and frankly, the evidence for this abounds... refusal to ratify the League of Nations, the Law of the Sea treaty, the international criminal court... etc etc. Our enthusiasm for the UN was pretty short lived, and historically, out of character for us ("No entangling alliances" - George Washington).
HBI may have put it bluntly, but he's basically right.
So what are the laws concerning data resident on vessels under a foreign flag ?
Seems like a nice way to get pirate-bay like content really close to the US backbone.
If they're doing this to host pirated content, then this is a really stupid idea, becuae it's easier for authorties to get to them. A land-side agency like the FBI needs a warrant to search a premises and seize stuff. The Coast Guard has much more leeway to board and search ships than the FBI could ever dream of having over some server farm.
My biggest criticism of these fools is that they tried to out-organize what is obviously a much larger crowd at Digg. Digg has been pretty leftish, especially since the 2nd Bush term. So trying to change that is kind of foolish. If you don't like the way the site is or the kind of people that run and use it... go elsewhere.
Got any citations to back that up? Go do your own study, then you'll be allowed to spout that shit.
If you think there aren't similar groups on the left that try to bury things they don't like then you're either extremely naive, or you're simply not honest enough to admit how partisian you are.
But if you're missing the give and take of the classroom, then you're missing out on vital elements of an education.
Most classrooms have no give and take.
True, some of them are boring as chalk, and it's simply an exercise in the class listening to an instructor read from a book for two hours. I've had those classes. And no matter where you go... Harvard or Easy-to-get-into-StateU.... your freshman classes are mostly going to be taught by grad assistants anyway. But as you move along and take higher level classes, you WILL start getting ones with an instructor or professor that gives a damn about what he's doing, and not only wants to impart knowledge to his students, but some wisdom too. And that's what you're missing out on when you do everything online.
Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, so seeing him say that university isn't necessary is a little unsurprising.
Yes, extraordinary people can succeed without college. Steve Jobs did it too. But the fact is that most people aren't extraordinary, and most people with a college degree end up better off than those without one.
I'm 100% with on the issue of the higher education bubble. The costs involved are in no way justified by reality... there's just no way to stretch supply and demand to explain both the ridiculous costs and the way the system is rigged to artificially raise those costs.
One of the newspaper pundits with an economics background... maybe Thomas Sowell, I'm not sure... was arguing against a proposed grant to all parents for college. Someone in Congress was tossing around the idea of sending every set a parents $5000 per child to help with college costs. The pundit argued that if you did that, nothing would be helped, because what would happen is that every college would just raise their tuition by $5000. I think he was probably right about that.
UCLA rounds out the three in top 25 rankings. Caltech is also perennially in that list, but enrollment-wise, it's pretty small, while the big three manage the feat with far greater numbers of students (which is supposed to make rankings harder, as they less people you admit, the more selective you are). The big 3 have pretty large numbers of students for elite schools, so while I'm a critic of rankings like those of U.S. News, you can't deny that the Cal schools are doing a pretty good job.
Caltech, being a science and tech school, also tends to get left out of these discussions as well, and perhaps that isn't right. Looking at other exclusive specialty schools, with low rates of admission and high standards.... Caltech, MIT, the military academies.... you can't really argue that the education they're offering is of lesser quality than a Berkeley or a Princeton or a UVa.
Keep in mind who we're talking about when it comes to predictions here.
There's absolutely no doubt that the web is already changing education and revolutionizing it. But there's no substitute for actually going to a class in person... with other learners and a teacher in front of you... for much of your formal education.
Anyone can read the Iliad on their own, or teach themselves HTML, or read the words of critics or teachers on a screen. But if you're missing the give and take of the classroom, then you're missing out on vital elements of an education.
"He that teaches himself has a fool for his master" - Ben Franklin
I know they have some serious water supply problems in Africa... so... thoughts on just how hard it would be to tow this thing there? What are the challenges beyond boat power and grappling such a large yet fragile mass? How much would melt by the time it arrived?
Well, this is true for lots of areas, not just Africa. If Australia suddenly had a LOT more water, look at all that western land they could irrigate, a'la California. The problem with just towing it is that even if you get most of it where you want, you still have the problems of getting the water ashore, and of coastal temperatures dropping rapidly.... but temporarily... and affecting local sea life.
The better thing then would be to build more coastal desalinators and simply pump the fresh water inland via pipes. By the time you finish with the expense of continually towing ices, breaking it up, moving it ashore, etc, you might have enough to just build a plant and essentially do the same thing. To compensate for the lost salt, I suppose you could send a C-130 to where the glacier is melting and just start spreading the salt left over from the plant process.
Who knows if all that is feasible, but since we do lots of desalinization already, I'd like to see someone address it.
Interesting result. Certainly isn't the case at my local University. I do wonder about the demographic of the surveyed college? For example are they fairly wealthy?...
As I said, I am deeply curious how rich these kids are.
UVa is a so-called "public Ivy". It's consistently rated in national Top 25 rankings every single year. Its competitors are schools like the Ivy's, U. of Chicago, the big 3 in California, Northwestern, etc. They're as selective as any Ivy, and so they're attracting the same kind of affluent students. There have been some complaints in the state of Virginia that UVa prefers out of state "stars" to some of its own better students (whether or not that's actually true, I don't know). But most UVa students, academic-wise and income-wise, wouldn't be out of place in any Ivy school. UVa has more in common with Brown or Dartmouth than they do with, say, Penn State.
So he had practice ripping off the public to line his pockets.
Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer that relied on federal subsidies. JFK's family not only made money from illicit activities, they maintained their fortune with sweet favors from the government.
I think cities that foot the bill for stadium owners are downright stupid, but it's not as if Bush was the only one to get that kind of deal. All of them do. And you make it sound like he's the only one that's ever profited from stupid government policies.
He's a nice guy. Soft spoken, almost shy. Not someone I'd consider a fame whore.
Who says you have to act like David Lee Roth or Lady Gaga to be a fame whore? Greta Garbo was quiet and famously said "I want to be let alone", and yet she chose a profession that mandated fame and public exposure.
It could be that he's simply not an outlandish fame whore.
Soldiers always want more war - that is not what is always wanted by society at large.
In 11 years of posting here, that's one of the dumbest things I've ever read here. If you really believe that, then you don't know a damn thing about soldiers.
The people behind Nixon were the same people behind Reagan, and Bush1, and Bush2. You can look at group pictures and litterally see these same people standing behind the frontman.
And?
Obama has Clinton carry-overs. Clinton had Carter carry-overs. Carter had LBJ carry-overs. JFK/LBJ had FDR carry-overs. And some of those administrations had guys that had White House time going back 40 years.
When a President enters office, he wants some seasoned hands with him. That means people that have served in previous administrations. There's nothing sinister or conspiratorial about that. That's just common sense. One of the things Clinton suffered from his first two years was having more green rookies than guys like Lloyd Bentsen who actually knew what the hell was going on. Plus, since Republicans have won more often than Democrats in the White House since 1970, there's a lot more guys with experience working there on the GOP side. You want to bring in some fresh blood, but at that level, it's more important to have experience.
Alex Jones has an interesting theory: Wikileaks is actually a false flag project by the government to (1) leak information and then (2) use that to justify why only people with Internet Licenses should be allowed to have websites.
I think AJ is full of shit too, but it's an interesting thought. Sounds like something the 1920s-era National Socialists would invent.
I don't think there's a conspiracy here at all... just a case of Bradley Manning's ego running wild (when he gets to Ft. Leavenworth, I wonder if he'll think it was worth it?), but if there was any conspiracy to leak the documents, then it's far more likely that an intelligence agency did it to pressure Pakistan, as many docs purportedly implicate the Pakistani military and intelligence services of aiding Al Qaeda on the side.
Slashdot Mirror
Airlines could do a lot to reduce carbon emissions, and also encourage better public health, by requiring passengers at checkin to stand on a large weighing platform along with their bags, and pay for the total weight. I strenuously object to subsidising the fares of obese people.
The rule at the airlines is now that if you can't comfortably fit in your own seat without spilling over, then you have to buy two tickets. The seats are small enough that, I can assure you, if you do fit in them, then you're not costing them anything extra if you're heavy, because you can't be that heavy and fit. It used to be that if the flight wasn't full, they didn't care... they'd just let you take two seats, and they'd even give a passenger a seat-belt extender if needed. But those days are gone. The post 9/11 era is reality, and they're going to put as many people in that plane as they can, and squeeze every single dime out of them. And while people complain about that, frankly, it's the only way they're making any money. The checked-baggage fee was the difference between a profit and a loss for Southwest airlines last quarter.
And yes, I see this all the time, working at an airport.
It's called progressive taxation, and it's been a foundational principal of our tax system since the income tax was invented. And that's as it should be.
Absolutely not. Thinking like yours is one of the reasons Americans fought so hard against a income tax in the first place. You have this screwed up idea that because someone makes more money than you do, that somehow, you deserve some of it.
Just how much of what another man earns is your "fair share"?
"Bush couldn't read the words, even *with* the teleprompter."
That's utterly stupid. Fine, you hate George W. Bush. We get it. But knock off the "he was too stupid to speak" meme. It's bullshit, and you know it. Do you actually listen to speeches from other presidents? Bush's performance in public speaking is no worse than LBJ or Truman or Bush the Elder, and at times even, Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter couldn't pronounce "nuclear" either.
Most Americans don't watch Fox News.
That's funny. They have more viewers than all of their competitors combined.
But yeah, no one watches them.
Better come up with another excuse for social-democracy working so much better than capitalism.
If that's the case, then why are they moving away from it?
Replace a plutocracy with a more socialist-minded system, ask cubans, chinese, russians, and many other nations how well that shit worked out for them.
Yeah, ask those poor Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finish, Icelandic and mostly ask the French. Poor lost souls. Oh the humanity.
And every one of your examples are backpeddling from the social democrat model... some more than others. Every single one of them are cutting budgets, benefits, and freeing up their markets. Even Sweden refused to get involved in the sale of Volvo. They wanted to leave it strictly to the market.
None of them are ever going to be the wide-open economy that we had, and will have again. But they've also largely decided that they may have overdid it on the safety net. Someone has to pay for that stuff, after all.
"Freedom of the press only applies to the press that the government can directly or indirectly influence and control."
Freedom of the press doesn't include access to classified documents. Even free governments have to keep some things secret for a time. Anyone that honestly doesn't believe this should never be given authority over American lives.
When the system for legislation gets so confusing that not even the people passing the bills can keep it straight, I think it shows that there is some fundamental flaw in the system, or it didn't scale well or something.
Do we have to go back to Schoolhouse Rock?
I've been looking at the constitutions of other countries, past and present, and ironically, I think the best solution to this was actually included in the Confederate constitution during the Civil War. They banned the practice of sneaking in pet projects on the back of a bigger ones:
"Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title."
Keeping legislation to one topic both simplifies the process and eliminates logrolling, at least outright. If we were to vote on a new round of amendments to the Constitution, this would be near the top of my list. I'm so tired of reading about a slew of pet projects on the back of a bill completely unrelated to the subject... things like grants for local agencies tucked into a defense bill.
Clue: We don't give a shit what the rest of the world thinks. He's out of touch with mainstream America, and that's all that counts.
Thanks for playing.
You're being hammed with troll mods, but you're mostly correct. The country... most of it, anyway... really doesn't give a rats ass what the rest of the world thinks. "Passing the Global Test" just doesn't concern us all that much. There are more George Bush's than John Kerry's in America. Just the way it is. Our independence is important to us, and frankly, the evidence for this abounds... refusal to ratify the League of Nations, the Law of the Sea treaty, the international criminal court... etc etc. Our enthusiasm for the UN was pretty short lived, and historically, out of character for us ("No entangling alliances" - George Washington).
HBI may have put it bluntly, but he's basically right.
Except that you've all built up a narrative of what you think mainstream america should be, not what it is.
Wow. A PDF from Media Matters saying that the US is a liberal country and not a conservative one. Well, now I'm convinced.
So what are the laws concerning data resident on vessels under a foreign flag ?
Seems like a nice way to get pirate-bay like content really close to the US backbone.
If they're doing this to host pirated content, then this is a really stupid idea, becuae it's easier for authorties to get to them. A land-side agency like the FBI needs a warrant to search a premises and seize stuff. The Coast Guard has much more leeway to board and search ships than the FBI could ever dream of having over some server farm.
My biggest criticism of these fools is that they tried to out-organize what is obviously a much larger crowd at Digg. Digg has been pretty leftish, especially since the 2nd Bush term. So trying to change that is kind of foolish. If you don't like the way the site is or the kind of people that run and use it... go elsewhere.
Both sides were doing it
Got any citations to back that up? Go do your own study, then you'll be allowed to spout that shit.
If you think there aren't similar groups on the left that try to bury things they don't like then you're either extremely naive, or you're simply not honest enough to admit how partisian you are.
Most classrooms have no give and take.
True, some of them are boring as chalk, and it's simply an exercise in the class listening to an instructor read from a book for two hours. I've had those classes. And no matter where you go... Harvard or Easy-to-get-into-StateU.... your freshman classes are mostly going to be taught by grad assistants anyway. But as you move along and take higher level classes, you WILL start getting ones with an instructor or professor that gives a damn about what he's doing, and not only wants to impart knowledge to his students, but some wisdom too. And that's what you're missing out on when you do everything online.
Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, so seeing him say that university isn't necessary is a little unsurprising.
Yes, extraordinary people can succeed without college. Steve Jobs did it too. But the fact is that most people aren't extraordinary, and most people with a college degree end up better off than those without one.
I'm 100% with on the issue of the higher education bubble. The costs involved are in no way justified by reality... there's just no way to stretch supply and demand to explain both the ridiculous costs and the way the system is rigged to artificially raise those costs.
One of the newspaper pundits with an economics background... maybe Thomas Sowell, I'm not sure... was arguing against a proposed grant to all parents for college. Someone in Congress was tossing around the idea of sending every set a parents $5000 per child to help with college costs. The pundit argued that if you did that, nothing would be helped, because what would happen is that every college would just raise their tuition by $5000. I think he was probably right about that.
UCLA rounds out the three in top 25 rankings. Caltech is also perennially in that list, but enrollment-wise, it's pretty small, while the big three manage the feat with far greater numbers of students (which is supposed to make rankings harder, as they less people you admit, the more selective you are). The big 3 have pretty large numbers of students for elite schools, so while I'm a critic of rankings like those of U.S. News, you can't deny that the Cal schools are doing a pretty good job.
Caltech, being a science and tech school, also tends to get left out of these discussions as well, and perhaps that isn't right. Looking at other exclusive specialty schools, with low rates of admission and high standards.... Caltech, MIT, the military academies.... you can't really argue that the education they're offering is of lesser quality than a Berkeley or a Princeton or a UVa.
Keep in mind who we're talking about when it comes to predictions here.
There's absolutely no doubt that the web is already changing education and revolutionizing it. But there's no substitute for actually going to a class in person... with other learners and a teacher in front of you... for much of your formal education.
Anyone can read the Iliad on their own, or teach themselves HTML, or read the words of critics or teachers on a screen. But if you're missing the give and take of the classroom, then you're missing out on vital elements of an education.
"He that teaches himself has a fool for his master" - Ben Franklin
I know they have some serious water supply problems in Africa ... so ... thoughts on just how hard it would be to tow this thing there? What are the challenges beyond boat power and grappling such a large yet fragile mass? How much would melt by the time it arrived?
Well, this is true for lots of areas, not just Africa. If Australia suddenly had a LOT more water, look at all that western land they could irrigate, a'la California. The problem with just towing it is that even if you get most of it where you want, you still have the problems of getting the water ashore, and of coastal temperatures dropping rapidly.... but temporarily... and affecting local sea life.
The better thing then would be to build more coastal desalinators and simply pump the fresh water inland via pipes. By the time you finish with the expense of continually towing ices, breaking it up, moving it ashore, etc, you might have enough to just build a plant and essentially do the same thing. To compensate for the lost salt, I suppose you could send a C-130 to where the glacier is melting and just start spreading the salt left over from the plant process.
Who knows if all that is feasible, but since we do lots of desalinization already, I'd like to see someone address it.
Interesting result. Certainly isn't the case at my local University. I do wonder about the demographic of the surveyed college? For example are they fairly wealthy? ...
As I said, I am deeply curious how rich these kids are.
UVa is a so-called "public Ivy". It's consistently rated in national Top 25 rankings every single year. Its competitors are schools like the Ivy's, U. of Chicago, the big 3 in California, Northwestern, etc. They're as selective as any Ivy, and so they're attracting the same kind of affluent students. There have been some complaints in the state of Virginia that UVa prefers out of state "stars" to some of its own better students (whether or not that's actually true, I don't know). But most UVa students, academic-wise and income-wise, wouldn't be out of place in any Ivy school. UVa has more in common with Brown or Dartmouth than they do with, say, Penn State.
Got the city to build a new stadium
So he had practice ripping off the public to line his pockets.
Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer that relied on federal subsidies. JFK's family not only made money from illicit activities, they maintained their fortune with sweet favors from the government.
I think cities that foot the bill for stadium owners are downright stupid, but it's not as if Bush was the only one to get that kind of deal. All of them do. And you make it sound like he's the only one that's ever profited from stupid government policies.
He's a nice guy. Soft spoken, almost shy. Not someone I'd consider a fame whore.
Who says you have to act like David Lee Roth or Lady Gaga to be a fame whore? Greta Garbo was quiet and famously said "I want to be let alone", and yet she chose a profession that mandated fame and public exposure.
It could be that he's simply not an outlandish fame whore.
Soldiers always want more war - that is not what is always wanted by society at large.
In 11 years of posting here, that's one of the dumbest things I've ever read here. If you really believe that, then you don't know a damn thing about soldiers.
The people behind Nixon were the same people behind Reagan, and Bush1, and Bush2. You can look at group pictures and litterally see these same people standing behind the frontman.
And?
Obama has Clinton carry-overs. Clinton had Carter carry-overs. Carter had LBJ carry-overs. JFK/LBJ had FDR carry-overs. And some of those administrations had guys that had White House time going back 40 years.
When a President enters office, he wants some seasoned hands with him. That means people that have served in previous administrations. There's nothing sinister or conspiratorial about that. That's just common sense. One of the things Clinton suffered from his first two years was having more green rookies than guys like Lloyd Bentsen who actually knew what the hell was going on. Plus, since Republicans have won more often than Democrats in the White House since 1970, there's a lot more guys with experience working there on the GOP side. You want to bring in some fresh blood, but at that level, it's more important to have experience.
Alex Jones has an interesting theory: Wikileaks is actually a false flag project by the government to (1) leak information and then (2) use that to justify why only people with Internet Licenses should be allowed to have websites.
I think AJ is full of shit too, but it's an interesting thought.
Sounds like something the 1920s-era National Socialists would invent.
I don't think there's a conspiracy here at all... just a case of Bradley Manning's ego running wild (when he gets to Ft. Leavenworth, I wonder if he'll think it was worth it?), but if there was any conspiracy to leak the documents, then it's far more likely that an intelligence agency did it to pressure Pakistan, as many docs purportedly implicate the Pakistani military and intelligence services of aiding Al Qaeda on the side.