Idiot. The vast majority of Federal spending goes to the DoD, Medicare, and Social Security. Frankly, the major constituents for all of these are core Republican voters.
Eh, no. The GOP backs military spending for sure, but if they even mention bringing SS Medicare under control, out come the "push grandma over a cliff" commercials from Democrats. Entitlements are the third rail of politics. Touch them, and the old will punish you. And when they did, they voted for Democrats.
The truth is, we need to drastically cut and/or restructure all three. We have a military so expensive we can't afford it (and by making rational choices we could cut the DOD budget in half and not be any less safe), and we have entitlements that will either have to be slashed, or supported with Weimar Republic-like printing presses. The fantasy land we're living in currently... all the guns and butter you like, bill me later... simply can't keep continuing.
I can see states like Mississippi, Alabama doing poorly because they are run by Republicans and republicans hate spending money on kids. (Yes I just heard a guy on MSNBC say that last night.) But California is a Democrat-run state. Their students should be the best and brightest and most well-funded. Like Democrat-run Maryland. Hmmmm.
(Note: I'm being sarcastic. I think Democrats suck just as badly as Republicans. None of them know how to run anything.... not the schools, not the MVA, not the Amtrak, nor the post office.)
Not only is it a statement on the fallacy of the superiority of "progressive" regimes in schooling, but in funding as well. Utah spends far, far less per pupil, and gets much better results. Success in education comes from, first and foremost, an appreciation of getting an education, and second, the willingness to work for it. You'll get better results with a single, good teacher with nothing but a piece of chalk and a chalkboard, teaching a class of eager students, then you will with any expensive computerized, state of the art classroom that's been staffed with some guy waiting for his retirement age and a class of kids that don't give a damn.
Unlike Canada, the news in the US no longer has to present a balanced viewpoint.
Good, I prefer it that way. Know why? Because the "balanced viewpoint" was always fake before. Walter Duranty was Stalin's mouthpiece at the NY Times. Walter Cronkite conducted an anti-Vietnam campaign in his position at CBS, and on the eve of the biggest defeat the US forces ever dealt to the North Vietnamese the day after Tet.
I much prefer a British type press system where you know where your newspapers and stations stand. Quality of reporting can go hand in hand with an editorial viewpoint if done correctly. Both the Telegraph and the Guardian... both 180 from each other in viewpoint... still do good journalism. Our "balance" was an illusion and a farce. I may not like MSNBC, but they have the virtue of being more honest than NBC, which tries to pretend that they're centrist and above it all.
Russia seems to be more concerned that the US would be putting a strategic asset in part of the "near abroad".
That's precisely what this comes down to. Russia still resents the independence of countries like Poland and the Czechs, and dreams of controlling them like puppet states once more.
What do you think the USA would do if Russia began installing a "Missile Defense System" in Cuba and Venezuela?
Next to nothing. Because it's a defense system. It shoots down missiles. Bitching about this is like saying "Boy, we'd better not have our own army, because it'll make the other guy's army mad".
There's a big difference between an inherently defensive military weapon and one like an ICBM that has one purpose: kill massive amounts of your citizens. If a hostile foreign power is threatening to attack you because you're buying equipment to defend yourselves, then backing down is only going to embolden them. Good Lord, have you read anything about Munich? The answer here is not to slink away. The answer is to double down on the missile defense system and tell them "fine, you pre-emptively attack us, and our Ohio SSBN's are standing by. Your move".
This one failed because the Navy already has stealth ships, and has had them for years. They're called submarines. Surface stealth ships just aren't as useful or effective.
"There's a long tradition of "read it for yourself" in Judaism and Christianity."
Actually, no - the Catholic Church didn't let people read the Bible itself until printing and Martin Luther forced their hand.
The KJV followed (and used) large chunks of the Tyndale bible. Now, what happened to Tyndale?
Your argument is with Catholic policy of old, not Christianity as a whole, as any Protestant or pre-Nicean Christian would tell you. Again, reference the Bereans here, where Paul praised them for reading and deciding for themselves. There's a reason why so many split off from Catholicism to form different branches... Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, etc. And it's been almost 500 years since Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door at Wittenberg. So it's not like freedom to read scripture for yourself is a recent thing.
Considering that belief is the opposite of thinking.
Nonsense. Both belief AND unbelief come from thinking. The most fervently faithful tend to be those that have read scriptures over and over and weighed the arguments, pro and con, in their own minds. That's thinking, no matter how you cut it.
He was a great guy, that much I am sure of. The problem is the belief in a personal god, and the oppressive power machine that the church is.
(Note: I am an atheist)
This is silly. Look, you say he was a great guy, and that you're an atheist and that you can still admire him if you remove the mystical stuff, right? Except that C.S. Lewis is right, and this kind of thinking is a bit dishonest. You're an atheist, and yet you admire a man who claimed to be the Son of God, and that promised a terrible fate to all those that didn't believe in him? Lewis said that you have one of three choices here: he has to be Lord, Liar, or Lunatic. He's Lord if you believe what he says. If you think he wasn't telling the truth, then he was a liar. If you think he was off his rocker, then he was a lunatic. You've already indicated that you can't believe the first. How can you admire a liar or a lunatic?
Right wing: tending toward fascism. Left wing: tending toward socialism. Since both ideologies are dedicated to crushing personal freedom it is easy to confuse the two. It's *how* they want to crush your freedom that distinguishes them.
Except that fascism and socialism are relatives, ideologically speaking. Fascism was spawned from socialism. Benito Mussolini was a socialist as a young man. He didn't leave socialism. He mutated it into another form. He saw Fascism as the next logical step of political evolution, with socialism the previous iteration. It still had collectivist impulses, and deference to the state.
Pretty much. Like any bible, Mein Kampf isn't actually meant to be read by its believers.
That's nonsense. Of course Bibles are meant to be read. That's why they were put to paper in the first place, so that worshipers didn't have to depend on oral tradition, or depend on one guy. There's a long tradition of "read it for yourself" in Judaism and Christianity. Many Christians have the "Berean test". Paul wrote that the Bereans neither accepted nor rejected his message until they had the chance to go through the scriptures themselves, and then decided to follow him. Christianity and Judaism depends on people reading the Bible for themselves. This is why the publishing of the King James edition was so historically important: for the first time, subjects of the realm could read it in their own tongue. They didn't have to rely on priests who knew Latin. And in do so, printing the KJV also spread literacy. Many people learned to read by learning the Bible, right up to the 20th century. Since then, it's been published in pretty much every language on Earth. Reading it for yourself is the whole point. So to say that Bibles "aren't really meant to be read" is the most ludicrous of statements, reflecting your hostility, not reality.
The Statue of Liberty is not going to go to California, while the professors from the CS department might.
No one is going to California anymore. People are leaving California now. Witness the growth of the surrounding states. Most of it is from Californians leaving. Even the illegals from Mexico are beginning to pack up and head back. California is an economic hellhole, and it's not going to get better anytime soon.
This was made worse by the Republican Conservative Right who seem to think research is a conspiracy to overturn the truths they see in the Bible.
This simply isn't true. First, it was killed in 1993, when Democrats controlled both chambers in Congress. Second, the vote didn't break down by partisan lines, but by chamber lines. The Senate supported it, and a majority of both parties in the House opposed it. In the Senate, the support for the project was overwhelmingly on the Republican side.
The House of Representatives voted three times in 1992 and 1993 to kill the SSC; the final pivotal vote was 159-264 (139 Cong. Rec. H8124 (daily ed. Oct. 19, 1993)). The Senate voted to rescue it each time; their last vote in favor was 57-42 (139 Cong. Rec. S12,760 (daily ed. Sept. 30, 1993)).
In 1993, the two houses met in a conference committee twice; the first time the Senate negotiators won and the SSC was left in the bill. The second time the House won. In the end the conference report was adopted by both houses with large majorities: 332-81 in the House, 139 Cong Rec H8435 (daily ed. Oct. 26, 1993), and 89-11 in the Senate, 139 Cong Rec S14483 (daily ed. Oct. 27, 1993).
From Lexis-Nexis, here is the roll call for the 57-42 Senate vote, which worked out to 26-29 among Democrats (voting to preserve the collider) and 31-13 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...
Here's the roll call for the 159-264 vote in the House, which was 98-153 among Democrats and 61-111 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...
Without an agreement, funding died. The leading voice for the death of the SSC was in fact a Democrat.
Unless you can find evidence to the contrary, I cannot recall a single religious leader protesting the SSC on grounds that it would contradict religious teachings, except for liberal Christians that argued the funds should be better used for so-called social justice efforts. Support for the SSC in most conservative denominations was uniformly high. I recall Pat Robertson lamenting the cancellation of the project on television. History simply doesn't match up to your assertion on this.
Given that it is pumped into oil/gas-carrying rock, it will not seep into the water table.
Start the countdown to the news announcement that fracking is really "healthy for the Earth" along with pictures of children planting flowers around the site.
Sure, right after the countdown that were doomed, doomed if we do it, and that our only hope is wind powered cars.
I presume by "our government" he means the U.S. government. Why is it that that so many of those who lament science funding only talk about U.S. funding, as if the U.S. is supposed to fund everything by itself?
BTW, for those that weren't around when the SSC was being built, and then canceled, you should know that the firestorm over the SSC was not from anti-science budget cutters, but from other scientists... chemists, biologists, etc... that were angry that physics was getting so much of the budget pie. These other scientists went on TV shows and to the press complaining that the SSC was a boondoggle, and that it should be canceled and the funds spread out to other fields "equitably". One of their prime arguments was that, just like defense spending, post Cold War "big physics" should shrink as it was viewed as nothing more than a race with the Soviets for prestige. With the big military drawdown in the early 90's, that argument sold. And SSC died.
Rather than a desire to kill science, the SSC died in part at the hands of jealousy from other scientists.
Computer science is a programme of study not an entire department.
Only if you're at a bad school.
This is absolutely silly. Why does UF have to do it the way others do it? Further, why does every single state university have to have a CS department? They don't all have law schools or medical schools. At a lot of schools, several fields are folded into larger departments, without any real loss of quality.
They do not make money. The median net loss of each of the Division 1A schools' athletic programs is in the vicinity of $7 million annually.
Florida, in the football loving South Eastern Conference, is not one of them. They make a lot of money from football. Second, no tax funds go to the athletic program. All SEC schools fund their athletic programs separately from the main budget, and all of the athletic money comes from ticket sales, TV revenue, bowl payouts, merchandise, etc. Athletics takes not one single dollar from state appropriations in the SEC.
The whole thing has gotten batshit thanks to the insane amount of money flowing through the pentagon and military industrial complex.
I'm pretty right wing, at least compared to most posters on Slashdot, but there's one thing I'm pretty much in agreement with liberals on: our military industrial complex is out of control. We can't seem to make a weapons system without breaking the bank, and I'm pretty firmly convinced it's because of our MIC tainted procurement process. Unlike the private sector, where I'm a free market guy, I'd like to see the military return to the military owned-system of production we used partially in the 20's and 30's. Many of the Navy's ships were built by the Navy itself in Navy-owned shipyards. Before the naval aviation industry really took off, the Navy made its own airplanes in their own factory. The Army had various plants producing armor and guns. The military began phasing these systems out in the mid-30's (kind of surprising that this would happen under FDR, but it did), and by the early 60's, almost all military production was done by contractors. Some studies showed that the mix of Navy-owned and private shipyards helped keep the contractors honest and prices down.
Basically, I think that since weapons procurement really isn't a "market" in the US, that they military should simply come up with a requirement for what they need, and then build it themselves with a fixed budget from Congress. Get someone like Lockheed involved, and the price always shoots up stratospherically with all of the subcontractors they bring along.
And if human beings are going to be traveling really long distances in space, more than just "fly to the moon and fall back", then sustainability is going to be a big part of the technical hurdle that needs to be overcome.
And if we actually had the technology to take humans long distances in space, that might matter. But we don't, and it doesn't. There will be no Mars landing in our lifetime. And humans going to any other world other than Mars? Get back to me when someone actually learns to make that wormhole.
This building has nothing to do with space exploration, and everything to do with the government's greener than thou initiatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Idiot. The vast majority of Federal spending goes to the DoD, Medicare, and Social Security. Frankly, the major constituents for all of these are core Republican voters.
Eh, no. The GOP backs military spending for sure, but if they even mention bringing SS Medicare under control, out come the "push grandma over a cliff" commercials from Democrats. Entitlements are the third rail of politics. Touch them, and the old will punish you. And when they did, they voted for Democrats.
The truth is, we need to drastically cut and/or restructure all three. We have a military so expensive we can't afford it (and by making rational choices we could cut the DOD budget in half and not be any less safe), and we have entitlements that will either have to be slashed, or supported with Weimar Republic-like printing presses. The fantasy land we're living in currently... all the guns and butter you like, bill me later... simply can't keep continuing.
Actually the tax is quite low - 50 years ago, the tax was a lot higher.
So your justification is "Hey, it used to suck even worse. Quit complaining"?
Washington should keep its mouth shut, since this is an in-state affair.
People seem to sadly forget the 10th amendment and that there are matters that the fed has no say in.
The money came from Federal stimulus programs... tax dollars at large. That makes it a federal issue.
I can see states like Mississippi, Alabama doing poorly because they are run by Republicans and republicans hate spending money on kids. (Yes I just heard a guy on MSNBC say that last night.) But California is a Democrat-run state. Their students should be the best and brightest and most well-funded. Like Democrat-run Maryland. Hmmmm.
(Note: I'm being sarcastic. I think Democrats suck just as badly as Republicans. None of them know how to run anything.... not the schools, not the MVA, not the Amtrak, nor the post office.)
Not only is it a statement on the fallacy of the superiority of "progressive" regimes in schooling, but in funding as well. Utah spends far, far less per pupil, and gets much better results. Success in education comes from, first and foremost, an appreciation of getting an education, and second, the willingness to work for it. You'll get better results with a single, good teacher with nothing but a piece of chalk and a chalkboard, teaching a class of eager students, then you will with any expensive computerized, state of the art classroom that's been staffed with some guy waiting for his retirement age and a class of kids that don't give a damn.
Unlike Canada, the news in the US no longer has to present a balanced viewpoint.
Good, I prefer it that way. Know why? Because the "balanced viewpoint" was always fake before. Walter Duranty was Stalin's mouthpiece at the NY Times. Walter Cronkite conducted an anti-Vietnam campaign in his position at CBS, and on the eve of the biggest defeat the US forces ever dealt to the North Vietnamese the day after Tet.
I much prefer a British type press system where you know where your newspapers and stations stand. Quality of reporting can go hand in hand with an editorial viewpoint if done correctly. Both the Telegraph and the Guardian... both 180 from each other in viewpoint... still do good journalism. Our "balance" was an illusion and a farce. I may not like MSNBC, but they have the virtue of being more honest than NBC, which tries to pretend that they're centrist and above it all.
Russia seems to be more concerned that the US would be putting a strategic asset in part of the "near abroad".
That's precisely what this comes down to. Russia still resents the independence of countries like Poland and the Czechs, and dreams of controlling them like puppet states once more.
What do you think the USA would do if Russia began installing a "Missile Defense System" in Cuba and Venezuela?
Next to nothing. Because it's a defense system. It shoots down missiles. Bitching about this is like saying "Boy, we'd better not have our own army, because it'll make the other guy's army mad".
There's a big difference between an inherently defensive military weapon and one like an ICBM that has one purpose: kill massive amounts of your citizens. If a hostile foreign power is threatening to attack you because you're buying equipment to defend yourselves, then backing down is only going to embolden them. Good Lord, have you read anything about Munich? The answer here is not to slink away. The answer is to double down on the missile defense system and tell them "fine, you pre-emptively attack us, and our Ohio SSBN's are standing by. Your move".
Call their bluff.
This one failed because the Navy already has stealth ships, and has had them for years. They're called submarines. Surface stealth ships just aren't as useful or effective.
It is sad when submitters don't check for the best sources.
And it's pathetic when someone bitches because a link is from Fox. Sheesh. Give it a rest.
"There's a long tradition of "read it for yourself" in Judaism and Christianity."
Actually, no - the Catholic Church didn't let people read the Bible itself until printing and Martin Luther forced their hand.
The KJV followed (and used) large chunks of the Tyndale bible. Now, what happened to Tyndale?
Your argument is with Catholic policy of old, not Christianity as a whole, as any Protestant or pre-Nicean Christian would tell you. Again, reference the Bereans here, where Paul praised them for reading and deciding for themselves. There's a reason why so many split off from Catholicism to form different branches... Eastern Orthodox, Protestant, etc. And it's been almost 500 years since Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door at Wittenberg. So it's not like freedom to read scripture for yourself is a recent thing.
Considering that belief is the opposite of thinking.
Nonsense. Both belief AND unbelief come from thinking. The most fervently faithful tend to be those that have read scriptures over and over and weighed the arguments, pro and con, in their own minds. That's thinking, no matter how you cut it.
He was a great guy, that much I am sure of. The problem is the belief in a personal god, and the oppressive power machine that the church is.
(Note: I am an atheist)
This is silly. Look, you say he was a great guy, and that you're an atheist and that you can still admire him if you remove the mystical stuff, right? Except that C.S. Lewis is right, and this kind of thinking is a bit dishonest. You're an atheist, and yet you admire a man who claimed to be the Son of God, and that promised a terrible fate to all those that didn't believe in him? Lewis said that you have one of three choices here: he has to be Lord, Liar, or Lunatic. He's Lord if you believe what he says. If you think he wasn't telling the truth, then he was a liar. If you think he was off his rocker, then he was a lunatic. You've already indicated that you can't believe the first. How can you admire a liar or a lunatic?
Right wing: tending toward fascism. Left wing: tending toward socialism. Since both ideologies are dedicated to crushing personal freedom it is easy to confuse the two. It's *how* they want to crush your freedom that distinguishes them.
Except that fascism and socialism are relatives, ideologically speaking. Fascism was spawned from socialism. Benito Mussolini was a socialist as a young man. He didn't leave socialism. He mutated it into another form. He saw Fascism as the next logical step of political evolution, with socialism the previous iteration. It still had collectivist impulses, and deference to the state.
Pretty much. Like any bible, Mein Kampf isn't actually meant to be read by its believers.
That's nonsense. Of course Bibles are meant to be read. That's why they were put to paper in the first place, so that worshipers didn't have to depend on oral tradition, or depend on one guy. There's a long tradition of "read it for yourself" in Judaism and Christianity. Many Christians have the "Berean test". Paul wrote that the Bereans neither accepted nor rejected his message until they had the chance to go through the scriptures themselves, and then decided to follow him. Christianity and Judaism depends on people reading the Bible for themselves. This is why the publishing of the King James edition was so historically important: for the first time, subjects of the realm could read it in their own tongue. They didn't have to rely on priests who knew Latin. And in do so, printing the KJV also spread literacy. Many people learned to read by learning the Bible, right up to the 20th century. Since then, it's been published in pretty much every language on Earth. Reading it for yourself is the whole point. So to say that Bibles "aren't really meant to be read" is the most ludicrous of statements, reflecting your hostility, not reality.
Applebee's
"iEat... at Applebee's!"
The Statue of Liberty is not going to go to California, while the professors from the CS department might.
No one is going to California anymore. People are leaving California now. Witness the growth of the surrounding states. Most of it is from Californians leaving. Even the illegals from Mexico are beginning to pack up and head back. California is an economic hellhole, and it's not going to get better anytime soon.
This was made worse by the Republican Conservative Right who seem to think research is a conspiracy to overturn the truths they see in the Bible.
This simply isn't true. First, it was killed in 1993, when Democrats controlled both chambers in Congress. Second, the vote didn't break down by partisan lines, but by chamber lines. The Senate supported it, and a majority of both parties in the House opposed it. In the Senate, the support for the project was overwhelmingly on the Republican side.
The House of Representatives voted three times in 1992 and 1993 to kill the SSC; the final pivotal vote was 159-264 (139 Cong. Rec. H8124 (daily ed. Oct. 19, 1993)). The Senate voted to rescue it each time; their last vote in favor was 57-42 (139 Cong. Rec. S12,760 (daily ed. Sept. 30, 1993)).
In 1993, the two houses met in a conference committee twice; the first time the Senate negotiators won and the SSC was left in the bill. The second time the House won. In the end the conference report was adopted by both houses with large majorities: 332-81 in the House, 139 Cong Rec H8435 (daily ed. Oct. 26, 1993), and 89-11 in the Senate, 139 Cong Rec S14483 (daily ed. Oct. 27, 1993).
From Lexis-Nexis, here is the roll call for the 57-42 Senate vote, which worked out to 26-29 among Democrats (voting to preserve the collider) and 31-13 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...
Here's the roll call for the 159-264 vote in the House, which was 98-153 among Democrats and 61-111 among Republicans: http://web.mit.edu/keithw/Public...
Without an agreement, funding died. The leading voice for the death of the SSC was in fact a Democrat.
Unless you can find evidence to the contrary, I cannot recall a single religious leader protesting the SSC on grounds that it would contradict religious teachings, except for liberal Christians that argued the funds should be better used for so-called social justice efforts. Support for the SSC in most conservative denominations was uniformly high. I recall Pat Robertson lamenting the cancellation of the project on television. History simply doesn't match up to your assertion on this.
Start the countdown to the news announcement that fracking is really "healthy for the Earth" along with pictures of children planting flowers around the site.
Sure, right after the countdown that were doomed, doomed if we do it, and that our only hope is wind powered cars.
I presume by "our government" he means the U.S. government. Why is it that that so many of those who lament science funding only talk about U.S. funding, as if the U.S. is supposed to fund everything by itself?
BTW, for those that weren't around when the SSC was being built, and then canceled, you should know that the firestorm over the SSC was not from anti-science budget cutters, but from other scientists... chemists, biologists, etc... that were angry that physics was getting so much of the budget pie. These other scientists went on TV shows and to the press complaining that the SSC was a boondoggle, and that it should be canceled and the funds spread out to other fields "equitably". One of their prime arguments was that, just like defense spending, post Cold War "big physics" should shrink as it was viewed as nothing more than a race with the Soviets for prestige. With the big military drawdown in the early 90's, that argument sold. And SSC died.
Rather than a desire to kill science, the SSC died in part at the hands of jealousy from other scientists.
Computer science is a programme of study not an entire department.
Only if you're at a bad school.
This is absolutely silly. Why does UF have to do it the way others do it? Further, why does every single state university have to have a CS department? They don't all have law schools or medical schools. At a lot of schools, several fields are folded into larger departments, without any real loss of quality.
They do not make money. The median net loss of each of the Division 1A schools' athletic programs is in the vicinity of $7 million annually.
Florida, in the football loving South Eastern Conference, is not one of them. They make a lot of money from football. Second, no tax funds go to the athletic program. All SEC schools fund their athletic programs separately from the main budget, and all of the athletic money comes from ticket sales, TV revenue, bowl payouts, merchandise, etc. Athletics takes not one single dollar from state appropriations in the SEC.
The whole thing has gotten batshit thanks to the insane amount of money flowing through the pentagon and military industrial complex.
I'm pretty right wing, at least compared to most posters on Slashdot, but there's one thing I'm pretty much in agreement with liberals on: our military industrial complex is out of control. We can't seem to make a weapons system without breaking the bank, and I'm pretty firmly convinced it's because of our MIC tainted procurement process. Unlike the private sector, where I'm a free market guy, I'd like to see the military return to the military owned-system of production we used partially in the 20's and 30's. Many of the Navy's ships were built by the Navy itself in Navy-owned shipyards. Before the naval aviation industry really took off, the Navy made its own airplanes in their own factory. The Army had various plants producing armor and guns. The military began phasing these systems out in the mid-30's (kind of surprising that this would happen under FDR, but it did), and by the early 60's, almost all military production was done by contractors. Some studies showed that the mix of Navy-owned and private shipyards helped keep the contractors honest and prices down.
Basically, I think that since weapons procurement really isn't a "market" in the US, that they military should simply come up with a requirement for what they need, and then build it themselves with a fixed budget from Congress. Get someone like Lockheed involved, and the price always shoots up stratospherically with all of the subcontractors they bring along.
And if we actually had the technology to take humans long distances in space, that might matter. But we don't, and it doesn't. There will be no Mars landing in our lifetime. And humans going to any other world other than Mars? Get back to me when someone actually learns to make that wormhole.
This building has nothing to do with space exploration, and everything to do with the government's greener than thou initiatives.
The article claims it's the world's greenest building, but from the pictures it looks kinda blue, steely and clear for the most part.
It's also ugly as sin.
How infinitely arrogant one has to be to decide their "enemies" are not even capable of acting rationally.
Some aren't. It wasn't very rational for Hitler to start a two-front war. Seemed like a great idea to him, though.