Our schools actually are chronically underfunded, because the actual cost of materials and facilities has skyrocketed. The cost of textbooks is way more than 4x what it was in the 1960s. It's probably closer to 20x. And in the 1960s, we didn't need computers for students, nor network infrastructure. You can't compare education now to the 1960s by just comparing dollars, because if you educated someone today in the way that you educated kids in the 1960s, they would not be hirable. Too much has changed in those fifty years, and jobs that pay well tend to also require skills that do, in fact, cost way more to teach.
When talking about funding in general, you have to talk about funding for a particular thing. Not just "underfunded" or "overfunded." I am underfunded to buy a million dollar house. I am not underfunded to buy a smaller house. Do we need computers for students? I don't think so, at least not to the extent that schools are stuffing into their budgets today. My school had a computer lab in the late 90s. "A" meaning "one." Enough for one class of kids at a time. Did it prepare me for the jobs of today and the future? Yes. Today schools districts are issuing laptops or tablets to each individual student, it's ridiculous.
Schools are just bad with their money, and they get away with it because it's for the kids. People affiliated with education become infected with the inability to save money. You know donorschoose.org I presume? Take a look at the projects and see the expensive garbage teachers want for their classrooms. One in my area wanted chargers for all the tablets that the kids use so they wouldn't die in class. So they put their project on donors choose and specified the most expensive "charging station" they could find. I searched amazon and found many competing models ("charging stations" not just chargers) with the same number of charging ports for half the cost. So I sent the teacher a note and did not donate.
Either way, the ratio of teachers to students is strongly correlated with graduation rates.
I'm sure it is, but you have to consider the size of the effect, not just strength of correlation.
No, actually, I can't. When I'm grading your papers I'm sitting in a room, usually alone so I'm not distracted, maybe with some music to drown out outside noise. I can't see the lines on your face or anything else specific to you.
GP's analogy was beautifully stated. He's questioning the validity of partial credit, not saying that you should be able to see the work of a math problem on a person's face, or remember it when you're grading. His point is that even if you show your work, ie write down the steps you take to solve the problem, if it's wrong in the end then it isn't acceptable.
Ahh. You hate a teacher that will give other people 9/10ths credit for something because your landlord wouldn't give you 9/10ths credit on the money you owed him. Your landlord is an ass.
That just shows that you don't have landlord experience yourself or secondhand from a friend or family member. A landlord who gives rent credit for hard stories isn't going to be a landlord for long, unless he's independently wealthy and running his business as a charity. People lie. I don't think it applies as much to education as GP wants to believe, because I agree with you that there is value in partially correct answers when it comes to assessing what someone has learned. But you can't argue the analogy, GP is dead right.
That is a different question. Please stay on topic.
Your link said one of the problems with deflation was it shifts wealth from borrowers to savers. Well, what do you think negative interest rates do, a tool that a few years ago was thought to be unavailable by "people who actually study this stuff for a living." I'm sorry I didn't spoon feed it to you, you seem to know what you're talking about. You apparently follow what economists say after all.
So I should put faith in you instead? No thanks.
I don't know why you're being so aggressive here, I obviously did not position myself as an expert you should listen to purely based on my credentials. I gave you some information you can evaluate yourself. Surely you see the difference between "Today we have negative interest rates, and also here's a link talking about good vs bad deflation" and "I'm an expert, put your faith in me."
That's a curious argument since you have no idea what my political leanings might actually be nor what I consider to be prevalent economic theories.
Not really, it's just something that tends to be the case, and it goes both ways so your political leanings are irrelevant. If you have thought critically about economics and economists more particularly, then why do you say stuff like "people who actually study this stuff for a living say x, therefore I believe x?" Don't you know how bad their track record is in actual prediction? It's almost entirely a tool used to present a rational-seeming argument for a political agenda.
That's a nice attempt to frame the issue but I think it says more about you than it does about me.
I'm not trying to reframe the discussion, it was just an aside questioning why you place faith in economists. Since you said you're evidence-based, I'm wondering why you've spent so much time being offended by part of my comment, but completely ignored the link I posted and didn't take any time to consider what I said about negative interest rates.
You put too much faith in economists. That suggests, to me, that you find prevalent economic theories useful to your political leanings and so it's convenient to put faith in them. Most economics is just apology for one or another political agenda. "Hmm we want mass immigration, what can we say? Oh some drivel about a free labor market."
Depends what you mean by consequence. In the current discussion if we're talking about societal consequence rather than basic physics, then I think the answer is obvious -- there are lots of things you may wish to do privately that nobody ever need know about, thus avoiding the issue of societal consequence entirely.
If my choices can have consequences I like, then they can have consequences I don't like, if only by comparison.
They can. However you seem to be treating it as a binary choice. In reality I may freely accept some negative consequences, but not any negative consequences that can be imagined.
To me it seems pretty obvious that the degree to which you can claim a societal freedom is directly related to the degree to which you can avoid societal consequences if desired. If I can say most things without negative consequence, but not some things, then I mostly have freedom of speech. If I can say anything I like without negative consequence, then I have absolute freedom of speech. If I can only say certain things in certain situations, I have little freedom of speech. If I have the ability to easily make anonymous speech then I have more freedom of speech than if the tools of anonymous speech are prohibited.
I mean isn't that obvious? What useful definition of "societal freedom of speech" do you have that contradicts that?
Freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequences.
That is what it means actually. Well, more specifically it's about being free from consequences that you don't wish to be subjected to. If you don't have freedom from consequences that you don't want then it's meaningless because you're really talking about free will, not societal freedom. "If you do drugs, we'll throw you in jail as a consequence! We support your freedom of choice in doing drugs!" That isn't useful.
What matters is the probability of a black man being shot by police vs. the probability of a white man being shot by police.
Why does that matter? Seems like it matters more about the probability of a criminal being shot by police vs a non-criminal. And blacks are overrepresented as criminals. So it stands to reason they will be shot at a proportion higher than their share of the general population.
Do you mean that seriously? I can't tell if it's just a rhetorical technique or not. If it's serious, it seems weird because it would apply to the people criticizing Damore equally, which means it's not really contributing to the discussion.
Actually both concepts have been well understood by social scientists for decades
Please, don't make me laugh. Calling "white privilege" a scientific principle just shows how stupid you are.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you disbelieve in global warming too, are probably anti-vax and think fluoridated water is poisoning people. Someone like you isn't in any position to lecture on scientific validity.
All your guesses are wrong, what does that mean to you? Perhaps not coincidentally, someone who believes white privilege and toxic masculinity are scientific principles is in no position to lecture on scientific validity.
Then there's the corollary, many people will believe they are tolerant because they can delude themselves into thinking the people they are intolerant towards MUST BE intolerant.
Probably many are. That doesn't make them incorrect. I don't know why it's disappointing to you, seems kind of like a stupid person's view on things. "Oh gee, people who don't think like me, how disappointing boo."
To pick and example, Damore says that women are less able to deal with stress on average. The problem is that while there may be some statistical evidence for that, it's not clear how much is due to social factors (like having more stress to start with, or being more inclined to admit to feeling stress) and how much is biological.
That doesn't seem like a good example. It's immaterial whether it's biological or social since Google operates within an existing society. We're not talking about sending embryos to Mars to start a new society, we're talking about how to engage with demographic subgroups that already have a host of influences both biological and social.
You didn't actually say Damore claimed the difference was 100% biological, so I'm assuming he didn't (because if he did that would obviously strengthen your position).
So in that light the suggestion that women need special low stress jobs is both patronising and suggests that they are the problem.
I agree it's patronizing, but it is backed by what he said. It doesn't have to be a biological cause for his argument to be correct.
I wonder if you also find things like the promotion of affirmative action to be patronizing and worthy of punishment? If not, can you explain the difference?
The statements in the memo, even when citing existing research, can hardly be called obvious or mundane.
Calling something obvious or mundane is entirely subjective. To me it's blindingly obvious that men and women think differently and are drawn to different things. It's the kind of thing that is so obvious that one might have trouble finding evidence that is deemed scientific by people like you. It's also pretty obvious that biology probably has something to do with that difference. From my own life experience, most people essentially hand-wave the "nature vs nurture" question by saying "probably both!"
I don't know which statements of Damore's memo you're referring to, but those are the statements that have drawn the most ire that I'm aware of.
As a final point. It's been noted that Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, despite having female engineers making up only ~20-30% of their workforce are anyway above the industry average. And look, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are objectively out-performing the majority of their peers across most business metrics and most "nice places to work" metrics.
You have to be awfully careful with that these days. After all, if you start throwing objective measurements about and linking them causally with demographics, you're entering a real minefield (as Damore discovered).
Google has more women than the average tech company, but much fewer women than the population. So maybe adding more women will make them worse! Maybe 20% is the magic number, better than 10% and also better than 50%. Would you be satisfied if the data ends up showing that? (Because it does, you know... Google and Facebook and Apple outperform more male-dominated tech companies as you note, but of course they outperform just about everybody... including companies and industries where the sex balance is more even.)
Virtue signaling is often not an argument. Saying "Hey man, autism is a mental/condition/ not a mental/illness/" is not an argument, it's just a criticism of word choice that shows the person is more in tune with modern language sensibilities. You're right that it's a silencing tactic, because when people are making non-arguments, what else can you do? Pretty much ignore them or make your own non-argument.
Guess what, that kind of thing annoys people. Google got a *lot* of internal feedback from engineers that were offended and there were serious concerns that this would affect recruiting. At that point they did what businesses do, they made a business decision.
That's a bullshit argument and you know it. It annoys people to be told they benefit from white privilege. It annoys people to hear that women are underrepresented in their workplace because of toxic masculinity. These aren't "scientific" concepts either, the only difference is one opinion is approved by the executives and the other isn't.
Also the real culprit, the one who actually offended others, is the one who brought attention to the memo. Why weren't they fired for inciting, if this was purely a business decision? Who wants witch-hunting employees around disturbing morale?
You're full of shit, and the sad part is you sound well-spoken enough to know it. I don't understand people like you, what's the benefit to you in jumping on the PC bandwagon on a fairly low impact anonymous news discussion site?
They used to charge a lot more, and relied on people skipping periods of time when no new worthwhile movies were out. When they announced the cheap plan, they said their goal was to amass data and sell it. People are speculating that their real ultimate plan is to use loss-leading to gain market share and then turn around and negotiate a new price structure with movie companies and theater chains. So it'll be like an in-theater Netflix... and if a theater doesn't play ball, they're going to lose out on that customer base. MoviePass has made a big deal about how their users spend much more on average on things like concessions (where theaters make most of their profit) than the average movie goer.
No it's not a pyramid scheme because people aren't being paid. The long-term plan they have, since dropping prices, has been to steal enough market share to be able to negotiate prices with theater chains. That is why AMC is looking at ways to ban MoviePass. The goal is eventually to turn it into a Netflix style all you can watch program, and the theater just gets a cut of it, rather than a per-ticket profit. Of course the theaters don't care at all about profit on movie prices IF they can pass on those reductions to the distribution companies. Are they willing to do so? Well they already get a lower share of the box office take in other markets... it's about 50% in the US, and from the last I read it's about 20% in China.
That's interesting, my friend was in the program since the beginning and they never changed the terms. The only restriction was seeing a movie once, and one movie per day. Never had to take pictures or have a lottery or any of that stuff. Sounds like they were experimenting in certain markets to see what they could get away with.
It's illegal for foreign institutions to interfere in US elections.
No it's not. There are specific actions that are illegal, not just "interfering" which is vague. Otherwise, when are the arrest warrants coming out for all the foreign politicians who made negative comments about Trump during the election?
Division is everywhere and is damaging your country...
I agree, I just don't understand what this has to do with Russian ads during the election. If you want to connect this to Russia, you'll have to go further back to when academia became leftist and began training our youth to be cultural Marxists. The division we see today is because there are enough people (though a minority) who believe the institutions of the country are actually evil, have an evil past, and must be destroyed and rebuilt to be good.
Or the prospect that the next election will be similarly fucked up by Russian political trolling?
No, I don't think it had any significant effect. I honestly wonder if people like you would care about it if it had ended up favoring Hillary or Bernie? I wonder if Russia was helping to fund BLM whether that would change your perception of BLM (or Russia)?
Coming back to the replies to my comment, reading yours feels like I've stumbled across someone having a bipolar episode. Yes, I'm worse than Hitler because I said the concept of censorship applies to private entities suppressing expression as well as government. Great argument, very well put!
You already have shown that you understood what "censoring" means with respect to a private entity, so I'm not sure why you think I (or you) need to read the dictionary, but here you go...
the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security
Notice how it doesn't limit that to the government. Hey the dictionary agrees with me! What's your take on this startling new development?
A private entity can censor you whenever and however they want within their system.
I'm guessing you misunderstood what I said, or responded to the wrong post, because you're actually agreeing with me (despite your first sentence).
My point: when private entities censor you, that is censorship. I was disagreeing with someone who said "You really don't know what censorship means, do you? It does not apply to private entities. It applies to Goverment only."
Slashdot Mirror
Our schools actually are chronically underfunded, because the actual cost of materials and facilities has skyrocketed. The cost of textbooks is way more than 4x what it was in the 1960s. It's probably closer to 20x. And in the 1960s, we didn't need computers for students, nor network infrastructure. You can't compare education now to the 1960s by just comparing dollars, because if you educated someone today in the way that you educated kids in the 1960s, they would not be hirable. Too much has changed in those fifty years, and jobs that pay well tend to also require skills that do, in fact, cost way more to teach.
When talking about funding in general, you have to talk about funding for a particular thing. Not just "underfunded" or "overfunded." I am underfunded to buy a million dollar house. I am not underfunded to buy a smaller house. Do we need computers for students? I don't think so, at least not to the extent that schools are stuffing into their budgets today. My school had a computer lab in the late 90s. "A" meaning "one." Enough for one class of kids at a time. Did it prepare me for the jobs of today and the future? Yes. Today schools districts are issuing laptops or tablets to each individual student, it's ridiculous.
Schools are just bad with their money, and they get away with it because it's for the kids. People affiliated with education become infected with the inability to save money. You know donorschoose.org I presume? Take a look at the projects and see the expensive garbage teachers want for their classrooms. One in my area wanted chargers for all the tablets that the kids use so they wouldn't die in class. So they put their project on donors choose and specified the most expensive "charging station" they could find. I searched amazon and found many competing models ("charging stations" not just chargers) with the same number of charging ports for half the cost. So I sent the teacher a note and did not donate.
Either way, the ratio of teachers to students is strongly correlated with graduation rates.
I'm sure it is, but you have to consider the size of the effect, not just strength of correlation.
No, actually, I can't. When I'm grading your papers I'm sitting in a room, usually alone so I'm not distracted, maybe with some music to drown out outside noise. I can't see the lines on your face or anything else specific to you.
GP's analogy was beautifully stated. He's questioning the validity of partial credit, not saying that you should be able to see the work of a math problem on a person's face, or remember it when you're grading. His point is that even if you show your work, ie write down the steps you take to solve the problem, if it's wrong in the end then it isn't acceptable.
Ahh. You hate a teacher that will give other people 9/10ths credit for something because your landlord wouldn't give you 9/10ths credit on the money you owed him. Your landlord is an ass.
That just shows that you don't have landlord experience yourself or secondhand from a friend or family member. A landlord who gives rent credit for hard stories isn't going to be a landlord for long, unless he's independently wealthy and running his business as a charity. People lie. I don't think it applies as much to education as GP wants to believe, because I agree with you that there is value in partially correct answers when it comes to assessing what someone has learned. But you can't argue the analogy, GP is dead right.
How does preventing ISPs from blocking and throttling content benefit only Republicans and not Democrats? Doesn't make sense.
That is a different question. Please stay on topic.
Your link said one of the problems with deflation was it shifts wealth from borrowers to savers. Well, what do you think negative interest rates do, a tool that a few years ago was thought to be unavailable by "people who actually study this stuff for a living." I'm sorry I didn't spoon feed it to you, you seem to know what you're talking about. You apparently follow what economists say after all.
So I should put faith in you instead? No thanks.
I don't know why you're being so aggressive here, I obviously did not position myself as an expert you should listen to purely based on my credentials. I gave you some information you can evaluate yourself. Surely you see the difference between "Today we have negative interest rates, and also here's a link talking about good vs bad deflation" and "I'm an expert, put your faith in me."
That's a curious argument since you have no idea what my political leanings might actually be nor what I consider to be prevalent economic theories.
Not really, it's just something that tends to be the case, and it goes both ways so your political leanings are irrelevant. If you have thought critically about economics and economists more particularly, then why do you say stuff like "people who actually study this stuff for a living say x, therefore I believe x?" Don't you know how bad their track record is in actual prediction? It's almost entirely a tool used to present a rational-seeming argument for a political agenda.
That's a nice attempt to frame the issue but I think it says more about you than it does about me.
I'm not trying to reframe the discussion, it was just an aside questioning why you place faith in economists. Since you said you're evidence-based, I'm wondering why you've spent so much time being offended by part of my comment, but completely ignored the link I posted and didn't take any time to consider what I said about negative interest rates.
Seriously, among people who actually study this stuff for a living it's not even a question that deflation is bad for economies.
A few years ago it was not even a question that the zero lower bound on interest rates made perfect sense.
https://www.investopedia.com/a...
You put too much faith in economists. That suggests, to me, that you find prevalent economic theories useful to your political leanings and so it's convenient to put faith in them. Most economics is just apology for one or another political agenda. "Hmm we want mass immigration, what can we say? Oh some drivel about a free labor market."
But in lieu of that would there have been significant deflation in Japan, all else being equal?
If my choices have no consequences, why bother?
Depends what you mean by consequence. In the current discussion if we're talking about societal consequence rather than basic physics, then I think the answer is obvious -- there are lots of things you may wish to do privately that nobody ever need know about, thus avoiding the issue of societal consequence entirely.
If my choices can have consequences I like, then they can have consequences I don't like, if only by comparison.
They can. However you seem to be treating it as a binary choice. In reality I may freely accept some negative consequences, but not any negative consequences that can be imagined.
To me it seems pretty obvious that the degree to which you can claim a societal freedom is directly related to the degree to which you can avoid societal consequences if desired. If I can say most things without negative consequence, but not some things, then I mostly have freedom of speech. If I can say anything I like without negative consequence, then I have absolute freedom of speech. If I can only say certain things in certain situations, I have little freedom of speech. If I have the ability to easily make anonymous speech then I have more freedom of speech than if the tools of anonymous speech are prohibited.
I mean isn't that obvious? What useful definition of "societal freedom of speech" do you have that contradicts that?
What matters is your poor grasp of statistics.
Really, that's odd. Even if it's true (and it's not), this is what you just turned the discussion into:
You: what matters is race
Me: what matters is criminal history
You: no I take it back, what matters is your poor grasp of statistics!! boom!
and so I reply,
Me: okay so you don't care about race anymore?
Perhaps you would like to clarify your claim before I rip it apart.
No, please, "rip it apart." I'd like to see your argument for why race matters and criminal history does not.
Freedom of choice does not mean freedom from consequences.
That is what it means actually. Well, more specifically it's about being free from consequences that you don't wish to be subjected to. If you don't have freedom from consequences that you don't want then it's meaningless because you're really talking about free will, not societal freedom. "If you do drugs, we'll throw you in jail as a consequence! We support your freedom of choice in doing drugs!" That isn't useful.
What matters is the probability of a black man being shot by police vs. the probability of a white man being shot by police.
Why does that matter? Seems like it matters more about the probability of a criminal being shot by police vs a non-criminal. And blacks are overrepresented as criminals. So it stands to reason they will be shot at a proportion higher than their share of the general population.
Waaah! Powh 'liddle snowflakes.
Do you mean that seriously? I can't tell if it's just a rhetorical technique or not. If it's serious, it seems weird because it would apply to the people criticizing Damore equally, which means it's not really contributing to the discussion.
Actually both concepts have been well understood by social scientists for decades
Please, don't make me laugh. Calling "white privilege" a scientific principle just shows how stupid you are.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say you disbelieve in global warming too, are probably anti-vax and think fluoridated water is poisoning people. Someone like you isn't in any position to lecture on scientific validity.
All your guesses are wrong, what does that mean to you? Perhaps not coincidentally, someone who believes white privilege and toxic masculinity are scientific principles is in no position to lecture on scientific validity.
Then there's the corollary, many people will believe they are tolerant because they can delude themselves into thinking the people they are intolerant towards MUST BE intolerant.
Probably many are. That doesn't make them incorrect. I don't know why it's disappointing to you, seems kind of like a stupid person's view on things. "Oh gee, people who don't think like me, how disappointing boo."
To pick and example, Damore says that women are less able to deal with stress on average. The problem is that while there may be some statistical evidence for that, it's not clear how much is due to social factors (like having more stress to start with, or being more inclined to admit to feeling stress) and how much is biological.
That doesn't seem like a good example. It's immaterial whether it's biological or social since Google operates within an existing society. We're not talking about sending embryos to Mars to start a new society, we're talking about how to engage with demographic subgroups that already have a host of influences both biological and social.
You didn't actually say Damore claimed the difference was 100% biological, so I'm assuming he didn't (because if he did that would obviously strengthen your position).
So in that light the suggestion that women need special low stress jobs is both patronising and suggests that they are the problem.
I agree it's patronizing, but it is backed by what he said. It doesn't have to be a biological cause for his argument to be correct.
I wonder if you also find things like the promotion of affirmative action to be patronizing and worthy of punishment? If not, can you explain the difference?
The statements in the memo, even when citing existing research, can hardly be called obvious or mundane.
Calling something obvious or mundane is entirely subjective. To me it's blindingly obvious that men and women think differently and are drawn to different things. It's the kind of thing that is so obvious that one might have trouble finding evidence that is deemed scientific by people like you. It's also pretty obvious that biology probably has something to do with that difference. From my own life experience, most people essentially hand-wave the "nature vs nurture" question by saying "probably both!"
I don't know which statements of Damore's memo you're referring to, but those are the statements that have drawn the most ire that I'm aware of.
As a final point. It's been noted that Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, despite having female engineers making up only ~20-30% of their workforce are anyway above the industry average. And look, Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are objectively out-performing the majority of their peers across most business metrics and most "nice places to work" metrics.
You have to be awfully careful with that these days. After all, if you start throwing objective measurements about and linking them causally with demographics, you're entering a real minefield (as Damore discovered).
Google has more women than the average tech company, but much fewer women than the population. So maybe adding more women will make them worse! Maybe 20% is the magic number, better than 10% and also better than 50%. Would you be satisfied if the data ends up showing that? (Because it does, you know... Google and Facebook and Apple outperform more male-dominated tech companies as you note, but of course they outperform just about everybody... including companies and industries where the sex balance is more even.)
Virtue signaling is often not an argument. Saying "Hey man, autism is a mental /condition/ not a mental /illness/" is not an argument, it's just a criticism of word choice that shows the person is more in tune with modern language sensibilities. You're right that it's a silencing tactic, because when people are making non-arguments, what else can you do? Pretty much ignore them or make your own non-argument.
Guess what, that kind of thing annoys people. Google got a *lot* of internal feedback from engineers that were offended and there were serious concerns that this would affect recruiting. At that point they did what businesses do, they made a business decision.
That's a bullshit argument and you know it. It annoys people to be told they benefit from white privilege. It annoys people to hear that women are underrepresented in their workplace because of toxic masculinity. These aren't "scientific" concepts either, the only difference is one opinion is approved by the executives and the other isn't.
Also the real culprit, the one who actually offended others, is the one who brought attention to the memo. Why weren't they fired for inciting, if this was purely a business decision? Who wants witch-hunting employees around disturbing morale?
You're full of shit, and the sad part is you sound well-spoken enough to know it. I don't understand people like you, what's the benefit to you in jumping on the PC bandwagon on a fairly low impact anonymous news discussion site?
They used to charge a lot more, and relied on people skipping periods of time when no new worthwhile movies were out. When they announced the cheap plan, they said their goal was to amass data and sell it. People are speculating that their real ultimate plan is to use loss-leading to gain market share and then turn around and negotiate a new price structure with movie companies and theater chains. So it'll be like an in-theater Netflix... and if a theater doesn't play ball, they're going to lose out on that customer base. MoviePass has made a big deal about how their users spend much more on average on things like concessions (where theaters make most of their profit) than the average movie goer.
No it's not a pyramid scheme because people aren't being paid. The long-term plan they have, since dropping prices, has been to steal enough market share to be able to negotiate prices with theater chains. That is why AMC is looking at ways to ban MoviePass. The goal is eventually to turn it into a Netflix style all you can watch program, and the theater just gets a cut of it, rather than a per-ticket profit. Of course the theaters don't care at all about profit on movie prices IF they can pass on those reductions to the distribution companies. Are they willing to do so? Well they already get a lower share of the box office take in other markets... it's about 50% in the US, and from the last I read it's about 20% in China.
That's interesting, my friend was in the program since the beginning and they never changed the terms. The only restriction was seeing a movie once, and one movie per day. Never had to take pictures or have a lottery or any of that stuff. Sounds like they were experimenting in certain markets to see what they could get away with.
It's impossible to be pro-Trump without supporting corruption, racism, theft and fraud.
That sounds like something a Russian troll would say, trying to sow divisiveness.
It's illegal for foreign institutions to interfere in US elections.
No it's not. There are specific actions that are illegal, not just "interfering" which is vague. Otherwise, when are the arrest warrants coming out for all the foreign politicians who made negative comments about Trump during the election?
Division is everywhere and is damaging your country...
I agree, I just don't understand what this has to do with Russian ads during the election. If you want to connect this to Russia, you'll have to go further back to when academia became leftist and began training our youth to be cultural Marxists. The division we see today is because there are enough people (though a minority) who believe the institutions of the country are actually evil, have an evil past, and must be destroyed and rebuilt to be good.
Or the prospect that the next election will be similarly fucked up by Russian political trolling?
No, I don't think it had any significant effect. I honestly wonder if people like you would care about it if it had ended up favoring Hillary or Bernie? I wonder if Russia was helping to fund BLM whether that would change your perception of BLM (or Russia)?
Coming back to the replies to my comment, reading yours feels like I've stumbled across someone having a bipolar episode. Yes, I'm worse than Hitler because I said the concept of censorship applies to private entities suppressing expression as well as government. Great argument, very well put!
You already have shown that you understood what "censoring" means with respect to a private entity, so I'm not sure why you think I (or you) need to read the dictionary, but here you go...
the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security
Notice how it doesn't limit that to the government. Hey the dictionary agrees with me! What's your take on this startling new development?
You might want that to be the case, but it's not.
vs
A private entity can censor you whenever and however they want within their system.
I'm guessing you misunderstood what I said, or responded to the wrong post, because you're actually agreeing with me (despite your first sentence).
My point: when private entities censor you, that is censorship. I was disagreeing with someone who said "You really don't know what censorship means, do you? It does not apply to private entities. It applies to Goverment only."