Agreed. I sometimes drive my car into Times Square on a Sunday morning, because it's more convenient than the train for my family, and we have a thing every week. There are parking spots available (for a few hours) right outside of $20-$25 an hour market-rate private parking lots. It's ridiculous, but I'll keep doing it while it's free.
I'm not sure we'd need to make public transit free, though, if we're planning to eliminate free/subsidized parking. That might be enough to effect change all on its own.
Viewing these words as a mistake is the simplest interpretation of the law. The other option is to re-interpret lots of other sections, and change the law to be at odds with how the people writing it meant for it to be interpreted.
The writers of the law clearly wanted to establish state exchanges for any state that wanted them, and a federal exchange for any state that didn't want to roll its own, and that all of these exchanges do the same thing. This might not be apparent in that little snippet, but it's very much apparent in the text of the law itself.
It's not as though the SCOTUS majority is pulling meaning out of nowhere for just this passage. Quite the contrary, they'd have had to re-interpret a lot of text to infer that the law was written so as to exclude subsidies for the federal exchange.
Legit.
Especially given the culture of "it's only wrong if you get caught" attitude towards breaking rules that pervades so many of our high schools and trickles up into college and the work force with every graduation, and then gets reinforced with every performance evaluation or annual bonus.
The mind blowing thing is that even though the money follows the winner (everyone loves to back a winner!) the politicians give their loyalty away for contributions, as if those contributions ensured their victory, rather than the other way around.
Source: I spent 7 years of my life getting a Ph.D. in physics. By the time I got the Ph.D., the only reason left I had for finishing was because I'd started.
A Master's in physics, though, that's legit. You're still having fun, and still learning a lot.
Be sure to solve the problems at the end of the chapters. You will know physics when you can solve physics problems. If you're not interested in solving the problems, just read some pop physics books.
For astronomy, I would be of no help whatsoever. The math is easier, though; if you can use the Pythagorean Theorem, you're good (I hear).
My background: 36, a Ph.D. in physics, and I work at New York tech startups.
People who are suffering, ignorant, and afraid are more willing to turn to the supernatural - be it religion or superstitions - as a 'solution' to their problems.
Definitely.
I see parallels between this and any number of other situations that make people desperate:
* Cancer patients turning to stem cell "remedies" from quacks who don't bother looking for evidence
* People with autistic children who can't find a cause so they blame vaccines
* People who can't see any obvious good options, so they turn to psychics
Fear is a wonderful tool if you're a charlatan, as it makes your victims less likely to pause and ask whether you're actually qualified to do (or to know) any of the things you claim.
When I was in primary school, I was taught by all teachers to not take any drugs, smoke or drink excessively, even painkillers...
Well, one problem is that the teachers lie through their teeth, demonizing marijuana along with heroin. But then you get to high school, and your friends are smoking weed, having fun, and they look fine. You've got older friends who have smoked pot on & off for years without visible consequences. So you try it and, sure enough, it's not the drug you were warned about by your teachers; it's actually fine, except for the consequences of getting caught. Your teachers lied to you, and now you know it.
And the irony is that the most dangerous, most addictive, most popular drugs (alcohol and tobacco), well, these the ones your teachers tell you to use in "moderation." They imply that there's relative safety in these drugs, which is another lie.
So how should you know about the dangers of addiction from heroin or methamphetamines, when your teachers are demonstrably lying to you about drugs?
I've worked at startups for the last 2 years. It's OK to be one of the "grownups" there and duck out of the social activities. They'll still massively value your work, and I'm sure you'll find plenty of others in your age range to relate to.
BTW, I'm 36, with a wife and 2 kids, and I work in New York.
... Forced unionization has often just become a tool by which employers actually force collective bargaining on workers. It seems all too common that employers are actually the ones creating the unions...
I'm pretty sure employers tend to oppose unions.
Re:You act the part, and blame people for believin
on
Programmer Privilege
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think he's trying to say that not everyone gets the benefit of the doubt. Sure, he was pretty much qualified, but a lot of people don't have the chance. He's not blaming anyone for his privilege, he's not saying he is wrong to have this privilege, he's saying it's wrong that so many other people don't.
I was using Mathematica in grad school (experimental physics). Great for simple number crunching, but awful for doing anything programmatically interesting, and annoyingly expensive.
My sentiments are the same. I loved Ender's Game, but I see his morality infiltrate his writing in everything else of his that I've read (Speaker, Shadow, and a prequel about the parents). It's ubiquitous, and it makes his writing worse. I can't read his writing anymore.
They have a Windows desktop, but they don't use it anymore.
The iPad works great for them. I couldn't survive without a keyboard, but I live inside a vim terminal, pulling out to execute my code. My parents... they don't code. Without that, there's literally nothing they do that can't be done on an iPad. Even things that seem more convenient (long emails) are tedious for them ("I have to go all the way _upstairs_ to do that? I'd rather sit on the couch, or compose it in the passenger set of the car."). They find it significantly more convenient than their desk top, and they argue over who gets to use it. They'll soon buy a second one.
Based on my parents' experience, I say have your mom ditch the desktop.
Also, microwaves only penetrate a centimeter or two. And yes, putting wire mesh (say, 1 cm square) in the walls will completely shield you from all of the microwaves. Of course, it might also cause cell-phone troubles. And your windows will be holes in your net, but that should be fine unless you sleep with a window and no screen, facing the towers.
I spent a summer working at the DIII-D tokamak in La Jolla, CA back in 2001, and this system was already in use. It had clearly been around for years, and the train (and track) had been packed & unpacked for the n-th time during a long period of scheduled downtime. Things were starting up again, and the neutron detectors had to be calibrated. It was my job to get the train working, making sure the connections were good by assembling the train outside of the chamber & sanding the aluminum (some of which was lightly oxidized and nonconductive) until the train ran smoothly.
Things were going well until I disassembled it for reassembly in the chamber. During the process, I dropped a small connector piece on the floor. My attitude was "oh, well, it's not worth my hourly wage to look for this," until I was informed that due to exposure to the radiation, the piece was considered nuclear waste, and had to be found, even if a replacement piece was only $0.01. Half an hour later, the problem was compounded when the lights went off. So there I was, in a huge bay, with a flashlight, looking for a tiny grey connector on a grey unpainted concrete floor.
I didn't realize it at the time, but the lights going off really sped up the search process. With a flashlight, I could simply crouch onto the ground and look for long shadows. I found the piece after about two minutes of trying this technique.
Technically, the sun is wobbling about the center of mass of the solar system, mainly due to the movement of Jupiter, much like an olympic contender doing a hammer throw. The earth is also tugged a bit by the movement of Jupiter, and its main effect isn't to cause the earth's orbit to decay, but rather just to perturb the orbit slightly so that the semimajor axis to precess slowly.
There should be a small (too small to detect, even on the scale of millenia) amount of gravitational energy being radiated in gravity waves because the field at the Earth's radius takes a few minutes to catch up with the slowly accelerating sun, but this sort of effect has only been strong enough to be observed in binary pulsar inspirals, for which the 2003 Nobel in physics was awarded. The earth will be swallowed by the expanding sun when it turns into a red giant well before the earth loses enough energy through this process to change its orbit in any significant (experimentally detectable) way.
It's Quantum Electrodynamics, and covers pretty much everything you'd need to know about electrons, which means 99% of the stuff we deal with in everyday lives (everything but gravity, that is).
Absolutely, the best place in the world to work is in academia. If you're a professor, a researcher, a postdoc, or a gradstudent, the hours are long, the pay is shitty, etc, etc, but there are 2 things working for it:
1. You're doing exactly what you want to do, you've got no bosses (if a professor), or 1 boss who's probably got a better idea of what you're doing than you do, and he's your friend.
2. If you don't like the guy you're working for, there are plenty out there you will like working for, and you can quit anytime with a great thing to put on your resume.
I'm not going in to secondary school teaching regardless, so I'm not sweating it. I am, however, hoping that my grandkids will get a decent education 50 years down the line when they are going to school.
No citation, just opinion, sorry, I was surely exaggerating and I apologize if I sounded like I meant it. Still, I have asked some math/science teachers some pretty basic questions and gotten blank stares. I remember when I asked my math teacher what polar coordinates were and she said she'd never seen them, or when I asked a physics teacher why vectors were being represented by matrices, and HE said he'd never seen such a thing before.
Look, I'm not going to argue with anecdotal evidence. Most all of us at slashdot have had knowledgeable science/math teachers that couldn't communicate their way out of a paper bag, but the fact of the matter is, a lot of teachers out there aren't all that competent in science. And if the teacher wasn't even enthused enough about the subject to major in it him/herself, what's to say that they'll be able to pass on any enthusiasm at all? We should be hiring the most enthused, best communicating science majors to teach our science classes. Anything less is failing our children.
Let's face it: after you've had a REALLY cool teacher who totally knows his/her stuff, you want to study his/her field, even if you don't want to teach. Some may care less, but give them the right inspiration, and they could be some kick ass scientists who could help solve many of the world's problems.
The thing to remember, however, is that not only are we suffering from a shortage of qualified teachers, but also an EXTREME shortage of science teachers that are even competent. Your average English teacher at least has a degree in English. If you ask him/her what Romeo and Juliet is, he/she will tell you. If you ask the average high school science teacher what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, your odds are 50/50 that he/she won't know.
The fact of the matter is, not all high school teaching jobs are equal, and since we've got this shortage of competent science teachers, then let's start paying them what they're worth and get the quality of science teachers up to snuff! It'll also encourage more kids to go into science when they see their English teacher driving around in a rusty Metro and his Physics teacher in a red Porche.
Slashdot Mirror
:%s/\ \ /\ /g
Problem solved.
Agreed. I sometimes drive my car into Times Square on a Sunday morning, because it's more convenient than the train for my family, and we have a thing every week. There are parking spots available (for a few hours) right outside of $20-$25 an hour market-rate private parking lots. It's ridiculous, but I'll keep doing it while it's free. I'm not sure we'd need to make public transit free, though, if we're planning to eliminate free/subsidized parking. That might be enough to effect change all on its own.
Viewing these words as a mistake is the simplest interpretation of the law. The other option is to re-interpret lots of other sections, and change the law to be at odds with how the people writing it meant for it to be interpreted.
The writers of the law clearly wanted to establish state exchanges for any state that wanted them, and a federal exchange for any state that didn't want to roll its own, and that all of these exchanges do the same thing. This might not be apparent in that little snippet, but it's very much apparent in the text of the law itself.
It's not as though the SCOTUS majority is pulling meaning out of nowhere for just this passage. Quite the contrary, they'd have had to re-interpret a lot of text to infer that the law was written so as to exclude subsidies for the federal exchange.
Legit. Especially given the culture of "it's only wrong if you get caught" attitude towards breaking rules that pervades so many of our high schools and trickles up into college and the work force with every graduation, and then gets reinforced with every performance evaluation or annual bonus.
The mind blowing thing is that even though the money follows the winner (everyone loves to back a winner!) the politicians give their loyalty away for contributions, as if those contributions ensured their victory, rather than the other way around.
+1
Source: I spent 7 years of my life getting a Ph.D. in physics. By the time I got the Ph.D., the only reason left I had for finishing was because I'd started.
A Master's in physics, though, that's legit. You're still having fun, and still learning a lot.
For physics, start by reading an intro textbook.
Be sure to solve the problems at the end of the chapters. You will know physics when you can solve physics problems. If you're not interested in solving the problems, just read some pop physics books.
For astronomy, I would be of no help whatsoever. The math is easier, though; if you can use the Pythagorean Theorem, you're good (I hear).
My background: 36, a Ph.D. in physics, and I work at New York tech startups.
People who are suffering, ignorant, and afraid are more willing to turn to the supernatural - be it religion or superstitions - as a 'solution' to their problems.
Definitely.
I see parallels between this and any number of other situations that make people desperate:
* Cancer patients turning to stem cell "remedies" from quacks who don't bother looking for evidence
* People with autistic children who can't find a cause so they blame vaccines
* People who can't see any obvious good options, so they turn to psychics
Fear is a wonderful tool if you're a charlatan, as it makes your victims less likely to pause and ask whether you're actually qualified to do (or to know) any of the things you claim.
When I was in primary school, I was taught by all teachers to not take any drugs, smoke or drink excessively, even painkillers...
Well, one problem is that the teachers lie through their teeth, demonizing marijuana along with heroin. But then you get to high school, and your friends are smoking weed, having fun, and they look fine. You've got older friends who have smoked pot on & off for years without visible consequences. So you try it and, sure enough, it's not the drug you were warned about by your teachers; it's actually fine, except for the consequences of getting caught. Your teachers lied to you, and now you know it.
And the irony is that the most dangerous, most addictive, most popular drugs (alcohol and tobacco), well, these the ones your teachers tell you to use in "moderation." They imply that there's relative safety in these drugs, which is another lie.
So how should you know about the dangers of addiction from heroin or methamphetamines, when your teachers are demonstrably lying to you about drugs?
I've worked at startups for the last 2 years. It's OK to be one of the "grownups" there and duck out of the social activities. They'll still massively value your work, and I'm sure you'll find plenty of others in your age range to relate to.
BTW, I'm 36, with a wife and 2 kids, and I work in New York.
... Forced unionization has often just become a tool by which employers actually force collective bargaining on workers. It seems all too common that employers are actually the ones creating the unions ...
I'm pretty sure employers tend to oppose unions.
I think he's trying to say that not everyone gets the benefit of the doubt. Sure, he was pretty much qualified, but a lot of people don't have the chance. He's not blaming anyone for his privilege, he's not saying he is wrong to have this privilege, he's saying it's wrong that so many other people don't.
+1
I was using Mathematica in grad school (experimental physics). Great for simple number crunching, but awful for doing anything programmatically interesting, and annoyingly expensive.
I'm now using Python and loving it.
My sentiments are the same. I loved Ender's Game, but I see his morality infiltrate his writing in everything else of his that I've read (Speaker, Shadow, and a prequel about the parents). It's ubiquitous, and it makes his writing worse. I can't read his writing anymore.
They have a Windows desktop, but they don't use it anymore.
The iPad works great for them. I couldn't survive without a keyboard, but I live inside a vim terminal, pulling out to execute my code. My parents ... they don't code. Without that, there's literally nothing they do that can't be done on an iPad. Even things that seem more convenient (long emails) are tedious for them ("I have to go all the way _upstairs_ to do that? I'd rather sit on the couch, or compose it in the passenger set of the car."). They find it significantly more convenient than their desk top, and they argue over who gets to use it. They'll soon buy a second one.
Based on my parents' experience, I say have your mom ditch the desktop.
Also, microwaves only penetrate a centimeter or two. And yes, putting wire mesh (say, 1 cm square) in the walls will completely shield you from all of the microwaves. Of course, it might also cause cell-phone troubles. And your windows will be holes in your net, but that should be fine unless you sleep with a window and no screen, facing the towers.
But seriously, you should be fine.
I spent a summer working at the DIII-D tokamak in La Jolla, CA back in 2001, and this system was already in use. It had clearly been around for years, and the train (and track) had been packed & unpacked for the n-th time during a long period of scheduled downtime. Things were starting up again, and the neutron detectors had to be calibrated. It was my job to get the train working, making sure the connections were good by assembling the train outside of the chamber & sanding the aluminum (some of which was lightly oxidized and nonconductive) until the train ran smoothly.
Things were going well until I disassembled it for reassembly in the chamber. During the process, I dropped a small connector piece on the floor. My attitude was "oh, well, it's not worth my hourly wage to look for this," until I was informed that due to exposure to the radiation, the piece was considered nuclear waste, and had to be found, even if a replacement piece was only $0.01. Half an hour later, the problem was compounded when the lights went off. So there I was, in a huge bay, with a flashlight, looking for a tiny grey connector on a grey unpainted concrete floor.
I didn't realize it at the time, but the lights going off really sped up the search process. With a flashlight, I could simply crouch onto the ground and look for long shadows. I found the piece after about two minutes of trying this technique.
Technically, the sun is wobbling about the center of mass of the solar system, mainly due to the movement of Jupiter, much like an olympic contender doing a hammer throw. The earth is also tugged a bit by the movement of Jupiter, and its main effect isn't to cause the earth's orbit to decay, but rather just to perturb the orbit slightly so that the semimajor axis to precess slowly.
There should be a small (too small to detect, even on the scale of millenia) amount of gravitational energy being radiated in gravity waves because the field at the Earth's radius takes a few minutes to catch up with the slowly accelerating sun, but this sort of effect has only been strong enough to be observed in binary pulsar inspirals, for which the 2003 Nobel in physics was awarded. The earth will be swallowed by the expanding sun when it turns into a red giant well before the earth loses enough energy through this process to change its orbit in any significant (experimentally detectable) way.
It's Quantum Electrodynamics, and covers pretty much everything you'd need to know about electrons, which means 99% of the stuff we deal with in everyday lives (everything but gravity, that is).
Absolutely, the best place in the world to work is in academia. If you're a professor, a researcher, a postdoc, or a gradstudent, the hours are long, the pay is shitty, etc, etc, but there are 2 things working for it:
1. You're doing exactly what you want to do, you've got no bosses (if a professor), or 1 boss who's probably got a better idea of what you're doing than you do, and he's your friend.
2. If you don't like the guy you're working for, there are plenty out there you will like working for, and you can quit anytime with a great thing to put on your resume.
I'm not going in to secondary school teaching regardless, so I'm not sweating it. I am, however, hoping that my grandkids will get a decent education 50 years down the line when they are going to school.
No citation, just opinion, sorry, I was surely exaggerating and I apologize if I sounded like I meant it. Still, I have asked some math/science teachers some pretty basic questions and gotten blank stares. I remember when I asked my math teacher what polar coordinates were and she said she'd never seen them, or when I asked a physics teacher why vectors were being represented by matrices, and HE said he'd never seen such a thing before.
Look, I'm not going to argue with anecdotal evidence. Most all of us at slashdot have had knowledgeable science/math teachers that couldn't communicate their way out of a paper bag, but the fact of the matter is, a lot of teachers out there aren't all that competent in science. And if the teacher wasn't even enthused enough about the subject to major in it him/herself, what's to say that they'll be able to pass on any enthusiasm at all? We should be hiring the most enthused, best communicating science majors to teach our science classes. Anything less is failing our children.
Let's face it: after you've had a REALLY cool teacher who totally knows his/her stuff, you want to study his/her field, even if you don't want to teach. Some may care less, but give them the right inspiration, and they could be some kick ass scientists who could help solve many of the world's problems.
The thing to remember, however, is that not only are we suffering from a shortage of qualified teachers, but also an EXTREME shortage of science teachers that are even competent. Your average English teacher at least has a degree in English. If you ask him/her what Romeo and Juliet is, he/she will tell you. If you ask the average high school science teacher what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, your odds are 50/50 that he/she won't know.
The fact of the matter is, not all high school teaching jobs are equal, and since we've got this shortage of competent science teachers, then let's start paying them what they're worth and get the quality of science teachers up to snuff! It'll also encourage more kids to go into science when they see their English teacher driving around in a rusty Metro and his Physics teacher in a red Porche.