Teachers as a demographic of college graduates represent the lower half of the GPA pool.
Citation needed. I've heard this sor of allegation many times, but every time I try to look it up, I find counter-data:
"More important than the high school grades, though, the study also tracked one group of students over their college careers from 1979 to 1983. The college grades of this group also showed no differences between potential teachers and others. As sophomores, those who planned to teach had an average college GPA of 2.88; those who planned to do something else came in at 2.87." -- http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=2368DB6068831EED5083CA8B0BCA0C46.inst3_1a?docId=5000446952
"Kevin Rask, an economics professor at Wake Forest...after reviewing the records of more than 5,000 students, who graduated from an unnamed elite liberal arts college in the Northeast from 2001 to 2009", found that education majors had the highest GPA, and chemistry majors, the lowest. --
http://moneywatch.bnet.com/saving-money/blog/college-solution/5-best-and-worst-college-majors-for-top-grades/1878/ (How much is this is due to unqualified students seeing chemistry as a good career choice, and how much is due to grade inflation on the "soft" side of campus, is of course a legitimate topic; but that's not the proposition you put forward.)
As Boortz has said, sending your children to a government school in the U.S. is tantamount to child abuse.
Handing them over to a church school or a corporate school is inherently better? It is to laugh.
Let's face it, the only group that's indiscriminately targeting American civilians in mass transportation are radicalized Muslims. Someone will probably mention McVeigh or go through the last few decades to come up with a list of a half dozen white guys who were "terrorists". They weren't terrorists.
Bullshit. You don't get to redefine "terrorism" so that it only applies to mass transportation. And you think that McVeigh's goal wasn't creating terror? WTF.
No offense, but this is completely speculative, and seems to ignore the fact that these body scanners can cost up to and exceeding $100,000 [epic.org], and that's not even including the costs of hiring and maintaining staff to manage the machines.
So what? A single Predator drone costs $4.5 million, and you don't hear anybody but a bunch of peaceniks complaining about that. There's always money for our friends in the defense/security business.
You don't think that "The comparison between the swastika and the war on Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq" was supposed to be a comparison of the Germans in WW II to the US in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq?
No. Since that's not what it says, why would you read it what way?
Let me rewrite the OP a bit for you to assist your comprehension: "They face an abstract geometric form that has negative connotations for many people (though positive ones for others[*]) with the horror of facing the son of Satan or whatever, but then they go happily supporting the actual on-going killing of human beings in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq (although to a lesser extent)...Yeah, the abstract geometric form is the real evil here, that's what we should worry about..."
The symbol is not the thing, the pointer isn't the object, the map is not the territory.
([*]You will commonly see swastikas on shrines and temples in Japan. It's often used on maps to mark a temple. We live in an international culture; nearly 40% of the world's population is Chinese or Indian, cultures where this is a symbol with positive associations.)
"Tort reform" is a shibboleth for the right wing and a way to distract people from the enormous profits that health insurers and Big Phama extract from the system, not a serious proposal to reduce costs.
They're TV performers - none of them studied science academically - what?
Science doesn't care whether you study it academically, it cares that you study it experimentally.
Faraday had little formal education, but discovered electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, the laws of electrolysis, the fact that magnetism can effect light, and laid the foundation for the development of the electric motor and dynamo. And he invented the Faraday cage. Oh, he also discovered benzene and invented an early form of the Bunsen burner, synthesized the first chorlocarbon compounds, and was the first to report on nanoparticles. Some historians rank him as the best experimentalist, ever.
Honestly, this whole thing is a joke and just shows how becoming too PC is a weakness. If we would just profile we wouldn't need half the security we have.
Profile whom, and how?
Racial profiling is not only bigotry, a violation of the guarantee of equal protection, and a great way to motivate more hatred -- and thus more attacks -- against the U.S., but it doesn't work. As soon as you know that they're looking twice at people of Arabic descent, just send in an English/Jamaican guy.
Religious profiling -- what, you're going to ask me for a baptism certificate from a State-approved church before I can get on the plane? And again, a great way to motivate more hatred and more attacks against the U.S.
Any profile you set up, is just an incentive for the other side to recruit people who can pass as not fitting it -- and a way to make the 99.9999% of people fitting that profile who are innocent, angry enough at you to think of joining that other 0.00001%.
You want a secure flight? The best idea I've ever heard to secure a plane against terrorists is that, just like we've got emergency oxygen masks, we should put emergency Louisville Sluggers in tubes running down the side of the plane. In case of emergency, the pilot pushes a button, the tubes rotate open, and you've got passengers armed with something every American knows how to swing.
I am failing to grasp why our observation or non observation has any effect on the particle at all.
To observe a particle, we have to interact with it. We have to scatter a photon off of it or something.
It's not like observing wild animals in the jungle, where we might be able to stay hidden back in the foliage and see them without being seen ourselves. When we observe an electron, it (to get poetic) observes us back.
If that were true, then the concept of responsibility would crumble. I can't be held responsible for something that's inherent to the fabric of the universe. I never had a choice.
The whole question of "free will" is based on an erroneous partition of the universe into "self" and "other". I suggest Raymond Smullyan's essay "Is God A Taoist? as a corrective.
The question of "responsibility" is based on a confusion about "ability to respond" versus "liability for punishment/reward". If, for example, you conk a little old lady over the head and steal her purse, and I want to take some action to rectify the situation and prevent a re-occurrence, you are the segment of the universe to which I must address my efforts. That's the case regardless of whether we have a "clockwork" deterministic universe, or whether we have a quantum one where particles have random behavior; and it the case regardless of whether my corrective methods are harsh punishments or compassionate rehabilitation.
So what would Ireland be like if they hadn't attracted those companies? Probably fucked even sooner.
Perhaps they would have build their own companies, slowly growing into a truly strong economy based on robust small businesses rather than on kowtowing to the whims of sociopathic mulinational legal fictions. It would have been a much slower rise than the "Celtic Tiger" years were -- but it wouldn't be so easy to topple over.
How many businesses besides Google, Microsoft, HP, Bank of America, Merril Lynch and Intel will leave? How many businesses will close their doors, because much of their income was based on the spending and consumption of those businesses, and their employees?
So the proper lesson here is never build your economy on the basis of large corporations that can leave you as part of a "race to the bottom".
A robust economy will have many small, local businesses that are tied to the community. When you hook your city's, state's, or nation's economic well-being to some megacorp, you are then forever at that megacorp's mercy.
Unfortunately, corporatist politicians will instead take this as an excuse to further kowtow to their masters, and seek even lighter corporate taxes and looser regulations. And the class warfare continues.
Re:Israeli Airport Security folks are professional
on
Bruce Schneier vs. the TSA
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There's no shortage of proven interrogation techniques that work, and they're very easy to learn. I learned the Reid Technique in the span of about a month.
Elicit any false confessions with it yet? Funny example to use to make a point about "proven" interrogation techniques, as Reid as proven to in fact not work (assuming you goal is to learn the truth, and not just to "break" a suspect).
I'd just like to point out that the last post of yours that got down-moderated was a "The State knows best" - type post, which is probably more associated with the Far Left than the Right.
Tangential to the thread, but an important distinction:
Authority ("the Church/State/Boss/Father/Mother knows best") vs. liberty ("I'll decide for myself") is orthogonal to left (the interests of people who do productive work) vs. right (the interests of people who own capital). It is certainly true that there are two main clusters in contemporary American politics; whether our two parties reflect or create this dynamic is an open question. But to understand the issues, we have to see politics as multi-dimensional. (And no, the two dimensional "Nolan Chart" used as a recruiting tool by the so-called "Libertarian Party" is just as much of a distortion.)
The contemporary mainstream American right, which we can more-or-less identify with the Republican Party, is capitalist and authoritarian. It thinks the State knows best what sort of sexual and romantic relationships you ought to be permitted to engage in, believes that the state ought to have the power of life and death over citizens (not just in the death penalty, but in opposing euthanasia laws), and fetishizes the military chain of command, where the individual submits to the moral judgment of the State as to who ought to be shot or bombed.
On economic issues, both the GOP and the "libertarian" right of the "Libertarian Party" want a state that's powerful enough to preserve the privilege of the investment class (i.e., the capitalists). You'll never hear them talk about reducing government's power to enforce and create property "rights". The mouth-noise from the GOP about "smaller government" is marketing; their idea of "smaller government" is about decreasing democratic governance and increasing state-backed private power. (It's government cops who come to evict you from "private" property.)
The contemporary moderate left in the U.S. -- the center of the Democratic Party, to a first order approximation -- is more skeptical of the State dictating "family values" and deciding who should live and die, though there is also an bit of a holdover from the Progressive Era's Prohibitionist tendencies to save people from themselves. (It is sometimes a tricky line to figure out what's "saving people from themselves" and what's "sensible consumer protection against fraud".) This group thinks that the State knows better than corporate oligarchs what's good for the economy -- and given the fact that the economy has historically done better under Democrats than under Republicans, they seem to be correct in that belief.
The far left, though, thinks that rather than regulating them, we shouldn't have corporate oligarchs in the first place. While Marxists believe that the solution is a "dictatorship of the proletariat", the libertarian left understands that corporate charters (and therefore the stock market that trades corporate ownership), reserve banking, all the economic factors that concentrate wealth -- hell, money and property itself -- are either creations of the state or rely directly on it, and that disempowering the state along these lines is a more desirable means to the end of economic justice and liberty.
There is, to be blunt, no worthwhile investment in putting human beings on Mars. Robots can gather scientific knowledge at a fraction of the cost, and the idea of a Mars colony as some sort of "backup" for humanity is nonsense. Far easier to build a series of enclosed and shielded environments here on Earth; nothing that's going to happen within the next 10,000 years could render Earth less hospitable than Mars is now. I think that by that time we might have some pretty good ways to shield the homeworld from such unfortunate incidents.
And the argument that manned space exploration is "inspirational" makes it just a form of performance art -- let it compete for NEA dollars against your local symphony orchestra or grants to controversial photographers, then.
Manned missions to Mars are a project for another century. We have to get through the 21st first -- that means a focus of resources locally to develop sustainable civilization. That certainly might include near-space operations, like solar photovolatic (or even solar wind power collectors), He3 collection on Luna, or even orbital reflectors to cool a warming planet. But there's just no good reason for manned exploration of deep space at this time. Even the cliched trope of asteroid mining -- which really serves more as a background for the laissez-faire capitalism of certain right-wing SF writers than as a serious approach to meeting humanity's needs -- would be better accomplished by robots.
No, the problem is that the Palestinians want a small strip of land without any Jews on it.
You mean, the Palestinians want to expel the people who invaded their land? Imagine that.
Jews and Arabs were able to live in relative peace in Palestine until the thrice-damned British decided that establishing a Jewish homeland there would serve their geopolitical interest and started implementing the "Balfour Declaration".
Or Jews on any land, anywhere.
Nonsense. Most Palestinians don't give a damn about Jews outside the disputed territory.
But yet the come, start their business, succeed or fail based on their concept, efforts, and efficiency.
Businesses succeed or fail based on their ability to get backing from the investment classes. Much of that ability has little to do with concept, efforts, and efficiency; it has instead to do with dumb luck and shameless gaming of the system.
Yes the big players can Game Google to push their links higher, (for a while anyway) but when the small company's happy customers (or unhappy ones) start tweeting for friending, yelping, or what-ever-is-nexting, it won't matter.
And then the big players start gaming Twitter, Facebook, or whatever is next.
You make money by pushing your competitors out of the market and taking their business. Credit is what allows you to do that. In addition, the fact that you have loans to pay means you are largely required by your creditors to grow.
It's not just credit, but all forms of investment where the investor -- who is not involved in the actual production of goods and services -- supplies capital with the expectation to receive profit later. (And that profit has to be skimmed off the top of the productivity of the people who are actually doing the work, so that they can never receive the full value of their labor.)
In other word, capitalism -- which, despite the confusion its apologists like to engender, is a very different thing than free markets -- is at fault. If you get the backing of the investment class, you can push others out of the market, even if their product is superior
The fact that people have seen a thing before, even hundreds of times, does not mean that they can't look at it later and go, "WTF is that?!" We are an unreliable bunch of observers.
Defaulting to cautionary surprise is evolution in action: if you're not sure if you've seen something before, assume you don't know what it is, that it's strange and dangerous, that it might eat you. This improves your chances of surviving to have offspring. But it's not really good behavior for a technological culture. Resolving this conundrum is left as an exercise for the species.
Actually, that's not groupthink but a religious commandment.
No, it's actually quite possible to believe that "murder is bad" for better reasons than "because an all-powerful dude who lives in the sky said so, and is going to punish you if you don't obey."
One thing with those ten commandments, though. Of those that deal with human-human relationships and not the human-god relationship, they sure have stood the test of time.
But that's only 50-60% of those 10 (different Judeo-Christian sects list them differently); and those prohibitions are hardly original to Moses, they're found in other ancient legal texts such as the Code of Hammurabi.
The Ten Commandments were primarily a source of power for the priestly class, and secondarily a list of basic social prohibitions. As a source of ethical guidance, they fail it.
Most people can't grasp the fact that if you put a random employee in place of the CEO in the company, the company will most likely grind to a halt or even disintegrate.
Citation needed.
CEOs of large companies do not generally get there on merit, but on the "old boys" network. I would not surprised if randomocracy generally produced equivalent results.
Were you sick from school when they explained reproduction?
Are you unfamiliar with the concept of adoption? Of step-children? Do you think that infertile people should be unable to marry?
Sorry, but where in your constitution does it say that everyone has a right to marriage
That would be the equal protection clause of Amendment XIV. When Alice and Bob are allowed to get married, but Alice and Bobbi are not, merely because of the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, that is not equal protection under the law.
and that the government has a right to redefine marriage?
Civil marriage is a government creation. Law doesn't "redefine" it any more than it "redefines" patents or copyrights; without government action, civil marriage does not exist.
Marriage was not instituted by the government because it preceded any form of government.
Nonsense. There is no civil marriage without a government; and anyway, when was this mythical time when humans had no form of government? Hominid dominance hierarchies have always been with us.
Governments passed laws to recognize and regulate marriage based on societies values which is not the same thing as creating marriage.
No. Civil marriage is a legal institution, a contractual obligation. The social aspect of marriage is between the couple (or triad or whatever) and their friends; the religious aspect is between them and their priests, ministers, or shamans. But the legal aspect is entirely a creation of the state.
It's entirely possible for these to be separate; there are many people who are legally married whose marriage is not recognized by the Catholic church, for example. If you don't want to invite Alice and Bobbi to the cotillion, or want to disinclude them in your prayers to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, that's your own business; if you want to deny them equal protection under the law, then you're guilty of a high crime against humanity.
Marriage requires a license and so it is not a right.
So what? Do you think, "Driving requires a license so it is not a right; so it's ok for the government to forbid (blacks/Christians/Democrats/whatever) from driving"? Equal treatment under the law is a right.
The UK has 36,700 more deaths in winter than in summer, mostly among the elderly. (Your blood thickens when you are cold and you are more likely to have a heart attack or stroke.) So the most likely cause of the difference in death rates would be that US homes are better insulated, being generally newer, and have better heating.
It seems questionable to me that a typical new American house, made of vinyl siding over foam board, is necessarily better insulated than an older stone or brick home. But it's certainly the case that the U.K. is farther north than most of the U.S. population, so people have a colder environment regardless of insulation, and they get less sun, thus raising the risk of vitamin D deficiency, which has been tied to a host of health problems.
Clearly this is because of our lack of socialized healthcare, and this is no other factor that could possibly affect this.
Clearly this shows that America's socialized healthcare for the elderly -- i.e., Medicare -- is in fact quite effective. It's a strong case for expanding access to it to everyone -- i.e., the "public option".
Slashdot Mirror
Citation needed. I've heard this sor of allegation many times, but every time I try to look it up, I find counter-data:
"More important than the high school grades, though, the study also tracked one group of students over their college careers from 1979 to 1983. The college grades of this group also showed no differences between potential teachers and others. As sophomores, those who planned to teach had an average college GPA of 2.88; those who planned to do something else came in at 2.87." -- http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=2368DB6068831EED5083CA8B0BCA0C46.inst3_1a?docId=5000446952
"Kevin Rask, an economics professor at Wake Forest...after reviewing the records of more than 5,000 students, who graduated from an unnamed elite liberal arts college in the Northeast from 2001 to 2009", found that education majors had the highest GPA, and chemistry majors, the lowest. -- http://moneywatch.bnet.com/saving-money/blog/college-solution/5-best-and-worst-college-majors-for-top-grades/1878/ (How much is this is due to unqualified students seeing chemistry as a good career choice, and how much is due to grade inflation on the "soft" side of campus, is of course a legitimate topic; but that's not the proposition you put forward.)
Handing them over to a church school or a corporate school is inherently better? It is to laugh.
Bullshit. You don't get to redefine "terrorism" so that it only applies to mass transportation. And you think that McVeigh's goal wasn't creating terror? WTF.
So what? A single Predator drone costs $4.5 million, and you don't hear anybody but a bunch of peaceniks complaining about that. There's always money for our friends in the defense/security business.
No. Since that's not what it says, why would you read it what way?
Let me rewrite the OP a bit for you to assist your comprehension: "They face an abstract geometric form that has negative connotations for many people (though positive ones for others[*]) with the horror of facing the son of Satan or whatever, but then they go happily supporting the actual on-going killing of human beings in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq (although to a lesser extent)...Yeah, the abstract geometric form is the real evil here, that's what we should worry about..."
The symbol is not the thing, the pointer isn't the object, the map is not the territory.
([*]You will commonly see swastikas on shrines and temples in Japan. It's often used on maps to mark a temple. We live in an international culture; nearly 40% of the world's population is Chinese or Indian, cultures where this is a symbol with positive associations.)
Rising healthcare costs have little to do with malpractice awards -- malpractice costs account for less than 2 percent of healthcare spending. Malpractice costs have been estimated to be about $12 per American a year. So, if you completely eliminated them, you'd have...a dollar a month. Whoop de frickin' do.
"Tort reform" is a shibboleth for the right wing and a way to distract people from the enormous profits that health insurers and Big Phama extract from the system, not a serious proposal to reduce costs.
Science doesn't care whether you study it academically, it cares that you study it experimentally.
Faraday had little formal education, but discovered electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, the laws of electrolysis, the fact that magnetism can effect light, and laid the foundation for the development of the electric motor and dynamo. And he invented the Faraday cage. Oh, he also discovered benzene and invented an early form of the Bunsen burner, synthesized the first chorlocarbon compounds, and was the first to report on nanoparticles. Some historians rank him as the best experimentalist, ever.
Profile whom, and how?
Racial profiling is not only bigotry, a violation of the guarantee of equal protection, and a great way to motivate more hatred -- and thus more attacks -- against the U.S., but it doesn't work. As soon as you know that they're looking twice at people of Arabic descent, just send in an English/Jamaican guy.
You think a blond-haired blue-eyed woman can't be a terrorist? Think again.
Religious profiling -- what, you're going to ask me for a baptism certificate from a State-approved church before I can get on the plane? And again, a great way to motivate more hatred and more attacks against the U.S.
Any profile you set up, is just an incentive for the other side to recruit people who can pass as not fitting it -- and a way to make the 99.9999% of people fitting that profile who are innocent, angry enough at you to think of joining that other 0.00001%.
As for "behavioral profiling", it's pseudoscientific garbage.
You want a secure flight? The best idea I've ever heard to secure a plane against terrorists is that, just like we've got emergency oxygen masks, we should put emergency Louisville Sluggers in tubes running down the side of the plane. In case of emergency, the pilot pushes a button, the tubes rotate open, and you've got passengers armed with something every American knows how to swing.
To observe a particle, we have to interact with it. We have to scatter a photon off of it or something.
It's not like observing wild animals in the jungle, where we might be able to stay hidden back in the foliage and see them without being seen ourselves. When we observe an electron, it (to get poetic) observes us back.
The whole question of "free will" is based on an erroneous partition of the universe into "self" and "other". I suggest Raymond Smullyan's essay "Is God A Taoist? as a corrective.
The question of "responsibility" is based on a confusion about "ability to respond" versus "liability for punishment/reward". If, for example, you conk a little old lady over the head and steal her purse, and I want to take some action to rectify the situation and prevent a re-occurrence, you are the segment of the universe to which I must address my efforts. That's the case regardless of whether we have a "clockwork" deterministic universe, or whether we have a quantum one where particles have random behavior; and it the case regardless of whether my corrective methods are harsh punishments or compassionate rehabilitation.
Most of the folks complaining about the tax burden also somehow don't know that their taxes are very low compared to other nations, or compared to their own nation's history. It's long past time to grow up and raise taxes, especially on the investment classes who have been giving the rest of us the shaft for the past 30 years.
Perhaps they would have build their own companies, slowly growing into a truly strong economy based on robust small businesses rather than on kowtowing to the whims of sociopathic mulinational legal fictions. It would have been a much slower rise than the "Celtic Tiger" years were -- but it wouldn't be so easy to topple over.
So the proper lesson here is never build your economy on the basis of large corporations that can leave you as part of a "race to the bottom".
A robust economy will have many small, local businesses that are tied to the community. When you hook your city's, state's, or nation's economic well-being to some megacorp, you are then forever at that megacorp's mercy.
Unfortunately, corporatist politicians will instead take this as an excuse to further kowtow to their masters, and seek even lighter corporate taxes and looser regulations. And the class warfare continues.
Elicit any false confessions with it yet? Funny example to use to make a point about "proven" interrogation techniques, as Reid as proven to in fact not work (assuming you goal is to learn the truth, and not just to "break" a suspect).
Tangential to the thread, but an important distinction:
Authority ("the Church/State/Boss/Father/Mother knows best") vs. liberty ("I'll decide for myself") is orthogonal to left (the interests of people who do productive work) vs. right (the interests of people who own capital). It is certainly true that there are two main clusters in contemporary American politics; whether our two parties reflect or create this dynamic is an open question. But to understand the issues, we have to see politics as multi-dimensional. (And no, the two dimensional "Nolan Chart" used as a recruiting tool by the so-called "Libertarian Party" is just as much of a distortion.)
The contemporary mainstream American right, which we can more-or-less identify with the Republican Party, is capitalist and authoritarian. It thinks the State knows best what sort of sexual and romantic relationships you ought to be permitted to engage in, believes that the state ought to have the power of life and death over citizens (not just in the death penalty, but in opposing euthanasia laws), and fetishizes the military chain of command, where the individual submits to the moral judgment of the State as to who ought to be shot or bombed.
On economic issues, both the GOP and the "libertarian" right of the "Libertarian Party" want a state that's powerful enough to preserve the privilege of the investment class (i.e., the capitalists). You'll never hear them talk about reducing government's power to enforce and create property "rights". The mouth-noise from the GOP about "smaller government" is marketing; their idea of "smaller government" is about decreasing democratic governance and increasing state-backed private power. (It's government cops who come to evict you from "private" property.)
The contemporary moderate left in the U.S. -- the center of the Democratic Party, to a first order approximation -- is more skeptical of the State dictating "family values" and deciding who should live and die, though there is also an bit of a holdover from the Progressive Era's Prohibitionist tendencies to save people from themselves. (It is sometimes a tricky line to figure out what's "saving people from themselves" and what's "sensible consumer protection against fraud".) This group thinks that the State knows better than corporate oligarchs what's good for the economy -- and given the fact that the economy has historically done better under Democrats than under Republicans, they seem to be correct in that belief.
The far left, though, thinks that rather than regulating them, we shouldn't have corporate oligarchs in the first place. While Marxists believe that the solution is a "dictatorship of the proletariat", the libertarian left understands that corporate charters (and therefore the stock market that trades corporate ownership), reserve banking, all the economic factors that concentrate wealth -- hell, money and property itself -- are either creations of the state or rely directly on it, and that disempowering the state along these lines is a more desirable means to the end of economic justice and liberty.
It's also a matter of money.
There is, to be blunt, no worthwhile investment in putting human beings on Mars. Robots can gather scientific knowledge at a fraction of the cost, and the idea of a Mars colony as some sort of "backup" for humanity is nonsense. Far easier to build a series of enclosed and shielded environments here on Earth; nothing that's going to happen within the next 10,000 years could render Earth less hospitable than Mars is now. I think that by that time we might have some pretty good ways to shield the homeworld from such unfortunate incidents.
And the argument that manned space exploration is "inspirational" makes it just a form of performance art -- let it compete for NEA dollars against your local symphony orchestra or grants to controversial photographers, then.
Manned missions to Mars are a project for another century. We have to get through the 21st first -- that means a focus of resources locally to develop sustainable civilization. That certainly might include near-space operations, like solar photovolatic (or even solar wind power collectors), He3 collection on Luna, or even orbital reflectors to cool a warming planet. But there's just no good reason for manned exploration of deep space at this time. Even the cliched trope of asteroid mining -- which really serves more as a background for the laissez-faire capitalism of certain right-wing SF writers than as a serious approach to meeting humanity's needs -- would be better accomplished by robots.
You mean, the Palestinians want to expel the people who invaded their land? Imagine that.
Jews and Arabs were able to live in relative peace in Palestine until the thrice-damned British decided that establishing a Jewish homeland there would serve their geopolitical interest and started implementing the "Balfour Declaration".
Nonsense. Most Palestinians don't give a damn about Jews outside the disputed territory.
Actually, a signifant number of British criminals ended up in the North American colonies; it's estimated that about 50,000 convicts were "transported" to North America.
This bit of history doesn't fit the American Myth, so is generally ignored.
Businesses succeed or fail based on their ability to get backing from the investment classes. Much of that ability has little to do with concept, efforts, and efficiency; it has instead to do with dumb luck and shameless gaming of the system.
Microsoft, for example, got big by buying stolen ideas, riding IBM's coattails, exploiting Billy Boy's Harvard connections, and then once they got big enough, ruthlessly gaming the system in the ways we all know and love. Hell, Billy started his business career by lying to MITS about having writen a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800.
And then the big players start gaming Twitter, Facebook, or whatever is next.
It's not just credit, but all forms of investment where the investor -- who is not involved in the actual production of goods and services -- supplies capital with the expectation to receive profit later. (And that profit has to be skimmed off the top of the productivity of the people who are actually doing the work, so that they can never receive the full value of their labor.)
In other word, capitalism -- which, despite the confusion its apologists like to engender, is a very different thing than free markets -- is at fault. If you get the backing of the investment class, you can push others out of the market, even if their product is superior
That's because you have misstated the hypothesis.
Hypothesis: Trail that is mysterious to some observers is from scheduled flight.
Please keep in mind that people have identified the moon as a freaking UFO. (And this is not an isolated case.)
Venus has often been mistaken for an airplane or UFO -- during WWII, there were cases where anti-aircraft batteries tried to shoot it down.
The fact that people have seen a thing before, even hundreds of times, does not mean that they can't look at it later and go, "WTF is that?!" We are an unreliable bunch of observers.
Defaulting to cautionary surprise is evolution in action: if you're not sure if you've seen something before, assume you don't know what it is, that it's strange and dangerous, that it might eat you. This improves your chances of surviving to have offspring. But it's not really good behavior for a technological culture. Resolving this conundrum is left as an exercise for the species.
No, it's actually quite possible to believe that "murder is bad" for better reasons than "because an all-powerful dude who lives in the sky said so, and is going to punish you if you don't obey."
But that's only 50-60% of those 10 (different Judeo-Christian sects list them differently); and those prohibitions are hardly original to Moses, they're found in other ancient legal texts such as the Code of Hammurabi.
And they're not that good -- one would do better with the Ten Commandments of Solon or the basic Five Precepts of Buddhism.
The Ten Commandments were primarily a source of power for the priestly class, and secondarily a list of basic social prohibitions. As a source of ethical guidance, they fail it.
Citation needed.
CEOs of large companies do not generally get there on merit, but on the "old boys" network. I would not surprised if randomocracy generally produced equivalent results.
Uh, no, it does not.
Are you unfamiliar with the concept of adoption? Of step-children? Do you think that infertile people should be unable to marry?
That would be the equal protection clause of Amendment XIV. When Alice and Bob are allowed to get married, but Alice and Bobbi are not, merely because of the presence or absence of a Y chromosome, that is not equal protection under the law.
Civil marriage is a government creation. Law doesn't "redefine" it any more than it "redefines" patents or copyrights; without government action, civil marriage does not exist.
Nonsense. There is no civil marriage without a government; and anyway, when was this mythical time when humans had no form of government? Hominid dominance hierarchies have always been with us.
No. Civil marriage is a legal institution, a contractual obligation. The social aspect of marriage is between the couple (or triad or whatever) and their friends; the religious aspect is between them and their priests, ministers, or shamans. But the legal aspect is entirely a creation of the state.
It's entirely possible for these to be separate; there are many people who are legally married whose marriage is not recognized by the Catholic church, for example. If you don't want to invite Alice and Bobbi to the cotillion, or want to disinclude them in your prayers to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, that's your own business; if you want to deny them equal protection under the law, then you're guilty of a high crime against humanity.
So what? Do you think, "Driving requires a license so it is not a right; so it's ok for the government to forbid (blacks/Christians/Democrats/whatever) from driving"? Equal treatment under the law is a right.
Your homophobia shames you. Get over it.
It seems questionable to me that a typical new American house, made of vinyl siding over foam board, is necessarily better insulated than an older stone or brick home. But it's certainly the case that the U.K. is farther north than most of the U.S. population, so people have a colder environment regardless of insulation, and they get less sun, thus raising the risk of vitamin D deficiency, which has been tied to a host of health problems.
Clearly this shows that America's socialized healthcare for the elderly -- i.e., Medicare -- is in fact quite effective. It's a strong case for expanding access to it to everyone -- i.e., the "public option".