practically everyone around the world in their 20's has a facebook account.
Which they will probably regret before age 40. Employers can afford to be choosy these days. They will be even choosier in the future and they aren't much interested in your extended international vacations and snow boarding expeditions. If you must do these things, do yourself a favor and don't post the evidence on Facebook. Your 40 year old future self will thank you someday.
Ah, the day I deleted my facebook account, one of the most liberating things I have ever done.
I never created one in the first place. Facebook allows one to waste time meeting boring, trivial and worthless people all while being tracked and sold down the river to the highest bidder. Can someone please explain to me why it's "cool" to help some corporation ruin your privacy? Do people not understand that they are doing the advertisers' (and governments') work for them by tracking themselves and posting complete dossiers? Zuckerberg was right, Facebook users are dumbasses.
Do you really believe that the Fed and the Treasury would be restraining themselves from issuing more debt than they can repay even if we were still on the gold standard?? Really??
Actually they wouldn't be able to do anything like what they are now doing without fiat currency. There simply aren't enough gold reserves to credibly back their promises to repay. The United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky contains about 147.3 million troy ounces or approximately $192 billion dollars worth at today's price. Compare this with the outstanding debt of the United States Federal Government which is now rapidly approaching the current debt ceiling of $14 trillion dollars.
The Chinese will simply sell to European middlemen who will then turn around and sell to us at even higher prices. This won't work. The Japanese dealt with the US because they needed us to defend them against foreign aggressors. Remember that Japan depended upon the United States for defense against military attack, including nuclear attack from either China (who still have scores to settle with the Japanese) or Russia, in the decades following WWII. They were willing to put up with US import quotas and tariffs because they needed us. The Chinese, who neither need nor want US military protection, are not likely to be so accommodating.
What really prevents more programmers from working as independent IT contractors here in the United States are the arcane and outdated US tax codes which contain a 20-part test for distinguishing between who is an employee and who is a contractor. These difficulties are further compounded by a tax code change, inserted into a tax reform bill by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. as a favor to IBM. To this day, despite various attempts at repeal, Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Code makes it very difficult to remain self employed as an independent contract programmer in the United States because few companies are willing to risk a claim by the IRS for back payroll taxes on regular employees who were "misclassified" as contractors. It's not just programmers either, the entire US tax code is in desperate need of reform, especially in light of stiff foreign competition with fewer regulatory burdens and far more efficient tax regimes. It's like US companies and employees are being asked to run a race with parachutes tied to our collective backs. The Chinese and Indians are laughing at us behind our backs.
and quite frankly I have to agree with Zuckerberg. People are dumbasses!
Indeed.
Not the people you refer to though, but rather the people constantly making said argument.
This is where we disagree. It's possible to argue that those who earn their living in the public eye benefit from or even require a Facebook account. After all, privacy is mostly a sunk cost for politicians, professional athletes and entertainers. However, for every one of them there are tens of thousands of "ordinary" people who benefit much less while still paying that steep privacy price. So no, I don't believe that I'm a dumbass for making this argument while those ordinary Facebook users are geniuses for handing over their privacy with little or nothing to show for it.
How much do you think it costs to host a site like Facebook?
That's irrelevant. Why should I care? When you fly, do you care about how much it costs to run the airline as a business or do you care about arriving at your destination on time, safely and in comfort?
regardless of your blind ideologies.
Ideology has nothing to do with it. I don't concern myself with the costs of other people's businesses unless I am investing in them. As I've already said, it's not my problem.
That being said, I'm not a huge fan of ads or information gathering
As you have no doubt already guessed, neither am I.
but I'd rather have a small text-based Google ad informing me about online electronics stores, robotics and other somewhat interesting stuff than the huge Flash obscenities of old!
I'd rather have none. Firefox with Adblock, BetterPrivacy, FlashBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy. Accept no substitutes.
What you say about benefits it true, but the biggest drawback to Facebook, or any social network for that matter, is the inability to forget. Facebook will save all of those messages forever and mine them for every last morsel of data so that they can sell ads that "target" you and your friends and creep everyone out. I don't know about you, but I don't want a corporation mining the details of my "special" moments in life to sell me shit I didn't ask for and don't need. Zuckerberg is on the record calling users of Facebook "dumbasses" for giving up that kind of information. Maybe he is right?
soon we will all be slaves to the power structure in beijing. soon we will all be like the typical chinese citizen
Yeah, but maybe there will be cool cybernetics and we can all go on Shadowruns against the evil mega-corps. After all, street samurai sounds so much cooler than wage salve, wouldn't you agree?
and then blaming my teaching for their failure to work up to their potential.
If I were you, that is the point where I would take offense. As others have said in this discussion, feel free to waste your own time as long as you don't disturb others who have also paid and would prefer not to waste theirs. It's ironic that students are just about the only major consumer group that is satisfied with receiving less for their money, wouldn't you agree?
We have passed our research on to the business school which requires students to have laptops, and faculty to pre-publish slides (because that is how the business world works) but they aren't interested in knowing.
Researchers at other universities have done the same or similar studies involving multitasking and have all arrived at similar results. Those who claim that they are capable of performing multiple tasks simultaneously at the same level of quality as those performing only single tasks consistently demonstrate in repeated experiments that they cannot. They believe that they are "good" at multitasking, even though the results prove that their beliefs are unfounded. It's even worse in the business world where every manager seems to believe that multitasking is not only necessary, but desirable. They all of them refuse to believe the data from the university experiments and continue to multitask despite the fact that in all but the most trivial cases it doesn't work.
Perhaps we need another one of those, maybe with China as you seem to think may happen.
It may yet come to that. Would you be willing to fit in that war? Are you willing to kill for what you've been promised? Suppose that a few more decades pass between then and now, would you send your children out to fight instead? We may find out just how badly Americans want it when the Chinese finally come around to collect.
There simply isn't enough money to pay the benefits promised, regardless of sentiment. That is reality. There aren't enough resources on this declining planet for everyone to live into their "golden" years in the manner to which middle class Americans have become accustomed. You and your grandparents were lied to by those in power, the political elites. There never was enough money to pay those promises, deserved or not. That is the hard truth and taxing the rich, even at 100%, won't change that outcome; the debt is simply too large. Perhaps it will help you to better understand the public debt crisis if I made an analogy to climate change? The United States, like the global climate, is on an unsustainable path. We still have some time, but not much, to avoid this fate. Although personally, I don't hold out too much hope that we will succeed. If we fail, you will be begging the Chinese, while looking down the barrels of their guns, for your "entitlements". Somehow, I doubt that your pleas will fall upon sympathetic ears. Billions of people already live in abject poverty on this miserable planet. What makes you and your grandparents think that you have a "right" to a better fate than that which has befallen them? Perhaps you believe that your foreign masters, the holders of your debt, will not use violence to collect? My advice: have no illusions about what is coming and take what steps you can to look out for you and yours because soon enough it will be everyone for themselves in this country.
Taxing the rich is the liberal version of the canard, it's like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the "rich" were taxed at 100% of their income it wouldn't matter, the government would still be running massive deficits and the national debt would still be increasing rapidly. The non-discretionary entitlement spending, medicare and social security, already consume 60%+ of the budget, leaving only 40% up to discretion and the discretionary share is shrinking every year while the rate of increase in non-discretionary spending is increasing and will continue to accelerate as the boomers start to collect benefits en masse. Meanwhile the debt, now 14 trillion, continues to pile on top. News flash to liberals: there is NO way that the United States can pay "promised" entitlement benefits and remain solvent. Either we fix this ourselves through severe cuts or foreign debt holders will step in and force the issue; at gunpoint if necessary. Look at what is happening in Ireland, Greece and Italy. Think "austerity" can't happen here in America? Think again, our creditors will demand it.
The work that went into Chess AIs has translated to many other games and has been useful in the development of AIs in general. The game tree of Go is too large to be solved by simply searching for the best move. No matter how fast computers become they will never be powerful enough to exhaustively search the game tree of Go. In fact, numerical estimates show that the number of possible games of Go far exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. Why is this interesting? Well, Many situations that occur in real life, including the car driving analogy that you made, also have very large numbers of discreet "positions" or "instances". The game of Go rather nicely abstracts and isolates much of what makes these sorts of problems "hard" for current AIs without allowing context sensitive or coincidental concerns to obscure the essential essence of that complexity.
As for the argument that Go has not been solved simply because of lack of effort or interest in the AI or Computer Science community, that's simply not true. The fact that Go AIs are so much less effective than their Chess counterparts is not due to lack of effort or understanding of the problem by the AI community. In fact, recent efforts have seen some substantial improvements in Go playing AIs, but these are not the sorts of qualitative breakthroughs that would signal real progress towards a definitive solution. A truly effective Go AI will most almost certainly require fundamentally new and different approaches and as with Chess, these new techniques will likely find many more useful applications outside of just playing Go.
Chess is an artful mastery of planning, brainpower, and pattern recognition that cannot be matched
It is matched and exceeded by the game of Go. The game of Chess has long since been conquered by AIs, but the game of Go has thus far proved stubbornly resistant to the sorts of AIs which conquered Chess. In fact, the Go AIs are so relatively weak that even an average human player, with only a couple years of experience, can easily defeat the AI, even with a substantial handicap. Chess is a game based upon a coincidental historical context, but it is sometimes said that if there are intelligent beings elsewhere in this universe, they too play Go.
Barter? There will always be commodities that many or most people will be willing to accept as exchange. At various times and in various different places alcohol, cigarettes, gold, silver, diamonds, drugs, weapons and all sorts of other things have served as "money" for black market transactions. Cash makes things more convenient, but the black market would function almost just as well without it.
Universities exist to provide education, not job training. People who want "job skillz only pleez" should be attending trade school instead. A genuine university education teaches one how to think, reason and learn as much as it teaches any specific skills. It's up to the individual to take that education and use it acquire new skills as necessary.
As a fellow CS degree holder, I must respectfully disagree with your assertion that what is now commonly referred to as "Computer Science" could be accurately summarized as "Algorithm Development". My own considered opinion on this matter is that software engineering needs to be broken off as a separate degree and much of what is now taught as "Computer Science", with the exception of lower division programming courses, should be consolidated into a specialized "Theory of Computation and Complexity" series taught within the school of mathematics. Some portion of the mathematics courses would be required for software engineering degrees in much the same way that some physics and calculus are required for mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering degrees. While it is indeed unfortunate that "Computer Science" as a term has become so muddled in non-academic circles, it is important for students considering "Computer Science" as a field of study to understand that the confusion is not due to any intentional effort at obfuscation on the part of computer scientists, but rather to incomplete agreement, particularly in the early years, on where to draw boundaries and what constitutes the essential body of knowledge in the field.
You'll turn off those that really are qualified for the position despite them not necessarily having all the outrageous qualifications you seek
Have you considered the possibility that this is exactly what they are trying to do? Would you be surprised if an H1-B worker was hired instead of a qualified American or the job was outsourced to Chindia instead? The foreign workers don't meet the requirements either, but they are cheaper, so the requirements are actually a ploy designed to ensure that no "qualified" American workers are actually found.
The difference is that these are private institutions making private decisions with private money. As long as the aren't discriminating based upon race, gender, nationality or sexual orientation there is little to stop them from giving preference to the children of rich alumni. Now in practice the number of slots reserved for children of rich alumni, deserving or not, are limited because at least some (perhaps most?) of these undergraduates must perform well enough to maintain the long term prestige of the institution.
You too could invest a paltry $15K to avoid electric bills for the rest of your time in your house
The middle class in the United States is under tremendous pressure right now what with the recession, high unemployment and the collapsed housing market. They don't have an extra $15k to invest and their home equity is negative so where are they going to get the money? Have you tried to get an unsecured consumer loan lately? It's tough. As I have already said, the solar subsidies primarily benefit the upper middle class (pseudo-rich) and the wealthy ($250K+ households) at the expense of the broader group of working class Americans.
Try squeezing your family and their luggage into that early-model Honda insight. There are many ordinary working families in America who require a "family hauler" type vehicle. Why should we punish them with excessive gas taxes? For those who say, "your gas taxes don't subsidize my solar" you just aren't seeing the big picture. Those federal gas taxes go to pay for lots of other things besides highways and road maintenance. You can earmark tax revenues for specific projects all you want but governments always find a way to get their hands back in the cookie jar to fund unrelated things from the pool of gas tax revenues.
This works in the same way people like to have the government tax things to discourage usage, like taxing oil and giving breaks to solar
Except that solar, which has far fewer users than gasoline, is still too expensive and now I'm angry that I have to pay more at the gas pump. I have to drive to work each day, so gas taxes hit me hard right now and I don't own a mansion covered in solar panels like Al Gore does. Has anyone else noticed that "green" subsidies for electric cars and solar panels seem primarily to benefit those who can afford to pay full price anyway? Why should ordinary working folks pay more at the gas pump so that hybrid limousine liberals can have their "green" fetishes satisfied at a subsidized rate?
The war in Afghanistan costs ten billion dollars a month. Let's cut that. End the war. Bring the troops home.
Wars are difficult to unilaterally end. The other side, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in this case, might simply decide to keep on fighting. I would be in favor of finding better and more efficient ways to fight these new types of enemies, but pulling out entirely isn't feasible right now. If Afghanistan reverted to its pre 9-11 state, there would be very little standing in the way of an Taliban and Al-Qaeda takeover of Pakistan and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. India might decide to act before that happens. If the US retreated hastily from Afghanistan now, it could lead to an even larger regional war(s). The Afghan situation stinks, but for now we are stuck there.
Slashdot Mirror
Made perfect sense not to sink their economy to recover British savings.
Perhaps it does today, but in the past wars have been fought over less and the British fought some of them.
practically everyone around the world in their 20's has a facebook account.
Which they will probably regret before age 40. Employers can afford to be choosy these days. They will be even choosier in the future and they aren't much interested in your extended international vacations and snow boarding expeditions. If you must do these things, do yourself a favor and don't post the evidence on Facebook. Your 40 year old future self will thank you someday.
Ah, the day I deleted my facebook account, one of the most liberating things I have ever done.
I never created one in the first place. Facebook allows one to waste time meeting boring, trivial and worthless people all while being tracked and sold down the river to the highest bidder. Can someone please explain to me why it's "cool" to help some corporation ruin your privacy? Do people not understand that they are doing the advertisers' (and governments') work for them by tracking themselves and posting complete dossiers? Zuckerberg was right, Facebook users are dumbasses.
Do you really believe that the Fed and the Treasury would be restraining themselves from issuing more debt than they can repay even if we were still on the gold standard?? Really??
Actually they wouldn't be able to do anything like what they are now doing without fiat currency. There simply aren't enough gold reserves to credibly back their promises to repay. The United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky contains about 147.3 million troy ounces or approximately $192 billion dollars worth at today's price. Compare this with the outstanding debt of the United States Federal Government which is now rapidly approaching the current debt ceiling of $14 trillion dollars.
The Chinese will simply sell to European middlemen who will then turn around and sell to us at even higher prices. This won't work. The Japanese dealt with the US because they needed us to defend them against foreign aggressors. Remember that Japan depended upon the United States for defense against military attack, including nuclear attack from either China (who still have scores to settle with the Japanese) or Russia, in the decades following WWII. They were willing to put up with US import quotas and tariffs because they needed us. The Chinese, who neither need nor want US military protection, are not likely to be so accommodating.
What really prevents more programmers from working as independent IT contractors here in the United States are the arcane and outdated US tax codes which contain a 20-part test for distinguishing between who is an employee and who is a contractor. These difficulties are further compounded by a tax code change, inserted into a tax reform bill by the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. as a favor to IBM. To this day, despite various attempts at repeal, Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Code makes it very difficult to remain self employed as an independent contract programmer in the United States because few companies are willing to risk a claim by the IRS for back payroll taxes on regular employees who were "misclassified" as contractors. It's not just programmers either, the entire US tax code is in desperate need of reform, especially in light of stiff foreign competition with fewer regulatory burdens and far more efficient tax regimes. It's like US companies and employees are being asked to run a race with parachutes tied to our collective backs. The Chinese and Indians are laughing at us behind our backs.
and quite frankly I have to agree with Zuckerberg. People are dumbasses!
Indeed.
Not the people you refer to though, but rather the people constantly making said argument.
This is where we disagree. It's possible to argue that those who earn their living in the public eye benefit from or even require a Facebook account. After all, privacy is mostly a sunk cost for politicians, professional athletes and entertainers. However, for every one of them there are tens of thousands of "ordinary" people who benefit much less while still paying that steep privacy price. So no, I don't believe that I'm a dumbass for making this argument while those ordinary Facebook users are geniuses for handing over their privacy with little or nothing to show for it.
How much do you think it costs to host a site like Facebook?
That's irrelevant. Why should I care? When you fly, do you care about how much it costs to run the airline as a business or do you care about arriving at your destination on time, safely and in comfort?
regardless of your blind ideologies.
Ideology has nothing to do with it. I don't concern myself with the costs of other people's businesses unless I am investing in them. As I've already said, it's not my problem.
That being said, I'm not a huge fan of ads or information gathering
As you have no doubt already guessed, neither am I.
but I'd rather have a small text-based Google ad informing me about online electronics stores, robotics and other somewhat interesting stuff than the huge Flash obscenities of old!
I'd rather have none. Firefox with Adblock, BetterPrivacy, FlashBlock, NoScript and RequestPolicy. Accept no substitutes.
What you say about benefits it true, but the biggest drawback to Facebook, or any social network for that matter, is the inability to forget . Facebook will save all of those messages forever and mine them for every last morsel of data so that they can sell ads that "target" you and your friends and creep everyone out. I don't know about you, but I don't want a corporation mining the details of my "special" moments in life to sell me shit I didn't ask for and don't need. Zuckerberg is on the record calling users of Facebook "dumbasses" for giving up that kind of information. Maybe he is right?
soon we will all be slaves to the power structure in beijing. soon we will all be like the typical chinese citizen
Yeah, but maybe there will be cool cybernetics and we can all go on Shadowruns against the evil mega-corps. After all, street samurai sounds so much cooler than wage salve, wouldn't you agree?
and then blaming my teaching for their failure to work up to their potential.
If I were you, that is the point where I would take offense. As others have said in this discussion, feel free to waste your own time as long as you don't disturb others who have also paid and would prefer not to waste theirs. It's ironic that students are just about the only major consumer group that is satisfied with receiving less for their money, wouldn't you agree?
We have passed our research on to the business school which requires students to have laptops, and faculty to pre-publish slides (because that is how the business world works) but they aren't interested in knowing.
Researchers at other universities have done the same or similar studies involving multitasking and have all arrived at similar results. Those who claim that they are capable of performing multiple tasks simultaneously at the same level of quality as those performing only single tasks consistently demonstrate in repeated experiments that they cannot. They believe that they are "good" at multitasking, even though the results prove that their beliefs are unfounded. It's even worse in the business world where every manager seems to believe that multitasking is not only necessary, but desirable. They all of them refuse to believe the data from the university experiments and continue to multitask despite the fact that in all but the most trivial cases it doesn't work.
Perhaps we need another one of those, maybe with China as you seem to think may happen.
It may yet come to that. Would you be willing to fit in that war? Are you willing to kill for what you've been promised? Suppose that a few more decades pass between then and now, would you send your children out to fight instead? We may find out just how badly Americans want it when the Chinese finally come around to collect.
There simply isn't enough money to pay the benefits promised, regardless of sentiment. That is reality. There aren't enough resources on this declining planet for everyone to live into their "golden" years in the manner to which middle class Americans have become accustomed. You and your grandparents were lied to by those in power, the political elites. There never was enough money to pay those promises, deserved or not. That is the hard truth and taxing the rich, even at 100%, won't change that outcome; the debt is simply too large. Perhaps it will help you to better understand the public debt crisis if I made an analogy to climate change? The United States, like the global climate, is on an unsustainable path. We still have some time, but not much, to avoid this fate. Although personally, I don't hold out too much hope that we will succeed. If we fail, you will be begging the Chinese, while looking down the barrels of their guns, for your "entitlements". Somehow, I doubt that your pleas will fall upon sympathetic ears. Billions of people already live in abject poverty on this miserable planet. What makes you and your grandparents think that you have a "right" to a better fate than that which has befallen them? Perhaps you believe that your foreign masters, the holders of your debt, will not use violence to collect? My advice: have no illusions about what is coming and take what steps you can to look out for you and yours because soon enough it will be everyone for themselves in this country.
Taxing the rich is the liberal version of the canard, it's like re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Even if the "rich" were taxed at 100% of their income it wouldn't matter, the government would still be running massive deficits and the national debt would still be increasing rapidly. The non-discretionary entitlement spending, medicare and social security, already consume 60%+ of the budget, leaving only 40% up to discretion and the discretionary share is shrinking every year while the rate of increase in non-discretionary spending is increasing and will continue to accelerate as the boomers start to collect benefits en masse. Meanwhile the debt, now 14 trillion, continues to pile on top. News flash to liberals: there is NO way that the United States can pay "promised" entitlement benefits and remain solvent. Either we fix this ourselves through severe cuts or foreign debt holders will step in and force the issue; at gunpoint if necessary. Look at what is happening in Ireland, Greece and Italy. Think "austerity" can't happen here in America? Think again, our creditors will demand it.
The work that went into Chess AIs has translated to many other games and has been useful in the development of AIs in general. The game tree of Go is too large to be solved by simply searching for the best move. No matter how fast computers become they will never be powerful enough to exhaustively search the game tree of Go. In fact, numerical estimates show that the number of possible games of Go far exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. Why is this interesting? Well, Many situations that occur in real life, including the car driving analogy that you made, also have very large numbers of discreet "positions" or "instances". The game of Go rather nicely abstracts and isolates much of what makes these sorts of problems "hard" for current AIs without allowing context sensitive or coincidental concerns to obscure the essential essence of that complexity.
As for the argument that Go has not been solved simply because of lack of effort or interest in the AI or Computer Science community, that's simply not true. The fact that Go AIs are so much less effective than their Chess counterparts is not due to lack of effort or understanding of the problem by the AI community. In fact, recent efforts have seen some substantial improvements in Go playing AIs, but these are not the sorts of qualitative breakthroughs that would signal real progress towards a definitive solution. A truly effective Go AI will most almost certainly require fundamentally new and different approaches and as with Chess, these new techniques will likely find many more useful applications outside of just playing Go.
Chess is an artful mastery of planning, brainpower, and pattern recognition that cannot be matched
It is matched and exceeded by the game of Go. The game of Chess has long since been conquered by AIs, but the game of Go has thus far proved stubbornly resistant to the sorts of AIs which conquered Chess. In fact, the Go AIs are so relatively weak that even an average human player, with only a couple years of experience, can easily defeat the AI, even with a substantial handicap. Chess is a game based upon a coincidental historical context, but it is sometimes said that if there are intelligent beings elsewhere in this universe, they too play Go.
Where would the black market be without cash?
Barter? There will always be commodities that many or most people will be willing to accept as exchange. At various times and in various different places alcohol, cigarettes, gold, silver, diamonds, drugs, weapons and all sorts of other things have served as "money" for black market transactions. Cash makes things more convenient, but the black market would function almost just as well without it.
Universities exist to provide education, not job training. People who want "job skillz only pleez" should be attending trade school instead. A genuine university education teaches one how to think, reason and learn as much as it teaches any specific skills. It's up to the individual to take that education and use it acquire new skills as necessary.
As a fellow CS degree holder, I must respectfully disagree with your assertion that what is now commonly referred to as "Computer Science" could be accurately summarized as "Algorithm Development". My own considered opinion on this matter is that software engineering needs to be broken off as a separate degree and much of what is now taught as "Computer Science", with the exception of lower division programming courses, should be consolidated into a specialized "Theory of Computation and Complexity" series taught within the school of mathematics. Some portion of the mathematics courses would be required for software engineering degrees in much the same way that some physics and calculus are required for mechanical, electrical and chemical engineering degrees. While it is indeed unfortunate that "Computer Science" as a term has become so muddled in non-academic circles, it is important for students considering "Computer Science" as a field of study to understand that the confusion is not due to any intentional effort at obfuscation on the part of computer scientists, but rather to incomplete agreement, particularly in the early years, on where to draw boundaries and what constitutes the essential body of knowledge in the field.
You'll turn off those that really are qualified for the position despite them not necessarily having all the outrageous qualifications you seek
Have you considered the possibility that this is exactly what they are trying to do? Would you be surprised if an H1-B worker was hired instead of a qualified American or the job was outsourced to Chindia instead? The foreign workers don't meet the requirements either, but they are cheaper, so the requirements are actually a ploy designed to ensure that no "qualified" American workers are actually found.
It's affirmative action for the rich.
The difference is that these are private institutions making private decisions with private money. As long as the aren't discriminating based upon race, gender, nationality or sexual orientation there is little to stop them from giving preference to the children of rich alumni. Now in practice the number of slots reserved for children of rich alumni, deserving or not, are limited because at least some (perhaps most?) of these undergraduates must perform well enough to maintain the long term prestige of the institution.
Did someone make them have a giant family and own lots of things?
Translation: To American families with 3+ kids, house and car, "drop dead".
In case you hadn't noticed, anti-family arguments and ridiculing family values are political non-starters here in the United States
You too could invest a paltry $15K to avoid electric bills for the rest of your time in your house
The middle class in the United States is under tremendous pressure right now what with the recession, high unemployment and the collapsed housing market. They don't have an extra $15k to invest and their home equity is negative so where are they going to get the money? Have you tried to get an unsecured consumer loan lately? It's tough. As I have already said, the solar subsidies primarily benefit the upper middle class (pseudo-rich) and the wealthy ($250K+ households) at the expense of the broader group of working class Americans.
Try squeezing your family and their luggage into that early-model Honda insight. There are many ordinary working families in America who require a "family hauler" type vehicle. Why should we punish them with excessive gas taxes? For those who say, "your gas taxes don't subsidize my solar" you just aren't seeing the big picture. Those federal gas taxes go to pay for lots of other things besides highways and road maintenance. You can earmark tax revenues for specific projects all you want but governments always find a way to get their hands back in the cookie jar to fund unrelated things from the pool of gas tax revenues.
This works in the same way people like to have the government tax things to discourage usage, like taxing oil and giving breaks to solar
Except that solar, which has far fewer users than gasoline, is still too expensive and now I'm angry that I have to pay more at the gas pump. I have to drive to work each day, so gas taxes hit me hard right now and I don't own a mansion covered in solar panels like Al Gore does. Has anyone else noticed that "green" subsidies for electric cars and solar panels seem primarily to benefit those who can afford to pay full price anyway? Why should ordinary working folks pay more at the gas pump so that hybrid limousine liberals can have their "green" fetishes satisfied at a subsidized rate?
The war in Afghanistan costs ten billion dollars a month. Let's cut that. End the war. Bring the troops home.
Wars are difficult to unilaterally end. The other side, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in this case, might simply decide to keep on fighting. I would be in favor of finding better and more efficient ways to fight these new types of enemies, but pulling out entirely isn't feasible right now. If Afghanistan reverted to its pre 9-11 state, there would be very little standing in the way of an Taliban and Al-Qaeda takeover of Pakistan and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. India might decide to act before that happens. If the US retreated hastily from Afghanistan now, it could lead to an even larger regional war(s). The Afghan situation stinks, but for now we are stuck there.