Spotify is the worst culprit, since it PAUSES the commercial if you lower your system volume.
What you need is audio output to a dedicated hardware amp and mixer that controls volume beyond the ability of any software running on the system to detect or interfere with it.
The problem with this approach is that unscrupulous adults take advantage of the lack of critical thinking and mental defenses in young minds to shovel them full of ideologically motivated drivel before they're developed enough to recognize the agenda. Take history for example and the recent trends toward emphasizing minor details, even at the expense of essential persons and events, because it suits a politically correct agenda of ideological education. Another example is the extreme emphasis of environmental topics, converting grade school aged children into green zealots before it has even occurred to them that there might be unintended consequences from strict adherence to that path. It ought not to be the role of the public school system to instil morals or a value system beyond what is minimally necessary to maintain order in the classroom and proceed with necessary instruction. Anything more is a violation of the rights of parents to instruct their children in these subjects as they see fit.
Be inspired to code by dressing really slutty and letting a bunch of geeks you'd never go out with ogle you.
Have you seen what your teenage daughter and her friends are wearing these days by their own choice? This is already happening so she might as well be inspired by it.
No. I disagree with the notion that all insurance is fraud. Insurance is all about paying a small amount of money now to offset the risk of a catastrophic loss at some future date. The basic concept of insurance is economically sound, but health "insurance" here in the United States is peculiar in that it pays for costs which are neither uncertain nor catastrophic in nature. This has the result of creating a system in which the consumer neither knows nor cares about the prices of routine goods and services and providers of those goods and services likewise have no incentive to reduce prices or even improve quality because their customers are paying only part of the bills and indirectly at that. The health insurance market doesn't have to be corrupted, it's stupid and ill conceived government regulations that make it so in the United States.
Actually, most teacher's unions would just prefer the money be spent on hiring more teachers.
Yes, that's true but more education spending is always desirable from the liberal point of view, even if it's earmarked and cannot be used to hire more teachers, because spending begets more spending and larger budgets in future years which translates into more political power for their constituencies, namely the teachers unions and their fellow travelers in the Democratic Party.
Education has been a battle ground in the culture wars for decades in the United States, especially in California where education and government policy regarding it has been the source of much strife between those who favor parental choice and private education and those who favor government control, higher taxes and limitation of private options. In California we spend over half of the entire annual budget on education and hardly an election goes by without school bond measures and other education related initiatives on statewide ballots. In California education is a political issue and the left has used it as a lever to advance other goals of the long term liberal project, not least among them indoctrination of children into a leftist world view.
I consider myself left of center
Which would make you a liberal. To the extent that I'm right of center, I'm a conservative.
My wife is a teacher with a masters degree and she makes $42K. That is not an obscene pay.
No it's not. In fact she should probably be earning more. If we had more private education and less government bureaucracy then not only would children receive a much higher quality of education, but your wife would be receiving a salary more commensurate with her abilities as a teacher (read higher). Charter schools and vouchers work and they increase quality of education substantially wherever they are tried, even in poorer inner city areas, but they're anathema to those on the left who oppose vehemently any attempt to loosen the grip of government control over our schools.
yet technology is being forced on the schools by private companies looking to secure extra taxpayer money
Whenever the government loosens the strings of the public purse there are always scores of petitioners looking for ways to get their piece of the government largesse. In private schools, you don't see these sorts of wasteful spending because there are market incentives to either turn a profit or in the case of parochial schools (usually catholic) a religious obligation to provide quality education to the greatest number of students at the lowest average price. The only way to do either of these things is to maximize efficiency. There's no comparable mechanism in public schools funded by the government to enforce fiscal discipline and efficiency, particularly in administration.
Moreover the parents largely approve of these private companies and support increasing technology in the classroom.
They support them because they're not asked to pay for them directly but rather indirectly through taxes which encourages a wasteful attitude towards the spending. I wonder how many of these parents would continue to support iPads for every student if they were required to pay even some of the cost, say $100, directly out of their own pockets. At the very least, they would view the proposed technology purchases with a more critical eye towards cost benefit if they where being asked to shell out their own money for the devices.
The problem is that everyone wants to blame the government or teachers instead of taking personal responsibility and acting as parents for their kid.
But that's just it. The government and the teachers unions make it difficult or impossible for many parents to exercise the control and discretion necessary to take on that responsibility. Most parents want what's best for their children, in their judgment as parents, but the government and the teachers unions are often standing on their shoes or acting against the interests of parents and children when it comes to reform and change.
Technology is a solution that liberals love to apply to education for three reasons. First, it's high tech and anything tech related in education makes the person who suggested it look smart. Second, it distracts attention from the unholy alliance that exists between the teachers' unions and the Democratic Party by suggesting that the problem is not poor teaching but rather "low technology" in the classroom. Third and finally, it provides a target at which to throw money which is a favorite liberal "solution" to any problem, never mind the outcomes because it's the good thoughts and intentions, not results, that count.
It's not a flaw at all, that's how socialized medicine works.
Except that's not how it was sold to the American people. The Democrats tied themselves up in knots arguing that the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) was NOT socialized medicine and that it wasn't a tax. When you lie to people and trick them, regardless of your intentions, they get angry with you because most people naturally perceive lying and cheating as hostile acts. Lying to people "for their own good" has been the excuse of tyrants throughout history and usually it hasn't ended well for the people who were sold the big lie.
You carry catastrophic insurance for the hospital, but you never want to go there first. Most doctors will take cash and they will negotiate for a reasonable fee. In fact, the ones that I have paid in cash for my services were so happy to not be billing insurance that they were positively giddy (billing insurance is a major headache in most private medical practices). This works because the price is negotiated and paid up front. I don't feel like I've been ripped off doing this. In fact, I have received good service and discounted prices simply because I paid in cash. Many people aren't aware of all the services that are available at private non emergency clinics. They can stich you up, set broken bones, treat burns and even perform minor surgeries, provided that your life is not in immediate danger, and often for less than $1000. Try getting the same services in the hospital emergency room, even with your insurance, and see what that bill is. I guarantee you that it will be a lot more than $1000, that's what the hospital ER would charge you for the band-aid.
In NY I am paying over 60 cents on every dollar in taxes. I am including all taxes not just federal. when is enough enough? Oh, I also make just barely 25 grand a year pretax
You are receiving what economists call a "signal", through high taxes and low income (even by national standards), that New York is a bad place for you financially. If I were you, I would leave New York immediately and move to some place where I could begin making forward financial progress instead of racking up negative yardage year after year. You don't score touchdowns with negative yardage and you cannot win the game and retire comfortably without putting points on the board. The liberals in New York are holding you by the nose and kicking you in the ass. How much longer will you allow them to continue doing that before you vote with your feet? Take the advice of Horace Greeley and "Go West, young man" because there's no bright future for someone in New York earning 25k per year and paying 60 cents of every dollar in taxes.
Of course people who save carry insurance, that goes without saying because people with the prudence and discipline to save and invest over years and decades know only too well that insurance is a necessary part of securing their financial futures. Now, without going into a complete dissertation of everything wrong with a 2000+ page law, suffice it to say that ObamaCare has destroyed the very types of insurance that best fit our needs and budgets. Now, instead of benefiting from medical underwriting and the low premiums that come with it, we have to pay for many coverages that we neither need nor want. This is both wasteful and inefficient. ObamaCare has done nothing to reduce our costs. On the contrary, it has increased them by over 100%. That's not what we were promised. I'm still waiting for my $2500 per year in savings or maybe that was just another lie? If Obama will lie to us about healthcare, regardless of his "good" intentions, then what else will he lie to us about? What next will he decide that the American people aren't wise or smart enough to be given the truth on? The people who voted for him are getting what they deserve, I hope that they're enjoying every minute of it because the best is yet to come, along with the first bills for their new health insurance coverage.
The president said "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."
He said, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period".
Now, as I understand the English language ending a statement with "period" means that no further discussion is possible. It means that the previous statement was absolute and made without any equivocation. Obama is fond of statements like "make no mistake" and "period". He talks a tough game but he doesn't follow through so nobody trusts his words anymore and why should they?
if you don't get insurance, and break your arm, you avoid the bill because you can't pay it, or you declare bankruptcy
It's called putting money aside each month and saving for a rainy day instead of always eating out, always buying the latest gadgets and living high on the hog while expecting that other people will cover your ass in a jam or as I like to put it, "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
The fact is, someone with a gun can kill you and there's not the damndest shit you can do to defend yourself.
That was largely true even before the invention of gunpowder because the bearing of top-shelf arms was largely limited to the professional warrior class in every organized society. For example, in Japan a samurai had the absolute right to draw his sword and cut down any commoner on the spot, usually in response to what the samurai perceived was disrespect by the commoner. At least in theory the Samurai was supposed to do this to punish only an affirmative and deliberate offense committed by the commoner, but the commoner was dead and the word of the Samurai was taken over the word of the commoner(s). Like today there were those who took up arms outside the law, the Ninja, but they were the rare exception and not the rule.
Unfortunately, the corporate world has become very much like the political arena.
They've always gone hand and glove.
Honesty is no longer treasured.
Was it ever?
No matter if it's Helen Hill or Edward Snowden, as long as you blew the whistle on wrongdoings of others, you will get punished.
So don't blow it. Instead, gather and document all of the evidence and keep it secret. That way, when you need to play your get out of jail free card, you can throw that chip on the table. This works best in a mutually assured destruction type scenario where they wont act against you with what they know for fear that you will blow the whistle on them. Actually blowing the whistle is like launching the missiles, neither side really wants to do it.
The world we live in is becoming more and more fake.
I think that it has always been fake but that we notice it more now because it has become much more difficult for ordinary people to successfully keep secrets, especially in the long run.
Lies worth much more than truth.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Fakeries work much better than honesty.
Not sure what a "fakerie" is but it certainly pays to be sparing with the truth these days. President Obama is a master of this tactic but as the recent healthcare debacle demonstrates, even the best liars can only tell a whopper so large before the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it.
What can you say? The average person off the street is an idiot. If you told them to avoid dihydrogen monoxide too, they would probably agree with that as well. In fact, they would even probably sign a petition on the spot to ban dihydrogen monoxide if you asked them to..
women are scarce because they aren't as smart or as interested
Those aren't the same things. Frankly, some of the smartest people I've met in my working career have been women and let's be honest, coding requires long periods of intense focus and can be a pretty dry subject. This is especially true when working on the day to day nuts and bolts type grinds that makes up large parts of typical commercial software development. When more of the executives and project managers are women and we engineers are still working for them which of us will be considered the smart ones? I wonder sometimes.
I thought modern society was all about giving women choice?
Free to choose as long as society doesn't view the choice as politically incorrect it seems. For example conservative women who vote Republican are often criticized viciously by the left as being stupid, unsophisticated and unliberated for choosing traditional family values. These progressives profess tolerance, at least for those that agree with them, but are themselves intolerant of those that deviate from their ideals.
A perfect example of liberal hypocrisy as it concerns equal outcomes is professional sports. They don't begrudge the black basketball player who's superior strength, speed and size have enabled him to play that sport at an extraordinarily level of ability, even though this same professional athlete earns hundreds or thousands of times more money than someone not similarly endowed. However, if somebody is born to wealthy parents and inherits stocks, bonds and real estate worth millions, especially if that person is white, they demonize him for winning the "sperm lottery". Liberals give professional athletes and Hollywood free passes when it comes to equal outcomes, but God forbid that you should be a successful businessman or have an inheritance of non-physical assets because that would be unequal!
Complain all you want about the particular way that people try to solve problems, but the idea that we should just ignore biased outcomes under the assumption that nothing is wrong is absurd.
It's no less absurd to jumpt straight to the conclusion that different outcomes must be attributed to bias or discrimination simply because outcomes are different. What about different life choices and personal preferences? Isn't it reasonable to assume that people, when left to make their own choices freely, might experience different and possibly even unequal outcomes? Liberals are far too concerned with equality of outcome and not nearly enough with personal freedom and the right to a fighting chance. They fail to see that by using the power of the state to force equal outcomes they destroy both personal freedom and equal opportunity.
It just struck me as disappointing that this is a popular attitude.
Millennials are and have been graduating from college into one of the shittiest job markets and worst economic "recoveries" since the end of WWII. Our parents and grandparents are saddling us with crushing debts and now we're expected to chip in so that old people can get cheaper health care too? As if the Boomers hadn't taken enough already, they had to sock it to the young on health care so that they could gold plate their golden years. Under these circumstances can you fault us for being cynical and pushing back when pushed?
Sure, why wouldn't they? In many cities, parking tickets are a significant profit center.
Have you ever noticed that tickets tend to come in brightly colored envelopes? Well, the next time you get one, go ahead and pay it online but keep the envelope and the ticket in your glove box so that you can put it out on your windshield again the next time you park in violation of their rules. If it looks like you've already been given a ticket, you're not as likely to get another one and how many officers are going to open the ticket envelope that's already on your windshield and look inside and of those how many are going to check the date written on the legitimate past ticket within?
But technology, unlike any other sector, skills and tool knowledge requires constant swimming upstream to stay relevant and current.
Not necessarily. Haven't you ever heard of the $300 per hour mainframe COBOL programmer? Just because a technology isn't new and isn't growing doesn't mean there isn't profit to be had in managing it's decline. In the case of those COBOL programmers, it's been a very long, gradual and profitable decline. If that's what it means to become irrelevant then sign me up for the next long and slow ride off into the tech sunset.
Slashdot Mirror
Spotify is the worst culprit, since it PAUSES the commercial if you lower your system volume.
What you need is audio output to a dedicated hardware amp and mixer that controls volume beyond the ability of any software running on the system to detect or interfere with it.
The problem with this approach is that unscrupulous adults take advantage of the lack of critical thinking and mental defenses in young minds to shovel them full of ideologically motivated drivel before they're developed enough to recognize the agenda. Take history for example and the recent trends toward emphasizing minor details, even at the expense of essential persons and events, because it suits a politically correct agenda of ideological education. Another example is the extreme emphasis of environmental topics, converting grade school aged children into green zealots before it has even occurred to them that there might be unintended consequences from strict adherence to that path. It ought not to be the role of the public school system to instil morals or a value system beyond what is minimally necessary to maintain order in the classroom and proceed with necessary instruction. Anything more is a violation of the rights of parents to instruct their children in these subjects as they see fit.
Be inspired to code by dressing really slutty and letting a bunch of geeks you'd never go out with ogle you.
Have you seen what your teenage daughter and her friends are wearing these days by their own choice? This is already happening so she might as well be inspired by it.
No. I disagree with the notion that all insurance is fraud. Insurance is all about paying a small amount of money now to offset the risk of a catastrophic loss at some future date. The basic concept of insurance is economically sound, but health "insurance" here in the United States is peculiar in that it pays for costs which are neither uncertain nor catastrophic in nature. This has the result of creating a system in which the consumer neither knows nor cares about the prices of routine goods and services and providers of those goods and services likewise have no incentive to reduce prices or even improve quality because their customers are paying only part of the bills and indirectly at that. The health insurance market doesn't have to be corrupted, it's stupid and ill conceived government regulations that make it so in the United States.
Actually, most teacher's unions would just prefer the money be spent on hiring more teachers.
Yes, that's true but more education spending is always desirable from the liberal point of view, even if it's earmarked and cannot be used to hire more teachers, because spending begets more spending and larger budgets in future years which translates into more political power for their constituencies, namely the teachers unions and their fellow travelers in the Democratic Party.
What does this have to do with liberals?
Education has been a battle ground in the culture wars for decades in the United States, especially in California where education and government policy regarding it has been the source of much strife between those who favor parental choice and private education and those who favor government control, higher taxes and limitation of private options. In California we spend over half of the entire annual budget on education and hardly an election goes by without school bond measures and other education related initiatives on statewide ballots. In California education is a political issue and the left has used it as a lever to advance other goals of the long term liberal project, not least among them indoctrination of children into a leftist world view.
I consider myself left of center
Which would make you a liberal. To the extent that I'm right of center, I'm a conservative.
My wife is a teacher with a masters degree and she makes $42K. That is not an obscene pay.
No it's not. In fact she should probably be earning more. If we had more private education and less government bureaucracy then not only would children receive a much higher quality of education, but your wife would be receiving a salary more commensurate with her abilities as a teacher (read higher). Charter schools and vouchers work and they increase quality of education substantially wherever they are tried, even in poorer inner city areas, but they're anathema to those on the left who oppose vehemently any attempt to loosen the grip of government control over our schools.
yet technology is being forced on the schools by private companies looking to secure extra taxpayer money
Whenever the government loosens the strings of the public purse there are always scores of petitioners looking for ways to get their piece of the government largesse. In private schools, you don't see these sorts of wasteful spending because there are market incentives to either turn a profit or in the case of parochial schools (usually catholic) a religious obligation to provide quality education to the greatest number of students at the lowest average price. The only way to do either of these things is to maximize efficiency. There's no comparable mechanism in public schools funded by the government to enforce fiscal discipline and efficiency, particularly in administration.
Moreover the parents largely approve of these private companies and support increasing technology in the classroom.
They support them because they're not asked to pay for them directly but rather indirectly through taxes which encourages a wasteful attitude towards the spending. I wonder how many of these parents would continue to support iPads for every student if they were required to pay even some of the cost, say $100, directly out of their own pockets. At the very least, they would view the proposed technology purchases with a more critical eye towards cost benefit if they where being asked to shell out their own money for the devices.
The problem is that everyone wants to blame the government or teachers instead of taking personal responsibility and acting as parents for their kid.
But that's just it. The government and the teachers unions make it difficult or impossible for many parents to exercise the control and discretion necessary to take on that responsibility. Most parents want what's best for their children, in their judgment as parents, but the government and the teachers unions are often standing on their shoes or acting against the interests of parents and children when it comes to reform and change.
Technology is a solution that liberals love to apply to education for three reasons. First, it's high tech and anything tech related in education makes the person who suggested it look smart. Second, it distracts attention from the unholy alliance that exists between the teachers' unions and the Democratic Party by suggesting that the problem is not poor teaching but rather "low technology" in the classroom. Third and finally, it provides a target at which to throw money which is a favorite liberal "solution" to any problem, never mind the outcomes because it's the good thoughts and intentions, not results, that count.
It's not a flaw at all, that's how socialized medicine works.
Except that's not how it was sold to the American people. The Democrats tied themselves up in knots arguing that the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) was NOT socialized medicine and that it wasn't a tax. When you lie to people and trick them, regardless of your intentions, they get angry with you because most people naturally perceive lying and cheating as hostile acts. Lying to people "for their own good" has been the excuse of tyrants throughout history and usually it hasn't ended well for the people who were sold the big lie.
You carry catastrophic insurance for the hospital, but you never want to go there first. Most doctors will take cash and they will negotiate for a reasonable fee. In fact, the ones that I have paid in cash for my services were so happy to not be billing insurance that they were positively giddy (billing insurance is a major headache in most private medical practices). This works because the price is negotiated and paid up front. I don't feel like I've been ripped off doing this. In fact, I have received good service and discounted prices simply because I paid in cash. Many people aren't aware of all the services that are available at private non emergency clinics. They can stich you up, set broken bones, treat burns and even perform minor surgeries, provided that your life is not in immediate danger, and often for less than $1000. Try getting the same services in the hospital emergency room, even with your insurance, and see what that bill is. I guarantee you that it will be a lot more than $1000, that's what the hospital ER would charge you for the band-aid.
In NY I am paying over 60 cents on every dollar in taxes. I am including all taxes not just federal. when is enough enough? Oh, I also make just barely 25 grand a year pretax
You are receiving what economists call a "signal", through high taxes and low income (even by national standards), that New York is a bad place for you financially. If I were you, I would leave New York immediately and move to some place where I could begin making forward financial progress instead of racking up negative yardage year after year. You don't score touchdowns with negative yardage and you cannot win the game and retire comfortably without putting points on the board. The liberals in New York are holding you by the nose and kicking you in the ass. How much longer will you allow them to continue doing that before you vote with your feet? Take the advice of Horace Greeley and "Go West, young man" because there's no bright future for someone in New York earning 25k per year and paying 60 cents of every dollar in taxes.
Of course people who save carry insurance, that goes without saying because people with the prudence and discipline to save and invest over years and decades know only too well that insurance is a necessary part of securing their financial futures. Now, without going into a complete dissertation of everything wrong with a 2000+ page law, suffice it to say that ObamaCare has destroyed the very types of insurance that best fit our needs and budgets. Now, instead of benefiting from medical underwriting and the low premiums that come with it, we have to pay for many coverages that we neither need nor want. This is both wasteful and inefficient. ObamaCare has done nothing to reduce our costs. On the contrary, it has increased them by over 100%. That's not what we were promised. I'm still waiting for my $2500 per year in savings or maybe that was just another lie? If Obama will lie to us about healthcare, regardless of his "good" intentions, then what else will he lie to us about? What next will he decide that the American people aren't wise or smart enough to be given the truth on? The people who voted for him are getting what they deserve, I hope that they're enjoying every minute of it because the best is yet to come, along with the first bills for their new health insurance coverage.
The president said "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan."
He said, "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period ".
Now, as I understand the English language ending a statement with "period" means that no further discussion is possible. It means that the previous statement was absolute and made without any equivocation. Obama is fond of statements like "make no mistake" and "period". He talks a tough game but he doesn't follow through so nobody trusts his words anymore and why should they?
if you don't get insurance, and break your arm, you avoid the bill because you can't pay it, or you declare bankruptcy
It's called putting money aside each month and saving for a rainy day instead of always eating out, always buying the latest gadgets and living high on the hog while expecting that other people will cover your ass in a jam or as I like to put it, "Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
The fact is, someone with a gun can kill you and there's not the damndest shit you can do to defend yourself.
That was largely true even before the invention of gunpowder because the bearing of top-shelf arms was largely limited to the professional warrior class in every organized society. For example, in Japan a samurai had the absolute right to draw his sword and cut down any commoner on the spot, usually in response to what the samurai perceived was disrespect by the commoner. At least in theory the Samurai was supposed to do this to punish only an affirmative and deliberate offense committed by the commoner, but the commoner was dead and the word of the Samurai was taken over the word of the commoner(s). Like today there were those who took up arms outside the law, the Ninja, but they were the rare exception and not the rule.
Unfortunately, the corporate world has become very much like the political arena.
They've always gone hand and glove.
Honesty is no longer treasured.
Was it ever?
No matter if it's Helen Hill or Edward Snowden, as long as you blew the whistle on wrongdoings of others, you will get punished.
So don't blow it. Instead, gather and document all of the evidence and keep it secret. That way, when you need to play your get out of jail free card, you can throw that chip on the table. This works best in a mutually assured destruction type scenario where they wont act against you with what they know for fear that you will blow the whistle on them. Actually blowing the whistle is like launching the missiles, neither side really wants to do it.
The world we live in is becoming more and more fake.
I think that it has always been fake but that we notice it more now because it has become much more difficult for ordinary people to successfully keep secrets, especially in the long run.
Lies worth much more than truth.
He who pays the piper calls the tune.
Fakeries work much better than honesty.
Not sure what a "fakerie" is but it certainly pays to be sparing with the truth these days. President Obama is a master of this tactic but as the recent healthcare debacle demonstrates, even the best liars can only tell a whopper so large before the whole house of cards comes crashing down.
I've asked said people what they think of ascorbic acid, to which most of them effectively say they'd avoid anything containing it.
What can you say? The average person off the street is an idiot. If you told them to avoid dihydrogen monoxide too, they would probably agree with that as well. In fact, they would even probably sign a petition on the spot to ban dihydrogen monoxide if you asked them to..
female software engineers seem to be about as common as unicorns.
They're uncommon, but not especially rare. I've worked with two so far in my career and I haven't been at this as long as you have.
Most women refuse to live in a dark room with a slot in the door that someone stuffs food through.
Which also requires a degree from the school of "hard knocks".
women are scarce because they aren't as smart or as interested
Those aren't the same things. Frankly, some of the smartest people I've met in my working career have been women and let's be honest, coding requires long periods of intense focus and can be a pretty dry subject. This is especially true when working on the day to day nuts and bolts type grinds that makes up large parts of typical commercial software development. When more of the executives and project managers are women and we engineers are still working for them which of us will be considered the smart ones? I wonder sometimes.
I thought modern society was all about giving women choice?
Free to choose as long as society doesn't view the choice as politically incorrect it seems. For example conservative women who vote Republican are often criticized viciously by the left as being stupid, unsophisticated and unliberated for choosing traditional family values. These progressives profess tolerance, at least for those that agree with them, but are themselves intolerant of those that deviate from their ideals.
A perfect example of liberal hypocrisy as it concerns equal outcomes is professional sports. They don't begrudge the black basketball player who's superior strength, speed and size have enabled him to play that sport at an extraordinarily level of ability, even though this same professional athlete earns hundreds or thousands of times more money than someone not similarly endowed. However, if somebody is born to wealthy parents and inherits stocks, bonds and real estate worth millions, especially if that person is white, they demonize him for winning the "sperm lottery". Liberals give professional athletes and Hollywood free passes when it comes to equal outcomes, but God forbid that you should be a successful businessman or have an inheritance of non-physical assets because that would be unequal!
Complain all you want about the particular way that people try to solve problems, but the idea that we should just ignore biased outcomes under the assumption that nothing is wrong is absurd.
It's no less absurd to jumpt straight to the conclusion that different outcomes must be attributed to bias or discrimination simply because outcomes are different. What about different life choices and personal preferences? Isn't it reasonable to assume that people, when left to make their own choices freely, might experience different and possibly even unequal outcomes? Liberals are far too concerned with equality of outcome and not nearly enough with personal freedom and the right to a fighting chance. They fail to see that by using the power of the state to force equal outcomes they destroy both personal freedom and equal opportunity.
It just struck me as disappointing that this is a popular attitude.
Millennials are and have been graduating from college into one of the shittiest job markets and worst economic "recoveries" since the end of WWII. Our parents and grandparents are saddling us with crushing debts and now we're expected to chip in so that old people can get cheaper health care too? As if the Boomers hadn't taken enough already, they had to sock it to the young on health care so that they could gold plate their golden years. Under these circumstances can you fault us for being cynical and pushing back when pushed?
Sure, why wouldn't they? In many cities, parking tickets are a significant profit center.
Have you ever noticed that tickets tend to come in brightly colored envelopes? Well, the next time you get one, go ahead and pay it online but keep the envelope and the ticket in your glove box so that you can put it out on your windshield again the next time you park in violation of their rules. If it looks like you've already been given a ticket, you're not as likely to get another one and how many officers are going to open the ticket envelope that's already on your windshield and look inside and of those how many are going to check the date written on the legitimate past ticket within?
But technology, unlike any other sector, skills and tool knowledge requires constant swimming upstream to stay relevant and current.
Not necessarily. Haven't you ever heard of the $300 per hour mainframe COBOL programmer? Just because a technology isn't new and isn't growing doesn't mean there isn't profit to be had in managing it's decline. In the case of those COBOL programmers, it's been a very long, gradual and profitable decline. If that's what it means to become irrelevant then sign me up for the next long and slow ride off into the tech sunset.