While it's true that "how to think" is an important skill, the basic idea of a canon of knowledge (aka rote memorization) is really very important. A shared body of knowledge is critical to communication, and if it's present can make expressing very complex thoughts much easier. It's not especially important for most people to know that Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517, but it's important to know that it happened after the Crusades and before the Enlightenment.
At the time, Harvard was a very different school than it is today. Gentlemen only, please, and if you didn't know Greek and Latin you'd definitely not had a gentleman's education.
Have to learn how to read those church inscriptions somewhere, right? I've not learned any Romance languages using my Latin as a base, so that's pretty much all I can do with it. You're totally right about the beauty of the language - being able to stand in St. Peter's and read TU ES PETRUS, ET SUPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM... that was pretty cool.
Why would you assume that the drug caused irreversible impotence? It's a drug; it gets excreted. It's far more likely that they took the drug from age 40 to age 55, then stopped, and all of a sudden noticed that their erections wouldn't come back.
NCLB has only been law for a little under a decade. I don't remember that people were much more impressed with the quality of the nation's schools in the 90s. (It may still be an awful law, mind you. I have no opinion on that.)
I can afford a good Verizon plan (and given their coverage quality at my workplace, I'd be insane to go to AT&T, regardless of how good they may be elsewhere), but you're right on the money. If my phone wasn't my primary business contact, dropping over $100/mo for a portable data device would be idiotic. As it is, it's just moderately stupid.
The Droid is a Verizon phone, which means no SIM. (Often, people condemn CDMA because it has no SIM. This is inaccurate; CDMA networks in other countries have SIM-equivalents. It's just Sprint and Verizon that won't do it.)
Well, duh. There's a reason that Amazon itself sells objects for more than the cheapo competition. When you're buying a book just to read it, that's not really important. When you're buying a TV, it is. I've paid more plenty of occasions to make the deal with a company I trust, like Amazon or Newegg. Saving $5 here or there isn't worth it, the way that saving $500 is.
In this case, the tax avoiders are the citizens who order things off the internet without paying their proper use tax. Not Amazon - at most, their duty is to collect the tax, not to pay it.
Incidentally, to the extent that the Internet is something "the government made for them", it's a product of the federal government - which does not collect sales tax.
No, I don't forget - I'm aware that people are supposed to pay use taxes; they just don't, because they're vanishingly unlikely to be caught. Of course, those people also pay income tax, property tax, car registration, etc., to their state and local governments. And some of those state and local governments offer very, very limited services - remember the shitstorm here when the city fire department in a small town in rural Tennessee let a house burn down because its owner lived outside the city limits and had failed to purchase their fire protection plan despite multiple reminders? - and so it's kind of hard to understand what responsibility Amazon has to places that it doesn't get jack from. After all, while collecting and forwarding sales taxes isn't impossibly difficult, it's also not free.
I'm sure that some of this is just the regular screwing that Canadians get for being a small market that nonetheless has its own copyrights and legal minefields to wander through. However, are there any other possible reasons? I had always wondered why European (e.g., with British being among the worst) prices on so many consumer goods were so much higher than what we pay in the US, until I learned about their consumer protection acts, which (in the UK, as I've been told) lets you get a replacement or refund on something that breaks within two years (or maybe three? long time, anyway) from the seller. In the US, nearly anything past 30 days will be a manufacturer's refund/warranty, rather than retailer's. Does Canada have similar laws? Because three-year point-of-sale-replacement warranties definitely aren't cheap.
There's not really any negotiation to be done with the states. The states believe that Amazon should collect and forward sales taxes for them, despite receiving no services from those states. Amazon thinks that lacking a physical presence in a state exempts them from that. There's not really a compromise position where they collect half the tax, or something. And as long as Amazon keeps its presence out of those states, they'll keep winning - there's no way to enforce a judgement against them, even in a court ruled that the state had standing to sue them.
First, it's pretty hard for people to get an unfavorable opinion of Amazon from anything that doesn't happen directly to them (as opposed to, say, BP getting unfavorables based on Deepwater Horizon from people who live nowhere near the Gulf of Mexico). Second, their customer service is pretty good. My wife's Kindle, which I bought about two years ago, had an untimely meeting with a Diet Coke back in October. I had bought the extended warranty, which came with a one-time we-don't-care-why-it-died replacement clause, mainly because her electronics have a surprisingly high rate of mysterious death. Despite the fact that the warranty is technically sold by another company, not Amazon, I got ZERO runaround - instead I was seamlessly transferred from Kindle support to the warranty processing people, who pulled up all the necessary information. The replacement stopped erasing its screen properly this week, so I called Amazon again yesterday - and again, got a no-hassle experience (the only stupid hoop to jump through was that they wanted me to reboot it once). The replacement's replacement will be here tomorrow. And they've paid the shipping both ways, every time, even including a prepaid shipping label so that all I have to do is drop it off at a post office.
While med students are rather harshly put upon, they do have a significant advantage over nearly all other grad students: they're essentially guaranteed to have a well-paying job at the end of it.
In some countries, yes. In the US, it's done after a bachelor's degree and is roughly comparable to grad school coursework (and yes, I've done both), although the focus is different.
$400 isn't exactly going to fit most student budgets. By contrast, Microsoft will sell you Office Pro Academic, with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access for $80 if you're a student.
Yeah, body fat % is a much better guide than BMI. At 6' and 195# I'd be pretty thin; ten pounds lighter, and I'd be looking unhealthy. (Yes, seriously. The last time I weighed less than 190 pounds, I was wearing a 34 waist, and people kept telling me I looked sick.)
From the government's perspective, the best time to die is just after you start taking Social Security - you only burden the system for a short while. Average diagnosis at 68 fits that nicely. After all, the average 68 year old can expect to live about 15 more years. One that's dying of lung cancer will have the costs associated with that, but will almost certainly not need nursing-home care (the frail elderly are mostly over the age of 80) and definitely won't be getting 15 years of pensions/SS.
The problem is the quantity, not the food. You can still get what was considered a full adult meal combination forty years ago by going to McD's and ordering a Happy Meal - with a regular Coke, it's 590 calories.
Fructose is metabolized differently from glucose, but it is most assuredly processed on the cellular level. Sugars and fats are not the same thing, and you have to metabolize sugar to turn it into fat.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the design of the Archimedean screw depend on low viscosity? I just assumed that it wouldn't be able to pick up much oil with each turn, nor would the oil ascend much up the screw. Ah, well, the specific design makes a difference.
Yes, the wonderful thing about the US is that failing at high school doesn't mean failing at life. "Intellectuals" gave us the abattoir of the twentieth century; that alone is reason to be suspect of them.
Algebra II? EE's use imaginary numbers, and hyperboloid surfaces occur in manufacturing (or so I'm told), but I can't think of anything from Algebra II that I've used in real life. I did the quadratic formula in Algebra I. Geometry and trig were useful. I really enjoyed discrete math and calculus. But Alg2? Total waste of time.
Yep. Teaching to the test is only bad if the test sucks. Of course, I'm biased - I'm a doctor, and medicine is a great field for someone whose only skill is being good at school. If you're a teenager reading this, and you're thinking about it, I'd recommend dental school, as their incomes are basically comparable and don't involve call or weekends. But if you want a good job that pays well, and you're really good at school, you can be a very successful physician. It's not well understood among the general populace that surgeons (e.g.) aren't chosen for their technical skill (they haven't had the chance to develop it before they're selected), but for their test scores.
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While it's true that "how to think" is an important skill, the basic idea of a canon of knowledge (aka rote memorization) is really very important. A shared body of knowledge is critical to communication, and if it's present can make expressing very complex thoughts much easier. It's not especially important for most people to know that Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517, but it's important to know that it happened after the Crusades and before the Enlightenment.
At the time, Harvard was a very different school than it is today. Gentlemen only, please, and if you didn't know Greek and Latin you'd definitely not had a gentleman's education.
Have to learn how to read those church inscriptions somewhere, right? I've not learned any Romance languages using my Latin as a base, so that's pretty much all I can do with it. You're totally right about the beauty of the language - being able to stand in St. Peter's and read TU ES PETRUS, ET SUPER HANC PETRAM AEDIFICABO ECCLESIAM MEAM... that was pretty cool.
Why would you assume that the drug caused irreversible impotence? It's a drug; it gets excreted. It's far more likely that they took the drug from age 40 to age 55, then stopped, and all of a sudden noticed that their erections wouldn't come back.
NCLB has only been law for a little under a decade. I don't remember that people were much more impressed with the quality of the nation's schools in the 90s. (It may still be an awful law, mind you. I have no opinion on that.)
I can afford a good Verizon plan (and given their coverage quality at my workplace, I'd be insane to go to AT&T, regardless of how good they may be elsewhere), but you're right on the money. If my phone wasn't my primary business contact, dropping over $100/mo for a portable data device would be idiotic. As it is, it's just moderately stupid.
The Droid is a Verizon phone, which means no SIM. (Often, people condemn CDMA because it has no SIM. This is inaccurate; CDMA networks in other countries have SIM-equivalents. It's just Sprint and Verizon that won't do it.)
Well, duh. There's a reason that Amazon itself sells objects for more than the cheapo competition. When you're buying a book just to read it, that's not really important. When you're buying a TV, it is. I've paid more plenty of occasions to make the deal with a company I trust, like Amazon or Newegg. Saving $5 here or there isn't worth it, the way that saving $500 is.
In this case, the tax avoiders are the citizens who order things off the internet without paying their proper use tax. Not Amazon - at most, their duty is to collect the tax, not to pay it.
Incidentally, to the extent that the Internet is something "the government made for them", it's a product of the federal government - which does not collect sales tax.
No, I don't forget - I'm aware that people are supposed to pay use taxes; they just don't, because they're vanishingly unlikely to be caught. Of course, those people also pay income tax, property tax, car registration, etc., to their state and local governments. And some of those state and local governments offer very, very limited services - remember the shitstorm here when the city fire department in a small town in rural Tennessee let a house burn down because its owner lived outside the city limits and had failed to purchase their fire protection plan despite multiple reminders? - and so it's kind of hard to understand what responsibility Amazon has to places that it doesn't get jack from. After all, while collecting and forwarding sales taxes isn't impossibly difficult, it's also not free.
I'm sure that some of this is just the regular screwing that Canadians get for being a small market that nonetheless has its own copyrights and legal minefields to wander through. However, are there any other possible reasons? I had always wondered why European (e.g., with British being among the worst) prices on so many consumer goods were so much higher than what we pay in the US, until I learned about their consumer protection acts, which (in the UK, as I've been told) lets you get a replacement or refund on something that breaks within two years (or maybe three? long time, anyway) from the seller. In the US, nearly anything past 30 days will be a manufacturer's refund/warranty, rather than retailer's. Does Canada have similar laws? Because three-year point-of-sale-replacement warranties definitely aren't cheap.
There's not really any negotiation to be done with the states. The states believe that Amazon should collect and forward sales taxes for them, despite receiving no services from those states. Amazon thinks that lacking a physical presence in a state exempts them from that. There's not really a compromise position where they collect half the tax, or something. And as long as Amazon keeps its presence out of those states, they'll keep winning - there's no way to enforce a judgement against them, even in a court ruled that the state had standing to sue them.
First, it's pretty hard for people to get an unfavorable opinion of Amazon from anything that doesn't happen directly to them (as opposed to, say, BP getting unfavorables based on Deepwater Horizon from people who live nowhere near the Gulf of Mexico). Second, their customer service is pretty good. My wife's Kindle, which I bought about two years ago, had an untimely meeting with a Diet Coke back in October. I had bought the extended warranty, which came with a one-time we-don't-care-why-it-died replacement clause, mainly because her electronics have a surprisingly high rate of mysterious death. Despite the fact that the warranty is technically sold by another company, not Amazon, I got ZERO runaround - instead I was seamlessly transferred from Kindle support to the warranty processing people, who pulled up all the necessary information. The replacement stopped erasing its screen properly this week, so I called Amazon again yesterday - and again, got a no-hassle experience (the only stupid hoop to jump through was that they wanted me to reboot it once). The replacement's replacement will be here tomorrow. And they've paid the shipping both ways, every time, even including a prepaid shipping label so that all I have to do is drop it off at a post office.
Customer service, in short, works.
While med students are rather harshly put upon, they do have a significant advantage over nearly all other grad students: they're essentially guaranteed to have a well-paying job at the end of it.
In some countries, yes. In the US, it's done after a bachelor's degree and is roughly comparable to grad school coursework (and yes, I've done both), although the focus is different.
$400 isn't exactly going to fit most student budgets. By contrast, Microsoft will sell you Office Pro Academic, with Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, OneNote, Publisher, and Access for $80 if you're a student.
We already have socialized health care for retirees; it's called Medicare.
Yeah, body fat % is a much better guide than BMI. At 6' and 195# I'd be pretty thin; ten pounds lighter, and I'd be looking unhealthy. (Yes, seriously. The last time I weighed less than 190 pounds, I was wearing a 34 waist, and people kept telling me I looked sick.)
From the government's perspective, the best time to die is just after you start taking Social Security - you only burden the system for a short while. Average diagnosis at 68 fits that nicely. After all, the average 68 year old can expect to live about 15 more years. One that's dying of lung cancer will have the costs associated with that, but will almost certainly not need nursing-home care (the frail elderly are mostly over the age of 80) and definitely won't be getting 15 years of pensions/SS.
The problem is the quantity, not the food. You can still get what was considered a full adult meal combination forty years ago by going to McD's and ordering a Happy Meal - with a regular Coke, it's 590 calories.
Fructose is metabolized differently from glucose, but it is most assuredly processed on the cellular level. Sugars and fats are not the same thing, and you have to metabolize sugar to turn it into fat.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the design of the Archimedean screw depend on low viscosity? I just assumed that it wouldn't be able to pick up much oil with each turn, nor would the oil ascend much up the screw. Ah, well, the specific design makes a difference.
Yes, the wonderful thing about the US is that failing at high school doesn't mean failing at life. "Intellectuals" gave us the abattoir of the twentieth century; that alone is reason to be suspect of them.
Algebra II? EE's use imaginary numbers, and hyperboloid surfaces occur in manufacturing (or so I'm told), but I can't think of anything from Algebra II that I've used in real life. I did the quadratic formula in Algebra I. Geometry and trig were useful. I really enjoyed discrete math and calculus. But Alg2? Total waste of time.
Yep. Teaching to the test is only bad if the test sucks. Of course, I'm biased - I'm a doctor, and medicine is a great field for someone whose only skill is being good at school. If you're a teenager reading this, and you're thinking about it, I'd recommend dental school, as their incomes are basically comparable and don't involve call or weekends. But if you want a good job that pays well, and you're really good at school, you can be a very successful physician. It's not well understood among the general populace that surgeons (e.g.) aren't chosen for their technical skill (they haven't had the chance to develop it before they're selected), but for their test scores.