Why? The average nice-suburban high school in $BIG_COASTAL_CITY is just as exclusive as the private school I went to in $CRAPHOLE_WITH_ELITE_WANTING_GOOD_SCHOOLS, they just call the tuition "property taxes".
Roads in the US are generally funded by fuel and car taxes that charge the most tax to the heaviest users. The water/sewer/neighborhood roads/etc infrastructure are almost always paid for by the developer as part of the cost they have to pay in order to be allowed to develop the land. The general taxpayer isn't on the hook for any of that. Furthermore, if a problem happens with suburban infrastructure, it's usually quite easy to get to - not always so in the city.
What do you get for $18k/year? It might be worth it (though it's probably not). I pay $2300/year in property tax (1800 sf house) and consider it a ripoff, but then again it doesn't get me usable city services - I pay for water, sewage, and garbage collection separately, and they're the only things my city effectively provides. I can expect to pay for private schooling (which, for a school as good as the ones you're getting in the average nice Westchester Co suburb, are going to run you $10k/year/child starting in kindergarten), the police are actively hostile to the citizens, and the fire department basically manages to prevent the fire from spreading to neighboring houses.
Carpooling is annoying to deal with - need to leave work because your child is sick? Hope you drove that day! So is park-and-ride -- given that you've already fought quite a lot of traffic, why pull over, put yourself in a lot, walk all the way down to the pickup point, wait for a bus, board it, and ride for an hour to get downtown? In a car-vs-transit competition, the car will always win if it's even remotely financially viable, because a car is a far better thing than public transit (from the perspective of the rider).
When I was a freshman in college, I ended up becoming friends with several people who had met one another a week or two before I met them. They had taken the bus downtown, because none of them had cars. It took almost an hour to make the trip - a trip that took twenty minutes by car if you took surface streets. Once your time has any monetary value to you at all, transit starts to look like a losing proposition.
more or less inadvertently created by the Eisenhower Interstate System anyway
Sorry, man, but this is just plain wrong. Suburbanization has been going on since the late 1800s in the US: Evanston, IL, founded 1892; Shaker Heights, OH, planned in 1905 and incorporated in 1912; Bryn Mawr, PA, 1900; there's even a Wikipedia article about those towns. And Levittown, NY, the prototypical cookie-cutter suburb, was built starting in 1947 - well before the federally funded interstates started marching out.
And besides, if you don't want to live in suburbia, don't live there. There's a hell of a lot of land out there.
Seeing "some people" doesn't mean that a large majority of the units aren't sold to investors, nor that the people who do live in the units are in any way "average" except in that they, too, have kids and play in the park.
Please do enlighten us with more recent knowledge. I'm well away from archaeology; the last word I know is Jared Diamond's, which was: even if Clovis culture wasn't the first one in North America, it was the first widespread one, and so predecessors are merely interesting curiosities. Much like L'Anse aux Meadows: it's impressive that the Norse made it that far, but it didn't really go anywhere.
The delay is from the carrier, not mGive. Hardly surprising that mGive isn't going to process transactions for free (they have bills too), nor that they're going to wait until they actually get the money to send it on to the charities. Just because you service not-for-profit corporations (and mind you, "not for profit" just means that there aren't shareholders to get a share of the coin, not that nobody makes any money) doesn't mean you don't have to make money to stay alive.
Correspondingly, there is a real ignorance of why polystyrene foam was originally considered such an environmental bugbear - after all, we're surrounded by the stuff; it's not as though a landfill full of foam would be likely to contaminate groundwater or hurt anyone (inks/dyes aside). The real reason? It was originally blown with nonflammable, nontoxic, non-oxidizing CFCs. "Styrofoam is bad" has been absorbed, but the disappearance of the original reason why has been ignored.
You can judge things from a utilitarian perspective, and that's generally how I roll. Just a gentle reminder that not everyone thinks that way, and in a morality vs utilitarianism argument, utilitarianism often loses.
Yes, I think birth control is too confusing for a surprisingly large number of dumb people. Remember that IQ fits a bell curve - for everyone above 120, there's someone below 80. You're expecting someone who can't get through tenth grade to remember to carry condoms and to pull one out when he's in the thick of it? I've known plenty of college grads who've gotten pregnant that way (though they don't typically get that reckless until they're married).
Most of the poor, unfortunately, are poor because they're just not very smart. Had they been only children rather than one of four or five, they would not have had significantly improved opportunities. In all but the most heart-wrenching cases, intelligent people born into poor families quickly rise above the rest.
it's too dangerous to farm in large swaths of Africa
Especially if you're white. I heard that Zambia has done really well for itself by inviting former Zimbabwean farmers into the country, though, especially in the later years when the pretense of giving the land to the black farmers who had actually worked it was abandoned and it all started going to Mugabe's goons.
Locavoring works fabulously in Northern California, as it sits astride one of the world's most benign climates and has (had?) plenty of water via snowmelt to grow all kinds of crops on the fantastically fertile soil found there. It does pretty well in the Pacific NW. But it's a non-starter in most of the country.
children exposed to abstinence only education have sex earlier, have more sexual partners, have sex more often, have more pregnancies, have more abortions, and have more sexually transmitted diseases than children who received uncensored sex education.
Be careful where you try to take that. People often point to extremely socially conservative policies that seem not to work especially well as evidence that said policies are inherently bad ideas. I've lived in the deep South my whole life, and what I've noticed is that while these ideas are not broadly effective at improving the life of the average poor person, they are profoundly effective in people who actually follow them. Incidents that would be a troubles to a middle class person - an unexpected pregnancy, an arrest for minor drug possession - are catastrophic to people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, because they don't have even the small reserves necessary to get past them. The morality of the poor tends to be somewhat more black-and-white, because that's precisely what they see: if you don't follow the straight and narrow path, you'll never make it anywhere. There are always examples nearby of people who did follow that straight and narrow path, and have been rewarded for it, for them to point to, and the rules are easy to understand, if not always to follow. When you start opposing the rules, based on outcomes, that's sacrificing God's morality on the altar of utilitarianism - and who are you, to think you know better than God? (Don't flame the messenger, people, but that's exactly the thought process.)
For most poor people, the world is a large and confusing place, and their part of it is often arbitrary and harsh. Faced with a game whose rules they can't understand, it's hardly surprising that so many are kindly disposed to believe in a power larger than themselves that is looking out for them (but who will punish them severely for getting out of line). The alternative is helplessness.
Territorial jurisdiction matters. I can't be prosecuted in California courts for a crime committed in Maine. Likewise, things that I do outside the US shouldn't be under US law.
That's what I thought of the first time I heard of this law. It seems somewhat odd that it can be a violation of US law to do something in another country.
I can think of no better way for a nation to acquire skills than to import people that some other country has gotten to the point of finishing undergraduate training, pouring in the high-value-added grad school, and working them to death as postdocs on the slim hope that they'll score a tenure-track faculty position.
Besides, given the dismal job prospects of most science PhDs, Americans are often making a very rational choice to stay out of those fields. If you want to work yourself to death, medical or dental school pays a lot better in the long run, and if you'd like an easier lifestyle there are plenty of jobs that will pay a resourceful college graduate $30k a year.
No, he didn't win because he's black; he won because McCain-Palin was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ticket. But is it your contention that his skin color has actually hurt him? I'm pretty sure it won him just as many supporters as it lost him (not a lot, but not zero either). If it did, what would he have done if white? Conquered the entire fucking world in a six-month whirlwind? The guy went from a relative nobody, to the state legislature, to the US Senate, to the Presidency, in twelve years. The only person with similarly short track record in politics to do that was John Kennedy, who had a prominent and powerful father pushing him along.
Yes, because www.thesun.co.uk is painful to type in, and because the average Joe really wants to know about the solar weather so he can shield his transmission lines the next time a solar storm comes through.
Are you dying to pay a million dollars to let the world know about the latest info re: the sun? Briefly: still a star, still undergoing fusion reactions, not expected to burn out in the next billion years.
The Internet of the NSF backbone days was a very different beast. Companies that appeared on it were usually defense contractors or university computing suppliers.
Slashdot Mirror
I dislike private schools on general principle
Why? The average nice-suburban high school in $BIG_COASTAL_CITY is just as exclusive as the private school I went to in $CRAPHOLE_WITH_ELITE_WANTING_GOOD_SCHOOLS, they just call the tuition "property taxes".
You know what's really funny? The law (CAFE) that killed the wagon in favor of the SUV was supposed to improve fuel efficiency. Oops!
Roads in the US are generally funded by fuel and car taxes that charge the most tax to the heaviest users. The water/sewer/neighborhood roads/etc infrastructure are almost always paid for by the developer as part of the cost they have to pay in order to be allowed to develop the land. The general taxpayer isn't on the hook for any of that. Furthermore, if a problem happens with suburban infrastructure, it's usually quite easy to get to - not always so in the city.
What do you get for $18k/year? It might be worth it (though it's probably not). I pay $2300/year in property tax (1800 sf house) and consider it a ripoff, but then again it doesn't get me usable city services - I pay for water, sewage, and garbage collection separately, and they're the only things my city effectively provides. I can expect to pay for private schooling (which, for a school as good as the ones you're getting in the average nice Westchester Co suburb, are going to run you $10k/year/child starting in kindergarten), the police are actively hostile to the citizens, and the fire department basically manages to prevent the fire from spreading to neighboring houses.
Funny, my state's DOT is financed almost entirely by car taxes and fuel taxes. Isn't yours?
Carpooling is annoying to deal with - need to leave work because your child is sick? Hope you drove that day! So is park-and-ride -- given that you've already fought quite a lot of traffic, why pull over, put yourself in a lot, walk all the way down to the pickup point, wait for a bus, board it, and ride for an hour to get downtown? In a car-vs-transit competition, the car will always win if it's even remotely financially viable, because a car is a far better thing than public transit (from the perspective of the rider).
When I was a freshman in college, I ended up becoming friends with several people who had met one another a week or two before I met them. They had taken the bus downtown, because none of them had cars. It took almost an hour to make the trip - a trip that took twenty minutes by car if you took surface streets. Once your time has any monetary value to you at all, transit starts to look like a losing proposition.
more or less inadvertently created by the Eisenhower Interstate System anyway
Sorry, man, but this is just plain wrong. Suburbanization has been going on since the late 1800s in the US: Evanston, IL, founded 1892; Shaker Heights, OH, planned in 1905 and incorporated in 1912; Bryn Mawr, PA, 1900; there's even a Wikipedia article about those towns. And Levittown, NY, the prototypical cookie-cutter suburb, was built starting in 1947 - well before the federally funded interstates started marching out.
And besides, if you don't want to live in suburbia, don't live there. There's a hell of a lot of land out there.
Seeing "some people" doesn't mean that a large majority of the units aren't sold to investors, nor that the people who do live in the units are in any way "average" except in that they, too, have kids and play in the park.
Please do enlighten us with more recent knowledge. I'm well away from archaeology; the last word I know is Jared Diamond's, which was: even if Clovis culture wasn't the first one in North America, it was the first widespread one, and so predecessors are merely interesting curiosities. Much like L'Anse aux Meadows: it's impressive that the Norse made it that far, but it didn't really go anywhere.
The delay is from the carrier, not mGive. Hardly surprising that mGive isn't going to process transactions for free (they have bills too), nor that they're going to wait until they actually get the money to send it on to the charities. Just because you service not-for-profit corporations (and mind you, "not for profit" just means that there aren't shareholders to get a share of the coin, not that nobody makes any money) doesn't mean you don't have to make money to stay alive.
Correspondingly, there is a real ignorance of why polystyrene foam was originally considered such an environmental bugbear - after all, we're surrounded by the stuff; it's not as though a landfill full of foam would be likely to contaminate groundwater or hurt anyone (inks/dyes aside). The real reason? It was originally blown with nonflammable, nontoxic, non-oxidizing CFCs. "Styrofoam is bad" has been absorbed, but the disappearance of the original reason why has been ignored.
You can judge things from a utilitarian perspective, and that's generally how I roll. Just a gentle reminder that not everyone thinks that way, and in a morality vs utilitarianism argument, utilitarianism often loses.
Yes, I think birth control is too confusing for a surprisingly large number of dumb people. Remember that IQ fits a bell curve - for everyone above 120, there's someone below 80. You're expecting someone who can't get through tenth grade to remember to carry condoms and to pull one out when he's in the thick of it? I've known plenty of college grads who've gotten pregnant that way (though they don't typically get that reckless until they're married).
Most of the poor, unfortunately, are poor because they're just not very smart. Had they been only children rather than one of four or five, they would not have had significantly improved opportunities. In all but the most heart-wrenching cases, intelligent people born into poor families quickly rise above the rest.
it's too dangerous to farm in large swaths of Africa
Especially if you're white. I heard that Zambia has done really well for itself by inviting former Zimbabwean farmers into the country, though, especially in the later years when the pretense of giving the land to the black farmers who had actually worked it was abandoned and it all started going to Mugabe's goons.
Locavoring works fabulously in Northern California, as it sits astride one of the world's most benign climates and has (had?) plenty of water via snowmelt to grow all kinds of crops on the fantastically fertile soil found there. It does pretty well in the Pacific NW. But it's a non-starter in most of the country.
children exposed to abstinence only education have sex earlier, have more sexual partners, have sex more often, have more pregnancies, have more abortions, and have more sexually transmitted diseases than children who received uncensored sex education.
Be careful where you try to take that. People often point to extremely socially conservative policies that seem not to work especially well as evidence that said policies are inherently bad ideas. I've lived in the deep South my whole life, and what I've noticed is that while these ideas are not broadly effective at improving the life of the average poor person, they are profoundly effective in people who actually follow them. Incidents that would be a troubles to a middle class person - an unexpected pregnancy, an arrest for minor drug possession - are catastrophic to people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, because they don't have even the small reserves necessary to get past them. The morality of the poor tends to be somewhat more black-and-white, because that's precisely what they see: if you don't follow the straight and narrow path, you'll never make it anywhere. There are always examples nearby of people who did follow that straight and narrow path, and have been rewarded for it, for them to point to, and the rules are easy to understand, if not always to follow. When you start opposing the rules, based on outcomes, that's sacrificing God's morality on the altar of utilitarianism - and who are you, to think you know better than God? (Don't flame the messenger, people, but that's exactly the thought process.)
For most poor people, the world is a large and confusing place, and their part of it is often arbitrary and harsh. Faced with a game whose rules they can't understand, it's hardly surprising that so many are kindly disposed to believe in a power larger than themselves that is looking out for them (but who will punish them severely for getting out of line). The alternative is helplessness.
Territorial jurisdiction matters. I can't be prosecuted in California courts for a crime committed in Maine. Likewise, things that I do outside the US shouldn't be under US law.
That's what I thought of the first time I heard of this law. It seems somewhat odd that it can be a violation of US law to do something in another country.
I can think of no better way for a nation to acquire skills than to import people that some other country has gotten to the point of finishing undergraduate training, pouring in the high-value-added grad school, and working them to death as postdocs on the slim hope that they'll score a tenure-track faculty position.
Besides, given the dismal job prospects of most science PhDs, Americans are often making a very rational choice to stay out of those fields. If you want to work yourself to death, medical or dental school pays a lot better in the long run, and if you'd like an easier lifestyle there are plenty of jobs that will pay a resourceful college graduate $30k a year.
No, he didn't win because he's black; he won because McCain-Palin was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad ticket. But is it your contention that his skin color has actually hurt him? I'm pretty sure it won him just as many supporters as it lost him (not a lot, but not zero either). If it did, what would he have done if white? Conquered the entire fucking world in a six-month whirlwind? The guy went from a relative nobody, to the state legislature, to the US Senate, to the Presidency, in twelve years. The only person with similarly short track record in politics to do that was John Kennedy, who had a prominent and powerful father pushing him along.
All of those are going to page3.co.uk, though, amirite?
Well, I do wish them the best, and everyone hopes to have some utterly irrational bidders in the pool. I'd just hold onto it, personally.
Yes, because www.thesun.co.uk is painful to type in, and because the average Joe really wants to know about the solar weather so he can shield his transmission lines the next time a solar storm comes through.
Are you dying to pay a million dollars to let the world know about the latest info re: the sun? Briefly: still a star, still undergoing fusion reactions, not expected to burn out in the next billion years.
The Internet of the NSF backbone days was a very different beast. Companies that appeared on it were usually defense contractors or university computing suppliers.
Why would they care? Is www.thesun.co.uk too hard to type in?