My point was that the worst imaginable voting experience takes less time than the least-imposing jury duty experience. A few hours of time without compensation is not an insane imposition; a few weeks is. Yes, that's an outlier. Outliers suck when they fall on you -- and life is not a law review article. You make a great and convincing argument for the pristine realm of law, but the rest of us live in the real world. You don't like my solution? Fine. No skin off my back. I'm exempt from jury duty in my jurisdiction as a result of my profession, so it's all moot to me.
Additionally, do you really believe that age has anything to do with ability when it comes to being a member of a jury?
Yes. Otherwise, why do we not let minors onto juries? Why are there age requirements for public offices?
Some of us younger folk don't hate everyone and everything yet, or haven't been stuck in our views of how to interperate laws for 50 years.
Bad ideas are not purely the province of the old.
I could have been more precise; most retired people have plenty to do, but relatively little that is time-critical. If it gets done next week instead of today... usually not a problem. If you can't be on your own schedule, why be retired?
The most horrendous voting experience I've ever had took an hour from the moment I left my workplace until I was back there. The most horrendous voting experience I've ever heard of took three hours for same. If trials were conducted within a day or two total time involved, it might be a reasonable imposition, but expecting people to take a week or more out of their lives in order to judge a case demands real compensation.
Personally, I'd prefer that retired people sit on juries - they presumably have a lifetime of accumulated wisdom, a fair amount of judgment, and little else to do. I'd certainly enjoy spending a few weeks every year of my retirement doing so.
Not everyone works for a massive employer that pays you your usual income when you're on jury duty. One day a year is not an unreasonable demand, but when you talk about trials that last for weeks on end, a self-employed person could be bankrupted easily. The guy who does my yard, for example - he has a full-time lawn service during the summer, backed up with a part-time job at a convenience store in the winter. If he gets sequestered in a jury for three weeks without access to his cell phone, all of his clients cancel his business. This is a hard-working guy from a blue-collar background who will, I am certain, have a productive small business employing half a dozen people or more within 5 years, if he's left alone. If the choice is between the jury system and his family, guess which one he cares more about?
Funny, the judge seems to think he's smart enough to distinguish between rumor on the Internet and what's presented in the courtroom. And I don't see him going to the crappy motel at night, barred from speaking to his friends and family.
I see your point, but how exactly would you phrase that sentence so as to be both perfectly precise and minimally sesquipedalian? Programming languages must produce clunky phrases in the pursuit of clarity, but human languages should leave some room for prosody.
"Cuz" is perfectly acceptable in an SMS. It is not in a paper. Someone who fails to distinguish between formal and informal writing may have difficulty distinguishing formal and informal behavior in other situations and end up telling your major client, who just happens to be a devout Christian, that she spent the last three days at a pot-fueled Wiccan orgy. (Or tell your other major client, who happens to be an LGBT activist, that she thinks all homos should be put to death by stoning.)
All the ones I've ever driven have a variable timing slider that you can set. It's useful for the lights to remain on for 10-30 seconds after turning the car off, to help you see.
The problem is that people aren't willing to stick around and get paid $25k if the company has a bad year in return for the chance to make $150k if it has a good one. People love a share of the profits, but for some reason management and shareholders are always the ones who need to suck it up and take a loss.
I imagine that it will become considerably more compelling, like iPhone and iPod, at around version 3.0. Wait, does that mean Apple is the new Microsoft?
What about gang murders? What if you live in that neighborhood? What if a crooked cop puts the screw to you over your failure to report that gang murder, and threatens to take away your kids?
My mom is a fuckup in every way and for some reason my dad is weak and allows her to control everything.
Many issues in marriage belong to the person who doesn't care, and many belong to the person who has fewer responsibilities. If he wasn't going to divorce her over it, he wasn't going to change her. Keep that in mind when selecting a mate; pick their most annoying characteristics and replay them over and over. See if it's something you can live with.
Do you advocate the reverse for too-secular families?
Seriously, though, there are a lot of places in the middle of the country where 80+% of the stuff that is done in church is not really religious; it's just a framework for community interaction.
I went to a private school like that for K-6, mainly because it was one of the best elementary schools in the city, and it was close enough for me to walk/ride my bike to and from school. Were parents really unaware? Did they never speak to their children about the sort of things being discussed in school? Or look at the homework? I learned how to diagram sentences with examples like "God does wonderful things for us every day." There's no way you could miss that if you paid the slightest bit of attention.
I know that this opinion is popular on Slashdot, but there's something that is easy to forget: many, many people are just not very intelligent. And for them, the world is a fundamentally scary place where a lot of very bad things happen for apparently random reasons. (Even before there were tax refund loans, people paid H&R Block or Jackson Hewitt to fill out a 1040EZ, because they couldn't understand it. Go work in a public hospital ER, or for a public defender, and you can meet these people too.) Religion - for all its faults - lets them believe that someone is watching out for them, and that it will be all right in the end. The fact that elites have co-opted it for their own purposes does not diminish this; the elites will co-opt anything - religion, democracy, communism, dictatorship, business, society - because the ability to co-opt things to your own purposes is what makes you become and stay an elite.
See my reply to hoppq, but basically, no. "I'd like to be in Congress in order to shrink the government" isn't a contradiction in terms. There are all sorts of groups that try to lay down restrictions on what the government can and cannot do - some are traditionally thought of as conservative (e.g., the NRA), some as liberal (e.g., the ACLU). Some are in between. Small government conservatives - or fiscal disciplinarians, which is really a much more descriptive term - are just one more of these groups, with the operative theory that a government that has a tightly reined in sphere of activity is a government that is less likely to do harm.
The douchebags, to use your term of art, are out of office after the voters booted them out in 2006 and 2008, precisely because they had gone to Washington promising to behave like adults when it came to spending and then demonstrating that by "adult" they meant "drunken sailor on shore leave two days before the start of World War II".
And remember that all I talked about was where the people grew up, not where they chose to live as adults. And if you look at internal migration in the US, you do see migration out of high-tax states to low-tax ones.
There are some people on both sides of the aisle who have no interest in the success of the country, but they are thankfully quite few. Keep that in mind when you write things like
conservatives are very afraid of a government that actually works for the people
No. Fiscal conservatives don't have an objection to government working. We object to a government trying to insist that everything is its business. We'd like the things that just about everyone except the radical anarchists believes should be government services to be government services - police, fire, search and rescue, military, roads, animal control, natural disasters. And we think things like this describe not a rare example, but a typical result of a large government sector - not that it can't be done well, just that it so rarely is.
In large parts of the South and Midwest that are today Republican strongholds, there was a prominent Progressive movement in the 20s and 30s. As primarily agricultural states, they were very much opposed to Big Business. (Heck, look at LBJ!) They started voting Republican when the Democrats began ignoring the populist elements of their makeup in favor of the social liberal ones, but only in national elections - local and state parties continued to field Democrats who won elections. The governments were composed of redistributionist types. And some were corrupt, and they didn't work. Some were clean, and they worked. It had nothing to do with the social attitudes of the people involved, but it sure did play a part in how a younger generation started to think.
Slashdot Mirror
Additionally, do you really believe that age has anything to do with ability when it comes to being a member of a jury?
Yes. Otherwise, why do we not let minors onto juries? Why are there age requirements for public offices?
Some of us younger folk don't hate everyone and everything yet, or haven't been stuck in our views of how to interperate laws for 50 years.
Bad ideas are not purely the province of the old.
I could have been more precise; most retired people have plenty to do, but relatively little that is time-critical. If it gets done next week instead of today... usually not a problem. If you can't be on your own schedule, why be retired?
Except that if he breaks his leg, there's nobody keeping him from contacting people to explain the situation.
The most horrendous voting experience I've ever had took an hour from the moment I left my workplace until I was back there. The most horrendous voting experience I've ever heard of took three hours for same. If trials were conducted within a day or two total time involved, it might be a reasonable imposition, but expecting people to take a week or more out of their lives in order to judge a case demands real compensation.
Personally, I'd prefer that retired people sit on juries - they presumably have a lifetime of accumulated wisdom, a fair amount of judgment, and little else to do. I'd certainly enjoy spending a few weeks every year of my retirement doing so.
it's illegal to fire workers if they missed work for jury duty
But you don't have to pay them for work not done, and they've been making $30/day as a juror. How are they going to pay the bills?
Not everyone works for a massive employer that pays you your usual income when you're on jury duty. One day a year is not an unreasonable demand, but when you talk about trials that last for weeks on end, a self-employed person could be bankrupted easily. The guy who does my yard, for example - he has a full-time lawn service during the summer, backed up with a part-time job at a convenience store in the winter. If he gets sequestered in a jury for three weeks without access to his cell phone, all of his clients cancel his business. This is a hard-working guy from a blue-collar background who will, I am certain, have a productive small business employing half a dozen people or more within 5 years, if he's left alone. If the choice is between the jury system and his family, guess which one he cares more about?
Funny, the judge seems to think he's smart enough to distinguish between rumor on the Internet and what's presented in the courtroom. And I don't see him going to the crappy motel at night, barred from speaking to his friends and family.
I see your point, but how exactly would you phrase that sentence so as to be both perfectly precise and minimally sesquipedalian? Programming languages must produce clunky phrases in the pursuit of clarity, but human languages should leave some room for prosody.
"Cuz" is perfectly acceptable in an SMS. It is not in a paper. Someone who fails to distinguish between formal and informal writing may have difficulty distinguishing formal and informal behavior in other situations and end up telling your major client, who just happens to be a devout Christian, that she spent the last three days at a pot-fueled Wiccan orgy. (Or tell your other major client, who happens to be an LGBT activist, that she thinks all homos should be put to death by stoning.)
It's not rare enough to raise eyebrows; in ed speak, "building a foundation" is a reasonably common phrasing.
I'm usually a grammar and spelling Nazi, but this thread invites the Nerdpocalypse. May God have mercy on our souls.
All the ones I've ever driven have a variable timing slider that you can set. It's useful for the lights to remain on for 10-30 seconds after turning the car off, to help you see.
Mod up. I can afford a Tesla, and I think it's insane that this is getting subsidy.
The problem is that people aren't willing to stick around and get paid $25k if the company has a bad year in return for the chance to make $150k if it has a good one. People love a share of the profits, but for some reason management and shareholders are always the ones who need to suck it up and take a loss.
I imagine that it will become considerably more compelling, like iPhone and iPod, at around version 3.0. Wait, does that mean Apple is the new Microsoft?
What about gang murders? What if you live in that neighborhood? What if a crooked cop puts the screw to you over your failure to report that gang murder, and threatens to take away your kids?
You were trying to prove your point, to prove your point.
So was his teacher. Don't give a dumb test to smart kids and then be surprised when they call you on it.
My mom is a fuckup in every way and for some reason my dad is weak and allows her to control everything.
Many issues in marriage belong to the person who doesn't care, and many belong to the person who has fewer responsibilities. If he wasn't going to divorce her over it, he wasn't going to change her. Keep that in mind when selecting a mate; pick their most annoying characteristics and replay them over and over. See if it's something you can live with.
get your kids some secular experiences
Do you advocate the reverse for too-secular families?
Seriously, though, there are a lot of places in the middle of the country where 80+% of the stuff that is done in church is not really religious; it's just a framework for community interaction.
Did you use A Beka books?
I went to a private school like that for K-6, mainly because it was one of the best elementary schools in the city, and it was close enough for me to walk/ride my bike to and from school. Were parents really unaware? Did they never speak to their children about the sort of things being discussed in school? Or look at the homework? I learned how to diagram sentences with examples like "God does wonderful things for us every day." There's no way you could miss that if you paid the slightest bit of attention.
Thanks. Can you re-stream without sitting at the PC? Or can you remote control?
I can even still watch Hulu from it.
Link for something that works with the Xbox and not just XBMC on PC?
I know that this opinion is popular on Slashdot, but there's something that is easy to forget: many, many people are just not very intelligent. And for them, the world is a fundamentally scary place where a lot of very bad things happen for apparently random reasons. (Even before there were tax refund loans, people paid H&R Block or Jackson Hewitt to fill out a 1040EZ, because they couldn't understand it. Go work in a public hospital ER, or for a public defender, and you can meet these people too.) Religion - for all its faults - lets them believe that someone is watching out for them, and that it will be all right in the end. The fact that elites have co-opted it for their own purposes does not diminish this; the elites will co-opt anything - religion, democracy, communism, dictatorship, business, society - because the ability to co-opt things to your own purposes is what makes you become and stay an elite.
what the hell, I was logged in and it makes me anon. let's see what happens this time.
See my reply to hoppq, but basically, no. "I'd like to be in Congress in order to shrink the government" isn't a contradiction in terms. There are all sorts of groups that try to lay down restrictions on what the government can and cannot do - some are traditionally thought of as conservative (e.g., the NRA), some as liberal (e.g., the ACLU). Some are in between. Small government conservatives - or fiscal disciplinarians, which is really a much more descriptive term - are just one more of these groups, with the operative theory that a government that has a tightly reined in sphere of activity is a government that is less likely to do harm.
The douchebags, to use your term of art, are out of office after the voters booted them out in 2006 and 2008, precisely because they had gone to Washington promising to behave like adults when it came to spending and then demonstrating that by "adult" they meant "drunken sailor on shore leave two days before the start of World War II".
And remember that all I talked about was where the people grew up, not where they chose to live as adults. And if you look at internal migration in the US, you do see migration out of high-tax states to low-tax ones.
conservatives are very afraid of a government that actually works for the people
No. Fiscal conservatives don't have an objection to government working. We object to a government trying to insist that everything is its business. We'd like the things that just about everyone except the radical anarchists believes should be government services to be government services - police, fire, search and rescue, military, roads, animal control, natural disasters. And we think things like this describe not a rare example, but a typical result of a large government sector - not that it can't be done well, just that it so rarely is.
In large parts of the South and Midwest that are today Republican strongholds, there was a prominent Progressive movement in the 20s and 30s. As primarily agricultural states, they were very much opposed to Big Business. (Heck, look at LBJ!) They started voting Republican when the Democrats began ignoring the populist elements of their makeup in favor of the social liberal ones, but only in national elections - local and state parties continued to field Democrats who won elections. The governments were composed of redistributionist types. And some were corrupt, and they didn't work. Some were clean, and they worked. It had nothing to do with the social attitudes of the people involved, but it sure did play a part in how a younger generation started to think.