We could fix that problem by starting foreign language education in early elementary school, actually, that's what we should do, but there's too much political baggage that goes along with language for that to happen any time soon.
It wouldn't make a difference. Say for instance you taught American schoolkids German from an early age. By the time they leave school they're pretty good at it. Then they leave school, and as they live in America they never use German at all, and several years later they've forgotten every bit they ever learnt.
Learning a foreign language is only useful if you're actually going to use it day in day out. For an English speaker in an English country, this isn't an issue.
It seems really strange now to hear well-off Americans complain that learning languages is "too hard" and requires special talent, when one can plainly see that any poor and uneducated peasant does it succesfully and without complaint.
In a way those peasants do have special circumstances, that is living in a place where several languages are used. Look in the post below for instance where in India three languages are used side by side.
It would be impossible for me to learn another language as I live in England where there is only English. Even if I did learn another language, as I'd have no-one to speak it to I'd just lose it as quickly as I learnt it.
Where are all these people going to live? You can argue about birthrates all you want, but you can't argue against geography. Britain for example has a population density that's almost unlivable. Most people can't even afford a house to live in. The roads are congested, there's hardly any countryside left, there's nowhere to build anything or do anything.
Do you think it's a coincidence that there's a declining birthrate when the place is so crowded that people can't get a house to raise a family in?
The Euro is getting stronger, but birthrates in Europe are declining. I wonder if Europe can be the first empire (Yeah, I am using that term very broadly) to continue to advance with a negative birthrate.
We're overcrowded anyway, we could do with a population cut. No chance of that though as we're being flooded by Eastern Europeans.
Bad news for you. If you define 'ruin' as to decrease the quality, then most Guinness sold in the world is ruined. The exported stuff tastes like black soapy water, homogenised for the American pallette.
Guinness: the stout of choice for plastic-paddies worldwide!
I say take out the vote as it is today. If you vote pro war in any issue, politician or not, you're INSTA DRAFTED.
And conversely, if you vote anti-war in any issue, any time a tyrannical regime takes over a country, you have to go and live there.
So if you voted against the war on Iraq, you have to go and be tortured by Saddam's goons, and have yourself and your family killed in his gas chambers.
They'll still be skinny living off vegetables. Rabbits, sheep and cows live off plants that humans can't eat anyway, so it makes more sense to eat beef than grass.
Your diatribe against poor people only shows me that you have little compassion and make the worst assumptions about people you don't know.
No I just don't appreciate working my balls off all week every week just to end up having a non-insignificant portion of it taken and allocated to people who don't work and have no intention of working.
So if those road workers are so hard-working and risk-taking, why are they working on roads? Maybe they should have put the same effort and risk into getting an education so they could get better jobs.
Your post seems to have proven my point. You put your labour in the right place, and so have reaped the rewards. Whereas your less intelligent colleagues haven't managed to better themselves.
The way you denigrate physical labor shows your ignorance, imo. Physical labor isn't "actual" hard work? Why don't you do it 80 hours a week, for just one week. Then come and tell us how it isn't "actual" work.
I think you should know, I am a manual labourer in a factory, and often work 72-84 hour weeks. In fact today I finished work at 7am. That does not mean that I begrude people with more ambition and talent than me.
How do you know it's the same people buying Madden every year? Maybe people buy a copy every 3-4 years, and the huge playerbase keeps each version top of the sales charts.
No one is worth 2000% more than another individual regardless of how good you are at your job.
Of course they are. Some people are so good at their jobs and their jobs are so important that there are only a small handful of people in the world who could replace them. Some people are so average and do jobs so easy and meaningless that anyone can replace them.
So it's probably a good idea to talk about it now. TFA shows the US "Gini" index increasing substatially from 1970 to 2005 (in small part due to change in computation).
The poorest in America have never had it better. They have houses, cars, heating, air conditioning, cable TV, expensive clothes, stereos etc.
In fact the poorest Americans are so rich they suffer from obesity. You're telling me Americans are going to turn to crime when they have easy jobs and have lots of free time to spend watching sport on TV eating endless food?
Brazil has crime not because of inequality, but because there are few other ways to make a living. Anyone in America can get a job that will provide a comfortable standard of living.
In which case how can you complain about not reaping the rewards from those games? I don't want to learn how to fly a plane, should I then complain about how much pilots are paid?
Companies need to remember that even a genius CEO is worthless without the underlings who follow his successful plans. Imagine if that $53,000,000 had been distributed among the employees as a company-wide bonus.
Then the CEO doesn't work there anymore, and there is no bonus to distribute between the employees. Have you considered that perhaps this man is worth far more to the company than the wages they pay him? His bonus is less than 1% of the company's profits.
Why should lesser employees with no ambition get the same money as the people who have to make all the hard decisions? It's easy to keep your head down in your little cubicle without having to worry about what's happening outside of it.
For the average corporate employee, the most they can hope for is a middle management position where they take blame for others' mistakes while their bosses take the credit for anything good that happens.
CEOs are not average employees, so why should they be compared to them? Believe it or not, all but people are not equal, some are better and more valuable than others. Janitors get paid next to nothing because it's a job anyone can do.
2. Working hard == become wealthy (individual-level) There is no correlation between the degree and intensity of your work and economic success. This is the core issue in "economic distribution" discussions. Work 40 years living in an apartment with one week off a year going nowhere because you can't afford it. Or, work 40 years with two weeks off a year, one spent in Aruba the other skiing in Breckenridge. Same hard work, two different outcomes.
Incorrect. The poor person in this case is obviously not working as hard. He obviously didn't work as hard at school, nor has he worked hard enough to acquire the extra education needed to get a better job. He has not worked hard enough to learn how to make more money. He has not learnt the most productive ways in which to direct his hard work.
Let's not confuse physically hard work with actual hard work. It's intellectually easy to perform grunt work for 80 hours a week for 40 years. It doesn't require any thought, any planning, any ambition or any risk-taking. In fact it is the path of least resistance, i.e. the easy route.
This money goes into public healthcare and social security, in order to basically make sure that even if you're the lowest drug-addict scum on earth, you don't have to steal anything, but can just show up at the social security office and get more than enough money to buy everything they need
And this is a good thing? If I was Swedish I'd wonder why I should bother working to get an education and a decent job, just pass the smack needle...
If you were to take half the money of the richest 10% of Americans and spread it out among the poorest 40%, you'd probably take one of the biggest steps in history towards eliminating poverty.
And what happens when they've spent all that money, and have now learnt to sit and do nothing but live on handouts? And what have the poor done to deserve those giant handouts? They won't work to better themselves, they won't live within the law, they won't know how to spend the money wisely anyway.
single parents are expected to work full-time from the time their child is about 2 months old
Perhaps then the solution is to not be a single parent? It's not societies fault that women get pregnant to men they're not going to spend the rest of their lives with.
Basic benefits that everyone shares equally reduce effective income inequality, and there is a well-known link between desparate poverty and crime.
So we give money to poor people or else they will commit crime? That sounds like blackmail to me. If poor people are blackmailing us why should we feel sorry for them?
The solution to crime is not paying them off, the solution is better policing and hard punishments. It's easy to be a criminal in the ghetto when there is little to no police presence, when sentences are light and prisons are a holiday.
The poor have no reason to trust people who run a society that is blatantly rigged against them.
Rigged how? Last I looked there was nothing stopping a poor person from earning a living, making money, getting an education, or starting a business. Many millionaires in America started out with nothing.
But for every poor person who wants to work to better himself, there are a thousand who want to wallow in self-pity and hold out the begging bowl. Society needs more of the former and less of the latter.
No, they were about light-sabre fights, spaceships and special effects. No-one came out of Star Wars when it was first shown talking about the character development.
Well, my walls are the quite common 8 feet walls, so 1/3 down is 8/3 of a foot, or 2 2/3, so I grab my tape measure, go down to 2'8", and away I go. If you have 10 foot walls, it's 10/3, or 3 1/3 foor, so 3'4" and away we go.
8 foot is about 2.4m. So a third of that is 0.8m. Now suppose your wall is 7 foot high, how do hang your picture a third of the way down?
If people were kidnapping children, and running them over in order to film them and sell the videos for profits, then your post might be somehow relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Learning a foreign language is only useful if you're actually going to use it day in day out. For an English speaker in an English country, this isn't an issue.
It would be impossible for me to learn another language as I live in England where there is only English. Even if I did learn another language, as I'd have no-one to speak it to I'd just lose it as quickly as I learnt it.
Where are all these people going to live? You can argue about birthrates all you want, but you can't argue against geography. Britain for example has a population density that's almost unlivable. Most people can't even afford a house to live in. The roads are congested, there's hardly any countryside left, there's nowhere to build anything or do anything.
Do you think it's a coincidence that there's a declining birthrate when the place is so crowded that people can't get a house to raise a family in?
You generally use 'killed' when someone dies by some external mechanism. When someone old dies you don't say they were killed by old age.
Bad news for you. If you define 'ruin' as to decrease the quality, then most Guinness sold in the world is ruined. The exported stuff tastes like black soapy water, homogenised for the American pallette.
Guinness: the stout of choice for plastic-paddies worldwide!
So if you voted against the war on Iraq, you have to go and be tortured by Saddam's goons, and have yourself and your family killed in his gas chambers.
They'll still be skinny living off vegetables. Rabbits, sheep and cows live off plants that humans can't eat anyway, so it makes more sense to eat beef than grass.
So if those road workers are so hard-working and risk-taking, why are they working on roads? Maybe they should have put the same effort and risk into getting an education so they could get better jobs.
Your post seems to have proven my point. You put your labour in the right place, and so have reaped the rewards. Whereas your less intelligent colleagues haven't managed to better themselves.
I think you should know, I am a manual labourer in a factory, and often work 72-84 hour weeks. In fact today I finished work at 7am. That does not mean that I begrude people with more ambition and talent than me.
How do you know it's the same people buying Madden every year? Maybe people buy a copy every 3-4 years, and the huge playerbase keeps each version top of the sales charts.
In fact the poorest Americans are so rich they suffer from obesity. You're telling me Americans are going to turn to crime when they have easy jobs and have lots of free time to spend watching sport on TV eating endless food?
Brazil has crime not because of inequality, but because there are few other ways to make a living. Anyone in America can get a job that will provide a comfortable standard of living.
Why should lesser employees with no ambition get the same money as the people who have to make all the hard decisions? It's easy to keep your head down in your little cubicle without having to worry about what's happening outside of it.
CEOs are not average employees, so why should they be compared to them? Believe it or not, all but people are not equal, some are better and more valuable than others. Janitors get paid next to nothing because it's a job anyone can do.
Incorrect. The poor person in this case is obviously not working as hard. He obviously didn't work as hard at school, nor has he worked hard enough to acquire the extra education needed to get a better job. He has not worked hard enough to learn how to make more money. He has not learnt the most productive ways in which to direct his hard work.
Let's not confuse physically hard work with actual hard work. It's intellectually easy to perform grunt work for 80 hours a week for 40 years. It doesn't require any thought, any planning, any ambition or any risk-taking. In fact it is the path of least resistance, i.e. the easy route.
Perhaps Switzerland has stricter standards on who comes in than America or Britain.
Perhaps then the solution is to not be a single parent? It's not societies fault that women get pregnant to men they're not going to spend the rest of their lives with.
So we give money to poor people or else they will commit crime? That sounds like blackmail to me. If poor people are blackmailing us why should we feel sorry for them?
The solution to crime is not paying them off, the solution is better policing and hard punishments. It's easy to be a criminal in the ghetto when there is little to no police presence, when sentences are light and prisons are a holiday.
Rigged how? Last I looked there was nothing stopping a poor person from earning a living, making money, getting an education, or starting a business. Many millionaires in America started out with nothing.
But for every poor person who wants to work to better himself, there are a thousand who want to wallow in self-pity and hold out the begging bowl. Society needs more of the former and less of the latter.
If people were kidnapping children, and running them over in order to film them and sell the videos for profits, then your post might be somehow relevant.
Free porn is generally low quality, i.e. short, grainy videos that are just adverts for the full thing (which costs money).