I'm still a big proponent of the USD—the "universal safety device," also sometimes called the "reverse airbag." It guarantees that the driver will be careful and attentive to the task at hand at all times while driving. It never has to be updated, and it's a very simple device so there's not much to go wrong with it.
It's a railroad spike sticking straight out of the steering wheel.
Disagree with the humiliation path on drinking. I think you'll find humiliation is rarely a good way to raise children.
Just give them booze periodically. They won't like it when they're really young. When they get older, let them have the occasional beer or glass of wine as if it were no big deal, which is pretty easy to do, because it's not. Make sure they understand that these drinks contain alcohol, and it's not good in large amounts like sugar, or other drugs like caffeine. But most of the attention should be on appreciation of the beverage.
I don't know why we don't teach kids to taste food and drink and pay attention to the difference between what's good and bad. Then we wonder why all they eat is junk and HFCS. It's like if we didn't teach them how to read, and then we were all completely dumbfounded by how illiterate they were.
No. It gets dark fast underwater. To reflect a lot of light, you have to be where the light is, which is near the surface. Somehow, it doesn't seem like a great idea to me, when we're looking for alternative sources of energy (all of which originate with the sun) to start kicking a large chunk of that energy back into space. Less energy staying on earth = less biomass & other energy sponges for us to tap to solve the source of the problem. Then again, maybe there's so much abundant energy here that it just won't move the needle in terms of what's available for us to exploit to get us off nonrenewables.
Sir, you seem to have mistaken/. for a place that hosts logical arguments based on critical thinking and reasoning. Prediction is the business of science. We can't be holding ourselves to that kind of standard...why, what would become of the preconceived notion? Shall we dispense with prejudgment itself?!
Using Chrome, I just popped every article on the/. main page into a new tab as quickly as I could while using the task manager. CPU never touched 100%. The highest it got was 60-odd% (I suspect this is because Chrome was requiring all of the overhead of allocating a new process to each task.... Networking, on the other hand, was pegged for much of my wait time. (In FF, the same test never broke 30% CPU...still pegged the network though.) All the while I have 2.35GB of 4GB physical RAM in use, 64-bit OS means that it's a long way away from the per-process limit.
Granted none of this is scientific, so let's think up a real use case that you'd think would be CPU or memory limited. How about Photoshop?
As luck would have it, I just built myself a serious honking PS workhorse of a machine. I attended a meetup last year at Adobe HQ on just this topic. The main takeaway from that talk by Adobe performance engineers? After you have a certain amount of memory required for your Photoshop use cases, adding more doesn't help. If you have a reasonable CPU, getting a faster one results in exactly 0% performance improvement. If you have a video card that supports all the latest features that PS CS4 leverages, beefing it up will add marginal improvements to your experience (unless you're doing a lot of hi-res images, running computationally complex filters like lens blur, or rendering a lot of complex 3D scenes, or doing a lot of video work).
So what can you do at that point to improve performance? Put it on a RAID-0 array, over as many disks as you can until you max out the bus bandwidth between your motherboard and your RAID controller card.
So I'm not saying that there are no use cases out there for which memory and CPU matter. I'm saying that for 99% of what Joe User does, the HD or the network is the bottleneck.
I don't necessarily think that writing in those languages specifically is the answer--but they do represent that we have the know-how, and it's a simple matter of applying it. Look at Google App Engine--you can't easily build an app on GAE that doesn't scale. It's just part of working in that environment.
Pop open your task manager and look at the CPU graph. What percentage of the time you spend sitting at your machine is the CPU pegged at 100%? Not 99%, 100%? Uh huh...thought so.
This simply isn't true. Unless you're transcoding lots of videos all day, nearly all the time you sit waiting for your computer to do something--anything--your HD light is on. I guar-an-tee it. The only use cases I can think of where performance is bottlenecked by memory or video or CPU and not HD, besides transcoding lots of video, result in degraded experience, but not waiting by the end user. Think about first person shooters--the graphics in the original Doom were not great compared to the FPS today--but you didn't have to sit there waiting for the environment to load when you entered a new room even then, did ya?
If you're willing to try my patent-pending system, I can have your deities and their direct descendants consuming less calories in just days, not weeks! You'll see the pounds melt before your eyes! Are you tired of worshipping overweight idols? Time to put Buddha on a treadmill? Just send me cash or money order and you will begin receiving my special deity diet plan with no further commitment!
Seriously, folks, I'm glad someone is doing this important research.
We know how to take advantage of parallel processing...it's an approach that does away with side effects called functional programming (see Erlang, Haskell, etc). The problem is not that we don't take advantage of it in the right ways...the problem is that CPUs have outpaced other hardware. The bottleneck is not your CPU--it's virtual memory swapping in and out. Continue increasing your CPU speed, and it'll just sit idle 99.9% of the time instead of 99.5% waiting for your disk.
The secret to performance is no moving parts. We need super fast SSDs. SSDs are super fast at reading, not so much at writing--so why aren't we already using them on the motherboard to cache disk accesses while not much else is going on? Some other more pressing issues that squeezing every last bit of processing power out of CPUs, why is wired ethernet still so slow, and why is wifi lagging behind? Come on already...we have the tech for this stuff.
But a key difference is that the pope's word is not absolute law to his followers, and analysis and dissent is normal and public.
Officially, the word of the Pope is supposedly guided by the action of the holy spirit in matters of Catholic dogma. So, his word on religious matters is not just law, it's god's law. The fact that the doctrine of Papal infallibility is not invoked often is simply a matter of degree...but the fundamentals are there.
Another is that the beliefs on which communion, confession, etc. are based is available publicly, and the nature of the rituals is well published.
There are rituals and many other aspects of this faith that are not available publicly, but exist only in the bowels of the Vatican under tightly controlled access. There are other faiths we are compelled to accept as legitimate religions that have secretive practices...the secret marriages, bloodletting, and others in Mormonism comes to mind.
I also agree that the pederasty permitted by Catholic leadership was abominable, but it doesn't seem to have been _policy_ to engage in it.
It seems the policy for decades was to cover it up...certainly not to purge it. The Branch Davidians kept the child sexual abuse they committed from prying public eyes as well. Again, the difference in behavior is simply one of degree, not principle.
The distinction between cult and religion can get slippery.
The point I am making is that the distinction bewteen cult & religion is slippery, and for good reason: the two don't differ in principle; when you get down to fundamentals, they are the same.
Well, in order to get a good look at it they had to make sure it wasn't moving (p=0)...as soon as they managed to stop it, figuring out the exact position of the edges for the purpose of measuring it became problematic.
My uninformed opinion about this is that Google made the deal in the first place because they recognize the difference between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, and after doing the calculus on it they reasoned that the overall benefit to the people was worth dealing with the government's rules, provided they didn't get too overt with it. I'm sure they also figured into it: once the people get a taste of a great search engine, and it gets taken away, they know what they're missing. If Google never goes in in the first place, they have no alternative but to believe what the government tells them, that Baidu is the best, yadda yadda.
These include the cult tendency to focus around a single, charismatic leader whose word is absolute law...
Are you calling the Pope non-charismatic? I think you might be offending some Catholics with that sentiment.
...their tendency to conceal their genuine inner beliefs in layers that each must be struggled through by new initiates...
So like: baptism, confirmation, etc?
...each is further divorced from the beliefs taught at the outer layers...
Uh huh...
This is part of what helps separate the cult inner core from the outer world...
The priesthood and convents, okay I'm still with you...
...helps bind them together among others who have learned to share those new increasingly bizarre core beliefs.
Beliefs like reanimating the dead, or ritually consuming the blood and flesh of your messiah!
Of course, I'm being facetious here. No one really thinks the Catholic Church is a cult, though cult v. "legitimate" religion certainly doesn't seem to break down across easily defined boundaries. I mean, perhaps if this church had used their "inner core" to conceal or promote serious crimes of its members, it'd be a different story COUGHCOUGHcoughcoughpedobearscoughCOUGHCOUGH—ahem.
(In truth, I could've gone after any religion COUGHCOUGHcoughcoughLDScoughCOUGHCOUGH—ahem—but I was trying to give myself a challenge by picking the Catholic faith...I didn't realize it was going to be such low-hanging fruit when I started this post. Awright, I'mma go get this cough looked at...)
You guys don't get it. Apps developed for the cloud have to be infinitely scalable...if they don't scale well, the cloud provider is happy to just keep adding machines and charging you for your crappy workmanship. Google's App Engine (GAE) goes one step beyond by providing a container into which you can deploy your app, and the restrictions placed upon your app is to guarantee that it's well-behaved in terms of scalability.
For all you PHB's that read this site: this is for your benefit, not theirs, to keep your technical people from doing all the stupid things they're free to do on Amazon EC2 that costs you lots of money. And it's also why companies like RightScale can provide OTT services for EC2 and charge you...to manage a lot of the technical drudgery that goes along with doing what GAE gives you for free, provided you understand why you have to comply with the requirements of their container. (Once you understand that, you realize that even if you're developing for EC2 you should follow all the same restrictions in your development anyway, or you'll end up with runaway scaling problem.)
Wow, having the number of users Bing has must really be a debilitating competitive disadvantage. And it's totally not fair, because Google never had to deal with that situation...they went straight from zero users to their current numbers...right?
So I can see Microsoft's point. When a company like Google starts to depend on keeping users by locking them in instead of by innovating and providing a better product, that's objectionable. Oops.
It seemed a no-brainer to buy these DVRs rather than buy a Tivo with a monthly rental.
Don't pay the monthly rental. Get a TiVo with lifetime service. They provide a bunch of plans, but really there's only one decision to make:
I will pay the $12.95/month. I plan to waste money by throwing my TiVo away shortly after buying it.
I will keep my TiVo at least 31 months because I'm a sensible person, so I will buy the lifetime subscription ($399 / $12.95 = 30.8 months break-even)
If you're not paying a monthly subscription for your ReplayTV, that means at some point in the past you've done the same...paid the lifetime subscription fee. Otherwise, it's $12.95/month for that too.
I have to say that one of the best things about TiVo is that it now provides access to a lot of web shows. I probably watch as much web TV (a good part of which is Revision3) as normal TV. Ok, not with the Olympics...but normally.
I agree with what you say to an extent...however, I feel that it's a mistake to equate education funding with effectiveness. Historically, the only kind of tax that consistently is supported by popular vote is an education tax that goes to fund local schooling. The problem with this is that it's been exploited by people in government, lobbyists, teachers' unions, and everyone else that wants a piece of that pie.
I learned this when I did a bit of research on the school district I grew up in. Despite having more funding than ever, and more funding per child than ever, my elementary, middle, jr high, and high school continue to slip in the national rankings since I attended. Where's the money going? Why less bang for the buck?
It turns out that the teacher's union in the area is run by, surprise surprise, the teachers that have been around the longest. They put in safeguards reducing teaching to an essentially blue collar job...based not on skills, but seniority. All the money goes to the teachers that have been there the longest, leaving little at the bottom for new teachers (can't attract new talent) and the most challenging positions (remedial, where it's needed the most, and special needs programs). The disparity between department heads that have taught in that district for 30+ years and the new teachers is staggering--last time I checked, the top paid physics teacher/dept head at the high school level was making $180k, the entry level special needs teacher only $21k. Teachers with union positions get a separate salary, as do teachers with administrative roles.
And let's not leave out the administrative roles. Oh my, how middle management has grown. Kids share books and do without microscopes so a bit of flab can exist between the superintendent and the teacher, a position that did not exist 20 years ago, and schools seemed to do just fine without.
There are too many examples of well-funded public schools doing terribly compared to private schools not nearly as well-funded doing great. And there's no room for private schools for anyone but the rich that can actually afford to support the extremely expensive public education plus the bill for a private school...crushing whatever market could exist for middle and lower class private institutions out of existence.
But I suppose we're wired to want the best for our next generation, and we're all to happy to let the unions and education lobby play on those fears and push us around. -sigh-
So in other words :
1 accountant (not better/worse than any other accountant) should be paid more than Obama
10 accountants (not better/worse than any other accountant) should be paid the same as the ceo
300 accountants (not better/worse than any other accountant) should be paid the same as a burger flipper
What? How is any of this representative of what I said above, "in other words"???
Repeat for all jobs. After all, doing so will result in short order in class divisions (and class wars, it seems to me). That would be what you want, right ? Quotas based on socioeconomic background, pay based on random chance, rather than demonstrated ability. Or perhaps you are a communist, wishing "the same" pay for everyone (except yourself obviously) ?
Why are you inferring that this is what I want? It's certainly not based on anything I actually wrote...
[snip snip — removal of self from argument via Godwin's Law, nice move btw]
Lots of these groups around. If you think you can make any of these groups happy without allowing yourself to be 100% subjugated, you're beyond delusional.
I don't want to make groups happy. I don't want to be subjugated. All I'm saying is that, if you are in a position to evaluate someone else for a position, you'd do better to consider what they've achieved relative to where they started and what resources they had at their disposal.
I'm suggesting this is a better way to do things because it benefits the employer...you get better people. Do I believe it should be legislated? No, in a free society, you're free to disagree and hire using whatever criteria you want. There's no law saying you have to be good at business.
From what I see these days, equal opportunity is aiming at the wrong mark. The problem is no longer disparity between races, it's disparity between socioeconomic classes. Historically the issue certainly was race, and consequently there are more of the historically disenfranchised minorities in the lower class...but that doesn't change the fact. When discrimination happens today, it's more likely to be a response to the socioeconomic status than race.
To present a somewhat oversimplified example that nevertheless makes the point, in the '60s it would have been remarkable for a black Harvard graduate to be chosen for a position over a much less qualified white person (not impossible, not unheard of, but remarkable nonetheless). Today, it's remarkable when someone who's scrapped from a challenging background and hasn't quite risen to the same level of achievement is chosen over that same black Harvard grad of privilege, regardless of that person's race.
The culture of equal opportunity has made it politically expedient and very convenient to choose historically disenfranchised minorities today over the currently disenfranchised lower class.
This animation-as-news stuff is brilliant! This is just what the news has been lacking, the presentation of a completely imaginary, emotionally laden point of view brimming with value judgments!
Slashdot Mirror
Of what practical effect is your friend's (anti-?) disability in the military, though? Did we win the Iraq because of his superpower or something?
I'm still a big proponent of the USD—the "universal safety device," also sometimes called the "reverse airbag." It guarantees that the driver will be careful and attentive to the task at hand at all times while driving. It never has to be updated, and it's a very simple device so there's not much to go wrong with it.
It's a railroad spike sticking straight out of the steering wheel.
Disagree with the humiliation path on drinking. I think you'll find humiliation is rarely a good way to raise children.
Just give them booze periodically. They won't like it when they're really young. When they get older, let them have the occasional beer or glass of wine as if it were no big deal, which is pretty easy to do, because it's not. Make sure they understand that these drinks contain alcohol, and it's not good in large amounts like sugar, or other drugs like caffeine. But most of the attention should be on appreciation of the beverage.
I don't know why we don't teach kids to taste food and drink and pay attention to the difference between what's good and bad. Then we wonder why all they eat is junk and HFCS. It's like if we didn't teach them how to read, and then we were all completely dumbfounded by how illiterate they were.
What do you mean, "No, he's right"?
Are you somehow under the impression that I disagreed with grandpappy post? (You didn't really read what I wrote, did ya?)
Am I the only one that's going to invoke rule 110 here?
No. It gets dark fast underwater. To reflect a lot of light, you have to be where the light is, which is near the surface. Somehow, it doesn't seem like a great idea to me, when we're looking for alternative sources of energy (all of which originate with the sun) to start kicking a large chunk of that energy back into space. Less energy staying on earth = less biomass & other energy sponges for us to tap to solve the source of the problem. Then again, maybe there's so much abundant energy here that it just won't move the needle in terms of what's available for us to exploit to get us off nonrenewables.
Sir, you seem to have mistaken /. for a place that hosts logical arguments based on critical thinking and reasoning. Prediction is the business of science. We can't be holding ourselves to that kind of standard...why, what would become of the preconceived notion? Shall we dispense with prejudgment itself?!
No, that won't do. This is /., dammit!
Using Chrome, I just popped every article on the /. main page into a new tab as quickly as I could while using the task manager. CPU never touched 100%. The highest it got was 60-odd% (I suspect this is because Chrome was requiring all of the overhead of allocating a new process to each task.... Networking, on the other hand, was pegged for much of my wait time. (In FF, the same test never broke 30% CPU...still pegged the network though.) All the while I have 2.35GB of 4GB physical RAM in use, 64-bit OS means that it's a long way away from the per-process limit.
Granted none of this is scientific, so let's think up a real use case that you'd think would be CPU or memory limited. How about Photoshop?
As luck would have it, I just built myself a serious honking PS workhorse of a machine. I attended a meetup last year at Adobe HQ on just this topic. The main takeaway from that talk by Adobe performance engineers? After you have a certain amount of memory required for your Photoshop use cases, adding more doesn't help. If you have a reasonable CPU, getting a faster one results in exactly 0% performance improvement. If you have a video card that supports all the latest features that PS CS4 leverages, beefing it up will add marginal improvements to your experience (unless you're doing a lot of hi-res images, running computationally complex filters like lens blur, or rendering a lot of complex 3D scenes, or doing a lot of video work).
So what can you do at that point to improve performance? Put it on a RAID-0 array, over as many disks as you can until you max out the bus bandwidth between your motherboard and your RAID controller card.
So I'm not saying that there are no use cases out there for which memory and CPU matter. I'm saying that for 99% of what Joe User does, the HD or the network is the bottleneck.
I don't necessarily think that writing in those languages specifically is the answer--but they do represent that we have the know-how, and it's a simple matter of applying it. Look at Google App Engine--you can't easily build an app on GAE that doesn't scale. It's just part of working in that environment.
Pop open your task manager and look at the CPU graph. What percentage of the time you spend sitting at your machine is the CPU pegged at 100%? Not 99%, 100%? Uh huh...thought so.
This simply isn't true. Unless you're transcoding lots of videos all day, nearly all the time you sit waiting for your computer to do something--anything--your HD light is on. I guar-an-tee it. The only use cases I can think of where performance is bottlenecked by memory or video or CPU and not HD, besides transcoding lots of video, result in degraded experience, but not waiting by the end user. Think about first person shooters--the graphics in the original Doom were not great compared to the FPS today--but you didn't have to sit there waiting for the environment to load when you entered a new room even then, did ya?
If you're willing to try my patent-pending system, I can have your deities and their direct descendants consuming less calories in just days, not weeks! You'll see the pounds melt before your eyes! Are you tired of worshipping overweight idols? Time to put Buddha on a treadmill? Just send me cash or money order and you will begin receiving my special deity diet plan with no further commitment!
Seriously, folks, I'm glad someone is doing this important research.
We know how to take advantage of parallel processing...it's an approach that does away with side effects called functional programming (see Erlang, Haskell, etc). The problem is not that we don't take advantage of it in the right ways...the problem is that CPUs have outpaced other hardware. The bottleneck is not your CPU--it's virtual memory swapping in and out. Continue increasing your CPU speed, and it'll just sit idle 99.9% of the time instead of 99.5% waiting for your disk.
The secret to performance is no moving parts. We need super fast SSDs. SSDs are super fast at reading, not so much at writing--so why aren't we already using them on the motherboard to cache disk accesses while not much else is going on? Some other more pressing issues that squeezing every last bit of processing power out of CPUs, why is wired ethernet still so slow, and why is wifi lagging behind? Come on already...we have the tech for this stuff.
Officially, the word of the Pope is supposedly guided by the action of the holy spirit in matters of Catholic dogma. So, his word on religious matters is not just law, it's god's law. The fact that the doctrine of Papal infallibility is not invoked often is simply a matter of degree...but the fundamentals are there.
There are rituals and many other aspects of this faith that are not available publicly, but exist only in the bowels of the Vatican under tightly controlled access. There are other faiths we are compelled to accept as legitimate religions that have secretive practices...the secret marriages, bloodletting, and others in Mormonism comes to mind.
It seems the policy for decades was to cover it up...certainly not to purge it. The Branch Davidians kept the child sexual abuse they committed from prying public eyes as well. Again, the difference in behavior is simply one of degree, not principle.
The point I am making is that the distinction bewteen cult & religion is slippery, and for good reason: the two don't differ in principle; when you get down to fundamentals, they are the same.
Well, in order to get a good look at it they had to make sure it wasn't moving (p=0)...as soon as they managed to stop it, figuring out the exact position of the edges for the purpose of measuring it became problematic.
(Get it? Man I'm clever.)
My uninformed opinion about this is that Google made the deal in the first place because they recognize the difference between the Chinese government and the Chinese people, and after doing the calculus on it they reasoned that the overall benefit to the people was worth dealing with the government's rules, provided they didn't get too overt with it. I'm sure they also figured into it: once the people get a taste of a great search engine, and it gets taken away, they know what they're missing. If Google never goes in in the first place, they have no alternative but to believe what the government tells them, that Baidu is the best, yadda yadda.
Are you calling the Pope non-charismatic? I think you might be offending some Catholics with that sentiment.
So like: baptism, confirmation, etc?
Uh huh...
The priesthood and convents, okay I'm still with you...
Beliefs like reanimating the dead, or ritually consuming the blood and flesh of your messiah!
Of course, I'm being facetious here. No one really thinks the Catholic Church is a cult, though cult v. "legitimate" religion certainly doesn't seem to break down across easily defined boundaries. I mean, perhaps if this church had used their "inner core" to conceal or promote serious crimes of its members, it'd be a different story COUGHCOUGHcoughcoughpedobearscoughCOUGHCOUGH—ahem.
(In truth, I could've gone after any religion COUGHCOUGHcoughcoughLDScoughCOUGHCOUGH—ahem—but I was trying to give myself a challenge by picking the Catholic faith...I didn't realize it was going to be such low-hanging fruit when I started this post. Awright, I'mma go get this cough looked at...)
You guys don't get it. Apps developed for the cloud have to be infinitely scalable...if they don't scale well, the cloud provider is happy to just keep adding machines and charging you for your crappy workmanship. Google's App Engine (GAE) goes one step beyond by providing a container into which you can deploy your app, and the restrictions placed upon your app is to guarantee that it's well-behaved in terms of scalability.
For all you PHB's that read this site: this is for your benefit, not theirs, to keep your technical people from doing all the stupid things they're free to do on Amazon EC2 that costs you lots of money. And it's also why companies like RightScale can provide OTT services for EC2 and charge you...to manage a lot of the technical drudgery that goes along with doing what GAE gives you for free, provided you understand why you have to comply with the requirements of their container. (Once you understand that, you realize that even if you're developing for EC2 you should follow all the same restrictions in your development anyway, or you'll end up with runaway scaling problem.)
Wow, having the number of users Bing has must really be a debilitating competitive disadvantage. And it's totally not fair, because Google never had to deal with that situation...they went straight from zero users to their current numbers...right?
So I can see Microsoft's point. When a company like Google starts to depend on keeping users by locking them in instead of by innovating and providing a better product, that's objectionable. Oops.
Don't pay the monthly rental. Get a TiVo with lifetime service. They provide a bunch of plans, but really there's only one decision to make:
If you're not paying a monthly subscription for your ReplayTV, that means at some point in the past you've done the same...paid the lifetime subscription fee. Otherwise, it's $12.95/month for that too.
I have to say that one of the best things about TiVo is that it now provides access to a lot of web shows. I probably watch as much web TV (a good part of which is Revision3) as normal TV. Ok, not with the Olympics...but normally.
Let's see if I can find any reasonable responses. Here. That was easy.
I agree with what you say to an extent...however, I feel that it's a mistake to equate education funding with effectiveness. Historically, the only kind of tax that consistently is supported by popular vote is an education tax that goes to fund local schooling. The problem with this is that it's been exploited by people in government, lobbyists, teachers' unions, and everyone else that wants a piece of that pie.
I learned this when I did a bit of research on the school district I grew up in. Despite having more funding than ever, and more funding per child than ever, my elementary, middle, jr high, and high school continue to slip in the national rankings since I attended. Where's the money going? Why less bang for the buck?
It turns out that the teacher's union in the area is run by, surprise surprise, the teachers that have been around the longest. They put in safeguards reducing teaching to an essentially blue collar job...based not on skills, but seniority. All the money goes to the teachers that have been there the longest, leaving little at the bottom for new teachers (can't attract new talent) and the most challenging positions (remedial, where it's needed the most, and special needs programs). The disparity between department heads that have taught in that district for 30+ years and the new teachers is staggering--last time I checked, the top paid physics teacher/dept head at the high school level was making $180k, the entry level special needs teacher only $21k. Teachers with union positions get a separate salary, as do teachers with administrative roles.
And let's not leave out the administrative roles. Oh my, how middle management has grown. Kids share books and do without microscopes so a bit of flab can exist between the superintendent and the teacher, a position that did not exist 20 years ago, and schools seemed to do just fine without.
There are too many examples of well-funded public schools doing terribly compared to private schools not nearly as well-funded doing great. And there's no room for private schools for anyone but the rich that can actually afford to support the extremely expensive public education plus the bill for a private school...crushing whatever market could exist for middle and lower class private institutions out of existence.
But I suppose we're wired to want the best for our next generation, and we're all to happy to let the unions and education lobby play on those fears and push us around. -sigh-
What? How is any of this representative of what I said above, "in other words"???
Why are you inferring that this is what I want? It's certainly not based on anything I actually wrote...
I don't want to make groups happy. I don't want to be subjugated. All I'm saying is that, if you are in a position to evaluate someone else for a position, you'd do better to consider what they've achieved relative to where they started and what resources they had at their disposal.
I'm suggesting this is a better way to do things because it benefits the employer...you get better people. Do I believe it should be legislated? No, in a free society, you're free to disagree and hire using whatever criteria you want. There's no law saying you have to be good at business.
Dial back that hair trigger a bit.
From what I see these days, equal opportunity is aiming at the wrong mark. The problem is no longer disparity between races, it's disparity between socioeconomic classes. Historically the issue certainly was race, and consequently there are more of the historically disenfranchised minorities in the lower class...but that doesn't change the fact. When discrimination happens today, it's more likely to be a response to the socioeconomic status than race.
To present a somewhat oversimplified example that nevertheless makes the point, in the '60s it would have been remarkable for a black Harvard graduate to be chosen for a position over a much less qualified white person (not impossible, not unheard of, but remarkable nonetheless). Today, it's remarkable when someone who's scrapped from a challenging background and hasn't quite risen to the same level of achievement is chosen over that same black Harvard grad of privilege, regardless of that person's race.
The culture of equal opportunity has made it politically expedient and very convenient to choose historically disenfranchised minorities today over the currently disenfranchised lower class.
This animation-as-news stuff is brilliant! This is just what the news has been lacking, the presentation of a completely imaginary, emotionally laden point of view brimming with value judgments!