Sorry, but this is just another in a long line of corporate pushes to strip away "real education" about science, math, the liberal arts, and culture from high schools and colleges and replace it with "vocational training" about narrow specialties so that they no longer have to pay for it. Fuck that; we need a well-educated populace. If we want a nation composed of poorly educated people working in virtual sweatshops to compete with an unlimited supply of both skilled and unskilled immigrants who drive down wages* to make those jobs less appealing to natives, we're sure well enough down that road by now without hitting the gas every time an employer wants new kinds of vocational sheep.
*: Harvard economist George Borjas has demonstrated conclusively that for every 10% increase in the labor supply, wages are driven down by 3-4%. Think about that every time someone says, "We need more [skilled/unskilled/whatever] immigration to compete." That job would pay more, and thus attract more Americans into that part of the labor market, and/or be subject to greater automation with skilled American operators overseeing it, if not for the already-high levels of immigration endemic in the given field.
These Greenpeace types are the same people who've prevented us from developing and deploying newer, safer nuclear power plants to replace the less safe older ones which are forced to keep running--and which could replace polluting coal plants and help us immensely in the transition away from the fossil fuels they themselves also decry. They're the same folks who stirred up opposition to Yucca Mountain, yet use the lack of such a facility as a talking point against nuclear. They're the same folks who also fight hydro and anything else with "environmental impact" (i.e., changing anything at all about a local environment).
Until they're willing to back some realistic alternatives to current power generation--other than living like Luddite hippies--I tune these idiots out. Solar and wind currently supply only about 1% of our national power generation needs, and there's no chance they'll ever supply it all. Until the Greenpeace types back something useful to our situation, they're the same ones keeping us stuck on fossil fuels. Fuck 'em.
>would you still consider a death "statistically insignificant" and not worthy
>of spending money on prevention if it were your spouse or child?
Statistics don't care whose spouse or child it is; that's why they're called statistics.;)
Seriously though, the only reasonable way to make policy decisions is impartially. Otherwise, every time someone dies from something somewhere, that someone's family will want to outlaw that something, or to mandate that we all spend an insane amount of money to prevent whatever it was from happening again. As I mentioned above, I'm willing to bet that more than 200 people die every year from falling over railings--that doesn't mean we should mandate that all railings have nets underneath to catch those people. What a waste of resources--and these wastes of resources add up.
>It's not about blaming the driver (and if you think the driver is
>as much or more of a victim than the dead child or the child's
>parent, you have a really twisted view of reality).
I think a driver who has to live with the guilt of running over a child (assuming no mistakes by the driver) because that child's parent or guardian was irresponsible by not supervising the child is a much bigger victim than the irresponsible parent or guardian, because the driver did nothing to cause the accident--but the parent or guardian did. The innocent party not at fault is the victim, not the responsible party who is at fault, regardless of the relative loss.
>It's about giving the responsible driver better tools to more
>effectively do what he's doing already.
No, mandating a $200 per new car expense to eliminate a statistically insignificant number of deaths each year--that's about forcing everyone to pay a combined _$3 billion_ per year for the privilege of maybe not backing over a kid whose parents should make sure he's not there in the first place. Let's just assume that this would eliminate 100% of such accidents--which is unrealistic, but even so--and this would cost $15 million per life saved. Do you have any idea, any at all, how many lives you could save for $15 million? Way more than one if you're spending it right, so this idea must be spending it wrong, very very wrong. It's a stupid, overwrought, needless waste of resources. We need to think of the opportunity cost here, and it's huge.
>If you don't think the benefit is worth the expense, that's one thing,
>but you sound like someone complaining that mandating railings
>on stairways is an abdication of personal responsibility that forces
>responsible people to pay for those irresponsible people who don't
>have perfect balance when they climb stairs.
Making everyone pay $200 to have a video system in their car to avoid 200 otherwise very preventable deaths each year is a far cry from expecting stairs to have railings so that people don't fall--it's more like requiring all stairs to have nets outside the railings so that in case some fucking moron falls over the railing, he'll get caught in the net instead of falling to the floor. It's an irrational overreaction to a statistically insignificant non-problem that would cost a lot of innocent people a huge aggregate amount of money that would better be spent elsewhere.
>You're right -- but blaming the grieving parents for their 5 seconds of inattention
>won't bring their dead child back, or save the next one either. In particular if your
>solution is to demand that parents never make a mistake, ever -- well, that's not a
>solution at all, it's just a way to make yourself feel better by blaming someone else.
That's the same sort of lack of personal responsibility and blaming of the victim (the person who runs over an unattended toddler through no fault of his own because irresponsible parents let him play around cars unattended is also a victim) that causes public pools to close because they can't get insurance and sees neighbors sued when children trespass on their property and hurt themselves. Unacceptable. If you have children, _you_ raise them, _you_ teach them what not to do, and _you_ take responsibility for their mistakes--don't expect the rest of us to have to go out of our way to raise _your_ kids and pay for _your_ lack of supervision. Why should the responsible people in society be forced to pay _$3 billion_ a year to prevent a _statistically insignificant_ number of deaths which, in the cases you're focusing on, are entirely the fault of a few irresponsible parents who are the ones who ought to be held accountable? Taxpayers already pay a large amount to support other people's children in the form of infrastructure and public school expenditures (e.g., where I live it costs over $10,000 per year per student); that's plenty. Expecting irrational amounts of resources to be wasted to make a statistically insignificant number of deaths slightly less likely is selfish and extreme, not to mention yet another expansion of the nanny state.
I'm willing to bet almost all involve old people whose vision and concentration are past their prime, young people without much experience, and people who are very distracted. I was in the car with my 70+ year old great-aunt when she backed directly into a dumpster--and she was in a minivan with a camera system. How can you not see a gigantic dumpster? You can't prevent accidents like that, period.
Seriously, 200 deaths a year is statistically insignificant when hundreds of millions use the roadways. Mandating that everyone who buys a car from now on will have to pay another $200 for a camera system, in order to prevent a statistically insignificant number of deaths which are probably largely attributed to age or inexperience, is a stupid waste of resources. Over 15 million new vehicles are sold every year in the U.S.--this is 3 BILLION DOLLARS WASTED every year if we force camera systems to be installed. Don't you think people can find something better to do with $3 billion of resources yearly?
No wonder our economy is in the crapper--I wonder what the total dollar amount wasted each year through needless government mandates is? Fucking nanny state bullshit.
> The banana is to keep the kid from dying of colon cancer.
I don't know how you eat your bananas, but I usually insert them into my mouth, not my colon...
men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago
So how does what you say contradict with what the authors of the article say:
men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused
The part about men being naturally wired for sexual jealousy is the mistake--modern thinking dictating their conclusions based on present customs, rather than starting from the anthropological past and working forward without bias. Jealousy isn't hardwired in our sexual software; it's a modern overlay, and not a positive emotion but a negative one:
It was normal in prehistory for us to watch the women we sleep with have sex with other men and NOT be jealous, but be purely sexually aroused by it because we knew our turn was coming soon. No negative emotions involved.
Are you really making the argument that if something is "the norm" for tens of thousands of generations (your words) it will neatly stay out of our genome?
It may indeed be the case that the last 10,000 years of scarcity and hierarchy has written "sexual jealousy" into the hardware of our genome rather than just being in the software of our cultural toolkits. Big changes have happened because agriculture, and the scarcity and hierarchy it created (we'd lived longer and been more egalitarian as hunter-gatherers, though our populations were kept resource-limited), likely accelerated the processes of natural selection and sexual selection. The well-known example of a recent genetic variant that took hold extensively only after the agricultural revolution is lactase persistence, and recent genetic studies show that the differences in melanin which caused Europeans to become "white people" gained frequency only 10,000 years ago or less thanks to agriculture and the poor nutrition it provided, making better vitamin production from sun exposure a valuable benefit it conveyed.
But, to say that jealousy is genetically hardwired without extensive evidence contradicting the ancestral case, that it's culturally derived, is at best unscientific, as it starts from current cultural assumptions. The fact that so many men are searching for "cheating wife porn" would also be evidence that it's not jealousy that's at work (again, it's a negative emotion not a pleasant one), but rather our ancestral partner-sharing desires.
This "study" was an idiotic exercise in which a couple of junior researchers mined search terms to reinforce their culturally formed and far from unbiased notions about sexuality. All the crap about men searching for cheating wife porn (I believe "cuckold" porn is a popular current term for it) because of jealousy being hardwired and competition triggering arousal was especially telling--these guys are parroting outdated "conventional wisdom" (i.e., assumptions based on post-facto theory rather than formed from evidence-based research) and nothing more. The real work is being done by folks like the authors of _Sex at Dawn_:
who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm. So, men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago when agriculture changed a hunter-gatherer society of communally shared lives (mating included) into a hierarchical society of enforced order and scarcity (mating changed into a scarce resource like everything else).
In other words, today we have external software (a legacy of early subsistence-farming civilization) installing a chimp-like sexuality of scarcity and aggression and competition into our heads, when our native OS is more bonobo-like and tells us we want to share sex partners.
And we can actually validate this theory, because we have extensive records of contact with "stone age" tribes some of whom are still around today, and true monogamous marriage is almost unheard-of. Most tribes practicing their ancestral ways without Western influence have marriage--but almost never exclusive marriage where partners are expected to be "faithful." Women are usually expected to be promiscuous, and many tribes have "partible paternity"--the belief that every man a pregnant woman has sex with contributes semen towards making the baby, and that if a woman is not promiscuous enough she's not giving the baby a big variety of helpful traits from the fathers, or that the baby could miscarry from lack of continued semen contribution. Some uncontacted tribes literally have had no idea that sex even causes pregnancy, because from the moment females are physically developed enough to have sex they're doing so, often with multiple partners over time, so that the connection between sex and pregnancy isn't clear to them.
Point being, if you want to really learn about human sexuality, read _Sex at Dawn_ and ignore this other crap.
You're failing to consider that many of us were alive LONG before the contemporary EU as a political entity existed. It was not at all uncommon to shorthand the world into obvious regions: NA=North America, SA=South America, EU=Europe, AP=Asia/Pacific, AF=Africa. Many multinationals, militaries, and of course geography classes did it as informal shorthand. I'm not saying it's correct & clear usage today, just that it can be the same as an oldtimer accidentally referring to Zimbabwe as Rhodesia or Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia. It doesn't mean they're ignorant, it's just a slip of the tongue (or keyboard).
> It should be significantly cheaper to get a degree in a field where their is demand - > the STEM degrees - and should cost significantly more for all other degrees.
You've got that backwards. More demand leads to *higher* prices, not lower ones. In every respect, STEM majors should be paying more than humanities majors, not less:
*STEM faculty cost more (often 2x to 3x more) than humanities faculty. *STEM labs and equipment cost far more than plain classrooms. *STEM coursework is usually more expensive.
and most important:
*STEM graduates make more money, and can therefore afford to pay back more student loan debt.
And why is there a shortage of native STEM workers in the USA in the first place? It isn't because of high tuition, or lack of ability; it's because STEM wages have been artificially lowered by the availability of immigrants to fill the jobs more cheaply, and the corporate culture that reinforces immigrant use. Harvard economist George Borjas and others have shown repeatedly that both unskilled and skilled immigrants to this country depress the wages in any occupation they enter, to the tune of a 3% drop in wages for every 10% increase in workforce. What percentage of STEM work in the US is being done by immigrants these days? And that doesn't even factor in the depressing economic effects of offshoring.
No, the market for STEM workers has been artificially short-circuited by the lobbying of corporations intent on importing a cheaper foreign labor pool, and this has resulted in lower STEM pay and therefore lower interest in STEM education and careers by natives. There is no STEM shortage, except the one created by artificial means in the pursuit of corporate greed. The stock answer from most economists is that such immigration is in our national interest since it grows the overall economy--but the problem is, all of that new growth goes exclusively into the pockets of the corporate owners of capital and the immigrant workers themselves, while native workers see their pay decrease by that 3% per 10% increase in workforce. That's why real-world inflation-adjusted earnings for working and middle class Americans have decreased since the 1970s. That's why the gap between rich and poor increases steadily (25 years ago the richest 1% of Americans took home 12% of all income, while today that 1% takes in almost 25% of all income; 25 years ago the richest 1% owned 33% of all assets and capital, while today they own over 40%).
Americans need to wake up to the fact that extreme immigration (we take in more legal immigrants *than every other country combined*) is the root of all of our current economic woes. Our elite classes of both political affiliations love it, the Democrats because they see votes and multiculturalism and the Republicans because they see cheap labor. But while it's good for the moneyed elites it is directly responsible for the worsening fortunes of the American working class and the ongoing disappearance of the middle class.
The sad part is the educated classes have known about this situation for a long time, and the average American may not know the facts but he feels them viscerally--Americans have been overwhelmingly for smaller immigration numbers for decades. Until they start pushing it as a forefront issue though, nothing will be done. An old but excellent book on the situation was published by Random House in 1995, and is now available for free from the author:
At the time it was a bestseller and was as widely discussed as *The Bell Curve*, but unlike that other controversial book not one challenge to its facts and numbers was ever substantiated.
It's possible to take the same group of kids from the same underprivileged neighborhood, and send some of them to public schools where 50% will fail to graduate, and send some from the same pool to charter schools where *for less money per student* 90% will go on to attend college. It really is all about the schools, teachers, and methods, not the students, neighborhoods, or money.
The biggest culprit is teacher tenure. After a measly 2 years of teaching, public school teachers can get tenure and be almost impossible to fire for the rest of their lives, even if they're actively bad at their jobs. At the university level tenure is a useful tool for retaining teachers with unconventional views, who add to the campus experience; but at the high school level tenure is useless since kids have too many basics to learn for unconventional views to be given time. We should institute merit pay for teachers, and eliminate tenure--good teachers could make twice what average ones make, and bad ones could be fired.
> TL;DR. So, by 'natural born', you mean 'not brown'. Right?
Don't be a race-baiting PC tool of the elite greedy capitalists and cultural Marxists on both sides of the political spectrum who caused this socioeconomic mess.
Of course not. There have been black, red, and Hispanic people in the U.S since before it was the U.S. I'm 1/16 Cherokee myself, and I probably have some black ancestry as well. But then, if you go far back enough, we all do.;)
If the 1965 Immigration Act had resulted in tens of millions of blond Germans and Scandinavians flooding our shores, keeping our black population in poverty, making the rich richer and the middle class less existent, tanking public education by costing our schools 1.65 times per student what it costs to educate natives, and waving German flags while demanding that we open borders to let more blond people in, I'd be just as justifiably unsatisfied at them as I am with our current crop of overnumerous immigrants. Whether brown, yellow, or blond, we need to limit immigration to sustainable and integratable levels. And fuck the racial red herring; it's about economics and culture--race is irrelevant.
>> In a few decades, native-born Americans will be about 25% of the U.S. population > > That seems like some sort of critical math failure.
You're right; I shouldn't have used the term "native-born" because the most natural interpretation of that would be "anyone born here," at any time under any circumstances. Parents come here on vacation, kid pops out, suddenly he's another "native-born" USian. He's legally entitled to birthright citizenship, of course (although absolute birthright citizenship isn't the norm in most developed countries). But that's not what I meant, though it's the most obvious interpretation of what I said.
Since I was talking about the negative consequences of the mass immigration begun in 1965, what I really meant in detail is, "In a few decades, the descendants of people who were already here before the mass immigration started by the 1965 Immigration Act will be about 25% of the U.S. population." The immigrants and their descendants will be about 75%. There's nothing special or "more American" about those people who were already here by around 1970 than anyone who immigrated here legally, attained citizenship, and integrated productively into the fabric of American society after that; we just need a baseline date to compare the pre-Act and post-Act population so we can assess its numerical impact. But certainly not all the immigrants and their descendants have integrated into the larger social fabric--some have, some haven't, and their presence has led to changes both good and bad; among the bad, some post-1970 immigrants and their children feel no connection with narratives of the Founding Fathers and the Enlightenment principles which shaped the Constitution; many take to the streets waving flags of their country of origin and advocating for even more open borders, for example; teaching the children of immigrants whose first language isn't English costs 1.65 times as much as teaching the children of native speakers (hello education meltdown); and some have very racist and tribalistic loyalties ("por la raza todo, fuera de la raza nada"); there are clear and sometimes arguably negative and divisive cultural differences in some immigrant communities even after having been in this country for decades.
At any rate, if we take the 1970 census data as our baseline, just 5 years after the new immigration begun by the 1965 act, we see exactly how big its effects were and continue to be:
I'm not anti-immigration in general, I just object to the way the 1965 Act skews immigration toward unskilled Latin American immigrants and certain Asians to the exclusion of other groups, and how it's had a continuous unchecked growth. I just think instead of H1B and other special ad hoc programs, immigration should be reformed to shuffle skilled immigrants who want permanent residence and citizenship to the front of the line, regardless of national origin, and should have low ceilings built in for the time being. Americans are fond of recalling the mass immigration of the late 1800s/early 1900s when championing the current mass immigration; what they forget is that in the 1920s we stopped almost all immigration entirely for the next 40 years (until the 1965 Act) to give the country time to "digest" and assimilate these relative newcomers. I really think it's time to do something similar.
At any rate, that book I linked above, _Alien Nation_, makes some very valid arguments about the history of American immigration and since it's free I highly recommend it. I grew up in an almost ideally mult
The source is a book published in 1995, before vdare existed; I don't care where the free scan of it is hosted. And yes, you helpfully point out that it's a basic logical fallacy to attack ad hominem instead of attacking the argument. I happened to find the book's facts (which are all based on impartial sources like census data, etc.) and its analysis of them (clear and logical) enlightening, and largely irrefutable.
As for whether vdare is a racist website, it's racist only in the same sense that _The Bell Curve_:
is racist. That is, it discusses facts which are politically incorrect and not discussed in repressed multicultural American society, yet are still facts. Reading the site, it's clear that some very tiny few of the linked articles have a racist tinge, while most are mainstream. This is to be expected from any site where cultural and ethnic issues are discussed honestly.
it started to dawn on me that nearly all the socioeconomic problems we in the U.S. face today* can be traced to the failings of the 1965 immigration reform. We shouldn't even have special niche programs like H1B; we should be putting those who really do have in-demand skills and qualifications at the front of the line for normal immigration visas and encouraging them to become citizens, but instead because of quirks of the 1965 reform unskilled Latin Americans will _always_ be at the head of the line--for the sole reason that they were "first out of the gate" to immigrate in large numbers post-1965--unless the law is amended. And good luck with that since so many are already here that they're a powerful special-interest lobby.
*: increasing economic stratification (rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, middle class shrinking), decline in inflation-adjusted wages (an average worker in the 70s had more buying power than an average worker today), high unemployment in the African-American community, etc., all trace back convincingly to post-1965 mass immigration, and the book _Alien Nation_ details the evidence. Even the recent housing bubble which set off the banking crisis and current recession has our immigration-driven population explosion and cheap immigrant construction labor as a significant component (though the book obviously doesn't detail this, having been published in 1995). In a few decades, native-born Americans will be about 25% of the U.S. population; will the culture of that day have anything in common with our own--will it descend from our culture and inherit its good points, or replace it and retain nothing of what we and our parents built? These are all interesting issues.
The russians WERE working on that quite hard, but political infighting between seperate teams proposing different heavy lift rockets, combined with them picking a slightly problematic design for the actual launcher (the N1 had 30 engines just for its first stage), which produced....
Why does this sound so familiar and timely? Oh yeah, because the USA has been killing its space program in a similar way for years now.
Fuck, just get a few billion in corporate advertising partnerships and use it to get us to Mars orbit already, where we can at least manipulate some probes usefully in realtime instead of leaving them to roam around with huge lag and probably missing 90% of the potentially interesting stuff they could be examining. And recover some material to bring back to Earth for life signs analysis, instead of baking it on Mars in a wholly inadequate process.
Seriously, if the USA announced a manned mission to Mars for a certain near but doable year and presold some corporate sponsorships, NASA's funding problems would go away. Why not put corporate money to good use for a change? I don't care if their damn spacesuits say Google on the back and they call it "the Mars Orbiter brought to you by Microsoft" as long as they actually get there before I'm bloodywell dead.
The real problem is that people aren't going to university to learn anymore, they're going because it's a prerequisite for jobs that didn't require a university degree a generation ago (and for the most part, shouldn't require one now). It's basically education inflation, with diminishing returns--now you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars and typically go into debt in the process just to get the same job your dad could've gotten for free. Is it any wonder then that almost 70% of university students cheat, and over 20% do it regularly? No, because they're not there for the education, just for the piece of paper that lets them get a decent job.
And let's be honest: for the most part students in university aren't learning anything they couldn't have learned for free in high school a generation ago, or for much cheaper than a full university education in a technical or trade school. Depth and breadth of high school education has suffered because the assumption is that any serious students will go on to university, and university education has suffered because they now have to teach remedial subjects that were covered in high school 20 or 30 years ago--so today's university graduate is typically be less well educated than his counterpart from previous generations. It's the McDonaldsization of higher education: it's been made attractive and affordable to the lowest common denominator and everyone is conditioned from a young age to like and expect it, but it isn't as good as a real meal, or a real education.
The result has been contributing to the devastation of the middle and working classes: adjusted for inflation and cost of living we typically earn less pay today than we did in the late 70s, and we have to go into education debt for the privilege while not being substantially more educated than we used to be. The only beneficiaries of this process are the corporate parasites which take advantage at all levels--large universities, for the most part, included.
I went to a small liberal arts institution in the 90s, which had recently instituted a required "Rhetoric" course (basic reading and writing and oral presentation proficiency) for all incoming freshmen who didn't score a 3 or above on the AP English Language exam. Professors were complaining even then that they were having to teach remedial skills that every high school graduate entering university used to possess just a decade before.
Yes, much of this is that people who'd never have had the opportunity to go to university before now do; the problem is we're making today's university into last generation's high school and dumbing it down in the process while going into debt without really getting ahead.
I'd say the scarlet letter is the public sex-offender registry, and that we also unreasonably impose a modern form of exile by making too many areas "exclusion zones" where past sex offenders are forbidden to live and work (so they end up living under bridges, at seedy motels etc., and at far greater risk of re-offending). I've actually thought for a long time that better, cheaper GPS technology would create a healthier alternative, but that unfortunately the older laws would never be repealed and we'd just create more layers of cruft on a poor system. That seems to be what's happening here.
Now, what they should do instead of adding GPS tracking on top of public sex offender registries and live/work exclusion zones, is use it _instead_ of those even more draconian measures. If we can track where every past sex offender is at any moment, that in itself is a powerful deterrent--a permanent record of movements would put any such person at the scene of any crime, and knowing there's a 100% chance of getting caught would deter most would-be offenders. Those not deterred, who re-offend even knowing they'd eventually get caught, would clearly be the worst of the worst and could be imprisoned permanently. But that other 99+ percent would be allowed to live normal lives, not be subject to public harassment by having their names and addresses and charges on a publicly accessible list, and be able to be productive citizens provided they don't spend more than a normal commute time traveling through real exclusion zones like school areas. And anyone afraid that their would-be babysitting neighbor or boyfriend shouldn't be left alone with their children could still find out if the guy's a convicted sex offender by asking him to lift his pant legs, but the general public need not know.
That will never happen because no politician wants to be the guy who says, "Yeah, let's get rid of the sex offender registries! We don't need 'em anymore thanks to technology!" But I think it would be a far better solution to the issue.
This may seem shallow or even trollish, but it's true: It won't see much adoption by offices in the U.S because of the association of "Libre" with third-world revolutionaries like Che and their hippie American fanclubs. Think like a management suit for a minute: is a name derived from dirty Marxist anarchist scum a name you want your clients to see your office using? Nope. They'd rather pay the Microsoft tax or stick with an old version of OpenOffice or find a third solution, than risk dropping the jaws of conservative clients.
Whatever happened to simple logic. The warming, heat-trapping characteristics of CO2 are well documented. Over the last hundred years CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have doubled. We're now burning more fossil fuels than at any time in history, releasing staggering amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and our oceans. It's trivially provable that the CO2 concentration increase in our atmosphere is man-made. We can therefore say with a fair amount of certainty that a significant amount of the global warming trend is, in fact, caused by human activities.
I used simple logic above when I pointed to temperature graphs showing current warming to have precedents. It is NOT simple logic however to posit what you claim above, because the world is not a controlled laboratory where every outside factor is eliminated and CO2 leads directly to warming. Climatologists themselves never tire to point out that the atmosphere and ocean and biosphere are full of sinks, feedbacks both positive and negative, and other nontrivial elements which we haven't even accurately modeled yet.
As the Climategate emails prove, climatologists themselves are upset that none of their models can account for recent decadal cooling trends. If we can't even get an accurate model of how the atmosphere works in the real world, what you're claiming above amounts to pure assumption, not Science.
Your attitude is the crux of the entire problem. It is *our* lifestyle that is causing significant problems for people who are in the worst possible shape to deal with the changes of climate change.
There you go assuming again. As I said above, current warming is not unusual when we switch to 100,000-year timescales, and the world is downright cool today when we look at 1,000,000-year-plus timescales. "We" (the industrialized world) aren't necessarily affecting temperature at all. And as for "our" lifestyles, most people in our civilization want more and better technology, not a devolution to a green Arcadia. Sorry. The future is more industrialization and an eventual reaching out into space, not less industrialization and everyone living in mud huts singing Cumbaya.
Most of us in the first world can probably adapt. After all we have huge cities in deserts where it regularly gets above 110.
Finally some honest truth. We can and will adapt. Anyone who can't deserves to lose and have their civilization replaced by a more technologically advanced and fit one. It's harsh, but necessary.
But to just casually toss millions of people aside just because "we got there first" is incredibly selfish and borders on criminal
No it doesn't, it's an unfortunate necessity of Progress. And by the way, when it comes to fucking over the environment, no one does it better than the third world, whose widespread deforestation (mostly by burning) is responsible for far more environmental impact than anything the industrialized world does. U.N. sources say 60,000 square miles of forest and destroyed each year, mostly by burning, in the third world. Talk about carbon release! And how many thousands of species go extinct from this? We don't know. Heck, Africans KNOW that apes and monkeys are endangered, yet they still hunt "bush meat"--and not usually to feed their families, but because it's profitable to sell. South Americans routinely expand slum cities by cutting and burning rainforest.
Frankly, the "industrialized world" isn't the problem.
The little humanitarian inside you appears rather weak and malnourished. Indeed, you're probably breaking a number of international treaties concerning the humane treatment of inner humanitarians.
You should assume that any random person belongs to the majority. You'll probably be right.
That's why it should be opt-out. Anyone too stupid or lazy to say, "I disagree with the majority and will check this box to indicate my dissent," is someone who deserves to get harvested.:o
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Sorry, but this is just another in a long line of corporate pushes to strip away "real education" about science, math, the liberal arts, and culture from high schools and colleges and replace it with "vocational training" about narrow specialties so that they no longer have to pay for it. Fuck that; we need a well-educated populace. If we want a nation composed of poorly educated people working in virtual sweatshops to compete with an unlimited supply of both skilled and unskilled immigrants who drive down wages* to make those jobs less appealing to natives, we're sure well enough down that road by now without hitting the gas every time an employer wants new kinds of vocational sheep.
*: Harvard economist George Borjas has demonstrated conclusively that for every 10% increase in the labor supply, wages are driven down by 3-4%. Think about that every time someone says, "We need more [skilled/unskilled/whatever] immigration to compete." That job would pay more, and thus attract more Americans into that part of the labor market, and/or be subject to greater automation with skilled American operators overseeing it, if not for the already-high levels of immigration endemic in the given field.
These Greenpeace types are the same people who've prevented us from developing and deploying newer, safer nuclear power plants to replace the less safe older ones which are forced to keep running--and which could replace polluting coal plants and help us immensely in the transition away from the fossil fuels they themselves also decry. They're the same folks who stirred up opposition to Yucca Mountain, yet use the lack of such a facility as a talking point against nuclear. They're the same folks who also fight hydro and anything else with "environmental impact" (i.e., changing anything at all about a local environment). Until they're willing to back some realistic alternatives to current power generation--other than living like Luddite hippies--I tune these idiots out. Solar and wind currently supply only about 1% of our national power generation needs, and there's no chance they'll ever supply it all. Until the Greenpeace types back something useful to our situation, they're the same ones keeping us stuck on fossil fuels. Fuck 'em.
>would you still consider a death "statistically insignificant" and not worthy
;)
>of spending money on prevention if it were your spouse or child?
Statistics don't care whose spouse or child it is; that's why they're called statistics.
Seriously though, the only reasonable way to make policy decisions is impartially. Otherwise, every time someone dies from something somewhere, that someone's family will want to outlaw that something, or to mandate that we all spend an insane amount of money to prevent whatever it was from happening again. As I mentioned above, I'm willing to bet that more than 200 people die every year from falling over railings--that doesn't mean we should mandate that all railings have nets underneath to catch those people. What a waste of resources--and these wastes of resources add up.
>It's not about blaming the driver (and if you think the driver is
>as much or more of a victim than the dead child or the child's
>parent, you have a really twisted view of reality).
I think a driver who has to live with the guilt of running over a child (assuming no mistakes by the driver) because that child's parent or guardian was irresponsible by not supervising the child is a much bigger victim than the irresponsible parent or guardian, because the driver did nothing to cause the accident--but the parent or guardian did. The innocent party not at fault is the victim, not the responsible party who is at fault, regardless of the relative loss.
>It's about giving the responsible driver better tools to more
>effectively do what he's doing already.
No, mandating a $200 per new car expense to eliminate a statistically insignificant number of deaths each year--that's about forcing everyone to pay a combined _$3 billion_ per year for the privilege of maybe not backing over a kid whose parents should make sure he's not there in the first place. Let's just assume that this would eliminate 100% of such accidents--which is unrealistic, but even so--and this would cost $15 million per life saved. Do you have any idea, any at all, how many lives you could save for $15 million? Way more than one if you're spending it right, so this idea must be spending it wrong, very very wrong. It's a stupid, overwrought, needless waste of resources. We need to think of the opportunity cost here, and it's huge.
>If you don't think the benefit is worth the expense, that's one thing,
>but you sound like someone complaining that mandating railings
>on stairways is an abdication of personal responsibility that forces
>responsible people to pay for those irresponsible people who don't
>have perfect balance when they climb stairs.
Making everyone pay $200 to have a video system in their car to avoid 200 otherwise very preventable deaths each year is a far cry from expecting stairs to have railings so that people don't fall--it's more like requiring all stairs to have nets outside the railings so that in case some fucking moron falls over the railing, he'll get caught in the net instead of falling to the floor. It's an irrational overreaction to a statistically insignificant non-problem that would cost a lot of innocent people a huge aggregate amount of money that would better be spent elsewhere.
>You're right -- but blaming the grieving parents for their 5 seconds of inattention
>won't bring their dead child back, or save the next one either. In particular if your
>solution is to demand that parents never make a mistake, ever -- well, that's not a
>solution at all, it's just a way to make yourself feel better by blaming someone else.
That's the same sort of lack of personal responsibility and blaming of the victim (the person who runs over an unattended toddler through no fault of his own because irresponsible parents let him play around cars unattended is also a victim) that causes public pools to close because they can't get insurance and sees neighbors sued when children trespass on their property and hurt themselves. Unacceptable. If you have children, _you_ raise them, _you_ teach them what not to do, and _you_ take responsibility for their mistakes--don't expect the rest of us to have to go out of our way to raise _your_ kids and pay for _your_ lack of supervision. Why should the responsible people in society be forced to pay _$3 billion_ a year to prevent a _statistically insignificant_ number of deaths which, in the cases you're focusing on, are entirely the fault of a few irresponsible parents who are the ones who ought to be held accountable? Taxpayers already pay a large amount to support other people's children in the form of infrastructure and public school expenditures (e.g., where I live it costs over $10,000 per year per student); that's plenty. Expecting irrational amounts of resources to be wasted to make a statistically insignificant number of deaths slightly less likely is selfish and extreme, not to mention yet another expansion of the nanny state.
> How did all of these accidents happen?
I'm willing to bet almost all involve old people whose vision and concentration are past their prime, young people without much experience, and people who are very distracted. I was in the car with my 70+ year old great-aunt when she backed directly into a dumpster--and she was in a minivan with a camera system. How can you not see a gigantic dumpster? You can't prevent accidents like that, period.
Seriously, 200 deaths a year is statistically insignificant when hundreds of millions use the roadways. Mandating that everyone who buys a car from now on will have to pay another $200 for a camera system, in order to prevent a statistically insignificant number of deaths which are probably largely attributed to age or inexperience, is a stupid waste of resources. Over 15 million new vehicles are sold every year in the U.S.--this is 3 BILLION DOLLARS WASTED every year if we force camera systems to be installed. Don't you think people can find something better to do with $3 billion of resources yearly?
No wonder our economy is in the crapper--I wonder what the total dollar amount wasted each year through needless government mandates is? Fucking nanny state bullshit.
> The banana is to keep the kid from dying of colon cancer. I don't know how you eat your bananas, but I usually insert them into my mouth, not my colon...
men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago
So how does what you say contradict with what the authors of the article say:
men are wired to be sexually jealous but simultaneously they're also sexually aroused so if a man sees a woman — including his partner — with another man, he becomes more aroused
The part about men being naturally wired for sexual jealousy is the mistake--modern thinking dictating their conclusions based on present customs, rather than starting from the anthropological past and working forward without bias. Jealousy isn't hardwired in our sexual software; it's a modern overlay, and not a positive emotion but a negative one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jealousy
It was normal in prehistory for us to watch the women we sleep with have sex with other men and NOT be jealous, but be purely sexually aroused by it because we knew our turn was coming soon. No negative emotions involved.
Are you really making the argument that if something is "the norm" for tens of thousands of generations (your words) it will neatly stay out of our genome?
It may indeed be the case that the last 10,000 years of scarcity and hierarchy has written "sexual jealousy" into the hardware of our genome rather than just being in the software of our cultural toolkits. Big changes have happened because agriculture, and the scarcity and hierarchy it created (we'd lived longer and been more egalitarian as hunter-gatherers, though our populations were kept resource-limited), likely accelerated the processes of natural selection and sexual selection. The well-known example of a recent genetic variant that took hold extensively only after the agricultural revolution is lactase persistence, and recent genetic studies show that the differences in melanin which caused Europeans to become "white people" gained frequency only 10,000 years ago or less thanks to agriculture and the poor nutrition it provided, making better vitamin production from sun exposure a valuable benefit it conveyed.
But, to say that jealousy is genetically hardwired without extensive evidence contradicting the ancestral case, that it's culturally derived, is at best unscientific, as it starts from current cultural assumptions. The fact that so many men are searching for "cheating wife porn" would also be evidence that it's not jealousy that's at work (again, it's a negative emotion not a pleasant one), but rather our ancestral partner-sharing desires.
This "study" was an idiotic exercise in which a couple of junior researchers mined search terms to reinforce their culturally formed and far from unbiased notions about sexuality. All the crap about men searching for cheating wife porn (I believe "cuckold" porn is a popular current term for it) because of jealousy being hardwired and competition triggering arousal was especially telling--these guys are parroting outdated "conventional wisdom" (i.e., assumptions based on post-facto theory rather than formed from evidence-based research) and nothing more. The real work is being done by folks like the authors of _Sex at Dawn_:
http://www.sexatdawn.com/
who look at the anthropological evidence of how human communities used to live in prehistory, and let that guide their conclusions on how contemporary sexuality got where it is. For example, the _Sex at Dawn_ authors would explain that men want to see cheating wife porn not because jealousy is hardwired and competition sexually excites them, but because we used to live for hundreds of thousands of years (maybe a million+ depending on where you put the dividing line for what's "human") in small communal groups where sex with multiple partners in succession or was the norm. So, men want to see cheating wife porn, and porn where multiple men share a woman, because that was the norm in our prehistory until about 10,000 years ago when agriculture changed a hunter-gatherer society of communally shared lives (mating included) into a hierarchical society of enforced order and scarcity (mating changed into a scarce resource like everything else).
In other words, today we have external software (a legacy of early subsistence-farming civilization) installing a chimp-like sexuality of scarcity and aggression and competition into our heads, when our native OS is more bonobo-like and tells us we want to share sex partners.
And we can actually validate this theory, because we have extensive records of contact with "stone age" tribes some of whom are still around today, and true monogamous marriage is almost unheard-of. Most tribes practicing their ancestral ways without Western influence have marriage--but almost never exclusive marriage where partners are expected to be "faithful." Women are usually expected to be promiscuous, and many tribes have "partible paternity"--the belief that every man a pregnant woman has sex with contributes semen towards making the baby, and that if a woman is not promiscuous enough she's not giving the baby a big variety of helpful traits from the fathers, or that the baby could miscarry from lack of continued semen contribution. Some uncontacted tribes literally have had no idea that sex even causes pregnancy, because from the moment females are physically developed enough to have sex they're doing so, often with multiple partners over time, so that the connection between sex and pregnancy isn't clear to them.
Point being, if you want to really learn about human sexuality, read _Sex at Dawn_ and ignore this other crap.
> they are a scourage...
So what do they scour? Genitals? Those douchebags...
You're failing to consider that many of us were alive LONG before the contemporary EU as a political entity existed. It was not at all uncommon to shorthand the world into obvious regions: NA=North America, SA=South America, EU=Europe, AP=Asia/Pacific, AF=Africa. Many multinationals, militaries, and of course geography classes did it as informal shorthand. I'm not saying it's correct & clear usage today, just that it can be the same as an oldtimer accidentally referring to Zimbabwe as Rhodesia or Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia. It doesn't mean they're ignorant, it's just a slip of the tongue (or keyboard).
> It should be significantly cheaper to get a degree in a field where their is demand -
> the STEM degrees - and should cost significantly more for all other degrees.
You've got that backwards. More demand leads to *higher* prices, not lower ones. In every respect, STEM majors should be paying more than humanities majors, not less:
*STEM faculty cost more (often 2x to 3x more) than humanities faculty.
*STEM labs and equipment cost far more than plain classrooms.
*STEM coursework is usually more expensive.
and most important:
*STEM graduates make more money, and can therefore afford to pay back more student loan debt.
And why is there a shortage of native STEM workers in the USA in the first place? It isn't because of high tuition, or lack of ability; it's because STEM wages have been artificially lowered by the availability of immigrants to fill the jobs more cheaply, and the corporate culture that reinforces immigrant use. Harvard economist George Borjas and others have shown repeatedly that both unskilled and skilled immigrants to this country depress the wages in any occupation they enter, to the tune of a 3% drop in wages for every 10% increase in workforce. What percentage of STEM work in the US is being done by immigrants these days? And that doesn't even factor in the depressing economic effects of offshoring.
No, the market for STEM workers has been artificially short-circuited by the lobbying of corporations intent on importing a cheaper foreign labor pool, and this has resulted in lower STEM pay and therefore lower interest in STEM education and careers by natives. There is no STEM shortage, except the one created by artificial means in the pursuit of corporate greed. The stock answer from most economists is that such immigration is in our national interest since it grows the overall economy--but the problem is, all of that new growth goes exclusively into the pockets of the corporate owners of capital and the immigrant workers themselves, while native workers see their pay decrease by that 3% per 10% increase in workforce. That's why real-world inflation-adjusted earnings for working and middle class Americans have decreased since the 1970s. That's why the gap between rich and poor increases steadily (25 years ago the richest 1% of Americans took home 12% of all income, while today that 1% takes in almost 25% of all income; 25 years ago the richest 1% owned 33% of all assets and capital, while today they own over 40%).
Americans need to wake up to the fact that extreme immigration (we take in more legal immigrants *than every other country combined*) is the root of all of our current economic woes. Our elite classes of both political affiliations love it, the Democrats because they see votes and multiculturalism and the Republicans because they see cheap labor. But while it's good for the moneyed elites it is directly responsible for the worsening fortunes of the American working class and the ongoing disappearance of the middle class.
The sad part is the educated classes have known about this situation for a long time, and the average American may not know the facts but he feels them viscerally--Americans have been overwhelmingly for smaller immigration numbers for decades. Until they start pushing it as a forefront issue though, nothing will be done. An old but excellent book on the situation was published by Random House in 1995, and is now available for free from the author:
http://www.vdare.com/alien_nation/
At the time it was a bestseller and was as widely discussed as *The Bell Curve*, but unlike that other controversial book not one challenge to its facts and numbers was ever substantiated.
Everyone should watch the school documentary Waiting for Superman:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100929/REVIEWS/100929981
It's possible to take the same group of kids from the same underprivileged neighborhood, and send some of them to public schools where 50% will fail to graduate, and send some from the same pool to charter schools where *for less money per student* 90% will go on to attend college. It really is all about the schools, teachers, and methods, not the students, neighborhoods, or money.
The biggest culprit is teacher tenure. After a measly 2 years of teaching, public school teachers can get tenure and be almost impossible to fire for the rest of their lives, even if they're actively bad at their jobs. At the university level tenure is a useful tool for retaining teachers with unconventional views, who add to the campus experience; but at the high school level tenure is useless since kids have too many basics to learn for unconventional views to be given time. We should institute merit pay for teachers, and eliminate tenure--good teachers could make twice what average ones make, and bad ones could be fired.
> TL;DR. So, by 'natural born', you mean 'not brown'. Right?
Don't be a race-baiting PC tool of the elite greedy capitalists and cultural Marxists on both sides of the political spectrum who caused this socioeconomic mess.
Of course not. There have been black, red, and Hispanic people in the U.S since before it was the U.S. I'm 1/16 Cherokee myself, and I probably have some black ancestry as well. But then, if you go far back enough, we all do. ;)
If the 1965 Immigration Act had resulted in tens of millions of blond Germans and Scandinavians flooding our shores, keeping our black population in poverty, making the rich richer and the middle class less existent, tanking public education by costing our schools 1.65 times per student what it costs to educate natives, and waving German flags while demanding that we open borders to let more blond people in, I'd be just as justifiably unsatisfied at them as I am with our current crop of overnumerous immigrants. Whether brown, yellow, or blond, we need to limit immigration to sustainable and integratable levels. And fuck the racial red herring; it's about economics and culture--race is irrelevant.
>> In a few decades, native-born Americans will be about 25% of the U.S. population
>
> That seems like some sort of critical math failure.
You're right; I shouldn't have used the term "native-born" because the most natural interpretation of that would be "anyone born here," at any time under any circumstances. Parents come here on vacation, kid pops out, suddenly he's another "native-born" USian. He's legally entitled to birthright citizenship, of course (although absolute birthright citizenship isn't the norm in most developed countries). But that's not what I meant, though it's the most obvious interpretation of what I said.
Since I was talking about the negative consequences of the mass immigration begun in 1965, what I really meant in detail is, "In a few decades, the descendants of people who were already here before the mass immigration started by the 1965 Immigration Act will be about 25% of the U.S. population." The immigrants and their descendants will be about 75%. There's nothing special or "more American" about those people who were already here by around 1970 than anyone who immigrated here legally, attained citizenship, and integrated productively into the fabric of American society after that; we just need a baseline date to compare the pre-Act and post-Act population so we can assess its numerical impact. But certainly not all the immigrants and their descendants have integrated into the larger social fabric--some have, some haven't, and their presence has led to changes both good and bad; among the bad, some post-1970 immigrants and their children feel no connection with narratives of the Founding Fathers and the Enlightenment principles which shaped the Constitution; many take to the streets waving flags of their country of origin and advocating for even more open borders, for example; teaching the children of immigrants whose first language isn't English costs 1.65 times as much as teaching the children of native speakers (hello education meltdown); and some have very racist and tribalistic loyalties ("por la raza todo, fuera de la raza nada"); there are clear and sometimes arguably negative and divisive cultural differences in some immigrant communities even after having been in this country for decades.
At any rate, if we take the 1970 census data as our baseline, just 5 years after the new immigration begun by the 1965 act, we see exactly how big its effects were and continue to be:
http://www.flsuspop.org/images/population459.gif
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/about/question-where-does-census-bureau-say-we.html
http://www.mnforsustain.org/united_states_population_growth_graph.htm
I'm not anti-immigration in general, I just object to the way the 1965 Act skews immigration toward unskilled Latin American immigrants and certain Asians to the exclusion of other groups, and how it's had a continuous unchecked growth. I just think instead of H1B and other special ad hoc programs, immigration should be reformed to shuffle skilled immigrants who want permanent residence and citizenship to the front of the line, regardless of national origin, and should have low ceilings built in for the time being. Americans are fond of recalling the mass immigration of the late 1800s/early 1900s when championing the current mass immigration; what they forget is that in the 1920s we stopped almost all immigration entirely for the next 40 years (until the 1965 Act) to give the country time to "digest" and assimilate these relative newcomers. I really think it's time to do something similar.
At any rate, that book I linked above, _Alien Nation_, makes some very valid arguments about the history of American immigration and since it's free I highly recommend it. I grew up in an almost ideally mult
The source is a book published in 1995, before vdare existed; I don't care where the free scan of it is hosted. And yes, you helpfully point out that it's a basic logical fallacy to attack ad hominem instead of attacking the argument. I happened to find the book's facts (which are all based on impartial sources like census data, etc.) and its analysis of them (clear and logical) enlightening, and largely irrefutable.
As for whether vdare is a racist website, it's racist only in the same sense that _The Bell Curve_:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve
is racist. That is, it discusses facts which are politically incorrect and not discussed in repressed multicultural American society, yet are still facts. Reading the site, it's clear that some very tiny few of the linked articles have a racist tinge, while most are mainstream. This is to be expected from any site where cultural and ethnic issues are discussed honestly.
After reading this prescient book from 1995:
http://www.vdare.com/alien_nation/
it started to dawn on me that nearly all the socioeconomic problems we in the U.S. face today* can be traced to the failings of the 1965 immigration reform. We shouldn't even have special niche programs like H1B; we should be putting those who really do have in-demand skills and qualifications at the front of the line for normal immigration visas and encouraging them to become citizens, but instead because of quirks of the 1965 reform unskilled Latin Americans will _always_ be at the head of the line--for the sole reason that they were "first out of the gate" to immigrate in large numbers post-1965--unless the law is amended. And good luck with that since so many are already here that they're a powerful special-interest lobby.
*: increasing economic stratification (rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, middle class shrinking), decline in inflation-adjusted wages (an average worker in the 70s had more buying power than an average worker today), high unemployment in the African-American community, etc., all trace back convincingly to post-1965 mass immigration, and the book _Alien Nation_ details the evidence. Even the recent housing bubble which set off the banking crisis and current recession has our immigration-driven population explosion and cheap immigrant construction labor as a significant component (though the book obviously doesn't detail this, having been published in 1995). In a few decades, native-born Americans will be about 25% of the U.S. population; will the culture of that day have anything in common with our own--will it descend from our culture and inherit its good points, or replace it and retain nothing of what we and our parents built? These are all interesting issues.
The russians WERE working on that quite hard, but political infighting between seperate teams proposing different heavy lift rockets, combined with them picking a slightly problematic design for the actual launcher (the N1 had 30 engines just for its first stage), which produced....
Why does this sound so familiar and timely? Oh yeah, because the USA has been killing its space program in a similar way for years now.
Fuck, just get a few billion in corporate advertising partnerships and use it to get us to Mars orbit already, where we can at least manipulate some probes usefully in realtime instead of leaving them to roam around with huge lag and probably missing 90% of the potentially interesting stuff they could be examining. And recover some material to bring back to Earth for life signs analysis, instead of baking it on Mars in a wholly inadequate process.
Seriously, if the USA announced a manned mission to Mars for a certain near but doable year and presold some corporate sponsorships, NASA's funding problems would go away. Why not put corporate money to good use for a change? I don't care if their damn spacesuits say Google on the back and they call it "the Mars Orbiter brought to you by Microsoft" as long as they actually get there before I'm bloodywell dead.
The real problem is that people aren't going to university to learn anymore, they're going because it's a prerequisite for jobs that didn't require a university degree a generation ago (and for the most part, shouldn't require one now). It's basically education inflation, with diminishing returns--now you have to spend tens of thousands of dollars and typically go into debt in the process just to get the same job your dad could've gotten for free. Is it any wonder then that almost 70% of university students cheat, and over 20% do it regularly? No, because they're not there for the education, just for the piece of paper that lets them get a decent job.
And let's be honest: for the most part students in university aren't learning anything they couldn't have learned for free in high school a generation ago, or for much cheaper than a full university education in a technical or trade school. Depth and breadth of high school education has suffered because the assumption is that any serious students will go on to university, and university education has suffered because they now have to teach remedial subjects that were covered in high school 20 or 30 years ago--so today's university graduate is typically be less well educated than his counterpart from previous generations. It's the McDonaldsization of higher education: it's been made attractive and affordable to the lowest common denominator and everyone is conditioned from a young age to like and expect it, but it isn't as good as a real meal, or a real education.
The result has been contributing to the devastation of the middle and working classes: adjusted for inflation and cost of living we typically earn less pay today than we did in the late 70s, and we have to go into education debt for the privilege while not being substantially more educated than we used to be. The only beneficiaries of this process are the corporate parasites which take advantage at all levels--large universities, for the most part, included.
I went to a small liberal arts institution in the 90s, which had recently instituted a required "Rhetoric" course (basic reading and writing and oral presentation proficiency) for all incoming freshmen who didn't score a 3 or above on the AP English Language exam. Professors were complaining even then that they were having to teach remedial skills that every high school graduate entering university used to possess just a decade before.
Yes, much of this is that people who'd never have had the opportunity to go to university before now do; the problem is we're making today's university into last generation's high school and dumbing it down in the process while going into debt without really getting ahead.
I'd say the scarlet letter is the public sex-offender registry, and that we also unreasonably impose a modern form of exile by making too many areas "exclusion zones" where past sex offenders are forbidden to live and work (so they end up living under bridges, at seedy motels etc., and at far greater risk of re-offending). I've actually thought for a long time that better, cheaper GPS technology would create a healthier alternative, but that unfortunately the older laws would never be repealed and we'd just create more layers of cruft on a poor system. That seems to be what's happening here.
Now, what they should do instead of adding GPS tracking on top of public sex offender registries and live/work exclusion zones, is use it _instead_ of those even more draconian measures. If we can track where every past sex offender is at any moment, that in itself is a powerful deterrent--a permanent record of movements would put any such person at the scene of any crime, and knowing there's a 100% chance of getting caught would deter most would-be offenders. Those not deterred, who re-offend even knowing they'd eventually get caught, would clearly be the worst of the worst and could be imprisoned permanently. But that other 99+ percent would be allowed to live normal lives, not be subject to public harassment by having their names and addresses and charges on a publicly accessible list, and be able to be productive citizens provided they don't spend more than a normal commute time traveling through real exclusion zones like school areas. And anyone afraid that their would-be babysitting neighbor or boyfriend shouldn't be left alone with their children could still find out if the guy's a convicted sex offender by asking him to lift his pant legs, but the general public need not know.
That will never happen because no politician wants to be the guy who says, "Yeah, let's get rid of the sex offender registries! We don't need 'em anymore thanks to technology!" But I think it would be a far better solution to the issue.
> You can't judge all vegetarians by your friends
> any more than I can judge all meat-eaters by the
> 400 lb guy in the scooter at McDonalds.
His name is CowboyNeal, you insensitive clod!
This may seem shallow or even trollish, but it's true: It won't see much adoption by offices in the U.S because of the association of "Libre" with third-world revolutionaries like Che and their hippie American fanclubs. Think like a management suit for a minute: is a name derived from dirty Marxist anarchist scum a name you want your clients to see your office using? Nope. They'd rather pay the Microsoft tax or stick with an old version of OpenOffice or find a third solution, than risk dropping the jaws of conservative clients.
Whatever happened to simple logic. The warming, heat-trapping characteristics of CO2 are well documented. Over the last hundred years CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have doubled. We're now burning more fossil fuels than at any time in history, releasing staggering amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and our oceans. It's trivially provable that the CO2 concentration increase in our atmosphere is man-made. We can therefore say with a fair amount of certainty that a significant amount of the global warming trend is, in fact, caused by human activities.
I used simple logic above when I pointed to temperature graphs showing current warming to have precedents. It is NOT simple logic however to posit what you claim above, because the world is not a controlled laboratory where every outside factor is eliminated and CO2 leads directly to warming. Climatologists themselves never tire to point out that the atmosphere and ocean and biosphere are full of sinks, feedbacks both positive and negative, and other nontrivial elements which we haven't even accurately modeled yet.
As the Climategate emails prove, climatologists themselves are upset that none of their models can account for recent decadal cooling trends. If we can't even get an accurate model of how the atmosphere works in the real world, what you're claiming above amounts to pure assumption, not Science.
Your attitude is the crux of the entire problem. It is *our* lifestyle that is causing significant problems for people who are in the worst possible shape to deal with the changes of climate change.
There you go assuming again. As I said above, current warming is not unusual when we switch to 100,000-year timescales, and the world is downright cool today when we look at 1,000,000-year-plus timescales. "We" (the industrialized world) aren't necessarily affecting temperature at all. And as for "our" lifestyles, most people in our civilization want more and better technology, not a devolution to a green Arcadia. Sorry. The future is more industrialization and an eventual reaching out into space, not less industrialization and everyone living in mud huts singing Cumbaya.
Most of us in the first world can probably adapt. After all we have huge cities in deserts where it regularly gets above 110.
Finally some honest truth. We can and will adapt. Anyone who can't deserves to lose and have their civilization replaced by a more technologically advanced and fit one. It's harsh, but necessary.
But to just casually toss millions of people aside just because "we got there first" is incredibly selfish and borders on criminal
No it doesn't, it's an unfortunate necessity of Progress. And by the way, when it comes to fucking over the environment, no one does it better than the third world, whose widespread deforestation (mostly by burning) is responsible for far more environmental impact than anything the industrialized world does. U.N. sources say 60,000 square miles of forest and destroyed each year, mostly by burning, in the third world. Talk about carbon release! And how many thousands of species go extinct from this? We don't know. Heck, Africans KNOW that apes and monkeys are endangered, yet they still hunt "bush meat"--and not usually to feed their families, but because it's profitable to sell. South Americans routinely expand slum cities by cutting and burning rainforest.
Frankly, the "industrialized world" isn't the problem.
The little humanitarian inside you appears rather weak and malnourished. Indeed, you're probably breaking a number of international treaties concerning the humane treatment of inner humanitarians.
But I give him food and waterboarding daily. ;)
Statistically speaking, you can. :)
You should assume that any random person belongs to the majority. You'll probably be right.
That's why it should be opt-out. Anyone too stupid or lazy to say, "I disagree with the majority and will check this box to indicate my dissent," is someone who deserves to get harvested. :o