single handedly destroy most of the somewhat well written articles
Some people like to feel important and powerful, even if they do so by being harmful to the organization as a whole.
It happens all the time. In fact, it happens so often that the phenomenon has a name: the Iron Law of Oligarchy:
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German syndicalist sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies. The reasons for this are the technical indispensability of leadership, the tendency of the leaders to organize themselves and to consolidate their interests; the gratitude of the led towards the leaders, and the general immobility and passivity of the masses.
Right. It was paperwork that pushed business offshore, not inhuman wages and a lack of environmental laws in other countries.
And the solution to the offshoring problem, I take it, is to cut taxes and cut regulation?
Grow up. Paperwork is a good thing when it protects people from thieves. We need old-fashioned tariffs, not a race to the bottom of the living standards scale.
The halting problem can be solved in restricted cases. You can definitely determine whether a program halts after N steps, and you can also tell whether a program running on a restricted-memory machine halts. The theorem applies only to turing machines, of which real-world computers are only an approximation.
One obvious way to fix this, then, is to provide free high education for gifted children, so that they don't end up with a huge debt immediately after graduation.
I agree with that much of your argument, but you ignore the things that make people "gifted" at the higher levels of education. By the time someone is ready to apply to college, his upbringing has already had a massive effect on his abilities. Between being wealthy enough to live in the suburbs with the best schools, to being able to afford test preparation materials, socioeconomic status has as much to do with being "gifted" as does raw intelligence.
Yes, we need good education for the gifted. But that needs to start far earlier than the collegiate level. We need more magnet schools, more gifted and talented programs, and greater support for parents who are blessed with having an unusually bright child.
Also, though, it's not fair to restrict the fruits of education to those who've won the genetic lottery. All people should be educated to the limit of their abilities. We'll always have morons, but most people in this country are operating at far below their intellectual capacity. You don't have to be a genius to approach your life with learning and reason, and be better off for it. Education should help everyone.
Your argument is that UK education was ruined by Tony Blair trying to equalize it for all.
Have you considered the possibility that Tony Blair was a neocon who simply lied? That education was never a priority for him, and that it's fallen into disrepair through neglect, not through well-meaning but ill-conceived repairs?
Blair didn't really want to fix education. His only goal was to destroy it for short-term political points. The same disease that's afflicted us on this side of the Atlantic has also infected you.
So we pay top academics, the people who make improvements to the sum of human knowledge that will still be used a thousand years from now, all of $250k.
Actually, the rest of the goddamn civilized world shows us that the system we're trying to build here is the one that actually works, and it is ours that is the known-broken one.
But I don't expect ideologues like you to apply reason to these things. After all, America, Fuck Yeah!
Don't forget your history. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, scientists and technicians were practically revered in this country. We valued the idea(l) of progress, and were convinced that we could improve our lives through the application of knowledge. And we did. Learning was valued, and science was respected.
That's all changed now, of course. But respect for learning isn't a uniquely Asian cultural phenomenon: rather, it's what you see in a society after it's become prosperous, but before it's become decadent.
It fucking infuriates me to see people complain about teachers, or police officers, or sanitation workers, or toll collectors, or any other normal person being paid too much. What the hell is wrong with you? Do you think the rich should keep even more of their ill-gotten spoils?
Instead of quixotically crying about others being paid a living wage, why aren't you asking for the same pay yourself? Why aren't you forming a union and demanding that your employer return to you a fair part of the value you produce? We should all be paid well, and the top 1% should be paid a whole lot fucking less.
You know why crabs won't escape when you have more than one in a barrel? Because when one tries to climb up the side, the others pull it back down.
You say parents won't be involved, and therefore this initiative is doomed. Therefore we shouldn't even try. And since we can't compel parents to do better, let's sit on our thumbs. That's not an argument. That's an excuse.
Go to hell. We need better education in this country, and if parents can't be bothered, then schools must take up the slack. Old approaches not working? Then let's try some new ones. Let's think of a better way to tackle the problem! We can do it!
Americans used to be famous world-wide for a "can-do" attitude: we used to look at a problem and think of ways to fix it. These days, we have defeatism embedded in our culture. People like you and most of my other countrymen look at a problem and think "ah, that's hard. Crap. Let me go back to World of Warcraft."
Get up off your ass and start thinking of solutions. Get rid of that defeatist attitude.
It's really a monument to how terrible our education system is that people like you trot out this horrible argument over and over:
We can't pay important people well, because we only want people who are really motivated in these positions.
That's obviously nonsense. Not everyone who is motivated by money is incompetent: on the contrary, those who are competent in one field tend to be competent in others. It's only natural they'd enter the field with the better pay. You're left with either those with an intrinsic motivation, or those who can't do anything else. That's stupid. If you paid physicists, for example, appropriately, you'd see not only people who are intrinsically motivated to be physicists, but also people who could do a number of things, and enter physics because it strikes a good balance between compensation and interest.
Your argument is what I'd expect to hear from a sociopathic business-school type, not from someone who uses logic and reason to build a better society.
I will not let them ruin their lives by learning something that our culture and economy have declared worthless
I don't know about you, but I'd rather die a pauper having made a real contribution to our sum of knowledge than a wealthy banker beset by nightmares who will quickly fade into obscurity after his death.
You can't take money with you when you're done, but you can certainly make the world a better place than it would have been without you. That, not a paycheck, is my criterion for a successful life.
Wait --- let me get this straight: you're actually claiming that education is actually a political ploy to garner more support for the left? You're actually arguing that science education is a bad thing because it encourages parents to be lazy? Therefore we shouldn't teach kids, and that'll show them unions and pinko parents? Never mind that we're falling further and further behind other nations in science: the solution, on the planet you live on, is to teach less science.
You're arguing that your partisan gain is more important than the success of the next generation, and that it's all right to doom them to ignorance if it helps the GOP.
Get out of your chair, go sit in your hummer, and without leaving your garage, turn it on and listen to Mike Savage until you fall into a deep, permanent sleep. You are a monster and a sociopath. You have no place in society, and the rest of us would be better off without you.
You realize that's precisely what these publications are already, right? If you want raw research, look at faculty webpages. Journals select a subset of this research and present it to interested readers, and charge for the service. You already have what you advocate.
This is a debate as old as time itself. You're clearly on the prescriptivist side of the argument, where I used to be myself. But then I came to realize that the purpose of language is communication, and as long as we're understood, what form that communication takes is really irrelevant. It's not as if there's some external Platonic ideal of a language to which we can compare ours and say, "Ah, this is good." Language just is.
That said, "irregardless" does get on my nerves, but not so much because of its inherent internal contradiction, but rather because it's negatively correlated with socioeconomic status. In other words, using "irregardless" isn't wrong per se, but it does mark you an idiot. In that sense, "irregardless" is useful: I can see it and immediately skip the rest of the post.
Sociologically speaking, prosperity and education make excellent birth control, while poverty breeds (literally). If we want to control the population of the planet, we should try as hard as possible to educate everyone, and to eliminate poverty everywhere. There's no reason everyone on the planet shouldn't be able to enjoy a first world lifestyle.
PLoS charges scientists to get published. A big part of what caused the economic collapse is that rating agencies started to hand out AAA ratings to securities that didn't deserve them, and they did this because the issuers of these securities were paying the rating agencies. This PLoS ONE's business model is the same thing. PLoS ONE receives more money when it publishes more articles.
Doesn't this just scream CONFLICT OF INTEREST to anyone else?
"Eating the seed corn" is a folksy expression that means staving off hunger now by eating the seeds you need for next year's planting. I know it's a tired metaphor, but nothing in the English language comes close to describing how tragic it is when governments squeeze students. Education is what will bring us prosperity in the future. It should be the last think to be cut, after the military, police, fire department, road maintenance, research grants, foreign aide and pensions. When we cut education, we forgo a possibility of hardship today for the guarantee of irrelevance is decay tomorrow.
Educate your population, and you'd be amazed at how many other problems you solve along the way.
Your philosophy is that corporations can do no wrong to consumers. Whenever something bad happens to a customer, it's that customer's fault for being stupid, right?
And women who get raped are asking for it by wearing skirts, right?
Blaming the victim is a disgusting and vile barbarism. I reject it.
Little by little, without our even realizing it, we're in the nightmare DRM world. Imagine waking up today after last being conscious in 1995. What, you need to be connected to the network to play games you purchased? What, the operating system limits the number of hardware changes you can make? What, you TV and speakers have DRM built-in? What, operating systems won't load kernel-mode code unless it's been approved by the OS vendor? Our books can be deleted out from under us? That's preposterous. That's fiction.
No, this was the stuff of dystopian fiction 15 years ago. Now it's daily life. Who knows what restrictions we'll see in the next 15 years? Will you finally stop thinking those of us who decry DRM are just crying wolf?
Why can't vendors implement their own Patch Tuesdays? That is, Microsoft would release patches any time, and large vendors would simply allow them to accrue until their internal "Patch Tuesday" came around, at which time they'd test and apply the patches.
You know your government is truly in the gutter when an American begins to criticize its brazen corruption and abject stupidity. How the hell are you guys still stuck with Mandelson?
Slashdot Mirror
Some people like to feel important and powerful, even if they do so by being harmful to the organization as a whole.
It happens all the time. In fact, it happens so often that the phenomenon has a name: the Iron Law of Oligarchy:
Right. It was paperwork that pushed business offshore, not inhuman wages and a lack of environmental laws in other countries.
And the solution to the offshoring problem, I take it, is to cut taxes and cut regulation?
Grow up. Paperwork is a good thing when it protects people from thieves. We need old-fashioned tariffs, not a race to the bottom of the living standards scale.
So you would punish kids and sacrifice the future of this country to teach those parents a lesson?
The halting problem can be solved in restricted cases. You can definitely determine whether a program halts after N steps, and you can also tell whether a program running on a restricted-memory machine halts. The theorem applies only to turing machines, of which real-world computers are only an approximation.
I agree with that much of your argument, but you ignore the things that make people "gifted" at the higher levels of education. By the time someone is ready to apply to college, his upbringing has already had a massive effect on his abilities. Between being wealthy enough to live in the suburbs with the best schools, to being able to afford test preparation materials, socioeconomic status has as much to do with being "gifted" as does raw intelligence.
Yes, we need good education for the gifted. But that needs to start far earlier than the collegiate level. We need more magnet schools, more gifted and talented programs, and greater support for parents who are blessed with having an unusually bright child.
Also, though, it's not fair to restrict the fruits of education to those who've won the genetic lottery. All people should be educated to the limit of their abilities. We'll always have morons, but most people in this country are operating at far below their intellectual capacity. You don't have to be a genius to approach your life with learning and reason, and be better off for it. Education should help everyone.
Your argument is that UK education was ruined by Tony Blair trying to equalize it for all.
Have you considered the possibility that Tony Blair was a neocon who simply lied? That education was never a priority for him, and that it's fallen into disrepair through neglect, not through well-meaning but ill-conceived repairs?
Blair didn't really want to fix education. His only goal was to destroy it for short-term political points. The same disease that's afflicted us on this side of the Atlantic has also infected you.
So we pay top academics, the people who make improvements to the sum of human knowledge that will still be used a thousand years from now, all of $250k.
But on the other hand, we pay leeches who actually cause destruction far more than that for doing far less.
Our society is broken. Very, very broken.
Actually, the rest of the goddamn civilized world shows us that the system we're trying to build here is the one that actually works, and it is ours that is the known-broken one.
But I don't expect ideologues like you to apply reason to these things. After all, America, Fuck Yeah!
And Asia one day will be where we are.
Don't forget your history. In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, scientists and technicians were practically revered in this country. We valued the idea(l) of progress, and were convinced that we could improve our lives through the application of knowledge. And we did. Learning was valued, and science was respected.
That's all changed now, of course. But respect for learning isn't a uniquely Asian cultural phenomenon: rather, it's what you see in a society after it's become prosperous, but before it's become decadent.
It fucking infuriates me to see people complain about teachers, or police officers, or sanitation workers, or toll collectors, or any other normal person being paid too much. What the hell is wrong with you? Do you think the rich should keep even more of their ill-gotten spoils?
Instead of quixotically crying about others being paid a living wage, why aren't you asking for the same pay yourself? Why aren't you forming a union and demanding that your employer return to you a fair part of the value you produce? We should all be paid well, and the top 1% should be paid a whole lot fucking less.
You know why crabs won't escape when you have more than one in a barrel? Because when one tries to climb up the side, the others pull it back down.
You say parents won't be involved, and therefore this initiative is doomed. Therefore we shouldn't even try. And since we can't compel parents to do better, let's sit on our thumbs. That's not an argument. That's an excuse.
Go to hell. We need better education in this country, and if parents can't be bothered, then schools must take up the slack. Old approaches not working? Then let's try some new ones. Let's think of a better way to tackle the problem! We can do it!
Americans used to be famous world-wide for a "can-do" attitude: we used to look at a problem and think of ways to fix it. These days, we have defeatism embedded in our culture. People like you and most of my other countrymen look at a problem and think "ah, that's hard. Crap. Let me go back to World of Warcraft."
Get up off your ass and start thinking of solutions. Get rid of that defeatist attitude.
It's really a monument to how terrible our education system is that people like you trot out this horrible argument over and over:
That's obviously nonsense. Not everyone who is motivated by money is incompetent: on the contrary, those who are competent in one field tend to be competent in others. It's only natural they'd enter the field with the better pay. You're left with either those with an intrinsic motivation, or those who can't do anything else. That's stupid. If you paid physicists, for example, appropriately, you'd see not only people who are intrinsically motivated to be physicists, but also people who could do a number of things, and enter physics because it strikes a good balance between compensation and interest.
Your argument is what I'd expect to hear from a sociopathic business-school type, not from someone who uses logic and reason to build a better society.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather die a pauper having made a real contribution to our sum of knowledge than a wealthy banker beset by nightmares who will quickly fade into obscurity after his death.
You can't take money with you when you're done, but you can certainly make the world a better place than it would have been without you. That, not a paycheck, is my criterion for a successful life.
Wait --- let me get this straight: you're actually claiming that education is actually a political ploy to garner more support for the left? You're actually arguing that science education is a bad thing because it encourages parents to be lazy? Therefore we shouldn't teach kids, and that'll show them unions and pinko parents? Never mind that we're falling further and further behind other nations in science: the solution, on the planet you live on, is to teach less science.
You're arguing that your partisan gain is more important than the success of the next generation, and that it's all right to doom them to ignorance if it helps the GOP.
Get out of your chair, go sit in your hummer, and without leaving your garage, turn it on and listen to Mike Savage until you fall into a deep, permanent sleep. You are a monster and a sociopath. You have no place in society, and the rest of us would be better off without you.
You realize that's precisely what these publications are already, right? If you want raw research, look at faculty webpages. Journals select a subset of this research and present it to interested readers, and charge for the service. You already have what you advocate.
This is a debate as old as time itself. You're clearly on the prescriptivist side of the argument, where I used to be myself. But then I came to realize that the purpose of language is communication, and as long as we're understood, what form that communication takes is really irrelevant. It's not as if there's some external Platonic ideal of a language to which we can compare ours and say, "Ah, this is good." Language just is.
That said, "irregardless" does get on my nerves, but not so much because of its inherent internal contradiction, but rather because it's negatively correlated with socioeconomic status. In other words, using "irregardless" isn't wrong per se, but it does mark you an idiot. In that sense, "irregardless" is useful: I can see it and immediately skip the rest of the post.
Sociologically speaking, prosperity and education make excellent birth control, while poverty breeds (literally). If we want to control the population of the planet, we should try as hard as possible to educate everyone, and to eliminate poverty everywhere. There's no reason everyone on the planet shouldn't be able to enjoy a first world lifestyle.
A dollar is that which I can exchange for 51.53 fluid ounces of crude oil.
Yes, doesn't it feel good to eat a critically endangered fish?
Enjoy your Bluefin Tuna. Your children certainly won't.
PLoS charges scientists to get published. A big part of what caused the economic collapse is that rating agencies started to hand out AAA ratings to securities that didn't deserve them, and they did this because the issuers of these securities were paying the rating agencies. This PLoS ONE's business model is the same thing. PLoS ONE receives more money when it publishes more articles.
Doesn't this just scream CONFLICT OF INTEREST to anyone else?
Please, I'll take Science and Nature any day.
"Eating the seed corn" is a folksy expression that means staving off hunger now by eating the seeds you need for next year's planting. I know it's a tired metaphor, but nothing in the English language comes close to describing how tragic it is when governments squeeze students. Education is what will bring us prosperity in the future. It should be the last think to be cut, after the military, police, fire department, road maintenance, research grants, foreign aide and pensions. When we cut education, we forgo a possibility of hardship today for the guarantee of irrelevance is decay tomorrow.
Educate your population, and you'd be amazed at how many other problems you solve along the way.
Your philosophy is that corporations can do no wrong to consumers. Whenever something bad happens to a customer, it's that customer's fault for being stupid, right?
And women who get raped are asking for it by wearing skirts, right?
Blaming the victim is a disgusting and vile barbarism. I reject it.
Little by little, without our even realizing it, we're in the nightmare DRM world. Imagine waking up today after last being conscious in 1995. What, you need to be connected to the network to play games you purchased? What, the operating system limits the number of hardware changes you can make? What, you TV and speakers have DRM built-in? What, operating systems won't load kernel-mode code unless it's been approved by the OS vendor? Our books can be deleted out from under us? That's preposterous. That's fiction.
No, this was the stuff of dystopian fiction 15 years ago. Now it's daily life. Who knows what restrictions we'll see in the next 15 years? Will you finally stop thinking those of us who decry DRM are just crying wolf?
Why can't vendors implement their own Patch Tuesdays? That is, Microsoft would release patches any time, and large vendors would simply allow them to accrue until their internal "Patch Tuesday" came around, at which time they'd test and apply the patches.
You know your government is truly in the gutter when an American begins to criticize its brazen corruption and abject stupidity. How the hell are you guys still stuck with Mandelson?