Market economics. Cut off the subsidies for wheat and corn. All of that land would probably be just fine as pasture land for cattle, sheep, and I know of a local place (Kansas) that sells free range pork. The unfortunate thing is that machinery and subsidies have substantially driven up the price of land making it difficult to make payments when the prices are bid by farmers are going to plant row crops.
As prices go up with demand, more farmers will switch to growing those foods. It wouldn't be instant, but a switch could be done.
I've had 2 bullies in school. One was when I was in 7th grade 22 years ago. He was a real snide SOB. Situation got to the point where he attacked me in the locker room, and sometime after that, he ended up going to school somewhere else. A couple of years ago, my sister was teaching school two hours away, and she was having parent-teacher conferences, and this guy is a parent of a kid at her school. Talking to each other, he admitted that he was a real jerk, and he wanted her to let me know that he knows he was in the wrong, and he hoped I could forgive him and know that he wouldn't do it if he could have the second chance.
I have a cousin that I never had a problem with, but has recently admitted that he was a bully to his younger siblings. Is he like that anymore? No.
People do change. I think their are three things that can change those people. One is correct parenting. Considering most individuals don't get a change in parents, this probably doesn't happen much.
The second has to do with getting along in the world that is different than school. In school, all children are equal in status, but different students find ways to be superior in different ways, academically, socially, athletically. Some kids resort to bullying. But when those individuals end up in the real world, and have to get jobs, some realize the error of their ways for different reasons.
For others, it's becoming a parent, and realizing that kids don't deserve to be bullied for things they can't control. I think this especially comes into play when there are multiple children in the family, and parents have to find a balance between the kids. Or a parent that was a bully has a kid that's more likely to be the victim and has to recognize and deal with what it means to be civilized.
Do some people stay the way they were when they were younger? Yep. Do others mature and become better people? Yep.
Concerning getting together with those people, I don't know that it provides any real benefit. It probably just feeds some desire for the past, but if I'm not going to make an effort to see these people again next month, is it really beneficial to go out of my way to get together? Probably not. But as a human, I recognize that history is significant, and that not only holds on a tribal level (for us as a country or family), but it also personally does for me. Given the opportunity, I would like to get together to talk to those people who I considered friends then.
Is Mozilla necessarily the best browser now? Considering the number of people switching, I guess not. But there are reasons I prefer Mozilla despite the issues others have raised. I like that Mozilla is independent of the pure profit motive. I don't trust Chrome for privacy as much as I do Mozilla. I also like to use Google for GMail, Search, Documents and maps. By using Mozilla, I hope that I can give Google good incentive to play fair to keep me as a user.
I like Sync. By supporting the third browser, I hope to help the maintain the market of multiple "good enough" browsers. If Mozilla falls into disuse, then we are back down to 2 browsers, with it being very difficult for a third option to get back in the game. Being on Debian at home, I like having two options (I don't consider the Linux-only browsers as a real option because of Sync) even though I have check Sid to get the latest update quicker.
I like the current update situation better than waiting 1.5-2 years for the latest improvements, but I've read about concerns with the API changes with the rapid release, and I hope the Mozilla team can do something to stabilize that. I've been very happy with the improvements with the browser this year. I'm still hopeful that the multi-process feature will be implemented which will squelch my biggest grip with the current browser, since the browser should stop locking when it is loading 20 tabs.
Maybe I'm just a creature of habit in my own way. I've used Firefox since it was called Phoenix at around version 0.6. I can still recall before version 1.0 came out, when several of my co-workers who were more experienced than myself came to me for advice on switching browsers because of a rash of IE exploits came out. After I showed them the power of tabs, being able to open dozens of tabs with a single click to check dozens of sites with minimal effort, and the ability to power up your browser with add-ons, they all became converts to the point of celebrating the 1.0 release.
That said, I think the biggest problem is that when the browser updates, many of the extensions break. I think they need to do a better job of encouraging add-on programmers to be ready for a new release before the new version releases, then most users won't be concerned with updates when they happen.
Cromwell (actor who played Zefram) was 56 when the movie premiered, probably 55 when taped. Given that you'd expect the character's age to be within 5 years of that, a real Zefram would have\will be born between 2003 and 2013. You've got a chance to give birth to him yet yourself.
Consider just within our solar system, 3 bodies in the range for reasonable temperatures and dozens including moons outside of those temperatures.. 1 of all of them, Earth has the correct combination to support complex life. Nothing else, barring massive intervention by intelligent beings, will never support anything above microbes.
You need the correct combination of the right molecules mixed together to be make the planet we are living on which had good portions of almost every molecule on the periodic chart up until they start getting radioactive. It's my understanding that after the Big Bang, hydrogen was the only molecule of any quantity. Everything else has been produced by fusion reactions within stars. Imagine the potential number of other combinations that could have resulted versus ending up with the right combination of molecules to produce a plant with a huge amount of iron in the core to generate a magnetosphere to protect against radiation, and the right mix of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water and soil substances to create the basics of life is probably a pretty uncommon result.
It's easy for us to say that since it happened here, it is likely to happen everywhere else. But if it's not a likely combination, it could be extremely rare to get the right mixes, and we're just really lucky. Or maybe there really is a God who had it planned all along and there is a reason we are here.
When I was in school, we occasionally went to math competitions with multiple choice questions. Some of the individuals invited would perform worse than than chance. Our eldest teacher would say they had "failed to beat the monkey."
The majority would get to pick every candidate. Say, 55% of your voters decide to get a particular set of candidates elected, and they focus all votes on a particular candidate, and get him elected. Then for the second vote, they change and select their second favorite candidate. Executed on a nationwide level, a party with a slight minority would have a significant edge in representation in Congress.
A much better way: Every voter picks their party. Each party gets representation based on the number of voters registered. Party holds an internal election to choose their own representatives, guaranteeing each voter is represented by somebody of their own party assuming their party has enough voters to qualify for a representative.
This would allow parties other than the big 2 to register voters to their cause from across the country, hopefully gaining enough voters to get a few representatives. Over time, if the parties do a good job of communicating their message, maybe they grow to be on par with the larger parties.
Also, instead of having big coalitions formed around the large issues that often aren't in line (for instance libertarians, social conservatives, pro-military Republicans and pro-business Republicans), these would break into small more fluid alliances, matched by similar breaks in the other side (socialists, communists, unionists, social liberals, environmentalists, etc.) that would attempt to form majority coalitions on issues other than their primary interests. So the libertarians and some pro-business Republicans might join with social liberals to try to engage the rest of Congress and the country on the social liberal agenda.
I work at a Postal Facility that ships Money Orders, and we have one of those as well. There is a log book to be signed by any employees who enter other than the 3 or 4 who normally work in their. As the support guy, often time my name filled half the slots in the log book. While somebody couldn't get money from the post office for stolen items, they might be able to trick somebody into selling them something for a bad money order.
We store our natural peanut butter upside down so the oil is at the bottom of the jar and the solid is at the top when we open it the first time. When ready to open, we flip it over and stir for a couple of minutes until the consistency is even. It seems to stay consistent for as long as the peanut butter lasts, which is usually less than 3 days in our house. A little inconvenient, but worth the effort to have food that tastes real.
I read an interesting article on the Smithsonian website a while back on Prohibition. It claimed that the Income Tax, legalized just before World War I, allowed the federal government to fund government activities through the income tax without import tariffs on alcohol. This was pursued by primarily religious and other groups concerned with drunkenness. As I recall, the Prohibitionists were never a majority, but they did leverage their votes by very effectively getting politicians who wouldn't support their policy objectives out of office, forcing enough politicians at both the federal and state levels to support their amendment and get it on the Constitution. I imagine they went about it that way because they figured they would never lose the support to keep the law in place. Unfortunately, they didn't realize ahead of time that Prohibition would give rise to the American mafia.
By virtue of the commerce clause (at least when the substances are shipped across state lines), government has authority to prohibit these substances. As a person who has no interest in using any of these currently banned substances, or letting any of my children near them, I don't see a problem with them being legal as long as we figure out a way to prevent motor vehicle deaths from people using any of these substances and operating a motor vehicle. I would require very strict guidelines on the production of meth, but other than that, I don't see how we are significantly better off other than drug use doesn't seem to be as bad now as it was in the 70s or 80s. Maybe that's just my perception. But I hope it's due to education and smart choices than any amount of effectiveness in our law enforcement activities.
My solution for that is to say if you make a stock transaction, you have to hold it a month unless it loses value and you choose to dump it for a loss. We should be encouraging stock activity for the purposes of investing, not trading. This eliminates the benefit to being a stock trader and encourages healthy market activities.
Catching it as it approaches as you recommend would still be fairly difficult, because in changing the speed to park it in orbit, you will have to change it's speed enough that it probably won't end up near earth.
If it's slower than earth, you would have to send the tug out, and start picking up speed so earth will catch up to it. If it's faster than us, you will have to slow it down as you describe, but our current engines aren't strong enough to do this in one pass. The ion engine Grishnakh mentions is much more efficient than old chemical rockets, but I think it would take a month to move a probe (or the tug) out to moon orbit. Slowing down an asteroid with ion engines would take years as Grishnakh said.
There is more to being a human being than grades or mental activity. By biology, we are physical creatures, and we have a need to be physical active, or we will waste away, leaving the world to those who are active. If everybody rejects physical activity, we will become the people in WALL-E.
As Lisa says, obesity is a function of diet, not activity level. Control your carbs (below 100g will decrease your weight), and eat plenty of natural meat, animal fat, and vegetables (healthy carbs) with some fruit, and you will find the right balance of nutrition. However, activity is an important part of health in ways other than weight management, for instance, preventing us from turning into invalids as we get older. Check out marksdailyapple.com for info on being healthy with optimal amounts of effort (3 hours of walking, 1 hour of actual exercise a week), and then do what you enjoy with your health body.
The great thing about what Mark teaches is that once you understand it, weight and health are no longer a mystery. Also, you don't have to worry about what if I splurge and eat something unhealthy, because you know it's something special and the next week of healthy habits will wipe out the effects of the indulgence. I'm looking forward to enjoying the holidays without worrying what my waistline will look like on New Year's, and looking forward to a failing a New Year's resolution of losing weight. Instead I can try (and fail) to change something else in my life for a change.
If you read John Mauldin's book, Endgame, about our current situation, he explains the bind the government is in. If you look at part 1 and 2 of his chapter on basic economics, you might get an understanding of how there is nothing the government CAN do, at least not actively. Obama wants you to believe he can fix these problems, but he can.
From the first page of part 2: -------------------- Now let's go back to our first equation. You remember,
GDP = C + I + G + Net Exports
We'll spare you the mathematical rigmarole, but if you play with this equation some, you come up with the following:
Savings = Investments
That is, the savings of consumers and businesses are what's available for investment in businesses, which grow the economy. But there's a rather large but.
Those savings are also what finances government debt. Unless a central bank elects to print money, government debt must be financed by the private sector. That means if the fiscal deficit is too large, it will crowd out private investment. But as we've seen, private investment is what fuels productivity growth, so if you don't have enough savings to satisfy private investment needs, you're choking off productivity growth and the creation of new jobs. ----------------------
As you can see from what Mauldin explains here, Government spending hinders job long term job creation. Obama's solution is not the medicine for fixing our situation, it's the poison that's making us sick, just as all of the spending under Bush did the same. On the other hand, reducing spending, and reducing the red tape that prevents companies from hiring workers should allow (over time) entrepreneurs to create the jobs we need.
Yes, much better to see the effects of these policies in Federal politics.
I'm a Catholic (non-Creationist) from Kansas, and we choose to home school because we believe we will be able to give our children the best character and education ourselves.
The old controversy over evolution in Kansas never required students to be taught creationism. It only prohibited testing evolution on standardized tests. Schools were still free to teach what the parents wanted. That said, it was never an issue that I heard of that any schools stopped teaching evolution or started teaching Creationism. I think most of the Creationists who care about this issue probably home school or send their children to private schools. School districts in rural areas are prone to being of like minded people, so maybe there are some areas where they teach Creationism, but there is nothing preventing anybody being taught the truth at home which is where most good students are going to learn anyway.
Significant problems with education have come with the rise of the federal government's involvement in public education. Return control and funding to the local schools with State oversight, and we'd see much better outcomes.
No he didn't. He said if a homosexual with AIDS used a condom to prevent transmission as he moved from having homosexual sex toward having no sex, then the condom might be OK in that very limited situation. This also was not a formal teaching of the Church, it was just published as part of an interview in which he speculated, not as a pronouncement or change in any actual teaching.
Any form of artificial birth control for the purposes of preventing pregnancy is still prohibited, and since the hierarchy is becoming more conservative we are less likely to see the Church make that change. In fact, tens of thousands of young Catholic parents are committed to having more than 6 children. By the end of this century, I expect the great-grandchildren of those couples will make up half of the Church or more, with those who disagree with the teaching leaving the church in droves.
Also, the Amish and the Mormons are also known for their large families as well which will contribute to the growing of the conservative religious groups that prefer large families.
Baseball has sensors that currently track every pitch of every game. This info is available to the teams and any fan or journalist willing to pay. Detailed trajectory data is kept, totaling approximately 700,000 pitches a year (2430 games (plus playoffs) at 250-300 pitches per game).
For balls and strikes where every umpire calls a different strike zone, and it could change from one pitch to the next. The desire of many fans is for this information to passed immediately to the umpire or scoreboard without the umpire's judgement to come into play. I'm not sure if the sensors would be used to detect a swing and miss, or if the umpires would override the system when it happens.
All other calls would be still called by the umpires. Baseball has implemented replay which is what you described .
My wife and I home school. In our research, we've read that in studies, home schooled children are significantly less likely to turn out like Jay. Does that mean that there are none? No, but Jay is just one kid, and it sounds like you identified a problem, that he had a lot of outside preasure instead of being internally driven.
There are large varieties of ways to handle home schooling. Most parents do school at home. That is, you sit at the dinner table, do your school work for 6 hours equivalent to what children are doing at the school. This is what most non-homeschoolers think homeschooling is, and for a lot of families, it is. For us, we have a half dozen families we associate, and they all do this, associating with various organizations that provide schooling materials. Students taught this way perform about as well as privately schooled kids when being tested. If a particular child will learn well with schooling, but needs to go faster, this can work. Other children will get bored with having to do the work if they don't feel they are growing.
Other methods deviate from this style to varying degrees. There are people who do literature based education. This would take real world materials, and learn from those instead of a text book. So instead of reading about the American Revolution in a text book, you would find the writtings of the American fathers as well as the British and French leaders, and study what they wrote about the issues of the day. To study science, you would read the works of Gallileo, Copernicus, Einstein and other scientific greats, as well as modern scientific journals.
Of course, you could take this last method, and employ field trips and hands on activities to explore whatever drives the kid, and let him find what interests him, and let him find his own way. If he ends up being a tradesman being an electrician, plumber, teacher, or farmer, or ends up going to college and being a scientist or inventor, as long as he's doing what he loves, he's probably loving life and has the drive to succeed, and will be a success.
We are trying to do this with our children following what is called the Thomas Jefferson Education model. The people that have developed that do have a religious faith that they incorporate into their program when they teach there children, but they are more about the framework than giving you the actual exact step by step process to get to the end. For instance, they teach that there are three stages in educating a child. In the first stage, early elementary school which they call Core Phase, you give the children the fundamental skills all children need: reading, writting and math, languages you want them to learn, and let them explore things that they are interested in (dinosaurs, animals, physics, electronics, mechanical technology, farming, etc.) and give children responsibilies like household chores so they build competence and confidence while allowing lots of time for playing. In the second stage, Love of Learning, you focus on exploring more of what the children are interested, and where possible try to pull in related studies. As they enter the final phase which is equivalent to high school which they call Scholar Phase, they add teacher led learning to the student led. Since the student should love learning by this point, continue letting them explore the things they love but provide some areas where they need to grow such as understanding of government, geography, different sciences, art, etc. An attentive parent should attempt to figure out if the child likes what they are studying, and try to find a balance between not driving the child too much and letting the child get away without doing anything. Their experience indicates that properly handled, all children will respond to a plan to become adults if they are given appropriate opportunities with the internal rewards that come with becoming competent and knowledgeable.
By pacing learning in each area to the children's interest, we expect that the child probably gets to their potentia
It takes a while to get a patent. But it's not like you have to have your patents before you show off your invention. You'll still be protected by your patent when it's granted. If this gives off significant amounts of energy, then what's the harm of giving a demonstration?
Didn't read the article, and I don't know how it's setup, but I don't expect them to be legit. But if I had really invented the real thing, I'd totally give some other scientists and engineers the chance to verify my measurements concerning the amount of electricity being produced by the machine and verify that there was no funny business going on. I imagine the venture capitalists who would consider investing in such a project will demand some sort of demonstration before any money changes hand. Once money starts changing hands is when you can be sure that somebody has really discovered something.
Fred really got going in '92 or '93, and I had a couple of friends that would counter protest over the next few years before we left town for college or military service.
I'll tell you this, they sincerely hate the people they protest. You can sense it in them when they are around, although their usual weekend rounds at the local churches is usually pretty low key other than the obscene stick figures on their signs, which I don't care for my kids to see.
What Fred's family really gets out of this though is that their protests bring condemnation. I suspect they sell this to the congregation that they are being good Christians being persecuted like the early Christians who were tortured and executed by various means. By ostracizing his followers from everybody else in town, they reinforce their members' dependance upon one another like any cult, and the family probably sees pretty good revenue in the collection basket.
A couple of his kids (he has a very large family, 2 or 3 are at odds with the rest of the family) wrote a book about Fred and the things that went on during the 70s and 80s. I think I once read some of it online. Very disturbing stuff.
Free market is available in banking. Just don't feed the big companies. Do business with a small bank, or better yet, a credit union. If the bank gets bought out, move to another. Great thing about a credit union is that it belongs to the account holders, who won't sell it to a bigger bank. If we insist on small banks/credit unions, and customers consistently move away from larger ones, there will continue to be lots of small banks, maintaining a real free market.
What if they don't have your solution to work with? What if the patent office gives a description of what the device does and those who want to invalidate it have to provide a solution without knowing the answer, that is your solution?
For an off the wall example, you invent the Hyperspace drive.
You present the drive to the patent office. The patent office puts out a description: Device that will propel a starship at faster than light speeds.
Other people then have 3 months to invalidate the patent by detailing how the drive works without any benefit of knowing what solution is being patented.
There is no copying being done, because the solution is secret at this point. Either a solution is obvious enough that SpaceX, Boeing, Lockheed or some university researcher can provide a prototype quickly based on the description, or point to prior art, or the device receives patent status.
With this sort of system, it should be pretty quickly apparent that a solution is either obvious or something new worth protecting.
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Market economics. Cut off the subsidies for wheat and corn. All of that land would probably be just fine as pasture land for cattle, sheep, and I know of a local place (Kansas) that sells free range pork. The unfortunate thing is that machinery and subsidies have substantially driven up the price of land making it difficult to make payments when the prices are bid by farmers are going to plant row crops.
As prices go up with demand, more farmers will switch to growing those foods. It wouldn't be instant, but a switch could be done.
Maybe it depends on the jerk.
I've had 2 bullies in school. One was when I was in 7th grade 22 years ago. He was a real snide SOB. Situation got to the point where he attacked me in the locker room, and sometime after that, he ended up going to school somewhere else. A couple of years ago, my sister was teaching school two hours away, and she was having parent-teacher conferences, and this guy is a parent of a kid at her school. Talking to each other, he admitted that he was a real jerk, and he wanted her to let me know that he knows he was in the wrong, and he hoped I could forgive him and know that he wouldn't do it if he could have the second chance.
I have a cousin that I never had a problem with, but has recently admitted that he was a bully to his younger siblings. Is he like that anymore? No.
People do change. I think their are three things that can change those people. One is correct parenting. Considering most individuals don't get a change in parents, this probably doesn't happen much.
The second has to do with getting along in the world that is different than school. In school, all children are equal in status, but different students find ways to be superior in different ways, academically, socially, athletically. Some kids resort to bullying. But when those individuals end up in the real world, and have to get jobs, some realize the error of their ways for different reasons.
For others, it's becoming a parent, and realizing that kids don't deserve to be bullied for things they can't control. I think this especially comes into play when there are multiple children in the family, and parents have to find a balance between the kids. Or a parent that was a bully has a kid that's more likely to be the victim and has to recognize and deal with what it means to be civilized.
Do some people stay the way they were when they were younger? Yep. Do others mature and become better people? Yep.
Concerning getting together with those people, I don't know that it provides any real benefit. It probably just feeds some desire for the past, but if I'm not going to make an effort to see these people again next month, is it really beneficial to go out of my way to get together? Probably not. But as a human, I recognize that history is significant, and that not only holds on a tribal level (for us as a country or family), but it also personally does for me. Given the opportunity, I would like to get together to talk to those people who I considered friends then.
Is Mozilla necessarily the best browser now? Considering the number of people switching, I guess not. But there are reasons I prefer Mozilla despite the issues others have raised. I like that Mozilla is independent of the pure profit motive. I don't trust Chrome for privacy as much as I do Mozilla. I also like to use Google for GMail, Search, Documents and maps. By using Mozilla, I hope that I can give Google good incentive to play fair to keep me as a user.
I like Sync. By supporting the third browser, I hope to help the maintain the market of multiple "good enough" browsers. If Mozilla falls into disuse, then we are back down to 2 browsers, with it being very difficult for a third option to get back in the game. Being on Debian at home, I like having two options (I don't consider the Linux-only browsers as a real option because of Sync) even though I have check Sid to get the latest update quicker.
I like the current update situation better than waiting 1.5-2 years for the latest improvements, but I've read about concerns with the API changes with the rapid release, and I hope the Mozilla team can do something to stabilize that. I've been very happy with the improvements with the browser this year. I'm still hopeful that the multi-process feature will be implemented which will squelch my biggest grip with the current browser, since the browser should stop locking when it is loading 20 tabs.
Maybe I'm just a creature of habit in my own way. I've used Firefox since it was called Phoenix at around version 0.6. I can still recall before version 1.0 came out, when several of my co-workers who were more experienced than myself came to me for advice on switching browsers because of a rash of IE exploits came out. After I showed them the power of tabs, being able to open dozens of tabs with a single click to check dozens of sites with minimal effort, and the ability to power up your browser with add-ons, they all became converts to the point of celebrating the 1.0 release.
That said, I think the biggest problem is that when the browser updates, many of the extensions break. I think they need to do a better job of encouraging add-on programmers to be ready for a new release before the new version releases, then most users won't be concerned with updates when they happen.
Cromwell (actor who played Zefram) was 56 when the movie premiered, probably 55 when taped. Given that you'd expect the character's age to be within 5 years of that, a real Zefram would have\will be born between 2003 and 2013. You've got a chance to give birth to him yet yourself.
Consider just within our solar system, 3 bodies in the range for reasonable temperatures and dozens including moons outside of those temperatures.. 1 of all of them, Earth has the correct combination to support complex life. Nothing else, barring massive intervention by intelligent beings, will never support anything above microbes.
You need the correct combination of the right molecules mixed together to be make the planet we are living on which had good portions of almost every molecule on the periodic chart up until they start getting radioactive. It's my understanding that after the Big Bang, hydrogen was the only molecule of any quantity. Everything else has been produced by fusion reactions within stars. Imagine the potential number of other combinations that could have resulted versus ending up with the right combination of molecules to produce a plant with a huge amount of iron in the core to generate a magnetosphere to protect against radiation, and the right mix of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water and soil substances to create the basics of life is probably a pretty uncommon result.
It's easy for us to say that since it happened here, it is likely to happen everywhere else. But if it's not a likely combination, it could be extremely rare to get the right mixes, and we're just really lucky. Or maybe there really is a God who had it planned all along and there is a reason we are here.
When I was in school, we occasionally went to math competitions with multiple choice questions. Some of the individuals invited would perform worse than than chance. Our eldest teacher would say they had "failed to beat the monkey."
The majority would get to pick every candidate. Say, 55% of your voters decide to get a particular set of candidates elected, and they focus all votes on a particular candidate, and get him elected. Then for the second vote, they change and select their second favorite candidate. Executed on a nationwide level, a party with a slight minority would have a significant edge in representation in Congress.
A much better way: Every voter picks their party. Each party gets representation based on the number of voters registered. Party holds an internal election to choose their own representatives, guaranteeing each voter is represented by somebody of their own party assuming their party has enough voters to qualify for a representative.
This would allow parties other than the big 2 to register voters to their cause from across the country, hopefully gaining enough voters to get a few representatives. Over time, if the parties do a good job of communicating their message, maybe they grow to be on par with the larger parties.
Also, instead of having big coalitions formed around the large issues that often aren't in line (for instance libertarians, social conservatives, pro-military Republicans and pro-business Republicans), these would break into small more fluid alliances, matched by similar breaks in the other side (socialists, communists, unionists, social liberals, environmentalists, etc.) that would attempt to form majority coalitions on issues other than their primary interests. So the libertarians and some pro-business Republicans might join with social liberals to try to engage the rest of Congress and the country on the social liberal agenda.
I work at a Postal Facility that ships Money Orders, and we have one of those as well. There is a log book to be signed by any employees who enter other than the 3 or 4 who normally work in their. As the support guy, often time my name filled half the slots in the log book. While somebody couldn't get money from the post office for stolen items, they might be able to trick somebody into selling them something for a bad money order.
We store our natural peanut butter upside down so the oil is at the bottom of the jar and the solid is at the top when we open it the first time. When ready to open, we flip it over and stir for a couple of minutes until the consistency is even. It seems to stay consistent for as long as the peanut butter lasts, which is usually less than 3 days in our house. A little inconvenient, but worth the effort to have food that tastes real.
I read an interesting article on the Smithsonian website a while back on Prohibition. It claimed that the Income Tax, legalized just before World War I, allowed the federal government to fund government activities through the income tax without import tariffs on alcohol. This was pursued by primarily religious and other groups concerned with drunkenness. As I recall, the Prohibitionists were never a majority, but they did leverage their votes by very effectively getting politicians who wouldn't support their policy objectives out of office, forcing enough politicians at both the federal and state levels to support their amendment and get it on the Constitution. I imagine they went about it that way because they figured they would never lose the support to keep the law in place. Unfortunately, they didn't realize ahead of time that Prohibition would give rise to the American mafia.
By virtue of the commerce clause (at least when the substances are shipped across state lines), government has authority to prohibit these substances. As a person who has no interest in using any of these currently banned substances, or letting any of my children near them, I don't see a problem with them being legal as long as we figure out a way to prevent motor vehicle deaths from people using any of these substances and operating a motor vehicle. I would require very strict guidelines on the production of meth, but other than that, I don't see how we are significantly better off other than drug use doesn't seem to be as bad now as it was in the 70s or 80s. Maybe that's just my perception. But I hope it's due to education and smart choices than any amount of effectiveness in our law enforcement activities.
My solution for that is to say if you make a stock transaction, you have to hold it a month unless it loses value and you choose to dump it for a loss. We should be encouraging stock activity for the purposes of investing, not trading. This eliminates the benefit to being a stock trader and encourages healthy market activities.
Catching it as it approaches as you recommend would still be fairly difficult, because in changing the speed to park it in orbit, you will have to change it's speed enough that it probably won't end up near earth.
If it's slower than earth, you would have to send the tug out, and start picking up speed so earth will catch up to it. If it's faster than us, you will have to slow it down as you describe, but our current engines aren't strong enough to do this in one pass. The ion engine Grishnakh mentions is much more efficient than old chemical rockets, but I think it would take a month to move a probe (or the tug) out to moon orbit. Slowing down an asteroid with ion engines would take years as Grishnakh said.
There is more to being a human being than grades or mental activity. By biology, we are physical creatures, and we have a need to be physical active, or we will waste away, leaving the world to those who are active. If everybody rejects physical activity, we will become the people in WALL-E.
As Lisa says, obesity is a function of diet, not activity level. Control your carbs (below 100g will decrease your weight), and eat plenty of natural meat, animal fat, and vegetables (healthy carbs) with some fruit, and you will find the right balance of nutrition. However, activity is an important part of health in ways other than weight management, for instance, preventing us from turning into invalids as we get older. Check out marksdailyapple.com for info on being healthy with optimal amounts of effort (3 hours of walking, 1 hour of actual exercise a week), and then do what you enjoy with your health body.
The great thing about what Mark teaches is that once you understand it, weight and health are no longer a mystery. Also, you don't have to worry about what if I splurge and eat something unhealthy, because you know it's something special and the next week of healthy habits will wipe out the effects of the indulgence. I'm looking forward to enjoying the holidays without worrying what my waistline will look like on New Year's, and looking forward to a failing a New Year's resolution of losing weight. Instead I can try (and fail) to change something else in my life for a change.
If you read John Mauldin's book, Endgame, about our current situation, he explains the bind the government is in. If you look at part 1 and 2 of his chapter on basic economics, you might get an understanding of how there is nothing the government CAN do, at least not actively. Obama wants you to believe he can fix these problems, but he can.
From the first page of part 2:
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Now let's go back to our first equation. You remember,
GDP = C + I + G + Net Exports
We'll spare you the mathematical rigmarole, but if you play with this equation some, you come up with the following:
Savings = Investments
That is, the savings of consumers and businesses are what's available for investment in businesses, which grow the economy. But there's a rather large but.
Those savings are also what finances government debt. Unless a central bank elects to print money, government debt must be financed by the private sector. That means if the fiscal deficit is too large, it will crowd out private investment. But as we've seen, private investment is what fuels productivity growth, so if you don't have enough savings to satisfy private investment needs, you're choking off productivity growth and the creation of new jobs.
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As you can see from what Mauldin explains here, Government spending hinders job long term job creation. Obama's solution is not the medicine for fixing our situation, it's the poison that's making us sick, just as all of the spending under Bush did the same. On the other hand, reducing spending, and reducing the red tape that prevents companies from hiring workers should allow (over time) entrepreneurs to create the jobs we need.
Yes, much better to see the effects of these policies in Federal politics.
I'm a Catholic (non-Creationist) from Kansas, and we choose to home school because we believe we will be able to give our children the best character and education ourselves.
The old controversy over evolution in Kansas never required students to be taught creationism. It only prohibited testing evolution on standardized tests. Schools were still free to teach what the parents wanted. That said, it was never an issue that I heard of that any schools stopped teaching evolution or started teaching Creationism. I think most of the Creationists who care about this issue probably home school or send their children to private schools. School districts in rural areas are prone to being of like minded people, so maybe there are some areas where they teach Creationism, but there is nothing preventing anybody being taught the truth at home which is where most good students are going to learn anyway.
Significant problems with education have come with the rise of the federal government's involvement in public education. Return control and funding to the local schools with State oversight, and we'd see much better outcomes.
No he didn't. He said if a homosexual with AIDS used a condom to prevent transmission as he moved from having homosexual sex toward having no sex, then the condom might be OK in that very limited situation. This also was not a formal teaching of the Church, it was just published as part of an interview in which he speculated, not as a pronouncement or change in any actual teaching.
Any form of artificial birth control for the purposes of preventing pregnancy is still prohibited, and since the hierarchy is becoming more conservative we are less likely to see the Church make that change. In fact, tens of thousands of young Catholic parents are committed to having more than 6 children. By the end of this century, I expect the great-grandchildren of those couples will make up half of the Church or more, with those who disagree with the teaching leaving the church in droves.
Also, the Amish and the Mormons are also known for their large families as well which will contribute to the growing of the conservative religious groups that prefer large families.
Baseball has sensors that currently track every pitch of every game. This info is available to the teams and any fan or journalist willing to pay. Detailed trajectory data is kept, totaling approximately 700,000 pitches a year (2430 games (plus playoffs) at 250-300 pitches per game).
For balls and strikes where every umpire calls a different strike zone, and it could change from one pitch to the next. The desire of many fans is for this information to passed immediately to the umpire or scoreboard without the umpire's judgement to come into play. I'm not sure if the sensors would be used to detect a swing and miss, or if the umpires would override the system when it happens.
All other calls would be still called by the umpires. Baseball has implemented replay which is what you described .
My wife and I home school. In our research, we've read that in studies, home schooled children are significantly less likely to turn out like Jay. Does that mean that there are none? No, but Jay is just one kid, and it sounds like you identified a problem, that he had a lot of outside preasure instead of being internally driven.
There are large varieties of ways to handle home schooling. Most parents do school at home. That is, you sit at the dinner table, do your school work for 6 hours equivalent to what children are doing at the school. This is what most non-homeschoolers think homeschooling is, and for a lot of families, it is. For us, we have a half dozen families we associate, and they all do this, associating with various organizations that provide schooling materials. Students taught this way perform about as well as privately schooled kids when being tested. If a particular child will learn well with schooling, but needs to go faster, this can work. Other children will get bored with having to do the work if they don't feel they are growing.
Other methods deviate from this style to varying degrees. There are people who do literature based education. This would take real world materials, and learn from those instead of a text book. So instead of reading about the American Revolution in a text book, you would find the writtings of the American fathers as well as the British and French leaders, and study what they wrote about the issues of the day. To study science, you would read the works of Gallileo, Copernicus, Einstein and other scientific greats, as well as modern scientific journals.
Of course, you could take this last method, and employ field trips and hands on activities to explore whatever drives the kid, and let him find what interests him, and let him find his own way. If he ends up being a tradesman being an electrician, plumber, teacher, or farmer, or ends up going to college and being a scientist or inventor, as long as he's doing what he loves, he's probably loving life and has the drive to succeed, and will be a success.
We are trying to do this with our children following what is called the Thomas Jefferson Education model. The people that have developed that do have a religious faith that they incorporate into their program when they teach there children, but they are more about the framework than giving you the actual exact step by step process to get to the end. For instance, they teach that there are three stages in educating a child. In the first stage, early elementary school which they call Core Phase, you give the children the fundamental skills all children need: reading, writting and math, languages you want them to learn, and let them explore things that they are interested in (dinosaurs, animals, physics, electronics, mechanical technology, farming, etc.) and give children responsibilies like household chores so they build competence and confidence while allowing lots of time for playing. In the second stage, Love of Learning, you focus on exploring more of what the children are interested, and where possible try to pull in related studies. As they enter the final phase which is equivalent to high school which they call Scholar Phase, they add teacher led learning to the student led. Since the student should love learning by this point, continue letting them explore the things they love but provide some areas where they need to grow such as understanding of government, geography, different sciences, art, etc. An attentive parent should attempt to figure out if the child likes what they are studying, and try to find a balance between not driving the child too much and letting the child get away without doing anything. Their experience indicates that properly handled, all children will respond to a plan to become adults if they are given appropriate opportunities with the internal rewards that come with becoming competent and knowledgeable.
By pacing learning in each area to the children's interest, we expect that the child probably gets to their potentia
It takes a while to get a patent. But it's not like you have to have your patents before you show off your invention. You'll still be protected by your patent when it's granted. If this gives off significant amounts of energy, then what's the harm of giving a demonstration?
Didn't read the article, and I don't know how it's setup, but I don't expect them to be legit. But if I had really invented the real thing, I'd totally give some other scientists and engineers the chance to verify my measurements concerning the amount of electricity being produced by the machine and verify that there was no funny business going on. I imagine the venture capitalists who would consider investing in such a project will demand some sort of demonstration before any money changes hand. Once money starts changing hands is when you can be sure that somebody has really discovered something.
Fred really got going in '92 or '93, and I had a couple of friends that would counter protest over the next few years before we left town for college or military service.
I'll tell you this, they sincerely hate the people they protest. You can sense it in them when they are around, although their usual weekend rounds at the local churches is usually pretty low key other than the obscene stick figures on their signs, which I don't care for my kids to see.
What Fred's family really gets out of this though is that their protests bring condemnation. I suspect they sell this to the congregation that they are being good Christians being persecuted like the early Christians who were tortured and executed by various means. By ostracizing his followers from everybody else in town, they reinforce their members' dependance upon one another like any cult, and the family probably sees pretty good revenue in the collection basket.
A couple of his kids (he has a very large family, 2 or 3 are at odds with the rest of the family) wrote a book about Fred and the things that went on during the 70s and 80s. I think I once read some of it online. Very disturbing stuff.
Free market is available in banking. Just don't feed the big companies. Do business with a small bank, or better yet, a credit union. If the bank gets bought out, move to another. Great thing about a credit union is that it belongs to the account holders, who won't sell it to a bigger bank. If we insist on small banks/credit unions, and customers consistently move away from larger ones, there will continue to be lots of small banks, maintaining a real free market.
I used to get those credit protection calls from Chase, and I told them not to call and they stopped.
What if they don't have your solution to work with? What if the patent office gives a description of what the device does and those who want to invalidate it have to provide a solution without knowing the answer, that is your solution?
For an off the wall example, you invent the Hyperspace drive.
You present the drive to the patent office. The patent office puts out a description: Device that will propel a starship at faster than light speeds.
Other people then have 3 months to invalidate the patent by detailing how the drive works without any benefit of knowing what solution is being patented.
There is no copying being done, because the solution is secret at this point. Either a solution is obvious enough that SpaceX, Boeing, Lockheed or some university researcher can provide a prototype quickly based on the description, or point to prior art, or the device receives patent status.
With this sort of system, it should be pretty quickly apparent that a solution is either obvious or something new worth protecting.