The consevatives didn't win because they were so beloved but because England has no third party... one that matter anyway.
What about the Liberal Democrats? They've polled around 20% of the vote for a while, have 57 seats in Parliament, and were large enough that the Conservatives had to form a coalition with them in order to get a government. Now, I'm an ignorant American, but that seems like the Lib Dems matter - among other things, they have the option of withdrawing from the coalition and bringing a confidence vote against Cameron if they so choose.
The problem with the modern education system is parental apathy.
If only it were that simple.
Let's say you have a school district which is incredibly poor, but has a highly motivated but not unusually smart set of parents (Such districts aren't hard to find - they exist in most US cities and more isolated rural areas). Because they are poor, they are facing these problems: * outdated textbooks * a facility that gives their kids respiratory problems * teachers without a strong background in either teaching or their subject matter (because smart and capable teachers prefer districts that can pay them well)
To give our highly motivated parents the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume they've: * Ensured that their kids can read, count, and possibly add or subtract 1-digit numbers before entering first grade. * Make sure their kids do their homework and study for exams. * Do some teaching of the kids at home based on their own knowledge and experience.
The thing is, it doesn't matter how motivated our parents are if the poorly educated teachers using outdated textbooks are teaching them things that are flat wrong. For example, in US history, many people are taught that Columbus proved the world was round even though everyone thought it was flat (invented by Washington Irving), George Washington cut down his dad's cherry tree (also invented by Washington Irving), and that Paul Revere said "The British are coming!" (invented by Henry Longfellow).
The Murdoch organization has 2 major differences with the Daily Bugle: 1. The Daily Bugle doesn't commit crimes, whereas this investigation of News Corp has turned up a bunch (phone hacking, bribery, possibly blackmail, and the suspicious death of a major witness) 2. J Jonah Jameson can be brusque or opportunistic, but also shows a shred of decency on many occasions.
What do you think would happen to that corporation if it came out they were tracking everybody like this? They'd be run out of business quite fast.
Pretend for the moment you're somebody who has a lot to lose if material about your location got out. For instance, maybe you're a highly respected conservative pastor who also frequents a gay bar using a pseudonym. A corporation has been tracking everybody like this for some time, and gets caught. Their business is run into the ground, and they go bankrupt. A tabloid thinks that this tracking information might have a lot of value, so they buy the data during the mess of the bankruptcy. The tabloid then publishes that information to grocery stores across the country.
You can sue the tabloid for defamation if you aren't really a public figure, I guess, but regardless of what you do the damage is already done.
Also, as the stories of people like Carly Fiorina have proven many times, running a company into the ground isn't necessarily a bad career move.
All right, all right... Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what has the government ever done for us?
Here's the deal on this: Ron Paul is one of the minority in Congress who actually believes what he's saying and isn't for sale. It's actually not unusual for him to ally himself with the likes of Bernie Sanders (S-VT) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), because he will come to the same conclusions they do for completely different reasons. For instance, Kucinich and Paul have worked together trying to stop the war in Libya. Dennis is against it for typical liberal peacenik reasons like thinking it immoral to bomb people who present no threat to the United States. Ron is against it because he thinks of big military spending as tax-and-spend big government.
Now, Paul has been pushing "audit the Fed" from a conservative angle for years. Sanders, on the other hand, actually managed to get it into law. Kudos to both of them for making the right decision.
I'm curious: How does having the choice to ensure that your kid gets health care using a government program rather than private insurance trigger the "protect my kid at all costs" response?
I mean, I understand all the rest of those, but the public healthcare thing just doesn't make any sense.
I include it as it not only allows BOTH Pluto and Charon to be counted as planets, but also takes into account any new extra-solar co-orbiters we may discover in the future.
Except that they haven't in fact cleared their orbit of all other bodies that aren't satellites - with the discovery of the Kuiper Belt, Pluto started looking a lot more like Ceres than it did like Mercury.
While I think you're absolutely right about the relationship between business executives in the same industry and their apparent corporate animosity, you're neglecting the fact that Linux isn't and never has been a business.
Tools and support to use Linux more effectively are a business - that's what RedHat and IBM have been selling for a long time. Applications that run on Linux can be a business - Oracle and IBM and MySQL and others have done that for a while now. But Linux itself is free as in beer as well as free as in freedom, and you can't build a business off of giving away your product for free.
You have nothing to lose but your on-call pager! IT workers of the world, unite!
I'm actually being serious about that - a strong IT union or professional organization would go a long way towards improving developer working conditions.
the rich benefit disproportionately from government services, they should pay their fair share for them.
So to you, "fair" is that out of 10 people, 1 person pays almost the entire bill, 4 people pay a little bit, and the remaining 5 pay nothing at all? On top of that, those non-paying 5 people are the ones consuming most of the benefits! This all seems "fair" to you?
Yes, it's completely reasonable, for 2 main reasons: 1. Trying to get anything out of the non-paying 5 is about as effective as trying to squeeze blood from a stone. They don't have the money, that's why they aren't paying. Trying to get anything more from the chipping-in-but-still-not-huge contributors also is hard to do right now. 2. The guy who's paying almost the entire bill has the ability to make the rules about who gets what.
The other issue is that once you take away the silly analogy of a country with 10 people in it and get back in reality, you discover that your numbers are misleading at best: The groups you've described only apply to income taxes, and ignore all other kinds of taxes (most notably payroll taxes). And the 1 guy with a lot of cash is paying about 70% of the total bill, not "almost the entire" amount.
The alternate analogy here: Imagine 10 people living in a house with a roof that needs $20K worth of repairs. 1 person makes $100K, 4 people make $50K, 2 people make $15K, and 2 people make nothing. How would you going to come up with the money to pay for it? Would you kick out the people making nothing, knowing that they have nowhere to go and will likely die of exposure or starvation once winter comes? Would you try to ignore the need for repairs until the roof collapses?
You mean those dust-ups in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia don't count? Besides that, the most horrific war so far in human history killed about 75 million people, which is a mere 10% of 7 billion people.
There are 2 real solutions to the problem: 1. Government policies making it difficult-to-impossible for parents to have lots of kids (the Chinese approach). The biggest drawback of this is that societies with a strong sense of gender roles may engage in infanticide in order to ensure they end up with a male child (which also creates a large pool of sexually frustrated men) 2. Economic development. Societies with a highly developed economy make birth control readily available and make having children more expensive. That reduces population growth. For instance, many European countries have been contending with negative growth rates for a long time now.
Keynesians most definitely understand the Broken Window Fallacy. That's why they typically advocate that the government should hire people to do useful stuff, preferably stuff that would have to be done sometime but kept on getting put off, rather than useless stuff during a recession. A typical Keynesian would likely suggest investing in bridge and levee projects, because both need a lot of work and a recession is the cheapest time to do such things (because your workers and suppliers are demanding lower prices). And then, if you take that approach, you get better infrastructure which makes your economy stronger post-recession, you have workers with useful skills, and you've stimulated the economy.
The bit about paying people to do useless work is part of Keynes' larger argument that in order to stop a recession you need to put money in the hands of people who are broke, so they can buy stuff, thus creating demand for stuff that stimulates business. He thought it better to do useful work than useless work, he just argued that it was better for people to do useless work than to sit on their butts at home.
Ah, but there's a way of dealing with the problem of having the leaders all taken out in what is known as a 'decapitation strike', as explained by General Buck Turgidson:
Plan R is an emergency war plan in which a lower echelon commander may order nuclear retaliation after a sneak attack if the normal chain of command is disrupted. You approved it, sir. You must remember. Surely you must recall, sir, when Senator Buford made that big hassle about our deterrent lacking credibility. The idea was for plan R to be a sort of retaliatory safeguard. I admit the human element seems to have failed us here, but the idea was to discourage the Russkies from any hope that they could knock out Washington, and yourself, sir, as part of a general sneak attack, and escape retaliation because of lack of proper command and control.
When it comes to oppressing citizens, the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans are happy to show their support. For instance, the original USA PATRIOT Act was passed with exactly one vote against it in the Senate (Russ Feingold D-Wisconsin), and been renewed with overwhelming bipartisan support on two occasions, with signatures from President Bush and President Obama.
So you can't absolve either major party from blame here.
The difference between a Boston driver and a New York driver: The New York driver takes a right turn from the left lane at 45 mph honking and giving you the finger. The Boston driver does the same thing, but is also drinking coffee, reading the paper, and talking on his cell phone.
One of the first rules of writing my lawyer mother taught me was "If you read the word 'obviously' or 'clearly', it is probably neither clear nor obvious."
The TSA can't point to a single terrorist attack foiled by these scanners. They can't point to a time where terrorists (e.g. those being spied on by the FBI) have had to change their plans and tactics due to these scanners. That's right - 0. There's absolutely no demonstrable value to the scanners.
For my part, I refuse to fly until the scanners are no longer a part of airport procedure. That causes significant expense and inconvenience - for instance, it will take me 6 days of travel time to get to a conference rather than 8 hours, but if I can't accept losses of time and money in the defense of freedom then I'd be a complete wimp and hypocrite.
Slashdot Mirror
The consevatives didn't win because they were so beloved but because England has no third party... one that matter anyway.
What about the Liberal Democrats? They've polled around 20% of the vote for a while, have 57 seats in Parliament, and were large enough that the Conservatives had to form a coalition with them in order to get a government. Now, I'm an ignorant American, but that seems like the Lib Dems matter - among other things, they have the option of withdrawing from the coalition and bringing a confidence vote against Cameron if they so choose.
The problem with the modern education system is parental apathy.
If only it were that simple.
Let's say you have a school district which is incredibly poor, but has a highly motivated but not unusually smart set of parents (Such districts aren't hard to find - they exist in most US cities and more isolated rural areas). Because they are poor, they are facing these problems:
* outdated textbooks
* a facility that gives their kids respiratory problems
* teachers without a strong background in either teaching or their subject matter (because smart and capable teachers prefer districts that can pay them well)
To give our highly motivated parents the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume they've:
* Ensured that their kids can read, count, and possibly add or subtract 1-digit numbers before entering first grade.
* Make sure their kids do their homework and study for exams.
* Do some teaching of the kids at home based on their own knowledge and experience.
The thing is, it doesn't matter how motivated our parents are if the poorly educated teachers using outdated textbooks are teaching them things that are flat wrong. For example, in US history, many people are taught that Columbus proved the world was round even though everyone thought it was flat (invented by Washington Irving), George Washington cut down his dad's cherry tree (also invented by Washington Irving), and that Paul Revere said "The British are coming!" (invented by Henry Longfellow).
The Murdoch organization has 2 major differences with the Daily Bugle:
1. The Daily Bugle doesn't commit crimes, whereas this investigation of News Corp has turned up a bunch (phone hacking, bribery, possibly blackmail, and the suspicious death of a major witness)
2. J Jonah Jameson can be brusque or opportunistic, but also shows a shred of decency on many occasions.
You have entered a room full of nerds!
@@@@@
@@@.@
Dkleinsc the Stripling St:03 Dx:05 Co:10 In:12 Wi:14 Ch:01
Dlvl:1 $:2000 HP:10(10) PW:0(0) AC:10 Ex:0
What do you think would happen to that corporation if it came out they were tracking everybody like this? They'd be run out of business quite fast.
Pretend for the moment you're somebody who has a lot to lose if material about your location got out. For instance, maybe you're a highly respected conservative pastor who also frequents a gay bar using a pseudonym. A corporation has been tracking everybody like this for some time, and gets caught. Their business is run into the ground, and they go bankrupt. A tabloid thinks that this tracking information might have a lot of value, so they buy the data during the mess of the bankruptcy. The tabloid then publishes that information to grocery stores across the country.
You can sue the tabloid for defamation if you aren't really a public figure, I guess, but regardless of what you do the damage is already done.
Also, as the stories of people like Carly Fiorina have proven many times, running a company into the ground isn't necessarily a bad career move.
All right, all right ... Apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what has the government ever done for us?
That's clearly an impossible thesis - it's way too friggin' cold in Norway to have a concept of "Spring"
Here's the deal on this: Ron Paul is one of the minority in Congress who actually believes what he's saying and isn't for sale. It's actually not unusual for him to ally himself with the likes of Bernie Sanders (S-VT) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), because he will come to the same conclusions they do for completely different reasons. For instance, Kucinich and Paul have worked together trying to stop the war in Libya. Dennis is against it for typical liberal peacenik reasons like thinking it immoral to bomb people who present no threat to the United States. Ron is against it because he thinks of big military spending as tax-and-spend big government.
Now, Paul has been pushing "audit the Fed" from a conservative angle for years. Sanders, on the other hand, actually managed to get it into law. Kudos to both of them for making the right decision.
being against a public healthcare options
I'm curious: How does having the choice to ensure that your kid gets health care using a government program rather than private insurance trigger the "protect my kid at all costs" response?
I mean, I understand all the rest of those, but the public healthcare thing just doesn't make any sense.
Chatting on Facebook isn't conceptually any different from chatting on the phone, or at the cafe.
... except that this way every advertiser on the planet can eavesdrop on those conversations.
I include it as it not only allows BOTH Pluto and Charon to be counted as planets, but also takes into account any new extra-solar co-orbiters we may discover in the future.
Except that they haven't in fact cleared their orbit of all other bodies that aren't satellites - with the discovery of the Kuiper Belt, Pluto started looking a lot more like Ceres than it did like Mercury.
d) Geek gets a kick on the backside and video is now "officially MS property".
FTFY.
While I think you're absolutely right about the relationship between business executives in the same industry and their apparent corporate animosity, you're neglecting the fact that Linux isn't and never has been a business.
Tools and support to use Linux more effectively are a business - that's what RedHat and IBM have been selling for a long time. Applications that run on Linux can be a business - Oracle and IBM and MySQL and others have done that for a while now. But Linux itself is free as in beer as well as free as in freedom, and you can't build a business off of giving away your product for free.
You have nothing to lose but your on-call pager! IT workers of the world, unite!
I'm actually being serious about that - a strong IT union or professional organization would go a long way towards improving developer working conditions.
I am so sick of the erroneous belief that Indians make better programmers. It is simply not true.
You don't understand - when management says "better", what they really mean is "cheaper".
the rich benefit disproportionately from government services, they should pay their fair share for them.
So to you, "fair" is that out of 10 people, 1 person pays almost the entire bill, 4 people pay a little bit, and the remaining 5 pay nothing at all? On top of that, those non-paying 5 people are the ones consuming most of the benefits! This all seems "fair" to you?
Yes, it's completely reasonable, for 2 main reasons:
1. Trying to get anything out of the non-paying 5 is about as effective as trying to squeeze blood from a stone. They don't have the money, that's why they aren't paying. Trying to get anything more from the chipping-in-but-still-not-huge contributors also is hard to do right now.
2. The guy who's paying almost the entire bill has the ability to make the rules about who gets what.
The other issue is that once you take away the silly analogy of a country with 10 people in it and get back in reality, you discover that your numbers are misleading at best: The groups you've described only apply to income taxes, and ignore all other kinds of taxes (most notably payroll taxes). And the 1 guy with a lot of cash is paying about 70% of the total bill, not "almost the entire" amount.
The alternate analogy here: Imagine 10 people living in a house with a roof that needs $20K worth of repairs. 1 person makes $100K, 4 people make $50K, 2 people make $15K, and 2 people make nothing. How would you going to come up with the money to pay for it? Would you kick out the people making nothing, knowing that they have nowhere to go and will likely die of exposure or starvation once winter comes? Would you try to ignore the need for repairs until the roof collapses?
Besides that, the most horrific war so far in human history killed about 75 million people, which is a mere 10% of 7 billion people.
Oops - obvious math error: Make that 1% of 7 billion people.
We're due for a war soon.
You mean those dust-ups in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia don't count? Besides that, the most horrific war so far in human history killed about 75 million people, which is a mere 10% of 7 billion people.
There are 2 real solutions to the problem:
1. Government policies making it difficult-to-impossible for parents to have lots of kids (the Chinese approach). The biggest drawback of this is that societies with a strong sense of gender roles may engage in infanticide in order to ensure they end up with a male child (which also creates a large pool of sexually frustrated men)
2. Economic development. Societies with a highly developed economy make birth control readily available and make having children more expensive. That reduces population growth. For instance, many European countries have been contending with negative growth rates for a long time now.
Keynesians most definitely understand the Broken Window Fallacy. That's why they typically advocate that the government should hire people to do useful stuff, preferably stuff that would have to be done sometime but kept on getting put off, rather than useless stuff during a recession. A typical Keynesian would likely suggest investing in bridge and levee projects, because both need a lot of work and a recession is the cheapest time to do such things (because your workers and suppliers are demanding lower prices). And then, if you take that approach, you get better infrastructure which makes your economy stronger post-recession, you have workers with useful skills, and you've stimulated the economy.
The bit about paying people to do useless work is part of Keynes' larger argument that in order to stop a recession you need to put money in the hands of people who are broke, so they can buy stuff, thus creating demand for stuff that stimulates business. He thought it better to do useful work than useless work, he just argued that it was better for people to do useless work than to sit on their butts at home.
Ah, but there's a way of dealing with the problem of having the leaders all taken out in what is known as a 'decapitation strike', as explained by General Buck Turgidson:
Plan R is an emergency war plan in which a lower echelon commander may order nuclear retaliation after a sneak attack if the normal chain of command is disrupted. You approved it, sir. You must remember. Surely you must recall, sir, when Senator Buford made that big hassle about our deterrent lacking credibility. The idea was for plan R to be a sort of retaliatory safeguard. I admit the human element seems to have failed us here, but the idea was to discourage the Russkies from any hope that they could knock out Washington, and yourself, sir, as part of a general sneak attack, and escape retaliation because of lack of proper command and control.
When it comes to oppressing citizens, the vast majority of Democrats and Republicans are happy to show their support. For instance, the original USA PATRIOT Act was passed with exactly one vote against it in the Senate (Russ Feingold D-Wisconsin), and been renewed with overwhelming bipartisan support on two occasions, with signatures from President Bush and President Obama.
So you can't absolve either major party from blame here.
The difference between a Boston driver and a New York driver: The New York driver takes a right turn from the left lane at 45 mph honking and giving you the finger. The Boston driver does the same thing, but is also drinking coffee, reading the paper, and talking on his cell phone.
in Massachusetts, it's who you know
And here I was thinking the key question is whether your last name was "Kennedy".
One of the first rules of writing my lawyer mother taught me was "If you read the word 'obviously' or 'clearly', it is probably neither clear nor obvious."
The TSA can't point to a single terrorist attack foiled by these scanners. They can't point to a time where terrorists (e.g. those being spied on by the FBI) have had to change their plans and tactics due to these scanners. That's right - 0. There's absolutely no demonstrable value to the scanners.
For my part, I refuse to fly until the scanners are no longer a part of airport procedure. That causes significant expense and inconvenience - for instance, it will take me 6 days of travel time to get to a conference rather than 8 hours, but if I can't accept losses of time and money in the defense of freedom then I'd be a complete wimp and hypocrite.
How exactly were you forced? Was a court order involved? Or did the psych force pills down your daughter's throat? Or what?
I'm not doubting your story, I'm just thinking that kind of information could help other parents who find themselves in a similar situation.