Maj Gen Smedley Butler (yes, that's his real name) put it best: War is a Racket
General Butler has another notable footnote in history, bringing to the attention of Congress and the military the alleged Business Plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt.
1. Teach critical thinking - Kids need to learn at an early age how to figure things out for themselves. This goes from how do I turn the TV on to Why is the sky blue. Self exploration of knowledge leads to a door that's hard to close. Starting at an early age, this could be enough on its own
There are a lot of folks who don't want to do that. Parents often don't want to because it can make parenting more difficult ("Why do I have to do that? That's stupid!"). Many teachers don't want to, because it undermines their "teacher is always right" authority. Many religious authorities don't want to because critical thinking will eventually lead to "How do we know what some guy wrote down 1600 years ago is true?" and before you know it the kid stops being religious. Advertisers definitely don't want kids thinking critically, because then it's harder to fool kids into wanting whatever they're selling. Basically, kids who understand critical thinking are much harder to control, and become adults that are much harder to control, and for those who make their living controlling others this is thoroughly a bad idea.
3. Say goodbye to religion - I have no problem with any specific ideology but an organization whose very approach means ignoring point number 1 and some amount of point number 2 will have no place in a scientific society. Sorry.
Actually, a lot of religions (Judaism, Buddhism, and Unitarian Universalism to name a few) encourage critical thinking, particularly around philosophical and ethical questions. There's a lot more to religion than televangelist schlock, and I don't think you're thinking critically about the place of religion in society.
The Mythbusters don't claim to be a scientifically rigorous research lab. They claim to try to replicate various hypotheses to the best of their ability to see if they're true.
And a very interesting thing is that they do go back and try to repeat their results when they're disputed. Again, a common part of the scientific process is that an experimental result must be repeatable.
If you are running off with the CEO's PC for 20 hours (especially over business hours), you should fear for your job's security.
Unless you find any juicy tidbits (e.g. emails to his mistress, embezzlement schemes, evidence of a stock pump-and-dump, etc) on it. Then you will have fantastic job security if you play your cards right. *
It's worth noting that the Brits obviously drink it anyway. Funny thing that, but I guess if you can stomach British cuisine then Budweiser isn't so bad.
For Federalist #10, read the section on how a majority faction won't subvert the democratic republic. The size and spread of the population was critical to that argument.
For the subprime mortgages, a very likely reason the government didn't oversee the mortgage markets was because Congress and the President underfunded the organizations dedicated to overseeing the markets. For instance, the head of enforcement for the SEC testified to Congress that "While we appreciate and examine every lead we receive, we simply do not have the resources to fully investigate them all."
On your last point, you would be incorrect about the financial strength of the middle class. Using the census's figures on median and mean income: From 1949 to 1969, mean and median incomes (adjusted for inflation) approximately doubled. From 1985 to 2005, median and mean incomes (again adjusted for inflation) increased by about 20%. Looking at this chart of how those income gains were distributed also suggests that the 80's and 90's were not the environment of a middle-class powerhouse.
Lastly, under Clinton the top marginal tax rate went from 35% to 39.5%.
Actually, I have read both the Federalist Papers and Adam Smith. Federalist #10 in particular has a massive problem, namely it assumes that a faction can't organize itself because of how large the country is (which doesn't work thanks to modern communication tools). Adam Smith's big mistake is that he tends to assume that everyone understands what they need to know about what is being bought and sold, which as recent events with subprime mortgages have demonstrated is not necessarily the case.
Now, about your last paragraph, which is really fascinating:
The only hope for a lasting democracy is a vibrant middle class, which will be buried by a single payer system.
When did we have a vibrant middle class in this country? Most economists would point to the 1950's as the height of middle-class America. Which has a lot of characteristics that current America is missing like:
* very high marginal tax rates for top brackets. And by very high, I mean 75-90%.
* a heavily unionized labor force.
* High minimum wages, enough so that one minimum wage earner could support himself (yes, usually himself) and his family working 40 hours a week.
* Health care wasn't government run, but was considered a standard part of any employment offer. It obviously wasn't perfect (particularly for black people and women), but it was the closest this country has ever come to a vibrant middle class. And it happened with economic policies that would make Ronald Reagan roll over in his grave.
Well, for Windows 7 you'll just have to use the SMB packet of death instead. Which is really too bad: usually Microsoft has a much better track record on backwards compatibility.
Actually, one of the more interesting recent political shifts is that evangelical Christians are no longer a unified conservative block of voters. A significant portion of them find the economics of more liberal folks appealing, as part of the whole "love your neighbor as yourself" thing.
1. I'll bet good money you haven't read his argument. Do so. Then we'll talk. Among other things, he and I both stated that this issue is less about race now than it was in the 1940's when Truman first tried to create a single-payer system.
2. If I grant your point entirely (that the 20-25 million foreign nationals without health insurance aren't a problem), then you still have 20-25 million citizens, or about 10% of the population, to concern yourself with. It's hardly insignificant.
3. What about those people employed by companies that aren't as flexible as yours was? There are lots of companies who's only goal with health benefits is to keep the price low, and if they lose a few employees that's just a cost of doing business.
If you picked an honest comparison, you'd look at the one area of the US passenger rail network that Amtrak has complete control over, namely Boston to DC corridor. There the Acela times are comparable to flying if you factor in the time needed to get to the airport / station, get through security, wait for boarding, get a cab, and get to where you're going.
"How about a bomb anecdote? You know, no punch line, just a really cute story. Are they prepared to make that distinction? I think not!" - George Carlin
Could an American please explain to me why the majority of USA seems to oppose public healthcare?
According to economist Paul Krugman in The Conscience of a Liberal, the most likely answer to this question is "because it will help black people". He argues that this was the biggest reason Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson couldn't get health care plans through. And part of the reason why Bill Clinton couldn't, and probably bigger part of the reason Barack Obama's having a tough time.
Plus (like some of my sibling posters) a lot of folks put a Somebody Else's Problem field around 40-50 million people who lack health insurance, and the even larger number of folks who's health insurance companies cancel their coverage as soon as it comes time to pay major claims.
Joel Spolsky agrees with you wholeheartedly on this:
Why am I so hardnosed about this? It's because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people's time fixing all their bugs. Firing someone you hired by mistake can take months and be nightmarishly difficult, especially if they decide to be litigious about it. In some situations it may be completely impossible to fire anyone. Bad employees demoralize the good employees. And they might be bad programmers but really nice people or maybe they really need this job, so you can't bear to fire them, or you can't fire them without pissing everybody off, or whatever. It's just a bad scene.
On the other hand, if you reject a good candidate, I mean, I guess in some existential sense an injustice has been done, but, hey, if they're so smart, don't worry, they'll get lots of good job offers. Don't be afraid that you're going to reject too many people and you won't be able to find anyone to hire. During the interview, it's not your problem. Of course, it's important to seek out good candidates. But once you're actually interviewing someone, pretend that you've got 900 more people lined up outside the door. Don't lower your standards no matter how hard it seems to find those great candidates.
As someone who worked in "alternative education" for a while, that's not entirely true. There are stupid kids out there. There are kids who don't want to learn anything at all (usually in my experience these are kids who grew up in a really privileged environment and never had to work for anything in their lives).
It is partially true. If you drone on about sines, cosines, and tangents for 15 minutes, kids will get bored. If you tell them you're going to show them how to design and build a set of steps that people won't trip on (which actually can use quite a bit of trig and geometry), they'll pay a lot more attention.
The horrid technical issues could easily have been intentional. Let's say (purely theoretically of course) the person charged with ensuring that voting machines got delivered was the state campaign manager for one of the presidential candidates. And said campaign manager knew that certain areas of Cuyahoga County heavily favored the opposing presidential candidate. Would it be any surprise that the voting machines that went to those areas just so happened to be the ones that failed most often?
By contrast, I'd like to give a shout-out to the most impartial election official in the country, Bill Gardner, Secretary of State of New Hampshire, who has been in office since 1976, through both legislatures and governorships of both major parties. He's been at the forefront of making sure that paper records exist for all votes cast in N.H.
Slashdot Mirror
Maj Gen Smedley Butler (yes, that's his real name) put it best:
War is a Racket
General Butler has another notable footnote in history, bringing to the attention of Congress and the military the alleged Business Plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt.
1. Teach critical thinking - Kids need to learn at an early age how to figure things out for themselves. This goes from how do I turn the TV on to Why is the sky blue. Self exploration of knowledge leads to a door that's hard to close. Starting at an early age, this could be enough on its own
There are a lot of folks who don't want to do that. Parents often don't want to because it can make parenting more difficult ("Why do I have to do that? That's stupid!"). Many teachers don't want to, because it undermines their "teacher is always right" authority. Many religious authorities don't want to because critical thinking will eventually lead to "How do we know what some guy wrote down 1600 years ago is true?" and before you know it the kid stops being religious. Advertisers definitely don't want kids thinking critically, because then it's harder to fool kids into wanting whatever they're selling. Basically, kids who understand critical thinking are much harder to control, and become adults that are much harder to control, and for those who make their living controlling others this is thoroughly a bad idea.
3. Say goodbye to religion - I have no problem with any specific ideology but an organization whose very approach means ignoring point number 1 and some amount of point number 2 will have no place in a scientific society. Sorry.
Actually, a lot of religions (Judaism, Buddhism, and Unitarian Universalism to name a few) encourage critical thinking, particularly around philosophical and ethical questions. There's a lot more to religion than televangelist schlock, and I don't think you're thinking critically about the place of religion in society.
xkcd as usual beats us all to the point.
The Mythbusters don't claim to be a scientifically rigorous research lab. They claim to try to replicate various hypotheses to the best of their ability to see if they're true.
And a very interesting thing is that they do go back and try to repeat their results when they're disputed. Again, a common part of the scientific process is that an experimental result must be repeatable.
If you are running off with the CEO's PC for 20 hours (especially over business hours), you should fear for your job's security.
Unless you find any juicy tidbits (e.g. emails to his mistress, embezzlement schemes, evidence of a stock pump-and-dump, etc) on it. Then you will have fantastic job security if you play your cards right. *
* Unless your CEO has a mob connection
Also while we may be able to trust a President Bush or President Obama with the ability to monitor our internet transactions
Why the heck would we do a stupid thing like that?
It's worth noting that the Brits obviously drink it anyway. Funny thing that, but I guess if you can stomach British cuisine then Budweiser isn't so bad.
What the heck is taking so long? 7 and 1/2 more years for a modified spam can? WTF?
Yeah, it can't be that hard, it's only rocket science.
You're sounding a lot like a PHB setting an "aggressive" timeline on a software project with no clue about what the job really entails.
For Federalist #10, read the section on how a majority faction won't subvert the democratic republic. The size and spread of the population was critical to that argument.
For the subprime mortgages, a very likely reason the government didn't oversee the mortgage markets was because Congress and the President underfunded the organizations dedicated to overseeing the markets. For instance, the head of enforcement for the SEC testified to Congress that "While we appreciate and examine every lead we receive, we simply do not have the resources to fully investigate them all."
On your last point, you would be incorrect about the financial strength of the middle class. Using the census's figures on median and mean income: From 1949 to 1969, mean and median incomes (adjusted for inflation) approximately doubled. From 1985 to 2005, median and mean incomes (again adjusted for inflation) increased by about 20%. Looking at this chart of how those income gains were distributed also suggests that the 80's and 90's were not the environment of a middle-class powerhouse.
Lastly, under Clinton the top marginal tax rate went from 35% to 39.5%.
Yeah, they should have called it Omni Consumer Products instead.
"I suggest a new strategy - Let the guy with the exoskeleton win."
-C3PO
Actually, I have read both the Federalist Papers and Adam Smith. Federalist #10 in particular has a massive problem, namely it assumes that a faction can't organize itself because of how large the country is (which doesn't work thanks to modern communication tools). Adam Smith's big mistake is that he tends to assume that everyone understands what they need to know about what is being bought and sold, which as recent events with subprime mortgages have demonstrated is not necessarily the case.
Now, about your last paragraph, which is really fascinating:
The only hope for a lasting democracy is a vibrant middle class, which will be buried by a single payer system.
When did we have a vibrant middle class in this country? Most economists would point to the 1950's as the height of middle-class America. Which has a lot of characteristics that current America is missing like:
* very high marginal tax rates for top brackets. And by very high, I mean 75-90%.
* a heavily unionized labor force.
* High minimum wages, enough so that one minimum wage earner could support himself (yes, usually himself) and his family working 40 hours a week.
* Health care wasn't government run, but was considered a standard part of any employment offer.
It obviously wasn't perfect (particularly for black people and women), but it was the closest this country has ever come to a vibrant middle class. And it happened with economic policies that would make Ronald Reagan roll over in his grave.
Well, for Windows 7 you'll just have to use the SMB packet of death instead. Which is really too bad: usually Microsoft has a much better track record on backwards compatibility.
Actually, one of the more interesting recent political shifts is that evangelical Christians are no longer a unified conservative block of voters. A significant portion of them find the economics of more liberal folks appealing, as part of the whole "love your neighbor as yourself" thing.
1. I'll bet good money you haven't read his argument. Do so. Then we'll talk. Among other things, he and I both stated that this issue is less about race now than it was in the 1940's when Truman first tried to create a single-payer system.
2. If I grant your point entirely (that the 20-25 million foreign nationals without health insurance aren't a problem), then you still have 20-25 million citizens, or about 10% of the population, to concern yourself with. It's hardly insignificant.
3. What about those people employed by companies that aren't as flexible as yours was? There are lots of companies who's only goal with health benefits is to keep the price low, and if they lose a few employees that's just a cost of doing business.
They should do it here in the US - dove season just opened in many states
I really had no idea. I thought the US was full of hawks, not doves.
If you picked an honest comparison, you'd look at the one area of the US passenger rail network that Amtrak has complete control over, namely Boston to DC corridor. There the Acela times are comparable to flying if you factor in the time needed to get to the airport / station, get through security, wait for boarding, get a cab, and get to where you're going.
'do you have a mental disorder'
Why yes, yes I do. I'm a pathological liar on questions like this one.
"How about a bomb anecdote? You know, no punch line, just a really cute story. Are they prepared to make that distinction? I think not!" - George Carlin
Could an American please explain to me why the majority of USA seems to oppose public healthcare?
According to economist Paul Krugman in The Conscience of a Liberal, the most likely answer to this question is "because it will help black people". He argues that this was the biggest reason Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson couldn't get health care plans through. And part of the reason why Bill Clinton couldn't, and probably bigger part of the reason Barack Obama's having a tough time.
Plus (like some of my sibling posters) a lot of folks put a Somebody Else's Problem field around 40-50 million people who lack health insurance, and the even larger number of folks who's health insurance companies cancel their coverage as soon as it comes time to pay major claims.
Joel Spolsky agrees with you wholeheartedly on this:
Why am I so hardnosed about this? It's because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people's time fixing all their bugs. Firing someone you hired by mistake can take months and be nightmarishly difficult, especially if they decide to be litigious about it. In some situations it may be completely impossible to fire anyone. Bad employees demoralize the good employees. And they might be bad programmers but really nice people or maybe they really need this job, so you can't bear to fire them, or you can't fire them without pissing everybody off, or whatever. It's just a bad scene.
On the other hand, if you reject a good candidate, I mean, I guess in some existential sense an injustice has been done, but, hey, if they're so smart, don't worry, they'll get lots of good job offers. Don't be afraid that you're going to reject too many people and you won't be able to find anyone to hire. During the interview, it's not your problem. Of course, it's important to seek out good candidates. But once you're actually interviewing someone, pretend that you've got 900 more people lined up outside the door. Don't lower your standards no matter how hard it seems to find those great candidates.
(or read his spiel on interviewing yourself)
No child fails, the teacher fails the child.
As someone who worked in "alternative education" for a while, that's not entirely true. There are stupid kids out there. There are kids who don't want to learn anything at all (usually in my experience these are kids who grew up in a really privileged environment and never had to work for anything in their lives).
It is partially true. If you drone on about sines, cosines, and tangents for 15 minutes, kids will get bored. If you tell them you're going to show them how to design and build a set of steps that people won't trip on (which actually can use quite a bit of trig and geometry), they'll pay a lot more attention.
Shouldn't it be "Yet Another Terrorist Tracking Apparatus", or "YATTA!" for short? Or is that the Japanese version?
And creates a great risk of corruption among those who use it.
The horrid technical issues could easily have been intentional. Let's say (purely theoretically of course) the person charged with ensuring that voting machines got delivered was the state campaign manager for one of the presidential candidates. And said campaign manager knew that certain areas of Cuyahoga County heavily favored the opposing presidential candidate. Would it be any surprise that the voting machines that went to those areas just so happened to be the ones that failed most often?
By contrast, I'd like to give a shout-out to the most impartial election official in the country, Bill Gardner, Secretary of State of New Hampshire, who has been in office since 1976, through both legislatures and governorships of both major parties. He's been at the forefront of making sure that paper records exist for all votes cast in N.H.
See, I was thinking much more along the lines of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MRf7DrWsBk
Best proof of Danny John-Jules' genius.