Washington was offered to be king of America, which he refused, because Washington was a small government kind of guy.
It's more complicated than that: Yes, Washington turned down being effectively a king a few times. The first time was actually when he'd won the Revolution, and probably could have taken his army to Philadelphia, rounded up the Continental Congress, and become a dictator. Then there were some who kind of wanted him to take over when the government was hopelessly disfunctional under the Articles of Confederation. And then he could have been President for as long as he'd wanted to be.
However, George Washington was by all accounts a Federalist, and believed in a strong central government. President Washington, in his first term, passed the first federal tax, and when people in western PA tried to resist paying it he gathered up 13,000 militia and personally led them to crush the rebellion. While Washington had John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton all in his Cabinet, he tended to side with Hamilton on issues like creating the First Bank of the United States.
So no, not a king, but also not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination.
Well, it might have been Thor, but his style always seemed to be walking straight up to whatever he wants to smite and smacking it with Mjollnir. Zeus, on the other hand, tends to prefer smiting with a lightning bolt from afar, so this seemed more like Zeus' doing.
But yes, my Asatru and Heathen friends argued this same point with me back when the smiting happened.
I wouldn't be: A few years ago there was a large statue of Jesus near Monroe, OH struck down by a bolt of lightning, so clearly Zeus exists and decided to smite that statue.
What proof do we have that this was really James Randi answering the questions, and not just somebody (say, someone else at JREF) claiming to be Randi?
What happened was this: Mysql and Postgres got to the point of a usable release at about the same time. Mysql was very slightly easier for someone with a very limited skill set to set up, and was arguably slightly faster, so it quickly became the preference among the crowd that swarmed into "tech" thinking that throwing together some HTML pages was serious programming. This same crowd was also very attracted to PHP because it seemed really simple by comparison to Perl or C for making web pages a bit dynamic. By 2000 or so, it was entrenched as the "LAMP stack", and shared hosting providers were offering Mysql and PHP support as standard (well, sort of standard, with different PHP options available, different versions, etc).
After the.com implosion in 2001, you had all sorts of people billing themselves as programmers, but only being familiar with PHP and Mysql. Many of them are now working as independent website contractors and the like, and this same crowd is also responsible for writing most of the CMS's out there, which in turn means that they use the Mysql/PHP platform that they know, rather than learn Postgres or Python or Ruby or Java. And that means that Postgres support for CMS's is more often than not an afterthought.
Really, that's it. All the other less successful VC firms have the same tools of the trade and people that are on average about as good at spotting a winner. The difference is that the successful firms have their 5% bet pay off 10% of the time rather than 0% of the time.
Then the pro and anti climate change people get to send their best scientists and try to convince the students of their case.
Serious question: Who does the anti-climate-change side send to this debate? Because as far as I can tell, there simply aren't climatologists out there who can look at graphs like this and not think there's some sort of serious problem.
This guy isn't a Christian, he's a huckster pretending to be a Christian, as so many modern leaders of the religious right (e.g. Ted Haggard) are.
Jesus was very clear that bragging about your giving or your faith was not only missing the point but counterproductive spiritually: He praises the poor widow giving a couple of pennies, denounces the rich guy giving huge sums of money to the temple, and tells anyone who wants to pray that the right way to do it is to go into the closet in your house and lock the door first so that no one but God could hear. And of course that whole "Love thy neighbor" bit.
FTFY, really getting tired of the hurr durr, muricans r dumb meme.
Americans, compared to the rest of the industrialized world, score worse on standardized tests, are more likely to have demonstrably false beliefs about things that have been scientifically settled for at least a century, and have an all-around terrible educational system. Hence the belief that Americans are dumb.
"annual global average temperature" means exactly what it says: Annual - over the entire year Global - over all the points we can measure on the Earth Average - use statistical techniques to combine the data points Temperature - measuring of how warm / cold it is
How it's measured: With a thermometer, of course, and a computer with a formula that's probably more complicated than I can write out here to do the statistical part to deal with problems like "we have more weather stations in New York City than we do in Iqaluit". And to make sure the trends are clear, we apply the same formula for each year's data.
Go-Green initiative: An institutional process to convince the public that the institution isn't destroying the environment and doesn't have to significantly change their behavior.
I was with you except for this part. If you look at labor productivity over, say, the last couple of decades, it turns out that Americans are the most productive workers in the world, producing more per hour than anyone else. In addition, Americans work on average longer hours than other industrialized nations do.
The reason they're seen as "inefficient" is that they're paid significantly better than their counterparts in Third World countries. Another way of looking at it: Option A: Hire 1 American for $8 an hour, and he produces $12 worth of goods in that hour. Option B: Hire 4 Chinese workers for $2 an hour each, and each one produces $8 worth of goods per hour for a total of $32.
When we came here, all there was was swamp! And people said it would be daft to build a capital in a swamp, but we built one anyways, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So we built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So we built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, the strongest capital in all the world!
My story wasn't making a point of "I'm so smart, I saw it!". The point of the story is that anyone who claims that "nobody could have seen it before the crash" is lying, possibly to themselves.
Anyone who wanted to buy a house could have seen it. Anyone who had handled any piece of mortgage transactions could see it. Heck, anyone who had seen TV ads for the mortgage companies that were begging people to buy houses they couldn't really afford could have seen it. A number of economists from a wide variety of political backgrounds and theoretical schools warned about it. And that tells me that those who were trained to see it and had the job of looking for it and preventing it were either hopelessly incompetent or willfully blind.
No, I didn't, because I didn't know how high or long the bubble would go before it popped, and I was completely broke at the time. I did, however, keep the financials completely out of my portfolio.
Also, buying put options is typically less risky than shorting.
I saw the housing bubble. In 2006, specifically, when working as a programmer for a mortgage titling company. I just saw the numbers going into the database and realized that there's no possible way this could work in the long term - there were tons of refinanced loans for lower monthly payments that did nothing to pay back the principal, which more-or-less guaranteed that eventually the borrower couldn't pay.
I could see it, and I wasn't trained to see it or supposed to be looking for it. But it was there plain as day.
for doing something dumb (not intending to harm anybody)
"He didn't intend to harm anyone, he was just pointing a gun in someone's general direction and pulling the trigger, and the bullet actually ended up hitting a tree somewhere."
He gets more than someone who committs assault on a peace officer
When he pointed his laser at a police helicopter, he committed assault on a peace officer (attempting to blind him/her). So it seems fair to me that his sentence was at least that long.
The goal isn't just that this kid doesn't do it again. It's also to try to convince other knuckleheads that doing this is a really bad idea.
And as some have pointed out, the reason that this guy didn't cause a couple hundred deaths and several million dollars worth of property damage was because he was lucky. If he had in fact caused the plane to crash, he would probably be locked up for the rest of his life.
It would be nice if raw greed didn't run the world. However, reality will intrude sooner or later and all of these new discoveries will become worthless.
The problem is: How many people die before reality intrudes?
Slashdot Mirror
At first they were thinking of nuking Detroit, but then they realized that no one would notice the difference.
I'm sure the founders are hoping this idea will take off!
Washington was offered to be king of America, which he refused, because Washington was a small government kind of guy.
It's more complicated than that: Yes, Washington turned down being effectively a king a few times. The first time was actually when he'd won the Revolution, and probably could have taken his army to Philadelphia, rounded up the Continental Congress, and become a dictator. Then there were some who kind of wanted him to take over when the government was hopelessly disfunctional under the Articles of Confederation. And then he could have been President for as long as he'd wanted to be.
However, George Washington was by all accounts a Federalist, and believed in a strong central government. President Washington, in his first term, passed the first federal tax, and when people in western PA tried to resist paying it he gathered up 13,000 militia and personally led them to crush the rebellion. While Washington had John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton all in his Cabinet, he tended to side with Hamilton on issues like creating the First Bank of the United States.
So no, not a king, but also not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination.
Wouldn't it be nice if the system had some security built into it to exert control over what tower their subscribers' phone connects to.
It does have security! The DOJ is absolutely secure in the knowledge that it can have control over what tower a cell phone connects to.
Well, it might have been Thor, but his style always seemed to be walking straight up to whatever he wants to smite and smacking it with Mjollnir. Zeus, on the other hand, tends to prefer smiting with a lightning bolt from afar, so this seemed more like Zeus' doing.
But yes, my Asatru and Heathen friends argued this same point with me back when the smiting happened.
I am surprised Zeus really does exist.
I wouldn't be: A few years ago there was a large statue of Jesus near Monroe, OH struck down by a bolt of lightning, so clearly Zeus exists and decided to smite that statue.
What proof do we have that this was really James Randi answering the questions, and not just somebody (say, someone else at JREF) claiming to be Randi?
What happened was this: Mysql and Postgres got to the point of a usable release at about the same time. Mysql was very slightly easier for someone with a very limited skill set to set up, and was arguably slightly faster, so it quickly became the preference among the crowd that swarmed into "tech" thinking that throwing together some HTML pages was serious programming. This same crowd was also very attracted to PHP because it seemed really simple by comparison to Perl or C for making web pages a bit dynamic. By 2000 or so, it was entrenched as the "LAMP stack", and shared hosting providers were offering Mysql and PHP support as standard (well, sort of standard, with different PHP options available, different versions, etc).
After the .com implosion in 2001, you had all sorts of people billing themselves as programmers, but only being familiar with PHP and Mysql. Many of them are now working as independent website contractors and the like, and this same crowd is also responsible for writing most of the CMS's out there, which in turn means that they use the Mysql/PHP platform that they know, rather than learn Postgres or Python or Ruby or Java. And that means that Postgres support for CMS's is more often than not an afterthought.
It's not slavery, it's indentured servitude. And that doesn't make it any less stupid or wrong.
Luck.
Really, that's it. All the other less successful VC firms have the same tools of the trade and people that are on average about as good at spotting a winner. The difference is that the successful firms have their 5% bet pay off 10% of the time rather than 0% of the time.
Then the pro and anti climate change people get to send their best scientists and try to convince the students of their case.
Serious question: Who does the anti-climate-change side send to this debate? Because as far as I can tell, there simply aren't climatologists out there who can look at graphs like this and not think there's some sort of serious problem.
This guy isn't a Christian, he's a huckster pretending to be a Christian, as so many modern leaders of the religious right (e.g. Ted Haggard) are.
Jesus was very clear that bragging about your giving or your faith was not only missing the point but counterproductive spiritually: He praises the poor widow giving a couple of pennies, denounces the rich guy giving huge sums of money to the temple, and tells anyone who wants to pray that the right way to do it is to go into the closet in your house and lock the door first so that no one but God could hear. And of course that whole "Love thy neighbor" bit.
FTFY, really getting tired of the hurr durr, muricans r dumb meme.
Americans, compared to the rest of the industrialized world, score worse on standardized tests, are more likely to have demonstrably false beliefs about things that have been scientifically settled for at least a century, and have an all-around terrible educational system. Hence the belief that Americans are dumb.
And I write this as a "murican".
"annual global average temperature" means exactly what it says:
Annual - over the entire year
Global - over all the points we can measure on the Earth
Average - use statistical techniques to combine the data points
Temperature - measuring of how warm / cold it is
How it's measured: With a thermometer, of course, and a computer with a formula that's probably more complicated than I can write out here to do the statistical part to deal with problems like "we have more weather stations in New York City than we do in Iqaluit". And to make sure the trends are clear, we apply the same formula for each year's data.
Where I live, it's cold right now. That means that annual global average temperature must be colder than it was last year.
(Of course, this is silly "logic", but that's what most Americans in particular tend to be thinking)
Go-Green initiative: An institutional process to convince the public that the institution isn't destroying the environment and doesn't have to significantly change their behavior.
a hopelessly inefficient workforce
I was with you except for this part. If you look at labor productivity over, say, the last couple of decades, it turns out that Americans are the most productive workers in the world, producing more per hour than anyone else. In addition, Americans work on average longer hours than other industrialized nations do.
The reason they're seen as "inefficient" is that they're paid significantly better than their counterparts in Third World countries. Another way of looking at it:
Option A: Hire 1 American for $8 an hour, and he produces $12 worth of goods in that hour.
Option B: Hire 4 Chinese workers for $2 an hour each, and each one produces $8 worth of goods per hour for a total of $32.
When we came here, all there was was swamp! And people said it would be daft to build a capital in a swamp, but we built one anyways, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So we built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So we built a third. That burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, the strongest capital in all the world!
My story wasn't making a point of "I'm so smart, I saw it!". The point of the story is that anyone who claims that "nobody could have seen it before the crash" is lying, possibly to themselves.
Anyone who wanted to buy a house could have seen it. Anyone who had handled any piece of mortgage transactions could see it. Heck, anyone who had seen TV ads for the mortgage companies that were begging people to buy houses they couldn't really afford could have seen it. A number of economists from a wide variety of political backgrounds and theoretical schools warned about it. And that tells me that those who were trained to see it and had the job of looking for it and preventing it were either hopelessly incompetent or willfully blind.
No, I didn't, because I didn't know how high or long the bubble would go before it popped, and I was completely broke at the time. I did, however, keep the financials completely out of my portfolio.
Also, buying put options is typically less risky than shorting.
I saw the housing bubble. In 2006, specifically, when working as a programmer for a mortgage titling company. I just saw the numbers going into the database and realized that there's no possible way this could work in the long term - there were tons of refinanced loans for lower monthly payments that did nothing to pay back the principal, which more-or-less guaranteed that eventually the borrower couldn't pay.
I could see it, and I wasn't trained to see it or supposed to be looking for it. But it was there plain as day.
for doing something dumb (not intending to harm anybody)
"He didn't intend to harm anyone, he was just pointing a gun in someone's general direction and pulling the trigger, and the bullet actually ended up hitting a tree somewhere."
He gets more than someone who committs assault on a peace officer
When he pointed his laser at a police helicopter, he committed assault on a peace officer (attempting to blind him/her). So it seems fair to me that his sentence was at least that long.
The goal isn't just that this kid doesn't do it again. It's also to try to convince other knuckleheads that doing this is a really bad idea.
And as some have pointed out, the reason that this guy didn't cause a couple hundred deaths and several million dollars worth of property damage was because he was lucky. If he had in fact caused the plane to crash, he would probably be locked up for the rest of his life.
The sketches are proof that many great ideas start out on napkins or lined paper.
Proof: a 36" Stonehenge monument.
It would be nice if raw greed didn't run the world. However, reality will intrude sooner or later and all of these new discoveries will become worthless.
The problem is: How many people die before reality intrudes?