My question isn't about how to get my children to read more. My children like reading. They just prefer it less than outdoor activites, video games, and TV. If the power were out due to a thunderstorm, the ones who can read would be reading. So it's not a question of getting them to enjoy reading.
TV is sendentary and passive. Reading is sedentary and passive (although arguably less so than TV). Video gaming is sedentary (sometimes *) and highly interactive (non-passive). What are the unique characteristics of reading that make it a permanantly healthy activity for children? What are the unique characteristics of video gaming that make an acceptable, but generally unhealthy activity for children? It seems like there's a bias for reading and against video gaming. I don't understand why.
(*) I'm thinking of DDR (and it's ilk) as non-sedentary video games.
Why is it that people always complain about kids playing with electronics? You never see complaints about the negative effects of reading even though reading is just as sedentary and even less interactive than playing a video game. Is there a bias against gadget based sendentary time?
NOTE: I'm not some tweener complaining about all the adults who want to interrupt my game time. I've got 4 children. They get equal doses of reading, computer and TV time. All of that comes with required outdoor, non-sedentary time. I don't have to push them to go outside or play on the computer. I do have to push them to do their reading. I read this book and found it to be completely compelling.
I'm in a similar situation and I'm trying to weigh the same decision. I'm coming up with a different conclusion. For me the S3 TiVo's monthly sub is pretty expensive. And DTV is already cheaper than Time Warner with the DVR monthly fee included. Add to that the fact that TWC is doing SDV and I'm stuck between:
Stick with DTV and HDTiVo: (-) No MPEG4 HD channels (-) HDTiVo still needs phone connection (+) OTA channels work and I get great signal
Switch to TWC and S3: (-) No SDV channels (-) more expensive (+) OTA channels work and I get great signal
At this point, cost is the bigggest differentiator to me.
Of course, I will try to use the availability of the S3 to apply pressure to DTV. Our new house will be finished soon. So I'll be calling DTV to cancel. I'm going to try and extract a free HDTiVo from them. I'll use the existence of the S3 as leverage. DTV's customer retention is pretty generous when there's a credible threat that they might lose the customer. The S3 gives me that credible threat.
If you believe that climate scientists have been doing good science for the last several decades, you've gotta think that their consensus that humans are responsible for the current warming are pretty well baked.
I'm not a climate scientist. But I find the reaction of climate scientists to criticism to be a mark against them. I don't know if Lomberg is right or wrong. But he's a voice and he should be allowed to speak. If he's wrong, he should be easy to dismantle on the merits of his claims. Most climate scientists seem to think he's wrong. But at the same time they also seem unwilling to debate him on point. Scientific American gave him only a 1 page response to their 11 page critique? And when he tried to respond on his own point by point, he got sued for copyright? I don't care about Lomberg, but it sure smells like someone wants him to shut up.
As far as Crichton's critiques, I don't have any skin in the game for or against him, either. But it seems like you're criticizing him instead of his points. Isn't this the definition of ad hominem? I don't care if he is a climate scientist or not. Can you tell me about why his claims are wrong? That's something I'm interested in. If the best you can tell me that he's not qualified to critique, that seems rather weak to me. If he's not qualified to critique his claims should be easy to discredit directly.
At the end of the day, all I care about is what is or isn't true. If all the climate scientists are right, then they should be able to easily defend themselves against criticism. They need not resort to ad hominem responses. If that's all they've got, then it makes me wonder about the veracity of their science. I'm open to being convinced either way. The climate scientists haven't done a very good job of making their case. And since they need my vote to implement the policy changes that they want, I think it would be in their best interest to be compelling. Ad hominem is not compelling.
I also have a very hard time stomaching the claims about the huge downside risk of reducing carbon emissions and the miniscule upside potential.
Unfortunately, you're going to have to study some economics to better understand those downside risks. I can't adequately represent the economists claims.
Every time humanity has come up with big changes in its basic technology, vast improvements in human wealth and well-being have quickly followed.
That is only true when those technological changes were a result of mutually consentual free trade. In other words well being came because the new technology actually created benefits that people were willing to pay for. It's not well being if you're forced to pay for something that you're not sure you want. What happens is that some people, those who were right on the edge of making this decision anyway, will decide that if their money is going to be forcibly taken from them anyway, they might as well not make it. Leisure is much more enjoyable than working so that someone else can have your money. Multiply this sort of decision by a society and you end up with productivity losses, which produce inflationary pressures, which decreases everyone's purchasing power, which is (by definition) an increase in poverty. And if we've learned anything over the last 200+ years, poverty is a deadly killer. Prosperity is the only antidote.
In the history of mankind, nothing has produced more prosperty than mutually consentual free trade. Or put another way, nothing has alleviated poverty more than mutually consentual free trade. Anything that interferes with that is a deadly threat to our society. I'm entirely for technological advances improving our environment. If we're going to advance policy recommendations, we have to be extremely cautious before we interfere with free trade.
Yes, by definition. When a scientific community comes to consesus, whatever it presently concludes is accepted as correct until it's proven wrong. That's how science works. If you don't believe the climate science community, you don't believe science.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. But I didn't think that science worked on consensus. I thought science worked on verification of repeatable tests. No consensus necessary. As soon as you rely on "consensus" to determine the truth, aren't you stepping more into the realm of politics than science?
In one of his speeches Michael Crichton (yes, that one) had some really interesting commentary on the value of consensus in science. Here's the relevant quote:
I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.
Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
That's pretty compelling. Is he wrong? Isn't being skeptical of claims also part of the job of science? Does the consensus of climate scientists trump normal scientific skepticism? If so, is that ok with you?
Thanks for the tip. We currently use an allowance to teach them budgeting. They get two allowances: their weekely allowance and their birthday allowance. The weekly allowance is used to buy absolutely everything that we don't provide for them. My oldest recently saved up his allowance and money that he earned selling lemonaid and doing odd jobs for the neighbors. He used it to buy a gameboy, which my wife and I were not willing to fund nor provide as a gift. We also give them $100 allowance for their birthday parties. They can blow it all on a big party at Chucky Cheese or NASCAR Speed Park, but then they won't have anything left for a gift. Or they can (as they've consistently chosen to do) have an inexpensive at home party and save some of it for a gift. It's been working really well.
At this point, a cell phone falls into the "wife & I won't fund" area. If they are willing to fund it themselves, then I'm fine getting one for them. Of course, they're going to need to do a *LOT* of extra odd jobs in order to afford one. Or sell gallons upon gallons of lemonaid.
But thanks for the tip. I'm always looking for good ideas on how to use differing desires to teach life lessons to my children.
While I'm sympathetic to this concern, it seems equally probable to me that irrational human behavior could trigger the same sort of problem. Interestingly, here's the very next paragraph in the article you linked to:
Economist Richard Roll believes that the international nature of the stock market decline contradicts the argument that program trading was to blame. Program trading strategies were used primarily in the United States, Roll writes. If program trading caused the decline, why would markets where program trading was not prevalent such as Australia and Hong Kong have declined, as well? Although these markets might have been reacting to excessive program trading in the United States, Roll points to observations that would indicate otherwise. The crash began on October 19 in Hong Kong, spread west to Europe, and hit the United States only after Hong Kong and other markets had already declined by a significant margin.
I don't mean to suggest that I know anything about what caused Black Monday. But it seems dangerous to me to suggest that it's only possible cause could be algorithmic trading. Everything has pros and cons. Including relying on human behavior. It's a mistake to assume that changing one decision could have prevented disaster. Maybe the disaster wouldn't be exactly the same, but everything has pros and cons, and over time the cons come to bite.
However - DVR functionality at this point is just about commonplace - Dish/Echostar's DVRs perform the same functions that Tivo, and 50 other competing products do, and to tell Echostar that it can no longer compete in this now-established market is tantamount to handing the company over to a Firing Squad.
I would agree with that argument if TiVo hadn't been attempting to resolve patent issues with Echostar for several years. E* can hardly claim ignorance on this issue. They can't now say, "Well we infringed on the patent, but we didn't know!" IMHO, it was E*'s defiance that enabled cable companies to feel free to implement their own DVRs.
This is definately a win for TiVo. This is definately a loss for E*, but I think the loss was E*'s own doing. It's also a loss for Time Warner, who is not in negotiations with TiVo and a win for Comcast who is. And depending on whether or not you think that TiVo functionality is better than all the other DVRs out there, it may or may not be a win for the consumer.
But as far as E* is concerned, this is exactly the outcome they should have expected if they lost the case. As far as E*'s customers are concerned, I am almost entirely certain that E* will not shut off DVR service to their customers. They'd lose way too many customers to DirecTV - who does license TiVo - or to cable companies who have no injunction over their heads. What will happen is that E* will pay a license fee to TiVo in order to retain its customer base. E*'s profits will go down a little bit. E*'s stock will take a hit. TiVo's profits & stock will go up. E*'s customers won't experience anything different.
I have 4 sons, the oldest of which is 8. For my children, there is no place that they go where they are not supervised by adults. So it's not really an issue... yet. But it soon will be. Soon, I'm going to be faced with a dillemma. On the one hand, I want them to have access to a cell phone so that they can call me if they need me. It's a safety thing.
On the other hand, I really don't want them eating up 17x10^23 minutes every month. Nor do I want to worry about the frequency with which my kids tend to lose things. They lose things that aren't important to them. And if I gave them a device that limited their minutes and contacts (e.g. a firefly type device) then they'd probably lose it because it's just not that important to them.
The one thing I am absolutely certain of, however, is that I do not want to see some law come in and make the decision for me. Let me decide how old is an appropriate age for my children to have a cell phone. What might be a sensible answer for my kids might not be a sensible answer for my neighbor's kids. My neighbor is a single parent mom. Her 8 year old has a cell phone. She absolutely relies on her kids ability to have a cell phone, and it seems a sensible thing for her situation. Any law, even one that tries to think of all the contingencies, will ultimately fail to account for something. This is better left to individuals to decide for themselves and leave the legislation out of it.
Of course, what will happen now is the the TSA or the FAA is going to ban all carryon liquids on air travel, and just for good measure will throw in food. So now that the airlines don't offer free food on flights, anyone want to start a pool on when the free sodas on the airplane will suddenly become very expensive? Put me down for Aug 18, 2006.
I'm not trying to suggest that this is some sort of plot by the airlines to charge higher drink prices. I don't think any such thing. I'm simply saying that this is the likely result of the inane government action that will innevitably follow: banning all carryon fluids on all commercial flights.
The number itself might be unreasonable, but not the fact that the damages are more than the income.
Really? Aren't the damages in this particular case supposed to be fees that advertisers paid to Google that they shouldn't have paid? If that's true, how can the plaintiff attorneys allege that the damages for click fraud exceed the total revenue that Google has taken in during it's entire lifetime?
NOTE: I'm not saying your wrong. I just don't understand. Can you clarify?
Instead, all they want is pointless, worthless crap, or space on a giant banner ad site no sane person would ever visit save out of morbid curiousity after seeing an article carried by the AP.
Why do you care? If the thing that I want seems pointless to you, what do you care? I'd bet that you purchase some things that seem pointless to me. But the advantage of me earning my money and you earning your money is that we each get to decide what to do with it, even if it seems pointless to someone else.
Just out of curiosity, how would you propose that purchasing be done? Are you suggesting that we prevent people from purchasing what you think of as pointless crap? How would you implement that? What if that enforcement agency looked at slashdot, saw all of the -1 rated posts and concluded that this was a pointless purchase? Don't you think that you'd feel your freedom was impinged upon? Don't you think that if you enforce purchasing controls, that ALL people who aren't allowed to purchase something they want (even if it's "pointless crap") will also feel that their freedom was impinged upon?
Personally, I don't see any way of solving the pointless crap problem without dramatically curtailing individual freedom. IMHO, I'm happy to live with the problem of folks buying "pointless crap" if it means we get to keep individual freedom.
Prior to reading a few articles on the subject, I had taken the assumption that network neutrality was a good thing. It didn't cross my mind to question whether or not it was actually good. But then I read this article and it tweaked my desire to have the government leave me alone to negotiate my own private decisions.
But, of course, I'm frustrated by this. I'm really nervous about the ability of the telco and the cableco to take away my easy access to vonage (or any other 3rd party service that I might like). Both of those companies offer competing voice services at a higher price. So they have incentive to make it hard for me to use a more efficient and cheaper solution. I don't know how to resolve this because I feel like I have very little choice in the matter and I can't effectively make use of an alternative high speed broadband provider.
That is, until I read this article which argued that the entire problem starts with government regulation of telco and cableco providers. We have very little choice because the government came in and granted exclusive monopolies. Do we really think the solution to the problems created by government regulation is more government regulation? For my part, I don't.
I now think that the best solution is to get the regulating bodies out of the way so that competition can be employed. As soon as there's a competitive marketplace for last mile high speed connectivity, if the cableco restricts my access to vonage, there's lots of other choices. They'll lose market share and the benefits of network neutrality will be achieved without all of the heavy handed (and ineffective) government oversite.
My current stance is: have patience. It might just work itself out on it's own. It might not and at that time the argument in favor of network neutrality might have more weight. But for now, I'm not convinced. And if you're certain that we need to "do something" then the thing we should do is release the restrictions on who can and can't provide last mile service to my house.
But, of course, I'm willing to be wrong on this one. Anyone care to educate me?
Oh... and here's a pretty good compilation of opinions on the subject.
I don't think I missed your point. I just don't happen to agree with it. Applying a different meaning to "dongle" than what you like does not make someone ignorant. It means that the meaning of the word has grown or changed.
Stick with your semantic purity if you insist. The fact that I won't be semantically pure does not make me a gansta. Nor does it make me ignorant. (Although you're welcome to believe both of those if you wish.) It simply means that I'm adaptable enough to accept new meanings for words.
FWIW, I happen to agree that there are some words (e.g. "crib" & "homey", etc) which you wouldn't expect to hear in professional circles. However, just because they exist, does not mean that all words that evolve to have new meanings are unacceptable professionally. Your vision of word meaning as black and white is overly simplistic and not reflective of the real world. IMHO.
You are certainly welcome to believe whatever you wish. However, you're ignoring something that I think is important: folly is in the eye of the beholder. There was a time when it was considered slang to say "don't" and "won't", or any other contractions. The only contraction that remains as slang is "ain't", but even that's in the dictionary now.
Is the transformation of "don't" and "won't" language evolution? Yes, sure. But if you argue that the transfermation of "dongle" is not language evolution, I would have to disagree with you. The mechanism by which "don't" and "won't" became acceptable is the same mechanism by which "dongle" has taken on more than one meaning. People using it understood it and accepted it.
The vast majority of people who use "dongle" accept that it can mean something more than a license verification device. And the evidence for this is the large number of people who say "bluetooth dongle" and seem to understand what it means. The old meaning will only be upheld by the minority wishing to retain semantic purity. Frankly, I think the distinction you make between "educated technology expert" and "gansta moron" is a bit to broad brushed. I use "dongle" the way that you dislike and I get paid a lot of money to be a technology expert. My company is not willing to pay for any type of moron, gansta or not. The use of "dongle" is simply not something they consider in their hiring practices. The use of the word "crib" to mean my home, might not be very well received during an interview. But "dongle" seems to have received much wider spread acceptance than "crib".
About the only thing I agree with is that language is not a democracy. It's much more decentralized than even that. It's a market. What we get is the ability to communicate. What we pay is flexibility. If you're inflexible, you can't continue to participate in the market. Soon you won't be able to understand anyone outside of your semantically pure circle, nor will anyone else be able to understand you.
Good luck with that.
Here's my question for you: if you believe that language is not decentralized, then who is in control? Where are the edicts describing when we're going to start using "bit" to mean "binary digit", or "internet" to mean globally connected computer network? You might say that the dictionaries decide, but they don't. They reflect the changes that have already happened. They don't make those changes. So, if it's not a decentralized process, where are the central authorities deciding what new words that none of us have heard of we're going to use? In my entire life, I don't remember ever reading one.
The problem is that language doesn't work that way. All of us, as a group, are in control of language. Words that were intended for one context frequently apply to all kinds of other contexts. And people gravitate towards analogies. So the "dongle" that you speak of, works very well as an analogy for a bluetooth peripheral. Pretty soon, "dongle" means any sort of thing you plug into a PC that sticks out the end.
It is very difficult to keep people from using words the way that they want to. This is the motivation behind trademark laws. Once the mass decides that a word (e.g. kleenex or xerox) means something more than the specific original intention, the game is up. I believe that dongle has passed that threshold.
So you can continue, in a Quixote-esque manner, to try and steer people back to the single specific meaning of dongle. But I don't think you'll succeed. And I think you're likely to get very frustrated. But if that's what you want to do, have at it!
I have a the DirecTV integrated TiVo. I can already receive a huge number of movies, watch them on demand, and pause/rewind/etc.
The difference is that this takes a little bit of planning. Recently DirecTV had a free everything weekend, in which we got everyone of their non-PPV channels for free for the entire weekend. That weekend, my TiVo recorded pretty much non-stop on HBO, Starz, Cinemax & Showtime. I've gotten through a few of those movies that I recorded. By the time I get through all of them, it'll be time for another free weekend.
But if I get impatient, I can order a PPV and record it and watch it whenever I want, as many times as I want, until I delete it.
There are pros/cons to Moviebeam. For example, they have a much better selection. But that's countered by the fact that what I do record, I can keep until my hard drive dies.
Doesn't seem like a service that I really want/need.
OK. But I would comment that Enron's stock price killed Enron much more quickly than the Federal Government. In other words the market is a much better mechanism for behavior correction than the Federal Government.
Sorry, but this story happened in the United States, where that wouldn't work. Our Constitutional rights only protect us from government actions. Private corporations are not required to follow the Bill of Rights.
True. But private corporations, as opposed to the government, are not allowed to forcibly extract money from us. If a private corporation does that, it's called theft. When the government does that, it's called taxes. The reason that we have limits on the government is because they can foricbly extract our money. Without those limits we'd have constant coups.
So what controls do private corporations have? They are regulated by customer satisfaction. Each one of us has a right to stop being a customer to a private corporation. We control their purse strings. So they are forced to make sure we're happy.
It doesn't matter that the constitution only describes limitations on the government and not private entities. The limits and controls built into a free society with property rights are much more powerful limitations than the constitutional limits on government.
In a private school, the story is different: He would have no rights whatsoever.
That's only true if you ignore the right that he and his parents have to extract their money from the school and send it and the kid somewhere less draconian.
And good luck finding a "market" solution to this. Competition only works when at least one competitor is willing to supply what you want. If they all have "gentlemen's agreements" to not supply something, you don't get it.
The "gentleman's agreements" are surefire ways to lose market share. Don't believe me? How well do you think the RIAA is doing with their "gentleman's agreement" to only sell music through their existing distribution channels? Don't like that example, how about the american car companies who never updated their manufacturing processes and enabled Toyota and Honda and others to come in and steal huge portions of market share? Every example of innovation ever, came about because someone decided that the status quo wasn't good enough. Enormous corporations have been toppled by this process.
Good ideas simply can not be kept in the can. Someone else will come along and let them out to the detriment of the gentlemen who agreed to squash them.
I believe that I do understand the meaning of socialism:
Socialism refers to a broad array of doctrines, and may also refer to political movements that aspire to put these doctrines into practice. These movements generally envisage a system of social organization in which property and the distribution of income are subject to social control. As an economic system, socialism is usually associated with state or collective ownership of the means of production. This control may be either direct, exercised through popular collectives such as workers' councils, or it may be indirect, exercised on behalf of the people by the state.
Of course, public schools have local oversite. But they simply do not have control. And if you want an example of that, I submit to you No Child Left Behind. How many people who don't like the rules imposed have any control to supercede them?
I don't think you have a very good understanding of the words "Personal Responsibility". What they mean is that if you don't like the private school you're sending your kids to, it's your responsibility to either influence change or leave. If you don't like the terms of your employment, it's your responsibility to find a new employer. In general, you are responsible for the condition of your life. If you don't like it, change it.
I love taking shots at public entities because they are
expensive
ineffective
destroyers of freedom
And all in the name of insulating people against the consequences of free choices. I'm glad you think that public institutions provide you excellent service. I submit that they are the highest cost producer and if we sent less of our money to them and didn't allow them to spend as much as they do, we'd all be better off and richer.
Public schools are funded through socialist means. Say what you want about control of economic resources by workers, but it's just not true. Economic control in socialism is done by the government. They tax the money and then provide it for something else. Capitalism is a much better example of distributed control of economic resources. No one forces you to purchase food from BiLo or Publix or (whetever your local grocer is). As a result the owners of those stores have no control over your economic resources. You have all the control. If you don't like the quality of produce, you go somewhere else. The owner of that grocery chain can do nothing about it.
Compare and contrast this with public education. It's paid for through taxes. It's regulated through a central, hierarchical authority. The people who receive the education services, get one and only one choice: attend or not. There are no alternatives. You can't extract your tax money to go somewhere else. You can't even extract your tax money to fund home schooling, much less private schooling. If you try to keep your money, the government comes and puts you in jail for tax evasion. The vast majority of the population has absolutely no control over how their money gets spent in public education... except maybe every 4 years when a new election cycle comes up. And then you'd better hope that your pet peeve gets noticed enough to become an election issue. And even then your favorite guy might lose. But even if he wins, and your solution gets implemented. There may be other folks who were happy without that solution and are now forced to fund that solution and have it applied to them. No matter who gets to decide in socialism, someone gets screwed.
Sorry. Socialism can not work. The only thing socialism successfully does is concentrate decision making power into government officials - who are about as far away as possible from the real costs and benefits of the decisions they make.
Except that the desire to retain funds that can easily be removed in a private system provides protection against first amendments rights far more effectively than the federal government does. Or, put another way, if Best Buy is violating your privacy rights, you don't need to get a federal subpoena to get it to stop. You simply purchase stuff somewhere else.
If education were purchased instead of supplied by the government, education would work this way, too.
However, if you are under the age of 18 in the United States, school attendance is mandatory. If your school or your school district oversteps its authority, you can't just go elsewhere.
In our current socialized education system, that's absolutely correct. But in a private system - even one that's based on public vouchers - if the school you were attending offended you and your parents' sense of privacy, you'd just switch to a different school that did a better job. If the privacy violations were too egregious, then that school would not last long.
Privatization allows for choice. Choice allows for competition. Competition weeds out crap like this. Democratic/socialist systems only allow for crap like this to be weeded out at election time, and only if they become an election issue. In other words everyone has to hate it in order for it to get fixed in a socialist system. In a private/capitalist system, if you don't like it, you can fix it by exercising your options. It doesn't fix it for everyone. It fixes it only for those who really care about it. Which has the added benefit of making the solution cheaper since the scope of the fix is smaller.
I remain undeterred in my belief that privatization would do a better job of preventing crap like this.
I went to private high school for 4 years. I'm absolutely certain that the level of privacy that I wanted was not the same as what the school allowed for. What I don't know is whether or not the level of privacy afforded by the school is different from the level that my parents wanted for me.
However, in this case, it's clear that the parents are aligned with the kid in opposition to the level of intrusion the school is applying. Since it's the parents who pay, it's the parents that a private school will listen to. I don't think that private schools could get away with this kind of thing in opposition to the will of the parents and survive long.
As far as workplaces, there is federal law that prevents discrimination on some of the things you are worried about. With respect to the rest, remember who the customer is: the employer is the one who's paying. If the terms of your employment state that they can fire you for those things, then they can. You accepted the employement on those terms.
But employers have to be careful even without federal law. The most important and expensive part of almost every industry are human resources. Finding people and retaining people is hard. If a company is too unjudicious in their firing process, they will lose people that they don't want to lose. This will cause them to lose business.
I would suggest this: if you believe that private industry currently pays too little to its employees in the way of privacy, then that means that there is a market out there which you could tap into to provide that level of privacy to your employees. If the demand is high enough, you might even be able to offer them slightly less cash incentive in order to pay them higher rewards in employee privacy... maybe.
My point is that if you have a good idea to sell, you also have a great way to attract a LARGE number of talented employees away from your competition. Go do it! I guarantee that if incumbant company X starts losing all of their employees to you, they will change their employee privacy policies.
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My question isn't about how to get my children to read more. My children like reading. They just prefer it less than outdoor activites, video games, and TV. If the power were out due to a thunderstorm, the ones who can read would be reading. So it's not a question of getting them to enjoy reading.
TV is sendentary and passive. Reading is sedentary and passive (although arguably less so than TV). Video gaming is sedentary (sometimes *) and highly interactive (non-passive). What are the unique characteristics of reading that make it a permanantly healthy activity for children? What are the unique characteristics of video gaming that make an acceptable, but generally unhealthy activity for children? It seems like there's a bias for reading and against video gaming. I don't understand why.
(*) I'm thinking of DDR (and it's ilk) as non-sedentary video games.
Why is it that people always complain about kids playing with electronics? You never see complaints about the negative effects of reading even though reading is just as sedentary and even less interactive than playing a video game. Is there a bias against gadget based sendentary time?
NOTE: I'm not some tweener complaining about all the adults who want to interrupt my game time. I've got 4 children. They get equal doses of reading, computer and TV time. All of that comes with required outdoor, non-sedentary time. I don't have to push them to go outside or play on the computer. I do have to push them to do their reading. I read this book and found it to be completely compelling.
- Stick with DTV and HDTiVo: (-) No MPEG4 HD channels (-) HDTiVo still needs phone connection (+) OTA channels work and I get great signal
- Switch to TWC and S3: (-) No SDV channels (-) more expensive (+) OTA channels work and I get great signal
At this point, cost is the bigggest differentiator to me.Of course, I will try to use the availability of the S3 to apply pressure to DTV. Our new house will be finished soon. So I'll be calling DTV to cancel. I'm going to try and extract a free HDTiVo from them. I'll use the existence of the S3 as leverage. DTV's customer retention is pretty generous when there's a credible threat that they might lose the customer. The S3 gives me that credible threat.
I'm not a climate scientist. But I find the reaction of climate scientists to criticism to be a mark against them. I don't know if Lomberg is right or wrong. But he's a voice and he should be allowed to speak. If he's wrong, he should be easy to dismantle on the merits of his claims. Most climate scientists seem to think he's wrong. But at the same time they also seem unwilling to debate him on point. Scientific American gave him only a 1 page response to their 11 page critique? And when he tried to respond on his own point by point, he got sued for copyright? I don't care about Lomberg, but it sure smells like someone wants him to shut up.
As far as Crichton's critiques, I don't have any skin in the game for or against him, either. But it seems like you're criticizing him instead of his points. Isn't this the definition of ad hominem? I don't care if he is a climate scientist or not. Can you tell me about why his claims are wrong? That's something I'm interested in. If the best you can tell me that he's not qualified to critique, that seems rather weak to me. If he's not qualified to critique his claims should be easy to discredit directly.
At the end of the day, all I care about is what is or isn't true. If all the climate scientists are right, then they should be able to easily defend themselves against criticism. They need not resort to ad hominem responses. If that's all they've got, then it makes me wonder about the veracity of their science. I'm open to being convinced either way. The climate scientists haven't done a very good job of making their case. And since they need my vote to implement the policy changes that they want, I think it would be in their best interest to be compelling. Ad hominem is not compelling.
Unfortunately, you're going to have to study some economics to better understand those downside risks. I can't adequately represent the economists claims.
That is only true when those technological changes were a result of mutually consentual free trade. In other words well being came because the new technology actually created benefits that people were willing to pay for. It's not well being if you're forced to pay for something that you're not sure you want. What happens is that some people, those who were right on the edge of making this decision anyway, will decide that if their money is going to be forcibly taken from them anyway, they might as well not make it. Leisure is much more enjoyable than working so that someone else can have your money. Multiply this sort of decision by a society and you end up with productivity losses, which produce inflationary pressures, which decreases everyone's purchasing power, which is (by definition) an increase in poverty. And if we've learned anything over the last 200+ years, poverty is a deadly killer. Prosperity is the only antidote.
In the history of mankind, nothing has produced more prosperty than mutually consentual free trade. Or put another way, nothing has alleviated poverty more than mutually consentual free trade. Anything that interferes with that is a deadly threat to our society. I'm entirely for technological advances improving our environment. If we're going to advance policy recommendations, we have to be extremely cautious before we interfere with free trade.
Thanks for the response.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. But I didn't think that science worked on consensus. I thought science worked on verification of repeatable tests. No consensus necessary. As soon as you rely on "consensus" to determine the truth, aren't you stepping more into the realm of politics than science?
In one of his speeches Michael Crichton (yes, that one) had some really interesting commentary on the value of consensus in science. Here's the relevant quote:
That's pretty compelling. Is he wrong? Isn't being skeptical of claims also part of the job of science? Does the consensus of climate scientists trump normal scientific skepticism? If so, is that ok with you?
Thanks for the tip. We currently use an allowance to teach them budgeting. They get two allowances: their weekely allowance and their birthday allowance. The weekly allowance is used to buy absolutely everything that we don't provide for them. My oldest recently saved up his allowance and money that he earned selling lemonaid and doing odd jobs for the neighbors. He used it to buy a gameboy, which my wife and I were not willing to fund nor provide as a gift. We also give them $100 allowance for their birthday parties. They can blow it all on a big party at Chucky Cheese or NASCAR Speed Park, but then they won't have anything left for a gift. Or they can (as they've consistently chosen to do) have an inexpensive at home party and save some of it for a gift. It's been working really well.
At this point, a cell phone falls into the "wife & I won't fund" area. If they are willing to fund it themselves, then I'm fine getting one for them. Of course, they're going to need to do a *LOT* of extra odd jobs in order to afford one. Or sell gallons upon gallons of lemonaid.
But thanks for the tip. I'm always looking for good ideas on how to use differing desires to teach life lessons to my children.
If I had the mod points to give you +1,Insightful, you'd get one.
I would agree with that argument if TiVo hadn't been attempting to resolve patent issues with Echostar for several years. E* can hardly claim ignorance on this issue. They can't now say, "Well we infringed on the patent, but we didn't know!" IMHO, it was E*'s defiance that enabled cable companies to feel free to implement their own DVRs.
This is definately a win for TiVo. This is definately a loss for E*, but I think the loss was E*'s own doing. It's also a loss for Time Warner, who is not in negotiations with TiVo and a win for Comcast who is. And depending on whether or not you think that TiVo functionality is better than all the other DVRs out there, it may or may not be a win for the consumer.
But as far as E* is concerned, this is exactly the outcome they should have expected if they lost the case. As far as E*'s customers are concerned, I am almost entirely certain that E* will not shut off DVR service to their customers. They'd lose way too many customers to DirecTV - who does license TiVo - or to cable companies who have no injunction over their heads. What will happen is that E* will pay a license fee to TiVo in order to retain its customer base. E*'s profits will go down a little bit. E*'s stock will take a hit. TiVo's profits & stock will go up. E*'s customers won't experience anything different.
$.02
I have 4 sons, the oldest of which is 8. For my children, there is no place that they go where they are not supervised by adults. So it's not really an issue... yet. But it soon will be. Soon, I'm going to be faced with a dillemma. On the one hand, I want them to have access to a cell phone so that they can call me if they need me. It's a safety thing.
On the other hand, I really don't want them eating up 17x10^23 minutes every month. Nor do I want to worry about the frequency with which my kids tend to lose things. They lose things that aren't important to them. And if I gave them a device that limited their minutes and contacts (e.g. a firefly type device) then they'd probably lose it because it's just not that important to them.
The one thing I am absolutely certain of, however, is that I do not want to see some law come in and make the decision for me. Let me decide how old is an appropriate age for my children to have a cell phone. What might be a sensible answer for my kids might not be a sensible answer for my neighbor's kids. My neighbor is a single parent mom. Her 8 year old has a cell phone. She absolutely relies on her kids ability to have a cell phone, and it seems a sensible thing for her situation. Any law, even one that tries to think of all the contingencies, will ultimately fail to account for something. This is better left to individuals to decide for themselves and leave the legislation out of it.
Of course, what will happen now is the the TSA or the FAA is going to ban all carryon liquids on air travel, and just for good measure will throw in food. So now that the airlines don't offer free food on flights, anyone want to start a pool on when the free sodas on the airplane will suddenly become very expensive? Put me down for Aug 18, 2006.
I'm not trying to suggest that this is some sort of plot by the airlines to charge higher drink prices. I don't think any such thing. I'm simply saying that this is the likely result of the inane government action that will innevitably follow: banning all carryon fluids on all commercial flights.
Really? Aren't the damages in this particular case supposed to be fees that advertisers paid to Google that they shouldn't have paid? If that's true, how can the plaintiff attorneys allege that the damages for click fraud exceed the total revenue that Google has taken in during it's entire lifetime?
NOTE: I'm not saying your wrong. I just don't understand. Can you clarify?
Why do you care? If the thing that I want seems pointless to you, what do you care? I'd bet that you purchase some things that seem pointless to me. But the advantage of me earning my money and you earning your money is that we each get to decide what to do with it, even if it seems pointless to someone else.
Just out of curiosity, how would you propose that purchasing be done? Are you suggesting that we prevent people from purchasing what you think of as pointless crap? How would you implement that? What if that enforcement agency looked at slashdot, saw all of the -1 rated posts and concluded that this was a pointless purchase? Don't you think that you'd feel your freedom was impinged upon? Don't you think that if you enforce purchasing controls, that ALL people who aren't allowed to purchase something they want (even if it's "pointless crap") will also feel that their freedom was impinged upon?
Personally, I don't see any way of solving the pointless crap problem without dramatically curtailing individual freedom. IMHO, I'm happy to live with the problem of folks buying "pointless crap" if it means we get to keep individual freedom.
Prior to reading a few articles on the subject, I had taken the assumption that network neutrality was a good thing. It didn't cross my mind to question whether or not it was actually good. But then I read this article and it tweaked my desire to have the government leave me alone to negotiate my own private decisions.
But, of course, I'm frustrated by this. I'm really nervous about the ability of the telco and the cableco to take away my easy access to vonage (or any other 3rd party service that I might like). Both of those companies offer competing voice services at a higher price. So they have incentive to make it hard for me to use a more efficient and cheaper solution. I don't know how to resolve this because I feel like I have very little choice in the matter and I can't effectively make use of an alternative high speed broadband provider.
That is, until I read this article which argued that the entire problem starts with government regulation of telco and cableco providers. We have very little choice because the government came in and granted exclusive monopolies. Do we really think the solution to the problems created by government regulation is more government regulation? For my part, I don't.
I now think that the best solution is to get the regulating bodies out of the way so that competition can be employed. As soon as there's a competitive marketplace for last mile high speed connectivity, if the cableco restricts my access to vonage, there's lots of other choices. They'll lose market share and the benefits of network neutrality will be achieved without all of the heavy handed (and ineffective) government oversite.
My current stance is: have patience. It might just work itself out on it's own. It might not and at that time the argument in favor of network neutrality might have more weight. But for now, I'm not convinced. And if you're certain that we need to "do something" then the thing we should do is release the restrictions on who can and can't provide last mile service to my house.
But, of course, I'm willing to be wrong on this one. Anyone care to educate me?
Oh... and here's a pretty good compilation of opinions on the subject.
I don't think I missed your point. I just don't happen to agree with it. Applying a different meaning to "dongle" than what you like does not make someone ignorant. It means that the meaning of the word has grown or changed.
Stick with your semantic purity if you insist. The fact that I won't be semantically pure does not make me a gansta. Nor does it make me ignorant. (Although you're welcome to believe both of those if you wish.) It simply means that I'm adaptable enough to accept new meanings for words.
FWIW, I happen to agree that there are some words (e.g. "crib" & "homey", etc) which you wouldn't expect to hear in professional circles. However, just because they exist, does not mean that all words that evolve to have new meanings are unacceptable professionally. Your vision of word meaning as black and white is overly simplistic and not reflective of the real world. IMHO.
You are certainly welcome to believe whatever you wish. However, you're ignoring something that I think is important: folly is in the eye of the beholder. There was a time when it was considered slang to say "don't" and "won't", or any other contractions. The only contraction that remains as slang is "ain't", but even that's in the dictionary now.
Is the transformation of "don't" and "won't" language evolution? Yes, sure. But if you argue that the transfermation of "dongle" is not language evolution, I would have to disagree with you. The mechanism by which "don't" and "won't" became acceptable is the same mechanism by which "dongle" has taken on more than one meaning. People using it understood it and accepted it.
The vast majority of people who use "dongle" accept that it can mean something more than a license verification device. And the evidence for this is the large number of people who say "bluetooth dongle" and seem to understand what it means. The old meaning will only be upheld by the minority wishing to retain semantic purity. Frankly, I think the distinction you make between "educated technology expert" and "gansta moron" is a bit to broad brushed. I use "dongle" the way that you dislike and I get paid a lot of money to be a technology expert. My company is not willing to pay for any type of moron, gansta or not. The use of "dongle" is simply not something they consider in their hiring practices. The use of the word "crib" to mean my home, might not be very well received during an interview. But "dongle" seems to have received much wider spread acceptance than "crib".
About the only thing I agree with is that language is not a democracy. It's much more decentralized than even that. It's a market. What we get is the ability to communicate. What we pay is flexibility. If you're inflexible, you can't continue to participate in the market. Soon you won't be able to understand anyone outside of your semantically pure circle, nor will anyone else be able to understand you.
Good luck with that.
Here's my question for you: if you believe that language is not decentralized, then who is in control? Where are the edicts describing when we're going to start using "bit" to mean "binary digit", or "internet" to mean globally connected computer network? You might say that the dictionaries decide, but they don't. They reflect the changes that have already happened. They don't make those changes. So, if it's not a decentralized process, where are the central authorities deciding what new words that none of us have heard of we're going to use? In my entire life, I don't remember ever reading one.
The problem is that language doesn't work that way. All of us, as a group, are in control of language. Words that were intended for one context frequently apply to all kinds of other contexts. And people gravitate towards analogies. So the "dongle" that you speak of, works very well as an analogy for a bluetooth peripheral. Pretty soon, "dongle" means any sort of thing you plug into a PC that sticks out the end.
It is very difficult to keep people from using words the way that they want to. This is the motivation behind trademark laws. Once the mass decides that a word (e.g. kleenex or xerox) means something more than the specific original intention, the game is up. I believe that dongle has passed that threshold.
So you can continue, in a Quixote-esque manner, to try and steer people back to the single specific meaning of dongle. But I don't think you'll succeed. And I think you're likely to get very frustrated. But if that's what you want to do, have at it!
I have a the DirecTV integrated TiVo. I can already receive a huge number of movies, watch them on demand, and pause/rewind/etc.
The difference is that this takes a little bit of planning. Recently DirecTV had a free everything weekend, in which we got everyone of their non-PPV channels for free for the entire weekend. That weekend, my TiVo recorded pretty much non-stop on HBO, Starz, Cinemax & Showtime. I've gotten through a few of those movies that I recorded. By the time I get through all of them, it'll be time for another free weekend.
But if I get impatient, I can order a PPV and record it and watch it whenever I want, as many times as I want, until I delete it.
There are pros/cons to Moviebeam. For example, they have a much better selection. But that's countered by the fact that what I do record, I can keep until my hard drive dies.
Doesn't seem like a service that I really want/need.
OK. But I would comment that Enron's stock price killed Enron much more quickly than the Federal Government. In other words the market is a much better mechanism for behavior correction than the Federal Government.
True. But private corporations, as opposed to the government, are not allowed to forcibly extract money from us. If a private corporation does that, it's called theft. When the government does that, it's called taxes. The reason that we have limits on the government is because they can foricbly extract our money. Without those limits we'd have constant coups.
So what controls do private corporations have? They are regulated by customer satisfaction. Each one of us has a right to stop being a customer to a private corporation. We control their purse strings. So they are forced to make sure we're happy.
It doesn't matter that the constitution only describes limitations on the government and not private entities. The limits and controls built into a free society with property rights are much more powerful limitations than the constitutional limits on government.
That's only true if you ignore the right that he and his parents have to extract their money from the school and send it and the kid somewhere less draconian.
The "gentleman's agreements" are surefire ways to lose market share. Don't believe me? How well do you think the RIAA is doing with their "gentleman's agreement" to only sell music through their existing distribution channels? Don't like that example, how about the american car companies who never updated their manufacturing processes and enabled Toyota and Honda and others to come in and steal huge portions of market share? Every example of innovation ever, came about because someone decided that the status quo wasn't good enough. Enormous corporations have been toppled by this process.
Good ideas simply can not be kept in the can. Someone else will come along and let them out to the detriment of the gentlemen who agreed to squash them.
Of course, public schools have local oversite. But they simply do not have control. And if you want an example of that, I submit to you No Child Left Behind. How many people who don't like the rules imposed have any control to supercede them?
I don't think you have a very good understanding of the words "Personal Responsibility". What they mean is that if you don't like the private school you're sending your kids to, it's your responsibility to either influence change or leave. If you don't like the terms of your employment, it's your responsibility to find a new employer. In general, you are responsible for the condition of your life. If you don't like it, change it.
I love taking shots at public entities because they are
And all in the name of insulating people against the consequences of free choices. I'm glad you think that public institutions provide you excellent service. I submit that they are the highest cost producer and if we sent less of our money to them and didn't allow them to spend as much as they do, we'd all be better off and richer.
Public schools are funded through socialist means. Say what you want about control of economic resources by workers, but it's just not true. Economic control in socialism is done by the government. They tax the money and then provide it for something else. Capitalism is a much better example of distributed control of economic resources. No one forces you to purchase food from BiLo or Publix or (whetever your local grocer is). As a result the owners of those stores have no control over your economic resources. You have all the control. If you don't like the quality of produce, you go somewhere else. The owner of that grocery chain can do nothing about it.
Compare and contrast this with public education. It's paid for through taxes. It's regulated through a central, hierarchical authority. The people who receive the education services, get one and only one choice: attend or not. There are no alternatives. You can't extract your tax money to go somewhere else. You can't even extract your tax money to fund home schooling, much less private schooling. If you try to keep your money, the government comes and puts you in jail for tax evasion. The vast majority of the population has absolutely no control over how their money gets spent in public education... except maybe every 4 years when a new election cycle comes up. And then you'd better hope that your pet peeve gets noticed enough to become an election issue. And even then your favorite guy might lose. But even if he wins, and your solution gets implemented. There may be other folks who were happy without that solution and are now forced to fund that solution and have it applied to them. No matter who gets to decide in socialism, someone gets screwed.
Sorry. Socialism can not work. The only thing socialism successfully does is concentrate decision making power into government officials - who are about as far away as possible from the real costs and benefits of the decisions they make.
Except that the desire to retain funds that can easily be removed in a private system provides protection against first amendments rights far more effectively than the federal government does. Or, put another way, if Best Buy is violating your privacy rights, you don't need to get a federal subpoena to get it to stop. You simply purchase stuff somewhere else.
If education were purchased instead of supplied by the government, education would work this way, too.
Privatization allows for choice. Choice allows for competition. Competition weeds out crap like this. Democratic/socialist systems only allow for crap like this to be weeded out at election time, and only if they become an election issue. In other words everyone has to hate it in order for it to get fixed in a socialist system. In a private/capitalist system, if you don't like it, you can fix it by exercising your options. It doesn't fix it for everyone. It fixes it only for those who really care about it. Which has the added benefit of making the solution cheaper since the scope of the fix is smaller.
I remain undeterred in my belief that privatization would do a better job of preventing crap like this.
I went to private high school for 4 years. I'm absolutely certain that the level of privacy that I wanted was not the same as what the school allowed for. What I don't know is whether or not the level of privacy afforded by the school is different from the level that my parents wanted for me.
However, in this case, it's clear that the parents are aligned with the kid in opposition to the level of intrusion the school is applying. Since it's the parents who pay, it's the parents that a private school will listen to. I don't think that private schools could get away with this kind of thing in opposition to the will of the parents and survive long.
As far as workplaces, there is federal law that prevents discrimination on some of the things you are worried about. With respect to the rest, remember who the customer is: the employer is the one who's paying. If the terms of your employment state that they can fire you for those things, then they can. You accepted the employement on those terms.
But employers have to be careful even without federal law. The most important and expensive part of almost every industry are human resources. Finding people and retaining people is hard. If a company is too unjudicious in their firing process, they will lose people that they don't want to lose. This will cause them to lose business.
I would suggest this: if you believe that private industry currently pays too little to its employees in the way of privacy, then that means that there is a market out there which you could tap into to provide that level of privacy to your employees. If the demand is high enough, you might even be able to offer them slightly less cash incentive in order to pay them higher rewards in employee privacy... maybe.
My point is that if you have a good idea to sell, you also have a great way to attract a LARGE number of talented employees away from your competition. Go do it! I guarantee that if incumbant company X starts losing all of their employees to you, they will change their employee privacy policies.