There are plenty of private charities they can send their money to. Or they can outsource a startup to Iowa - the big state schools do produce plenty of quality engineering talent, and you can pay them less, but it's still less of a headache than going to India.
All in all, America has pushed into a high-expertise economy. No matter where you are geographically, you can do pretty well for yourself with a competent tech background. It's less about Silicon Valley versus Iowa than it is the guy with the BS versus the one with the BA or the GED.
They're a great replacement for a high-volume 4-way stop, or a low-volume switched traffic light in a new development. What I don't get are the cities that are ripping out existing, well-performing intersections to put them in, or putting them on intersections where they can't handle the traffic.
Where I am, they're more of a status symbol for expensive communities than they are proper traffic engineering. It seems like every month the nicer suburb rips up an intersection to put in a round-about that takes up twice as much space, but has more room for flower arrangements. Paid for with your stimulus money, too!
The problem with a uniform sales tax is that it would necessitate a uniform tax code on everything else, causing a cascading blow up of the rest of the local tax codes.
Some localities do not have a sales tax, but have a higher income or property tax. Others have a higher sales tax but don't tax income.
If you require a uniform sales tax, you end up requiring a uniform tax code for everything else, or at the very least a complete reworking of the rest of the tax code to equalize funding.
Alternatively... states could wise up to the fact that having your spending grow at several times the rate of inflation, population, and GDP growth is not a sustainable policy. If state budgets had only grown with inflation over the last 15 years, there would be no budget crisis.
We need a reasonable way to separate "sound advice to reduce your chances of being victimized" with "if you don't do this, it's your fault."
Because of history, this only really seems to come up with rape cases. We are more than willing to apply this concept to other areas.
You should look both ways before you cross the street. You should avoid bad parts of town. You should stay in lit areas, and not travel alone. You should use your turn signal. You shouldn't take candy from strangers, or get in the strange van. You should consider arming yourself, and improving your situational awareness, especially if you work in a dangerous job.
All of these involve precautions to protect you, but do not transfer blame if you fail to take those precautions.
In a rational world, "don't wear slutty clothes" can go along with that. Unfortunately, with the baggage associated with the phrase, I don't know if it will.
Their being the majority doesn't give anyone else an excuse to be an asshole about it.
Yes, there are stupid moralizing Christians. There are going to be plenty, as they're 80% of the fucking country. It has very little to do with their being Christian, and quite a bit to their just being morons to begin with.
Or it could be that cultural differences matter much more than whatever is being done in the school.
Iowans score on par with asians on those test results. So do children of Scandinavian decent living in the US in general.
Immigrant families in sweden score much lower.
But it couldn't be that only the rich and successful parts of China take part in that test, or that Finland (or for that matter, most of the US) has a culture that is much more functional than the lower-income inner-city culture dragging our test scores down.
We make a big mistake when we act as though education policy is the only, or even the largest, controlling variable here.
Median family income in the US is $45k. That's roughly 50% higher than any European country short of Luxembourg. $27k isn't even below the poverty line for a family of four in the US. And *that* is still more money than 90% of the world lives on.
You work in a well-compensated industry in a market that has much higher cost of living than most of the world. Don't be an ass about it.
You are seriously claiming that taking 1-2 hours to charge enough to get home is not a significant design negative compared to less than five minutes fill up at a gas station?
It may or may not be a deal killer, but it is still a significant difference.
Because the downside of the Tesla is that if you misjudge your "one more lap" estimation you can't get home until the next morning... If you misjudge on a GT-40, you look like an idiot while you wait for someone to drive you to a petrol station. It was a dramatization of a very real problem.
Let's just say it's really, *really* important if you're buying an electric car to use as a normal sports car - that is, to drive it around like a normal car six days out of the week, and thrash it at a track day on the seventh. I don't have a fancy pit crew or a mechanic who can swap out my gear box in five minutes, but I *can* fill my gas tank back up in a couple minutes and drive home from the track.
So it was a little important when road-testing a Tesla, whose entire point is to be an electric sports car.
Every place I have worked, if you pass the interview phase, sends home a coding assignment for you. Something that can be accomplished in an evening, that is not for production, that a programmer competent in your areas of expertise should be able to do.
For a graphics programming position, it was to make a 3d "game" where you could drive around a little car. Another guy had to make something that would show your GPS location on a map. Something that proves you can write code that will work, and that your code doesn't look like crap. Submitting unit tests with it is a big bonus.
We've only had one or two guys refuse the test, but every single person who did the assignment ended up writing good enough code to get the job, and were excellent co-workers.
If I've been taking 20+ credit hours of graduate level classes per quarter, most of which involved massive amounts of coding and very little sleep, I'm sure as hell not going to be writing android apps in my spare time. If I've been working 15 hours at an internship in addition to that, I'm not going to play around with websites after work. I'm going to go outside or hang out with my friends.
And honestly the ability to do the last one of those has served me as well in my programming career as the software projects have.
As opposed to the congress that passed the law to begin with?
Or the democratic congress that did nothing to change it?
By the letter of the law, I'm having a hard time seeing the unconstitutionality. Federal law generally trumps state, and free association is protected. It's an awful law, but bad law doesn't make it unconstitutional.
Still doesn't really matter, because the phone company has this information on you anyway, and the DOJ has been claiming they can access it without a warrant for years.
Personally I'm *much* more worried about the personal location history on ATT's servers that I *don't* get a notification if the police sniff, than anything that is sitting on my own device.
This is the truth whether it's a shiny Mac or a local off-brand PC - the way it works in education is you can get funding for buying everyone new computers, but you get zero funding for IT, setup, support.
All of the teachers I know are still using 5-year-old iBook labs that some whiz-bang paid for. With the original batteries, and no one servicing them for the entire time. No computers are going to work well in that environment.
There are have been studies proving practically every different thing about which computer company or OS has lower total cost of ownership for a large group - and of course the standard is for the school board to ignore all of them and go with whichever member has a stronger opinion. The real problem is that there is no funding for dedicated computer people to teach their use or keep them running.
For the most part, why do people care so much, other than it gives them a chance to bash the US.
For basic, every-day measurements it makes as much as sense as you ever care about. Really, how often do you convert miles into feet? You have a simple way to divide into basic fractions for your small length and volume units, and Fahrenheit vs Celsius is entirely arbitrary. What I'm saying is it's not like you're wasting a giant section of brain space on this.
And anything scientific should, as the article pointed out, already be done in metric. The only real effect this has on most people is having to keep two sets of wrenches around - which you'll still have to do for decades as long as old american cars are around.
And that raising a child to be successful in the middle class is considered a much larger investment. They must go to music lessons, soccer practice, football practice, and church, as well as be in a good neighborhood to go to a good school (ie, more expensive housing). Then you need to pay for them to go to a good college, where tuition prices are rising much higher than inflation.
And all of this is after you and your spouse have completed your degrees and become established in your fields, so you're pushing thirty by the time you have kids and don't have time to naturally want to have more than two or three.
It has much more to do with cultural values in child-rearing and professional development than it does with any sort of environmentalist nihilism.
Additionally, with phonemes the act of losing one seems to require a much lower effort than creating one.
Just think about how hard it is to learn a new phoneme as an adult from a different culture. If you didn't acquire it from another culture to speak *their* language, why would you ever go to that effort, and how likely would it be you convince other people to do it as well?
As opposed to losing a phoneme - we can all think of examples of shortening words or sounds, or just being lazy with pronunciation.
It's less that a founder group is likely to consist most of people who slur something, and more that in isolation it is much easier to lose sounds than it is to gain them.
Really, on most math tests if you can save yourself significant time by putting something on the calculator, it shouldn't be on the test. Most of my higher level tests allowed you to make your own cheat sheet. The important thing is learning how to work the problems, not memorizing every permutation of equivalence between trigonometric functions.
That said, I actually think that past a certain point you *should* have problems that have not been manipulated to have all clean, simple math. It keeps you from falling into the trap of thinking that because the answer came out as whole numbers, you must be doing it right.
Slashdot Mirror
Wonder what the PUFF bounty on that was...
There are plenty of private charities they can send their money to. Or they can outsource a startup to Iowa - the big state schools do produce plenty of quality engineering talent, and you can pay them less, but it's still less of a headache than going to India.
All in all, America has pushed into a high-expertise economy. No matter where you are geographically, you can do pretty well for yourself with a competent tech background. It's less about Silicon Valley versus Iowa than it is the guy with the BS versus the one with the BA or the GED.
They're a great replacement for a high-volume 4-way stop, or a low-volume switched traffic light in a new development. What I don't get are the cities that are ripping out existing, well-performing intersections to put them in, or putting them on intersections where they can't handle the traffic.
Where I am, they're more of a status symbol for expensive communities than they are proper traffic engineering. It seems like every month the nicer suburb rips up an intersection to put in a round-about that takes up twice as much space, but has more room for flower arrangements. Paid for with your stimulus money, too!
The problem with a uniform sales tax is that it would necessitate a uniform tax code on everything else, causing a cascading blow up of the rest of the local tax codes.
Some localities do not have a sales tax, but have a higher income or property tax. Others have a higher sales tax but don't tax income.
If you require a uniform sales tax, you end up requiring a uniform tax code for everything else, or at the very least a complete reworking of the rest of the tax code to equalize funding.
Alternatively... states could wise up to the fact that having your spending grow at several times the rate of inflation, population, and GDP growth is not a sustainable policy. If state budgets had only grown with inflation over the last 15 years, there would be no budget crisis.
This.
We need a reasonable way to separate "sound advice to reduce your chances of being victimized" with "if you don't do this, it's your fault."
Because of history, this only really seems to come up with rape cases. We are more than willing to apply this concept to other areas.
You should look both ways before you cross the street. You should avoid bad parts of town. You should stay in lit areas, and not travel alone. You should use your turn signal. You shouldn't take candy from strangers, or get in the strange van. You should consider arming yourself, and improving your situational awareness, especially if you work in a dangerous job.
All of these involve precautions to protect you, but do not transfer blame if you fail to take those precautions.
In a rational world, "don't wear slutty clothes" can go along with that. Unfortunately, with the baggage associated with the phrase, I don't know if it will.
Their being the majority doesn't give anyone else an excuse to be an asshole about it.
Yes, there are stupid moralizing Christians. There are going to be plenty, as they're 80% of the fucking country. It has very little to do with their being Christian, and quite a bit to their just being morons to begin with.
And I say this as a devout Atheist.
Now we're going to get weapons-export laws on Tonka trucks, and mandatory background checks for a Barbie Jeep.
I mean, the rich have privacy rights, too. Why the hell should everywhere they fly be made public?
Or it could be that cultural differences matter much more than whatever is being done in the school.
Iowans score on par with asians on those test results. So do children of Scandinavian decent living in the US in general.
Immigrant families in sweden score much lower.
But it couldn't be that only the rich and successful parts of China take part in that test, or that Finland (or for that matter, most of the US) has a culture that is much more functional than the lower-income inner-city culture dragging our test scores down.
We make a big mistake when we act as though education policy is the only, or even the largest, controlling variable here.
http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html
Median family income in the US is $45k. That's roughly 50% higher than any European country short of Luxembourg. $27k isn't even below the poverty line for a family of four in the US. And *that* is still more money than 90% of the world lives on.
You work in a well-compensated industry in a market that has much higher cost of living than most of the world. Don't be an ass about it.
You are seriously claiming that taking 1-2 hours to charge enough to get home is not a significant design negative compared to less than five minutes fill up at a gas station?
It may or may not be a deal killer, but it is still a significant difference.
Also, petrol stations close?
Most people never take their SUV off the road, either. That doesn't mean that a review shouldn't include whether this SUV can be used that way or not.
Because the downside of the Tesla is that if you misjudge your "one more lap" estimation you can't get home until the next morning... If you misjudge on a GT-40, you look like an idiot while you wait for someone to drive you to a petrol station. It was a dramatization of a very real problem.
Let's just say it's really, *really* important if you're buying an electric car to use as a normal sports car - that is, to drive it around like a normal car six days out of the week, and thrash it at a track day on the seventh. I don't have a fancy pit crew or a mechanic who can swap out my gear box in five minutes, but I *can* fill my gas tank back up in a couple minutes and drive home from the track.
So it was a little important when road-testing a Tesla, whose entire point is to be an electric sports car.
Every place I have worked, if you pass the interview phase, sends home a coding assignment for you. Something that can be accomplished in an evening, that is not for production, that a programmer competent in your areas of expertise should be able to do.
For a graphics programming position, it was to make a 3d "game" where you could drive around a little car. Another guy had to make something that would show your GPS location on a map. Something that proves you can write code that will work, and that your code doesn't look like crap. Submitting unit tests with it is a big bonus.
We've only had one or two guys refuse the test, but every single person who did the assignment ended up writing good enough code to get the job, and were excellent co-workers.
If I've been taking 20+ credit hours of graduate level classes per quarter, most of which involved massive amounts of coding and very little sleep, I'm sure as hell not going to be writing android apps in my spare time. If I've been working 15 hours at an internship in addition to that, I'm not going to play around with websites after work. I'm going to go outside or hang out with my friends.
And honestly the ability to do the last one of those has served me as well in my programming career as the software projects have.
Not to mention that the way the smog inspections are run in most states is already pretty much just make-work for the mechanics doing the inspection.
As opposed to the congress that passed the law to begin with?
Or the democratic congress that did nothing to change it?
By the letter of the law, I'm having a hard time seeing the unconstitutionality. Federal law generally trumps state, and free association is protected. It's an awful law, but bad law doesn't make it unconstitutional.
Still doesn't really matter, because the phone company has this information on you anyway, and the DOJ has been claiming they can access it without a warrant for years.
Personally I'm *much* more worried about the personal location history on ATT's servers that I *don't* get a notification if the police sniff, than anything that is sitting on my own device.
This is the truth whether it's a shiny Mac or a local off-brand PC - the way it works in education is you can get funding for buying everyone new computers, but you get zero funding for IT, setup, support.
All of the teachers I know are still using 5-year-old iBook labs that some whiz-bang paid for. With the original batteries, and no one servicing them for the entire time. No computers are going to work well in that environment.
There are have been studies proving practically every different thing about which computer company or OS has lower total cost of ownership for a large group - and of course the standard is for the school board to ignore all of them and go with whichever member has a stronger opinion. The real problem is that there is no funding for dedicated computer people to teach their use or keep them running.
For the most part, why do people care so much, other than it gives them a chance to bash the US.
For basic, every-day measurements it makes as much as sense as you ever care about. Really, how often do you convert miles into feet? You have a simple way to divide into basic fractions for your small length and volume units, and Fahrenheit vs Celsius is entirely arbitrary. What I'm saying is it's not like you're wasting a giant section of brain space on this.
And anything scientific should, as the article pointed out, already be done in metric. The only real effect this has on most people is having to keep two sets of wrenches around - which you'll still have to do for decades as long as old american cars are around.
And that raising a child to be successful in the middle class is considered a much larger investment. They must go to music lessons, soccer practice, football practice, and church, as well as be in a good neighborhood to go to a good school (ie, more expensive housing). Then you need to pay for them to go to a good college, where tuition prices are rising much higher than inflation.
And all of this is after you and your spouse have completed your degrees and become established in your fields, so you're pushing thirty by the time you have kids and don't have time to naturally want to have more than two or three.
It has much more to do with cultural values in child-rearing and professional development than it does with any sort of environmentalist nihilism.
Additionally, with phonemes the act of losing one seems to require a much lower effort than creating one.
Just think about how hard it is to learn a new phoneme as an adult from a different culture. If you didn't acquire it from another culture to speak *their* language, why would you ever go to that effort, and how likely would it be you convince other people to do it as well?
As opposed to losing a phoneme - we can all think of examples of shortening words or sounds, or just being lazy with pronunciation.
It's less that a founder group is likely to consist most of people who slur something, and more that in isolation it is much easier to lose sounds than it is to gain them.
It's as useful as a historical/archeological guide as any set of mythologies. The advantage is that this particular one is incredibly well-preserved.
Really, on most math tests if you can save yourself significant time by putting something on the calculator, it shouldn't be on the test. Most of my higher level tests allowed you to make your own cheat sheet. The important thing is learning how to work the problems, not memorizing every permutation of equivalence between trigonometric functions.
That said, I actually think that past a certain point you *should* have problems that have not been manipulated to have all clean, simple math. It keeps you from falling into the trap of thinking that because the answer came out as whole numbers, you must be doing it right.