The idea behind a liberal arts education is to become a well-rounded person, with a (hopefully) better understanding and appreciation of the world around you.
The idea behind a liberal arts education was to create well-rounded aristocrats who could take over the father's business or run for the local legislature. The vast majority of the population as apprenticed in trade.
The liberal arts model of education does not function as a method of mass education for people who need to get a job to live on after they graduate.
Of course, the interesting thing is that when you try to correct for cultural background, the US isn't so terribly far behind Europe in educational successes.
ie, the poor immigrants/nonwhites are doing terribly in Sweden as well, they're just a much smaller and newer portion of the population.
You're going to tell the fifteen year old with cancer that she can't get chemo because we spent all of our money on grandmothers?
The money isn't infinite. At some point there is going to be a cutoff. It's not a question of do we draw a line or not, it's where the line is drawn. The current pace is not sustainable.
I don't smoke. But when they passed the ban here, it was passed by a bunch of people who don't go to a pub more than once a year. They shouldn't have the right to tell other people how to live their lives.
If a pub owner wants to bring in non-smokers, he can make the place non-smoking himself. If there were such an outcry from actual patrons and not a bunch of do-gooders, there would have been more nonsmoking bars to begin with.
Most people don't really know how to cook, because it isn't considered a valued skill, and we don't have half of the population who are supposed to specialize in it in order to find a good husband.
It also takes time. Cooking that soup is going to take several hours, during which you at least need to be home to make sure the pot doesn't boil over. If you figure minimum wage and a half hour of work, McDonald's becomes a lot more comparable.
1) Teach people how to cook, and convince them they should make time to cook. We used to have people in the family specialized in cooking nutritious meals that took a while to prepare but kept a family fed. They were called "moms." I'm not saying that we need to chain women back to the stove all day, but I am saying that we need to realize that this was an important role in the family, that takes a lot of time and expertise! Even my grandma's cooking with lard was less likely to cause obesity than most sugar-soaked fast food and frozen dinners.
2) Get rid of farm subsidies. I noticed when I visited Europe... coke still comes in small cans there, and one of them is considered a dessert. You can barely get anything to drink at a quick american restaurant that *doesn't* come with enough corn syrup in your drink to fulfill your calorie intake for an entire day. You get so accustomed to sweetener in everything that *nothing* tastes right if it doesn't have sugar in it. It's taken me years to wean myself off of a childhood spent drinking mountain dew or sugared fruit drinks every time I got thirsty.
As for medical spending... why is it such a horrible idea to have defined limits for government medical aid. Something like "everyone is entitled to 100k worth of government insurance. After that you're on your own." The idea that we should provide aid to people who can't pay for it is great - the idea that it should be practically unlimited aid, when available medical care is only going to become *more* unlimited in scope, is just untenable.
Did you miss where they praised its acceleration and were amazed that it went round the track as fast as a Porsche 911 GT3? They praise or trash cars where they think it is merited.
Most of their criticism with hybrids has been that they are over-hyped for what you actually get from them. Which is even the opinion of a lot of hybrid-proponents, they just argue that you have to support the early, moderately rubbish designs in order to grow the industry enough to make more successful ones.
Because it's incredibly rare to take an hour drive to someplace fun on the weekends. No one could ever do that often enough that it would uneconomical to rent a petrol car.
Or more importantly, don't buy a Tesla if you intent to take it to a track day. Because when you burn through your gas at 2x the normal rate in a petrol car, you can go to the gas station and fill it up and be on your way home.
Regardless of what range it actually gets, a multiple-hour charging time is going to require *much* more forethought when it comes to use of the car, and this is an important point to show.
Even when the engineers have an extreme conflict of interest as their bosses really want their expensive product to look good on a major TV show?
Even if Top Gear did have problems with the cars, it's one data point and says nothing about their overall reliability, and any engineer should know that.
I think this whole line of argument can be summed up as "I like X, but I bought Y, and now I am unhappy that Y does not work like X."
You are unhappy that OS X does not work like Linux. I am often unhappy that Linux does not work like OS X. They both have their issues, but more importantly they both have their different design philosophies. I hate wasting screen real estate by each different window having its own never-hidden menu bar:)
It is useful information to know that OS X is not Linux. But it should also be somewhat expected... They do have more similarities than going to a Windows box - you do have *some* options of a package manager, as well as a command line that doesn't suck and much of *nix toolkit. But they aren't the same thing, and if you come from either direction expecting them to match up exactly in your list of features you will be disappointed.
So building your wind mills will take at minimum the same amount of coal as running a coal plant for 6 months, just for the steel. I just thought that was interesting.
You pretend that I'm not in favor of cutting all of the above. If you chopped 15% off of all of those (probably more off of military and medicare, as those are responsible for most of the recent bloat) I don't think it would change our general well-being as a country hardly at all. I'm not even completely convinced it would require giving up on Iraq and Afghanistan from a strategic standpoint, although that would definitely help things.
As for special interests (what interest isn't special by the way? You might as well just say "voters who care about this topic"), I didn't say this was a likely plan, just that in terms of running the country, cutting spending back to sustainable levels does not require going back to some stone-age state-of-nature in terms of government support.
First world snipers generally use guns that redirect the sound and flash, so the targets can hear it, but it is very hard to locate specifically.
The snipers shooting at first world armies generally use whatever hand-me-down battle rifle they happen to have, at a range that tries to be "just outside of what an M4 is comfortable with."
Games have all kinds of different rules for this sort of radar. I'm personally a fan of ones that require at least motion or sound to be able to function, instead of pretending that it's tracking every commando's cell phone or something.
I may be exaggerating or misunderstanding his stories. I definitely remember him saying that separating out the chipped bottles was a major time waster, though, regardless of what precise reason caused it. It was also twenty of thirty years ago, so the filler machinery may not have been quite as developed.
My father-in-law used to run a Coca-cola plant. They went away from glass bottles because of the automated process that fills them.
Glass bottles not only have to be collected from the stores (instead of getting a regular shipment from the plastic factory), they also tend to acquire chips and scratches. So they have to be inspected.
But sometimes those ships are hard to see, or just structurally weak without any visible sign, and they break when they go through the automatic filling/capping machine. And then you have to stop the production line to clean up all the broken glass, and make sure it didn't get into the rest of your process.
Essentially, recycling glass bottles is a *huge* headache and time and money sink for the bottlers. That's why they went to plastic more than anything.
That said, playing guitar with an easy to read interface for your notes coming up (instead of flipping pages through books and turning pages), as well as a back track that syncs up automatically with your music, *and* feedback as to what notes you're playing wrong, is just a better way to practice.
I don't see anyone claiming how this will take the place of music lessons, but if it means that people actually play their instrument in between lessons it's a *huge* win.
Not to mention that seven years of guitar lessons costs something on the order of seven thousand dollars, whereas the game will probably run 50 bucks.
The real issue is that "faster than a speeding bullet" is a meaningless term. You can shoot a bullet at practically whatever speed you want. Even within normal pistol rounds you have hundreds of fps of variance.
The interesting thing about trying to do these calculations is that murder rates are *very* localized. The vast majority of murders in the US are gang-related killings in places with large concentrations of poor urban minorities. Sure you get a few CSI-type husband-wife or drunken hillbilly murders, but something like 80% of murders are directly related to gang violence. Sort that list by murder rate and see if it doesn't point out that something is incredibly broken in our cultural and regulatory systems regarding those areas.
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The idea behind a liberal arts education is to become a well-rounded person, with a (hopefully) better understanding and appreciation of the world around you.
The idea behind a liberal arts education was to create well-rounded aristocrats who could take over the father's business or run for the local legislature. The vast majority of the population as apprenticed in trade.
The liberal arts model of education does not function as a method of mass education for people who need to get a job to live on after they graduate.
Of course, the interesting thing is that when you try to correct for cultural background, the US isn't so terribly far behind Europe in educational successes.
ie, the poor immigrants/nonwhites are doing terribly in Sweden as well, they're just a much smaller and newer portion of the population.
And you propose to streamline this how?
Don't you think that, if administrative cost reduction were *so* easy, the insurance companies would already be doing it to increase their profits?
Assuming away administrative overhead is like assuming away friction - great for simple models, but not likely in actual implementation.
Even if you reduce it by a couple percent... it's a drop in the bucket.
And... so what *should* be base these decisions on? You do not have infinite time and resources. The world does not work that way.
You're going to tell the fifteen year old with cancer that she can't get chemo because we spent all of our money on grandmothers?
The money isn't infinite. At some point there is going to be a cutoff. It's not a question of do we draw a line or not, it's where the line is drawn. The current pace is not sustainable.
I don't smoke. But when they passed the ban here, it was passed by a bunch of people who don't go to a pub more than once a year. They shouldn't have the right to tell other people how to live their lives.
If a pub owner wants to bring in non-smokers, he can make the place non-smoking himself. If there were such an outcry from actual patrons and not a bunch of do-gooders, there would have been more nonsmoking bars to begin with.
Fast food is about knowledge and time.
Most people don't really know how to cook, because it isn't considered a valued skill, and we don't have half of the population who are supposed to specialize in it in order to find a good husband.
It also takes time. Cooking that soup is going to take several hours, during which you at least need to be home to make sure the pot doesn't boil over. If you figure minimum wage and a half hour of work, McDonald's becomes a lot more comparable.
And that gives you the right to fuck over everyone who smokes or is a friend of a smoker why?
Going to a pub occasionally isn't going to get anyone killed from second-hand smoke. The waitresses may have a slightly better claim.
To vote these things down yet?
You want to slow obesity?
1) Teach people how to cook, and convince them they should make time to cook. We used to have people in the family specialized in cooking nutritious meals that took a while to prepare but kept a family fed. They were called "moms." I'm not saying that we need to chain women back to the stove all day, but I am saying that we need to realize that this was an important role in the family, that takes a lot of time and expertise! Even my grandma's cooking with lard was less likely to cause obesity than most sugar-soaked fast food and frozen dinners.
2) Get rid of farm subsidies. I noticed when I visited Europe... coke still comes in small cans there, and one of them is considered a dessert. You can barely get anything to drink at a quick american restaurant that *doesn't* come with enough corn syrup in your drink to fulfill your calorie intake for an entire day. You get so accustomed to sweetener in everything that *nothing* tastes right if it doesn't have sugar in it. It's taken me years to wean myself off of a childhood spent drinking mountain dew or sugared fruit drinks every time I got thirsty.
As for medical spending... why is it such a horrible idea to have defined limits for government medical aid. Something like "everyone is entitled to 100k worth of government insurance. After that you're on your own." The idea that we should provide aid to people who can't pay for it is great - the idea that it should be practically unlimited aid, when available medical care is only going to become *more* unlimited in scope, is just untenable.
Did you miss where they praised its acceleration and were amazed that it went round the track as fast as a Porsche 911 GT3? They praise or trash cars where they think it is merited.
Most of their criticism with hybrids has been that they are over-hyped for what you actually get from them. Which is even the opinion of a lot of hybrid-proponents, they just argue that you have to support the early, moderately rubbish designs in order to grow the industry enough to make more successful ones.
Because it's incredibly rare to take an hour drive to someplace fun on the weekends. No one could ever do that often enough that it would uneconomical to rent a petrol car.
Or more importantly, don't buy a Tesla if you intent to take it to a track day. Because when you burn through your gas at 2x the normal rate in a petrol car, you can go to the gas station and fill it up and be on your way home.
Regardless of what range it actually gets, a multiple-hour charging time is going to require *much* more forethought when it comes to use of the car, and this is an important point to show.
Even when the engineers have an extreme conflict of interest as their bosses really want their expensive product to look good on a major TV show?
Even if Top Gear did have problems with the cars, it's one data point and says nothing about their overall reliability, and any engineer should know that.
I think this whole line of argument can be summed up as "I like X, but I bought Y, and now I am unhappy that Y does not work like X."
You are unhappy that OS X does not work like Linux. I am often unhappy that Linux does not work like OS X. They both have their issues, but more importantly they both have their different design philosophies. I hate wasting screen real estate by each different window having its own never-hidden menu bar :)
It is useful information to know that OS X is not Linux. But it should also be somewhat expected... They do have more similarities than going to a Windows box - you do have *some* options of a package manager, as well as a command line that doesn't suck and much of *nix toolkit. But they aren't the same thing, and if you come from either direction expecting them to match up exactly in your list of features you will be disappointed.
You made me curious.
The standard steel production process takes .6 tons of coke coal per ton of steel produced. http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/coal-statistics/coal-steel-statistics/
And a 3.5 GW coal plant burns about 1.4 million million tons of coal a year.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/question481.htm
So building your wind mills will take at minimum the same amount of coal as running a coal plant for 6 months, just for the steel. I just thought that was interesting.
You pretend that I'm not in favor of cutting all of the above. If you chopped 15% off of all of those (probably more off of military and medicare, as those are responsible for most of the recent bloat) I don't think it would change our general well-being as a country hardly at all. I'm not even completely convinced it would require giving up on Iraq and Afghanistan from a strategic standpoint, although that would definitely help things.
As for special interests (what interest isn't special by the way? You might as well just say "voters who care about this topic"), I didn't say this was a likely plan, just that in terms of running the country, cutting spending back to sustainable levels does not require going back to some stone-age state-of-nature in terms of government support.
Lowering spending from historically high, unsustainable levels? Ridiculous!
The last time we were spending this high of a % of our GDP on government we were using it to beat the Nazis.
First world snipers generally use guns that redirect the sound and flash, so the targets can hear it, but it is very hard to locate specifically.
The snipers shooting at first world armies generally use whatever hand-me-down battle rifle they happen to have, at a range that tries to be "just outside of what an M4 is comfortable with."
Heck, try Marathon, back in 1993.
Games have all kinds of different rules for this sort of radar. I'm personally a fan of ones that require at least motion or sound to be able to function, instead of pretending that it's tracking every commando's cell phone or something.
I may be exaggerating or misunderstanding his stories. I definitely remember him saying that separating out the chipped bottles was a major time waster, though, regardless of what precise reason caused it. It was also twenty of thirty years ago, so the filler machinery may not have been quite as developed.
My father-in-law used to run a Coca-cola plant. They went away from glass bottles because of the automated process that fills them.
Glass bottles not only have to be collected from the stores (instead of getting a regular shipment from the plastic factory), they also tend to acquire chips and scratches. So they have to be inspected.
But sometimes those ships are hard to see, or just structurally weak without any visible sign, and they break when they go through the automatic filling/capping machine. And then you have to stop the production line to clean up all the broken glass, and make sure it didn't get into the rest of your process.
Essentially, recycling glass bottles is a *huge* headache and time and money sink for the bottlers. That's why they went to plastic more than anything.
That said, playing guitar with an easy to read interface for your notes coming up (instead of flipping pages through books and turning pages), as well as a back track that syncs up automatically with your music, *and* feedback as to what notes you're playing wrong, is just a better way to practice.
I don't see anyone claiming how this will take the place of music lessons, but if it means that people actually play their instrument in between lessons it's a *huge* win.
Not to mention that seven years of guitar lessons costs something on the order of seven thousand dollars, whereas the game will probably run 50 bucks.
Anyone who thinks there is more than a semantic difference between high engineering and high art knows nothing of either.
The real issue is that "faster than a speeding bullet" is a meaningless term. You can shoot a bullet at practically whatever speed you want. Even within normal pistol rounds you have hundreds of fps of variance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
The interesting thing about trying to do these calculations is that murder rates are *very* localized. The vast majority of murders in the US are gang-related killings in places with large concentrations of poor urban minorities. Sure you get a few CSI-type husband-wife or drunken hillbilly murders, but something like 80% of murders are directly related to gang violence. Sort that list by murder rate and see if it doesn't point out that something is incredibly broken in our cultural and regulatory systems regarding those areas.