Ok, I understand where the poster was coming from, and (s)he is right, but I have to vote "Why Pirates Failed To Prevent a Box Office Record" as the most annoying article title for 2012, so far.
Lisinopril. It's one of the most common prescription medications on earth, and is so inexpensive that it's easily affordable without insurance. Yet doctors hold your refills hostage to expensive monthly office visits, which consist in their entirety of a nurse practitioner taking your weight and blood pressure, measurements anyone with high blood pressure already takes at home. This nonsense must stop.
> If I should happen to meet one of these video producers, I just might club him/her senseless. Then ask, "How's THAT for a special effect?"[/end rant]
Be sure to film it. It'll be a source of amusement for us, and perhaps a warning to others.
*can*, but rarely is, at least in this area. I know the stations of which you speak -- they deliberately do not have any provision to do the transaction at the pump, forcing you to take your number and walk inside to conclude the transaction, on the off chance that you'll buy a novelty cigarette lighter or a $5 bottle of pepsi when you're in there. But what usually happens is that the convenience-trap stores notice that they can charge the same price as the fill-only stores and do about the same volume, so why would you want to give money away?
Even where the price is higher, it's worth money to me to be able to fill up at the pump in a minimum amount of time and then drive away. I don't think I'm alone. It's going to be interesting if the powers that be can pull off the social paradigm shift necessary for people to be ok with spending a half hour every 100 miles getting a charge.
> You're not far off. Have you noticed how gas stations are starting to charge more for credit than cash, sometimes by far more than the card fees are?
Yeah, I tend not to fuel up at stations with a quicki-mart. The reason for this is that I do not consider a gas station to be a destination. It is a necessary stop on the way to my real destination, and I want it to be as quick as possible. I don't consider fueling up as an opportunity to buy high priced carbohydrates, sodas, caffeine, or giggly hula dolls, pine scent air fresheners, or trucker caps. If I want to buy something, there are other places where I do those things.
Someone suggested that we work it backwards; that instead of trying to herd fuel purchasers into a little high priced store selling nothing interesting, that instead actual destinations you'd want to go to start providing fuel. If that fuel is electricity, that's fine. But seriously, putting a Starbucks at a fueling station is not a solution, except for the people who's destination is Starbucks and who happen to need fuel.
But that's ok, because early adopters will be waiting for their full charge when I've long gotten back on the road. Maybe they'll put a Starbucks at the charging station for something to do while the cars are charging.
A point, but I'd contend that the main differences are these: (a) they'd be bunching up at separate gates, which tends to spread out the mass somewhat, as opposed to passengers from all gates bunching up at a single TSA checkpoint (b) you as an individual would have a *choice* whether to bunch up or not, which you currently do not have.
This occurred to me the other day, and I'm astonished it hasn't occurred to more people. To terrorists, a choke point is an opportunity because there are a lot of potential victims in a small space.
It occurred to the people with a clue long ago. As Dave Hackworth (US Army infantry, highly decorated, later a writer and war correspondent for Newsweek) wrote right after 9/11, "Don't bunch up".
Yes, and it's strange that government -- through massive density housing, mass transit, security checkpoints, other things -- is maneuvering us into bunching up.
This occurred to me the other day, and I'm astonished it hasn't occurred to more people. To terrorists, a choke point is an opportunity because there are a lot of potential victims in a small space. Planes are natural targets because the passengers don't have any place to escape to and the vehicle is relatively fragile and easy to destroy. (This is to some extent true for any mass transit.)
But a choke point that contains many more potential victims and is easier to get to than a plane is the TSA security checkpoint during a busy day. It occurs to me that in trying to eliminate one opportunity (the plane) we are creating an even bigger opportunity (the checkpoint).
And so, I get this nagging feeling that besides creating entertainment (security theater) and not especially increasing security on the plane, the TSA, by creating a massive target of opportunity at the checkpoint, is very specifically making airports less safe. And if you're killed in a terrorist attack, there's little difference in whether it happens in a plane or at the airport.
Just parenthetically, the recent case of TSA agents successfully bribed into letting drug dealers through is a conclusive example of why the process doesn't work. When your only guard is a poorly trained former grocery store worker, leverage will always exist to successfully get a package on a plane. (Whether it's money or blackmail or hostages.) We're lucky that so far the payload has been merely drugs.
Having worked on a site for a fairly large church, I observe that the entire development and administration team were volunteers. We happened to have some experienced people in the congregation, and our site was fairly well policed.
I suspect that smaller churches are even more likely to have all-volunteer staff, and more likely to have people who are trying their best but just don't know what they're doing. In a separate circumstance, I volunteered to host a website (I set up a common blog package on one of my web servers, skinned it for them, taught them how to use it, all for free on the condition that I didn't have to maintain it) for a smaller church, and observed that initially there was a lot of enthusiasm which drained off over time when they realized that updating and maintaining a web site is harder than they realized. The website was effectively abandoned and sat unused until their domain expired.
So go ahead and make your religious jokes; it's a free country. But the reason really is that one (porn) is a business and the other is not. And all that this entails.
I've done this. Besides helping out people who are demonstrably doing good works, I was able to keep my web skills polished at a time when I wasn't professionally engaged as a web administrator. It was a win-win.
On L'Engle, daughter and I went through all the Murry family stories (wrinkle in time, etc) and she loved them. I skipped over House like a Lotus because I couldn't bring myself to read the attempted rape scene and sex scene to my daughter. (I guess I'm a coward.) I assured her that it was a good story, one of the best of the Polly O'Keefe stories, but she'd have to read it on her own. She hasn't yet, and I regret that a little. She loved Arm of the Starfish and Dragon in the Waters. She thought An Acceptable Time was a little boring and repetitious.
It's possible we got off on the wrong foot. I dismissed the poster to which you originally replied as someone who wanted to justify in his own mind his decision not to read to his kids. There's no helping that. People have a huge capability to rationalize the actions they want to take or not take. My wife does this all the time, justifying in odd ways the reason why she shouldn't do this or that for her daughter, when we all know the real reason is that she doesn't want to get out of the chair. But I digress.
Some time later I read your posting, (the one that begins "letting a kid type") and -- go back and read it -- taken out of context (admittedly) it probably doesn't say what you were actually trying to express. My kid started using a computer (loading her Disney storybooks and playing them herself) long before kindergarten, and (I often work at home) when I was working she'd crawl up in my lap and type on the keyboard. Nothing coherent, but who cares? Emails to family would often include:
And now, daughter would like to say something:
23089ythoeuitgahjrvmt wn458ghf 08tyqhe0aag3gj9aj9
And at worst, that's fun, and at best it introduces her to keyboard as an input device. (Now, at seventeen, she has her own logmein account and provides technical support for her less computer literate friends.)
But I agree with what I think you're saying, that kids benefit from all kinds of experience, and shouldn't be confined to just one or two things. Am I getting it right now?
I also don't recommend reading HP Lovecraft to her...
Funny you should mention that...
Daughter has been an artist from a young age, and I recognized some of the figures she was drawing around fifth and sixth grade. I swear I had not read her any of the Cthulhu stories at that time. It was a mystery.
We eventually learned that one of the older kids at a homeschool co-op she attended from third through eighth grade played the computer game "The Call of Cthulhu" at the house where she was homeschooled. So we *think* the images came from there. But geeze... to say it was disconcerting is an understatement.
But what the hell -- if you can't fight it, just embrace it. I got her a Cthulhu plush for Christmas around fourth or fifth grade. She slept with it every night for years.
I was pointing out that there's more to painting than painting walls. I'd also like to point out that there's more to playing with legos than learning how to snap them together. I worked with a kid who made very intricate lego structures at a very young age. Testing indicated that the child had an amazing degree of spatial awareness -- show her a structure from one angle, and she could draw it accurately from any other angle. I'm thinking there's a set of marketable skills there, at the proper time.
I'm not exactly sure what this all has to do with reading to one's child.
Letting a kid type on the computer is useless unless you are also teaching them to read. But just building with Legos or just painting works if all you ever want them to be able to do is hard labor jobs.
Hmm? My daughter "just paints". Oils and acrylics. She's about to graduate from an art magnet school, and is signing up for an art business course. Or perhaps that's not what you meant?
Why not just get them for free from Project Gutenberg? (Genuine question)
Good question. It's not like Doyle needs the money, being dead.
I guess it was a matter of convenience. Back in the Palm Pilot days, Project Gutenberg was my friend. I read all of Burroughs and Dumas on the Pilot.
But... see I have Kindle on the Android phone, and it's just too convenient to pay the minor download price (and there are free titles also) in order to keep all my books in a single place. And yes, I know you can side-load the Kindle app -- I had to do it for the Officer's Pocket Guide to Oregon Law (every citizen should have a working understanding of state law -- else, how could we be expected to act lawfully?) but it was a complex and annoying process which I would not want to do often.
Apropos of another recent thread, (regarding video downloads) if the price is reasonable, I have no problem paying it, even if my only motive is convenience.
Reading to your kids is a great experience for both you and the kid.
Meh. Might be nice for the kids, but I never enjoyed reading to them, (or the grandkids). Some people just gush about it like its a given that any human with a heart would naturally enjoy this, and you are a totally bad parent not to do so. Its taken as gospel and is pretty much an unassailable belief these days, and woe be to anyone who questions it.
I view this as just the current fad, and building something together with Legos, or letting the kids help paint a wall, or type on your computer, is far more educational.
./me... goes away hanging head in shame...
It depends. Some people find it difficult, and some don't have any talent for it. My wife has tried to read to my daughter, but she reads right at the national average (about 250 words a minute) and has difficulty producing a narrative that one would actually want to listen to. I read almost four times that speed, and my brain can read ahead a paragraph or so ahead of my voice, which gives me time to plan out how I'm going to speak the lines. Besides a more flowing narrative, I also get to "do the voices". (Pratchett's "Death" hurts my throat a little.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I understand where the poster was coming from, and (s)he is right, but I have to vote "Why Pirates Failed To Prevent a Box Office Record" as the most annoying article title for 2012, so far.
Lisinopril. It's one of the most common prescription medications on earth, and is so inexpensive that it's easily affordable without insurance. Yet doctors hold your refills hostage to expensive monthly office visits, which consist in their entirety of a nurse practitioner taking your weight and blood pressure, measurements anyone with high blood pressure already takes at home. This nonsense must stop.
> If I should happen to meet one of these video producers, I just might club him/her senseless. Then ask, "How's THAT for a special effect?"[/end rant]
Be sure to film it. It'll be a source of amusement for us, and perhaps a warning to others.
*can*, but rarely is, at least in this area. I know the stations of which you speak -- they deliberately do not have any provision to do the transaction at the pump, forcing you to take your number and walk inside to conclude the transaction, on the off chance that you'll buy a novelty cigarette lighter or a $5 bottle of pepsi when you're in there. But what usually happens is that the convenience-trap stores notice that they can charge the same price as the fill-only stores and do about the same volume, so why would you want to give money away?
Even where the price is higher, it's worth money to me to be able to fill up at the pump in a minimum amount of time and then drive away. I don't think I'm alone. It's going to be interesting if the powers that be can pull off the social paradigm shift necessary for people to be ok with spending a half hour every 100 miles getting a charge.
> You're not far off. Have you noticed how gas stations are starting to charge more for credit than cash, sometimes by far more than the card fees are?
Yeah, I tend not to fuel up at stations with a quicki-mart. The reason for this is that I do not consider a gas station to be a destination. It is a necessary stop on the way to my real destination, and I want it to be as quick as possible. I don't consider fueling up as an opportunity to buy high priced carbohydrates, sodas, caffeine, or giggly hula dolls, pine scent air fresheners, or trucker caps. If I want to buy something, there are other places where I do those things.
Someone suggested that we work it backwards; that instead of trying to herd fuel purchasers into a little high priced store selling nothing interesting, that instead actual destinations you'd want to go to start providing fuel. If that fuel is electricity, that's fine. But seriously, putting a Starbucks at a fueling station is not a solution, except for the people who's destination is Starbucks and who happen to need fuel.
> 4. Then dont include the battery with the car.
That's actually brilliant.
> We will see drunks piss on a cable, then their next of kin sue the station and everyone else upstream.
But at very least, that will gain us a number of youtube moments.
But that's ok, because early adopters will be waiting for their full charge when I've long gotten back on the road. Maybe they'll put a Starbucks at the charging station for something to do while the cars are charging.
A point, but I'd contend that the main differences are these: (a) they'd be bunching up at separate gates, which tends to spread out the mass somewhat, as opposed to passengers from all gates bunching up at a single TSA checkpoint (b) you as an individual would have a *choice* whether to bunch up or not, which you currently do not have.
This occurred to me the other day, and I'm astonished it hasn't occurred to more people. To terrorists, a choke point is an opportunity because there are a lot of potential victims in a small space.
It occurred to the people with a clue long ago. As Dave Hackworth (US Army infantry, highly decorated, later a writer and war correspondent for Newsweek) wrote right after 9/11, "Don't bunch up".
Yes, and it's strange that government -- through massive density housing, mass transit, security checkpoints, other things -- is maneuvering us into bunching up.
I'm not aware of that. Could you provide details?
This occurred to me the other day, and I'm astonished it hasn't occurred to more people. To terrorists, a choke point is an opportunity because there are a lot of potential victims in a small space. Planes are natural targets because the passengers don't have any place to escape to and the vehicle is relatively fragile and easy to destroy. (This is to some extent true for any mass transit.)
But a choke point that contains many more potential victims and is easier to get to than a plane is the TSA security checkpoint during a busy day. It occurs to me that in trying to eliminate one opportunity (the plane) we are creating an even bigger opportunity (the checkpoint).
And so, I get this nagging feeling that besides creating entertainment (security theater) and not especially increasing security on the plane, the TSA, by creating a massive target of opportunity at the checkpoint, is very specifically making airports less safe. And if you're killed in a terrorist attack, there's little difference in whether it happens in a plane or at the airport.
Just parenthetically, the recent case of TSA agents successfully bribed into letting drug dealers through is a conclusive example of why the process doesn't work. When your only guard is a poorly trained former grocery store worker, leverage will always exist to successfully get a package on a plane. (Whether it's money or blackmail or hostages.) We're lucky that so far the payload has been merely drugs.
Like.
Having worked on a site for a fairly large church, I observe that the entire development and administration team were volunteers. We happened to have some experienced people in the congregation, and our site was fairly well policed.
I suspect that smaller churches are even more likely to have all-volunteer staff, and more likely to have people who are trying their best but just don't know what they're doing. In a separate circumstance, I volunteered to host a website (I set up a common blog package on one of my web servers, skinned it for them, taught them how to use it, all for free on the condition that I didn't have to maintain it) for a smaller church, and observed that initially there was a lot of enthusiasm which drained off over time when they realized that updating and maintaining a web site is harder than they realized. The website was effectively abandoned and sat unused until their domain expired.
So go ahead and make your religious jokes; it's a free country. But the reason really is that one (porn) is a business and the other is not. And all that this entails.
I've done this. Besides helping out people who are demonstrably doing good works, I was able to keep my web skills polished at a time when I wasn't professionally engaged as a web administrator. It was a win-win.
On L'Engle, daughter and I went through all the Murry family stories (wrinkle in time, etc) and she loved them. I skipped over House like a Lotus because I couldn't bring myself to read the attempted rape scene and sex scene to my daughter. (I guess I'm a coward.) I assured her that it was a good story, one of the best of the Polly O'Keefe stories, but she'd have to read it on her own. She hasn't yet, and I regret that a little. She loved Arm of the Starfish and Dragon in the Waters. She thought An Acceptable Time was a little boring and repetitious.
Mod up insightful.
It's possible we got off on the wrong foot. I dismissed the poster to which you originally replied as someone who wanted to justify in his own mind his decision not to read to his kids. There's no helping that. People have a huge capability to rationalize the actions they want to take or not take. My wife does this all the time, justifying in odd ways the reason why she shouldn't do this or that for her daughter, when we all know the real reason is that she doesn't want to get out of the chair. But I digress.
Some time later I read your posting, (the one that begins "letting a kid type") and -- go back and read it -- taken out of context (admittedly) it probably doesn't say what you were actually trying to express. My kid started using a computer (loading her Disney storybooks and playing them herself) long before kindergarten, and (I often work at home) when I was working she'd crawl up in my lap and type on the keyboard. Nothing coherent, but who cares? Emails to family would often include:
And now, daughter would like to say something:
23089ythoeuitgahjrvmt wn458ghf 08tyqhe0aag3gj9aj9
And at worst, that's fun, and at best it introduces her to keyboard as an input device. (Now, at seventeen, she has her own logmein account and provides technical support for her less computer literate friends.)
But I agree with what I think you're saying, that kids benefit from all kinds of experience, and shouldn't be confined to just one or two things. Am I getting it right now?
I also don't recommend reading HP Lovecraft to her...
Funny you should mention that...
Daughter has been an artist from a young age, and I recognized some of the figures she was drawing around fifth and sixth grade. I swear I had not read her any of the Cthulhu stories at that time. It was a mystery.
We eventually learned that one of the older kids at a homeschool co-op she attended from third through eighth grade played the computer game "The Call of Cthulhu" at the house where she was homeschooled. So we *think* the images came from there. But geeze... to say it was disconcerting is an understatement.
But what the hell -- if you can't fight it, just embrace it. I got her a Cthulhu plush for Christmas around fourth or fifth grade. She slept with it every night for years.
I guess we're not a normal family.
Wow, long rant. Sounds personal.
I was pointing out that there's more to painting than painting walls. I'd also like to point out that there's more to playing with legos than learning how to snap them together. I worked with a kid who made very intricate lego structures at a very young age. Testing indicated that the child had an amazing degree of spatial awareness -- show her a structure from one angle, and she could draw it accurately from any other angle. I'm thinking there's a set of marketable skills there, at the proper time.
I'm not exactly sure what this all has to do with reading to one's child.
Letting a kid type on the computer is useless unless you are also teaching them to read. But just building with Legos or just painting works if all you ever want them to be able to do is hard labor jobs.
Hmm? My daughter "just paints". Oils and acrylics. She's about to graduate from an art magnet school, and is signing up for an art business course. Or perhaps that's not what you meant?
Reading to them prepares them for what? Being helpless?
There is no believable evidence that reading to kids gets them reading sooner or better than formal reading instruction.
I suspect you don't really get it. That's not why one reads to one's kids. Not everything is 100% mercenary.
Why not just get them for free from Project Gutenberg? (Genuine question)
Good question. It's not like Doyle needs the money, being dead.
I guess it was a matter of convenience. Back in the Palm Pilot days, Project Gutenberg was my friend. I read all of Burroughs and Dumas on the Pilot.
But... see I have Kindle on the Android phone, and it's just too convenient to pay the minor download price (and there are free titles also) in order to keep all my books in a single place. And yes, I know you can side-load the Kindle app -- I had to do it for the Officer's Pocket Guide to Oregon Law (every citizen should have a working understanding of state law -- else, how could we be expected to act lawfully?) but it was a complex and annoying process which I would not want to do often.
Apropos of another recent thread, (regarding video downloads) if the price is reasonable, I have no problem paying it, even if my only motive is convenience.
Reading to your kids is a great experience for both you and the kid.
Meh. Might be nice for the kids, but I never enjoyed reading to them, (or the grandkids). Some people just gush about it like its a given that any human with a heart would naturally enjoy this, and you are a totally bad parent not to do so. Its taken as gospel and is pretty much an unassailable belief these days, and woe be to anyone who questions it.
I view this as just the current fad, and building something together with Legos, or letting the kids help paint a wall, or type on your computer, is far more educational.
. /me ... goes away hanging head in shame...
It depends. Some people find it difficult, and some don't have any talent for it. My wife has tried to read to my daughter, but she reads right at the national average (about 250 words a minute) and has difficulty producing a narrative that one would actually want to listen to. I read almost four times that speed, and my brain can read ahead a paragraph or so ahead of my voice, which gives me time to plan out how I'm going to speak the lines. Besides a more flowing narrative, I also get to "do the voices". (Pratchett's "Death" hurts my throat a little.)
I was a little older than 3, but I loved http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usagi_Yojimbo as a pre-teen.
That's brilliant! Why have I never heard of this?? My daughter is now 17, but she'd really get into this. (She's a manga freak.) I must tell her.