FYI, cancer rates in the 1950's were MUCH lower than today.
We make more for less, with less material cost and less labor costs. You are falsely equating labor with technological advances. A low income person today can own a TV while in the 1950s they could not - in large part because of technological advances not because people work more or less hours.
Working long hours didn't give us Cell Phone technology. It all will happen with less labor; in some cases just as quickly.
People want to work full time to get benefits. Americans must work more if they want any healthcare. Wanting shit they don't need is just another post WW2 propaganda issue; you don't have much freedom to opt out of the wage slave culture. The system is designed to lock you into bondage in addition to the propaganda to help you enjoy being one. I don't want to work full time and I don't need the money but I do need healthcare... and a moderate shelter with internet is not as cheap as it should be (not many places pay that well to part timers, the good pay comes with a demand for time.)
Race, gender, origin culture - those CANT be changed. Your beliefs and your actions are YOUR responsibility and they can be changed. It is NOT THE SAME. If you believe puberty defines adulthood and have sex with 12 year olds... are we imposing double standard by discriminating against your beliefs? You have the right to those beliefs but we don't have to let you act on them and we don't even have to leave you alone to your beliefs.
These religious bigots have made life miserable to all who don't think like they do throughout the history of mankind. The largely quiet minority of people without faith have not been treated fairly for just as long.
These fanatics who are acting up because their rigid delusions are at greater risk as science/education progresses forward and they NEED to be properly put into their place. They may have a legal right to their primitive beliefs but that doesn't mean we should be P.C. and let them be completely untouched. Just as we shouldn't fully accept those Nazi wannabees simply because they have the right to exist. We must be in their face at least as much as they are in ours... it's not like they are keeping to themselves in their compounds... and even if they were - isolation and ignorance (living in a bubble) doesn't help anybody in the long run (it increases intolerance - but yes, there are limits to tolerance and one can be tolerant while still trying to convert or educate them.)
We are becoming a society of cowardly wimps (if not already.) If you can't have your ideas questioned you can't learn and you're going to eventually have trouble with science and logic. The REAL problems these religious fanatics pose to society is their opposition to critical thinking in education - as the job market moves towards more thinking jobs it gets harder to simply train workers without making them think a little for themselves.
I'm so sick of this bullying PC crap going on today - it's being abused like it was a mild form of the word "terrorism." Adulthood involves facing bullies.
Not the best way to present it; however, it is not entirely bad policy. Laying on the ground is extreme. Self defense shouldn't be allowed as a justifiable excuse. Sure the punishment should be less but "self defense" should be punished. A true defense wouldn't involve any counter-attack; only defensive moves. Actual education on Ghandi might help people understand; he could be described as militant in his non-violence tactics. Americans are not taught about Ghandi or MLK in any meaningful way... or most of history or geography either.
It is an extremely common rationalization; abused all the time from small fights to full blown wars. Self defense can even be used when you started a fight... Trayvon Martin comes to mind. No, you don't have a right to self-defense. No, the 2nd amendment isn't it either. Children barely have rights (which were only partially granted in recent times.) It's a traditional cultural belief, that's all. Now if you think the punishment is worth defending yourself then by all means take the lesser evil.
As the parent states - STUDY TIME IS REQUIRED. I've seen worthless busy work which misses the point...(but it pleases many of today's parents) although the students are not in the right perspective to objectively classify it and sadly, I'd say many parents as well.
Reality is that the old models WORK and are time tested. Most students don't put in the time, they'll game the system to do as little as possible - some even teach them how to game tests to maximize their scores (undermining the purpose but it does help to normalize the results.) I find these fads laughable - I'm in a university and while students are more mature, they still can't be expected to do enough studying. The old timers tell me it has gotten worse over the decades and that metrics have increased influence - you can't get away with flunking everybody anymore and the students know this. No, it's not always the teachers fault. Your only power is their end grade for the students who are not actually interested in the topic. I would like to see these experiments carried out on struggling inner city schools without massive grants -- we largely seem only interested in improving things to those who are already advantaged when the impact is minimal compared with helping the disadvantaged. (I do agree with the/. article about how research profs suck. duh! Nobody would want to research and then be distracted by clueless undergrads. )
Just because you had work done on your teeth doesn't make you a Dentist. Same with education; however, everybody is not only an education critic, they are also expert advisers. Especially parents, who want their brat to excel despite a large number of them not doing their job as parents. I come from a line of educators. I have limited experience and training in education; but far more than the average commentator or "reporter." I know about how crazy parents are. They need to be kept as far as possible from influencing the education SYSTEM.
The traditional education models got mankind to where we are today. Humans no longer evolve (sorry.) We can use science to improve education but it's not a simple process; it's far more of an art form - the human brain is too complex and social sciences are so fuzzy and inconclusive. Most these studies are not rigorous; which should be required given how soft sciences are the most difficult to apply the scientific process. One only has to look at the fad from the 70s-80s in reading education in the USA to see how much harm it can cause (FYI, they dumped phonetics and composition for a lexicon memorization scheme. it resulted in poor reading skills many years later... but short term it looked great on tests. )
If you want to seriously improve things, you need to classify students by learning styles. The traditional students remain the same. Experiment on the other groups instead of potentially going backwards. Poor parents cause more harm than anything; we should stop trying to make the school compensate for them... that is, compensate enough to raise test scores. Metrics are a gross oversimplification nearly ALL the time. I had an award winning teacher who didn't look so great on paper --- she purposely took all the troubled kids who shouldn't have gotten to her grade and fixed them. At the end, they forced her into retirement and belittled her accomplishments with her poor results with their metrics. She saved lives, literally.
An old-style lecture works fine. I've only experienced it 1 time as an undergrad. An interactive lecture is similar to a class discussion. Most the time people watch a lecture like it was TV, some take notes. In which case, it may as well be online and acted out by a performer. If everybody is prepared the group will move pretty well together. Masters courses are closer to this and from what I'm told, is that 60 years ago undergrad was more like masters in this respect. Undergrad has been turning into high school and high school has been failing. it's no surprise they are slowly combining them; yes, i
If you must keep your freemarket religion at all cost... the costs are going to get too high for an increasing number of people. Capitalism can go too far. It naturally corrupts and the LAST thing it does is employ people. Now maybe you grew up on the Jetson's and think there will be jobs fixing robots or pushing start buttons and helping computers make decisions... and you'd be up in the clouds with that cartoon.
Economics is going to have to change fundamentally... but it'll likely take WW4 with billions more suffering and dying before people are willing to break from traditional beliefs. Even the optimistic Star Trek series charted a dismal early future for us.
Remember the 50s? space age etc? We are supposed to be working 30 hours per week but instead we work MORE hours than a farmer did before the industrial revolution. Our work is also meaningless, most don't do anything meaningful for a living (go ahead and rationalize if it makes you feel better.)
I had an automation project with the local university started and all of us stopped it because it would make 3rd world agriculture cheaply automated. Yeah, we would have solved fully automated farming (it wasn't some ploy topic for students like all other such projects.)
The other issue nobody touches is overpopulation. people selfishly banging out brats who consume more resources and want even more than their parents. 1/3 is in poverty already (it's easy to raise that up to 2/3.)
Some people would argue that Nuclear physics is not bad; but some also regret giving us the bomb. Military automation = skynet.... kind of sad we must resort to shallow movie references to convey an issue with it.
See the PNAC document, written before Bush Jr got into office. It outlines some of the reasons and all their plans to conquer the middle east. We've been following that plan since 2000 when Bush got into office. I practically memorized it.
Whomever is in charge - it's not us... because both parties are following the plans. Afghanistan was #1 on the list (yes, years before 9/11,) Iraq #2 and Syria was #3. We even started to build to invade fairly early into Iraq but some deals were made... So now for some reason we've decided the deal is off and we'll go back to our original plans. Iran is #4. You'd think we'd be pushing harder on Iran... but you just watch after Syria meets our demands (which is not WMD) the Iran situation will get much worse.
What surprises me is that these plans are so old and despite the world changing we are basically following the same plans (true, the motives haven't changed.) North Korea is #5 on the list; it was pre-nuclear so I wonder after we level Iran if they'll keep with the plan and just how they'll pull it off.
Exactly what I was going to say, but I only had 5 years in IT long ago. Most the nature of IT is unlikely to change; the big issues are rarely technical in nature... people and culture change so slowly it seems almost static relative to technology.
I would add the problem with management is they often are short sighted (except the founder) and do not want to invest in the hypothetical. They don't want to comprehend enough to actually be able to weigh the risks in their "thinking" on such matters - if you make the decisions for them they are OK as long as they don't become aware of it.
There are always stories of idiots or corruption etc. I have stories of my own that I've heard, which are verified. Given the number of people involved and how bad the percentages are it doesn't surprise me; in addition, people don't realize just how bad things are out there in the real world -- outside organizations and government it is plenty bad, possibly worse.
Adults refuse to THINK and that is why nothing improves:
Child protection services is a failure; we have TV shows like Honey Boo Boo (only saw 1 on youtube) when those children should be taken away. It does more harm to a child to have a damaging home environment than most kinds of sexual abuse.... We as a culture seem to only care about sex... from parents to politicians. No, you don't have a right to your children - they are not your property or pets. Any fool can procreate. If you ACTUALLY THINK about it, a child is part of a society and impacts society; that is also a two way street. There are cultures that view the children as community property over parental property. (face it, we may have recently taken away parental ownership legally but the mentality hasn't changed any.)
If raising children is so important (as people claim) then why don't we really act like it is? A parent should be paid for their work and if they are incompetent, they should lose their job. Sure some "losers" will have a lot of children to make their living, but that happens already - the incompetent ones should have their children taken away and given to those who are competent. Some "loser" who is a great parent could raise dozens of children - sure the biological parents would be deprived the love of their offspring, but do those selfish jerks deserve any of it? (hey, some people have kids so somebody will love them - not a good reason but can become harmful to society if they are incompetent parents.)
How about thinking for a change about the biological biases we have about pushing your genome over others? Surely if most men can get over their desire to mate with every female (willing or unwilling) both genders can use their brain to overcome the desire to promote their children at the expense of the others? To a degree that society supports that line of thinking (as they do with rape laws, cheating etc.)
Plenty of premises out there to question that usually go untouched. A simple shift on 1 could drastically change the whole problem landscape.
Good point but Offtopic; the topic is how SCIENCE is being ignored in education.... oddly, we keep wanting better science and math education but refuse to use them in order to achieve it.
Humans ANIMALS like to believe they are above their biological urges, but in reality they are not.
I may not beat you down for your food (because that weakens the tribe) but I'll steal food from your children so mine gets more... In other words, I'll help my child survive and not yours; other than the minimum to maintain group cohesion.
Fighting human nature and biologically rooted tradition is NOT an easy task.
Television addiction exists as much as internet addiction does and for a longer period of time. Television lowers your IQ and has more correlations to bad health but we don't dare call it an addiction.... that would upset too many people-- lets pick on the new less entrenched activities like video games and internet...
I have no trouble with the unofficial stuff, that is just the beginning of the process to become official and is never a guarantee it completes the process. Even if it does, the procession is fuzzy and it could be unrecognized again later on.
CA TLD is an example TLD. It is in charge of.ca, it decides who and how it's subdomains are managed. It can sell them off like an anarchist or it can manage them all with an iron fist. That includes dictating how the lower domains like.bc or.qc are to be run (if not running them itself.) Each nation can do it's own thing..US and the non-country TLDs are the same thing-- they are the responsibility and fault of the US Dept of Commerce.
The U.N. should take over and the USA deserves the right to not need.US as a TLD because we invented it all-- just as the British are the only ones not required to put "UK" on their postage stamps. It won't stop idiotic TLDs because the USA will still have control of those (but they should ban the USA from having any 2 letter TLDs... or non-ascii chars...) The U.N. would also likely allow aliases so.uk or.cn work and allow unicode versions of nations so the Chinese can use Chinese to write "China." I only speak english but I'm not one of those asshats who think the world must use my language to operate a computer.
I'm totally ok with raising my taxes. I would prefer income taxes... especially raising capital gains taxes to AT LEAST be equal to normal income taxes since that is not really legitimate income... I don't do anything to get or really contribute to the economy with it.... if anything, I should dump it completely (most of it I have already) since it goes towards evil bastards who ruin the legitimate economy.
Toronto.ON.CA should work today, the CA TLD is to blame..city would be stupid which is why ICANN shouldn't be idiotically opening up TLDs to anybody with the cash.
Operating a registry should have been the only admissible use of the new TLDs. ICANN is screwing everything up now; time for the U.N. to take over. If I had the cash, I'd buy.USA and then proceed to spoof the.us domains... and.MS or.Microsoft or.Microsott....
I believe they have conspiracy laws on the books in regards to aiding applicants to certain federal jobs CHEAT the process; which includes helping people cheat the FBI entrance exam or gaming the polygraph or other aspects of the process. Probably fits under the rather broad laws on fraud as well (which still haven't been applied to the credit agencies that caused the depression.)
It'll cost Americans less to fully fund relocation than it will to have our governments hijacked and made to fund idiotic and extremely expensive bandaids just because the corporations won't spend a dime to solve their problems.
The leaked USA black budget chews up 1 Bill Gates per year. SpaceX is an insect... no... a microbe.
Ignorance aside, he is smarter than most the planet and is likely going to better with less information than most people with more information. He can speak intelligently on anything; that is not impossible, he just has to think before speaking for his whole life and remain intelligent. Ignorance is another topic; the two are not the same (and what qualifies as "educated" is a rather large debate in itself.)
Space is not cheap or simple. It took a long long time of free government work to let an insect like SpaceX buzz around the space station a few times... their wealthy customers? government.
Mars is a total waste and I have no problem arguing with people like Tyson - even though it is his area expertise; I don't have to be as educated as him in the area to mop the floor with his pro Mars arguments. Same goes for him addressing the evangelical type FAITH in the "free market" to answer all our prayers.
I couldn't let this go without a response. Greedy jerks are all over the place; however, the vehicles differ greatly. Monopolies have zero competition benefit. FAITH in the superiority of "free enterprise" is a religion and your true god is Mammon.
Private interests use their ill gotten gains to corrupt and undermine democracy! Those corrupt officials who take an extra $100k are small fry who can't defend themselves anything like the CEOs and shareholders stealing millions do. The bigger the crime the LESS accountability. Don't rob banks, run them.
They had a problem that required long court cases and rulings with ultimately a LAW to fix the problem. There are proven documented cases and plenty of real people to back it up - yet you act like there is no problem because of averages and an excuse for the difference in the average. It doesn't matter if ONE black man is discriminated against, it is still a problem and the law should protect him equally. Same goes for women. I personally have known women who were payed less and passed up for promotion simply because of their gender. It is a problem and the law should protect them equally.
Educated women have fewer children. They are not all quitting to raise a dozen children... and with the collapsing middle class, fewer couples are able to afford to have an at home parent.
That has to be the 1st time I've heard somebody claim that it is short-sighted to NOT build an economy around natural resource extraction!
Ruin a large area of land permanently just to employ some people for a few generations? Sure there are reasonable levels... except that the current generation is always BIASED for themselves and their children; making it difficult for them to ever be reasonable in the eyes of history. Plus, usually a few people get mega rich from the people's resources. Yeah, I'm dissing mineral rights as a total farce being pulled on the public by the wealthy. Those jobs are not so numerous and often not so great either.
Population growth increases the demand for resources and.... jobs. NZ should be thinking for the long term and those who don't like it can leave... You can't be the best nation in the world and REMAIN that way if you don't address population growth.
Slashdot Mirror
FYI, cancer rates in the 1950's were MUCH lower than today.
We make more for less, with less material cost and less labor costs. You are falsely equating labor with technological advances. A low income person today can own a TV while in the 1950s they could not - in large part because of technological advances not because people work more or less hours.
Working long hours didn't give us Cell Phone technology. It all will happen with less labor; in some cases just as quickly.
People want to work full time to get benefits. Americans must work more if they want any healthcare. Wanting shit they don't need is just another post WW2 propaganda issue; you don't have much freedom to opt out of the wage slave culture. The system is designed to lock you into bondage in addition to the propaganda to help you enjoy being one. I don't want to work full time and I don't need the money but I do need healthcare... and a moderate shelter with internet is not as cheap as it should be (not many places pay that well to part timers, the good pay comes with a demand for time.)
Could somebody point me to a real active thorium reactor power station somewhere in the world?
I've heard for decades and haven't ever even seen a photo of one. do they only exist on paper?
Race, gender, origin culture - those CANT be changed. Your beliefs and your actions are YOUR responsibility and they can be changed. It is NOT THE SAME. If you believe puberty defines adulthood and have sex with 12 year olds... are we imposing double standard by discriminating against your beliefs? You have the right to those beliefs but we don't have to let you act on them and we don't even have to leave you alone to your beliefs.
These religious bigots have made life miserable to all who don't think like they do throughout the history of mankind. The largely quiet minority of people without faith have not been treated fairly for just as long.
These fanatics who are acting up because their rigid delusions are at greater risk as science/education progresses forward and they NEED to be properly put into their place. They may have a legal right to their primitive beliefs but that doesn't mean we should be P.C. and let them be completely untouched. Just as we shouldn't fully accept those Nazi wannabees simply because they have the right to exist. We must be in their face at least as much as they are in ours... it's not like they are keeping to themselves in their compounds... and even if they were - isolation and ignorance (living in a bubble) doesn't help anybody in the long run (it increases intolerance - but yes, there are limits to tolerance and one can be tolerant while still trying to convert or educate them.)
We are becoming a society of cowardly wimps (if not already.) If you can't have your ideas questioned you can't learn and you're going to eventually have trouble with science and logic. The REAL problems these religious fanatics pose to society is their opposition to critical thinking in education - as the job market moves towards more thinking jobs it gets harder to simply train workers without making them think a little for themselves.
I'm so sick of this bullying PC crap going on today - it's being abused like it was a mild form of the word "terrorism." Adulthood involves facing bullies.
I think; therefore, I am dangerous.
Not the best way to present it; however, it is not entirely bad policy. Laying on the ground is extreme. Self defense shouldn't be allowed as a justifiable excuse. Sure the punishment should be less but "self defense" should be punished. A true defense wouldn't involve any counter-attack; only defensive moves. Actual education on Ghandi might help people understand; he could be described as militant in his non-violence tactics. Americans are not taught about Ghandi or MLK in any meaningful way... or most of history or geography either.
It is an extremely common rationalization; abused all the time from small fights to full blown wars. Self defense can even be used when you started a fight... Trayvon Martin comes to mind. No, you don't have a right to self-defense. No, the 2nd amendment isn't it either. Children barely have rights (which were only partially granted in recent times.) It's a traditional cultural belief, that's all. Now if you think the punishment is worth defending yourself then by all means take the lesser evil.
Zero Tolerance == Zero Brains
As the parent states - STUDY TIME IS REQUIRED. I've seen worthless busy work which misses the point...(but it pleases many of today's parents) although the students are not in the right perspective to objectively classify it and sadly, I'd say many parents as well.
Reality is that the old models WORK and are time tested. Most students don't put in the time, they'll game the system to do as little as possible - some even teach them how to game tests to maximize their scores (undermining the purpose but it does help to normalize the results.) I find these fads laughable - I'm in a university and while students are more mature, they still can't be expected to do enough studying. The old timers tell me it has gotten worse over the decades and that metrics have increased influence - you can't get away with flunking everybody anymore and the students know this. No, it's not always the teachers fault. Your only power is their end grade for the students who are not actually interested in the topic. I would like to see these experiments carried out on struggling inner city schools without massive grants -- we largely seem only interested in improving things to those who are already advantaged when the impact is minimal compared with helping the disadvantaged. (I do agree with the /. article about how research profs suck. duh! Nobody would want to research and then be distracted by clueless undergrads. )
Just because you had work done on your teeth doesn't make you a Dentist. Same with education; however, everybody is not only an education critic, they are also expert advisers. Especially parents, who want their brat to excel despite a large number of them not doing their job as parents. I come from a line of educators. I have limited experience and training in education; but far more than the average commentator or "reporter." I know about how crazy parents are. They need to be kept as far as possible from influencing the education SYSTEM.
The traditional education models got mankind to where we are today. Humans no longer evolve (sorry.) We can use science to improve education but it's not a simple process; it's far more of an art form - the human brain is too complex and social sciences are so fuzzy and inconclusive. Most these studies are not rigorous; which should be required given how soft sciences are the most difficult to apply the scientific process. One only has to look at the fad from the 70s-80s in reading education in the USA to see how much harm it can cause (FYI, they dumped phonetics and composition for a lexicon memorization scheme. it resulted in poor reading skills many years later... but short term it looked great on tests. )
If you want to seriously improve things, you need to classify students by learning styles. The traditional students remain the same. Experiment on the other groups instead of potentially going backwards. Poor parents cause more harm than anything; we should stop trying to make the school compensate for them... that is, compensate enough to raise test scores. Metrics are a gross oversimplification nearly ALL the time. I had an award winning teacher who didn't look so great on paper --- she purposely took all the troubled kids who shouldn't have gotten to her grade and fixed them. At the end, they forced her into retirement and belittled her accomplishments with her poor results with their metrics. She saved lives, literally.
An old-style lecture works fine. I've only experienced it 1 time as an undergrad. An interactive lecture is similar to a class discussion. Most the time people watch a lecture like it was TV, some take notes. In which case, it may as well be online and acted out by a performer. If everybody is prepared the group will move pretty well together. Masters courses are closer to this and from what I'm told, is that 60 years ago undergrad was more like masters in this respect. Undergrad has been turning into high school and high school has been failing. it's no surprise they are slowly combining them; yes, i
If you must keep your freemarket religion at all cost... the costs are going to get too high for an increasing number of people. Capitalism can go too far. It naturally corrupts and the LAST thing it does is employ people. Now maybe you grew up on the Jetson's and think there will be jobs fixing robots or pushing start buttons and helping computers make decisions... and you'd be up in the clouds with that cartoon.
Economics is going to have to change fundamentally... but it'll likely take WW4 with billions more suffering and dying before people are willing to break from traditional beliefs. Even the optimistic Star Trek series charted a dismal early future for us.
Remember the 50s? space age etc? We are supposed to be working 30 hours per week but instead we work MORE hours than a farmer did before the industrial revolution. Our work is also meaningless, most don't do anything meaningful for a living (go ahead and rationalize if it makes you feel better.)
I had an automation project with the local university started and all of us stopped it because it would make 3rd world agriculture cheaply automated. Yeah, we would have solved fully automated farming (it wasn't some ploy topic for students like all other such projects.)
The other issue nobody touches is overpopulation. people selfishly banging out brats who consume more resources and want even more than their parents. 1/3 is in poverty already (it's easy to raise that up to 2/3.)
Some people would argue that Nuclear physics is not bad; but some also regret giving us the bomb. Military automation = skynet.... kind of sad we must resort to shallow movie references to convey an issue with it.
See the PNAC document, written before Bush Jr got into office. It outlines some of the reasons and all their plans to conquer the middle east. We've been following that plan since 2000 when Bush got into office. I practically memorized it.
Whomever is in charge - it's not us... because both parties are following the plans. Afghanistan was #1 on the list (yes, years before 9/11,) Iraq #2 and Syria was #3. We even started to build to invade fairly early into Iraq but some deals were made... So now for some reason we've decided the deal is off and we'll go back to our original plans. Iran is #4. You'd think we'd be pushing harder on Iran... but you just watch after Syria meets our demands (which is not WMD) the Iran situation will get much worse.
What surprises me is that these plans are so old and despite the world changing we are basically following the same plans (true, the motives haven't changed.) North Korea is #5 on the list; it was pre-nuclear so I wonder after we level Iran if they'll keep with the plan and just how they'll pull it off.
http://politicalcompass.org/
Exactly what I was going to say, but I only had 5 years in IT long ago. Most the nature of IT is unlikely to change; the big issues are rarely technical in nature... people and culture change so slowly it seems almost static relative to technology.
I would add the problem with management is they often are short sighted (except the founder) and do not want to invest in the hypothetical. They don't want to comprehend enough to actually be able to weigh the risks in their "thinking" on such matters - if you make the decisions for them they are OK as long as they don't become aware of it.
There are always stories of idiots or corruption etc. I have stories of my own that I've heard, which are verified. Given the number of people involved and how bad the percentages are it doesn't surprise me; in addition, people don't realize just how bad things are out there in the real world -- outside organizations and government it is plenty bad, possibly worse.
Adults refuse to THINK and that is why nothing improves:
Child protection services is a failure; we have TV shows like Honey Boo Boo (only saw 1 on youtube) when those children should be taken away. It does more harm to a child to have a damaging home environment than most kinds of sexual abuse.... We as a culture seem to only care about sex... from parents to politicians. No, you don't have a right to your children - they are not your property or pets. Any fool can procreate. If you ACTUALLY THINK about it, a child is part of a society and impacts society; that is also a two way street. There are cultures that view the children as community property over parental property. (face it, we may have recently taken away parental ownership legally but the mentality hasn't changed any.)
If raising children is so important (as people claim) then why don't we really act like it is? A parent should be paid for their work and if they are incompetent, they should lose their job. Sure some "losers" will have a lot of children to make their living, but that happens already - the incompetent ones should have their children taken away and given to those who are competent. Some "loser" who is a great parent could raise dozens of children - sure the biological parents would be deprived the love of their offspring, but do those selfish jerks deserve any of it? (hey, some people have kids so somebody will love them - not a good reason but can become harmful to society if they are incompetent parents.)
How about thinking for a change about the biological biases we have about pushing your genome over others? Surely if most men can get over their desire to mate with every female (willing or unwilling) both genders can use their brain to overcome the desire to promote their children at the expense of the others? To a degree that society supports that line of thinking (as they do with rape laws, cheating etc.)
Plenty of premises out there to question that usually go untouched. A simple shift on 1 could drastically change the whole problem landscape.
Good point but Offtopic; the topic is how SCIENCE is being ignored in education.... oddly, we keep wanting better science and math education but refuse to use them in order to achieve it.
You don't have to comprehend something to make it true. Reality and the Earth will continue without human "intelligence."
Humans ANIMALS like to believe they are above their biological urges, but in reality they are not.
I may not beat you down for your food (because that weakens the tribe) but I'll steal food from your children so mine gets more... In other words, I'll help my child survive and not yours; other than the minimum to maintain group cohesion.
Fighting human nature and biologically rooted tradition is NOT an easy task.
Television addiction exists as much as internet addiction does and for a longer period of time. Television lowers your IQ and has more correlations to bad health but we don't dare call it an addiction.... that would upset too many people-- lets pick on the new less entrenched activities like video games and internet...
I have no trouble with the unofficial stuff, that is just the beginning of the process to become official and is never a guarantee it completes the process. Even if it does, the procession is fuzzy and it could be unrecognized again later on.
CA TLD is an example TLD. It is in charge of .ca, it decides who and how it's subdomains are managed. It can sell them off like an anarchist or it can manage them all with an iron fist. That includes dictating how the lower domains like .bc or .qc are to be run (if not running them itself.) Each nation can do it's own thing. .US and the non-country TLDs are the same thing-- they are the responsibility and fault of the US Dept of Commerce.
The U.N. should take over and the USA deserves the right to not need .US as a TLD because we invented it all-- just as the British are the only ones not required to put "UK" on their postage stamps. It won't stop idiotic TLDs because the USA will still have control of those (but they should ban the USA from having any 2 letter TLDs... or non-ascii chars...) The U.N. would also likely allow aliases so .uk or .cn work and allow unicode versions of nations so the Chinese can use Chinese to write "China." I only speak english but I'm not one of those asshats who think the world must use my language to operate a computer.
I'm totally ok with raising my taxes. I would prefer income taxes... especially raising capital gains taxes to AT LEAST be equal to normal income taxes since that is not really legitimate income... I don't do anything to get or really contribute to the economy with it.... if anything, I should dump it completely (most of it I have already) since it goes towards evil bastards who ruin the legitimate economy.
patents need to be stopped.
Toronto.ON.CA should work today, the CA TLD is to blame. .city would be stupid which is why ICANN shouldn't be idiotically opening up TLDs to anybody with the cash.
Operating a registry should have been the only admissible use of the new TLDs. ICANN is screwing everything up now; time for the U.N. to take over. If I had the cash, I'd buy .USA and then proceed to spoof the .us domains... and .MS or .Microsoft or .Microsott ....
I believe they have conspiracy laws on the books in regards to aiding applicants to certain federal jobs CHEAT the process; which includes helping people cheat the FBI entrance exam or gaming the polygraph or other aspects of the process. Probably fits under the rather broad laws on fraud as well (which still haven't been applied to the credit agencies that caused the depression.)
It'll cost Americans less to fully fund relocation than it will to have our governments hijacked and made to fund idiotic and extremely expensive bandaids just because the corporations won't spend a dime to solve their problems.
The leaked USA black budget chews up 1 Bill Gates per year. SpaceX is an insect... no... a microbe.
Ignorance aside, he is smarter than most the planet and is likely going to better with less information than most people with more information. He can speak intelligently on anything; that is not impossible, he just has to think before speaking for his whole life and remain intelligent. Ignorance is another topic; the two are not the same (and what qualifies as "educated" is a rather large debate in itself.)
Space is not cheap or simple. It took a long long time of free government work to let an insect like SpaceX buzz around the space station a few times... their wealthy customers? government.
Mars is a total waste and I have no problem arguing with people like Tyson - even though it is his area expertise; I don't have to be as educated as him in the area to mop the floor with his pro Mars arguments. Same goes for him addressing the evangelical type FAITH in the "free market" to answer all our prayers.
I couldn't let this go without a response. Greedy jerks are all over the place; however, the vehicles differ greatly. Monopolies have zero competition benefit.
FAITH in the superiority of "free enterprise" is a religion and your true god is Mammon.
Private interests use their ill gotten gains to corrupt and undermine democracy! Those corrupt officials who take an extra $100k are small fry who can't defend themselves anything like the CEOs and shareholders stealing millions do. The bigger the crime the LESS accountability. Don't rob banks, run them.
They had a problem that required long court cases and rulings with ultimately a LAW to fix the problem. There are proven documented cases and plenty of real people to back it up - yet you act like there is no problem because of averages and an excuse for the difference in the average. It doesn't matter if ONE black man is discriminated against, it is still a problem and the law should protect him equally. Same goes for women. I personally have known women who were payed less and passed up for promotion simply because of their gender. It is a problem and the law should protect them equally.
Educated women have fewer children. They are not all quitting to raise a dozen children... and with the collapsing middle class, fewer couples are able to afford to have an at home parent.
That has to be the 1st time I've heard somebody claim that it is short-sighted to NOT build an economy around natural resource extraction!
Ruin a large area of land permanently just to employ some people for a few generations? Sure there are reasonable levels... except that the current generation is always BIASED for themselves and their children; making it difficult for them to ever be reasonable in the eyes of history. Plus, usually a few people get mega rich from the people's resources. Yeah, I'm dissing mineral rights as a total farce being pulled on the public by the wealthy. Those jobs are not so numerous and often not so great either.
Population growth increases the demand for resources and.... jobs. NZ should be thinking for the long term and those who don't like it can leave... You can't be the best nation in the world and REMAIN that way if you don't address population growth.