Star Wars Episode 7: Beating the Cash Cow
Star Wars Episode 8: Milking a Dead Horse
Star Wars Episode 9: If There Were A God, It Would Have Stopped Already
That's why the sky is blue on virtually every planet.
The scattering occurs because of the atmosphere. It's kind of like how light refracts when it hits a crystal: blue bends more sharply than red. The blue scatters down, the red scatters away from the surface. Therefore, planets with no atmosphere will not have a blue sky, e.g. the moon, and virtually every body in the solar system other than Earth and Mars. Venus has an atmosphere, but so many clouds that the sky is never visable from the surface. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, so I'd expect less scattering. It is plausible to me that the sky would only be "blue" around the sun, and red in other places. On Earth we see red skies many degrees separated from the sun (at sunset and sunrise) but maybe the separation is more like 30 degrees or somesuch with a thin atmosphere.
Speaking as a government employee, I have to say that the only time politics is _ever_ mentioned is when I bring it up. I have never seen a more apolitical bunch. Why? Because we get paid no matter who is in the White House. And days off. Your conspiracy theory is uninformed by experience, it seems.
Why do you think that the stockholders allow this to happen? I think this question will become more important in the coming years as the investor class expands. Once Upon a Time, the stockholders and the management team of a company would be in bed with each other, but now there are stocks that are incredibly widely held, and it seems like there should be some stockholder push for reasonable executive compensation.
What about an "open standard" for running a company, with a list of 10 rules that must be followed to meet the standard (e.g. total compensation of CEO is not greater than 100x the average employee)? Then a company could publish whether it follows the standard or not. The rules would have to be picked with an eye towards pleasing the stockholder, not the socialist long-hair, of course. For example, I wouldn't add "Lowest paid worker makes more than 2x min wage" because the stockholder doesn't really care about that. I'd make something that virtually everyone, no matter how nutty their religion, can agree upon. Another example might be limitations on nepotism, or limitations on how many other company boards the members of the board can sit upon. Maybe laws about how the management team can change their own compensation? A no-brainer should be mandated changes in the auditing company after a certain number of years, but the current administration deams that to be uncompetitive.... So let's force the companies that we invest with to do it themselves.
I don't know if it was conscious irony on your part, but you begin your post by blaming lawyers and "uninvolved parents willing to sue the school when something happens to their kid." Then you end your post with "Nobody wants a lawsuit over something this small, but we don't want our kids becoming compliant drones either," implying that you are willing to sue the school to get your way. This is the real problem with American schools -- Americans.
We love our kids, but we are all very different, and we are used to having what we want, when we want it. Compromise is not part of the national character in this day and age, which is said. Everything is very adversarial and confrontational. "HE is the problem with schools," "THIS teacher is doing THIS wrong," "I don't want to sue but I will if I have to." We all know how we'd like our kids to be taught, but we rely on a public system to do the teaching, and that system is subject to all of the pressures that are brought to bear upon it. I have a friend that started teaching high school in Oregon a couple of years ago. She didn't last more than a year. She loved the kids, it was the parents that she couldn't stand. Some of them were uninvolved, but it was the involved parents that were truly disruptive. Everyone wants parents to be involved in their child's education, but when the parents call the teacher every time little Suzie doesn't get 100% on a quiz, it can be very frustrating for the teacher. Parents assume that the schools exist purely for the benefit of their child.
Since I'm on the rant anyway, I agree with your point about ignoring parent teaching experience. That's moronic, and like many moronic policies in place in public schools, it stems from unionization. Every class that _you_ teach is one less class for some schlub who wants to die. The only good thing that I can say about unionization is that it is the only way to get any sane individual to voluntarily take a teaching job.
I am afraid that the only solution to this mess will be private schools, and that would be a real shame. I went to both private and public school, and the public schools introduced me to a wide range of very cool people who happened to be different from my parents. It brought me a little closer to understanding that not everyone is like me. I am very interested in ways to make public schools more efficient and effective, but I haven't heard many good ideas.
There was a NYT article yesterday about how the US National Park Service is "re-evaluating" plaques that it placed in the Grand Canyon expressing the theory that the canyon was created during the Biblical Flood and is only a few thousand years old. Apparently the Bush Administration wants the plaques to be kept in the park, and other (read "sane") people are shocked and awed by the ignorance involved. If a number of US citizens REALLY believe that the Grand Canyon was formed when Noah was on an ark, then there is no logical limit to their ignorance. It may be hard to understand if you don't live here, but the scientific method is no longer taught in public schools. The idea of subjecting a hypothesis to tests conflicts with the value of "faith-based education" which gives us more in common with Iran than anywhere else. Oh well, I guess we'll always need gas station attendents. They can believe that the Grand Canyon came from the tears of Quarnog the World Unicorn if it makes them happy.
I've wondered about this, too. The answer that I've found in MBA textbooks goes something like this:
The investors choose a management team to take care of their capital and run the company with a profit. If the management team is payed a flat salary, they have no incentive to make, say, 15% instead of 8% profit. Their incentive is to keep their jobs, theoretically by doing the minimum necessary. If, however, their compensation is tied to the performance of the company (through growth targets, stock options, etc), the executives have a personal financial interest in maximizing the value of the company, and thus (in theory) the share price.
I guess the big flaw in this is that no other member of the company is compensated the same way, while arguably an engineer has the same influence over the success or failure of the company, at least on a small scale. If it works for the executive, why not the front-line worker? The only answer I can think of is that there is no "procedure" for being a CEO. Everything that the company does is a calculated risk, and management requires a high degree of customization. Maybe without this compensation there'd be less incentive to take risks, while the last thing you want to tell your front-liners is to take risks. I'm not saying it's a good answer, but it is all I can think of. I'm open to other ideas. Thoughts?
I didn't mean to imply that the founding fathers were divine. I merely meant to imply that they probably had some political knowledge, savvy, insights, wisdom, experience, or whathaveyou that the average (or above average) Slashdot reader will only ever aspire to. Of course the FF were prone to error, but they were deeply thoughtful about what they did. To suggest that the separation of church and state was something they threw into the Constitution without thinking about it a great deal is to expose one's ignorance of history and lack of common sense. Read the Federalist Papers. There are reasons, no matter what FOX News implies.
Actually, the founding fathers were right when they permitted slavery and denied women the vote, because without those compromises, there would have been civil war and the US would never have been established. Of course, it only delayed the civil war (which Jefferson knew at the time) but at least the US had enough strength to survive when the war happened.
"Should church and state be separated" is not a valid question, since it a basis of our Constitution and form of government. It's like asking "Should freedom of speech be allowed?" or "Should freedom of religion be allowed?" These questions have already been resolved. Perhaps we can debate the extent to which church and state can be separated, but if you sincerely don't understand why church and state should be separated at all, break out the history books. If you don't have time for that, catch a flight to Tehran. My ad hominem argument was a shortcut to illustrate the fact that a group of men who were studying relevant policy their whole lives and are acknowledged to have produced something thoughtful. What have you been studying your whole life?
Slashdot Mirror
Is that some kind of racist remark?
...but I don't want to spend a lot of money.
I wondered what they were talking about when they mentioned a lot of "Martian Rock" associated with the rover.
I think I'm too young to date sixty year-old women. Maybe I'd better just improve my asshole appeal.
I sure hope that wasn't intentional. Ick.
"Shouting."
Does anyone here know the story of why Duke Nukem Forever has become vaporware? I'm interested in the seedy underbelly of the gaming industry.
"Oh, anyone could miss Europe, all tucked away down there!"
A few typos; it should have read:
Star Wars Episode 7: Beating the Cash Cow
Star Wars Episode 8: Milking a Dead Horse
Star Wars Episode 9: If There Were A God, It Would Have Stopped Already
CLERK: And this attachment is for shooting down police helicopters.
HOMER: Oh, I don't need anything like that...yet. Just gimme my gun!
From the article:
"Requests are normally answered within two weeks."
Hello, information superhighway!
When you're living in the gutter, honour is a luxury.
The scattering occurs because of the atmosphere. It's kind of like how light refracts when it hits a crystal: blue bends more sharply than red. The blue scatters down, the red scatters away from the surface. Therefore, planets with no atmosphere will not have a blue sky, e.g. the moon, and virtually every body in the solar system other than Earth and Mars. Venus has an atmosphere, but so many clouds that the sky is never visable from the surface. Mars has a very thin atmosphere, so I'd expect less scattering. It is plausible to me that the sky would only be "blue" around the sun, and red in other places. On Earth we see red skies many degrees separated from the sun (at sunset and sunrise) but maybe the separation is more like 30 degrees or somesuch with a thin atmosphere.
Speaking as a government employee, I have to say that the only time politics is _ever_ mentioned is when I bring it up. I have never seen a more apolitical bunch. Why? Because we get paid no matter who is in the White House. And days off. Your conspiracy theory is uninformed by experience, it seems.
What about an "open standard" for running a company, with a list of 10 rules that must be followed to meet the standard (e.g. total compensation of CEO is not greater than 100x the average employee)? Then a company could publish whether it follows the standard or not. The rules would have to be picked with an eye towards pleasing the stockholder, not the socialist long-hair, of course. For example, I wouldn't add "Lowest paid worker makes more than 2x min wage" because the stockholder doesn't really care about that. I'd make something that virtually everyone, no matter how nutty their religion, can agree upon. Another example might be limitations on nepotism, or limitations on how many other company boards the members of the board can sit upon. Maybe laws about how the management team can change their own compensation? A no-brainer should be mandated changes in the auditing company after a certain number of years, but the current administration deams that to be uncompetitive.... So let's force the companies that we invest with to do it themselves.
Dollars vote.
We love our kids, but we are all very different, and we are used to having what we want, when we want it. Compromise is not part of the national character in this day and age, which is said. Everything is very adversarial and confrontational. "HE is the problem with schools," "THIS teacher is doing THIS wrong," "I don't want to sue but I will if I have to." We all know how we'd like our kids to be taught, but we rely on a public system to do the teaching, and that system is subject to all of the pressures that are brought to bear upon it. I have a friend that started teaching high school in Oregon a couple of years ago. She didn't last more than a year. She loved the kids, it was the parents that she couldn't stand. Some of them were uninvolved, but it was the involved parents that were truly disruptive. Everyone wants parents to be involved in their child's education, but when the parents call the teacher every time little Suzie doesn't get 100% on a quiz, it can be very frustrating for the teacher. Parents assume that the schools exist purely for the benefit of their child.
Since I'm on the rant anyway, I agree with your point about ignoring parent teaching experience. That's moronic, and like many moronic policies in place in public schools, it stems from unionization. Every class that _you_ teach is one less class for some schlub who wants to die. The only good thing that I can say about unionization is that it is the only way to get any sane individual to voluntarily take a teaching job.
I am afraid that the only solution to this mess will be private schools, and that would be a real shame. I went to both private and public school, and the public schools introduced me to a wide range of very cool people who happened to be different from my parents. It brought me a little closer to understanding that not everyone is like me. I am very interested in ways to make public schools more efficient and effective, but I haven't heard many good ideas.
There was a NYT article yesterday about how the US National Park Service is "re-evaluating" plaques that it placed in the Grand Canyon expressing the theory that the canyon was created during the Biblical Flood and is only a few thousand years old. Apparently the Bush Administration wants the plaques to be kept in the park, and other (read "sane") people are shocked and awed by the ignorance involved. If a number of US citizens REALLY believe that the Grand Canyon was formed when Noah was on an ark, then there is no logical limit to their ignorance. It may be hard to understand if you don't live here, but the scientific method is no longer taught in public schools. The idea of subjecting a hypothesis to tests conflicts with the value of "faith-based education" which gives us more in common with Iran than anywhere else. Oh well, I guess we'll always need gas station attendents. They can believe that the Grand Canyon came from the tears of Quarnog the World Unicorn if it makes them happy.
The investors choose a management team to take care of their capital and run the company with a profit. If the management team is payed a flat salary, they have no incentive to make, say, 15% instead of 8% profit. Their incentive is to keep their jobs, theoretically by doing the minimum necessary. If, however, their compensation is tied to the performance of the company (through growth targets, stock options, etc), the executives have a personal financial interest in maximizing the value of the company, and thus (in theory) the share price.
I guess the big flaw in this is that no other member of the company is compensated the same way, while arguably an engineer has the same influence over the success or failure of the company, at least on a small scale. If it works for the executive, why not the front-line worker? The only answer I can think of is that there is no "procedure" for being a CEO. Everything that the company does is a calculated risk, and management requires a high degree of customization. Maybe without this compensation there'd be less incentive to take risks, while the last thing you want to tell your front-liners is to take risks. I'm not saying it's a good answer, but it is all I can think of. I'm open to other ideas. Thoughts?
Someone thought so, or he'd never have been born.
I think parts of New York tried to make these tunnels, but it only led to Morlocks, CHUDs, and Mole People.
A limitation on bandwidth doesn't dictate a limitation on total information. Simply increase the encoding on the data. E.g. 64 QAM vs 128 QAM.
They also have no knowledge of this one called "Chao-boi Ni-er."
I didn't mean to imply that the founding fathers were divine. I merely meant to imply that they probably had some political knowledge, savvy, insights, wisdom, experience, or whathaveyou that the average (or above average) Slashdot reader will only ever aspire to. Of course the FF were prone to error, but they were deeply thoughtful about what they did. To suggest that the separation of church and state was something they threw into the Constitution without thinking about it a great deal is to expose one's ignorance of history and lack of common sense. Read the Federalist Papers. There are reasons, no matter what FOX News implies.
"Should church and state be separated" is not a valid question, since it a basis of our Constitution and form of government. It's like asking "Should freedom of speech be allowed?" or "Should freedom of religion be allowed?" These questions have already been resolved. Perhaps we can debate the extent to which church and state can be separated, but if you sincerely don't understand why church and state should be separated at all, break out the history books. If you don't have time for that, catch a flight to Tehran. My ad hominem argument was a shortcut to illustrate the fact that a group of men who were studying relevant policy their whole lives and are acknowledged to have produced something thoughtful. What have you been studying your whole life?
...according to Yoda