There are lots of people who did a logical analysis in the library (Karl Marx was one), but it turned out that things worked out differently in real life.
We haven’t seen many employers move forward with such a change. A recent survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis found that 4 percent of companies it surveyed had moved to a larger, part-time workforce in response to the Affordable Care Act.
If part-time workers offer an easy way to dodge an expensive mandate, why haven’t more employers jumped on board? I asked Christopher Ryan, a vice president of strategic services at ADP, to help explain. He spends a lot of time talking to companies about this issue and says it mostly boils down to a trade-off between having a skilled workforce and reducing benefit costs.
“If you’re operating a large restaurant in Manhattan on Valentine’s Day, you’re probably wanting to have a highly-trained, highly-skilled wait staff,” he says. “And it’s a question of, do you want your restaurant manager thinking about benefit costs, and who needs to be sent home at 8 p.m. [so they don't go over their 30-hour week], or do you want to think about providing consumers with a great experience?”
Obamacare will only affect employers with under 50 employees who are not offering health insurance to their employees right now. Right now, those businesses are freeloading off the government, because when their employees or their families get sick, they go to an emergency room, and the public hospitals pay for them.
Most profitable businesses do offer health insurance to their employees. So if those inefficient businesses have to stay under 50 employees to avoid paying enough to afford health care, good riddence to bad jobs. They'll be replaced by more efficient businesses that can afford to pay for health care for their employees.
This is not to defend Obamacare. A single payer system would have been much better, but the people who contribute to Democratic and Republican campaigns didn't want it. We didn't have a president who would resist them.
I'm sure your son is a bright kid and I hope that during his college education he will learn to look at reality as well as theory.
I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs
Leaders will pop up, and they can be useful, but you have to know how to be skeptical of them and you can't fall in love with them, which is a failing of liberal Democrats. http://www.barackobama.com/
All one needs is a reasonable set of import / export tools.
Can't be done.
Two years ago I had to convert some important WordPerfect documents to Word, and then to Excel. They had a lot of tables, outlines and columns. It didn't come out right, and I had to manually correct every page. The margins, columns and tabs were changed. One page in WordPerfect ran over one page in Word. Text didn't fit into tables. Some of the fonts were missing. There were workarounds that didn't work any more.
In searching the subject on the web, I found a message from someone who claimed to have worked for Microsoft during the original rollout of Word, on the compatibility with WordPerfect. He said that it was very important to MS to have compatibility with WordPerfect, since that was the installed base. Potential customers had their own historical documents in WordPerfect, and they had to exchange documents with clients who still used WordPerfect. MS put a lot of work into it, but they couldn't get them to convert exactly. The two programs approached document formatting in different ways.
Consider a typical Microsoft potential customer. A law firm may have 100 lawyers, each of whom writes 10 documents a day. The lawyer's life is tied up in his documents. The documents are the firm memory. When a new case comes up, it's important for them to be able to search their documents to find out whether and how they've dealt with this matter before. They want to go back for decades. Lawyers have lots of stories about how an old partner says, "I remember we did something like this back in 1960," and they find an old memo that wins a million-dollar case. Usually it's important to get the documents back in exactly the same format, because, for example, the page citations have to line up.
Another problem was that they had staff, like secretaries and paralegals, who were expert in the sometimes-esoteric language and style of law, with its footnotes and citations, who already knew WordPerfect. These are not stupid people, and some of them were experts in the details of WordPerfect, but most of them were not. They could learn a new word processing program, but it would take time, and even more important, during the learning process they could make mistakes. Microsoft had an elaborate learning mode in the earlier versions of Word for people who were switching from WordPerfect in which it would automatically give you your "error" when you tried to use a WordPerfect command. Some of the WordPerfect commands had no equivalent in Word. You had to use an elaborate workaround. And it wasn't just converting documents. You could easily search all the files in a WordPerfect directory for a text string. You couldn't do that any more in Word.
For a law firm like that, it's an enormous job to switch from one word processing program to another. They did it, mostly during the transition from DOS to Windows, but they wouldn't do it again without a good reason.
Zimmerrman was following Martin, and Martin was correct in fearing that his life was in danger. Martin reasonably defended himself.
Put a gun in the situation and somebody gets killed. Zimmerman put a gun in the situation.
Zimmerman started a confrontation which led to Martin's death, and rejected the 911 operator's advice that he stay in the car. You have a right to kill somebody in self-defense, but if you started the confrontation, you don't have that right any more. It's homicide.
If I were on the jury, I would have decided that Zimmerman was guilty of a low degree of homicide. He's guilty the way a driver can be guilty of homicide when he kills someone because of negligence or irresponsibility. If you carry a gun, you're accepting a lot of responsibility. The law says that if you don't do everything right, you can be guilty of criminal homicide. Zimmerman accepted that.
In at least some states, if you start a confrontation, and wind up having to use lethal force to defend yourself, you're still guilty of homicide. That's not a self-defense defense.
If I were on the jury, I would have decided that Zimmerman had an obligation to act prudently and responsibly. It would have been prudent and responsible to follow the 911 operator's advice and stay in the car. If he's not acting prudently and responsibly, then he starts to get responsible for the consequences.
Once he stepped out of the car, and rejected that advice, he wasn't acting prudently and responsibly. He took an unnecessary risk.
If the consequence of taking an unnecessary risk is that you get your ass kicked by a black teenager who (reasonably) believes that you're threatening his life -- that's the risk you accepted when you (stupidly) stepped out of the car. You don't have a right to kill him just to escape a beating, when he reasonably thinks you might attack him and defends himself first.
Juries don't consider sentences, but I think the sentence of other homicides like this is around 1-3 years. That's what black people get. Of course, black people are sentenced to unjustly long sentences, so you could easily convince me to show mercy to Zimmerman, or anyone, and give him a sentence of 6 months-1 year.
I think he needs a criminal sentence, with some time in jail. You have to do it to be fair. Black people get sentenced to much worse. His family wants justice. You have to send a message that if you carry a gun, you're responsible for the consequences.
I feel sorry for Zimmerman because he was motivated by civic responsibility. But his bad judgment got him into a terrible situation and he committed a crime.
I'm very happy for people to get justice. I'll try to help them get justice. I just don't believe that mis-representation of racist notions is a means of achieving anything except more hate.
I don't think you help would be too useful.
For example, you say "black people were killed if they tried to vote, up to the late 1960s", to make it sound like it was a widespread, common practice up until the late 1960s.
It was a widespread, common practice in the South up until the late 1960s. We didn't have the Voting Rights Act until 1965. Martin Luther King was killed in 1968. If a black person tried to vote in the South, he was very likely to be killed. If somebody tried to organize blacks to vote, they would definitely try to kill him. I went to a memorial service for somebody who was killed organizing blacks to vote. If a black person wanted to stay alive in the south, he wouldn't vote. When were you born? Go read a history textbook.
I can't even begin to COUNT the number of times that I'm been told I'm racist *BECAUSE* I'm white, without the accuser having any further knowledge of my thoughts on anything.
That's what you say. I wonder what really happened.
There may be a touch of justification for this. The confidentiality laws are one-sided. A patient can criticize a doctor or dentist, but under HIPAA, the doctor or dentist can't defend himself because the doctor is under an obligation of confidentiality. So you could call that a loophole.
When somebody sues a doctor for malpractice, as part of the filing the doctor is released from HIPAA confidentiality to defend himself.
This contract may be intended to say, "Since I can't defend myself in public, you can't attack me in public either."
But I don't think it's good contract. You can't require a patient not to complain, for the reasons described in the article. The dentist might have been able to get the patient to agree that if he complains about her in public, he waives his confidentiality and she has a right to reply.
Medical Justice seemed to have tried something clever by turning it into a copyright issue so they could enforce it with CDA takedown notices. It looks like they were a little too clever. That didn't hold up.
She should have stuck with meatpuppets raving about what a wonderful dentist she is.
It is well established by social science data that black people are treated worse by almost any measurement than white people, and that this is even worse in the formerly Confederate South. Black people were killed if they tried to vote, up to the late 1960s. That's racism.
I just go by the facts. That's not racism.
I'm not advocating violence. I'm just telling you what happened in the past, and what may happen again. It happens because people think they can't get justice by nonviolent methods. And sometimes it does get results. That's history.
You don't like it? Help them get justice. You seem to be doing the opposite.
Principals and teachers know how to deal with difficult students. Some high school teachers say that their first job is to deal with difficult students. If you're an educator, you know how to deal with these things.
A lot of times, when they find out more about the kid, it's obvious why he's having so much trouble. They often have severe family problems, including poverty. When educators study the factors that are associated with poor school performance, one thing stands out -- low family income. A lot of this is simply poverty. Both the Republicans and Democrats claimed at some time that they wanted to eliminate poverty. Instead, they both eliminated the safety net. You want people to act civilized -- pay them enough to live a civilized life.
Suppose somebody told you that you had to continue to do your job, and maintain the same standards -- at a minimum wage income of $250 a week. Could you do it?
I said, "People are executed in Florida for killing white people, but not for killing black people." Nothing in your sources says otherwise. Carl Dausch would be the first, and he still hasn't been executed. Somebody who accuses another guy of getting his facts wrong, as you do, should read more carefully.
I'm not talking about hispanic people, who have a completely different history. Black people were slaves for 100 years, and they were suppressed by Jim Crow for another 100 years. Cubans were welcomed to the U.S. as political refugees and privileged minorities.
A hitchhiker accused of leaving a motorist on the side of a Sumter County road, hog-tied, raped and stomped to death, could become the first white to be executed for killing a black person in the state of Florida.
A 12-member jury, consisting of one black, took about 50 minutes earlier this month to decide on the death penalty for Carl Dausch, 53, in the death of Adrian Renard Mobley, a black man.
The 8-4 vote was one more than required to give Dausch death over life in prison.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, blacks have been executed in the murders of 254 white victims since a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowed states to resume use of the death penalty.
But only 17 whites have been executed on convictions of murdering black victims during the same time period. None of those executions have taken place in Florida.
According to Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, no white person has ever been executed for killing a black throughout all of Florida's history.
The ironic thing here is, simply blinding believing that other people are being racist due to a set of circumstances which aren't actually occuring, is highly suggestive of you, in fact, being racist. You're already set in a prejudiced view and don't care about the facts. BTW, George Zimmerman is innocent. Deal with it.
A friend of mine was killed in Mississippi during the civil rights days http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers'_murders , so I know very well what's occurring. The South is a place where white men kill black men and get away with it, although not as often as they used to. I suppose you think Willis McCall is innocent too. As soon as we saw that there were no blacks on the jury, we knew what to expect, and it went as predicted.
I don't know the Florida codes, but Zimmerman was guilty of causing somebody else's death as a foreseeable result of his negligence and recklessness, the same way a drunken driver can be guilty of homicide if he kills somebody. As long as he was carrying a gun, it was foreseeable that he could kill somebody. He was negligent and reckless by getting out of his car when the 911 operator told him to stay inside. He wasn't minding his own business. He started it. If you carry a gun, be prepared to pay the consequences of your mistake.
"Deal with it" seems to be a code word on the right wing blogs. We'll deal with it in our own way. Here's another case where an all-white jury acquitted white cops for killing a black man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Miami_riots I suppose you think those cops were innocent too. It looks as if the southern white racists want to start the Civil War all over again. If you don't want to deal with the non-violent blacks who are demanding their legal r
Correct. That's what Paul Farmer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_farmer said. Farmer did more than anybody else in the world to improve Haiti's health care system.
Farmer said that, to run a health care system, you need an overall plan, and that requires a central government. You can't have volunteer charities from the US and elsewhere parachute in for 6 months to do their thing. You need the government to decide what the priorities are. Maybe some church group wants to come in for 6 months and hand out eyeglasses, which is all well and good. But their urgent problems are infant mortality, maternal mortality, diarrhea (which is the main cause of infant mortality), and sheer starvation. Somebody has to come up with a strategy to assign priorities, and the free market isn't good at that. (The free market has already assigned its priority as taking care of the needs of rich people.)
Unfortunately, Farmer (who spends half the year in Haiti and half in Harvard) said that the Clinton Administration was trying to drive Aristide, the (elected) president, out of office, so the U.S. prevented funds from going directly to the Aristide government, but sent them to the NGOs, some of whom were run by Aristide's rivals. You wind up with warehouses full of (say) enough mosquito nets for 10 years, when hospitals don't have essential drugs like morphine to give people who have their limbs amputated, or drugs for people with cancer.
Haiti is a classic case of a government that, for all its faults, could have run its health care system better than NGOs.
Why doesn't Microsoft pay its taxes, so that we can run the schools, libraries and support services for kids to grow up to be programmers or anything else they want?
We're a wealthy country. We should be able to raise money among ourselves and decide among ourselves how we want to spend it. (It's called taxes.) I think most of us would want to spend the money on free public schools, including free college (like the countries we compete with, including the countries those HB-1 immigrants come from). I don't think many people here want their children to graduate college $50,000 in debt, or to drop out of college because they can't afford it. (The Gates Foundation, BTW, was a member of ALEC, which did so much to cut our taxes and destroy low-cost public university education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_American_Legislative_Exchange_Council#Former_corporate_members)
We don't need billionaires making these decisions for us, instead of paying taxes so we can decide ourselves.
(Reuters) - If you want to know why tax from surging corporate profits isn't making much of a dent in the United States' crippling budget deficit, a glance at Microsoft Corp's recent results provides some clues.
Things were rosy in the giant software company's just-ended fiscal fourth quarter, which produced record sales of nearly $17.4 billion, a 30 percent increase in after-tax profit, and a 35 percent gain in earnings per share.
But for the Internal Revenue Service and foreign tax authorities, things weren't so rosy. Microsoft reported only $445 million in taxes in the U.S. and other foreign countries, just 7 percent of its $6.32 billion in pre-tax profit....
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's stock photos of happy black children.
This country is getting increasingly racist. People are executed in Florida for killing white people, but not for killing black people. The Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats are telling us that they don't want to eliminate poverty; poverty is good for us and besides they're too greedy to pay taxes. Bill Gates and the Billionaire Boys Club are destroying the public school system and unions. They joined ALEC to promote the entire right-wing agenda including "stand your ground" laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_American_Legislative_Exchange_Council#Former_corporate_members
Now they're taking $100,000 out of the petty cash drawer to create image-burnishing propaganda, and they run these pictures of happy black children (who will be shot under their ALEC-sponsored laws as soon as they grow up).
Technical editors tell me that when they edit LaTeX documents, they usually edit the PDF. Then they send the PDF back to the writer who makes the edits in the LaTeX document.
Sometimes they convert the PDF to Word and edit in Word.
If a student gets kicked out of one school, why would another school take him?
(Actually we had a situation something like that before federal laws prohibited it. It was a disaster. Kids never got educated. Girls got pregnant and went on welfare. Boys joined gangs, got into crime and went to jail.)
Every so often I find a technical book that was written by the U.S. military during World War II. They published a lot of basic (and advanced) training books in electronics, etc., to turn farmers and backyard mechanics into electronics technicians, repair men, aircraft and ship operators, etc. (A lot of those books were reprinted by Dover and other publishers.)
They did a damn good job. They had very good writers and editors who knew how to explain things. In those days patriotism meant that you would go to work for the government and do the best job you could to contribute to the war effort. Some of them could have made a lot of money in the war industry. I know people who made training movies during WWII. When they returned to civilian life they were some of the best in the industry.
And if Pearson wants to be competitive, maybe they need to port it to Android.
I heard a lecture about that by an ebook developer. Publishers like Pearson make all their textbooks in a standard ebook format, which can be easily converted into the other formats (except Kindle).
I think that by increasing the pay you would start to attract teachers who didn't necessarily major in education. You could start to "steal" teachers from industry - professionals who maybe want to do some good for the community, but can't afford to live on the current level of teacher pay. If the current pay is $66k, then raise it to $96k! I guarantee that at some price point you'll start to get some really smart people competing - simple capitalism.
Simple capitalism has been oversold. The Catholic school system had some of the best teachers when it was mostly taught by nuns who took a vow of poverty. Medicine attracted a lot of doctors who just wanted to make a lot of money, and didn't care about their patients. A lot of doctors are giving treatments that are very profitable but actually harm patients, like spinal injections of steroids http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Compounding_Center
There's some merit to what you say, but it's not that simple.
If professionals can't afford to live on the current level of teacher pay, then teachers can't either. If you want employees who do a good job, you have to pay them enough to live on.
Teaching isn't that easy. First you have to understand the content, and then you have to understand the methods. High school science, for example, requires you to understand an enormous breadth of information. You may be an engineer, and you may know a lot about a narrow specialty, but a science teacher has to teach biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, the environment, etc. to a much greater depth than you get from reading Scientific American every month.
Second, you have to know how to teach. The part that most people get wrong is that kids can learn different things at different stages of development, and you have to figure out what stage of development each kid is at and tailor your teaching to that kid. For example, most middle school kids are not capable of understanding atoms and molecules -- not because they're stupid, but because it's an abstract concept. When's the last time you saw a molecule? After all, the 17th century chemists were pretty smart, and they didn't understand molecules. It's not enough to know something; you have to recognize why a kid isn't understanding it, and figure out a way to make him understand it. If you studied science in college, you probably had some professors who understood their subject very well and didn't know how to teach.
Somebody else here pointed out that the main complaint teachers have is not money but dealing with an administration that doesn't help them and gives them arbitrary rules and useless paperwork. Conversely, teachers like to work for schools where the principal understands what they're doing and helps them do it.
It's probably good to have a few engineers or lawyers as part of the mix of teachers. But it takes more than a financial incentive. They would probably require a lot of support in the first year, and some of them would make it while others wouldn't.
I think the single best thing that public schools could do is give teachers the right to expel students from their classroom and schools to expel students from the school. The bar for this should be extremely low.
Teachers would be happier. Students that wanted to learn would be able to, and parents would be forced to take a more active roll in raising their own children.
Doesn't sound like you've thought this out very far. What happens to the students you've expelled?
Editors tell me that Latex isn't good for editing because it doesn't track changes well. You can't easily see the changes, and you can't easily revert the changes. True?
In the magazines I've worked for, the writer sends in a MS.
The editor edits the MS and send it back to the writer.
The writer reviews the corrections, accepts them, rejects them, or clarifies them, and sends it back to the editor.
They set the final pages, and (sometimes) send the PDF to the writer.
There shouldn't be any more corrections by that point, but if there is, the writer makes them, sends the PDF back, and they send it to the printer and/or post it on the web site.
The point is, the MS goes through cycles. If you have a correction, wait till the next cycle. If you OK'd the PDF, that's it. If you send an email saying, "I just thought of something else when I was in the shower," your answer is, "Too late, we already sent it to the printer."
We used to have a saying in the days of print: Corrections are free on the MS, 50 cents on the galley, and $5 on the press.
I know somebody who works in textbook production for the big publishers.
She said that authors submit manuscripts in Word.
They convert Word to pure text and spec them again from scratch.
It's easier for them to edit pure text to get it to look the way they want than to work with the author's Word files.
Conversions are not perfect, so you have to review and correct them manually to make sure everything came out right.
It's easier to just convert the files to text and do it manually from the beginning.
These are high school and college textbooks with fairly complicated chapter layouts. You could make up something like it in Word, but it wouldn't be in their format, and they couldn't process it in their system.
Slashdot Mirror
There are lots of people who did a logical analysis in the library (Karl Marx was one), but it turned out that things worked out differently in real life.
Obamacare will only affect employers with under 50 employees who are not offering health insurance to their employees right now. Right now, those businesses are freeloading off the government, because when their employees or their families get sick, they go to an emergency room, and the public hospitals pay for them.
Most profitable businesses do offer health insurance to their employees. So if those inefficient businesses have to stay under 50 employees to avoid paying enough to afford health care, good riddence to bad jobs. They'll be replaced by more efficient businesses that can afford to pay for health care for their employees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act#Employer_mandate_and_part-time_working_hours
This is not to defend Obamacare. A single payer system would have been much better, but the people who contribute to Democratic and Republican campaigns didn't want it. We didn't have a president who would resist them.
I'm sure your son is a bright kid and I hope that during his college education he will learn to look at reality as well as theory.
I think this is what you're trying to say:
I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_V._Debs
Debs didn't believe that you should go off into Galt Gulch, and he ultimately rejected the violence of the IWW. He believed that people should organize themselves into collective action. http://www.oldielyrics.com/lyrics/pete_seeger/talking_union.html
Leaders will pop up, and they can be useful, but you have to know how to be skeptical of them and you can't fall in love with them, which is a failing of liberal Democrats. http://www.barackobama.com/
All one needs is a reasonable set of import / export tools.
Can't be done.
Two years ago I had to convert some important WordPerfect documents to Word, and then to Excel. They had a lot of tables, outlines and columns. It didn't come out right, and I had to manually correct every page. The margins, columns and tabs were changed. One page in WordPerfect ran over one page in Word. Text didn't fit into tables. Some of the fonts were missing. There were workarounds that didn't work any more.
In searching the subject on the web, I found a message from someone who claimed to have worked for Microsoft during the original rollout of Word, on the compatibility with WordPerfect. He said that it was very important to MS to have compatibility with WordPerfect, since that was the installed base. Potential customers had their own historical documents in WordPerfect, and they had to exchange documents with clients who still used WordPerfect. MS put a lot of work into it, but they couldn't get them to convert exactly. The two programs approached document formatting in different ways.
Consider a typical Microsoft potential customer. A law firm may have 100 lawyers, each of whom writes 10 documents a day. The lawyer's life is tied up in his documents. The documents are the firm memory. When a new case comes up, it's important for them to be able to search their documents to find out whether and how they've dealt with this matter before. They want to go back for decades. Lawyers have lots of stories about how an old partner says, "I remember we did something like this back in 1960," and they find an old memo that wins a million-dollar case. Usually it's important to get the documents back in exactly the same format, because, for example, the page citations have to line up.
Another problem was that they had staff, like secretaries and paralegals, who were expert in the sometimes-esoteric language and style of law, with its footnotes and citations, who already knew WordPerfect. These are not stupid people, and some of them were experts in the details of WordPerfect, but most of them were not. They could learn a new word processing program, but it would take time, and even more important, during the learning process they could make mistakes. Microsoft had an elaborate learning mode in the earlier versions of Word for people who were switching from WordPerfect in which it would automatically give you your "error" when you tried to use a WordPerfect command. Some of the WordPerfect commands had no equivalent in Word. You had to use an elaborate workaround. And it wasn't just converting documents. You could easily search all the files in a WordPerfect directory for a text string. You couldn't do that any more in Word.
For a law firm like that, it's an enormous job to switch from one word processing program to another. They did it, mostly during the transition from DOS to Windows, but they wouldn't do it again without a good reason.
Zimmerrman was following Martin, and Martin was correct in fearing that his life was in danger. Martin reasonably defended himself.
Put a gun in the situation and somebody gets killed. Zimmerman put a gun in the situation.
Zimmerman started a confrontation which led to Martin's death, and rejected the 911 operator's advice that he stay in the car. You have a right to kill somebody in self-defense, but if you started the confrontation, you don't have that right any more. It's homicide.
If I were on the jury, I would have decided that Zimmerman was guilty of a low degree of homicide. He's guilty the way a driver can be guilty of homicide when he kills someone because of negligence or irresponsibility. If you carry a gun, you're accepting a lot of responsibility. The law says that if you don't do everything right, you can be guilty of criminal homicide. Zimmerman accepted that.
In at least some states, if you start a confrontation, and wind up having to use lethal force to defend yourself, you're still guilty of homicide. That's not a self-defense defense.
If I were on the jury, I would have decided that Zimmerman had an obligation to act prudently and responsibly. It would have been prudent and responsible to follow the 911 operator's advice and stay in the car. If he's not acting prudently and responsibly, then he starts to get responsible for the consequences.
Once he stepped out of the car, and rejected that advice, he wasn't acting prudently and responsibly. He took an unnecessary risk.
If the consequence of taking an unnecessary risk is that you get your ass kicked by a black teenager who (reasonably) believes that you're threatening his life -- that's the risk you accepted when you (stupidly) stepped out of the car. You don't have a right to kill him just to escape a beating, when he reasonably thinks you might attack him and defends himself first.
Juries don't consider sentences, but I think the sentence of other homicides like this is around 1-3 years. That's what black people get. Of course, black people are sentenced to unjustly long sentences, so you could easily convince me to show mercy to Zimmerman, or anyone, and give him a sentence of 6 months-1 year.
I think he needs a criminal sentence, with some time in jail. You have to do it to be fair. Black people get sentenced to much worse. His family wants justice. You have to send a message that if you carry a gun, you're responsible for the consequences.
I feel sorry for Zimmerman because he was motivated by civic responsibility. But his bad judgment got him into a terrible situation and he committed a crime.
I'm very happy for people to get justice. I'll try to help them get justice. I just don't believe that mis-representation of racist notions is a means of achieving anything except more hate.
I don't think you help would be too useful.
For example, you say "black people were killed if they tried to vote, up to the late 1960s", to make it sound like it was a widespread, common practice up until the late 1960s.
It was a widespread, common practice in the South up until the late 1960s. We didn't have the Voting Rights Act until 1965. Martin Luther King was killed in 1968. If a black person tried to vote in the South, he was very likely to be killed. If somebody tried to organize blacks to vote, they would definitely try to kill him. I went to a memorial service for somebody who was killed organizing blacks to vote. If a black person wanted to stay alive in the south, he wouldn't vote. When were you born? Go read a history textbook.
I can't even begin to COUNT the number of times that I'm been told I'm racist *BECAUSE* I'm white, without the accuser having any further knowledge of my thoughts on anything.
That's what you say. I wonder what really happened.
There may be a touch of justification for this. The confidentiality laws are one-sided. A patient can criticize a doctor or dentist, but under HIPAA, the doctor or dentist can't defend himself because the doctor is under an obligation of confidentiality. So you could call that a loophole.
When somebody sues a doctor for malpractice, as part of the filing the doctor is released from HIPAA confidentiality to defend himself.
This contract may be intended to say, "Since I can't defend myself in public, you can't attack me in public either."
But I don't think it's good contract. You can't require a patient not to complain, for the reasons described in the article. The dentist might have been able to get the patient to agree that if he complains about her in public, he waives his confidentiality and she has a right to reply.
Medical Justice seemed to have tried something clever by turning it into a copyright issue so they could enforce it with CDA takedown notices. It looks like they were a little too clever. That didn't hold up.
She should have stuck with meatpuppets raving about what a wonderful dentist she is.
It is well established by social science data that black people are treated worse by almost any measurement than white people, and that this is even worse in the formerly Confederate South. Black people were killed if they tried to vote, up to the late 1960s. That's racism.
I just go by the facts. That's not racism.
I'm not advocating violence. I'm just telling you what happened in the past, and what may happen again. It happens because people think they can't get justice by nonviolent methods. And sometimes it does get results. That's history.
You don't like it? Help them get justice. You seem to be doing the opposite.
Principals and teachers know how to deal with difficult students. Some high school teachers say that their first job is to deal with difficult students. If you're an educator, you know how to deal with these things.
A lot of times, when they find out more about the kid, it's obvious why he's having so much trouble. They often have severe family problems, including poverty. When educators study the factors that are associated with poor school performance, one thing stands out -- low family income. A lot of this is simply poverty. Both the Republicans and Democrats claimed at some time that they wanted to eliminate poverty. Instead, they both eliminated the safety net. You want people to act civilized -- pay them enough to live a civilized life.
Suppose somebody told you that you had to continue to do your job, and maintain the same standards -- at a minimum wage income of $250 a week. Could you do it?
I said, "People are executed in Florida for killing white people, but not for killing black people." Nothing in your sources says otherwise. Carl Dausch would be the first, and he still hasn't been executed. Somebody who accuses another guy of getting his facts wrong, as you do, should read more carefully.
There's a long history of this in Florida. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_V._McCall McCall killed several black people in cold blood, and got away with it.
I'm not talking about hispanic people, who have a completely different history. Black people were slaves for 100 years, and they were suppressed by Jim Crow for another 100 years. Cubans were welcomed to the U.S. as political refugees and privileged minorities.
http://www.cncpunishment.com/forums/showthread.php?5742-Carl-Dausch-Florida-Death-Row
Dausch: Florida's 1st execution for white-on-black murder
A hitchhiker accused of leaving a motorist on the side of a Sumter County road, hog-tied, raped and stomped to death, could become the first white to be executed for killing a black person in the state of Florida.
A 12-member jury, consisting of one black, took about 50 minutes earlier this month to decide on the death penalty for Carl Dausch, 53, in the death of Adrian Renard Mobley, a black man.
The 8-4 vote was one more than required to give Dausch death over life in prison.
According to the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, blacks have been executed in the murders of 254 white victims since a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowed states to resume use of the death penalty.
But only 17 whites have been executed on convictions of murdering black victims during the same time period. None of those executions have taken place in Florida.
According to Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, no white person has ever been executed for killing a black throughout all of Florida's history.
The ironic thing here is, simply blinding believing that other people are being racist due to a set of circumstances which aren't actually occuring, is highly suggestive of you, in fact, being racist. You're already set in a prejudiced view and don't care about the facts. BTW, George Zimmerman is innocent. Deal with it.
A friend of mine was killed in Mississippi during the civil rights days http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_civil_rights_workers'_murders , so I know very well what's occurring. The South is a place where white men kill black men and get away with it, although not as often as they used to. I suppose you think Willis McCall is innocent too. As soon as we saw that there were no blacks on the jury, we knew what to expect, and it went as predicted.
I don't know the Florida codes, but Zimmerman was guilty of causing somebody else's death as a foreseeable result of his negligence and recklessness, the same way a drunken driver can be guilty of homicide if he kills somebody. As long as he was carrying a gun, it was foreseeable that he could kill somebody. He was negligent and reckless by getting out of his car when the 911 operator told him to stay inside. He wasn't minding his own business. He started it. If you carry a gun, be prepared to pay the consequences of your mistake.
"Deal with it" seems to be a code word on the right wing blogs. We'll deal with it in our own way. Here's another case where an all-white jury acquitted white cops for killing a black man. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Miami_riots I suppose you think those cops were innocent too. It looks as if the southern white racists want to start the Civil War all over again. If you don't want to deal with the non-violent blacks who are demanding their legal r
Correct. That's what Paul Farmer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_farmer said. Farmer did more than anybody else in the world to improve Haiti's health care system.
Farmer said that, to run a health care system, you need an overall plan, and that requires a central government. You can't have volunteer charities from the US and elsewhere parachute in for 6 months to do their thing. You need the government to decide what the priorities are. Maybe some church group wants to come in for 6 months and hand out eyeglasses, which is all well and good. But their urgent problems are infant mortality, maternal mortality, diarrhea (which is the main cause of infant mortality), and sheer starvation. Somebody has to come up with a strategy to assign priorities, and the free market isn't good at that. (The free market has already assigned its priority as taking care of the needs of rich people.)
Unfortunately, Farmer (who spends half the year in Haiti and half in Harvard) said that the Clinton Administration was trying to drive Aristide, the (elected) president, out of office, so the U.S. prevented funds from going directly to the Aristide government, but sent them to the NGOs, some of whom were run by Aristide's rivals. You wind up with warehouses full of (say) enough mosquito nets for 10 years, when hospitals don't have essential drugs like morphine to give people who have their limbs amputated, or drugs for people with cancer.
Haiti is a classic case of a government that, for all its faults, could have run its health care system better than NGOs.
Why doesn't Microsoft pay its taxes, so that we can run the schools, libraries and support services for kids to grow up to be programmers or anything else they want?
We're a wealthy country. We should be able to raise money among ourselves and decide among ourselves how we want to spend it. (It's called taxes.) I think most of us would want to spend the money on free public schools, including free college (like the countries we compete with, including the countries those HB-1 immigrants come from). I don't think many people here want their children to graduate college $50,000 in debt, or to drop out of college because they can't afford it. (The Gates Foundation, BTW, was a member of ALEC, which did so much to cut our taxes and destroy low-cost public university education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_American_Legislative_Exchange_Council#Former_corporate_members)
We don't need billionaires making these decisions for us, instead of paying taxes so we can decide ourselves.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/27/us-microsoft-tax-idUSTRE76Q6OB20110727
Insight: Microsoft use of low-tax havens drives down tax bill
By Lynnley Browning
FAIRFIELD, Connecticut | Wed Jul 27, 2011 7:07pm EDT
(Reuters) - If you want to know why tax from surging corporate profits isn't making much of a dent in the United States' crippling budget deficit, a glance at Microsoft Corp's recent results provides some clues.
Things were rosy in the giant software company's just-ended fiscal fourth quarter, which produced record sales of nearly $17.4 billion, a 30 percent increase in after-tax profit, and a 35 percent gain in earnings per share.
But for the Internal Revenue Service and foreign tax authorities, things weren't so rosy. Microsoft reported only $445 million in taxes in the U.S. and other foreign countries, just 7 percent of its $6.32 billion in pre-tax profit....
If there's one thing I can't stand, it's stock photos of happy black children.
This country is getting increasingly racist. People are executed in Florida for killing white people, but not for killing black people. The Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats are telling us that they don't want to eliminate poverty; poverty is good for us and besides they're too greedy to pay taxes. Bill Gates and the Billionaire Boys Club are destroying the public school system and unions. They joined ALEC to promote the entire right-wing agenda including "stand your ground" laws. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_American_Legislative_Exchange_Council#Former_corporate_members
Now they're taking $100,000 out of the petty cash drawer to create image-burnishing propaganda, and they run these pictures of happy black children (who will be shot under their ALEC-sponsored laws as soon as they grow up).
Technical editors tell me that when they edit LaTeX documents, they usually edit the PDF. Then they send the PDF back to the writer who makes the edits in the LaTeX document.
Sometimes they convert the PDF to Word and edit in Word.
disclaimer: I'm a mechanical engineer. Mechanical engineering == best engineering.
http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/cooking-steel
If a student gets kicked out of one school, why would another school take him?
(Actually we had a situation something like that before federal laws prohibited it. It was a disaster. Kids never got educated. Girls got pregnant and went on welfare. Boys joined gangs, got into crime and went to jail.)
Every so often I find a technical book that was written by the U.S. military during World War II. They published a lot of basic (and advanced) training books in electronics, etc., to turn farmers and backyard mechanics into electronics technicians, repair men, aircraft and ship operators, etc. (A lot of those books were reprinted by Dover and other publishers.)
They did a damn good job. They had very good writers and editors who knew how to explain things. In those days patriotism meant that you would go to work for the government and do the best job you could to contribute to the war effort. Some of them could have made a lot of money in the war industry. I know people who made training movies during WWII. When they returned to civilian life they were some of the best in the industry.
The government can do a good job.
And if Pearson wants to be competitive, maybe they need to port it to Android.
I heard a lecture about that by an ebook developer. Publishers like Pearson make all their textbooks in a standard ebook format, which can be easily converted into the other formats (except Kindle).
I think that by increasing the pay you would start to attract teachers who didn't necessarily major in education. You could start to "steal" teachers from industry - professionals who maybe want to do some good for the community, but can't afford to live on the current level of teacher pay. If the current pay is $66k, then raise it to $96k! I guarantee that at some price point you'll start to get some really smart people competing - simple capitalism.
Simple capitalism has been oversold. The Catholic school system had some of the best teachers when it was mostly taught by nuns who took a vow of poverty. Medicine attracted a lot of doctors who just wanted to make a lot of money, and didn't care about their patients. A lot of doctors are giving treatments that are very profitable but actually harm patients, like spinal injections of steroids http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England_Compounding_Center
There's some merit to what you say, but it's not that simple.
If professionals can't afford to live on the current level of teacher pay, then teachers can't either. If you want employees who do a good job, you have to pay them enough to live on.
Teaching isn't that easy. First you have to understand the content, and then you have to understand the methods. High school science, for example, requires you to understand an enormous breadth of information. You may be an engineer, and you may know a lot about a narrow specialty, but a science teacher has to teach biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, the environment, etc. to a much greater depth than you get from reading Scientific American every month.
Second, you have to know how to teach. The part that most people get wrong is that kids can learn different things at different stages of development, and you have to figure out what stage of development each kid is at and tailor your teaching to that kid. For example, most middle school kids are not capable of understanding atoms and molecules -- not because they're stupid, but because it's an abstract concept. When's the last time you saw a molecule? After all, the 17th century chemists were pretty smart, and they didn't understand molecules. It's not enough to know something; you have to recognize why a kid isn't understanding it, and figure out a way to make him understand it. If you studied science in college, you probably had some professors who understood their subject very well and didn't know how to teach.
Somebody else here pointed out that the main complaint teachers have is not money but dealing with an administration that doesn't help them and gives them arbitrary rules and useless paperwork. Conversely, teachers like to work for schools where the principal understands what they're doing and helps them do it.
It's probably good to have a few engineers or lawyers as part of the mix of teachers. But it takes more than a financial incentive. They would probably require a lot of support in the first year, and some of them would make it while others wouldn't.
They have a situation something like that in the Favelas in Brazil. The police just kill them.
I think the single best thing that public schools could do is give teachers the right to expel students from their classroom and schools to expel students from the school. The bar for this should be extremely low.
Teachers would be happier. Students that wanted to learn would be able to, and parents would be forced to take a more active roll in raising their own children.
Doesn't sound like you've thought this out very far. What happens to the students you've expelled?
I was reading one of my freelance editors' email lists and there was some discussion of LaTeX.
Most of them don't edit in LaTeX. They edit the PDFs.
The writer reviews the edits, and manually makes them in the LaTeX document.
Editors tell me that Latex isn't good for editing because it doesn't track changes well. You can't easily see the changes, and you can't easily revert the changes. True?
I don't understand the process you used.
In the magazines I've worked for, the writer sends in a MS.
The editor edits the MS and send it back to the writer.
The writer reviews the corrections, accepts them, rejects them, or clarifies them, and sends it back to the editor.
They set the final pages, and (sometimes) send the PDF to the writer.
There shouldn't be any more corrections by that point, but if there is, the writer makes them, sends the PDF back, and they send it to the printer and/or post it on the web site.
The point is, the MS goes through cycles. If you have a correction, wait till the next cycle. If you OK'd the PDF, that's it. If you send an email saying, "I just thought of something else when I was in the shower," your answer is, "Too late, we already sent it to the printer."
We used to have a saying in the days of print: Corrections are free on the MS, 50 cents on the galley, and $5 on the press.
Back in my day we had MANUAL typewriters.
I know somebody who works in textbook production for the big publishers.
She said that authors submit manuscripts in Word.
They convert Word to pure text and spec them again from scratch.
It's easier for them to edit pure text to get it to look the way they want than to work with the author's Word files.
Conversions are not perfect, so you have to review and correct them manually to make sure everything came out right.
It's easier to just convert the files to text and do it manually from the beginning.
These are high school and college textbooks with fairly complicated chapter layouts. You could make up something like it in Word, but it wouldn't be in their format, and they couldn't process it in their system.