I think they are using the word incorrectly. Class is not the same as wealth. Plenty of working class occupations pay more than many middle-class ones.
Electricians and plumbers are making more than teachers and nurses around here.
Please stop trying to make analogies between physical property, and information. You cannot "take something back" if you never lost it in the first place.
To solve the environnement problem, China should split into 10 countries. Any of them would pollute less than the USA.
The 10 countries would still be overpopulated. But credit to China for dealing effectively with population explosion since 1979. Now we should worry about India and more so Nigeria.
Which is a problem. China is terribly overpopulated. China has less arable land than US, Russia or India. Only twice as much usable land as Australia, but sixty times the population, and 25x the emissions!
Does adding more people to lower their per-capita emissions help or hinder the world?
Would you say that the US is allowed to pollute more because they have more cars and trucks?
of those 1.5 billion (ie twice the current population of india) will be squeezed into Nigeria. That's quite a step up from the current 200 million. It'll be about as crowded as say Vatican City. GIGO at its best.
Are you from 1983? India is already over 1.3, and headed for 1.5b in about ten years. Many projections show around a billion people in Nigeria by 2100, giving a population density similar to present-day Bangladesh, about 4 people per acre. Nigeria, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, is not showing a significant reduction in birth rate from prosperity, the way Asia and the rest of the world has done.
Vatican city, BTW, is crowded from all the visitors, not the small number of residents from which your population density numbers come.
I know it is only a slashdot headline, but the thought of a 7 degree increase that soon gave me a brief panic. 4 degrees in my kids' lifetime is bad enough.
Even the United States uses metric units for science.
Take pagan Rome and Christianity, for example. Not the same values, which is why all the conflict.
Back when it was a small cult? I'm sure you can find plenty of counter examples, but they general trend when you have different religions in one society is for them to share values. Otherwise they'd be at war even more. You could look at the US today, or the Middle East a hundred years ago.
If religion really shaped morality, you'd expect Christianity today to have more than superficial resemblance to the Christianity of ancient Rome. And the morality of Jesus time bore little resemblance to that in the Torah.
Folks don't seem to realize how many evangelicals America has. Our Vice President is a Dominionist, for example.
Australia's new Prime Minister (won't last long) is a evangelical (or "happy clappy" as we call them), but I never heard anybody call him a creationist. If he was, surely the opposition would be making it known.
Senator Steve Fielding has been widely ridiculed for his creationist beliefs, but he belongs to the fringe "Family First" party.
hang on, "creationist"? In the developed world (possibly excluding parts of the us?), these are a tiny minority of religious people.
I've seen some great discussions between Dawkins et al and and theists. But an intellectual debate between a professor of evolutionary biology and a creationist, would be like a running race between Stephen Hawking and Usain Bolt. Just embarrassing. Unless by "creationist" you mean something other than the usual young-earth, created as is, sense.
Atheists for their part argue that morality can exist without supernatural explanations.
Are these creationists suggesting that atheists are immoral, or that they derive their morality from outside the natural universe (whatever that means) even without faith? Either seems absurd if you know anything about biology and psychology.
I've never met a religious person who claimed religion had a monopoly on morality, they just thought their morality was better.
There's a pretty big debate on, for example, whether you can have morality without God.
Where is that !? At your local evangelical church or mosque? Even there, it would only be among the dumber, more zealous members.
I mean, not only is it obviously true, but it even turns out that societies share the same moral values, even when individual members have different or no religions. i.e. religion does not shape moral values, but the opposite occurs.
"all the work China is doing in Africa is largely being done by Chinese construction crews"
There's a reason for that, but in todays politically correct west we're not allowed to say it.
Why wouldn't you be allowed to say that the Chinese don't want the Africans to have the skills to build the factories they're going to work in, because the Chinese want to get paid for that work?
No. I've spent some time in Africa. The reason the Chinese are doing the work now, is the same reason why the British colonies in Africa imported Chinese and Indian labour at great expense a hundred years ago. The local population is often just not willing or not capable.
Why then does the gun control utopia of Chicago have such high rates of gun violence (but only some areas oddly), while there is a low rate of violence in places like... Plano, TX, where getting a gun is easy.
Presumably, the gun laws are a response to the violence, not the other way around as your question wrongly suggests. Not a lot of black people in Plano. But this is obvious, so what is your point?
You are not married, are you? The correct answer is "no". This is the least bad answer. Do not elaborate. There is no good answer. A possible alternative is to pretend not to hear, mumble an excuse, and run away.
you want to build your liberal Utopia around? Given that poverty in the US also highly correlates with color/race (black & non-white Hispanics being over represented
I'm not a part of your liberal vs conservative American partisanship. The facts as I see them do not make either "side" happy. - US conservatives think anybody can get a good job "if they just get off theirs lazy asses". - US liberals think everybody is equally capable "if they just have the opportunities given to them".
poor people are dumb & that the nanny state has to take care of them?
Errr... no. I said they are correlated. No "nanny state" needed for the majority if unskilled and semi-skilled workers are paid a decent wage, and can access childcare and health insurance. The state does need to intervene to protect the weak from being exploited.
There will be some people (maybe as much as 10% of the population, going by Jordan Peterson, though I'm not completely convinced), who lack the ability to contribute meaningfully to a complex modern society, and I worry that increased automation and workplace complexity is increasing this number.
Or you could make soda bread which uses plain flour and no yeast. Just saying...
So eat bad bread, AND go to the effort of making it, for maybe 30 cents. Using proper flour and yeast will cost me $1/loaf but make delicious fresh bread. Or I could buy a loaf of supermarket's cheapest bread for $1 (Australia - so I assume less in the US?)
Pasta and rice are very cheap too. Why would anyone go to the effort of making their own bad bread, even with a machine, to save a buck or less? Even on US minimum wage that makes no sense.
FYI, bread is made from high-gluten flour, which costs a lot more than plain flour around here. If you ever tried to make your own bread from cheap flour, you should have noticed it is not at all the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you define "middle class" as: ...
I think they are using the word incorrectly. Class is not the same as wealth.
Plenty of working class occupations pay more than many middle-class ones.
Electricians and plumbers are making more than teachers and nurses around here.
students are just holding them wrong.
Wrong Steve.
You are not being vilified. I'm just grumpy when people ruin a joke, thinking they made the joke. Nothing personal, we've all done it.
You know this "Derangement", be it left or right, is not a real thing, just a vague insult?
Wouldn't "partisan" be a better word?
he could end up being the next President of the United States!
(*rimshot*)
Thankyou for explaining the joke. It is much funnier now, with all that needless subtlety removed.
Please stop trying to make analogies between physical property, and information.
You cannot "take something back" if you never lost it in the first place.
To solve the environnement problem, China should split into 10 countries. Any of them would pollute less than the USA.
The 10 countries would still be overpopulated. But credit to China for dealing effectively with population explosion since 1979.
Now we should worry about India and more so Nigeria.
China has 4x the number of people that the US has
Which is a problem. China is terribly overpopulated.
China has less arable land than US, Russia or India. Only twice as much usable land as Australia, but sixty times the population, and 25x the emissions!
Does adding more people to lower their per-capita emissions help or hinder the world?
Would you say that the US is allowed to pollute more because they have more cars and trucks?
of those 1.5 billion (ie twice the current population of india) will be squeezed into Nigeria. That's quite a step up from the current 200 million. It'll be about as crowded as say Vatican City. GIGO at its best.
Are you from 1983? India is already over 1.3, and headed for 1.5b in about ten years.
Many projections show around a billion people in Nigeria by 2100, giving a population density similar to present-day Bangladesh, about 4 people per acre.
Nigeria, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, is not showing a significant reduction in birth rate from prosperity, the way Asia and the rest of the world has done.
Vatican city, BTW, is crowded from all the visitors, not the small number of residents from which your population density numbers come.
FFS! Please put "Fahrenheit" in the subject line!
I know it is only a slashdot headline, but the thought of a 7 degree increase that soon gave me a brief panic. 4 degrees in my kids' lifetime is bad enough.
Even the United States uses metric units for science.
they get it to 1.2 jigga-watts!
For many years I just assumed that was normal American pronunciation :-)
Found the women's studies major ...
Or an AC making a parody of "gender studies". Unfortunately, parodies are indistinguishable from the real thing.
Take pagan Rome and Christianity, for example. Not the same values, which is why all the conflict.
Back when it was a small cult? I'm sure you can find plenty of counter examples, but they general trend when you have different religions in one society is for them to share values. Otherwise they'd be at war even more. You could look at the US today, or the Middle East a hundred years ago.
If religion really shaped morality, you'd expect Christianity today to have more than superficial resemblance to the Christianity of ancient Rome.
And the morality of Jesus time bore little resemblance to that in the Torah.
Folks don't seem to realize how many evangelicals America has. Our Vice President is a Dominionist, for example.
Australia's new Prime Minister (won't last long) is a evangelical (or "happy clappy" as we call them), but I never heard anybody call him a creationist.
If he was, surely the opposition would be making it known.
Senator Steve Fielding has been widely ridiculed for his creationist beliefs, but he belongs to the fringe "Family First" party.
talking points for the Creationist side
hang on, "creationist"? In the developed world (possibly excluding parts of the us?), these are a tiny minority of religious people.
I've seen some great discussions between Dawkins et al and and theists.
But an intellectual debate between a professor of evolutionary biology and a creationist, would be like a running race between Stephen Hawking and Usain Bolt. Just embarrassing. Unless by "creationist" you mean something other than the usual young-earth, created as is, sense.
Atheists for their part argue that morality can exist without supernatural explanations.
Are these creationists suggesting that atheists are immoral, or that they derive their morality from outside the natural universe (whatever that means) even without faith?
Either seems absurd if you know anything about biology and psychology.
I've never met a religious person who claimed religion had a monopoly on morality, they just thought their morality was better.
Amazon doesn't care if you don't steal because you are honest or if you don't steal because you know you will get caught.
Sounds just like God.
There's a pretty big debate on, for example, whether you can have morality without God.
Where is that !? At your local evangelical church or mosque? Even there, it would only be among the dumber, more zealous members.
I mean, not only is it obviously true, but it even turns out that societies share the same moral values, even when individual members have different or no religions.
i.e. religion does not shape moral values, but the opposite occurs.
> "They even exposed their [underside], where their mouth is, which is not something octopuses usually do."
"all the work China is doing in Africa is largely being done by Chinese construction crews"
There's a reason for that, but in todays politically correct west we're not allowed to say it.
Why wouldn't you be allowed to say that the Chinese don't want the Africans to have the skills to build the factories they're going to work in, because the Chinese want to get paid for that work?
No. I've spent some time in Africa. The reason the Chinese are doing the work now, is the same reason why the British colonies in Africa imported Chinese and Indian labour at great expense a hundred years ago. The local population is often just not willing or not capable.
Why then does the gun control utopia of Chicago have such high rates of gun violence (but only some areas oddly), while there is a low rate of violence in places like... Plano, TX, where getting a gun is easy.
Presumably, the gun laws are a response to the violence, not the other way around as your question wrongly suggests.
Not a lot of black people in Plano.
But this is obvious, so what is your point?
The *correct* answer is:
I love you regardless of how you look.
You are not married, are you?
The correct answer is "no". This is the least bad answer. Do not elaborate. There is no good answer.
A possible alternative is to pretend not to hear, mumble an excuse, and run away.
Copenhagen interpretation is still taught as the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics
Perhaps in some of the more backward, remote realities, but it has long been abandoned in the more sophisticated worlds.
you want to build your liberal Utopia around? Given that poverty in the US also highly correlates with color/race (black & non-white Hispanics being over represented
I'm not a part of your liberal vs conservative American partisanship. The facts as I see them do not make either "side" happy.
- US conservatives think anybody can get a good job "if they just get off theirs lazy asses".
- US liberals think everybody is equally capable "if they just have the opportunities given to them".
Both hypotheses seem to be thoroughly disproved.
poor people are dumb & that the nanny state has to take care of them?
Errr ... no. I said they are correlated. No "nanny state" needed for the majority if unskilled and semi-skilled workers are paid a decent wage, and can access childcare and health insurance. The state does need to intervene to protect the weak from being exploited.
There will be some people (maybe as much as 10% of the population, going by Jordan Peterson, though I'm not completely convinced), who lack the ability to contribute meaningfully to a complex modern society, and I worry that increased automation and workplace complexity is increasing this number.
Or you could make soda bread which uses plain flour and no yeast. Just saying...
So eat bad bread, AND go to the effort of making it, for maybe 30 cents. Using proper flour and yeast will cost me $1/loaf but make delicious fresh bread.
Or I could buy a loaf of supermarket's cheapest bread for $1 (Australia - so I assume less in the US?)
Pasta and rice are very cheap too. Why would anyone go to the effort of making their own bad bread, even with a machine, to save a buck or less? Even on US minimum wage that makes no sense.
FYI, bread is made from high-gluten flour, which costs a lot more than plain flour around here.
If you ever tried to make your own bread from cheap flour, you should have noticed it is not at all the same.