You haven't seen the explanations for how the industry really does this stuff, have you? Sure the exec will show up offering a "big fat contract" but the label recoups a lot of their costs.
So Wonderboyband gets a signing bonus of $100,000, plus an advance of $500,000 for their first album. But the label charges them $200,000 for use of a studio, plus another $300,000 for a music video for MTV. That leaves the band with just $100,000, which gets eaten by touring to promote the albums. Royalties don't help much since they're usually a few cents per cd.
So its perfectly possible for bands to make millions of dollars for their label while being forced to declare bankruptsy. This happened to TLS and Toni Braxton, who each earned something like 150 million dollars, each, for their record company but ended up in chapter 11.
That is why the inustry is "evil".
They take the risk of putting down hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to pay and promote a new artist that no one has heard of and just the year before was only singing in their church choir.
Feh. Their system is broken, but rather than fix the flaws they use the resulting problems as justification those flaws. The industry needs to get some thearapy for its one hit wonder fetish, and start promoting long running acts with reasonable contracts. Stop spending millions of dollars on a quick, hard push for the new album from Wonderboyband X and let album sales build.
I haven't looked at the entire review, but I smell the wiff of bullshit comming from Tom. First I checked out the game benchmarks...where he only ran Quake 3!!! If you didn't know, Quake 3 has always run faster on P4's than on Athalons. To be fair, he should have also benched something like Serious Sam 2 which has a similar advantage on AMD chips. I would be similarily suspicious of his other benchmarks, like mp3 and mpeg encoding. If he knowingly uses a game that's better optimized for one processor in a benchmark, whats to stop him from doing the same in others?
Remember that Tom plays favorites with Intel and AMD, depending on who's giving him more free stuff these days. A year or two ago he was loudly claiming there was no way Intel would be able to compete with AMD and that they'd end up exiting the consumer processor business.
So basically, to paraphrase: "there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there's benchmarks"
Children in an orphanges are living breathing human beings with emotions, memories and connections to the rest of the world. Especially in the first trimester, a fetus has none of those. Its just a blob of cells, and if you are comparing the loss of a blob to the loss of a child you need to check into Betty Ford and get a sense of proportion.
"For thousands of years, the whole point of human existence was to perpetuate and improve both quality and quantity of life."
Says who? I am serious. Your basic assumption is flawed. There is no real evidence of this.
No evidence? How about the fact that we aren't still living in caves? If the only purpose of our existence was to exist, humans wouldn't have invented agriculture, writing, etc. A basic tenant of evolution is that organisms that evolve and improve themselves will pass those that don't.
Regardless of that, many MANY MANY people would disagree with your asssumption, for many different reasons.
Well I don't know about those people, but I'm glad I'm not a single cell bacteria floating around in the ocean somewhere.
I myself would take issue with the idea that boosting quantity of life is even remotely positively connected to improving quality.
??? Where the heck are you getting this from? The origional poster wasn't talking about genetically modifying females so they can pump out a baby ever 3 months. If you are referring to the prevention of serious and even fatal birth defects, yeah that would increase the population but lets think of their quality of life. Hmm...heart defect fixed...kid wont die because of it...has his quality of life improved...not sure...
You obviously don't have the perspective or historical background to speak with authority on issues like this.
Wow, I am flumoxed here...can't decide if you're being condescending, patronizing or santimonious.
Some people are against progress through genetic modification...people like me and the parent poster want to know why, after millenia of modifying ourselves and our environment, that this new progress is suddenly bad.
At what point do we get bored with the superhero as vendetta killer theme? It ain't that amazing.
How many of those have we actually had? Off the top of my head I can only think of three heroes in a true blood rage: the aformentioned Miller books on DD, when the Green Goblin threw Gwen Stacey to her death and when the Punisher's family was killed. And of the three, only the Punisher actually killed anybody! The Kingpin and Bullseye are still alive and well, and the Goblin ended up killing himself with his own glider (another case where the movie scene comes straight from the book).
Most heros are all about not killing people, no matter how evil they might be. In fact most of them will stop somebody else from killing someone completely evil. Look at all the bad guys that Spidey saved from being taken out by the Punisher.
And they're so extreme at times that I get disgusted. Spidey pulls Carnage out of a fire, saving his life just after Carnage went on a killing spree. Hell, the story arc was called "Maximum Carnage". So you have this bad guy who kills innocent people, and sure he's being sent to jail but you know they always escape and you know they'll kill again when they do. I wonder how many people in the Marvel Universe are dead because Spidey pulled Carnage out of a fire.
Sure, you can say you value human life, no matter how evil, but when you save a bad guy who you know is going to kill again and again you are putting a higher value on his life than that of his victums.
I think most of those problems came from having editors on crack *and* meth. X-Men, DD and Spider-Man all feel like they were edited to the bone to remove any "excess" nanoseconds from the movie. I think they'd be much better films if they had another 30-40 minutes for charachter development, and to let scenes build instead of throwing everything in your face.
People are complaining about the Hulk graphics because they aren't consistent with the rest of the movie. The rest of the charachters aren't obviously CG, so the Hulk stands out like a sore thumb. If the whole movie was generated on a computer, a la FF: Spirits Within, then it would be ok because it would be consistent.
And aside from looking right, its got to move right too. In the comics the Hulk is 8 feet tall and wights about a ton, but is incredibly strong. He might be able to jump a mile into the air, but he still has mass. To make an example, say somebody rams him with a two ton truck. He can't go flying because he weighs too much, but he wont not be moved because he's not that heavy. So when they're working the CG they should also make sure the physics look right as well.
Q Squared is frikkin awsome. If only that had been made into the last Next Gen movie rather than Nemesis....
And unfortunatly I missed on out New Fronteir. I did notice that it was a Peter David book, but I was poor and figured he was merely launching the series, and other writers would take over later. Little did I know that he was going to write all of them.:(
Actually I haven't either, but I know what happened.
He was one of the first comic book authors to take a charachter and basically destroy his life, then watch what he does. Now thats pretty common, seems to happen to Spider-Man all the time, but when Miller was writting DD it was fresh, shocking, and cool.
The way Bullseye kills Electra in the movie is straight out of the comic book. He takes her own sword and impales her with it striaght through the heart, and yeah you see the tip sticking out her back. Then she got ressurected by the Hand (ninja sorcerors) and ends up working for the Kingpin as his assasin, and is tasked with killing Daredevil.
One of the all time great moments in comics came after the Kingpin destoryed Daredevils personal and professional life prior to killing him. He had Daredevil put in a car that was then tossed in the river so he'd drown. The great moment is when the Kingpin realizes that not only did Matt escape from the car, but now he has enough reason to hate the Kingpin for the next ten thousand years and has nothing to lose.
So the movie is actually pretty tame compared to the comics. That said, I also dislike violence when its totally pointless. I'm a big Dr. Who fan, and there are several otherwise great episodes that I don't care for because everybody dies.
He's written for B5, most of the Q stories for Star Trek (good good stuff), Spider-Man and of course his 17 year run on the Hulk.
He came up with all the cool stuff for the Hulk: the grey skinned version who wanted to take over the world, the evil future version of himself, and the fusing of the crafyness of the grey hulk and Bruce Banner's personality into the body of the big green Hulk. If you think that the combination of a genious intellect in a near-invunerable body made him too strong, he had a new weakness: piss him off, and he'd turn human with the 'Hulk Smash!' personality.:)
The reason I heard he left the title is that he ran out of ideas that Marvel would let him do. Which is one of my gripes with Marvel (and Star Trek): to beholden to the status quo.
Spidey vs Transformers...Marvel had publishing rights at the time (can't remember whos doing the new Transformers comics) so they could do stuff like this.
As I recall, Spidey (in black costume era) was helping the Autobots rescue some human scientist that the Decepticons had kidnapped to turn oil into engergon.
What I REALLY want to see is Magneto vs the Transformers. Such sweet carnage it would be.:-)
But what is actually better for a kid to see? You drop a 50 pound anvil on a rooster and he gets up and walks away. You see a guy get shot in an old western and he just falls over...you see no blood, no cries of pain, no body.
So what is actually worse? Cartoon type violence that is funny and nobody really gets hurt, or realistic violence that has consequences?
I haven't found a single dissenter who protested the bombing of Kosovo
As someone else pointed out, that was a UN operation that was finally started over "ethnic cleansing". The only "problem" with the operation is that it was about 5 years too late.
Clinton's missile attacks on Iraq.
Missle attacks meant to knock out some of Iraqs military. Or can't you tell the difference between dropping a few cruise missles on suspected sites and handing out oil contracts before you've even finished the unilateral invasion and deposing another counties leader who has never attacked us?
Clinton despite the shame he brought upon the presidency
Shame, eh? Lets spend over 100 million dollars picking apart your entire life, and when we can't prove any ciminal wrongdoing, we'll manufacture pergury charges against you by asking irrelevant questions about your sex life until you lie. This will all be justified afterword by your "shameful lying". I mean jesus, somebody lying about their sex life? The world will end!
alright, lets try that again with proper formatting, and me not being a dork and using the preview:
There is no significant difference between the two.
(borrowed from an SNL schetch)
Question: is your head filled with human excrement, or dog excrement? Is there any history of mental retardation in your family?
Ok, serioulsy now, how can intelligent person say, with a straight face, that there is no difference between Dems and the GOP? Not that there aren't a lot of reasons to currently dislike the Democratic party: their general spinelessness, blind support of feminists and their efforts to retroactively extend copyrights every 20 years.
But thats a far cry from thowing people in jail indefinetly without a lawyer, unilateraly invading another country that hasn't attacked us, passing laws like the Patriot Act and rushing to add trillions to our nations debt.
Anyone who doesn't yet realize this has a screw lose, or their head buried in the sand.
Stones, glass houses.
Most will grab a single issue and say "I can't vote Libertarian because they like pot!"
No, most people don't vote Libertarian because it might be a fine philosophy for a country or city state, but a rotten system for a nation with a few hundred million people in it. One thing Libs don't seem to realize is that while it will certainally screw up, the primary job of government is to serve the people, while the primary job of business is to make money. You might succeed in taking power away from the gvt, but it will just be snapped up by businesses. So in the long run it will cost you more, not less, and you will have fewer choices, not more.
There is no significant difference between the two.
(borrowed from an SNL schetch)
Question: is your head filled with human excrement, or dog excrement? Is there any history of mental retardation in your family?
Ok, serioulsy now, how can intelligent person say, with a straight face, that there is no difference between Dems and the GOP? Not that there aren't a lot of reasons to currently dislike the Democratic party: their general spinelessness, blind support of feminists and their efforts to retroactively extend copyrights every 20 years.
But thats a far cry from thowing people in jail indefinetly without a lawyer, unilateraly invading another country that hasn't attacked us, passing laws like the Patriot Act and rushing to add trillions to our nations debt.
<I>Anyone who doesn't yet realize this has a screw lose, or their head buried in the sand.</I>
Stones, glass houses.
<I>Most will grab a single issue and say "I can't vote Libertarian because they like pot!" </i>
No, most people don't vote Libertarian because it might be a fine philosophy for a country or city state, but a rotten system for a nation with a few hundred million people in it. One thing Libs don't seem to realize is that while it will certainally screw up, the primary job of government is to serve the people, while the primary job of business is to make money. You might succeed in taking power away from the gvt, but it will just be snapped up by businesses. So in the long run it will cost you more, not less, and you will have fewer choices, not more.
<i>It only seems that way because a vast majority of people in the US agree with the administration's war policy.</i>
Snort. The only way you could possibly get a "vast majoraty" is by rigging the poll. i.e. 95% of Americans say they "support our troops" so support is infered for the whole operation.
I'm glad they did this because -- *gasp* -- that's a lot how the real world works
No, thats not how the real world works at all. By breathing down the kids neck all the time that becomes his sole motivation to do anything. Or as in Office Space, "(paraphrased) sure you can threaten to fire me, but that will only make me do just enough to not get fired".
In other words, the kid isn't motivated to get his homework done because he's a go-getter or because he wants to better himself, but because you'll bitch at him. Said kid turns 18, goes off to college, but without you bitching at him and without any personal movotivation, he'll fall flat on his face.
Same thing once he gets out to the workplace. You need to install self-motivation and a sense of pride in kids for them to go out and succed, and sticking your nose over their shoulders ever day isn't going to accomplish that.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why is she being credited for Revolutions?
It's a fucking cartoon, guy.
If its so unimportant to you, then why are you being such a dick? People who randomly rag on people for ordinary statements suxor.
You haven't seen the explanations for how the industry really does this stuff, have you? Sure the exec will show up offering a "big fat contract" but the label recoups a lot of their costs.
So Wonderboyband gets a signing bonus of $100,000, plus an advance of $500,000 for their first album. But the label charges them $200,000 for use of a studio, plus another $300,000 for a music video for MTV. That leaves the band with just $100,000, which gets eaten by touring to promote the albums. Royalties don't help much since they're usually a few cents per cd.
So its perfectly possible for bands to make millions of dollars for their label while being forced to declare bankruptsy. This happened to TLS and Toni Braxton, who each earned something like 150 million dollars, each, for their record company but ended up in chapter 11.
That is why the inustry is "evil".
They take the risk of putting down hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to pay and promote a new artist that no one has heard of and just the year before was only singing in their church choir.
Feh. Their system is broken, but rather than fix the flaws they use the resulting problems as justification those flaws. The industry needs to get some thearapy for its one hit wonder fetish, and start promoting long running acts with reasonable contracts. Stop spending millions of dollars on a quick, hard push for the new album from Wonderboyband X and let album sales build.
I haven't looked at the entire review, but I smell the wiff of bullshit comming from Tom. First I checked out the game benchmarks...where he only ran Quake 3!!! If you didn't know, Quake 3 has always run faster on P4's than on Athalons. To be fair, he should have also benched something like Serious Sam 2 which has a similar advantage on AMD chips. I would be similarily suspicious of his other benchmarks, like mp3 and mpeg encoding. If he knowingly uses a game that's better optimized for one processor in a benchmark, whats to stop him from doing the same in others?
Remember that Tom plays favorites with Intel and AMD, depending on who's giving him more free stuff these days. A year or two ago he was loudly claiming there was no way Intel would be able to compete with AMD and that they'd end up exiting the consumer processor business.
So basically, to paraphrase: "there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there's benchmarks"
Only if you're comparing bottom-of-the-barrel cdr's to expensive 4x dvd media.
Children in an orphanges are living breathing human beings with emotions, memories and connections to the rest of the world. Especially in the first trimester, a fetus has none of those. Its just a blob of cells, and if you are comparing the loss of a blob to the loss of a child you need to check into Betty Ford and get a sense of proportion.
"For thousands of years, the whole point of human existence was to perpetuate and improve both quality and quantity of life."
Says who? I am serious. Your basic assumption is flawed. There is no real evidence of this.
No evidence? How about the fact that we aren't still living in caves? If the only purpose of our existence was to exist, humans wouldn't have invented agriculture, writing, etc. A basic tenant of evolution is that organisms that evolve and improve themselves will pass those that don't.
Regardless of that, many MANY MANY people would disagree with your asssumption, for many different reasons.
Well I don't know about those people, but I'm glad I'm not a single cell bacteria floating around in the ocean somewhere.
I myself would take issue with the idea that boosting quantity of life is even remotely positively connected to improving quality.
??? Where the heck are you getting this from? The origional poster wasn't talking about genetically modifying females so they can pump out a baby ever 3 months. If you are referring to the prevention of serious and even fatal birth defects, yeah that would increase the population but lets think of their quality of life. Hmm...heart defect fixed...kid wont die because of it...has his quality of life improved...not sure...
You obviously don't have the perspective or historical background to speak with authority on issues like this.
Wow, I am flumoxed here...can't decide if you're being condescending, patronizing or santimonious.
Some people are against progress through genetic modification...people like me and the parent poster want to know why, after millenia of modifying ourselves and our environment, that this new progress is suddenly bad.
Yeah, but Doc wasn't hot. (-:
At what point do we get bored with the superhero as vendetta killer theme? It ain't that amazing.
How many of those have we actually had? Off the top of my head I can only think of three heroes in a true blood rage: the aformentioned Miller books on DD, when the Green Goblin threw Gwen Stacey to her death and when the Punisher's family was killed. And of the three, only the Punisher actually killed anybody! The Kingpin and Bullseye are still alive and well, and the Goblin ended up killing himself with his own glider (another case where the movie scene comes straight from the book).
Most heros are all about not killing people, no matter how evil they might be. In fact most of them will stop somebody else from killing someone completely evil. Look at all the bad guys that Spidey saved from being taken out by the Punisher.
And they're so extreme at times that I get disgusted. Spidey pulls Carnage out of a fire, saving his life just after Carnage went on a killing spree. Hell, the story arc was called "Maximum Carnage". So you have this bad guy who kills innocent people, and sure he's being sent to jail but you know they always escape and you know they'll kill again when they do. I wonder how many people in the Marvel Universe are dead because Spidey pulled Carnage out of a fire.
Sure, you can say you value human life, no matter how evil, but when you save a bad guy who you know is going to kill again and again you are putting a higher value on his life than that of his victums.
I think most of those problems came from having editors on crack *and* meth. X-Men, DD and Spider-Man all feel like they were edited to the bone to remove any "excess" nanoseconds from the movie. I think they'd be much better films if they had another 30-40 minutes for charachter development, and to let scenes build instead of throwing everything in your face.
Oh gawd I hate you.
People are complaining about the Hulk graphics because they aren't consistent with the rest of the movie. The rest of the charachters aren't obviously CG, so the Hulk stands out like a sore thumb. If the whole movie was generated on a computer, a la FF: Spirits Within, then it would be ok because it would be consistent.
And aside from looking right, its got to move right too. In the comics the Hulk is 8 feet tall and wights about a ton, but is incredibly strong. He might be able to jump a mile into the air, but he still has mass. To make an example, say somebody rams him with a two ton truck. He can't go flying because he weighs too much, but he wont not be moved because he's not that heavy. So when they're working the CG they should also make sure the physics look right as well.
Q Squared is frikkin awsome. If only that had been made into the last Next Gen movie rather than Nemesis....
:(
And unfortunatly I missed on out New Fronteir. I did notice that it was a Peter David book, but I was poor and figured he was merely launching the series, and other writers would take over later. Little did I know that he was going to write all of them.
Actually I haven't either, but I know what happened.
He was one of the first comic book authors to take a charachter and basically destroy his life, then watch what he does. Now thats pretty common, seems to happen to Spider-Man all the time, but when Miller was writting DD it was fresh, shocking, and cool.
The way Bullseye kills Electra in the movie is straight out of the comic book. He takes her own sword and impales her with it striaght through the heart, and yeah you see the tip sticking out her back. Then she got ressurected by the Hand (ninja sorcerors) and ends up working for the Kingpin as his assasin, and is tasked with killing Daredevil.
One of the all time great moments in comics came after the Kingpin destoryed Daredevils personal and professional life prior to killing him. He had Daredevil put in a car that was then tossed in the river so he'd drown. The great moment is when the Kingpin realizes that not only did Matt escape from the car, but now he has enough reason to hate the Kingpin for the next ten thousand years and has nothing to lose.
So the movie is actually pretty tame compared to the comics. That said, I also dislike violence when its totally pointless. I'm a big Dr. Who fan, and there are several otherwise great episodes that I don't care for because everybody dies.
He's written for B5, most of the Q stories for Star Trek (good good stuff), Spider-Man and of course his 17 year run on the Hulk.
:)
He came up with all the cool stuff for the Hulk: the grey skinned version who wanted to take over the world, the evil future version of himself, and the fusing of the crafyness of the grey hulk and Bruce Banner's personality into the body of the big green Hulk. If you think that the combination of a genious intellect in a near-invunerable body made him too strong, he had a new weakness: piss him off, and he'd turn human with the 'Hulk Smash!' personality.
The reason I heard he left the title is that he ran out of ideas that Marvel would let him do. Which is one of my gripes with Marvel (and Star Trek): to beholden to the status quo.
In the sequel I hope they bring out the She-Hulk, Bruces cousin who also got dosed with gama radiation. :)
Spidey vs Transformers...Marvel had publishing rights at the time (can't remember whos doing the new Transformers comics) so they could do stuff like this.
:-)
As I recall, Spidey (in black costume era) was helping the Autobots rescue some human scientist that the Decepticons had kidnapped to turn oil into engergon.
What I REALLY want to see is Magneto vs the Transformers. Such sweet carnage it would be.
But what is actually better for a kid to see? You drop a 50 pound anvil on a rooster and he gets up and walks away. You see a guy get shot in an old western and he just falls over...you see no blood, no cries of pain, no body.
So what is actually worse? Cartoon type violence that is funny and nobody really gets hurt, or realistic violence that has consequences?
That's why more people play Quake-style shooters than MOH:AA and Ghost Recon, because they see the movement physics as impairment, not realism
Not necessarily. Wether or not its realalistic isn't whats important. Whats imporant is that its done well and above all, fun.
For an example, more people played Counter-Strike with its more realistic gameplay than Quake III and Unreal Tournament combined.
I haven't found a single dissenter who protested the bombing of Kosovo
As someone else pointed out, that was a UN operation that was finally started over "ethnic cleansing". The only "problem" with the operation is that it was about 5 years too late.
Clinton's missile attacks on Iraq.
Missle attacks meant to knock out some of Iraqs military. Or can't you tell the difference between dropping a few cruise missles on suspected sites and handing out oil contracts before you've even finished the unilateral invasion and deposing another counties leader who has never attacked us?
Clinton despite the shame he brought upon the presidency
Shame, eh? Lets spend over 100 million dollars picking apart your entire life, and when we can't prove any ciminal wrongdoing, we'll manufacture pergury charges against you by asking irrelevant questions about your sex life until you lie. This will all be justified afterword by your "shameful lying". I mean jesus, somebody lying about their sex life? The world will end!
alright, lets try that again with proper formatting, and me not being a dork and using the preview:
There is no significant difference between the two.
(borrowed from an SNL schetch)
Question: is your head filled with human excrement, or dog excrement? Is there any history of mental retardation in your family?
Ok, serioulsy now, how can intelligent person say, with a straight face, that there is no difference between Dems and the GOP? Not that there aren't a lot of reasons to currently dislike the Democratic party: their general spinelessness, blind support of feminists and their efforts to retroactively extend copyrights every 20 years.
But thats a far cry from thowing people in jail indefinetly without a lawyer, unilateraly invading another country that hasn't attacked us, passing laws like the Patriot Act and rushing to add trillions to our nations debt.
Anyone who doesn't yet realize this has a screw lose, or their head buried in the sand.
Stones, glass houses.
Most will grab a single issue and say "I can't vote Libertarian because they like pot!"
No, most people don't vote Libertarian because it might be a fine philosophy for a country or city state, but a rotten system for a nation with a few hundred million people in it. One thing Libs don't seem to realize is that while it will certainally screw up, the primary job of government is to serve the people, while the primary job of business is to make money. You might succeed in taking power away from the gvt, but it will just be snapped up by businesses. So in the long run it will cost you more, not less, and you will have fewer choices, not more.
There is no significant difference between the two.
(borrowed from an SNL schetch)
Question: is your head filled with human excrement, or dog excrement? Is there any history of mental retardation in your family?
Ok, serioulsy now, how can intelligent person say, with a straight face, that there is no difference between Dems and the GOP? Not that there aren't a lot of reasons to currently dislike the Democratic party: their general spinelessness, blind support of feminists and their efforts to retroactively extend copyrights every 20 years.
But thats a far cry from thowing people in jail indefinetly without a lawyer, unilateraly invading another country that hasn't attacked us, passing laws like the Patriot Act and rushing to add trillions to our nations debt.
<I>Anyone who doesn't yet realize this has a screw lose, or their head buried in the sand.</I>
Stones, glass houses.
<I>Most will grab a single issue and say "I can't vote Libertarian because they like pot!" </i>
No, most people don't vote Libertarian because it might be a fine philosophy for a country or city state, but a rotten system for a nation with a few hundred million people in it. One thing Libs don't seem to realize is that while it will certainally screw up, the primary job of government is to serve the people, while the primary job of business is to make money. You might succeed in taking power away from the gvt, but it will just be snapped up by businesses. So in the long run it will cost you more, not less, and you will have fewer choices, not more.
Fox is slave to the dollar.
The conservative dollar.
<i>It only seems that way because a vast majority of people in the US agree with the administration's war policy.</i>
Snort. The only way you could possibly get a "vast majoraty" is by rigging the poll. i.e. 95% of Americans say they "support our troops" so support is infered for the whole operation.
Cuz the only people who care are some anal retentive jerks?
I'm glad they did this because -- *gasp* -- that's a lot how the real world works
No, thats not how the real world works at all. By breathing down the kids neck all the time that becomes his sole motivation to do anything. Or as in Office Space, "(paraphrased) sure you can threaten to fire me, but that will only make me do just enough to not get fired".
In other words, the kid isn't motivated to get his homework done because he's a go-getter or because he wants to better himself, but because you'll bitch at him. Said kid turns 18, goes off to college, but without you bitching at him and without any personal movotivation, he'll fall flat on his face.
Same thing once he gets out to the workplace. You need to install self-motivation and a sense of pride in kids for them to go out and succed, and sticking your nose over their shoulders ever day isn't going to accomplish that.