In most states, you lose your license for a year (something you agree to when you apply for a license), but they (usually) cannot prosecute you because they (usually) do not have a single shred of physical evidence to base that prosecution on.
People consent because they would prefer to take their chances gambling with the system than take the guaranteed year's loss of driving privileges.
I'm glad we see eye-to-eye. As a result, I hope you will support my petition for "no refusal" castration checkpoints, so that we may rid the world of rapists.
They don't need to have good reason to believe it. It's actually better if they don't, because then nobody can contest their basis for cause.
They just have to ra^H^Hmoles^H^H^H^H^Hcheck every wife/daughter who passes by. Then they're not violating the 4th Amendment by singling anyone out. It's a public safety measure.
Threatening removal should be a later effort, since you should be willing to follow through with punishment for a first offense.
Regardless of whether they enjoy it or not, it's a much lower penalty than removal. If you start with removal and don't want students calling your bluff, you have to carry it out the first time. That's pretty harsh, especially when the goal should be ending the behavior, not removing the first student to test the limits. Not starting with removal is common sense, not an indication of a sadistic personality.
I am also all for anything that highlights how broken our system is. The more egregious and public the abuse the better.
The system either needs complete reformation from the ground up, or it needs to be abused as heavily and as often as possible until it collapses under its own weight.
Since I don't see anyone in power, or with the possibility of ever getting into power, doing the former, we're left with the latter. Let's see if we can't break this old nag's back completely.
Unfortunately, as higher education is made more accessible to everyone (not just those highly motivated to be educated), expensive pieces of paper are necessary to even be considered for a job without significant (sometimes 10+ years and an undergraduate degree in recent work postings I've read through) previous work experience.
Yes, I did see your post about UPhoenix. Last I heard (documentary on them, so not my own research) it is actually a good bit more expensive to attend a commercial mill-college than it is to attend a state university.
A degree now is a requirement in most fields that your application is not binned in the first round. That's it. It just gets you looked at a second time, unless it's a really specific requirement. Those without degrees are limited to service industry jobs these days.
The more I hear about educational issues the more convinced I become that universal higher education is not actually a benefit to society, but is actually an enormous resource drain for many, many students that can sometimes take most of a working lifetime to recoup.
Teaching should require both teaching ability and at least a small degree of subject area expertise. The problem in the US is that overlap between the two is the exception rather than the rule. Pre-college schools have a dearth of subject matter expertise, and universities suffer from professors who don't have the first clue how to teach (and some who genuinely despise doing it, but do it because it's required for them to get tenure and research positions).
I'll take subject area expertise over teaching ability any day of the week though.
A professor at my fiance's college had a clearly-posted policy in the syllabus, which was also verbally drilled into the students the first day: He would run over to a student with a ringing phone, snatch it out of their hand, and proceed to talk at length to the person on the other end regarding the subject matter of the class at hand. Needless to say, there was usually only a single phone that ever rang during any given class in a given quarter.
Most traditional (i.e. teen - early 20s) college students don't have the balls to stand up for themselves in a situation of public humiliation, so it is very much an effective means of stopping bad behavior.
Somewhere in that mountain of paperwork you signed to enroll, you agreed to abide by certain rules or you would forfeit your tuition (or part thereof) without reimbursement. That was a contract. If you didn't like the conditions set upon your future behavior, you shouldn't have agreed to them in writing. That's called "personal responsibility."
If the school you enrolled in had no such clause anywhere, I would be greatly surprised.
Yes, in most schools, public or private, teachers have full authority to ask you to leave their class for any number of reasons. Your only recourse is to take it up with the department head, the administration, or as a civil lawsuit for breaching a contract. Otherwise, don't be surprised to be escorted out by security or the police when you refuse.
Do you believe all public funding should be removed from higher education? It seems from your statement above that you do, but I've met many who say things similar and then won't actually back the principle all the way up.
If so, fine. If not, why do you believe taxpayers should be forced to provide money to those who did not earn it, but not be able to expect some accountability in whether it is wasted or not?
I happen to think that part of this should absolutely be learning that, while you have the freedom to make your own decisions, those decisions frequently have unpleasant consequences.
This needs to be drilled into students' heads until their eyes bleed.
Zynga has adapted to the Facebook environment incredibly well.
Many people underestimate the competitive advantage that colonizers have, and after an ecosystem is developed they ask, "Why in the hell did X become dominant here? Y is so much more superior." Well, X got there first and adapted well enough that they could leverage their position as colonizer to remain dominant in the face of a superior, but later, competitor. It's common in biology, and it seems that many fail to recognize the impact of it simply because it's not actually an adaptation per se, but typically has more to do with who was lucky enough to be the first who was "good enough." Since it can't be quantified, it's ignored.
That's an interesting attempt to rationalize evil not being rooted in God's will.
It wouldn't surprise me to have it proven that a higher life form is largely responsible for our existence. They may even be actively working to direct things. However, if that's the case I'd doubt that it differs much from how we raise bacteriological cultures. It makes more sense than a mysterious, benevolent sky-monster pulling individual puppet strings.
For all anyone really knows, it's God's plan to determine the best way to kill us en masse, and he simply hasn't figured it out yet. Whatever the answer is, it is far beyond the scope of the human mind to comprehend.
The disastrous prices in the 70s in California were caused by hard rate caps imposed by the supposed "deregulation" laws. None of these markets saw deregulation, they saw partial deregulation. Most places don't have a board of power engineers in place to manage regulation (or to decide what can be deregulated), they have political appointees or hired bureaucrats. That leads to stupid decisions, such as the rate cap in California that drove 33% of total electricity producers to the brink of bankruptcy and 33%into bankruptcy. Oh, and each of those is a single company, leaving only one company still standing. The regulation in the "deregulation" law strangled the market. Know what happened after that? They had supply problems, so they had to buy out-of-state. But the "deregulation" law required utilities to purchase years-long contracts when they bought wholesale energy. Since energy was now at a premium, the utilities in California now had to sign up for years of high rates, continuing on at those rates while the wholesale rates plummeted following the energy crisis.
What we need is not more regulation, what we need is smarter regulators, say, people who actually know how power infrastructure and markets work. That would not be political appointee Bob, who covered up Senator Douchebag's gay love affair 5 years ago.
I have to agree, though I learned long ago that I see things far differently than most people. As a result, I have to be careful assuming that my perception of something at all resembles that of others.
Mind you, I don't actually use Opera these days. The thing easily goes over 100 MB in memory usage just after two tabs and it doesn't seem as stable as it used to be.
It's terrible. IE, Chrome, and Firefox do that too. You and me, we'll lead a Lynx revolution!
I think giving people a taste of a (slightly) saner system and then snatching it away has to be better than doing nothing, politically.
Well, there is always the hope that something that can pass as a silver lining exists in the mess. Unfortunately, the more years go by the more faith I lose in people in general to act out of any emotion other than fear. I suppose that's in large part because the fearful/angry are the loudest and most insistent, but dealing with that portion of humanity is like holding a belt sander to your soul.
And then there was Arena, which I wouldn't even hazard a count on NPCs, towns, and square miles. Each game has gotten smaller since then, when the game spanned the entire continent.
Nice to meet you. That really sucks. You now fall into this category:
Yes, there are people who truly get screwed through no fault of their own, but those represent a tiny minority of cases, at least amongst those I've encountered.
By the way, my name is Trevor. I have cancer. Should I survive to see remission, I will probably be in exactly the same boat you are.
Being on the short end of the stick myself, I am sympathetic to crappy personal situations. That sympathy doesn't cause me to support solutions that are short-term political hack jobs created because nobody has enough balls to actually tackle the root problems though. The system was screwed up before, and this course is going to screw it up even more. Either the Supreme Court finds it unenforceable by invalidating the individual mandate, or they indiscriminately expand the power of the Commerce Clause to allow Congress to compel individuals to buy any product deemed necessary to promote "the general welfare." Neither of those outcomes produce any meaningful, beneficial change.
Insurance gives someone money when certain circumstances are met, though that is very frequently not the named insured. Most types of insurance policies have been used in large minority or even predominantly as risk-reduction by interested third parties where large sums of money are concerned, typically lenders who hold a significant financial stake in the item or person insured. Most health insurance plans use direct-to-provider payment because people are unable to afford to make the upfront payment on their own to be reimbursed, and medical care usually can't wait for the claim process to complete in the same way every other type of insurance can.
I would agree that we didn't really have health insurance, since the monolithic process that the industry has become means that they control the construction of loopholes you can drive a bus through in order to avoid paying when they are contractually obligated to.
I don't see how my view of insurance is a re-definition, but I suppose we can just simply disagree on that point.
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In most states, you lose your license for a year (something you agree to when you apply for a license), but they (usually) cannot prosecute you because they (usually) do not have a single shred of physical evidence to base that prosecution on.
People consent because they would prefer to take their chances gambling with the system than take the guaranteed year's loss of driving privileges.
I'm glad we see eye-to-eye. As a result, I hope you will support my petition for "no refusal" castration checkpoints, so that we may rid the world of rapists.
They don't need to have good reason to believe it. It's actually better if they don't, because then nobody can contest their basis for cause.
They just have to ra^H^Hmoles^H^H^H^H^Hcheck every wife/daughter who passes by. Then they're not violating the 4th Amendment by singling anyone out. It's a public safety measure.
Threatening removal should be a later effort, since you should be willing to follow through with punishment for a first offense.
Regardless of whether they enjoy it or not, it's a much lower penalty than removal. If you start with removal and don't want students calling your bluff, you have to carry it out the first time. That's pretty harsh, especially when the goal should be ending the behavior, not removing the first student to test the limits. Not starting with removal is common sense, not an indication of a sadistic personality.
I am also all for anything that highlights how broken our system is. The more egregious and public the abuse the better.
The system either needs complete reformation from the ground up, or it needs to be abused as heavily and as often as possible until it collapses under its own weight.
Since I don't see anyone in power, or with the possibility of ever getting into power, doing the former, we're left with the latter. Let's see if we can't break this old nag's back completely.
Unfortunately, as higher education is made more accessible to everyone (not just those highly motivated to be educated), expensive pieces of paper are necessary to even be considered for a job without significant (sometimes 10+ years and an undergraduate degree in recent work postings I've read through) previous work experience.
Yes, I did see your post about UPhoenix. Last I heard (documentary on them, so not my own research) it is actually a good bit more expensive to attend a commercial mill-college than it is to attend a state university.
A degree now is a requirement in most fields that your application is not binned in the first round. That's it. It just gets you looked at a second time, unless it's a really specific requirement. Those without degrees are limited to service industry jobs these days.
The more I hear about educational issues the more convinced I become that universal higher education is not actually a benefit to society, but is actually an enormous resource drain for many, many students that can sometimes take most of a working lifetime to recoup.
Teaching should require both teaching ability and at least a small degree of subject area expertise. The problem in the US is that overlap between the two is the exception rather than the rule. Pre-college schools have a dearth of subject matter expertise, and universities suffer from professors who don't have the first clue how to teach (and some who genuinely despise doing it, but do it because it's required for them to get tenure and research positions).
I'll take subject area expertise over teaching ability any day of the week though.
A professor at my fiance's college had a clearly-posted policy in the syllabus, which was also verbally drilled into the students the first day: He would run over to a student with a ringing phone, snatch it out of their hand, and proceed to talk at length to the person on the other end regarding the subject matter of the class at hand. Needless to say, there was usually only a single phone that ever rang during any given class in a given quarter.
Most traditional (i.e. teen - early 20s) college students don't have the balls to stand up for themselves in a situation of public humiliation, so it is very much an effective means of stopping bad behavior.
Somewhere in that mountain of paperwork you signed to enroll, you agreed to abide by certain rules or you would forfeit your tuition (or part thereof) without reimbursement. That was a contract. If you didn't like the conditions set upon your future behavior, you shouldn't have agreed to them in writing. That's called "personal responsibility."
If the school you enrolled in had no such clause anywhere, I would be greatly surprised.
Yes, in most schools, public or private, teachers have full authority to ask you to leave their class for any number of reasons. Your only recourse is to take it up with the department head, the administration, or as a civil lawsuit for breaching a contract. Otherwise, don't be surprised to be escorted out by security or the police when you refuse.
As an actual serious question:
Do you believe all public funding should be removed from higher education? It seems from your statement above that you do, but I've met many who say things similar and then won't actually back the principle all the way up.
If so, fine. If not, why do you believe taxpayers should be forced to provide money to those who did not earn it, but not be able to expect some accountability in whether it is wasted or not?
I happen to think that part of this should absolutely be learning that, while you have the freedom to make your own decisions, those decisions frequently have unpleasant consequences.
This needs to be drilled into students' heads until their eyes bleed.
Zynga has adapted to the Facebook environment incredibly well.
Many people underestimate the competitive advantage that colonizers have, and after an ecosystem is developed they ask, "Why in the hell did X become dominant here? Y is so much more superior." Well, X got there first and adapted well enough that they could leverage their position as colonizer to remain dominant in the face of a superior, but later, competitor. It's common in biology, and it seems that many fail to recognize the impact of it simply because it's not actually an adaptation per se, but typically has more to do with who was lucky enough to be the first who was "good enough." Since it can't be quantified, it's ignored.
That's an interesting attempt to rationalize evil not being rooted in God's will.
It wouldn't surprise me to have it proven that a higher life form is largely responsible for our existence. They may even be actively working to direct things. However, if that's the case I'd doubt that it differs much from how we raise bacteriological cultures. It makes more sense than a mysterious, benevolent sky-monster pulling individual puppet strings.
For all anyone really knows, it's God's plan to determine the best way to kill us en masse, and he simply hasn't figured it out yet. Whatever the answer is, it is far beyond the scope of the human mind to comprehend.
From an extremist philosopher's perspective, the legitimacy of everything (virtually, anyway) is begging the question.
The disastrous prices in the 70s in California were caused by hard rate caps imposed by the supposed "deregulation" laws. None of these markets saw deregulation, they saw partial deregulation. Most places don't have a board of power engineers in place to manage regulation (or to decide what can be deregulated), they have political appointees or hired bureaucrats. That leads to stupid decisions, such as the rate cap in California that drove 33% of total electricity producers to the brink of bankruptcy and 33% into bankruptcy. Oh, and each of those is a single company, leaving only one company still standing. The regulation in the "deregulation" law strangled the market. Know what happened after that? They had supply problems, so they had to buy out-of-state. But the "deregulation" law required utilities to purchase years-long contracts when they bought wholesale energy. Since energy was now at a premium, the utilities in California now had to sign up for years of high rates, continuing on at those rates while the wholesale rates plummeted following the energy crisis.
What we need is not more regulation, what we need is smarter regulators, say, people who actually know how power infrastructure and markets work. That would not be political appointee Bob, who covered up Senator Douchebag's gay love affair 5 years ago.
I have to agree, though I learned long ago that I see things far differently than most people. As a result, I have to be careful assuming that my perception of something at all resembles that of others.
Lots of locations in the US have discovered this. Fry's, REI, and just about any bank or credit union, to name a few.
My reply was limited strictly to the implication that using IMAP means you can only check email in your mom's basement.
Since that's not a limitation of IMAP, the logical conclusion was that you have never used it.
I also never mentioned USB devices, either implicitly or explicitly. I've never had someone confuse my username for "Anonymous Coward" before.
Mind you, I don't actually use Opera these days. The thing easily goes over 100 MB in memory usage just after two tabs and it doesn't seem as stable as it used to be.
It's terrible. IE, Chrome, and Firefox do that too. You and me, we'll lead a Lynx revolution!
On second thought, maybe I'll sit this one out...
Doh to being nearly asleep still and adding an unnecessary apostrophe.
Moderated, but the point wasn't worth not being able to reply.
Or, apparently, has never used IMAP, v4 of which is celebrating it's sweet 16 this very month.
I think giving people a taste of a (slightly) saner system and then snatching it away has to be better than doing nothing, politically.
Well, there is always the hope that something that can pass as a silver lining exists in the mess. Unfortunately, the more years go by the more faith I lose in people in general to act out of any emotion other than fear. I suppose that's in large part because the fearful/angry are the loudest and most insistent, but dealing with that portion of humanity is like holding a belt sander to your soul.
And then there was Arena, which I wouldn't even hazard a count on NPCs, towns, and square miles. Each game has gotten smaller since then, when the game spanned the entire continent.
Nice to meet you. That really sucks. You now fall into this category:
Yes, there are people who truly get screwed through no fault of their own, but those represent a tiny minority of cases, at least amongst those I've encountered.
By the way, my name is Trevor. I have cancer. Should I survive to see remission, I will probably be in exactly the same boat you are.
Being on the short end of the stick myself, I am sympathetic to crappy personal situations. That sympathy doesn't cause me to support solutions that are short-term political hack jobs created because nobody has enough balls to actually tackle the root problems though. The system was screwed up before, and this course is going to screw it up even more. Either the Supreme Court finds it unenforceable by invalidating the individual mandate, or they indiscriminately expand the power of the Commerce Clause to allow Congress to compel individuals to buy any product deemed necessary to promote "the general welfare." Neither of those outcomes produce any meaningful, beneficial change.
Insurance gives someone money when certain circumstances are met, though that is very frequently not the named insured. Most types of insurance policies have been used in large minority or even predominantly as risk-reduction by interested third parties where large sums of money are concerned, typically lenders who hold a significant financial stake in the item or person insured. Most health insurance plans use direct-to-provider payment because people are unable to afford to make the upfront payment on their own to be reimbursed, and medical care usually can't wait for the claim process to complete in the same way every other type of insurance can.
I would agree that we didn't really have health insurance, since the monolithic process that the industry has become means that they control the construction of loopholes you can drive a bus through in order to avoid paying when they are contractually obligated to.
I don't see how my view of insurance is a re-definition, but I suppose we can just simply disagree on that point.