I went to a state college (twice!) and the graduation rate was bellow 33%
That's a scam... flat out scam. You have to go, they know you have to go, and they abuse you to squeeze as much money out of you as possible.
Yes, there are those that just drink themselves out. But the colleges offer absolutely no help with anything at all.
Certainly not my experience at the two state schools I went to. Every single teacher had office hours and some practically begged students to come in for what would essentially be private tutoring. The matter of the fact was that if people who needed that tutoring were willing to put as much time into it as going to class in the first place, they probably would have done their homework and not be in the spot they were in. Most sat in there offices for those hours waiting for students to come to them for help and while they would get the occasional person flunking who did really want to pass, most of the people that ever went were the students that were already doing great and wanted to ask questions about the topic. On top of that there were study groups, grad students, and other resources to help undergrads that rarely got used. Universities want you to graduate because that's longer you'll be in school and the better chance they can hit you up for money as an alumni.
I understand the neutrino was theorized before discovery, but I just read the article and the chain of properties either WIMPs or SIMPs need to have, and they seem overly complex for something that there is no direct evidence for. Of course I am not a physicist. Just seems like we need better data collection of anomalous particle behaviors before investing much faith in such conjectures. Granted these theories could guide future experiments, but perhaps just sometimes theory gets a little too far ahead of experimental evidence.
Well, there is lots of evidence for something out there. This something, after coming up with other options and rejecting them through testing, must not interact with electromagnetic forces to a degree we can detect and have mass. Thus the "dark" and "matter". I am pa physicist and what you aren't seeing when you read these articles is a lot of math. It's complicated because physics at this level is really complicated and to come up with these hypothesis, they have to come up with something that fits what we already know about matter and the universe. That's going to involve a lot of graduate level mathematics and physics that describe a world that even physicists have a hard time wrapping their heads around. That's how particles get predicted, the math works out that way, and physics without the math is just philosophy. Sometimes you end up with something like string theory where the math works out (or seems to) but it can't be easily tested. At least these options can be tested.
They don't have as much overhead and staff without it.
I work in health care and have seen everything from care to billing, and you are correct about it being because of the insurance industry, but not because of staff overhead (at least on the hospital side). Historically, insurance companies pay a certain percentage on the dollar of hospital costs. Usually around 33 cents but some of the better insurances pay up to 66 cents on the dollar based on the hospital's master charge record, the official cost of their procedures. Therefore, to break even, hospitals have to up their official prices to at least two or three times of what it actually costs just to break even. Of that $325 dollars the OP was charges, the hospital will most likely only see around a $108 of from the insurance company. As for self payers that get charged the $325, hospitals through experience have already written than off as non-payment. Sure some people pay the full amount, others work out a deal after months or years of nonpayment, but that is usually just considered bonus as they never expected to see that money anyway.
Of course, what is happening now, is that clinics are opening up and then contacting the insurance companies and making contracts for a set price per procedure. Thus they advertise their prices which are half to one third of the other hospitals and don't have to have the additional personel or equipment to do things like run tests, diagnose, or deal with inpatients. The regular hospitals are thus having their patients taken away after all the hard work is done. They'd like to redo their master charge record to reflect the actual costs too, but that includes new contracts with all the insurers and getting them to agree to do so, pretty much all at the same time.
People don't want 'prints', unless you consider the odd set of fifty year olds getting married these days. People want to post images online. They want to create their own derivative works - like turning some into B&W.
Then expect to pay for a professional for his time and equipment for what is probably a three days worth of contract work. Besides just showing up at the beginning and leaving at the end after taking all those photos, there is usually quite a lot of post production work that goes into those wedding photos to make them look as good as the ones that were on their website or in their portfolio that caused you to want to hire them. They really want that because if nothing else, if they let you have a bunch of unfinished photos or ruin it by turning it into a B&W and tell everybody they took them, their business is what is being harmed, not your wedding. No matter what, a professional photographer has to make his money to stay in business, and where they used to charge for prints, now it's becoming a service industry and people will have to pay for time and like about any time a person wants to hire a professional to do something, it's going to cost more money than they were expecting.
The other option is to have your friend or cousin take the photos or otherwise gather up all the photos everybody there takes. It might turn out fine, or it might not, same as if you had a friend come over and build your computer or code your program for free.
Until we all have extremely high-speed internet connections in our homes, the local HDD will not be obsolete. As that isn't happening anytime soon (in the US, at least), I don't think Seagate / WD have anything to worry about.
I don't know about that. The network guys at the company I have worked at for the last twenty years have been preaching that entire time about the advantages of an X-term or some other type of thin client. Any day now, all our computers are going to be replaced by them according to them.
You would have to emulate the custom bitslice processor. I think that all of the schematics exist and it would be possible but it would take a lot of work.
This is the one thing you cannot do yourself. Only the ice vendor is allowed to sell ice. You are not allowed to, so you can't just take over the ice concession.
dom
You can always give it away. That's what all the coffee camps, bars, and food places at Burning Man do.
What is the difference between being in prison and jail? Just curious...
Jails are usually local and run by the city or county. If you get arrested, you go to jail. If you have to stay in because you are awaiting trial and can't afford bail, you stay in the jail. If you are convicted and receive a short sentence (usually for anything less than a year) or waiting to go to the prison, you are in jail. Prisons are run by the states or the federal government and hold people convicted of either state or federal laws respectively for sentences generally longer than a year.
Fully fund a manned mission to Mars and set a 10 year goal.
Don't think it's possible actually. There's simply too much stuff that still needs to be worked out. Heavy launchers haven't even shown up yet. After that we still had to work out long term deep space habitats that despite the knowledge to even try and build them will take a while to work out the engineering bugs and get them good enough that they'll work for a two and half year trip away from help. Once we actually get to Mars, there is a whole series of problems with getting something capable of carrying a man down to the surface and back due to an atmosphere that isn't quite thick enough to help us and too thick to ignore. Apollo 1 didn't take men to the moon and the first in the Mars mission series won't take people to Mars.
I had no idea the Six Million Dollar Man was based on a book.
You can read about it here. Being a nerd in high school that di things like read novelizations of TV shows (the Srt. Pepper's Lonley Hearts Band one actually made sense out of the movie), I got it and tried to read it. I seem to remember giving up halfway through as he was still recovering from the crash and in the middle of a very dry discussion on how well he can use his remaining body parts as he crawled around in his hospital room.
I reread the books and honestly, it was better than Tolkien. Tolkien's stories show their age with their writing and lack of modern attitudes, no women, classist social structures sometimes bordering on racism.
While you may feel the movies were more reflective of a contemporary spirit than Tolkien, it's curious that you feel that this automatically makes them better. After all, Tolkien spent his entire career teaching young people that there was much to enjoy in ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, which also had few women and were rooted in classist social structures. Considering that Beowulf isn't only read as a boring school assignment, it sells decently to a readership that actually wants to read it, then why not consider Tolkien in the same way?
Better is a subjective value based upon whatever situational criteria is decided upon by the speaker. As entertainment, yes, I'd say that the story of the movies are better than Tolkein. As an example of English creation of pseudo-folklore based on Scandanavian heritage and language, then yes, Tolkien is probably better. There is a gap between writing for academics and writing for the public. Each one is going to consider their own favorites as better. Take Tom Bombadil for example. Doesn't move the story forward. Essentially has nothing to do with the story even as a false lead or false Chekov's Gun. However, take it in with all his other writings and how he fits into the world as created rather than just the singular story, and becomes something more and probably considered better by people who want different things. take Lovecraft's works. I like them but wouldn't consider them great writing. However, take it as a shared mythology and themes that was compeling enough to be adopted by other writers even at the time, and you have a sum that is better than the parts.
When I say The Wizard of Oz, the movie you are thinking of was the fifth one made, making it just a reboot.
And it was crap. MGM took a magnificent kids' adventure story and turned it into a frothy, brainless musical...then they crowned their travesty by tacking on an "It was all a dream" ending.
46 years later, Disney of all people made a real Oz story, Return to Oz, from two of the later books...and the critics savaged it because it was dark and scary and didn't have any singing and dancing.
Thank you for supporting my point. Hollywood has always been like they are now. The current era is not anything special.
Jackie Chan is the actor, not the character. Most of his films were one-offs with original stories, although there were some series. The Police Story trilogy is excellent, by the way.
Tolkien wasn't brought to the screen. Something was, and it was ok, but it wasn't Tolkien.
I reread the books and honestly, it was better than Tolkien. Tolkien's stories show their age with their writing and lack of modern attitudes, no women, classist social structures sometimes bordering on racism. He was writing for his own personal experiment with the biases of his time and it shows.
I am no expert, but I believe it's because they are easy.
I would add that they are also able to mine decades of stories for the ones that have proven themselves over time and have a following. Comics as a business compared to the film industry is almost not worth mentioning, but for what it is worth, they can essentially run scripts (complete with storyboards) past the public monthly to see what resonates with them and which ones turn out to be good, and even have them pay for themselves. Most of the movies that have been made have been the classic story lines that were getting printed into graphic novels and have highly sought after issues by collectors for years. Marvel even has a large collection of test marketing with updating such stories to a modern setting and sensibilities with the Ultimate series. It's no surprise that the movies are a combination of the regular Marvel stories and the Ultimate stories as they've already seen what people like and don't like with updating such. Comics seem to be an excellent marketing test field for movies and I'm actually sort of surprised they didn't end up experimenting with it way before now (probably because comic code kept them from really being useful to the movie industry).
Everything these days is reboots, reboots of reboots, sequels, prequels, sequels to prequels, prequels to sequels, comic book adaptations, games adaptations, movies made from tv series, remakes, remakes of remakes, japanese remakes.
Seems like they're not even trying anymore.
That has always been the case. When I say The Wizard of Oz, the movie you are thinking of was the fifth one made, making it just a reboot. Do you know how many Tarzan, Jackie Chan, and other characters that had endless series of reboots, sequels, and prequels there were in the history of film? They're always trying and this is what you get. If you think you can do better, start writing screen plays or form a production company and make your millions.
And for the irony, aren't the Republicans usually all for the free market and against restrictions?
No. In general they don't like big government,...
Ya, right. The last Republican president created and entire new branch of government and got all sorts of new powers granted to the government. There's no small government political party and there hasn't been a fiscally conservative President since Eisenhower. Everybody only hates pork spending when it doesn't go to their state or support their causes.
That is if the nurse(s) knew anything about Liberia. My experience is that people of the United States do not know the difference between Liberia and Belgium.
The nurse knew, it was one of the questions she asked the patient so they were checking, but the information that the patient had been to Liberia did not make it to the doctor. Why that is, either that info didn't make it to the record, or if the doctor didn't read the record, I have not seen. However, they probably certainly know about such issues as the ER of a major city hospital probably has a lot of cases of foreign nationals and immigrants coming in. We are still dealing with stuff like TB and other non-standard medical issues on a daily basis in the one I work for.
Is 15 IQ points really a meaningful difference "in the real world'?
Probably, but I suspect that nobody can predict exactly what the real world differences will mean. I learned in college pretty quickly that being bright and smart will only carry you so far and that having good study habits and the discipline to sit down and do as much work as you can mean much more. the true genius don't have just a high IQ, but have both. So, an increase in IQ might mean more geniuses but also asbergers, serial killers, sociopaths, and other deviants also tend to have high IQs. The human brain probably isn't just like some computer where you can install more RAM or upgrade the chip speed, but a balanced machine where things need to work well with each other in a balance or things go wacky.
I always liked the Bruce Sterling sci-fi stories where part of the world involved a history of creating "super brights". They mucked about with genetics and created the Khan style super intelligent children. They all were geniuses, but they also were all twisted insane deviants.
They say that if you are young and vote Republican you are heartless but if you are older and vote Democrat you are stupid. Not sure which gene controls that...
Only old Republicans like my father say that. Usually, while they are saying that, we're patting them on the back, agreeing with them, and blessing their sweet little heart because they've already lost the ability for critical discussions.
Really, it is only in recent years that the parties have stood for liberal or conservative as in the past both have been progressive but in different ways and had their own liberal and conservative branches mostly governed by local politics and issues.
In the late 70's and early 80's in the US, you could go into a big box store and buy a computer with BASIC for under $200. Heck, the Sinclair boxes were under a $100. Which computer fits that description today?
Just about any of them. For 200 1980 dollars in equivalent money, you could get a Mac mini and start programming whatever flavor of C they're working on or HTML or Javascript. There are free BASIC emulators that can be had as well as probably a dozen more. Pick up an even cheaper Dell and probably do the same thing. Those computers will be lightyears ahead of the crap that was back then as the users will at least be able to save their work without doubling the cost of their set up. If you wanted to go cheaper, I'm sure somebody could make some developer station out of some cheap android tablet that would be light years ahead of those machines (if only because they'd come with a screen).
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I went to a state college (twice!) and the graduation rate was bellow 33% That's a scam... flat out scam. You have to go, they know you have to go, and they abuse you to squeeze as much money out of you as possible.
Yes, there are those that just drink themselves out. But the colleges offer absolutely no help with anything at all.
Certainly not my experience at the two state schools I went to. Every single teacher had office hours and some practically begged students to come in for what would essentially be private tutoring. The matter of the fact was that if people who needed that tutoring were willing to put as much time into it as going to class in the first place, they probably would have done their homework and not be in the spot they were in. Most sat in there offices for those hours waiting for students to come to them for help and while they would get the occasional person flunking who did really want to pass, most of the people that ever went were the students that were already doing great and wanted to ask questions about the topic. On top of that there were study groups, grad students, and other resources to help undergrads that rarely got used. Universities want you to graduate because that's longer you'll be in school and the better chance they can hit you up for money as an alumni.
I understand the neutrino was theorized before discovery, but I just read the article and the chain of properties either WIMPs or SIMPs need to have, and they seem overly complex for something that there is no direct evidence for. Of course I am not a physicist. Just seems like we need better data collection of anomalous particle behaviors before investing much faith in such conjectures. Granted these theories could guide future experiments, but perhaps just sometimes theory gets a little too far ahead of experimental evidence.
Well, there is lots of evidence for something out there. This something, after coming up with other options and rejecting them through testing, must not interact with electromagnetic forces to a degree we can detect and have mass. Thus the "dark" and "matter". I am pa physicist and what you aren't seeing when you read these articles is a lot of math. It's complicated because physics at this level is really complicated and to come up with these hypothesis, they have to come up with something that fits what we already know about matter and the universe. That's going to involve a lot of graduate level mathematics and physics that describe a world that even physicists have a hard time wrapping their heads around. That's how particles get predicted, the math works out that way, and physics without the math is just philosophy. Sometimes you end up with something like string theory where the math works out (or seems to) but it can't be easily tested. At least these options can be tested.
THAT PROBLEM IS CREATED BY THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY
They don't have as much overhead and staff without it.
I work in health care and have seen everything from care to billing, and you are correct about it being because of the insurance industry, but not because of staff overhead (at least on the hospital side). Historically, insurance companies pay a certain percentage on the dollar of hospital costs. Usually around 33 cents but some of the better insurances pay up to 66 cents on the dollar based on the hospital's master charge record, the official cost of their procedures. Therefore, to break even, hospitals have to up their official prices to at least two or three times of what it actually costs just to break even. Of that $325 dollars the OP was charges, the hospital will most likely only see around a $108 of from the insurance company. As for self payers that get charged the $325, hospitals through experience have already written than off as non-payment. Sure some people pay the full amount, others work out a deal after months or years of nonpayment, but that is usually just considered bonus as they never expected to see that money anyway.
Of course, what is happening now, is that clinics are opening up and then contacting the insurance companies and making contracts for a set price per procedure. Thus they advertise their prices which are half to one third of the other hospitals and don't have to have the additional personel or equipment to do things like run tests, diagnose, or deal with inpatients. The regular hospitals are thus having their patients taken away after all the hard work is done. They'd like to redo their master charge record to reflect the actual costs too, but that includes new contracts with all the insurers and getting them to agree to do so, pretty much all at the same time.
People don't want 'prints', unless you consider the odd set of fifty year olds getting married these days. People want to post images online. They want to create their own derivative works - like turning some into B&W.
Then expect to pay for a professional for his time and equipment for what is probably a three days worth of contract work. Besides just showing up at the beginning and leaving at the end after taking all those photos, there is usually quite a lot of post production work that goes into those wedding photos to make them look as good as the ones that were on their website or in their portfolio that caused you to want to hire them. They really want that because if nothing else, if they let you have a bunch of unfinished photos or ruin it by turning it into a B&W and tell everybody they took them, their business is what is being harmed, not your wedding. No matter what, a professional photographer has to make his money to stay in business, and where they used to charge for prints, now it's becoming a service industry and people will have to pay for time and like about any time a person wants to hire a professional to do something, it's going to cost more money than they were expecting.
The other option is to have your friend or cousin take the photos or otherwise gather up all the photos everybody there takes. It might turn out fine, or it might not, same as if you had a friend come over and build your computer or code your program for free.
Until we all have extremely high-speed internet connections in our homes, the local HDD will not be obsolete. As that isn't happening anytime soon (in the US, at least), I don't think Seagate / WD have anything to worry about.
I don't know about that. The network guys at the company I have worked at for the last twenty years have been preaching that entire time about the advantages of an X-term or some other type of thin client. Any day now, all our computers are going to be replaced by them according to them.
You would have to emulate the custom bitslice processor. I think that all of the schematics exist and it would be possible but it would take a lot of work.
Great! Somebody should build it in Minecraft.
"to arouse lust towards children" One could equally say that this satisfies said lust without, you know, involving any real children...
Hush. Remember your Puritan training. There can be no satisfying of lusts, only repression of them.
This is the one thing you cannot do yourself. Only the ice vendor is allowed to sell ice. You are not allowed to, so you can't just take over the ice concession.
dom
You can always give it away. That's what all the coffee camps, bars, and food places at Burning Man do.
tea party WERE libertarians
No, the tea party WERE dixiecrats. Since when have "traditional republicans" been pro-state's rights Southerners?
What is the difference between being in prison and jail? Just curious...
Jails are usually local and run by the city or county. If you get arrested, you go to jail. If you have to stay in because you are awaiting trial and can't afford bail, you stay in the jail. If you are convicted and receive a short sentence (usually for anything less than a year) or waiting to go to the prison, you are in jail. Prisons are run by the states or the federal government and hold people convicted of either state or federal laws respectively for sentences generally longer than a year.
Fully fund a manned mission to Mars and set a 10 year goal.
Don't think it's possible actually. There's simply too much stuff that still needs to be worked out. Heavy launchers haven't even shown up yet. After that we still had to work out long term deep space habitats that despite the knowledge to even try and build them will take a while to work out the engineering bugs and get them good enough that they'll work for a two and half year trip away from help. Once we actually get to Mars, there is a whole series of problems with getting something capable of carrying a man down to the surface and back due to an atmosphere that isn't quite thick enough to help us and too thick to ignore. Apollo 1 didn't take men to the moon and the first in the Mars mission series won't take people to Mars.
I had no idea the Six Million Dollar Man was based on a book.
You can read about it here. Being a nerd in high school that di things like read novelizations of TV shows (the Srt. Pepper's Lonley Hearts Band one actually made sense out of the movie), I got it and tried to read it. I seem to remember giving up halfway through as he was still recovering from the crash and in the middle of a very dry discussion on how well he can use his remaining body parts as he crawled around in his hospital room.
While you may feel the movies were more reflective of a contemporary spirit than Tolkien, it's curious that you feel that this automatically makes them better. After all, Tolkien spent his entire career teaching young people that there was much to enjoy in ancient Anglo-Saxon literature, which also had few women and were rooted in classist social structures. Considering that Beowulf isn't only read as a boring school assignment, it sells decently to a readership that actually wants to read it, then why not consider Tolkien in the same way?
Better is a subjective value based upon whatever situational criteria is decided upon by the speaker. As entertainment, yes, I'd say that the story of the movies are better than Tolkein. As an example of English creation of pseudo-folklore based on Scandanavian heritage and language, then yes, Tolkien is probably better. There is a gap between writing for academics and writing for the public. Each one is going to consider their own favorites as better. Take Tom Bombadil for example. Doesn't move the story forward. Essentially has nothing to do with the story even as a false lead or false Chekov's Gun. However, take it in with all his other writings and how he fits into the world as created rather than just the singular story, and becomes something more and probably considered better by people who want different things. take Lovecraft's works. I like them but wouldn't consider them great writing. However, take it as a shared mythology and themes that was compeling enough to be adopted by other writers even at the time, and you have a sum that is better than the parts.
When I say The Wizard of Oz, the movie you are thinking of was the fifth one made, making it just a reboot.
And it was crap. MGM took a magnificent kids' adventure story and turned it into a frothy, brainless musical...then they crowned their travesty by tacking on an "It was all a dream" ending.
46 years later, Disney of all people made a real Oz story, Return to Oz, from two of the later books...and the critics savaged it because it was dark and scary and didn't have any singing and dancing.
Thank you for supporting my point. Hollywood has always been like they are now. The current era is not anything special.
Jackie Chan is the actor, not the character. Most of his films were one-offs with original stories, although there were some series. The Police Story trilogy is excellent, by the way.
Sorry, I meant to say Chralie Chan.
"The gun is good. The penis is bad."
Perhaps. I'd like to see it, but I think Alan Moore has long since sworn off of movies and Hollywood when he has anything to say about it.
Tolkien wasn't brought to the screen. Something was, and it was ok, but it wasn't Tolkien.
I reread the books and honestly, it was better than Tolkien. Tolkien's stories show their age with their writing and lack of modern attitudes, no women, classist social structures sometimes bordering on racism. He was writing for his own personal experiment with the biases of his time and it shows.
I am no expert, but I believe it's because they are easy.
I would add that they are also able to mine decades of stories for the ones that have proven themselves over time and have a following. Comics as a business compared to the film industry is almost not worth mentioning, but for what it is worth, they can essentially run scripts (complete with storyboards) past the public monthly to see what resonates with them and which ones turn out to be good, and even have them pay for themselves. Most of the movies that have been made have been the classic story lines that were getting printed into graphic novels and have highly sought after issues by collectors for years. Marvel even has a large collection of test marketing with updating such stories to a modern setting and sensibilities with the Ultimate series. It's no surprise that the movies are a combination of the regular Marvel stories and the Ultimate stories as they've already seen what people like and don't like with updating such. Comics seem to be an excellent marketing test field for movies and I'm actually sort of surprised they didn't end up experimenting with it way before now (probably because comic code kept them from really being useful to the movie industry).
Everything these days is reboots, reboots of reboots, sequels, prequels, sequels to prequels, prequels to sequels, comic book adaptations, games adaptations, movies made from tv series, remakes, remakes of remakes, japanese remakes.
Seems like they're not even trying anymore.
That has always been the case. When I say The Wizard of Oz, the movie you are thinking of was the fifth one made, making it just a reboot. Do you know how many Tarzan, Jackie Chan, and other characters that had endless series of reboots, sequels, and prequels there were in the history of film? They're always trying and this is what you get. If you think you can do better, start writing screen plays or form a production company and make your millions.
And for the irony, aren't the Republicans usually all for the free market and against restrictions?
No. In general they don't like big government, ...
Ya, right. The last Republican president created and entire new branch of government and got all sorts of new powers granted to the government. There's no small government political party and there hasn't been a fiscally conservative President since Eisenhower. Everybody only hates pork spending when it doesn't go to their state or support their causes.
That is if the nurse(s) knew anything about Liberia. My experience is that people of the United States do not know the difference between Liberia and Belgium.
The nurse knew, it was one of the questions she asked the patient so they were checking, but the information that the patient had been to Liberia did not make it to the doctor. Why that is, either that info didn't make it to the record, or if the doctor didn't read the record, I have not seen. However, they probably certainly know about such issues as the ER of a major city hospital probably has a lot of cases of foreign nationals and immigrants coming in. We are still dealing with stuff like TB and other non-standard medical issues on a daily basis in the one I work for.
Is 15 IQ points really a meaningful difference "in the real world'?
Probably, but I suspect that nobody can predict exactly what the real world differences will mean. I learned in college pretty quickly that being bright and smart will only carry you so far and that having good study habits and the discipline to sit down and do as much work as you can mean much more. the true genius don't have just a high IQ, but have both. So, an increase in IQ might mean more geniuses but also asbergers, serial killers, sociopaths, and other deviants also tend to have high IQs. The human brain probably isn't just like some computer where you can install more RAM or upgrade the chip speed, but a balanced machine where things need to work well with each other in a balance or things go wacky.
I always liked the Bruce Sterling sci-fi stories where part of the world involved a history of creating "super brights". They mucked about with genetics and created the Khan style super intelligent children. They all were geniuses, but they also were all twisted insane deviants.
They say that if you are young and vote Republican you are heartless but if you are older and vote Democrat you are stupid. Not sure which gene controls that...
Only old Republicans like my father say that. Usually, while they are saying that, we're patting them on the back, agreeing with them, and blessing their sweet little heart because they've already lost the ability for critical discussions.
Really, it is only in recent years that the parties have stood for liberal or conservative as in the past both have been progressive but in different ways and had their own liberal and conservative branches mostly governed by local politics and issues.
In the late 70's and early 80's in the US, you could go into a big box store and buy a computer with BASIC for under $200. Heck, the Sinclair boxes were under a $100. Which computer fits that description today?
Just about any of them. For 200 1980 dollars in equivalent money, you could get a Mac mini and start programming whatever flavor of C they're working on or HTML or Javascript. There are free BASIC emulators that can be had as well as probably a dozen more. Pick up an even cheaper Dell and probably do the same thing. Those computers will be lightyears ahead of the crap that was back then as the users will at least be able to save their work without doubling the cost of their set up. If you wanted to go cheaper, I'm sure somebody could make some developer station out of some cheap android tablet that would be light years ahead of those machines (if only because they'd come with a screen).