There's plenty of propaganda articles making it to Slashdot, but I don't think this is an example of what you're saying it is. The general "Slashdot hive mind" mentality is not friendly towards claims of "oh noes, think of the pornchildren!" being used to suppress information. As a piece of propaganda, this article is guaranteed to backfire (as demonstrated by all the upmodded comments in this thread). No one here is being swayed to the conclusion "Snowden helps pedophiles"; the only message coming across is "Whitehall officials are lying liar scum."
To spot a real propaganda article, look for pieces that harness the "groupthink" to produce a positive reception for some corporate agenda (rather than producing a near-unanimous backlash against the article claims). This article is simply ordinary tabloid clickbait for the Slashdot audience. The propaganda work was the original Telegraph piece linked, aimed at an audience who are terrified of the lurking pedos they've been trained to fear --- those are the people intended to be deceived by the crap coming out of Whitehall.
Here's the difference: it sounds like your uncle needed the money. Someone who can't afford their own $100 to fix their car is in a tough spot, and it's a decent human thing to help them out even if they're a pretty lousy person. Card does not need the money. He already has way too much money, demonstrated by the way he throws it around to harm the lives and freedoms of others. Your uncle needed a hand up; folks like Card need to be knocked down from their lofty arrogance.
Presumably, the knife is meant to be a "worst-case" stand-in for any object. If a robot can safely handle knives in close quarters to humans, then everything else is safe. In the grocery checkout situation, you don't want the robot to accidentally swing a can of beans through a customer's head when the absentminded customer leans over the counter to pick up the coupon they dropped.
What facts? More precisely, what facts *taken in meaningful context* rather than isolated blurbs re-assembled into a narrative contrary to history?
Your reference to Hiram Revels' election in 1870 is a perfect demonstration of your uselessly shallow "knowledge" of history. From the context in which you dropped that snippet, you presumably intended demonstrate that race issues in the US were nearly "resolved" in 1870, and everything's been fine since then. In the same post, you glowingly talk about "state's rights." But, when you include the tiniest bit of context --- that Revels was able to be elected in 1870 because of the Freedman's Bureau, a military presence guarding polling places to assure voting access for blacks (who held majorities in some areas) --- that "fact" you dropped with zero context to support your fictitious view of "state's rights" and racial equality in the US takes on an entirely different significance. After the reconstruction era ended --- the moment armed federal troops were recalled from the Southern states, and the KKK and fellow "state's rights" fans were given control over access to the ballot box, how many Southern black senators were elected? For the next century black majorities were entirely disenfranchised in an era of brutal repression. That's putting a fact in historical context.
Don't lecture me about facts and ideology until you've provided some facts not hopelessly detached from meaning and context, and re-invented in a purely ideological manner to fit into your ahistorical mythology.
Your post above is a perfect example of why I have yet to see any capitalist with the least bit of credibility as an anti-authoritarian. Your entire defense of the Constitution is based on hard-line authoritarian propaganda: that the common (wo)man is too stupid and ignorant to be tasked with the organization of society, thus they must rely on the superior class of wealthy men to rule over them. No actual anti-authoritarian could say what you just did with a straight face.
Yes, you can find isolated quotes from some of the Founding Fathers opposing slavery. Note, however, that they were too small a portion of the whole to push through such an agenda --- the documents produced don't reflect some mythical purity of free spirit, but a severe compromise with sick ideologies. Also, the evidence of history indicates that, besides a few quips, freedom and equality of the majority of humankind (including blacks and women) never rose high enough on the agenda of these "great leaders" to merit further action. Influential elder statesmen like President Washington could get a lot done when they wanted --- where were Washington's, or Adams', follow-up actions to put a "plan adopted for the abolition of slavery" into action, besides a few idle words as a low priority? If these men were so lacking in leadership ability to be unable to advance substantial later reforms, why do you think they somehow managed to keep the constitution free of ulterior influences?
Yes, a few black senators were elected shortly after the Civil War, when Southern "state's rights" were severely curtailed at Union gunpoint to break existing political factions and give blacks a brief period of political influence during the reconstruction era. That era quickly faded away, as the South was restored its political autonomy to enter the era of de-jure segregation that rapidly eliminated blacks from political representation for over half a century to follow. Your presumption that "state's rights" are helpful to human liberty is flatly contradicted by history. Human rights are helpful; "state's rights," that mean allowing the local wealthy power elite to rule with brutal impunity, have been nothing but disastrous; restoring "state's rights" is still the rallying cry of neo-confederate racist activists today.
Your assertion that the US under the Constitution has been "the most free & equal society ever to exist as a nation" generally lacks support from the facts. The nation's early development was marked by the systematic mass genocide of the native population. In intervening years, the US has pretty much never been a world leader in human rights, on the most basic issues. We were slow to abolish slavery, slow to allow women's suffrage, slow to remove explicitly racist laws, etc., compared to other developed countries. Foreign policy has generally involved supporting heinous brutal dictators and their death squads (trained in the good ol' USA). Today, the US is marked by rather high inequality and low social mobility compared to other first-world nations. The US isn't the worst place on Earth, but what's your evidence that it's anywhere near "the most free & equal society ever to exist as a nation"?
I've read history. You've obviously only read propaganda, that involves willfully ignoring what actually *happened* in history, in favor of a few snappy quotes that cast mythologized heroes in the best light.
That decentralized society you refer to is exactly what I described and what the authors of the US Constitution tried to design
No, the authors of the Constitution designed a society specifically set up to place wealthy, white, male landowners in exclusive control of society. Slavery was built into the system from the start. Concepts like ordinary citizens being able to vote for their national legislators were specifically circumvented. It has taken hundreds of years to reverse (and still, incompletely) the structural inequalities and oppressions built into the Constitutional system. Yes, the Constitution contained some good ideas; it's not pure evil, and parts are salvageable. But, neither is it a blueprint for a free and equal society, though it has frequently been mythologized as such.
Why yes, "profiteering" is a dirty word to me. Saying "we care less about the human lives potentially harmed by willfully publishing potentially fraudulent medical information in order to grab a few bucks" is among the most despicable things someone in their position would be able to do. Maybe you have lower standards for what constitutes crimes against humanity. Are you waiting for Elsevier's management to personally strangle your children before your eyes before passing judgment?
Well, then, you don't recall very well some of the major issues for which Elsevier was targeted. Such as printing fake shill journals under the Elsevier label just for articles produced by Big Pharma PR, so that pharmaceutical companies could pass requirements for "peer reviewed" studies of their products with a citation to a "peer reviewed" study (in their privately purchased Elsevier journal). The Elsevier upper management are profiteering crooks, plain and simple, which is a pity, because they've bought up and influence a lot of good journals with established good reputations (so you're stuck supporting the crooks to get to important past research).
Maybe 2 hours a day from a *qualified instructor* --- again, the upper-income college graduate professionals can do that, but the career hotel maid who wants her kid to have greater opportunity in life than herself may be stuck, even teaching 5th-grade fractions and vocabulary. Not everyone has the background to not only understand concepts (across all fields of knowledge) at an elementary-school appropriate level, but actually be able to *teach* them (far less, provide the inspiring type of teaching that comes from knowing *way more* about a subject than your 10-year-old pupils).
And, as for the baby-sitting role, what's wrong with that? What are active, energetic kids supposed to do, while their working-class parents are away from the tenement 12 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep food on the table? Sit around watching the TV all day? Maybe join the local friendly neighborhood gang, that provides their inquisitive growing minds with something to do? Even if public schools can only cram 2-3 hours a day of readin'-writin'-'rithemtic into kids heads (because, often, that's all they are wired to handle under even the best circumstances), in functioning school systems (like the kind rich parents send their kids to by choice, or civilized countries offer their general citizenry), there's a vital role for "babysitting" arts/music/drama/language/civics/etc. classes that get cut first thing for the poor because it might make kids into better human beings instead of better disposable laborers.
You know how mind-numbingly boring a lot of top-level experimental research is? Perhaps your perception of how "science happens" comes only from Hollywood montage scenes, where excited researchers go from "huh?" to world-changing discovery in 23 seconds of upbeat music and cutscenes of random equipment (totally inappropriate for the task, and hooked up nonsensically). In the real world, slogging through hours of busywork is how "science" gets done, with brief flashes of "highly intellectual" work in-between. Yes, these kids got a lot of help from dad, who got a lot of help from a big team keeping the observatory up-and-running (including plenty of thankless busywork). Their contribution to the project wasn't a brief flash of inspired intellectual heavy lifting, but the tedious slog necessary for research from the grade-school to PhD level. If they stay excited about astronomy, they'll have their chance to do the flashy sophisticated stuff later; but, they've already got a lot more real-world research experience from this than the vast majority of the population's Hollywood Montage view.
I just think prescriptive spelling is highly over-rated. A large section of "great literature" in the Western canon was written with extremely irregular spelling. Prior to the push for standardization to sell dictionaries, English in particular employed a far greater range of alternate spellings. William Shakespeare's name isn't even spelled consistently on contemporary editions, much less the words used --- yet, I wouldn't discount Shakespeare's literature as the work of a dunce because he (and his editors/typesetters/publishers) predated the rather modern emphasis on "correct" spelling over portrayal of sense. Yes, the poster above is clearly "uneducated" in the sense of not having memorized uniform modern spellings --- but, if tossing an occasional gratuitous 'e' on the end of a word (or name) makes a work "intellectually indefensible," then you'll have to discard basically every work written prior to the 19th century.
The $500-$600 expenditure neglects the cost of having a stay-at-home parent not earning a paycheck in the time taken to homeschool kids. This is no problem for upper-middle-class couples where a single professional salary can support a nice household. People in the lower quintiles of income, however (who suffer most from the shoddy quality of public education), don't have a spare $20k/year in excess salary they can give up to raise the kids. Now, perhaps an ideal solution would be a national $30/hr minimum wage (and move to reduced work weeks), so everyone has the time to raise their kids with extensive parental involvement. However, until you fix the fact that people working 80+ hour weeks on existing minimum wages are often still fairly impoverished (and lacking the resources to be a full-time teacher), tossing an extra $9-10k at upper-middle-income families to ditch the public school system (leaving only the most underserved and vulnerable population in the gutted remains) isn't an appealing solution.
Are you, in the original Hebrew, and guarantee that your preferred modern rendering accurately reproduces the implied vowel marks not present in the original texts? Of varied transliterations therefrom, any one is about as good as the others, so long as general meaning is conveyed (which, in this case, it apparently was).
People do "naturally" trade, but allowing *accumulated wealth* (without limits) to be the single, ultimate deciding factor in society's distribution of resources is the unique point of Capitalism (over varied pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societal mechanisms that still contain elements of trade and private property). Capitalism makes it a possibility, even a "moral prerogative," to permit one person to wield a million times the influence over how decisions are made in society (via markets) than another --- this is the ultimate in authoritarianism. More democratic, decentralized, and egalitarian societal forms do not preclude trade; but they do require alternate arrangements from the "golden rule" of "he who has the gold, rules." Unregulated markets are inherently unstable towards accumulation, monopolization, and ultimately the re-establishment of an elite ruling class that right-Libertarians are nominally seeking to escape.
A little subtlety would be required. In a document I'm working on, a whole load of references are papers containing flat out wrong, erroneous information (honest scientific mistakes, not deliberate fraud, but disproven material nonetheless). In the text, I'm using these as examples of things that have gone wrong in the past history of the field. Would my paper, with its bibliography littered with "red" entries (that I put there because they were "red," in order to comment on the scientific process --- which involves making and correcting mistakes --- leading to the present-day state of the field) be tagged as "red"? What if I reference a paper in which some material has held up under later scrutiny, and other hasn't (basing my work on the more "correct" material)?
Perhaps in part because government restrictions on ownership --- licenses, taxes, etc. --- make said devices significantly more difficult to procure than cheap, mass-market pistols. If, on the other hand, such devices were as cheap and easy to acquire as semi-automatic firearms, I suspect one would see wider use for nefarious purposes.
I agree with this to a large extent; and why, for functioning examples of Communist-style societies, I'd point to Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalism during the run-up to the Spanish civil war, who were typically at odds with Communist leaders hoping for the establishment of a more centralized "Worker's State."
I wouldn't completely erase the Capitalist/Fascist/Communist/etc. distinctions as being irrelevant compared to the anarchist-authoritarian dimension, for the reason that Capitalism is *always* authoritarian. The US right wing tries to construct a "populist-sounding" Capitalism in "right Libertarian" trends, by simply ignoring that hierarchies of accumulated wealth are no less insidious than any other hierarchies of accumulated power. By establishing a false dichotomy between "free markets" and "oppressive governments" as societal power structures oppressing the many for the benefit of the few (where the former can dogmatically do no bad, and the latter takes blame for every human evil), the right wing confuses freedom for money (and the rich) with freedom for humankind. Genuine anarchist alternatives are thus constantly undermined by Koch-brothers-style feudalism under the guise of "individual liberty" (as much as you've got money to buy).
Granted, there haven't been any examples of far-right countries that have done spectacularly better on that front, either. The US has the world's highest incarceration rate; we've become quite good at allowing dissent "in theory" while rounding up dissenters from the system on globally unprecedented scales, to create a permanent gulag class (often used as forced labor for the profits of the private prison industry).
It's an interesting dichotomy: the US has some of the world's best free speech protections "in theory," but the stranglehold of megacorporate interests over, e.g., all widespread media outlets assures that speech representing the interests of the working class is entirely lacking in the "public discourse" of the nation. When people try to speak more effectively proportional to their numbers rather than their wealth, e.g. Occupy protests, they are gassed and beaten and rounded up into jails (typically for the maximum time they can be held for "processing" without charges), and the corporate media does its job of letting multimillionaire white males explain to us why those dirty hippies deserved what they got.
This is only a flaw with Rawl's theory if you assume the goal is some "perfect" level of equality on the finest-grained scale, which is a silly oversimplification. Someone working from Rawl's "original position" of not knowing where they'll end up in society won't necessarily demand a society with mathematically perfect equality, where no one at all might get a tiny bit ahead by luck --- just one where no one ends up as child slave labor sweatshop workers.
I consider the main flaw with Rawl's approach one of implementation --- in practice, a bunch of rich, white males aren't actually going to be able to set their privileges aside and "neutrally" consider the best outcomes for changing the world for the better. That's why I prefer various feminist and anarchist approaches that, rather than stressing "idealized game theory" solutions, emphasize actually giving the poor and oppressed a voice in the discussion.
If I go to ship a box with UPS or FedEx, then L+W+H and total weight is what I pay for. The system imposes a strong penalty on odd-shaped packages; I can't ship a 1"x1"x144' package just like a 12"x12"x12" box. In shipping, L+W+H is a common method of specifying size (with weight considered separately).
Granted, the warehouse worker probably wasn't the brightest fellow, and ought to have known what "volume" meant. However, L+W+H is an "obvious" mistake to make if you work in shipping, not the sign of an extraordinarily idiotic mind. I bet you'd make a few ridiculous noob mistakes your first couple days working in a warehouse, too.
You're under the mistaken impression that a "barrel" is a large unit. Yeah, it's "only" 2 tons per barrel --- but barrels are generally counted by the billions per year. One barrel gives an SUV gas tank fill-up or two. And you're moving, processing, and dumping the noxious waste from two tons of sludge for just *that*.
Really? When you go shopping (possibly on a tight budget), you don't care about knowing the prices until you reach the register? "Don't worry, that box of pasta says $150, but it'll probably cost somewhere between $0.29 and $48 when you reach checkout. Just toss a dozen in the cart." To the end user, being presented *the amount they'll pay* while they're shopping is pretty important --- tacking on a random-number discount at the very end wouldn't make a helpful system.
Sounds somewhat like Edison's stunts using alternating current to execute prisoners and large mammals; primarily propaganda to present Tesla's AC power distribution systems as especially dangerous. In the '80's, this was FUD against "oh noes, big gubmint is forcing cars to have airbags, that'll kill us all!," not the cutting edge of humane execution methods (of which there is no shortage; the general difficulty is shortage of humanity that might stem execution rates in the first place).
I'm sure all those secondary and tertiary effects --- like having a larger proportion of the populace receiving regular medical care than before --- will be just terrible for the economy. Just imagine, all those millions of citizens now able to access medical care before reaching emergency room crisis level, being healthier and more productive. Nothing tanks an economy and drains money from government coffers like improved health and quality of life for the populace!
Oh, wait, that's just not true. Care to say why you think all the "deliberately ignored" secondary and tertiary effects of broadening healthcare access won't be a net improvement for everyone (populace, private sector, government spending/revenue), like it generally is in every other documented case?
Slashdot Mirror
There's plenty of propaganda articles making it to Slashdot, but I don't think this is an example of what you're saying it is. The general "Slashdot hive mind" mentality is not friendly towards claims of "oh noes, think of the pornchildren!" being used to suppress information. As a piece of propaganda, this article is guaranteed to backfire (as demonstrated by all the upmodded comments in this thread). No one here is being swayed to the conclusion "Snowden helps pedophiles"; the only message coming across is "Whitehall officials are lying liar scum."
To spot a real propaganda article, look for pieces that harness the "groupthink" to produce a positive reception for some corporate agenda (rather than producing a near-unanimous backlash against the article claims). This article is simply ordinary tabloid clickbait for the Slashdot audience. The propaganda work was the original Telegraph piece linked, aimed at an audience who are terrified of the lurking pedos they've been trained to fear --- those are the people intended to be deceived by the crap coming out of Whitehall.
Here's the difference: it sounds like your uncle needed the money. Someone who can't afford their own $100 to fix their car is in a tough spot, and it's a decent human thing to help them out even if they're a pretty lousy person. Card does not need the money. He already has way too much money, demonstrated by the way he throws it around to harm the lives and freedoms of others. Your uncle needed a hand up; folks like Card need to be knocked down from their lofty arrogance.
Presumably, the knife is meant to be a "worst-case" stand-in for any object. If a robot can safely handle knives in close quarters to humans, then everything else is safe. In the grocery checkout situation, you don't want the robot to accidentally swing a can of beans through a customer's head when the absentminded customer leans over the counter to pick up the coupon they dropped.
What facts? More precisely, what facts *taken in meaningful context* rather than isolated blurbs re-assembled into a narrative contrary to history?
Your reference to Hiram Revels' election in 1870 is a perfect demonstration of your uselessly shallow "knowledge" of history. From the context in which you dropped that snippet, you presumably intended demonstrate that race issues in the US were nearly "resolved" in 1870, and everything's been fine since then. In the same post, you glowingly talk about "state's rights." But, when you include the tiniest bit of context --- that Revels was able to be elected in 1870 because of the Freedman's Bureau, a military presence guarding polling places to assure voting access for blacks (who held majorities in some areas) --- that "fact" you dropped with zero context to support your fictitious view of "state's rights" and racial equality in the US takes on an entirely different significance. After the reconstruction era ended --- the moment armed federal troops were recalled from the Southern states, and the KKK and fellow "state's rights" fans were given control over access to the ballot box, how many Southern black senators were elected? For the next century black majorities were entirely disenfranchised in an era of brutal repression. That's putting a fact in historical context.
Don't lecture me about facts and ideology until you've provided some facts not hopelessly detached from meaning and context, and re-invented in a purely ideological manner to fit into your ahistorical mythology.
Your post above is a perfect example of why I have yet to see any capitalist with the least bit of credibility as an anti-authoritarian. Your entire defense of the Constitution is based on hard-line authoritarian propaganda: that the common (wo)man is too stupid and ignorant to be tasked with the organization of society, thus they must rely on the superior class of wealthy men to rule over them. No actual anti-authoritarian could say what you just did with a straight face.
Yes, you can find isolated quotes from some of the Founding Fathers opposing slavery. Note, however, that they were too small a portion of the whole to push through such an agenda --- the documents produced don't reflect some mythical purity of free spirit, but a severe compromise with sick ideologies. Also, the evidence of history indicates that, besides a few quips, freedom and equality of the majority of humankind (including blacks and women) never rose high enough on the agenda of these "great leaders" to merit further action. Influential elder statesmen like President Washington could get a lot done when they wanted --- where were Washington's, or Adams', follow-up actions to put a "plan adopted for the abolition of slavery" into action, besides a few idle words as a low priority? If these men were so lacking in leadership ability to be unable to advance substantial later reforms, why do you think they somehow managed to keep the constitution free of ulterior influences?
Yes, a few black senators were elected shortly after the Civil War, when Southern "state's rights" were severely curtailed at Union gunpoint to break existing political factions and give blacks a brief period of political influence during the reconstruction era. That era quickly faded away, as the South was restored its political autonomy to enter the era of de-jure segregation that rapidly eliminated blacks from political representation for over half a century to follow. Your presumption that "state's rights" are helpful to human liberty is flatly contradicted by history. Human rights are helpful; "state's rights," that mean allowing the local wealthy power elite to rule with brutal impunity, have been nothing but disastrous; restoring "state's rights" is still the rallying cry of neo-confederate racist activists today.
Your assertion that the US under the Constitution has been "the most free & equal society ever to exist as a nation" generally lacks support from the facts. The nation's early development was marked by the systematic mass genocide of the native population. In intervening years, the US has pretty much never been a world leader in human rights, on the most basic issues. We were slow to abolish slavery, slow to allow women's suffrage, slow to remove explicitly racist laws, etc., compared to other developed countries. Foreign policy has generally involved supporting heinous brutal dictators and their death squads (trained in the good ol' USA). Today, the US is marked by rather high inequality and low social mobility compared to other first-world nations. The US isn't the worst place on Earth, but what's your evidence that it's anywhere near "the most free & equal society ever to exist as a nation"?
I've read history. You've obviously only read propaganda, that involves willfully ignoring what actually *happened* in history, in favor of a few snappy quotes that cast mythologized heroes in the best light.
That decentralized society you refer to is exactly what I described and what the authors of the US Constitution tried to design
No, the authors of the Constitution designed a society specifically set up to place wealthy, white, male landowners in exclusive control of society. Slavery was built into the system from the start. Concepts like ordinary citizens being able to vote for their national legislators were specifically circumvented. It has taken hundreds of years to reverse (and still, incompletely) the structural inequalities and oppressions built into the Constitutional system. Yes, the Constitution contained some good ideas; it's not pure evil, and parts are salvageable. But, neither is it a blueprint for a free and equal society, though it has frequently been mythologized as such.
Why yes, "profiteering" is a dirty word to me. Saying "we care less about the human lives potentially harmed by willfully publishing potentially fraudulent medical information in order to grab a few bucks" is among the most despicable things someone in their position would be able to do. Maybe you have lower standards for what constitutes crimes against humanity. Are you waiting for Elsevier's management to personally strangle your children before your eyes before passing judgment?
Well, then, you don't recall very well some of the major issues for which Elsevier was targeted. Such as printing fake shill journals under the Elsevier label just for articles produced by Big Pharma PR, so that pharmaceutical companies could pass requirements for "peer reviewed" studies of their products with a citation to a "peer reviewed" study (in their privately purchased Elsevier journal). The Elsevier upper management are profiteering crooks, plain and simple, which is a pity, because they've bought up and influence a lot of good journals with established good reputations (so you're stuck supporting the crooks to get to important past research).
Maybe 2 hours a day from a *qualified instructor* --- again, the upper-income college graduate professionals can do that, but the career hotel maid who wants her kid to have greater opportunity in life than herself may be stuck, even teaching 5th-grade fractions and vocabulary. Not everyone has the background to not only understand concepts (across all fields of knowledge) at an elementary-school appropriate level, but actually be able to *teach* them (far less, provide the inspiring type of teaching that comes from knowing *way more* about a subject than your 10-year-old pupils).
And, as for the baby-sitting role, what's wrong with that? What are active, energetic kids supposed to do, while their working-class parents are away from the tenement 12 hours a day, seven days a week just to keep food on the table? Sit around watching the TV all day? Maybe join the local friendly neighborhood gang, that provides their inquisitive growing minds with something to do? Even if public schools can only cram 2-3 hours a day of readin'-writin'-'rithemtic into kids heads (because, often, that's all they are wired to handle under even the best circumstances), in functioning school systems (like the kind rich parents send their kids to by choice, or civilized countries offer their general citizenry), there's a vital role for "babysitting" arts/music/drama/language/civics/etc. classes that get cut first thing for the poor because it might make kids into better human beings instead of better disposable laborers.
You know how mind-numbingly boring a lot of top-level experimental research is? Perhaps your perception of how "science happens" comes only from Hollywood montage scenes, where excited researchers go from "huh?" to world-changing discovery in 23 seconds of upbeat music and cutscenes of random equipment (totally inappropriate for the task, and hooked up nonsensically). In the real world, slogging through hours of busywork is how "science" gets done, with brief flashes of "highly intellectual" work in-between. Yes, these kids got a lot of help from dad, who got a lot of help from a big team keeping the observatory up-and-running (including plenty of thankless busywork). Their contribution to the project wasn't a brief flash of inspired intellectual heavy lifting, but the tedious slog necessary for research from the grade-school to PhD level. If they stay excited about astronomy, they'll have their chance to do the flashy sophisticated stuff later; but, they've already got a lot more real-world research experience from this than the vast majority of the population's Hollywood Montage view.
I just think prescriptive spelling is highly over-rated. A large section of "great literature" in the Western canon was written with extremely irregular spelling. Prior to the push for standardization to sell dictionaries, English in particular employed a far greater range of alternate spellings. William Shakespeare's name isn't even spelled consistently on contemporary editions, much less the words used --- yet, I wouldn't discount Shakespeare's literature as the work of a dunce because he (and his editors/typesetters/publishers) predated the rather modern emphasis on "correct" spelling over portrayal of sense. Yes, the poster above is clearly "uneducated" in the sense of not having memorized uniform modern spellings --- but, if tossing an occasional gratuitous 'e' on the end of a word (or name) makes a work "intellectually indefensible," then you'll have to discard basically every work written prior to the 19th century.
The $500-$600 expenditure neglects the cost of having a stay-at-home parent not earning a paycheck in the time taken to homeschool kids. This is no problem for upper-middle-class couples where a single professional salary can support a nice household. People in the lower quintiles of income, however (who suffer most from the shoddy quality of public education), don't have a spare $20k/year in excess salary they can give up to raise the kids. Now, perhaps an ideal solution would be a national $30/hr minimum wage (and move to reduced work weeks), so everyone has the time to raise their kids with extensive parental involvement. However, until you fix the fact that people working 80+ hour weeks on existing minimum wages are often still fairly impoverished (and lacking the resources to be a full-time teacher), tossing an extra $9-10k at upper-middle-income families to ditch the public school system (leaving only the most underserved and vulnerable population in the gutted remains) isn't an appealing solution.
Are you, in the original Hebrew, and guarantee that your preferred modern rendering accurately reproduces the implied vowel marks not present in the original texts? Of varied transliterations therefrom, any one is about as good as the others, so long as general meaning is conveyed (which, in this case, it apparently was).
People do "naturally" trade, but allowing *accumulated wealth* (without limits) to be the single, ultimate deciding factor in society's distribution of resources is the unique point of Capitalism (over varied pre-capitalist and non-capitalist societal mechanisms that still contain elements of trade and private property). Capitalism makes it a possibility, even a "moral prerogative," to permit one person to wield a million times the influence over how decisions are made in society (via markets) than another --- this is the ultimate in authoritarianism. More democratic, decentralized, and egalitarian societal forms do not preclude trade; but they do require alternate arrangements from the "golden rule" of "he who has the gold, rules." Unregulated markets are inherently unstable towards accumulation, monopolization, and ultimately the re-establishment of an elite ruling class that right-Libertarians are nominally seeking to escape.
A little subtlety would be required. In a document I'm working on, a whole load of references are papers containing flat out wrong, erroneous information (honest scientific mistakes, not deliberate fraud, but disproven material nonetheless). In the text, I'm using these as examples of things that have gone wrong in the past history of the field. Would my paper, with its bibliography littered with "red" entries (that I put there because they were "red," in order to comment on the scientific process --- which involves making and correcting mistakes --- leading to the present-day state of the field) be tagged as "red"? What if I reference a paper in which some material has held up under later scrutiny, and other hasn't (basing my work on the more "correct" material)?
Perhaps in part because government restrictions on ownership --- licenses, taxes, etc. --- make said devices significantly more difficult to procure than cheap, mass-market pistols. If, on the other hand, such devices were as cheap and easy to acquire as semi-automatic firearms, I suspect one would see wider use for nefarious purposes.
I agree with this to a large extent; and why, for functioning examples of Communist-style societies, I'd point to Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalism during the run-up to the Spanish civil war, who were typically at odds with Communist leaders hoping for the establishment of a more centralized "Worker's State."
I wouldn't completely erase the Capitalist/Fascist/Communist/etc. distinctions as being irrelevant compared to the anarchist-authoritarian dimension, for the reason that Capitalism is *always* authoritarian. The US right wing tries to construct a "populist-sounding" Capitalism in "right Libertarian" trends, by simply ignoring that hierarchies of accumulated wealth are no less insidious than any other hierarchies of accumulated power. By establishing a false dichotomy between "free markets" and "oppressive governments" as societal power structures oppressing the many for the benefit of the few (where the former can dogmatically do no bad, and the latter takes blame for every human evil), the right wing confuses freedom for money (and the rich) with freedom for humankind. Genuine anarchist alternatives are thus constantly undermined by Koch-brothers-style feudalism under the guise of "individual liberty" (as much as you've got money to buy).
Granted, there haven't been any examples of far-right countries that have done spectacularly better on that front, either. The US has the world's highest incarceration rate; we've become quite good at allowing dissent "in theory" while rounding up dissenters from the system on globally unprecedented scales, to create a permanent gulag class (often used as forced labor for the profits of the private prison industry).
It's an interesting dichotomy: the US has some of the world's best free speech protections "in theory," but the stranglehold of megacorporate interests over, e.g., all widespread media outlets assures that speech representing the interests of the working class is entirely lacking in the "public discourse" of the nation. When people try to speak more effectively proportional to their numbers rather than their wealth, e.g. Occupy protests, they are gassed and beaten and rounded up into jails (typically for the maximum time they can be held for "processing" without charges), and the corporate media does its job of letting multimillionaire white males explain to us why those dirty hippies deserved what they got.
This is only a flaw with Rawl's theory if you assume the goal is some "perfect" level of equality on the finest-grained scale, which is a silly oversimplification. Someone working from Rawl's "original position" of not knowing where they'll end up in society won't necessarily demand a society with mathematically perfect equality, where no one at all might get a tiny bit ahead by luck --- just one where no one ends up as child slave labor sweatshop workers.
I consider the main flaw with Rawl's approach one of implementation --- in practice, a bunch of rich, white males aren't actually going to be able to set their privileges aside and "neutrally" consider the best outcomes for changing the world for the better. That's why I prefer various feminist and anarchist approaches that, rather than stressing "idealized game theory" solutions, emphasize actually giving the poor and oppressed a voice in the discussion.
Sorry, replied to wrong post in thread... consider my diatribe above aimed at the GGP, not GP post.
If I go to ship a box with UPS or FedEx, then L+W+H and total weight is what I pay for. The system imposes a strong penalty on odd-shaped packages; I can't ship a 1"x1"x144' package just like a 12"x12"x12" box. In shipping, L+W+H is a common method of specifying size (with weight considered separately).
Granted, the warehouse worker probably wasn't the brightest fellow, and ought to have known what "volume" meant. However, L+W+H is an "obvious" mistake to make if you work in shipping, not the sign of an extraordinarily idiotic mind. I bet you'd make a few ridiculous noob mistakes your first couple days working in a warehouse, too.
You're under the mistaken impression that a "barrel" is a large unit. Yeah, it's "only" 2 tons per barrel --- but barrels are generally counted by the billions per year. One barrel gives an SUV gas tank fill-up or two. And you're moving, processing, and dumping the noxious waste from two tons of sludge for just *that*.
Really? When you go shopping (possibly on a tight budget), you don't care about knowing the prices until you reach the register? "Don't worry, that box of pasta says $150, but it'll probably cost somewhere between $0.29 and $48 when you reach checkout. Just toss a dozen in the cart." To the end user, being presented *the amount they'll pay* while they're shopping is pretty important --- tacking on a random-number discount at the very end wouldn't make a helpful system.
Sounds somewhat like Edison's stunts using alternating current to execute prisoners and large mammals; primarily propaganda to present Tesla's AC power distribution systems as especially dangerous. In the '80's, this was FUD against "oh noes, big gubmint is forcing cars to have airbags, that'll kill us all!," not the cutting edge of humane execution methods (of which there is no shortage; the general difficulty is shortage of humanity that might stem execution rates in the first place).
I'm sure all those secondary and tertiary effects --- like having a larger proportion of the populace receiving regular medical care than before --- will be just terrible for the economy. Just imagine, all those millions of citizens now able to access medical care before reaching emergency room crisis level, being healthier and more productive. Nothing tanks an economy and drains money from government coffers like improved health and quality of life for the populace!
Oh, wait, that's just not true. Care to say why you think all the "deliberately ignored" secondary and tertiary effects of broadening healthcare access won't be a net improvement for everyone (populace, private sector, government spending/revenue), like it generally is in every other documented case?