Yes, he possibly could have used Go; but the algorithm would be much too complex. Every stone is a stone somewhere, and placing one stone to one point to key mapping is not useful. Its threats and influence are rather difficult to calculate, difficult enough for humans to ascertain even. Indeed, the translation of Go to music seems frivolous and illogical; the translation of chess to music seems more likely, but only with a strict structured algorithm intent on the purpose of getting good results in the limited space of a chess game.
That is as I understand it; there's a reason I didn't bother with other 3D softwares. I just don't care. The comparison between learning curve and efficiency of interface is not an inherently perfect trade-off; you can do the same thing in one or the other, it's faster in one but harder to learn to do that, is the trade-off worth it? When you're rusty, you sort of have to re-learn. The justification that it has a non-intuitive interface because they wanted an efficient interface is a valid justification for making something less intuitive; it's not automatically better for all purposes.
And you mentioned the others were scriptable, so I felt the need to point out that so is Blender. This is not a feature missing from Blender.
Beer idea - good. But a pale ale by definition has a lot of hops in it.
Only INDIA pale ale, because it has to be shipped far on a boat by heat. A basic british bitter is a nice pale ale with very little alcohol or hops, and you can make a smaller beer.
The author of the article first states that he doesn't need to show any proof because the "real gamers" the article is written for already know that what he says is true.
Blender has a steep learning curve, but if you put a solid 3 months into it you get there. The scripting engine is Python. As I understand it, it's supposedly the fastest, best-designed 3D software for the task; but also the most difficult, complex to use software for the task, and thus hard to learn. I'm not into 3D so I only played with it for a few months, rendered some cute stuff (rooms, dice, dolphins, etc), then gave up because the only thing of interest when I brought this skill up on IRC was "SWEET MAKE GIANT 3D PENISES!"
It's not much of a proposal, more an observation. Everyone is crying that the "frail and weak" can die in these situations; but this is not an emergency situation, it is a culling. Technically the damage is isolated to a few people, and really these people were going to die in a few months or a short couple years anyway (face it, if you're 70 and fit and healthy enough to live to 90 without living assistance, you're not frail and weak), so we lose not very much.
Beyond that, we suddenly lose load on the social security system, medicare, etc; free up population density; and put assets back into the economy. Remember, people who are not in the workforce are not contributing to society. Volunteers are in the workforce; any community service rendered is contribution to society. Retirees trimming their garden or watching TV for the last couple years of their lives are just drains. We have various social contracts ranging from simply not executing you when you retire to social security and reduced tax burdens; but you are far from important.
The world would be better off without people who spend too much time overplaying. Things like gun control and zero-tolerance policies (i.e. in schools, to squelch all violent tendencies) that do more harm than good. You can't save everyone, and when you send emergency services to someone with a 40% chance of survival you're taking a risk on someone with an 80% chance of survival. While it's quite possible to save 95% of the old people that are probably dying in the snow, the cost comes at losing a larger percentage of at-risk people that are theoretically more likely to survive and more useful to society (i.e. fathers of teenagers, the working force, etc).
People live off empathy and emotions and get themselves in all kinds of trouble doing the wrong thing for the "right" reasons. You can't fault someone for being a bad person, but you can fault them for being short-sighted and stupid.
Yeah, if only we could create some sort of surface-point electromagnetic shield generator to protect the ship. Something with sensors that detect feedback when charged particles interact with the field, increasing the impedance of specific generators, and shift more power to them to increase the shielding to that area. That way they could always run low power until detecting radioactive particles, immediately responding by increasing power flow to the affected area. That would be an awesome idea, but not practical; even John Archer knows there's no such thing as some kind of magical force field thing around a star ship.
I may have to keep several gallons of beer on hand. Of course, light pale ale, the good stuff, minimum hops, maybe 2.5% alcohol, the kind of shit you can hammer back like crazy and get "a little buzzed" from. Strong beer is not what I want; besides, I dislike it. It stores well, it's easy to handle, and enjoyable, and safe.
Yes, but they're old and no longer useful. The overall impact is purely aesthetic. I mean I would hate to live in a world where we euthenize the elderly (that includes suddenly denying medical service and "letting nature take over," though I feel what we do now--best effort, but we'll call it faster on an old guy whose heart will probably fail completely in the next 2 days anyway-- is reasonable), but it's not really a huge emergency when lots and lots of old people die in the middle of a snowstorm. They're old, they should have figured shit out by now, if not then oh well.
as you said, it's better to get stuck once and disarm your opponent than the back off...which I can attest, since I've been in about a dozen fights that started out with someone pulling a blade on me and ended with me tearing them off the chain;
People keep fucking telling me running INTO a knife attack is the WRONG thing to do and I should turn and run AWAY immediately. I keep telling them they have no idea how to fight, and you can't go from zero to running the hell away fast enough to avoid getting grabbed or stabbed. Needless to say, I have over-in-3-seconds mentality and base my responses on where not to go and what to do if I get there (oh, I pushed your arm to the outside, shit now I'm between your arms... well, knock the jaw to the side, the head will lead the body so the other arm is pushed away, and push the jaw upward to lean center of gravity dangling over an empty spot behind the legs... then hit the chest HARD going in and down. If that fails, do something else; there are no sure-fire secret techniques).
I think 2 people that are trained to fight are going to be less inclined to fight each other than 2 people who are not trained to fight. You got stabbed by a drunk bitch, case in point; I'd much rather NOT get stabbed. If I want to run, I will stab you and run away, I'm pretty sure that while you're dealing with that I can play that one lightly and let you have the knife, but not my hand; you're going to be busy with a loose knife that you don't want to fall pointy-end into you or catch by the blade, that's my head start.
In other words, you get the pipeline benefits of the RISC processor at the cost of loading, decoding, and storing CISC instructions into more on-dye cache, shrinking effective cache size and proving to the world that ARM was better anyway.
Consumer freedoms are far more important than hundreds of lives. In one episode of Justice League America, they stumbled into an alternate universe where Lex Luthor became president and Superman killed him to prevent nuclear war; then they implemented unending martial law and arrested anyone who got mouthy. Some guy was pissed about his restaurant bill, and the cops showed up and arrested him 4 seconds later when he started yelling at the waiter. I'm sure there was far less murder.
I'm very picky -- I obtained every movie and.mp3 file I have legally, because as a content generator (computer programmer) I kinda like getting paid.
But you do understand that the economy does not and should not have an aneurysm because some people take things they shouldn't, right? Like, about 3% of Best Buy's products get stolen; but they don't escort every single person through the store with an armed guard, or put absolutely everything behind locked bullet proof glass. It's good that you don't steal; but you have to accept the trade-off between relying on the general honesty of people and having a functional society.
A society where we try to eliminate 100% of the wrongness-- I mean honestly TRY-- is a horrible society. We have to accept some loss; at a level we must take some serious steps to curb that loss, but below that we have to accept it as a price of living in a pleasant, civilized society with something we like to call "freedom." Those of us who are upstanding citizens are essential to maintaining this "freedom," and even those of us that aren't but only occasionally lean across the ethical barriers we normally respect are keeping the system healthy by not building our house over on that side or making regular visits.
"I think the key to running a better lunch room is to examine the entire lunch serving process as a business process. "
no. That's how they got here.
They got there on the wrong goals.
TO a busing it's:Get the cheapest food into the mouths ans cheaply as possible.
Once you recognize the food isn't the big expense, the process is. The process becomes have some one deliver cheap crap food.
It's still a business process. Study business process management. Not all processes are strictly goal oriented towards "reduce expenses." Polo Ralph Lauren clothes have a big margin and are overpriced; but did you know they're also more expensive to produce? Not proportionally to their price, but they are indeed more costly to make than Chinese sweat-shop clothes you buy at Wal-Mart. They have a quality standard they want to live up to, and that is part of their business specification.
Look at Paul Reed Smith guitars vs Gibson for the same. Gibson guitars are pretty crappy. They have a big name, they have some materials requirements (solid tone wood), but they don't have the best craftsmanship. Tone wood is solid, but it's not selective; and sometimes it's frail, the grain can be wrong and the neck can snap or split (Gibson headstocks are known to break quite a lot, hence the volute during the 70s... which didn't help, so they discontinued it). Yet PRS guitars are cheaper, even though they're manufactured to a higher quality requirement, with better electronics, thicker wires, and carefully selected cuts of tone wood. Even the PRS SE line, made in Korea, has quality requirements; if they don't meet standards, PRS finds another Korean factory that will.
We can do much, much better than we are now; and we can do it cheaply and efficiently, and at quality. I would find $2 lunches acceptable (currently they are $1.50 on average here) with the same free and reduced lunch plans for low-income families here if we only used high-quality ingredients. Asian food is easier because rice is so cheap; but baked rotisserie chicken is cheap as hell too (American ethnic food), relatively healthy, and can be seasoned with expensive high-quality spices without breaking the bank. Yeah, a $6 bottle of i.e. Thyme vs a $3 bottle, but the bottle is good for about two dozen chickens so it's like 25 cents vs 12 cents a dozen, or 1-2 pennies per whole chicken; your students should not be eating a whole chicken by themselves, and the 8 spices that go into this make a whole 5 cents price increase in their meal.
Think on it. Quality chicken costs what $5? (I spend under $9 on packs of 2 cornish hens; a bigger chicken is bigger, but I don't expect a third grader to eat half a hen) Cut it up into 6 pieces and everyone gets a leg and a wing or just a breast; unused parts get chopped up for something like chicken and rice the next day. So the $5 / 4 == $1.25, plus you go with fresh fruits and steamed vegetables as sides (these are cheap as hell, even at high quality levels) for no more than 75 cents and you're at $2 lunch on very rich tastes. Whatever pays the teacher pays the cafeteria server (i.e. taxes, tuition fees...).
Food prep takes forever... at home. If I had to make sushi for 10 people, though, it would take me about 3 times as long as it does to make sushi for me... see it? Never mind anything stew (Japanese hot pots, Russian/German stews, British mutton stew) or soup (Chinese, Indian, Scandinavian, Belgian... lots to pick from). Tacos and makizushi are "some assembly required," meaning you make all the components in bulk and then grab tortillas or nori and wrap everything together in a few seconds; makizushi is somewhat easier since you can just do stock/flow economics and keep so much on hand, and start rapidly making/rolling/cutting the stuff when you run low. Still not a burden. Even better pizza is doable with some modification in process; you already have a giant oven, though meeting capacit
You can find cooked ethnic foods, Japanese and otherwise. Seafood is healthy and upper middle school and high school kids will appreciate sashimi. Salmon is better than tuna in respect to palate though. That wasn't my point; it costs me $1.46 and a few minutes' time to make 10 pieces of sushi, what's it cost you for 6 pieces of basic salmon roll? $5.95? $7.95 if it includes avocado?
How much Japanese Izakaya- and hotpot-style food do you think you can make cheap without a quality sacrifice? Cheap Chinese food (beef, chicken, pork!)? German, Mexican, Belgian,... Russian and Indian are kind of tough. Still, we can do better than having Pizza day and Hotdog day, with some kind of spaghetti-like food on Fridays.
What's being wasted? Is it our time? no, we have more time to do what we like. Is it our effort? No, we can do more with less effort. Is it our money? No, our standard of living has risen significantly.
Our standards of living have risen from high-quality hand-baked fresh bread being an 8 hour a day career for the baker, who sells the bread cheap enough for the peasants, to a niche career with overpriced artisan bread tucked away out of sight from the low-quality dough-extended mass market bread business.
Our standards of living have gone from expensive fancy furnishings and cheap, affordable carpentry to mass-produced particle board and plastic tables and desks, and anything solid wood being up in the realm of the exceedingly rich.
Our standards of living have gone from good home-cooked meals to lots of high-preservative, ingredient-substituted, vegetable oil crap that still costs too much... but it doesn't matter because nobody can cook, so we live between healthy choice TV dinners and mcdonalds, or maybe expensive sit-down diners.
And for it, peoples' attention span has gone down precisely because they have no patience for anything. Nobody knows how to cook because they can microwave their food until it's hot all the way through. Dry, chewy, poorly textured, somewhat tasteless, and not exactly pleasant; but it's hot food and it took 30 seconds. God forbid you actually have to mix spices in the kitchen, or set a timer and pull something out of the oven with potholders. It'd be far too much effort and, more importantly, time you could spend on Farmville or watching TV.
And that's all we want. We want to dump our laundry in the machine and have it sort, soap, wash, dry, and fold it for us. We want to push a button and have a sandwich. We want cars to drive for us-- still takes time, but at least I don't have to pay attention to it. And all so we can just watch TV; actually doing anything with the extra time would be ridiculously difficult, too much effort, can't have that. Maybe a video game.
The $100 shirt should not cost $100. Textile mills can produce high-quality fabric with mostly mechanical process. High quality materials are easy to properly produce; they cost a bit more, but I get extremely high quality stuff for $5-$10 more than Wal-Mart prices (so $18-$22 becomes $25-$30). It amazes me what Blue Ribbon and Wunderbread pass for bread these days, and what Kraft passes for food at ridiculous prices (for that matter, Snapple's overpriced juice-- all of it is pear juice).
There is a delicate balance between progress and societal destruction. The washing machine and the light bulb were good ideas. The dishwasher was a good idea-- but in principle less important than the washing machine; washing dishes by hand is viable, and a choice I prefer, although if I had a wife I would get a dishwasher to free up her time unless she felt otherwise (or well, two people work twice as fast... but the volume of dishes would increase). Washing clothes by hand is ridiculous; it literally takes an entire day of continuous labor and it's hard. Electric mixers were even a great idea. Plastic was a great idea; but look at the world of plastic we have and you can probably identify with "I can't find a good X made out of solid $notplastic" going around.
People need time to process things. They need to have something slow and somewhat meditative in their life, something that leaves their mind with nothing to focus on so they can reflect on things and work through problems. Because people interpret this as boredom now, they watch TV to occupy the mind with meaningless drivel, similar to having a computer compress and uncompress things repeatedly to keep it busy when there are other tasks (like reorganization of memory, for example) that could be performance-beneficial. Entertainment is good, but look at American TV: reused plots, TV series that take place in
Used to be the wench spent the whole day doing laundry by hand. By hand. That sucked, so we have washing machines now. That was a good thing.
But then we invented microwaves and fast food, everyone gets dinner in 1 minute with 15 seconds of effort. Anything worthwhile is extraordinarily expensive because it's cheap and easy to stamp shitty knives from sheet steel and injection-mold everything else from plastic. Want something done well and you have to pay someone $200/hr to do it by hand. Even TV has moved to a largely "on-demand" distribution method. Mixers weren't enough, so we have bread machines so you can just dump ingredients in and hit "bread." We have spray cans that shoot pancake batter. Automatic sandwich makers have yet to be perfected; automatic mochi machines exist though, pour in rice and water and close the lid and out comes steamed, mixed, pounded mochi.
Everything is instant-access, no-thought, touch-of-a-button. What a waste.
Everyone at the capital agrees that it's somehow evil and wrong to discipline a child, and all the nice little collectivist sheeps fall in line.
Yes and that's the problem. It's your job to raise and discipline your children. It's not in the interest of the public good for our public services to nanny your kids 24/7. They will get away with shit. They will get caught doing shit, and then you will punish them. Both of these are important, good, and proper.
I just don't think today's taboo society is natural or healthy, at all. If we could do it, we would make sure that people never saw anyone naked or knew what sex was until they turned 18. Think about it. If we could administratively put up a system where we prevented anyone under 18 from hearing about sex and prevented them from ever experimenting or getting into talks that wander toward such topics with their peers (and thus, discovering sex on their own), do you think we'd do it?
I don't think the struggle between parent and child on this is unhealthy. The parents need to parent. They need to set down ground rules. I think they need to explain sexuality and moral and ethical and health issues to their kids, too. The child then becomes a teenager, and wants to have sex; the parent has armed the child with enough knowledge to not screw up too bad (pregnancy, STDs, etc) in this endeavor, but also does not want the now-teenager to have sex, and takes steps to prevent it.
This needs to remain balanced as it is. Sorry but your teenage daughter needs to be able to get away with it, as hard as it might be to get that one by you, when she's 16. She doesn't need to be put under constant watch, with a cell phone with a baby monitor app running on it, with a GPS, phone calls every 20 minutes, and a chaperon. That's just sociopathic and likely to cause a huge amount of psychological damage.
When I was a kid, parents were concerned about their kids not going out and playing. I mean not like that, but they really wanted you to go outside and disappear with friends from time to time, instead of spending 24 hours a day locked in your room alone. They knew the risks, and when you did something stupid and got caught they beat you with a leather belt. That's called "parenting." What happened?
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Yes, he possibly could have used Go; but the algorithm would be much too complex. Every stone is a stone somewhere, and placing one stone to one point to key mapping is not useful. Its threats and influence are rather difficult to calculate, difficult enough for humans to ascertain even. Indeed, the translation of Go to music seems frivolous and illogical; the translation of chess to music seems more likely, but only with a strict structured algorithm intent on the purpose of getting good results in the limited space of a chess game.
That is as I understand it; there's a reason I didn't bother with other 3D softwares. I just don't care. The comparison between learning curve and efficiency of interface is not an inherently perfect trade-off; you can do the same thing in one or the other, it's faster in one but harder to learn to do that, is the trade-off worth it? When you're rusty, you sort of have to re-learn. The justification that it has a non-intuitive interface because they wanted an efficient interface is a valid justification for making something less intuitive; it's not automatically better for all purposes.
And you mentioned the others were scriptable, so I felt the need to point out that so is Blender. This is not a feature missing from Blender.
Beer idea - good. But a pale ale by definition has a lot of hops in it.
Only INDIA pale ale, because it has to be shipped far on a boat by heat. A basic british bitter is a nice pale ale with very little alcohol or hops, and you can make a smaller beer.
The author of the article first states that he doesn't need to show any proof because the "real gamers" the article is written for already know that what he says is true.
See my signature? Know what philosophy includes? These sort of things should stand out.
Blender has a steep learning curve, but if you put a solid 3 months into it you get there. The scripting engine is Python. As I understand it, it's supposedly the fastest, best-designed 3D software for the task; but also the most difficult, complex to use software for the task, and thus hard to learn. I'm not into 3D so I only played with it for a few months, rendered some cute stuff (rooms, dice, dolphins, etc), then gave up because the only thing of interest when I brought this skill up on IRC was "SWEET MAKE GIANT 3D PENISES!"
The site is listed as malware by web filters like BlueCoat.
It's not much of a proposal, more an observation. Everyone is crying that the "frail and weak" can die in these situations; but this is not an emergency situation, it is a culling. Technically the damage is isolated to a few people, and really these people were going to die in a few months or a short couple years anyway (face it, if you're 70 and fit and healthy enough to live to 90 without living assistance, you're not frail and weak), so we lose not very much.
Beyond that, we suddenly lose load on the social security system, medicare, etc; free up population density; and put assets back into the economy. Remember, people who are not in the workforce are not contributing to society. Volunteers are in the workforce; any community service rendered is contribution to society. Retirees trimming their garden or watching TV for the last couple years of their lives are just drains. We have various social contracts ranging from simply not executing you when you retire to social security and reduced tax burdens; but you are far from important.
The world would be better off without people who spend too much time overplaying. Things like gun control and zero-tolerance policies (i.e. in schools, to squelch all violent tendencies) that do more harm than good. You can't save everyone, and when you send emergency services to someone with a 40% chance of survival you're taking a risk on someone with an 80% chance of survival. While it's quite possible to save 95% of the old people that are probably dying in the snow, the cost comes at losing a larger percentage of at-risk people that are theoretically more likely to survive and more useful to society (i.e. fathers of teenagers, the working force, etc).
People live off empathy and emotions and get themselves in all kinds of trouble doing the wrong thing for the "right" reasons. You can't fault someone for being a bad person, but you can fault them for being short-sighted and stupid.
Is... is that a cow?
Yeah, if only we could create some sort of surface-point electromagnetic shield generator to protect the ship. Something with sensors that detect feedback when charged particles interact with the field, increasing the impedance of specific generators, and shift more power to them to increase the shielding to that area. That way they could always run low power until detecting radioactive particles, immediately responding by increasing power flow to the affected area. That would be an awesome idea, but not practical; even John Archer knows there's no such thing as some kind of magical force field thing around a star ship.
... yes the world is decaying. :/
I may have to keep several gallons of beer on hand. Of course, light pale ale, the good stuff, minimum hops, maybe 2.5% alcohol, the kind of shit you can hammer back like crazy and get "a little buzzed" from. Strong beer is not what I want; besides, I dislike it. It stores well, it's easy to handle, and enjoyable, and safe.
Yes, but they're old and no longer useful. The overall impact is purely aesthetic. I mean I would hate to live in a world where we euthenize the elderly (that includes suddenly denying medical service and "letting nature take over," though I feel what we do now--best effort, but we'll call it faster on an old guy whose heart will probably fail completely in the next 2 days anyway-- is reasonable), but it's not really a huge emergency when lots and lots of old people die in the middle of a snowstorm. They're old, they should have figured shit out by now, if not then oh well.
as you said, it's better to get stuck once and disarm your opponent than the back off...which I can attest, since I've been in about a dozen fights that started out with someone pulling a blade on me and ended with me tearing them off the chain;
People keep fucking telling me running INTO a knife attack is the WRONG thing to do and I should turn and run AWAY immediately. I keep telling them they have no idea how to fight, and you can't go from zero to running the hell away fast enough to avoid getting grabbed or stabbed. Needless to say, I have over-in-3-seconds mentality and base my responses on where not to go and what to do if I get there (oh, I pushed your arm to the outside, shit now I'm between your arms... well, knock the jaw to the side, the head will lead the body so the other arm is pushed away, and push the jaw upward to lean center of gravity dangling over an empty spot behind the legs... then hit the chest HARD going in and down. If that fails, do something else; there are no sure-fire secret techniques).
I think 2 people that are trained to fight are going to be less inclined to fight each other than 2 people who are not trained to fight. You got stabbed by a drunk bitch, case in point; I'd much rather NOT get stabbed. If I want to run, I will stab you and run away, I'm pretty sure that while you're dealing with that I can play that one lightly and let you have the knife, but not my hand; you're going to be busy with a loose knife that you don't want to fall pointy-end into you or catch by the blade, that's my head start.
In other words, you get the pipeline benefits of the RISC processor at the cost of loading, decoding, and storing CISC instructions into more on-dye cache, shrinking effective cache size and proving to the world that ARM was better anyway.
Consumer freedoms are far more important than hundreds of lives. In one episode of Justice League America, they stumbled into an alternate universe where Lex Luthor became president and Superman killed him to prevent nuclear war; then they implemented unending martial law and arrested anyone who got mouthy. Some guy was pissed about his restaurant bill, and the cops showed up and arrested him 4 seconds later when he started yelling at the waiter. I'm sure there was far less murder.
I'm very picky -- I obtained every movie and .mp3 file I have legally, because as a content generator (computer programmer) I kinda like getting paid.
But you do understand that the economy does not and should not have an aneurysm because some people take things they shouldn't, right? Like, about 3% of Best Buy's products get stolen; but they don't escort every single person through the store with an armed guard, or put absolutely everything behind locked bullet proof glass. It's good that you don't steal; but you have to accept the trade-off between relying on the general honesty of people and having a functional society.
A society where we try to eliminate 100% of the wrongness-- I mean honestly TRY-- is a horrible society. We have to accept some loss; at a level we must take some serious steps to curb that loss, but below that we have to accept it as a price of living in a pleasant, civilized society with something we like to call "freedom." Those of us who are upstanding citizens are essential to maintaining this "freedom," and even those of us that aren't but only occasionally lean across the ethical barriers we normally respect are keeping the system healthy by not building our house over on that side or making regular visits.
"I think the key to running a better lunch room is to examine the entire lunch serving process as a business process. " no. That's how they got here.
They got there on the wrong goals.
TO a busing it's :Get the cheapest food into the mouths ans cheaply as possible.
Once you recognize the food isn't the big expense, the process is. The process becomes have some one deliver cheap crap food.
It's still a business process. Study business process management. Not all processes are strictly goal oriented towards "reduce expenses." Polo Ralph Lauren clothes have a big margin and are overpriced; but did you know they're also more expensive to produce? Not proportionally to their price, but they are indeed more costly to make than Chinese sweat-shop clothes you buy at Wal-Mart. They have a quality standard they want to live up to, and that is part of their business specification.
Look at Paul Reed Smith guitars vs Gibson for the same. Gibson guitars are pretty crappy. They have a big name, they have some materials requirements (solid tone wood), but they don't have the best craftsmanship. Tone wood is solid, but it's not selective; and sometimes it's frail, the grain can be wrong and the neck can snap or split (Gibson headstocks are known to break quite a lot, hence the volute during the 70s... which didn't help, so they discontinued it). Yet PRS guitars are cheaper, even though they're manufactured to a higher quality requirement, with better electronics, thicker wires, and carefully selected cuts of tone wood. Even the PRS SE line, made in Korea, has quality requirements; if they don't meet standards, PRS finds another Korean factory that will.
We can do much, much better than we are now; and we can do it cheaply and efficiently, and at quality. I would find $2 lunches acceptable (currently they are $1.50 on average here) with the same free and reduced lunch plans for low-income families here if we only used high-quality ingredients. Asian food is easier because rice is so cheap; but baked rotisserie chicken is cheap as hell too (American ethnic food), relatively healthy, and can be seasoned with expensive high-quality spices without breaking the bank. Yeah, a $6 bottle of i.e. Thyme vs a $3 bottle, but the bottle is good for about two dozen chickens so it's like 25 cents vs 12 cents a dozen, or 1-2 pennies per whole chicken; your students should not be eating a whole chicken by themselves, and the 8 spices that go into this make a whole 5 cents price increase in their meal.
Think on it. Quality chicken costs what $5? (I spend under $9 on packs of 2 cornish hens; a bigger chicken is bigger, but I don't expect a third grader to eat half a hen) Cut it up into 6 pieces and everyone gets a leg and a wing or just a breast; unused parts get chopped up for something like chicken and rice the next day. So the $5 / 4 == $1.25, plus you go with fresh fruits and steamed vegetables as sides (these are cheap as hell, even at high quality levels) for no more than 75 cents and you're at $2 lunch on very rich tastes. Whatever pays the teacher pays the cafeteria server (i.e. taxes, tuition fees...).
Food prep takes forever... at home. If I had to make sushi for 10 people, though, it would take me about 3 times as long as it does to make sushi for me... see it? Never mind anything stew (Japanese hot pots, Russian/German stews, British mutton stew) or soup (Chinese, Indian, Scandinavian, Belgian... lots to pick from). Tacos and makizushi are "some assembly required," meaning you make all the components in bulk and then grab tortillas or nori and wrap everything together in a few seconds; makizushi is somewhat easier since you can just do stock/flow economics and keep so much on hand, and start rapidly making/rolling/cutting the stuff when you run low. Still not a burden. Even better pizza is doable with some modification in process; you already have a giant oven, though meeting capacit
You can find cooked ethnic foods, Japanese and otherwise. Seafood is healthy and upper middle school and high school kids will appreciate sashimi. Salmon is better than tuna in respect to palate though. That wasn't my point; it costs me $1.46 and a few minutes' time to make 10 pieces of sushi, what's it cost you for 6 pieces of basic salmon roll? $5.95? $7.95 if it includes avocado?
How much Japanese Izakaya- and hotpot-style food do you think you can make cheap without a quality sacrifice? Cheap Chinese food (beef, chicken, pork!)? German, Mexican, Belgian, ... Russian and Indian are kind of tough. Still, we can do better than having Pizza day and Hotdog day, with some kind of spaghetti-like food on Fridays.
What's being wasted? Is it our time? no, we have more time to do what we like. Is it our effort? No, we can do more with less effort. Is it our money? No, our standard of living has risen significantly.
Our standards of living have risen from high-quality hand-baked fresh bread being an 8 hour a day career for the baker, who sells the bread cheap enough for the peasants, to a niche career with overpriced artisan bread tucked away out of sight from the low-quality dough-extended mass market bread business.
Our standards of living have gone from expensive fancy furnishings and cheap, affordable carpentry to mass-produced particle board and plastic tables and desks, and anything solid wood being up in the realm of the exceedingly rich.
Our standards of living have gone from good home-cooked meals to lots of high-preservative, ingredient-substituted, vegetable oil crap that still costs too much... but it doesn't matter because nobody can cook, so we live between healthy choice TV dinners and mcdonalds, or maybe expensive sit-down diners.
And for it, peoples' attention span has gone down precisely because they have no patience for anything. Nobody knows how to cook because they can microwave their food until it's hot all the way through. Dry, chewy, poorly textured, somewhat tasteless, and not exactly pleasant; but it's hot food and it took 30 seconds. God forbid you actually have to mix spices in the kitchen, or set a timer and pull something out of the oven with potholders. It'd be far too much effort and, more importantly, time you could spend on Farmville or watching TV.
And that's all we want. We want to dump our laundry in the machine and have it sort, soap, wash, dry, and fold it for us. We want to push a button and have a sandwich. We want cars to drive for us-- still takes time, but at least I don't have to pay attention to it. And all so we can just watch TV; actually doing anything with the extra time would be ridiculously difficult, too much effort, can't have that. Maybe a video game.
The $100 shirt should not cost $100. Textile mills can produce high-quality fabric with mostly mechanical process. High quality materials are easy to properly produce; they cost a bit more, but I get extremely high quality stuff for $5-$10 more than Wal-Mart prices (so $18-$22 becomes $25-$30). It amazes me what Blue Ribbon and Wunderbread pass for bread these days, and what Kraft passes for food at ridiculous prices (for that matter, Snapple's overpriced juice-- all of it is pear juice).
There is a delicate balance between progress and societal destruction. The washing machine and the light bulb were good ideas. The dishwasher was a good idea-- but in principle less important than the washing machine; washing dishes by hand is viable, and a choice I prefer, although if I had a wife I would get a dishwasher to free up her time unless she felt otherwise (or well, two people work twice as fast... but the volume of dishes would increase). Washing clothes by hand is ridiculous; it literally takes an entire day of continuous labor and it's hard. Electric mixers were even a great idea. Plastic was a great idea; but look at the world of plastic we have and you can probably identify with "I can't find a good X made out of solid $notplastic" going around.
People need time to process things. They need to have something slow and somewhat meditative in their life, something that leaves their mind with nothing to focus on so they can reflect on things and work through problems. Because people interpret this as boredom now, they watch TV to occupy the mind with meaningless drivel, similar to having a computer compress and uncompress things repeatedly to keep it busy when there are other tasks (like reorganization of memory, for example) that could be performance-beneficial. Entertainment is good, but look at American TV: reused plots, TV series that take place in
I blame fast tech.
Used to be the wench spent the whole day doing laundry by hand. By hand. That sucked, so we have washing machines now. That was a good thing.
But then we invented microwaves and fast food, everyone gets dinner in 1 minute with 15 seconds of effort. Anything worthwhile is extraordinarily expensive because it's cheap and easy to stamp shitty knives from sheet steel and injection-mold everything else from plastic. Want something done well and you have to pay someone $200/hr to do it by hand. Even TV has moved to a largely "on-demand" distribution method. Mixers weren't enough, so we have bread machines so you can just dump ingredients in and hit "bread." We have spray cans that shoot pancake batter. Automatic sandwich makers have yet to be perfected; automatic mochi machines exist though, pour in rice and water and close the lid and out comes steamed, mixed, pounded mochi.
Everything is instant-access, no-thought, touch-of-a-button. What a waste.
I can and I'm just barely learning German.
Everyone at the capital agrees that it's somehow evil and wrong to discipline a child, and all the nice little collectivist sheeps fall in line.
Yes and that's the problem. It's your job to raise and discipline your children. It's not in the interest of the public good for our public services to nanny your kids 24/7. They will get away with shit. They will get caught doing shit, and then you will punish them. Both of these are important, good, and proper.
I just don't think today's taboo society is natural or healthy, at all. If we could do it, we would make sure that people never saw anyone naked or knew what sex was until they turned 18. Think about it. If we could administratively put up a system where we prevented anyone under 18 from hearing about sex and prevented them from ever experimenting or getting into talks that wander toward such topics with their peers (and thus, discovering sex on their own), do you think we'd do it?
I don't think the struggle between parent and child on this is unhealthy. The parents need to parent. They need to set down ground rules. I think they need to explain sexuality and moral and ethical and health issues to their kids, too. The child then becomes a teenager, and wants to have sex; the parent has armed the child with enough knowledge to not screw up too bad (pregnancy, STDs, etc) in this endeavor, but also does not want the now-teenager to have sex, and takes steps to prevent it.
This needs to remain balanced as it is. Sorry but your teenage daughter needs to be able to get away with it, as hard as it might be to get that one by you, when she's 16. She doesn't need to be put under constant watch, with a cell phone with a baby monitor app running on it, with a GPS, phone calls every 20 minutes, and a chaperon. That's just sociopathic and likely to cause a huge amount of psychological damage.
When I was a kid, parents were concerned about their kids not going out and playing. I mean not like that, but they really wanted you to go outside and disappear with friends from time to time, instead of spending 24 hours a day locked in your room alone. They knew the risks, and when you did something stupid and got caught they beat you with a leather belt. That's called "parenting." What happened?
I'm pretty sure that the kids would exceed your assessment of them if they went to school and learned something.
Yes, exactly. If they actually went to school and learned something they would exceed my assessment.