I'm sure there are other people in the world too that sticks to an idea or action, when its beneficial to them and when it's not. When that idea goes to their liking or when it does not go to their liking.
It's call having a fucking principle.
Actually, it's sometimes called being stupid. Here's an example of someone who exemplifies your oh-so-sophisticated worldview: George Bush. Sticking to principles that are damaging you is something that smart people don't do...but feel free to stay up on your high horse and let me know how it works out for you. Maybe try buying some stocks on principle and sticking with them even if they turn out to be corrupt, mismanaged companies.
I'll deem you a gutless imperialist.
Right. And I think it's gutless to sit back and do nothing while things are going to hell around you. By the way, if anything in my original post really caused you think think I was imperialist, you need to go out and try reading about what an imperialist is.
and if you cant get your head out of your ass, nobody in the world is asking the us for a higher standards. they're asking the us to follow it's own often preached standard. im sure you have heard of google, try using it to read on the renmibi issue, bechtel,subsidies, steel tariffs, canada lumber agreements.
I'll say it again: every country in the world has some sort of tariffs or subsidies. Where are you from? How much do you want to bet that your country has some that I could find on Google within 30 seconds? If I do find one,do I get to call you a gutless imperialist? By the way, on the yuan issue -- is it a free-floating currency yet? Or is it still kept artificially low to stimulate exports (which is ironically killing industries in other countries that need help -- Mexico, for example). To go back to the main point of the article: expecting American workers to not try and fight a system that's causing them to lose their jobs is stupid. You can make hypocritical appeals(which, in your case sound suspiciously like a childish desire for economic revenge) to principles that NO ONE actually adheres to fully all you want.
Yeah, where are the troll mods for this prick?
globalization benificial to us: good
globalization detrimental to us: bad
That's what countries are supposed to do. We pursue globalization if it's in our long-term interests. If we decide it's not, why should we keep pursuing it? Because people like YOU think we owe it to them? Wherever you live, feel free to make whatever economic decisions that maximize your self interest. Every country in the world does that, but only the U.S. is held to this higher standard and expected to shoot itself in the foot. That's Adam Smith at work. Talk about something going "both fucking way". You want to reap the benefits of a capitalist system while expecting one party to act against its own economic self-interest. Genius!
If? Look, maybe I'm just dumber than the average engineer, but without projects, I don't think I would have learned a damn thing in my Computer Science courses. It's important to discuss the theories of CS, but you won't survive in the real world without some practical experience.
The projects also help reinforce what you've learned in class. Talking about object inheritance models is all well and good, but the benefit really hits home when you find yourself copy/pasting code all over the place. Talking about compiler theory is all well and good, but it's not a whole lot of help when gcc/javac has spit out some errors at you,and you've never seen them before.
In short, someone who hasn't written much code at the college level will have a very rude awakening once he's out of school. Those who have cheated their way through the projects should not make it past the technical interview at a decent company, and even if they're hired by a second-rate one will be exposed within a week.
Is Google paying people to submit these "stories" about any article/blog/message board post with the word Google in it?
In any case, if I was to pretend that this was a serious article, Google had better watch its step. Let's not forget that Google is a one-trick pony. While it makes fantastic amount of money off that trick, serving up contextual ads in a browser is not the same as serving them up on TV. To begin with, the context is different. The most important factor that Google uses to show you adds is what you typed into their search box -- or the words on the page you're viewing in the Adsense case. When serving up adds on a TV show, it doesn't have as much to go off. It has the genre of the show, but so does the TV station choosing to serve up the ads, which is already doing targeting based on it. It has the episode description, which is small and often of limited value ex: (Magnum PI: "Mac returns and involves Rick in a scheme concering a luxury boat and its complement of four geishas"). Google also has access to "your interests", as the writer says. Not only is that much harder to determine, it's been done before. See: Doubleclick and Abacus. Things didn't work out so well for them.
Also, there's a reason that people find using Google adwords valuable right now: it's a completely measurable spend of your ad dollars. You'll know exactly how much traffic (minus the growing click fraud, I guess) was driven to your site. There's no interactive TV yet (at least not in the U.S.), and Google can't provide that anymore. At that point, they're really not that different from a typical advertising company.
Google could do a good job with TV ads, some day. The barriers to entry are much higher than slapping some adwords on every text page on the Web, though.
Not that I'm in favor of this, but I think people here are missing the point of the inclusion of GPS. If it were simply a mileage issue, we could do an annual checkup, calculate the mileage delta and tax appropriately.
Using GPS helps avoid problems like the one you're describing. I have a GPS nav system in my car, and it's able to tell me what road I'm currently driving on. It's not a stretch for it to keep track of that info ONLY IF I'm driving on a public road. Voila -- you're only taxed for your use of public infrastructure.
Again, I'm trying to come out in favor of this, just point out the obvious.
Kudos for an excellent point. Let me know when that number passes the 1 million/year point. Oh, and then let me know when the number who are completely impoverished and don't speak English or French crosses 1 million/year. Thanks.
Think you're missing the point here. It's not that someone who is fluent in two languages can't score well on tests. On the contrary, the type of people who care enough to master a second language probably score better.
The kids you describe speak English. They are then given standardized tests in English, a language they are fluent in. Of course they'll do fine. There are, however, many, many kids who don't speak English and are then being taught math in English, and tested on math in English. I agree that parents are important, but I think we're talking about 2 different issues here.
Note to other posters: Cry me a river about the impact of those damn illegal Mexican immigrants. They represent less than three percent of the total population; even if they all scored zero on the testing, dropping them from the scores wouldn't nudge the U.S. up more than a couple places in the rankings. I note that Mexico's students on average scored about 80% as well as their U.S. counterparts, too.
Note to this poster: don't be so dismissive. First of all, one important point to make here is that the children of illegal immigrants are legal citizens of the U.S. For the most part, illegal immigrants from Mexico/Central America/South America do not speak fluent English. So, while illegal immigrants might only make up 3% of the population, there could be a much larger percentage than that English-impaired. There is also a phenomenon that is beginning to be documented that many second or even third generation Hispanic immigrants are still speaking Spanish at home. There are many parts of the country, in fact, where you do not need English to function. I would know, having grown up in Southern California, and gone to a high school that was 35-45% Hispanic.
What's my point? Just that there's a large portion of the public that is English-impaired. When someone is English-impaired, an inordinate amount of time needs to be spent in school attempting to get that person assimiliated into the language. This comes at the expense of teaching them other subjects. Additionally, someone who doesn't have a good grasp of English will not understand what he's being taught in math class. Furthermore, there's a money issue. Money being spent on teaching high school students 6th grade English WILL results in cuts elsewhere. Guess what? That sword will sometimes fall on math education? The issue is not "damn illegal Mexican immigrants" as you so eloquently put it, but language.
If you're Canadian, get off your high horse about the claim of illegal immigration affecting national test scores. You admit immigrants _legally_, and from what I understand screen them pretty well to make sure that they're educated. You don't have a massive border with a poor country that sends hundreds of thousands of people over every year. And while Canada might have two languages, I'll bet that students aren't being given tests in a language they don't understand well.
In summary, I agree that a problem exists with American math/science education. This problem has many factors. But to say that one of the larger problems isn't due to immigration of non-English speakers is ignorant.
Parent poster is right, people. Some (most?) of you probably live in areas where "immigrants" means H-1 programmers, Chinese doctors, etc. And the children of educated, English-speaking immigrants, I suspect, DO improve the average test scores in the U.S. However...
I grew up in Southern California. I attended elementary, middle and high schools with a student body that was 35%-45% Latino. The majority of these kids did not speak English at home. Please note that I am _NOT_ trying to cast any aspersions on Latino immigrants or their children. However, the crux of the problem was that a lot of these kids did NOT speak functional English. A lot of time and effort had to be invested in these students just to get them to a 6th grade level of English. They took classes specifically to learn how to speak English (ESL -- English as a second language). Thus, in the advanced math and science classes there was an unfortunate lack of Latino students. And in the regular math and science classes, they tended to perform at a lower level than native English speakers. This is NOT surprising. If I were to go to school in Mexico and not speak Spanish, chances are I wouldn't have been in any advanced classes either. But...
These English-impaired students were taking the same state-mandated standardized tests as I was, IN ENGLISH. When it came time to measure the performance of our school based on these tests, we were at a serious disadvantage.
I don't want this to devolve into a big tract on the value of mass standardized testing, but take those results with a grain of salt. While I'm not saying that the US would be #1 in that ranking if you discounted those who weren't native speakers of English, I suspect it would be several pegs higher than it is.
Re:Someone has been reading too much Cryptonomicon
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Intro to Encryption
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· Score: 2, Informative
Won't supply a link here, but Simon Singh's excellent "The Code Book" provides a large level of detail about the Polish contributions to breaking Enigma.
Ahh, what the hell, I _will_ supply a link here.
Or, just google "Rejewski Enigma".
Start a war and I'll be first in line to stop you with all necessary force.
Why? At some point, shouldn't reasonable people realize that they share different value systems and agree to split up -- amicably? If it weren't for the fact that the blue states essentially subsidize the red ones -- best link I could find was here -- I'm sure they'd be happy to see us go.
But as I've said before: I'm sure that with strong morals, a lot of prayer and -- this is the most important part -- no gay marriage, the red states could make up for the lost income in no time.
From what I can tell, for the most part the "red states" care more about religious values than anything else. Evangelical Christians were one of the strongest voting blocs in Bush's base, according to what I saw on CNN last night. Gay marriage is more important to these people than the US's financial future, safety, etc.
The "blue states", IMO, have different agendas. I'm in California, and I'm not that overjoyed by the ideas of the Christian right running my life. Similarly, the voting population of the red states probably doesn't like the thought of all us heathens out here.
At some point, why not just call it an amicable split? Of course, the blues most likely contribute a higher percentage of US GDP than the reds. (Best link I could find was here.)
But I'm sure that with strong morals and a lot of prayer, the red population could make up for that in no time.
This guy bought a product, and it failed after an absolutely unreasonable timeframe.
Agreed.
And you're saying he should have _purchased_ (ie. PAID MORE MONEY!) to protect against such an occurance.
Not necessarily.
We are a litigious society because we have no useful consumer protection - here, consumer protection is usually insane over-protection, and a complete lack everywhere else...
Nice to see some good research backing up these sweeping claims. I'd like to see another country that has more effective consumer protection laws than the U.S. But I digress...
The core of this issue is how this case should be resolved. Unfortunately for us, things break. It's a fact of life. Oftentimes, this is due to a manufacturing error. That doesn't mean that every such error should be resolved in court. For most of these types of cases -- and by most, I mean cases in which the product failure doesn't cause other property/health damage -- the free market should resolve the problem. These issues are too hard to decide in court. It's very difficult to say what constitutes a "reasonable" timeframe for failure. For example, what's a reasonable timeframe for a towel? Does the price you paid for the towel matter? What if it's a super-cheap one made in China? What if 30 people are sharing the same one? Imagine having to answer these types of questions for every product on the market.
The free market is what typically decides these things. The free market is why American cars lost their popularity in the 70's and 80's. People realized they were crap, and went with a better-made option. Using the legal system to abitrate these types of issues is not only unfair, but it places a lot of strain on a system that already is under pressure. While I agree that the customer in the story has a right to be angry, he should let his future purchasing dollars rather than the courts express that anger.
That statement is misleading. If someone believes a lawsuit is frivolous, by definition they don't agree that it's valid (and thus, they usually don't like it). If the spirit of your statement is "People on juries don't like lawsuits that the majority of people in America consider to be frivolous", or "People on juries don't like to give out monetary awards that most of America considers excessive", you're dead wrong. The jury selection process is most likely to blame. By the time you actually get to the pool of people who aren't able/willing to get out of jury duty, you're generally left with a group that is a) stupid b) unemployed and thus c) looking to stick it to "the man" (in corporate tort cases like this).
Check out this: http://orig.clarionledger.com/news/0212/10/m02.htm l link (or google for "60 Minutes" and "jackpot justice"). The story in a nutshell: There's a county in Mississippi which is known for giving out obscenely large awards in suits against pharmaceutical companies. They are _so_ well known for this that lawyers in such suits make every attempt to get the case tried in this county. They do so by having a client buy a "controversial" drug in a drugstore in the county, suing the drugstore, and naming the manufacturer as a co-defendant. The drugstore typically drops off the case by the end, but only after having to spend time/money defending itself in the early stages of the case.
If you think that the McDonalds lawsuit itself was reasonable, that's fine. You and I just draw the line differently about what "personal responsibility" constitutes. But if you think that the damages awarded (almost $3 million) were reasonable -- and I think that this is what most people are really objecting to -- you're insane.
Oh, by the way -- the result of 60 Minutes airing this story? Some of the lawyers interviewed filing a 6 BILLION dollar suit against CBS.
I think that the point is that with the current fiat currency system, the supply is potentially much greater. With gold, there is a more physical constraint on how much money can be printed. With out current currency system (which is largely electronic anyway), you are limited by the amount of potential paper in the world -- or the amount of disk storage in the world.
This is a great post, which I would mod up if I could. From what I can tell, the US has the world in a catch-22 situation:
To finance our massive trade deficit, we have to create a bunch of dollars. These dollars are headed overseas. Unfortunately for foreigners who receive these dollars, unless they're willing to buy goods in the US, their only choice is to put that money into US bonds/equities. In the bonds case, this is just a promise that we'll give them MORE dollars in the future. Which, of course, requires the creation of more dollars and drives down the value of the dollar.
As our trade deficit demonstrates, the US is the world's biggest consumer. And if the value of the dollar falls, we can't afford to buy foreign goods anymore. So many countries are dependant on us buying their goods that this can't be allowed to happen. Thus, you have countries like Japan furiously buying MORE dollars to try and prevent its slide against the yen.
My understanding of the financial markets is weak, but this seems like a sweetheart deal for us. We're essentially trading a depreciating currency for physical goods. I'd say we make out better in that exchange. In my mind, the real question is: at what point should I abandon the dollar for my personal savings and try to move it to something less scary?
My understanding of the currency market is limited, but the article seems to miss an important point. That being: what incentive do the castaways have to use a monetary system that's initially controlled by Mr. Howell?
Let's say you're in a village in ancient Mesopotamia. Someone has figured out why the barter system is inefficient, and has come up with the idea of money. Now the Mr. Howell of the village happens to have a lot of stones with a hole in the middle of them. He wants to use those as the initial currency. The problem is, he controls the whole market initially, and he hasn't lifted a finger! So, why would the castaways accept Mr. Howell's cash, or his gold -- since he controlled the entire supply in the beginning (assuming, of course that they are rational)? Two reasons:
1) difficult of counterfeiting.
2) because they know that his cash is eventually redeemable for stuff back in the "real world".
As the author states, the castaways had ruled out possibility 2. IMO, possibility 1 is not a strong enough reason to hand over control of the whole currency market to a pompous ass. A rational Gilligan's island would have stayed with barter for a while, then evolved a new currency.
Agree on blackjack. Theoretically, it is possible to gain an advantage over the house with perfect blackjack play and hi/low card counting. The counting can be thwarted by the "continuous shuffle" machines that many casinos have introduced though. Either way, you need to wager with fairly large sums of money for a fairly long amount of time before you can make serious money at blackjack. I look at it as more of a social experience, and one in which you're not getting taken by the house _that_ badly.
Poker is different. Since you're not playing against the house, a good poker player can consistenly rake in good money if he's playing among lesser players. I've seen this with a friend who would routinely turn $100 into $500 at a shabby Indian casino in Southern California, playing mostly against retirees who were on breaks between keno rounds. But there's also a lot of risk of being taken. When you sit down at a table, you need to be concerned about whether the other people at the table are colluding against you and splitting the winnings later. Since the house makes money either way, they aren't going to be that vigilant about detecting this. Frankly, it's tough to prove. Let's say some doofus raises you with a garbage hand. Is he: a) just a doofus who can't play or b) raising because he knows that his partner has an unbeatable flush and he's trying to milk you for more money? That's why I enjoy playing poker among friends, but I'm hesitant to dip my foot into the casino waters.
Not a bad defense, but it's still slightly leaky, IMO. Here's why:
1) We shouldn't take a lack of "intelligent" signals to necessarily mean that there were civilizations out there once that died off. It could just mean that none existed.
2) We shouldn't _need_ a lack of signals to conclude that life on Earth is fragile. Even if the rest of the universe is full of life, that's no guarantee that we'll survive forever.
3) If you're really looking for a cure for extinction, you should be in favor of investigating climate change, AIDS, anthrax, etc. These are things that have bad consequences for human beings _now_.
4) The galaxy is a big place. Finding intelligent life might require a lot of time and scientific advances. It might require intelligent life to find US. Either way, the human race needs to be around for those scenarios to occur. Therefore, our first order of business should be making sure that the human race survives. And that, for now, means focusing on terrestrial issues, not interstellar ones.
Re:Let's not forget synthetics...and politics...
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
My problem with the high price of gas has very little to do with the direct impact on my wallet. My problems include:
1) The indirect impact. High gas prices, it has been pointed out several times, affect the cost ofpretty much all goods because oil plays such a big part during the manufacturing & transportation of almost all products. What we have the beginnings of in the US is an inflationary environment, which is partially due to high gas prices. Businesses have been waiting for _years_ for this sort of environment. Who wants to bet that in addition to passing on the higher cost of gas to us, they'll up the prices a little more?
2) Here's the big problem: OPEC is an unbearably noxious group that is partially behind these massive increases in price. And OPEC is raking in money from this price spike. Whether or not they're pumping at full capacity (which they aren't), they still have quotas on production, with the express aim of keeping the price high. This sort of _publicly acknowledged_ collusion would never fly in the US. I'm not quite sure why several OPEC countries are WTO members, actually, as this must fly in the face of WTO rules too. You think Microsoft is an unreasonable monopoly? The oil cartel is worse, because high oil prices affect so many more people.
The impact of sharply increased oil prices is bigger than you think. In addition to hitting your wallet, it hits pretty much every sector of the economy, and creates a massive transfer of wealth to a fairly corrupt organization that has way too much power over the US (see: oil embargo of 1973).
This isn't meant to be a bash on Canada. I just want to make a point here, because it fits nicely with an article I just read:
here (yes, I know it's an msn site, sue me). The point of it is that everyone in Western Europe got along with the US during the Cold War, because, well, they had to. The US was pretty much all that was protecting them from the Soviet Union. Well, I'll lump Canada into that group too. From the 1950's to present, Canada fell under a protective umbrella provided by the US. This was an extremely expensive umbrella, provided essentially gratis.
In addition, Canada derives many economic benefits from being in a free-trade alliance with the biggest economy in the world. You may look at oil/gas exports to the US as a favor to us. Canada isn't _giving_ fuel to the US -- it's _selling_ it. That probably accounts for a good portion of the trade deficit that we currently experience with Canada.
Despite this, the sentiment that I see (and feel free to disagree with me here) is that many Canadians look at the US as some sort of necessary evil, or maybe even an enemy. It's hard to back this sort of thing up, but Googling "canada anti-american" will bring up enough links to at least prompt a debate. Here is a good starting point. My point here isn't to demand gratitude from Canadians. But given the benefits that Canada has derived from its proximity to the US, I'd at least expect warmer feelings from up north. You're right -- in the US, Canada is on the fringe of peoples' consciousness. People close to the border make benign jokes about Canada, and those farther away don't really think about it much. But maybe that's for the best. If we paid closer attention, we might lump them in with a chorus of nations (*cough* France *cough*) that seem to reflexively and hypocritically dislike us, and the benign neglect would become animosity.
Side note-Berkshire hathaway is planning to soak up as many shares are available.
Woah. This should not just be a "side note". Are you sure about this, and where did you find this out?
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps your blanket slur against Indian developers should be considered flamebait, and you a douchebag.
I'm sure there are other people in the world too that sticks to an idea or action, when its beneficial to them and when it's not. When that idea goes to their liking or when it does not go to their liking. It's call having a fucking principle.
Actually, it's sometimes called being stupid. Here's an example of someone who exemplifies your oh-so-sophisticated worldview: George Bush. Sticking to principles that are damaging you is something that smart people don't do...but feel free to stay up on your high horse and let me know how it works out for you. Maybe try buying some stocks on principle and sticking with them even if they turn out to be corrupt, mismanaged companies.
I'll deem you a gutless imperialist.
Right. And I think it's gutless to sit back and do nothing while things are going to hell around you. By the way, if anything in my original post really caused you think think I was imperialist, you need to go out and try reading about what an imperialist is.
and if you cant get your head out of your ass, nobody in the world is asking the us for a higher standards. they're asking the us to follow it's own often preached standard. im sure you have heard of google, try using it to read on the renmibi issue, bechtel,subsidies, steel tariffs, canada lumber agreements.
I'll say it again: every country in the world has some sort of tariffs or subsidies. Where are you from? How much do you want to bet that your country has some that I could find on Google within 30 seconds? If I do find one,do I get to call you a gutless imperialist? By the way, on the yuan issue -- is it a free-floating currency yet? Or is it still kept artificially low to stimulate exports (which is ironically killing industries in other countries that need help -- Mexico, for example). To go back to the main point of the article: expecting American workers to not try and fight a system that's causing them to lose their jobs is stupid. You can make hypocritical appeals(which, in your case sound suspiciously like a childish desire for economic revenge) to principles that NO ONE actually adheres to fully all you want.
Yeah, where are the troll mods for this prick?
globalization benificial to us: good
globalization detrimental to us: bad
That's what countries are supposed to do. We pursue globalization if it's in our long-term interests. If we decide it's not, why should we keep pursuing it? Because people like YOU think we owe it to them? Wherever you live, feel free to make whatever economic decisions that maximize your self interest. Every country in the world does that, but only the U.S. is held to this higher standard and expected to shoot itself in the foot. That's Adam Smith at work. Talk about something going "both fucking way". You want to reap the benefits of a capitalist system while expecting one party to act against its own economic self-interest. Genius!
You, sir, should take yourself off Slashdot and over to the National Review board, or the nearest mental facility.
If? Look, maybe I'm just dumber than the average engineer, but without projects, I don't think I would have learned a damn thing in my Computer Science courses. It's important to discuss the theories of CS, but you won't survive in the real world without some practical experience.
The projects also help reinforce what you've learned in class. Talking about object inheritance models is all well and good, but the benefit really hits home when you find yourself copy/pasting code all over the place. Talking about compiler theory is all well and good, but it's not a whole lot of help when gcc/javac has spit out some errors at you,and you've never seen them before.
In short, someone who hasn't written much code at the college level will have a very rude awakening once he's out of school. Those who have cheated their way through the projects should not make it past the technical interview at a decent company, and even if they're hired by a second-rate one will be exposed within a week.
Is Google paying people to submit these "stories" about any article/blog/message board post with the word Google in it?
In any case, if I was to pretend that this was a serious article, Google had better watch its step. Let's not forget that Google is a one-trick pony. While it makes fantastic amount of money off that trick, serving up contextual ads in a browser is not the same as serving them up on TV. To begin with, the context is different. The most important factor that Google uses to show you adds is what you typed into their search box -- or the words on the page you're viewing in the Adsense case. When serving up adds on a TV show, it doesn't have as much to go off. It has the genre of the show, but so does the TV station choosing to serve up the ads, which is already doing targeting based on it. It has the episode description, which is small and often of limited value ex: (Magnum PI: "Mac returns and involves Rick in a scheme concering a luxury boat and its complement of four geishas"). Google also has access to "your interests", as the writer says. Not only is that much harder to determine, it's been done before. See: Doubleclick and Abacus. Things didn't work out so well for them.
Also, there's a reason that people find using Google adwords valuable right now: it's a completely measurable spend of your ad dollars. You'll know exactly how much traffic (minus the growing click fraud, I guess) was driven to your site. There's no interactive TV yet (at least not in the U.S.), and Google can't provide that anymore. At that point, they're really not that different from a typical advertising company.
Google could do a good job with TV ads, some day. The barriers to entry are much higher than slapping some adwords on every text page on the Web, though.
Not that I'm in favor of this, but I think people here are missing the point of the inclusion of GPS. If it were simply a mileage issue, we could do an annual checkup, calculate the mileage delta and tax appropriately. Using GPS helps avoid problems like the one you're describing. I have a GPS nav system in my car, and it's able to tell me what road I'm currently driving on. It's not a stretch for it to keep track of that info ONLY IF I'm driving on a public road. Voila -- you're only taxed for your use of public infrastructure. Again, I'm trying to come out in favor of this, just point out the obvious.
Kudos for an excellent point. Let me know when that number passes the 1 million/year point. Oh, and then let me know when the number who are completely impoverished and don't speak English or French crosses 1 million/year. Thanks.
Think you're missing the point here. It's not that someone who is fluent in two languages can't score well on tests. On the contrary, the type of people who care enough to master a second language probably score better.
The kids you describe speak English. They are then given standardized tests in English, a language they are fluent in. Of course they'll do fine. There are, however, many, many kids who don't speak English and are then being taught math in English, and tested on math in English. I agree that parents are important, but I think we're talking about 2 different issues here.
Note to other posters: Cry me a river about the impact of those damn illegal Mexican immigrants. They represent less than three percent of the total population; even if they all scored zero on the testing, dropping them from the scores wouldn't nudge the U.S. up more than a couple places in the rankings. I note that Mexico's students on average scored about 80% as well as their U.S. counterparts, too.
Note to this poster: don't be so dismissive. First of all, one important point to make here is that the children of illegal immigrants are legal citizens of the U.S. For the most part, illegal immigrants from Mexico/Central America/South America do not speak fluent English. So, while illegal immigrants might only make up 3% of the population, there could be a much larger percentage than that English-impaired. There is also a phenomenon that is beginning to be documented that many second or even third generation Hispanic immigrants are still speaking Spanish at home. There are many parts of the country, in fact, where you do not need English to function. I would know, having grown up in Southern California, and gone to a high school that was 35-45% Hispanic.
What's my point? Just that there's a large portion of the public that is English-impaired. When someone is English-impaired, an inordinate amount of time needs to be spent in school attempting to get that person assimiliated into the language. This comes at the expense of teaching them other subjects. Additionally, someone who doesn't have a good grasp of English will not understand what he's being taught in math class. Furthermore, there's a money issue. Money being spent on teaching high school students 6th grade English WILL results in cuts elsewhere. Guess what? That sword will sometimes fall on math education? The issue is not "damn illegal Mexican immigrants" as you so eloquently put it, but language.
If you're Canadian, get off your high horse about the claim of illegal immigration affecting national test scores. You admit immigrants _legally_, and from what I understand screen them pretty well to make sure that they're educated. You don't have a massive border with a poor country that sends hundreds of thousands of people over every year. And while Canada might have two languages, I'll bet that students aren't being given tests in a language they don't understand well.
In summary, I agree that a problem exists with American math/science education. This problem has many factors. But to say that one of the larger problems isn't due to immigration of non-English speakers is ignorant.
Parent poster is right, people. Some (most?) of you probably live in areas where "immigrants" means H-1 programmers, Chinese doctors, etc. And the children of educated, English-speaking immigrants, I suspect, DO improve the average test scores in the U.S. However...
I grew up in Southern California. I attended elementary, middle and high schools with a student body that was 35%-45% Latino. The majority of these kids did not speak English at home. Please note that I am _NOT_ trying to cast any aspersions on Latino immigrants or their children. However, the crux of the problem was that a lot of these kids did NOT speak functional English. A lot of time and effort had to be invested in these students just to get them to a 6th grade level of English. They took classes specifically to learn how to speak English (ESL -- English as a second language). Thus, in the advanced math and science classes there was an unfortunate lack of Latino students. And in the regular math and science classes, they tended to perform at a lower level than native English speakers. This is NOT surprising. If I were to go to school in Mexico and not speak Spanish, chances are I wouldn't have been in any advanced classes either. But...
These English-impaired students were taking the same state-mandated standardized tests as I was, IN ENGLISH. When it came time to measure the performance of our school based on these tests, we were at a serious disadvantage.
I don't want this to devolve into a big tract on the value of mass standardized testing, but take those results with a grain of salt. While I'm not saying that the US would be #1 in that ranking if you discounted those who weren't native speakers of English, I suspect it would be several pegs higher than it is.
Won't supply a link here, but Simon Singh's excellent "The Code Book" provides a large level of detail about the Polish contributions to breaking Enigma.
Ahh, what the hell, I _will_ supply a link here. Or, just google "Rejewski Enigma".
Start a war and I'll be first in line to stop you with all necessary force.
Why? At some point, shouldn't reasonable people realize that they share different value systems and agree to split up -- amicably? If it weren't for the fact that the blue states essentially subsidize the red ones -- best link I could find was here -- I'm sure they'd be happy to see us go.
But as I've said before: I'm sure that with strong morals, a lot of prayer and -- this is the most important part -- no gay marriage, the red states could make up for the lost income in no time.
You jest but...
From what I can tell, for the most part the "red states" care more about religious values than anything else. Evangelical Christians were one of the strongest voting blocs in Bush's base, according to what I saw on CNN last night. Gay marriage is more important to these people than the US's financial future, safety, etc.
The "blue states", IMO, have different agendas. I'm in California, and I'm not that overjoyed by the ideas of the Christian right running my life. Similarly, the voting population of the red states probably doesn't like the thought of all us heathens out here.
At some point, why not just call it an amicable split? Of course, the blues most likely contribute a higher percentage of US GDP than the reds. (Best link I could find was here.) But I'm sure that with strong morals and a lot of prayer, the red population could make up for that in no time.
This guy bought a product, and it failed after an absolutely unreasonable timeframe.
Agreed.
And you're saying he should have _purchased_ (ie. PAID MORE MONEY!) to protect against such an occurance.
Not necessarily.
We are a litigious society because we have no useful consumer protection - here, consumer protection is usually insane over-protection, and a complete lack everywhere else...
Nice to see some good research backing up these sweeping claims. I'd like to see another country that has more effective consumer protection laws than the U.S. But I digress...
The core of this issue is how this case should be resolved. Unfortunately for us, things break. It's a fact of life. Oftentimes, this is due to a manufacturing error. That doesn't mean that every such error should be resolved in court. For most of these types of cases -- and by most, I mean cases in which the product failure doesn't cause other property/health damage -- the free market should resolve the problem. These issues are too hard to decide in court. It's very difficult to say what constitutes a "reasonable" timeframe for failure. For example, what's a reasonable timeframe for a towel? Does the price you paid for the towel matter? What if it's a super-cheap one made in China? What if 30 people are sharing the same one? Imagine having to answer these types of questions for every product on the market.
The free market is what typically decides these things. The free market is why American cars lost their popularity in the 70's and 80's. People realized they were crap, and went with a better-made option. Using the legal system to abitrate these types of issues is not only unfair, but it places a lot of strain on a system that already is under pressure. While I agree that the customer in the story has a right to be angry, he should let his future purchasing dollars rather than the courts express that anger.
People don't like frivolous lawsuits
That statement is misleading. If someone believes a lawsuit is frivolous, by definition they don't agree that it's valid (and thus, they usually don't like it). If the spirit of your statement is "People on juries don't like lawsuits that the majority of people in America consider to be frivolous", or "People on juries don't like to give out monetary awards that most of America considers excessive", you're dead wrong. The jury selection process is most likely to blame. By the time you actually get to the pool of people who aren't able/willing to get out of jury duty, you're generally left with a group that is a) stupid b) unemployed and thus c) looking to stick it to "the man" (in corporate tort cases like this).
Check out this: http://orig.clarionledger.com/news/0212/10/m02.htm l link (or google for "60 Minutes" and "jackpot justice"). The story in a nutshell: There's a county in Mississippi which is known for giving out obscenely large awards in suits against pharmaceutical companies. They are _so_ well known for this that lawyers in such suits make every attempt to get the case tried in this county. They do so by having a client buy a "controversial" drug in a drugstore in the county, suing the drugstore, and naming the manufacturer as a co-defendant. The drugstore typically drops off the case by the end, but only after having to spend time/money defending itself in the early stages of the case.
If you think that the McDonalds lawsuit itself was reasonable, that's fine. You and I just draw the line differently about what "personal responsibility" constitutes. But if you think that the damages awarded (almost $3 million) were reasonable -- and I think that this is what most people are really objecting to -- you're insane.
Oh, by the way -- the result of 60 Minutes airing this story? Some of the lawyers interviewed filing a 6 BILLION dollar suit against CBS.
I think that the point is that with the current fiat currency system, the supply is potentially much greater. With gold, there is a more physical constraint on how much money can be printed. With out current currency system (which is largely electronic anyway), you are limited by the amount of potential paper in the world -- or the amount of disk storage in the world.
This is a great post, which I would mod up if I could. From what I can tell, the US has the world in a catch-22 situation:
To finance our massive trade deficit, we have to create a bunch of dollars. These dollars are headed overseas. Unfortunately for foreigners who receive these dollars, unless they're willing to buy goods in the US, their only choice is to put that money into US bonds/equities. In the bonds case, this is just a promise that we'll give them MORE dollars in the future. Which, of course, requires the creation of more dollars and drives down the value of the dollar.
As our trade deficit demonstrates, the US is the world's biggest consumer. And if the value of the dollar falls, we can't afford to buy foreign goods anymore. So many countries are dependant on us buying their goods that this can't be allowed to happen. Thus, you have countries like Japan furiously buying MORE dollars to try and prevent its slide against the yen.
My understanding of the financial markets is weak, but this seems like a sweetheart deal for us. We're essentially trading a depreciating currency for physical goods. I'd say we make out better in that exchange. In my mind, the real question is: at what point should I abandon the dollar for my personal savings and try to move it to something less scary?
My understanding of the currency market is limited, but the article seems to miss an important point. That being: what incentive do the castaways have to use a monetary system that's initially controlled by Mr. Howell?
Let's say you're in a village in ancient Mesopotamia. Someone has figured out why the barter system is inefficient, and has come up with the idea of money. Now the Mr. Howell of the village happens to have a lot of stones with a hole in the middle of them. He wants to use those as the initial currency. The problem is, he controls the whole market initially, and he hasn't lifted a finger! So, why would the castaways accept Mr. Howell's cash, or his gold -- since he controlled the entire supply in the beginning (assuming, of course that they are rational)? Two reasons:
1) difficult of counterfeiting.
2) because they know that his cash is eventually redeemable for stuff back in the "real world".
As the author states, the castaways had ruled out possibility 2. IMO, possibility 1 is not a strong enough reason to hand over control of the whole currency market to a pompous ass. A rational Gilligan's island would have stayed with barter for a while, then evolved a new currency.
Poker is different. Since you're not playing against the house, a good poker player can consistenly rake in good money if he's playing among lesser players. I've seen this with a friend who would routinely turn $100 into $500 at a shabby Indian casino in Southern California, playing mostly against retirees who were on breaks between keno rounds. But there's also a lot of risk of being taken. When you sit down at a table, you need to be concerned about whether the other people at the table are colluding against you and splitting the winnings later. Since the house makes money either way, they aren't going to be that vigilant about detecting this. Frankly, it's tough to prove. Let's say some doofus raises you with a garbage hand. Is he: a) just a doofus who can't play or b) raising because he knows that his partner has an unbeatable flush and he's trying to milk you for more money? That's why I enjoy playing poker among friends, but I'm hesitant to dip my foot into the casino waters.
1) We shouldn't take a lack of "intelligent" signals to necessarily mean that there were civilizations out there once that died off. It could just mean that none existed.
2) We shouldn't _need_ a lack of signals to conclude that life on Earth is fragile. Even if the rest of the universe is full of life, that's no guarantee that we'll survive forever.
3) If you're really looking for a cure for extinction, you should be in favor of investigating climate change, AIDS, anthrax, etc. These are things that have bad consequences for human beings _now_.
4) The galaxy is a big place. Finding intelligent life might require a lot of time and scientific advances. It might require intelligent life to find US. Either way, the human race needs to be around for those scenarios to occur. Therefore, our first order of business should be making sure that the human race survives. And that, for now, means focusing on terrestrial issues, not interstellar ones.
1) The indirect impact. High gas prices, it has been pointed out several times, affect the cost ofpretty much all goods because oil plays such a big part during the manufacturing & transportation of almost all products. What we have the beginnings of in the US is an inflationary environment, which is partially due to high gas prices. Businesses have been waiting for _years_ for this sort of environment. Who wants to bet that in addition to passing on the higher cost of gas to us, they'll up the prices a little more?
2) Here's the big problem: OPEC is an unbearably noxious group that is partially behind these massive increases in price. And OPEC is raking in money from this price spike. Whether or not they're pumping at full capacity (which they aren't), they still have quotas on production, with the express aim of keeping the price high. This sort of _publicly acknowledged_ collusion would never fly in the US. I'm not quite sure why several OPEC countries are WTO members, actually, as this must fly in the face of WTO rules too. You think Microsoft is an unreasonable monopoly? The oil cartel is worse, because high oil prices affect so many more people.
The impact of sharply increased oil prices is bigger than you think. In addition to hitting your wallet, it hits pretty much every sector of the economy, and creates a massive transfer of wealth to a fairly corrupt organization that has way too much power over the US (see: oil embargo of 1973).
In addition, Canada derives many economic benefits from being in a free-trade alliance with the biggest economy in the world. You may look at oil/gas exports to the US as a favor to us. Canada isn't _giving_ fuel to the US -- it's _selling_ it. That probably accounts for a good portion of the trade deficit that we currently experience with Canada.
Despite this, the sentiment that I see (and feel free to disagree with me here) is that many Canadians look at the US as some sort of necessary evil, or maybe even an enemy. It's hard to back this sort of thing up, but Googling "canada anti-american" will bring up enough links to at least prompt a debate. Here is a good starting point. My point here isn't to demand gratitude from Canadians. But given the benefits that Canada has derived from its proximity to the US, I'd at least expect warmer feelings from up north. You're right -- in the US, Canada is on the fringe of peoples' consciousness. People close to the border make benign jokes about Canada, and those farther away don't really think about it much. But maybe that's for the best. If we paid closer attention, we might lump them in with a chorus of nations (*cough* France *cough*) that seem to reflexively and hypocritically dislike us, and the benign neglect would become animosity.
Side note-Berkshire hathaway is planning to soak up as many shares are available. Woah. This should not just be a "side note". Are you sure about this, and where did you find this out?