really? most prisoners do not work. In fact, in most US prisons it is a benefit earned for good behavior (or properly paid bribes). In fact, I'm all for turning prisons into work camps. There is no reason if you are paying a debt to society you should get off without working. You possibly have been watching too many old movies about how prisons USED to be run.
you are under the assumption that if these stupid people were paid welfare, they wouldn't engage in stupid, illegal behavior. It should be called the "Aladdin complex". Most of these people were on oodles of social welfare as children and as adults.
take the UK for example,or especially Scotland. 375k crimes in a year. they have a total of 7500 people in prison. The UK overall has a higher crime rate than the US. It's a question of if you incarcerate these people and hope to reduce crime or just live with the crime and not incarcerate people. but an extraordinarily generous welfare state does not seem to reduce crime rates at all (nor does a low incarceration rate).
what censorship? I mean seriously, what information has the US government kept from you that is normally publically available? or are you now including classified information as censorship?
so by your theory, if anyone tells you to spend time learning something, you will dedicate the time to learn it simply because they told you to? How about I tell you it would be good for you to learn about the history and theories regarding abiogenic oil? How about go off and learn old Sanskrit because I'm telling you to?
your entire view point assumes time is infinite. Everyone will regret something. Who knows, looking back I may regret spending every free hour I had in college practicing martial arts. Heck, I regret not taking programming but then I wouldn't have done as much martial arts or rock climbing or have developed as much of a love of the outdoors as I did.
I should say I used to regret these things. Then I realized all the people with "other viewpoints" were probably just projecting on me regrets of things they wished they learned, but lacking value towards what they did learn instead. I've been told I should take more time to perfect my Japanese, but everyone is working with limited information. And at the end of the day, we all have to make a choice.
Anyways, if the reason I should listen to my elders is to be a well trained, mindless lemming working at a company, I'd much prefer my elders kept that information to themselves. I'll stick to the lessons I was raised with which basically contradict that complete lifestyle. Granted, I've been told I walk a fine line sometimes telling people with lots more experience I think they are completely wrong. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't, but I sure prefer that to the life you think we all are stuck leading. That is the worst reason of all to "do as you are told".
haha, that's funny. and I can tell you don't have a real job or do real work because you do have time to worry about capitalization and grammar? no. both points of view are equally ridiculous. The funniest part is how wrong you are. I never went to business school, never took a business class.... just take every assumption you have about me and throw a "never happened" in front and you'll have a shot at being right next time. Now how you can smell axe cologne on me, I have no idea. I've spent my life very allergic to colognes so that also falls under the "never" column as well.
That you are so self absorbed to believe that your book is meaningful to all people though, says you lack the breadth of vision to realize your opinion is small and relatively short sighted. That something is meaningful to you does not imply it is either relevant or meaningful to anyone else. But that you are arrogant enough to claim such is interesting.
I had quite a few literature teachers with that view point throughout my years in school. And finally, my senior year in high school, I had a teacher that got "it". Just because she was touched by Joyce's work or The Old Man and the Sea doesn't mean anyone else would consider those novels meaningful or poignant. So she gave us a lot more freedom by having us read several books and choosing. For me, Heart of Darkness was the book that really stood out. If she had your viewpoint that she had found the ONE book that is meaningful to all people and forced it down my throat, I'd have probably wanted to gag myself in that class as well. Instead, she was the first teacher to actually leave me feeling like literature wasn't a complete waste of time.
You should try the humility pill today as well. It would serve you just as well when someone tells you Pale Fire was a waste of their time. It really could be.
well, you counter your second point with yoru third paragraph. You have no idea what your student wishes to do with his life or what his goals and ambitions are. Contrary to most teacher's beliefs, your class could very well be a mere way point on his way to something completely unrelated. As such, at best, reading the novel is a waste of time at worst, does deprive him of the skills required in his future job which may mainly be plagiarism.
a great example, I work in finance. I can not possibly analyze from first principles all the data in the world. Instead, a more useful skill than reading raw data sets is to be able to quickly read someone elses analysis of a company, understand their point of view, and meld it into my own. In most forms of plagiarism (i.e. not blatantly copying but rather, taking and modifying slightly), I get more practice at what I'm doing than reading a novel.
and as you said, if your student was trying to become a plumber, reading the novel was actively detracting from what he wanted to be doing. In that case, most likely, he was only in your class because the school required him to be. And really, who are you to say what will benefit or detract from him development?
I think you don't know the difference between a fact and an opinion, or are ignoring it. both of the things you stated are opinions.
He is in Jail because he is accused of (in simple speak) being a traitor. Whether you think he was morally and ethically correct is a complete personal value judgment. maybe people feel what he did was morally and ethically wrong.
But without a doubt, what he is accused of doing violated the laws of this country. that is the 1 fact we can be absolutely certain of.
where did you get that idea? apple just basically got around to putting i3, i5, and i7 on all of it's line(yeah, I know it was there for the 17 inch but 13 inch where I look still had 2 year old tech on it) while every other manufacturer has had it for months on their entire line (at least dell, hp, sony, toshiba, acer which were the ones I checked).
apple is regularly behind on rolling out new hardware upgrades because they get it, as you said, all these computers are "good enough" and most buyers don't know much about hardware or requirements to run basic computing. I run a 5 year old computer to drive everything but games. I find I don't need to upgrade at all since I don't have the time to play games.
such a horrible world you envision where people who want to work and don't want to associate with you are forced to at the threat of harm to their person or property. is any sense of individualism or free choice lost on you?
you've got that massively backwards. The Keynesian view says wages are sticky in the DOWNWARD movement of prices... people don't take pay cuts even if prices have radically dropped.
anyways, I think you are in Europe possibly? In the US, every central banker and the government are basically on a mission to generate inflation in any way, shape, or form possible. We would struggle to have a more inflationary set of policies than we do right now (in theory, sure, anything is possible, but in practice, it's not so easy). Your policy prescription sounds like the EU, except there are reasons why they are the way they are.
the natural rate of unemployment is not a fixed number nor can it be calculated by looking at a historical period with very different economic, social, and legal institutions in place. It is very much a function of all these things. In fact, the increase in the natural rate in many societies can be traced to an overabundance of a social safety net. These are all well studied ideas.
it has worked quite well up to today throughout all of history. even our current brutally poor people who seem to work for nothing have better education, higher life expectancy, and a higher standard of living that the middle class did 100 years ago. don't you get tired of ignoring the facts?
It's not to say we are in a utopia, but our current model has produced continual gains for entire populations, in sharp contrast to the communist model which has generally produced horrific conditions for the majority of the population and minimal standard of living improvements. Even China, the last major communist country, and India, which was very socialist for a long time, started producing gains for their entire society only after adopting basically capitalist principles and ignoring the old communist doctrine.
curious, do you feel that yields on investments of savings should be taxed as income? For example, of the americans making over 10mm, only about 20% of their income comes from wages. Many of these people spent years building a business and then realize large amounts of income as they divest it. Should that also be taxed at 90%? Or can a person with a 20mm dollar business divest it 10%/ year to get under your safe level?
taxes are complicated when you try to get creative and socially engineer results.
anyways, you shoudl read up on tax history. the average income was never 50x, it was only 50x when you looked at what the IRS requested you report. Back in the 60s and 70s, every major corporation paid for a Rolls and a driver on the company account for their top management, provide vacation travel expenses, and more because this wasn't taxed. As the tax authorities went after this, it became tax efficient to just be paid more cash and do with it what you pleased. So while I'm not arguing against a progressive tax system, just that your view of 50x being some round number is based on very biased information.
no, people work based on their cultural values. my parents live and work as professionals in this country and my dad scoffs at people who aren't willing to work at leat 60 hours a week. his first two years he worked between 120-130 hours a week and never dropped below 80 until he hit 53 years old. We have tons of people I grew up with, all having moved up to being small business owners and educated management who are willing to work and have trouble understanding why it's so hard to work more than an 8 hour day and this is in the US. I was raised to look at someone who clocks out each day after a certain bell rings regardless of the work on the table as lazy and uncommitted.
You do realize SUV and truck production made the US companies the most profitable car companies around? The production and sale of SUVs kept the big three from declaring bankruptcy a decade earlier. I don't know what kool-aid you started drinking, but the best selling vehicle in the US, the biggest auto market in the world, was a ford truck. Even in 2008, with oil at 150$/barrel, the ford trucks and silverados were the best selling vehicles in this country. So get it right, the US manufacturers produce the vehicles americans most want to buy. They do not produce the most popular sedans though, which is where they have ceded ground to the Japanese every year for the last 25 years. That is an issue with competitiveness in a certain segment that is probably going to be dominant in a few years but had very little to do with the money problems of the big three through the early part of the last decade when they were selling vehicles at an amazing rate.
Japanese workers get paid very similarly to their US counterparts and unless detroit has significantly cut their medical care, it should be similar as well. What benefits are you referring to? Both sets of workers are paid about 25$/hour on average across the work force with about 80% of medical bills covered after you pay into the insurance schemes. But my data may be old and considering the strength of the Yen now vs when I last did this research (120 vs 80) it could have changed significantly. In actuality, laws in Japan are far LESS protective of union workers meaning they have to be more realistic with demands in the down times and in times of change.
maybe incompentent. but there have been at least 2 modest accidents under the watchful eye of the locked out employees, so I'm not sure we can immediately assume they are less incompetent.
well at least we can be sure the union employees responsible for the first two safety issues are safely separated from the plant..... or not?
I have no clue whose "fault" these accidents were, or if they were anyone's fault beyond our desire to point fingers. But to the extent they were the fault of someone on site, I generally hold accountable the employees doing the work until someone can show it was part of a larger scheme of irresponsibility (i.e. BP being completely foolish with safety).
many people outside of unions do work 12 hour days, 6 days a week. they just do it in other countries. preventing off shoring is equivalent to saying we want to make the ignorant in the labor force still employable so everyone will pay a tax (in higher prices) to fund their life style even though they can't contribute nearly as much anymore. I'm not against what unions have done, but why does any of it need to be codified into law? Well educated and skilled workers don't have the problems you imagine because they can demand better conditions or leave. turn of hte century unions basically protected the massive, uneducated work force from exploitation. If they are still needed, it just means we have too many stupid people and frankly, I'm sick of paying so much for stupid people after all these decades.
really, when Japanese automakers were massively modernizing, automating, and training employees for multiple jobs (as of 30 years ago) the UAW was fighting all of these things. the jobs bank is the last vestige of this to go, but they fought every step of modernization and by doing so, were complicit in killing the car industry. It was the management push to expand heavily into SUVs and large trucks that prevented the failure from hitting earlier than it did. But once gas prices rose and you required the ability to be agile as a company, the UAWs legacy actions killed them. Look at Japanese plants in the US, none are unionized and those workers by and large don't want the unions because they have seen how an american union can bring a successful business to its knees. The interesting thing is Japanese autoworkers are unionized, but the entire structure of their union would be unrecognizable in the US. It is very likely the willingness to both work when needed and be more dynamic and not institutionalize stupidity, laziness, and inflexibility that is why they didn't bring Toyota or Honda to its knees.
your problem can't be fixed by changing the rules around corporations. if the world is as dismal as you say it is (at least, from the US perspective) the real problem is an ignorant populace. you worry about false information, but if people weren't morons we wouldn't have that issue. and if people are morons, at least we have an educated elite making decisions rather than leaving to fools to go at it on their own. democracies only succeed with an educated and informed populace.
well, if nothing else, the historical record proves the view you credit to the civil rights leaders of the 60's and 70's is absolutely untrue. In fact, by massively extending civil rights to oppressed groups post the civil rights era, the record shows that these groups more completely integrated into society and have generally become much more supportive of the military and the government overall.
In reality, the extension of civil rights to disaffected groups reaffirms support for the status quo, not the other way around. It is being excluded from the benefits of the status quo that cause disaffected groups to rebel against it, rather than the other way around (i.e. you seem to be saying and correct me if I'm wrong, that the oppression of groups prevents them from uniting against a flawed and equally repressive international policy of the government).
that was a 4 billion dollar loan as part of the lend lease program. you do realize that those funds were because we basically paid for a massive build up of the British army and then after the war, when they owed us some 40 billion dollars, cut that amount down to 10% and turned it into a loan which gave them until the year 2000 to pay off at 2% interest. to put that in todays dollars, had they just let it compound, it is a meager 13 billion dollars in the year 2000, pretty cheap if you ask me.
And of course, I was referring to the marshall plan (13 billion dollars) and other 13 billion on aide given before that plan went effective in '48(?) which wasn't repaid.
weren't his contributions the most significant? early on, he basically single-handedly cracked enigma. while other may have figured it out, they didn't. I don't get the nobel prize for the discovery of of penicillin even though I "could" have done it later. Why would we honor those who didn't make the achievement? Are we going back to 3rd grade where everyone was a "winner"?
I thought turing worked directly for the war effort (HUT-8 in bletchley park) and was considered the single biggest reason that group broke so many german ciphers so early. I'm not saying the fact that gay engineers have contributed to the war effort means that don't ask, don't tell is purely a technological matter, but rather your point about a gay guy working with technology and teh military buying it doesn't follow from a comment about turing's massive contributions to the war effort.
or was yoru comment directed at the second paragraph? at which point, it is relevant to all the gay engineers that would like to enlist to contribute to the war effort, especially as technology is so important to the war effort now. but that effect isn't unique to tech, it probably coudl be said about several other "nerdy" specialties, so I think it satisfies the news for nerds.
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really? most prisoners do not work. In fact, in most US prisons it is a benefit earned for good behavior (or properly paid bribes). In fact, I'm all for turning prisons into work camps. There is no reason if you are paying a debt to society you should get off without working. You possibly have been watching too many old movies about how prisons USED to be run.
you are under the assumption that if these stupid people were paid welfare, they wouldn't engage in stupid, illegal behavior. It should be called the "Aladdin complex". Most of these people were on oodles of social welfare as children and as adults.
take the UK for example,or especially Scotland. 375k crimes in a year. they have a total of 7500 people in prison. The UK overall has a higher crime rate than the US. It's a question of if you incarcerate these people and hope to reduce crime or just live with the crime and not incarcerate people. but an extraordinarily generous welfare state does not seem to reduce crime rates at all (nor does a low incarceration rate).
what censorship? I mean seriously, what information has the US government kept from you that is normally publically available? or are you now including classified information as censorship?
so by your theory, if anyone tells you to spend time learning something, you will dedicate the time to learn it simply because they told you to? How about I tell you it would be good for you to learn about the history and theories regarding abiogenic oil? How about go off and learn old Sanskrit because I'm telling you to?
your entire view point assumes time is infinite. Everyone will regret something. Who knows, looking back I may regret spending every free hour I had in college practicing martial arts. Heck, I regret not taking programming but then I wouldn't have done as much martial arts or rock climbing or have developed as much of a love of the outdoors as I did.
I should say I used to regret these things. Then I realized all the people with "other viewpoints" were probably just projecting on me regrets of things they wished they learned, but lacking value towards what they did learn instead. I've been told I should take more time to perfect my Japanese, but everyone is working with limited information. And at the end of the day, we all have to make a choice.
Anyways, if the reason I should listen to my elders is to be a well trained, mindless lemming working at a company, I'd much prefer my elders kept that information to themselves. I'll stick to the lessons I was raised with which basically contradict that complete lifestyle. Granted, I've been told I walk a fine line sometimes telling people with lots more experience I think they are completely wrong. And sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't, but I sure prefer that to the life you think we all are stuck leading. That is the worst reason of all to "do as you are told".
haha, that's funny. and I can tell you don't have a real job or do real work because you do have time to worry about capitalization and grammar? no. both points of view are equally ridiculous. The funniest part is how wrong you are. I never went to business school, never took a business class.... just take every assumption you have about me and throw a "never happened" in front and you'll have a shot at being right next time. Now how you can smell axe cologne on me, I have no idea. I've spent my life very allergic to colognes so that also falls under the "never" column as well.
That you are so self absorbed to believe that your book is meaningful to all people though, says you lack the breadth of vision to realize your opinion is small and relatively short sighted. That something is meaningful to you does not imply it is either relevant or meaningful to anyone else. But that you are arrogant enough to claim such is interesting.
I had quite a few literature teachers with that view point throughout my years in school. And finally, my senior year in high school, I had a teacher that got "it". Just because she was touched by Joyce's work or The Old Man and the Sea doesn't mean anyone else would consider those novels meaningful or poignant. So she gave us a lot more freedom by having us read several books and choosing. For me, Heart of Darkness was the book that really stood out. If she had your viewpoint that she had found the ONE book that is meaningful to all people and forced it down my throat, I'd have probably wanted to gag myself in that class as well. Instead, she was the first teacher to actually leave me feeling like literature wasn't a complete waste of time.
You should try the humility pill today as well. It would serve you just as well when someone tells you Pale Fire was a waste of their time. It really could be.
well, you counter your second point with yoru third paragraph. You have no idea what your student wishes to do with his life or what his goals and ambitions are. Contrary to most teacher's beliefs, your class could very well be a mere way point on his way to something completely unrelated. As such, at best, reading the novel is a waste of time at worst, does deprive him of the skills required in his future job which may mainly be plagiarism.
a great example, I work in finance. I can not possibly analyze from first principles all the data in the world. Instead, a more useful skill than reading raw data sets is to be able to quickly read someone elses analysis of a company, understand their point of view, and meld it into my own. In most forms of plagiarism (i.e. not blatantly copying but rather, taking and modifying slightly), I get more practice at what I'm doing than reading a novel.
and as you said, if your student was trying to become a plumber, reading the novel was actively detracting from what he wanted to be doing. In that case, most likely, he was only in your class because the school required him to be. And really, who are you to say what will benefit or detract from him development?
I think you don't know the difference between a fact and an opinion, or are ignoring it. both of the things you stated are opinions.
He is in Jail because he is accused of (in simple speak) being a traitor. Whether you think he was morally and ethically correct is a complete personal value judgment. maybe people feel what he did was morally and ethically wrong.
But without a doubt, what he is accused of doing violated the laws of this country. that is the 1 fact we can be absolutely certain of.
where did you get that idea? apple just basically got around to putting i3, i5, and i7 on all of it's line(yeah, I know it was there for the 17 inch but 13 inch where I look still had 2 year old tech on it) while every other manufacturer has had it for months on their entire line (at least dell, hp, sony, toshiba, acer which were the ones I checked).
apple is regularly behind on rolling out new hardware upgrades because they get it, as you said, all these computers are "good enough" and most buyers don't know much about hardware or requirements to run basic computing. I run a 5 year old computer to drive everything but games. I find I don't need to upgrade at all since I don't have the time to play games.
wasn't the difference over 1 second? so it's like clicking and being done and clicking, and tapping your foot a few times and then getting the page.
that isn't something any composer should consider their high hurdle for artistic success.
such a horrible world you envision where people who want to work and don't want to associate with you are forced to at the threat of harm to their person or property. is any sense of individualism or free choice lost on you?
you've got that massively backwards. The Keynesian view says wages are sticky in the DOWNWARD movement of prices... people don't take pay cuts even if prices have radically dropped.
anyways, I think you are in Europe possibly? In the US, every central banker and the government are basically on a mission to generate inflation in any way, shape, or form possible. We would struggle to have a more inflationary set of policies than we do right now (in theory, sure, anything is possible, but in practice, it's not so easy). Your policy prescription sounds like the EU, except there are reasons why they are the way they are.
the natural rate of unemployment is not a fixed number nor can it be calculated by looking at a historical period with very different economic, social, and legal institutions in place. It is very much a function of all these things. In fact, the increase in the natural rate in many societies can be traced to an overabundance of a social safety net. These are all well studied ideas.
it has worked quite well up to today throughout all of history. even our current brutally poor people who seem to work for nothing have better education, higher life expectancy, and a higher standard of living that the middle class did 100 years ago. don't you get tired of ignoring the facts?
It's not to say we are in a utopia, but our current model has produced continual gains for entire populations, in sharp contrast to the communist model which has generally produced horrific conditions for the majority of the population and minimal standard of living improvements. Even China, the last major communist country, and India, which was very socialist for a long time, started producing gains for their entire society only after adopting basically capitalist principles and ignoring the old communist doctrine.
curious, do you feel that yields on investments of savings should be taxed as income? For example, of the americans making over 10mm, only about 20% of their income comes from wages. Many of these people spent years building a business and then realize large amounts of income as they divest it. Should that also be taxed at 90%? Or can a person with a 20mm dollar business divest it 10%/ year to get under your safe level?
taxes are complicated when you try to get creative and socially engineer results.
anyways, you shoudl read up on tax history. the average income was never 50x, it was only 50x when you looked at what the IRS requested you report. Back in the 60s and 70s, every major corporation paid for a Rolls and a driver on the company account for their top management, provide vacation travel expenses, and more because this wasn't taxed. As the tax authorities went after this, it became tax efficient to just be paid more cash and do with it what you pleased. So while I'm not arguing against a progressive tax system, just that your view of 50x being some round number is based on very biased information.
where did you get that idea? as per apple, he is still intimately involved in all major strategic decisions at the company.
no, people work based on their cultural values. my parents live and work as professionals in this country and my dad scoffs at people who aren't willing to work at leat 60 hours a week. his first two years he worked between 120-130 hours a week and never dropped below 80 until he hit 53 years old. We have tons of people I grew up with, all having moved up to being small business owners and educated management who are willing to work and have trouble understanding why it's so hard to work more than an 8 hour day and this is in the US. I was raised to look at someone who clocks out each day after a certain bell rings regardless of the work on the table as lazy and uncommitted.
You do realize SUV and truck production made the US companies the most profitable car companies around? The production and sale of SUVs kept the big three from declaring bankruptcy a decade earlier. I don't know what kool-aid you started drinking, but the best selling vehicle in the US, the biggest auto market in the world, was a ford truck. Even in 2008, with oil at 150$/barrel, the ford trucks and silverados were the best selling vehicles in this country. So get it right, the US manufacturers produce the vehicles americans most want to buy. They do not produce the most popular sedans though, which is where they have ceded ground to the Japanese every year for the last 25 years. That is an issue with competitiveness in a certain segment that is probably going to be dominant in a few years but had very little to do with the money problems of the big three through the early part of the last decade when they were selling vehicles at an amazing rate.
Japanese workers get paid very similarly to their US counterparts and unless detroit has significantly cut their medical care, it should be similar as well. What benefits are you referring to? Both sets of workers are paid about 25$/hour on average across the work force with about 80% of medical bills covered after you pay into the insurance schemes. But my data may be old and considering the strength of the Yen now vs when I last did this research (120 vs 80) it could have changed significantly. In actuality, laws in Japan are far LESS protective of union workers meaning they have to be more realistic with demands in the down times and in times of change.
maybe incompentent. but there have been at least 2 modest accidents under the watchful eye of the locked out employees, so I'm not sure we can immediately assume they are less incompetent.
well at least we can be sure the union employees responsible for the first two safety issues are safely separated from the plant..... or not?
I have no clue whose "fault" these accidents were, or if they were anyone's fault beyond our desire to point fingers. But to the extent they were the fault of someone on site, I generally hold accountable the employees doing the work until someone can show it was part of a larger scheme of irresponsibility (i.e. BP being completely foolish with safety).
many people outside of unions do work 12 hour days, 6 days a week. they just do it in other countries. preventing off shoring is equivalent to saying we want to make the ignorant in the labor force still employable so everyone will pay a tax (in higher prices) to fund their life style even though they can't contribute nearly as much anymore. I'm not against what unions have done, but why does any of it need to be codified into law? Well educated and skilled workers don't have the problems you imagine because they can demand better conditions or leave. turn of hte century unions basically protected the massive, uneducated work force from exploitation. If they are still needed, it just means we have too many stupid people and frankly, I'm sick of paying so much for stupid people after all these decades.
really, when Japanese automakers were massively modernizing, automating, and training employees for multiple jobs (as of 30 years ago) the UAW was fighting all of these things. the jobs bank is the last vestige of this to go, but they fought every step of modernization and by doing so, were complicit in killing the car industry. It was the management push to expand heavily into SUVs and large trucks that prevented the failure from hitting earlier than it did. But once gas prices rose and you required the ability to be agile as a company, the UAWs legacy actions killed them. Look at Japanese plants in the US, none are unionized and those workers by and large don't want the unions because they have seen how an american union can bring a successful business to its knees. The interesting thing is Japanese autoworkers are unionized, but the entire structure of their union would be unrecognizable in the US. It is very likely the willingness to both work when needed and be more dynamic and not institutionalize stupidity, laziness, and inflexibility that is why they didn't bring Toyota or Honda to its knees.
your problem can't be fixed by changing the rules around corporations. if the world is as dismal as you say it is (at least, from the US perspective) the real problem is an ignorant populace. you worry about false information, but if people weren't morons we wouldn't have that issue. and if people are morons, at least we have an educated elite making decisions rather than leaving to fools to go at it on their own. democracies only succeed with an educated and informed populace.
well, if nothing else, the historical record proves the view you credit to the civil rights leaders of the 60's and 70's is absolutely untrue. In fact, by massively extending civil rights to oppressed groups post the civil rights era, the record shows that these groups more completely integrated into society and have generally become much more supportive of the military and the government overall.
In reality, the extension of civil rights to disaffected groups reaffirms support for the status quo, not the other way around. It is being excluded from the benefits of the status quo that cause disaffected groups to rebel against it, rather than the other way around (i.e. you seem to be saying and correct me if I'm wrong, that the oppression of groups prevents them from uniting against a flawed and equally repressive international policy of the government).
that was a 4 billion dollar loan as part of the lend lease program. you do realize that those funds were because we basically paid for a massive build up of the British army and then after the war, when they owed us some 40 billion dollars, cut that amount down to 10% and turned it into a loan which gave them until the year 2000 to pay off at 2% interest. to put that in todays dollars, had they just let it compound, it is a meager 13 billion dollars in the year 2000, pretty cheap if you ask me.
And of course, I was referring to the marshall plan (13 billion dollars) and other 13 billion on aide given before that plan went effective in '48(?) which wasn't repaid.
weren't his contributions the most significant? early on, he basically single-handedly cracked enigma. while other may have figured it out, they didn't. I don't get the nobel prize for the discovery of of penicillin even though I "could" have done it later. Why would we honor those who didn't make the achievement? Are we going back to 3rd grade where everyone was a "winner"?
I thought turing worked directly for the war effort (HUT-8 in bletchley park) and was considered the single biggest reason that group broke so many german ciphers so early. I'm not saying the fact that gay engineers have contributed to the war effort means that don't ask, don't tell is purely a technological matter, but rather your point about a gay guy working with technology and teh military buying it doesn't follow from a comment about turing's massive contributions to the war effort.
or was yoru comment directed at the second paragraph? at which point, it is relevant to all the gay engineers that would like to enlist to contribute to the war effort, especially as technology is so important to the war effort now. but that effect isn't unique to tech, it probably coudl be said about several other "nerdy" specialties, so I think it satisfies the news for nerds.