I would say yes. No doubt that in more 'blue collar' areas of the nation, it wouldn't be as bad, but in the US, it is regularly reinforced that if you are not 'trained' to do something, then it must be impossible for you to do. One must defer to "experts" for everything, and those that don't must be wack jobs.
Electrical work is particularly feared because most people don't know what electricity is, or how it works. They see it as some magical force that can only be controlled by those trained in the magical electric arts.
Secular private schools are rare and for the very wealthy, but they do exist in small numbers. Well, technically that isn't true. Here in California, there are literally thousands of them. In fact in my city with a population of ~200,000, I know of at least two dozen, and there are no doubt many that I am unaware of. How is this? The simplest and most effective way of legally homeschooling your child is to start a private school with only one student. So, you will find that most home schooled kids in California are technically not 'homeschooled', but are in fact enrolled in a private school.
Of course, private schools run by the parent who only has their child as a student isn't what you were really talking about.
Honestly, the biggest 'socialization' problem that I have seen with home schoolers is that 15 year olds who have a mental age of 10 year olds find 15 year olds who have properly matured into adults as "weird". There is a joke that one of the local home schooling fathers likes to tell. When the subject of socialization comes up, he cracks the joke about having solved that. He just says "We solved the socialization problem by once a week, dragging our kids into the bathroom, smacking them around a bit and taking their allowance back."
Now, there is no doubt that he is cracking a joke, but it is funny because it is an exaggeration of the truth.
Being in the US, I can tell you that most people don't have beyond what I would consider an 'Elementary' education. Their education beyond 5th or 6th grade is patchy at best. Most of these people do just fine in life. So, even by yourself, you would likely give your child at least an equivalent education to what they get in the public schools. Of course, the resources available to home schoolers in no way would limit you to what the public schools offer.
One of the biggest lessons that home schoolers get to learn is how to learn. This is something sorely lacking in public schools. Their teachers either assign from a book, or already know the subject. They don't get to see their teacher learning. In a home school environment, the standard practice is when confronted with a subject that the parent is even a little shaky on, the parent takes the child, and they find out the answer together. The child learns how to effectively learn. Once that lesson is learned, the rest is almost impossible to stop.
I think you are fully aware that a very large and vocal part of the population believes that a 2 year old should be rationalized with. That you should sit down with them and explain the errors of their ways, and how their behavior now will impact them in the weeks, months and years to come. I think you are fully aware that this group believes that a quick swat on the bottom will not in any way associate discomfort with the action the child performed.
I think that you are fully aware that this group believes that "abuse" is a physical act, and no matter how badly they screw with their kids heads, as long as they don't leave a mark, they are "good" parents.
You, know the reason that all the other responses took your sarcasm as serious is because there as so many people that honest to goodness believe what you said to be true.
I guess, I better call my wife and have her bring our son home right now, since he is home schooled, he isn't supposed to be out playing with his friends or enjoying that museum event that was being run today.
On a more serious note... The "lack of socialization" is a myth. One of the reasons that home schooled kids are often described as "wierd" is because their socialization is so much farther ahead of what kids get in public schools. When a five year old strikes up a conversation about current events, or economics with a 10 year old, people see that as "weird".
When I first started looking into the mechanics of home schooling (legal requirements and whatnot), I went to a little "basics of home schooling" talk that a local home school store gave each week. After the meeting, I was talking to the owner of the store, and she started going on about how the public school system wasn't about education. It was a social program to indoctrinate kids into social and political beliefs. At that time, my internal flags started waving declaring the woman a nut job. Several year later, I have found that she was less a nut job, and more in line with the standard beliefs of the population. Given how many people, such as yourself, that believe public school is a social training program, I find it hard to believe that a very large portion of the public schools employees and school boards do not agree with you. Given that, I have to accept that maybe she wasn't a nut job, but that I might have just been nieve in thinking the schools were about "education".
Some things to consider when talking about public school socialization...
Supervision by adults is minimal. If they don't have to get involved, they don't want to. While this would be healthy in 13 year olds who have been properly socialized, it is not healthy in a room full of 8 year olds. When 8 year olds learn 'socialization' from other 8 year olds, their socialization skills get retarded, and they are not capable at 13.
While no rule is absolute, most home schooled kids around here are part of various clubs and other organizations. These groups tend not to be age discriminatory. So, the home schooled kids interact with people of all ages. Were as public school kids interact with a few adults that have to split their time between 20 to 1000 kids, and 20 to 30 other kids that are the exact same age as them. This grouping by age retards their development. I find it particularly ironic that while home schooled kids are regularly exposed to far more variation in environment, and and almost always have more detailed discussions about those situation, they are regularly accused of being sheltered.
I know that I regularly get accused of sheltering my child because I home school, as well as regularly accused of exposing my child to to more things than a child of his age can or should be able to understand. Often by the same person in the same conversation.
That makes me laugh. Why? Because while it is not a deciding factor in my choice to home school my child, I am fully aware that (whether they know it or not) our public schools don't want me as the parent of one of their students.
1) The lenders were allowed to do as you say, as well as play all sorts of other shell games. NINJA (No Income, No Job Applications) being a big one. My wife worked at a lender. There is no question that the lenders knew that they were frequently committing fraud. We had many a conversation where she would call me up and tell me that she was refusing to do work, and that she may get fired over it, because she was told to commit crimes. Luckily, she did not have to work. I can't imagine that the rest of the people in her office were as willing to respond to a request with an email saying "No, problem, just send me an email stating that our legal departments has ok'ed this as legal, and I'll get right on it."
2) Regulators knew what was happening, but did nothing.
3) Politicians knew what was happening, but they knew that they looked good now because of the fraud, and would shift the blame later when it all collapsed. No doubt many of them were making huge sums of money off of the artificial inflation caused by the fraud.
4) Mortgage brokers knew what was happening, but got their money at the time of sale, so they didn't care if the mortgage was bad. This led to the common practice of filing fraudulent loans.
5) Real Estate agents get paid on commission based on the selling price of the house. This led them to encourage buyers to buy houses that everyone knew they could not afford, and to recommend mortgage brokers and lenders that would help the buyer commit fraud.
6) Buyers knew they could not afford the houses they were buying, but figured that they could pay for the house with the artificially created inflation on it's value. Frequently they figured that they would just sell before the enevitable crash. They thought they could play the market and get rich via fraud.
So, while your comment is right and true, you should not blame ONLY the mortgage companies. Everyone in the chain was in on the scam, and just as everyone planned, when things collapsed, they could each point to a different person and truthfully say that "they caused this".
( I'm going to bet that you can't help yourself. You are so stubborn and have to always be right and have the last say that you will actually respond to this. This is officially a troll post.:) )
Using the, "If you argue with me, you must be wrong" argument shows that you know you are wrong. It is the kind of argument that a child would use.
They limited the number of parameters in order to understand the effect when other parameters are altered.
No, they chose parameters that would mislead the results. What does alchole have to do with distracted driving? Nothing. They specifically make the attempt to inject emotion into their 'study' by associating cell phones with drunk driving. Then after they got their results that showed drunk driving was not dangerous, they told you to ignore that part, and just assume the opposite of their results, so that they could get the results that they were looking for concerning cell phones. That is not scientific.
If they wanted to do a scientific study, they would have compared the cell phone use with something related. They didn't do that though because the results of "Driving while talking on a cell phone is almost as dangerous as driving with a car stereo and almost half as dangerous as driving your kid to soccer practice." wouldn't give people like you what you want.
Sorry still haven't said or found anything to sway me on "driving and using the phone is MORONIC" belief. All you have claimed is that it's rigged. That is your total 100% argument.
Of course you haven't. That is because you are not looking at cell phone use in comparison to all of the 'dangerous' activities you do every day, and seeing that it doesn't even show up on the radar. You feel that your shade of gray is better than anyone else's shade of gray. Every day, every person take many many unnecessary risks. That includes you. You just believe that the ones other people take are 'Moronic'. So, no, it isn't my 100% argument. You just don't acknowledge any argument as existing if it doesn't reinforce your choices of risk.
It takes me all of 5 seconds to find on google 100's of reports papers articles about how dumb using the phone while driving is. On the flip side I find next to nothing except for rants that say it's OK. No one is fullish enough it seems to report that using a phone while driving improves your abilities.
The same could be said about the tenets of Catholicism, but that doesn't mean there really is a invisible old man in the sky who created the earth in 7 days. I have yet to see one single cell phone study that compares cell phone use to common every day driving habits that are considered perfectly fine. Like (I repeat myself again) children in cars, radios in cars, driving without a cell phone while fatigued or tired, driving in areas with few distinguishing features, driving in environments that are extremely well know. Ignoring data that clearly is pertinent to a subject is one way to write a rigged report. In fact 'rigging' something means that you set it up to get the results you want. It far less often means that you plain out lied.
And to be honest I don't understand why you have such a passion for this belief of yours. Possibly where you live it is still legal to operate a phone while driving. I say enjoy it while you can. Cause those days are numbered.
'passion' is certainly hyperbole in an attempt to discredit a reasonable response. But to answer your question. I argue against your religious bias because your fear of new things makes life worse. It is the same reason I would argue against implementing laws that require us all to live an Amish lifestyle. Yes, cell phones while driving are still legal here, and their days may be numbered, but it won't be cause of rational thought. If they are outlawed, it will be because of fraudulent statistics. Ye
60 years ago, people got narrow biased news reports that were chosen by someone else. Today, people get narrow biased news reports that are chosen by them. I wold say that the situation has improved when it comes to exposure to different views. 60 years ago, if the town newspaper decided that they didn't like the mayor of the city two cities over, you were unlikely to meet a single person that didn't 'know' that he was a wife beating child molester, irrelevant of the facts. Today, you would have some people who 'know' this, some people who 'know' it isn't true, and a lot of people that just don't care about he mayor two cities over. When your standing around the water cooler at work, which time period is more likely to give you dissenting opinions?
The problem doesn't seem to be that people are getting biased inaccurate news. The 'problem' seems to be that people are now becoming aware that the news they get is biased, and are struggling with the idea of choosing the bias themselves instead of having it chosen for them.
It is worse than being called a nerd. When I have mentioned that I replaced the electrical wiring in my house, people don't think I'm a nerd, they think that I am some kind of dangerous nut who is going to kill himself and anyone around them. To most people electricity is magic, and you need an 'expert' to do anything with it. I'm not talking about industrial electrical work here. I'm talking about residential electrical work.
Last mile connectivity is not a natural monopoly. It is an artificial monopoly created by right of way laws. If cities ran pipes similar to the sewer system throughout the cities, the cost of competition would plummet, and you would see more players. Government mandated monopolies are not, by definition, natural monopolies.
Money is not going to fix the earth. Virtually all environmental problems that we have are directly tied to over population. No one is willing to discuss a plan to reduce the population in any significant numbers. Thus withholding funds from space research in favor of 'Fixing this dump' is at best self delusional.
You are a hypocrite and in denial. You do have 100% control over whether you drive with your child in your car. Saying otherwise is a complete lie. You may not have the guilt of killing your son because you used a cell phone while driving, but you may get to feel the guild of killing your son because you put him in the car when because you decided to drive to the park instead of walk.
The passenger seat of a car is a wonderful invention. I personally have 5. It is not an evil artifact. There is a time and a place to use it. And it's not while [fill in any unnecessary driving you do].
Your very post shows beyond a doubt that you in fact DO see the cell phone as an evil artifact. Your claim that you don't decide when you put your kid in a car or not isn't even a good lie. You admit that you drive with unnecessary distractions that are known to cause accidents, then call people who drive with smaller distraction moronic. What does that say about you?
Yes, that is a great example of a rigged 'study' that does not address any of the examples I showed of missing data. In fact, that very study produced data that showed driving drunk was safe. Of course, they contradicted their data with regards to the safety of driving drunk, and used that as a benchmark to show that cell phones are obviously evil. After all, we have established in our society that driving drunk is evil, so if we associate cell phones with drunk driving, that must make cell phones eeeeviiillll....
Thanks for supporting the point that these 'studies' are fixed.
Absolute and complete BS. Your trying to tell me that the 5 and 6 year old in the back seat that are fighting over who is on who's side of the car, and whether one of them is touching the other are going stop arguing because you are distracted? If you believe that, you are a scary person.
The fact does not remain that talking on a cell phone is more distracting. The fact remains that there are huge numbers of neo-luddites that find cell phones to be some form of evil artifact. Sometimes a necessary evil, but evil all the same. Due to this, they create 'studies' that are fundamentally flawed. Can you point me to a single 'study' that compares the quality of driving on and off a cell phone when the driver has been consistently driving for greater than an hour at night on a straight road without many distinguishing features? How about comparing the driving quality between people who have been working for the last 8 hours, and are now on a road that they have driven 1000 times before? Or, even easier, how about not rigging the 'study' to require the person on the cell phone to keep using the cell phone in tricky situation, while allowing the non cell phone driver to stop their conversation.
The so called 'studies' have nothing to do with facts. They are an attempt at beating back those evil new fangled devices. Nothing more.
Unless you are going to advocate the removal of all stereos from every car, you are nothing but a hypocrite. Car stereos have caused FAR more accidents than cell phones, but since they have been popular longer, the neo-luddites try to explain away why their stereo is ok, but a cell phone isn't.
This always gets me. The answer is that no matter how much you spend, or don't spend on space exploration, you will not effect how habitable the earth is. Virtually every single environmental problem we have is a direct result of over population. Over population is not a problem caused by underfunding. It is cause by a lack of will to solve the problem.
So, since you think that we should abandon space research in favor of spending resources to improve our habitat, I have to ask... Do YOU have the will to solve our environmental problems? And would you take the path of mass sterilization, or killing huge portions of the population?
I highly doubt that. The term 'scientist' seems to have been co-opted and turned into some kind of priesthood title. Can you honestly say that you never do any personal research into any kind of science? I would bet that you even use "The Scientific Method", if not rigorously, at least loosely. This anointment of the position of "Scientist" is a major piece of the political baggage surrounding this subject. "Scientist" gets thrown out as a way to tell "Non-Scientists" that they cannot possibly understand, so they should just take the word of the priesthood.
So, if you can use "The Scientific Method", stand up and take your rightful title of "Scientist".
That makes no sense. It completely ignores the 'you can't take it with you' mantra. Money that never gets spent is not money. It is just bits of paper, or bits of bits. Now, you could claim that the rich can save more than the poor because they are not spending the money and thus get tax free investment, but we already allow for that with things like Roth IRAs, and the fact that you only get taxed on your Stock Market investments when you sell them.
However, they neglect to mention how much work and inside knowledge is required to make everything work, and when people point out things that just work better on a different OS (or work at all, period), they say "well I don't really care about that, so it doesn't matter."
So, Linux is exactly the same as Mac and Windows in that respect.
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I would say yes. No doubt that in more 'blue collar' areas of the nation, it wouldn't be as bad, but in the US, it is regularly reinforced that if you are not 'trained' to do something, then it must be impossible for you to do. One must defer to "experts" for everything, and those that don't must be wack jobs.
Electrical work is particularly feared because most people don't know what electricity is, or how it works. They see it as some magical force that can only be controlled by those trained in the magical electric arts.
Secular private schools are rare and for the very wealthy, but they do exist in small numbers. Well, technically that isn't true. Here in California, there are literally thousands of them. In fact in my city with a population of ~200,000, I know of at least two dozen, and there are no doubt many that I am unaware of. How is this? The simplest and most effective way of legally homeschooling your child is to start a private school with only one student. So, you will find that most home schooled kids in California are technically not 'homeschooled', but are in fact enrolled in a private school.
Of course, private schools run by the parent who only has their child as a student isn't what you were really talking about.
I hope you are right, but fear you are wrong.
Honestly, the biggest 'socialization' problem that I have seen with home schoolers is that 15 year olds who have a mental age of 10 year olds find 15 year olds who have properly matured into adults as "weird". There is a joke that one of the local home schooling fathers likes to tell. When the subject of socialization comes up, he cracks the joke about having solved that. He just says "We solved the socialization problem by once a week, dragging our kids into the bathroom, smacking them around a bit and taking their allowance back."
Now, there is no doubt that he is cracking a joke, but it is funny because it is an exaggeration of the truth.
As an atheist, I've met many home-schoolers. And I don't think anyone would consider any of them to be ultra fanatic religious fringe group members.
Being in the US, I can tell you that most people don't have beyond what I would consider an 'Elementary' education. Their education beyond 5th or 6th grade is patchy at best. Most of these people do just fine in life. So, even by yourself, you would likely give your child at least an equivalent education to what they get in the public schools. Of course, the resources available to home schoolers in no way would limit you to what the public schools offer.
One of the biggest lessons that home schoolers get to learn is how to learn. This is something sorely lacking in public schools. Their teachers either assign from a book, or already know the subject. They don't get to see their teacher learning. In a home school environment, the standard practice is when confronted with a subject that the parent is even a little shaky on, the parent takes the child, and they find out the answer together. The child learns how to effectively learn. Once that lesson is learned, the rest is almost impossible to stop.
I think you are fully aware that a very large and vocal part of the population believes that a 2 year old should be rationalized with. That you should sit down with them and explain the errors of their ways, and how their behavior now will impact them in the weeks, months and years to come. I think you are fully aware that this group believes that a quick swat on the bottom will not in any way associate discomfort with the action the child performed.
I think that you are fully aware that this group believes that "abuse" is a physical act, and no matter how badly they screw with their kids heads, as long as they don't leave a mark, they are "good" parents.
You, know the reason that all the other responses took your sarcasm as serious is because there as so many people that honest to goodness believe what you said to be true.
I guess, I better call my wife and have her bring our son home right now, since he is home schooled, he isn't supposed to be out playing with his friends or enjoying that museum event that was being run today.
On a more serious note... The "lack of socialization" is a myth. One of the reasons that home schooled kids are often described as "wierd" is because their socialization is so much farther ahead of what kids get in public schools. When a five year old strikes up a conversation about current events, or economics with a 10 year old, people see that as "weird".
When I first started looking into the mechanics of home schooling (legal requirements and whatnot), I went to a little "basics of home schooling" talk that a local home school store gave each week. After the meeting, I was talking to the owner of the store, and she started going on about how the public school system wasn't about education. It was a social program to indoctrinate kids into social and political beliefs. At that time, my internal flags started waving declaring the woman a nut job. Several year later, I have found that she was less a nut job, and more in line with the standard beliefs of the population. Given how many people, such as yourself, that believe public school is a social training program, I find it hard to believe that a very large portion of the public schools employees and school boards do not agree with you. Given that, I have to accept that maybe she wasn't a nut job, but that I might have just been nieve in thinking the schools were about "education".
Some things to consider when talking about public school socialization...
Supervision by adults is minimal. If they don't have to get involved, they don't want to. While this would be healthy in 13 year olds who have been properly socialized, it is not healthy in a room full of 8 year olds. When 8 year olds learn 'socialization' from other 8 year olds, their socialization skills get retarded, and they are not capable at 13.
While no rule is absolute, most home schooled kids around here are part of various clubs and other organizations. These groups tend not to be age discriminatory. So, the home schooled kids interact with people of all ages. Were as public school kids interact with a few adults that have to split their time between 20 to 1000 kids, and 20 to 30 other kids that are the exact same age as them. This grouping by age retards their development. I find it particularly ironic that while home schooled kids are regularly exposed to far more variation in environment, and and almost always have more detailed discussions about those situation, they are regularly accused of being sheltered.
I know that I regularly get accused of sheltering my child because I home school, as well as regularly accused of exposing my child to to more things than a child of his age can or should be able to understand. Often by the same person in the same conversation.
That makes me laugh. Why? Because while it is not a deciding factor in my choice to home school my child, I am fully aware that (whether they know it or not) our public schools don't want me as the parent of one of their students.
That isn't the whole story though...
1) The lenders were allowed to do as you say, as well as play all sorts of other shell games. NINJA (No Income, No Job Applications) being a big one. My wife worked at a lender. There is no question that the lenders knew that they were frequently committing fraud. We had many a conversation where she would call me up and tell me that she was refusing to do work, and that she may get fired over it, because she was told to commit crimes. Luckily, she did not have to work. I can't imagine that the rest of the people in her office were as willing to respond to a request with an email saying "No, problem, just send me an email stating that our legal departments has ok'ed this as legal, and I'll get right on it."
2) Regulators knew what was happening, but did nothing.
3) Politicians knew what was happening, but they knew that they looked good now because of the fraud, and would shift the blame later when it all collapsed. No doubt many of them were making huge sums of money off of the artificial inflation caused by the fraud.
4) Mortgage brokers knew what was happening, but got their money at the time of sale, so they didn't care if the mortgage was bad. This led to the common practice of filing fraudulent loans.
5) Real Estate agents get paid on commission based on the selling price of the house. This led them to encourage buyers to buy houses that everyone knew they could not afford, and to recommend mortgage brokers and lenders that would help the buyer commit fraud.
6) Buyers knew they could not afford the houses they were buying, but figured that they could pay for the house with the artificially created inflation on it's value. Frequently they figured that they would just sell before the enevitable crash. They thought they could play the market and get rich via fraud.
So, while your comment is right and true, you should not blame ONLY the mortgage companies. Everyone in the chain was in on the scam, and just as everyone planned, when things collapsed, they could each point to a different person and truthfully say that "they caused this".
( I'm going to bet that you can't help yourself. You are so stubborn and have to always be right and have the last say that you will actually respond to this. This is officially a troll post. :) )
Using the, "If you argue with me, you must be wrong" argument shows that you know you are wrong. It is the kind of argument that a child would use.
They limited the number of parameters in order to understand the effect when other parameters are altered.
No, they chose parameters that would mislead the results. What does alchole have to do with distracted driving? Nothing. They specifically make the attempt to inject emotion into their 'study' by associating cell phones with drunk driving. Then after they got their results that showed drunk driving was not dangerous, they told you to ignore that part, and just assume the opposite of their results, so that they could get the results that they were looking for concerning cell phones. That is not scientific.
If they wanted to do a scientific study, they would have compared the cell phone use with something related. They didn't do that though because the results of "Driving while talking on a cell phone is almost as dangerous as driving with a car stereo and almost half as dangerous as driving your kid to soccer practice." wouldn't give people like you what you want.
Sorry still haven't said or found anything to sway me on "driving and using the phone is MORONIC" belief. All you have claimed is that it's rigged. That is your total 100% argument.
Of course you haven't. That is because you are not looking at cell phone use in comparison to all of the 'dangerous' activities you do every day, and seeing that it doesn't even show up on the radar. You feel that your shade of gray is better than anyone else's shade of gray. Every day, every person take many many unnecessary risks. That includes you. You just believe that the ones other people take are 'Moronic'. So, no, it isn't my 100% argument. You just don't acknowledge any argument as existing if it doesn't reinforce your choices of risk.
It takes me all of 5 seconds to find on google 100's of reports papers articles about how dumb using the phone while driving is. On the flip side I find next to nothing except for rants that say it's OK. No one is fullish enough it seems to report that using a phone while driving improves your abilities.
The same could be said about the tenets of Catholicism, but that doesn't mean there really is a invisible old man in the sky who created the earth in 7 days. I have yet to see one single cell phone study that compares cell phone use to common every day driving habits that are considered perfectly fine. Like (I repeat myself again) children in cars, radios in cars, driving without a cell phone while fatigued or tired, driving in areas with few distinguishing features, driving in environments that are extremely well know. Ignoring data that clearly is pertinent to a subject is one way to write a rigged report. In fact 'rigging' something means that you set it up to get the results you want. It far less often means that you plain out lied.
And to be honest I don't understand why you have such a passion for this belief of yours. Possibly where you live it is still legal to operate a phone while driving. I say enjoy it while you can. Cause those days are numbered.
'passion' is certainly hyperbole in an attempt to discredit a reasonable response. But to answer your question. I argue against your religious bias because your fear of new things makes life worse. It is the same reason I would argue against implementing laws that require us all to live an Amish lifestyle. Yes, cell phones while driving are still legal here, and their days may be numbered, but it won't be cause of rational thought. If they are outlawed, it will be because of fraudulent statistics. Ye
60 years ago, people got narrow biased news reports that were chosen by someone else. Today, people get narrow biased news reports that are chosen by them. I wold say that the situation has improved when it comes to exposure to different views. 60 years ago, if the town newspaper decided that they didn't like the mayor of the city two cities over, you were unlikely to meet a single person that didn't 'know' that he was a wife beating child molester, irrelevant of the facts. Today, you would have some people who 'know' this, some people who 'know' it isn't true, and a lot of people that just don't care about he mayor two cities over. When your standing around the water cooler at work, which time period is more likely to give you dissenting opinions?
The problem doesn't seem to be that people are getting biased inaccurate news. The 'problem' seems to be that people are now becoming aware that the news they get is biased, and are struggling with the idea of choosing the bias themselves instead of having it chosen for them.
It is worse than being called a nerd. When I have mentioned that I replaced the electrical wiring in my house, people don't think I'm a nerd, they think that I am some kind of dangerous nut who is going to kill himself and anyone around them. To most people electricity is magic, and you need an 'expert' to do anything with it. I'm not talking about industrial electrical work here. I'm talking about residential electrical work.
Last mile connectivity is not a natural monopoly. It is an artificial monopoly created by right of way laws. If cities ran pipes similar to the sewer system throughout the cities, the cost of competition would plummet, and you would see more players. Government mandated monopolies are not, by definition, natural monopolies.
Money is not going to fix the earth. Virtually all environmental problems that we have are directly tied to over population. No one is willing to discuss a plan to reduce the population in any significant numbers. Thus withholding funds from space research in favor of 'Fixing this dump' is at best self delusional.
You are a hypocrite and in denial. You do have 100% control over whether you drive with your child in your car. Saying otherwise is a complete lie. You may not have the guilt of killing your son because you used a cell phone while driving, but you may get to feel the guild of killing your son because you put him in the car when because you decided to drive to the park instead of walk.
The passenger seat of a car is a wonderful invention. I personally have 5. It is not an evil artifact. There is a time and a place to use it. And it's not while [fill in any unnecessary driving you do].
Your very post shows beyond a doubt that you in fact DO see the cell phone as an evil artifact. Your claim that you don't decide when you put your kid in a car or not isn't even a good lie. You admit that you drive with unnecessary distractions that are known to cause accidents, then call people who drive with smaller distraction moronic. What does that say about you?
Well, there own description of the process. Follow the link.
Yes, that is a great example of a rigged 'study' that does not address any of the examples I showed of missing data. In fact, that very study produced data that showed driving drunk was safe. Of course, they contradicted their data with regards to the safety of driving drunk, and used that as a benchmark to show that cell phones are obviously evil. After all, we have established in our society that driving drunk is evil, so if we associate cell phones with drunk driving, that must make cell phones eeeeviiillll....
Thanks for supporting the point that these 'studies' are fixed.
Absolute and complete BS. Your trying to tell me that the 5 and 6 year old in the back seat that are fighting over who is on who's side of the car, and whether one of them is touching the other are going stop arguing because you are distracted? If you believe that, you are a scary person.
The fact does not remain that talking on a cell phone is more distracting. The fact remains that there are huge numbers of neo-luddites that find cell phones to be some form of evil artifact. Sometimes a necessary evil, but evil all the same. Due to this, they create 'studies' that are fundamentally flawed. Can you point me to a single 'study' that compares the quality of driving on and off a cell phone when the driver has been consistently driving for greater than an hour at night on a straight road without many distinguishing features? How about comparing the driving quality between people who have been working for the last 8 hours, and are now on a road that they have driven 1000 times before? Or, even easier, how about not rigging the 'study' to require the person on the cell phone to keep using the cell phone in tricky situation, while allowing the non cell phone driver to stop their conversation.
The so called 'studies' have nothing to do with facts. They are an attempt at beating back those evil new fangled devices. Nothing more.
Unless you are going to advocate the removal of all stereos from every car, you are nothing but a hypocrite. Car stereos have caused FAR more accidents than cell phones, but since they have been popular longer, the neo-luddites try to explain away why their stereo is ok, but a cell phone isn't.
This always gets me. The answer is that no matter how much you spend, or don't spend on space exploration, you will not effect how habitable the earth is. Virtually every single environmental problem we have is a direct result of over population. Over population is not a problem caused by underfunding. It is cause by a lack of will to solve the problem.
So, since you think that we should abandon space research in favor of spending resources to improve our habitat, I have to ask... Do YOU have the will to solve our environmental problems? And would you take the path of mass sterilization, or killing huge portions of the population?
I'm not a scientist.
I highly doubt that. The term 'scientist' seems to have been co-opted and turned into some kind of priesthood title. Can you honestly say that you never do any personal research into any kind of science? I would bet that you even use "The Scientific Method", if not rigorously, at least loosely. This anointment of the position of "Scientist" is a major piece of the political baggage surrounding this subject. "Scientist" gets thrown out as a way to tell "Non-Scientists" that they cannot possibly understand, so they should just take the word of the priesthood.
So, if you can use "The Scientific Method", stand up and take your rightful title of "Scientist".
That makes no sense. It completely ignores the 'you can't take it with you' mantra. Money that never gets spent is not money. It is just bits of paper, or bits of bits. Now, you could claim that the rich can save more than the poor because they are not spending the money and thus get tax free investment, but we already allow for that with things like Roth IRAs, and the fact that you only get taxed on your Stock Market investments when you sell them.
However, they neglect to mention how much work and inside knowledge is required to make everything work, and when people point out things that just work better on a different OS (or work at all, period), they say "well I don't really care about that, so it doesn't matter."
So, Linux is exactly the same as Mac and Windows in that respect.