The moral is you need to constantly remind your kids that game physics != physics
Which is why kids need to do more actual physical things. You can probably tell from my sig that I hunt. Let me tell you: nothing takes the video-game-ness out of kid's head faster than actually tending the the carcass of a deer he's just shot. A large mammal, like a deer, with a rib cage and organs more or less laid out just like your own, dead by your own hand on its way to your freezer for some truly fine dining later in the season, is one hell of a wake-up call. Unless you're just wired really, really wrong, looking right at mortality like that makes you more thoughtful about life, a more careful person generally, and less tolerant of dangerous idiots (with guns or cars, regardless).
Kids should sometimes do a ride-along with paramedics, volunteer in a hospital, kill their own burger meat - all of that stuff will make life much more precious to them, and their driving (or gun handling) will be far less reckless than it might otherwise be. I'm sure I'll get flamed by people who can't connect "killing your own burger" with "reverence for life," but trust me, it works. Mmmmm, venison. And a nice Cabernet. Maybe some roast peppers, and a piece of cheese with a little home-made bread.
First, thanks for a thoughtful and verbose response (I'm one of the oddballs that actually appreciates lenghty prose if that's what it takes to make a point, and the hell with people that have too little attention span to cope with it). Um, which brings me to attention span. Which brings me right back around to the intellectual stagnation that I'm worried about, and which we're both talking about.
I agree with you that we (as a culture, as a species) have the ability to adapt to change. In fact, the introduction of technology (fire, antibiotics, wheels, Glocks, airplanes, levers, pointy sticks, refridgeration) has all, on balance, made things better.
But my concern is that we're now at a point where muddleheadedness has greater consequences than it ever has before. Things (good, and bad) are happening very quickly, now. Look at cancer research, and look at Iran.
We've got to be on our collective game, intellectually, to tackle things that require a large and abstract view of how to deal with other cultures that are experiencing the technology shocks in uglier ways, and lashing out. But now, that can happen with truly dire consequences, and it's possible that being intellectually weak, as a culture, is going to set us up for a difficult-to-come-back-from set of circumstances. That's a lot to take away from "playing video games for too many hours a day," but I can feel the dots connecting, here and there. I'm just lamenting the lack of a true celebration of well-roundedness in the broader culture, that's all. Worried it will come back to bite us worse than usual given the wider state of affairs.
Aristocracies collapse when they lose touch with the people they are supposed to rule over. "Let them eat cake", "They hate us for our freedom".
Let's see now. First, it's pretty apparent that Marie Antoinette never actually said that. Not that she wasn't idlely rich and non-productive (other than as a celebrity - still a busy occupation today, in a different form), but she was probably more sheltered and ignorant of the average peasant's plight than actually contemptuous of them. Read up here.
And as for the "they hate us for our freedom" concept. Well, that's actually correct. In fact, the architects of events like 9/11 and their spokesmen frequently take to the air expressly to remind us that's true. They refer to democracy as "un-Islamic" and speak in terms of beheading any that show up at the polls, etc. Democracy is exactly the freedom we hold most dear, because it's through that structure that we create and defend the rest of them (um, like allowing women to work, or their daughters to read and write). Have you not ever watched any of the footage from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan? People (like mothers teaching their daughters to read) were shot in public at lunchtime exactly for pursuing those freedoms that we consider inviolate. The west is built upon those freedoms, and stands for them. People who hate the intrusion of annoying trends like the right to vote (or read) into the medieval theocracy they want to re-instate at the point of a gun do hate those freedoms and those that seek to establish and defend them elsewhere.
And you know what? It probably wouldn't matter so much, except the people who want the world to live in that mysoginistic, backwards way are also the ones that realize their neighborhood is full of oil they can sell in Europe, Asia, India, and the Americas, etc. That allows the people willing to kill to posses those fields to have the cash with which to further entrench their jihaddist/wahabbist ways. And when part of that activity includes running training camps for thousands of militants, some of which then kill thousands of people going to work in the morning in New York and Washington, then you get the conflict right up there on the surface where you have to call it what it is: a conflict between world views. One that, to stick with the same example, thinks your wife or daughter is property that should be kept illiterate, and one that does not.
Or it could be the 500 Years of selective inbreeding of the idle aristocracy that made them loony and frail, not the fact they were entertained as kids.;)
Well, that too! But, we're doing almost the same thing there, as well (in terms of the wider population). There's a reason we used to have "hardy peasant stock" - if they weren't hardy, they didn't survive. We're now able to bear kids and further reproduce even in presence of previously self-selecting frailties. No, I'm not preaching eugenics or anything - just observing that a lot of DNA is getting passed along (or even amplified) in direct opposition to what would make for smarter, healthier, better-adapted populations. At least, in the context of the article we're talking about. Unless we also breed along the lines that would make the obesity of idleness either not set it (or not be so deadly), or breed in a way that would make sensory overload and ADHD an asset, rather than toxic to productivity - well, you get my point, I hope. I got yours! It used to be inbreeding (as you say), and now it's de-evolution through the suppression of natural selection mechanisms.
But isn't that the point of technology? If we had machines to do everything for us, replicators to give us anything we wanted, and so on, how is that ruining any generation? We could spend our lives being artists, researching history, or anything else we *want* to do without fear of starving or putting up with a mean old boss. We're so tantalizingly close to this, I can't imagine why anyone would want to go back. Just a few short generations, and humanity will have the means to do essentially whatever it wants.
Unless we also have a way to suppress millions of years of mammalian (in general) and advanced primate (specifically) evolution, some kid born three or four generations from now that still has his pointy eye-teeth, predator's senses and sensibilities, and pack-protecting urges - but who has no outlet for any of that - is going to do exactly what I think a lot of them are doing today: go slightly crazy. You can't take every (or even most) adolescent's nearly superhuman gusto for life and channel it entirely into art, research, or even mountain climbing. I suppose that challenging, competitive sports area good outlet (or would be, if we weren't squashing them into one big "everyone is special, everyone's the best" festival right at the ages when actually striving against some fairly low-risk adversity is hugely helpful, developmentally).
Essentially: unless you change human nature (biologically, I'm talking - behavior and perception as heavily influenced by our DNA), making the world like one big nursery/playground for adults is going to produce ever more sociopathic human BSODs. I wouldn't rant about it, but I think, with a little perspective, now, I actually see it happening. The challenge, in the scenario you describe, is to generate sufficient adventure and adversity to scratch all of those primal itches without needing to fend off religious fanatics or killer luddites in hijacked planes in order to flex that bit of deep-seated programming.
you simply CANNOT dismiss the fact that, even when the top of one of the falling towers starts to fall at an angle, away from the rest of the building, somehow it spontaneously turns to dust and debris instead of falling as one chunk
Try me. Watch carefully: I hereby dismiss it.
Easy, huh? You should note that you're blythely passing along things that make your point sound reasonable without (and you don't even need an "open" mind, here, just more facts) taking the reality into account.
The whole "turned to dust" canard is a great example. Sure, from a mile away on camera it might look that way, but every one of those steel beams stayed in one piece the whole way down. More to the point, though: the building's facade was made of gypsom and any sufficient distortion of the structure to which is was mounted (you know, say, like collapsing) shattered it, just as you'd expect. The entire structure was made of comparatively lightweight materials, and was essentially a hollow tube. What would have been amazing would have been some sideways force that would have caused the structure(s) to do anything but move in accordance to gravity. With the support structure heated and stressed into being useless, there was nothing to translate the downward force of the mass of the upper part of the building outwards in any particular direction. The vertical beams buckled outwards, and the mass of each floor above just kept sandwiching up, right onto the structure below.
As countless engineers have pointed out, the reason you've never seen this sort of failure before is because no building like this has ever experienced what happened. No building of that size has ever been destroyed intentionally or otherwise. But what the fire and stress did to the middle of the building was exactly a demolition crew would have done: weaken the centeral supporting structures all at the same time.
Why is it people use the phrase "open your mind" when they mean "take what I'm saying, however ridiculous, on faith, because it makes my loony position feel better by having more people not point out how wrong I am, which takes the fun out of trying to blame my idealogical opponents for something that was done by other people entirely, whose sociopathic outlook I can't personally grasp, so I'd rather project a fictional one on my local political opponents?" Why is that, anyway?
My daughter has a computer (a Macintosh running Mac OS 9). The only games she has are educational with no killing. She has a simple word processor, a complex drawing program, and other programs that create, not simulate destruction. We use Tivo Kidzone to record only programs with positive messages. So far, she doesn't watch much at the neighbor's kid's houses.
Does they know where chicken comes from? I'm not being sarcastic, here, but you're sort of setting them up for a bit of a shock the first time they turn on the news, or someone they know has a friend killed in a carjacking or something. It's not that you want that sort of unhappy reality foisted on them more than necessary, but being able to have a level-headed perspective about it is pretty important, isn't it? An informed one?
I wonder, sometimes, if the people that say if they only had a chance to have nice, quiet talk and some creative playtime with some sociopath, that that person would suddenly decide to stop being a destructive sociopath. I'm not saying that your daughters should steel themselves to deal with sociopaths, but it would be nice if they went into the world understanding that someone has to deal with them, and to respect what that involves. That way they won't resent paying taxes to hire police officers, etc. I know, sounds like a stretch - but I wouldn't mention it if I didn't perceive the trend in my own neighborhood's kids, and feel obliged to comment on it. Seems like in our area, we have either completely "street-wise" thug-wannabees, or completely sheltered kids that will be completely at the mercy of the other group once they all get to the same school. It's frustrating, that's for sure. Good on you for the gardening and dogs, though - that's stuff every kid should do and see, their entire lives.
Every generation has some aspect that is supposedly going to bring utter ruination to the future. And every generation manages to cope. I think we will be allright as long as parents bring some healthy balance to thier kids activities. When has that concept ever been new and fresh? It has always been that way.
But how many generations had their kids sitting in front of, essentially, puppet-shows (or some other analog equivalent) all day, every day? In fact, one could argue that the loonier offspring of the "idle" artistocracy and their highly entertained (but not so very challeneged, physically, etc) kids were the precursor to what we're seeing now, but across much larger swaths of the society: flacid minds, a sense of entitlement, no sense of causality or critical thinking... sort of the Caligulazation of a much wider population.
Basically, the standard of living for most of modern western society is now so high that most of us are living like (or better than) the aristrocracy of the not very distant past.
Yes, we all assume that our current generation's kids are the ones that will wreck civilization, but there's actually something TO this one, I think, at least a bit.
I admit I'd not heard of the 'twin towers' before 9/11, but up until reading your post I'd assumed that the name implied that that there were, well, two of them.
Are you saying there were 7? The news reports didn't seem to bear that out - there were clearly two in the pictures.
The "World Trade Center" was complex of multiple buildings. The two large towers (buildings 1 and 2, the "twin towers") were the most visible part of the complex. When they collapsed, the enormous crush of falling and flaming debris destroyed and damaged many surrounding buldings. Building number 7 in the complex (which I referred to simply as "7" in my comment, since I thought that was obvious, in context, given the comment I was responding to) was badly damaged as the big buildings next to it collapsed, and had a hot fire burning in it for a while, and then it collapsed a few hours later.
Many crazy folks who were initially hoping to convince others that the main two towers had been brought down as part of some sort of inside job have had their theories solidly debunked. So, they're now focusing on the collapse of the damaged #7 (which has received less critical review for the reasons I mentioned in my last comment) as some sort of last-gasp way to prop up their conspiracy theories. No, they have no basis in fact, but these people became so invested in their fabrication that when countless studies of the collapse of the two large towers dismissed their craziness, they had to find something else to keep talking about (their only alternative being to admit that they were wrong).
The best explanation is that one of the main structural beams (vertical, like the trunk of a tree) was both physically struck by some of the massive, high-speed beams that flew outwards from one of the larger collapsing towers, and was further weakened by the substantial fire that raged in 7 (don't forget the likely contributing impact of 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in tanks and pipes in that building's generator systems). The best models show that weakening that central support structure, and its eventual failure from the torqued stress, would have it collapse in the middle of the building, and pull the walls right in on top of it: exactly as we've all seen happened.
Just because people can score more political points among an audience/demographic that's just as likely to also accept "aliens did it" as an explanation doesn't mean that the vanilla, stress-and-heat-damaged-steel-beams is "on par" with teams of explosive-planting spooks sneaking around the entire WTC in concert with Al Queda's hijacking crews. Do you have any idea how many people would be involved in such a thing? Suggesting that it was deliberately blown up is right up there with insisting on a fake Apollo program. The far more interesting question (not, "why did the central beams in that building fail in a fire and debris path they way it did") is "what do the people who prop up such BS theories have to gain by promoting them?" It's exactly like those people who, despite a decent background in science, cling to the "intelligent design" nonsense: they know it's BS, but they're doing their damndest to promote a BS concept because they imagine that it serves their idealogical goals (to change the political landscape in someway, at the school board level or otherwise).
The reason you haven't seen the same millions of dollars invested in studying the WTC7 collapse is because it was plainly the byproduct of the tower collapses, surrounding damage, and fires. By demonstrating that the main event (the collapse of the big towers from impact and fire stresses), we can rule out the larger conspiracy nut-case story in the first place. That's been done, so any head-scratching about the WTC7 collapse can be left to architecture and engineering grad students that get grant money and don't have some addle-brained political axe to grind.
How they just 'fell straight down'...isn't that a scientific and physical miracle??
Well, OK, that's a nerdy topic, though a proper nerd wouldn't have any need to invoke "miracles," and would simply say "not immediately how I would have thought something like that would happen."
You can read a pretty good discussion of the collapse here. The article helps you understand why the "hollow" design of the buildings, and the fact that the gypsom facade allowed the jet fuel to spill largely into the core of the building and thoroughly ignite all sorts of material already in the building (like untold tons of paper). The cross beams would have started weakening very quickly at the temperatures involved. What would have really been astounding would have been if one or both towers actually toppled to the side. The floors above the impact points did tilt some as the supports gave way, but that became a non-issue once all that mass started sandwiching down.
But since the 1920s the kinds of guns that are legal for American citizens to own haven't had a chance of impacting the outcome of any real war.
In the case of a war against (or involving) the US military, you're of course correct. But if (as the thread mentions) we were talking about a "civil" war, in the sense of opposing sectors of the general population slugging it out, then believe me that a nice deer rifle will make you plenty dead. Now, it's a little hard to imagine such a conflict since, despite the rabid, rancorous divide over some policy issues, there aren't too many things that would have the people in, say, Pennsylvania, deciding that it's time to head a few miles south and wipe out the population of a town in northern Maryland. Of course, the people from PA would win, since the people in MD would still be fumbling with their mandated trigger locks.
The only thing that I think could possibly turn that ugly would be, say, a seriously inflammatory immigration incident, or perhaps some unthinkably ugly thing involving Dearborn, Michigan. Who knows. But the north vs. south type just isn't going to find some modern equivalent in "red" vs. "blue." In the more commonly fantasized uprising sort of action, you're completely correct that the military (or even just the Guard in one state) would be way too much for your average gun owner to face. Yes, I know Red Dawn was a documentary, but we repelled that invasion already. I'm waiting for the sequel: Refried Bean Dawn.
... the main vehicle their late husband had for actually using his money was a Chase-issued Circuit City Rewards Card. So, if they don't get this resolved quickly, it will be resolved for them.
This is slashdot. Please do not cite movie-style 'head of state asks-without-asking for an assination mission' analogies, or refer to centuries-old British church smack-downs. If you can't describe this in terms of chair throwing, iPod-killing, or some form of infringement, the message is lost.
It's not about it costing them their profits, it's about whether there's room within their budget, given their profits. Small businesses (say, those with revenue of two million dollars per year) that have a gross margin of %15 (which is very high, in terms of competitive commodity-ish products sold online) will gross $300,000. Out of that comes wages, insurance, hosting costs, financial fees, lawyers, and a jillion other things. Let's say you've got 4 employees, and their gross wages and unemployment insurance expenses and whatnot are $50k each. That's $200,000 right there. Out of the $100,000 that's left, you've got to pay your corporate taxes, rent, everything else.
A good makeover of an e-commerce web presence that's tied to back office account, drop-shippers, etc., is going to cost several thousand dollars. At least. That probably kills any breathing room left in the budget, and then some. Do the math, and you'll see.
You make a good business case for a sound web content/dev strategy. But that's not what we're talking about, is it? We're talking about being told by a 30%-earning lawyer that you HAVE to do it a certain way, whether or not you feel like going through possibly tens of thousands of HTML-rich product descriptions (gee, many of which may actually have been written some years back, using nested tables or other things you wouldn't do today). It doesn't matter what some web operator's reason is for leaving his site the way it is, and it doesn't matter how well they understand the impact (SEO-wise, etc) that a different/better design might have. The real issue that you're bringing the government into how a private merchant presents, say, pictures of their products to private customers.
Then, finally, there's the Montgomery bus service.
If you can't tell the difference between suing a small business to force them to spend perhaps many, many thousands of dollars to support a possibly non-existent customer demographic that they weren't looking to sell to in the first place (for better or worse - it's the merchant's call as to how it sizes up its possible customer flavors) and a taxpayer funded municipal service (like busses), then perhpas it's easier to understand why you sound the way you do.
But if there are three businesses that sell a given good or service, and none of them finds it profitable to serve people with disabilities, then what happens?
Nothing. Because if doing that business isn't profitable, then by definition, doing that business loses the company money. Why not simply say the company has to "do the business" of giving out cash to anyone who says they're poor that week? Businesses don't pursue activities that lose them money, or they'd go out of business, and then you wouldn't have anyone to tell what to do. Some things they do sell turn out not to be profitable, or some marketing approaches involve "loss leader" type items... but that's not the same as being told, by lawyers who get rich off of the telling, that you have to spend $X to make it easier for a very small number of people to do some business with you that might add up to $X/10, or possibly much less.
If there's money to be made selling a particular thing to a particular demographic, someone will step up. That's how the market works. You're talking about running private businesses like local branch offices of a government entitlement program.
BTW, your race baiting nonsense is complete crap, and you know it. Being blind can logistically prevent you from actually using the facilities of a business. Being black carries no such practical burden. Your race doesn't prevent you from reaching an elevator button, presenting cash at a register, or reading the labels of what's on a shelf (or a web browser). Being blind, or in a wheelchair, etc., though can. A business that can't invest in re-making their business around a small-to-non-existent disabled clientelle is not the same as putting up a "No African-Descent Shoppers Allowed" sign.
Come out and say what you really mean: you can't distinguish between skin color difference and seeing vs. blindness. Or, you're just grinding this axe because you think that the government should be able to use private businesses (and those businesses' own money) to run what amount to entitlement programs for select groups of other people.
Likewise, that should be the company's business decision to go after the African-descent community or to disregard it - it should not be required by law.
Um... what are you saying, here... that those businesses that actively go out and cultivate a customer base that fits the black/urban audience, and that pays to advertise expressly to that audience (say, on BET, or in an NAACP newsletter, or at an "historically black college," etc) should have the law look at and influence what they're doing? If I want to start a business that only means something to people that can see, should the law require me to invest in making my sales tools useful to people that cannot, by definition, use my products - and if I don't, essentially I get my business shut down? If I'm in such a business, I should be thrilled to death if my competition spends a lot of money preparing their web sites for use by people that cannot possibly make use of their products - because that's probably a poor use of overhead, and hurts my competition to do it.
A normal website for a typical small business can be redesigned completely from scratch in a week by a part-time employee of medium intelligence who taught himself HTML and CSS in a couple of shifts. It just isn't a big deal.
Really? I've got customers that have a staff of, say, three or four people. Some of them have web sites with thousands of bits/pages/records of information that would require attention if they were forced to comply with these standards. Say, a small special-order retailer with over 10,000 items. Sure, most of the raw product data is coming from a database (prices, etc), but so is the hand-written HTML that carefully describes every item... often including images that serve as backgrounds behind other design elements, or multiple roll-over images with complex scripting, etc. It's not necessarily as easy as you imply - and for operations like that, it's prohibitive. Completely.
Smaller businesses can take years to squeeze the cost of a total site re-design out of their profits. A large, sprawling site that's been growing for years may not lend itself to anything other than a major piece of work. That's not to say the business shouldn't do it for other reasons (like SEO), but if they want to alienate some customers because for them, that's less expensive than a big IT project, that should be their call. Not a lawyers. I can't believe that any business not in the mood to do this doesn't have competition that is.
Of course, I smell some consulting blood in the water, here. On the other hand, one of my customers sells eyewear for sports. Somehow I don't think that redesigning their site for the blind is going to be high on their list. The irony is, they can still get sued anyway. Brilliant.
I think you wanted LittleGreenIdiotBalls...it's the blog down the hall on the right. Your echo will please you more there. This is Slashdot. We're interested in facts, here.
Exactly why I mentioned the lack of any facts in the comment I responded to. It's just fine to refer to "all the irregularities" that someone says "stole" the election... but the multi-year-marathon of not actually showing what they are does indeed have me annoyed and indignant. So, I trot out a couple reminders of how things actually happened, and you (again!) rather than dealing with the facts you say you want, simply go ad hominem. Not that I'm surprised, of course - since that's all there is when you don't have facts.
Re:Please put on your RDFEG for testing purposes.
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So how do the lesser-paid professors, cleaners etc. at that same school manage to live?
Roomates. Hyundai sedans. Little or no savings. Less dinner out, no new flat panel TV. In other words, pretty much like most people. The real thing is having fewer dependents.
So all the reports of widespread voting irregularites and voter suppression in a state governed by the GW's brother were all just a teensy-weeensy co-ink-a-dince?
"All" of the reports? Nice sweeping, and fact-less generality, there. Show the way in which the governor of that state controls the local county election boards, and we'll have more to talk about. Show the way in which the governor of that state caused the news networks to "call" that election in Gore's favor before the western-most (and least likely to vote for Gore) part of the state had even closed their polls, and we'll have more to talk about. Ooops - that worked against, Bush, not for him. The "suppression" of votes is the cry of the loser. The people who were screaming about it have a real hard time, when asked for details, what they're actually talking about. "Can't be a felon" isn't suppressing the vote, any more than dead family members voting Democratic in Ohio are legitimate votes. If you think only one side in these issues can claim "irregularities" (real or not), you're completely wrong.
The 2004 Ohio election results have recently been ordered to be held and not destroyed, since they might record yet another reversal of GW's fortunes.
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The moral is you need to constantly remind your kids that game physics != physics
Which is why kids need to do more actual physical things. You can probably tell from my sig that I hunt. Let me tell you: nothing takes the video-game-ness out of kid's head faster than actually tending the the carcass of a deer he's just shot. A large mammal, like a deer, with a rib cage and organs more or less laid out just like your own, dead by your own hand on its way to your freezer for some truly fine dining later in the season, is one hell of a wake-up call. Unless you're just wired really, really wrong, looking right at mortality like that makes you more thoughtful about life, a more careful person generally, and less tolerant of dangerous idiots (with guns or cars, regardless).
Kids should sometimes do a ride-along with paramedics, volunteer in a hospital, kill their own burger meat - all of that stuff will make life much more precious to them, and their driving (or gun handling) will be far less reckless than it might otherwise be. I'm sure I'll get flamed by people who can't connect "killing your own burger" with "reverence for life," but trust me, it works. Mmmmm, venison. And a nice Cabernet. Maybe some roast peppers, and a piece of cheese with a little home-made bread.
First, thanks for a thoughtful and verbose response (I'm one of the oddballs that actually appreciates lenghty prose if that's what it takes to make a point, and the hell with people that have too little attention span to cope with it). Um, which brings me to attention span. Which brings me right back around to the intellectual stagnation that I'm worried about, and which we're both talking about.
I agree with you that we (as a culture, as a species) have the ability to adapt to change. In fact, the introduction of technology (fire, antibiotics, wheels, Glocks, airplanes, levers, pointy sticks, refridgeration) has all, on balance, made things better.
But my concern is that we're now at a point where muddleheadedness has greater consequences than it ever has before. Things (good, and bad) are happening very quickly, now. Look at cancer research, and look at Iran.
We've got to be on our collective game, intellectually, to tackle things that require a large and abstract view of how to deal with other cultures that are experiencing the technology shocks in uglier ways, and lashing out. But now, that can happen with truly dire consequences, and it's possible that being intellectually weak, as a culture, is going to set us up for a difficult-to-come-back-from set of circumstances. That's a lot to take away from "playing video games for too many hours a day," but I can feel the dots connecting, here and there. I'm just lamenting the lack of a true celebration of well-roundedness in the broader culture, that's all. Worried it will come back to bite us worse than usual given the wider state of affairs.
Caligulazingbling. Whatevar. Talk to the hand, cuz the face ain't listenin'. Mod parent lame-o-rama. ;)
Thanks for playing!
Let's see... *puts proper hat back on*
Get off my lawn!
Aristocracies collapse when they lose touch with the people they are supposed to rule over. "Let them eat cake", "They hate us for our freedom".
Let's see now. First, it's pretty apparent that Marie Antoinette never actually said that. Not that she wasn't idlely rich and non-productive (other than as a celebrity - still a busy occupation today, in a different form), but she was probably more sheltered and ignorant of the average peasant's plight than actually contemptuous of them. Read up here.
And as for the "they hate us for our freedom" concept. Well, that's actually correct. In fact, the architects of events like 9/11 and their spokesmen frequently take to the air expressly to remind us that's true. They refer to democracy as "un-Islamic" and speak in terms of beheading any that show up at the polls, etc. Democracy is exactly the freedom we hold most dear, because it's through that structure that we create and defend the rest of them (um, like allowing women to work, or their daughters to read and write). Have you not ever watched any of the footage from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan? People (like mothers teaching their daughters to read) were shot in public at lunchtime exactly for pursuing those freedoms that we consider inviolate. The west is built upon those freedoms, and stands for them. People who hate the intrusion of annoying trends like the right to vote (or read) into the medieval theocracy they want to re-instate at the point of a gun do hate those freedoms and those that seek to establish and defend them elsewhere.
And you know what? It probably wouldn't matter so much, except the people who want the world to live in that mysoginistic, backwards way are also the ones that realize their neighborhood is full of oil they can sell in Europe, Asia, India, and the Americas, etc. That allows the people willing to kill to posses those fields to have the cash with which to further entrench their jihaddist/wahabbist ways. And when part of that activity includes running training camps for thousands of militants, some of which then kill thousands of people going to work in the morning in New York and Washington, then you get the conflict right up there on the surface where you have to call it what it is: a conflict between world views. One that, to stick with the same example, thinks your wife or daughter is property that should be kept illiterate, and one that does not.
Or it could be the 500 Years of selective inbreeding of the idle aristocracy that made them loony and frail, not the fact they were entertained as kids. ;)
Well, that too! But, we're doing almost the same thing there, as well (in terms of the wider population). There's a reason we used to have "hardy peasant stock" - if they weren't hardy, they didn't survive. We're now able to bear kids and further reproduce even in presence of previously self-selecting frailties. No, I'm not preaching eugenics or anything - just observing that a lot of DNA is getting passed along (or even amplified) in direct opposition to what would make for smarter, healthier, better-adapted populations. At least, in the context of the article we're talking about. Unless we also breed along the lines that would make the obesity of idleness either not set it (or not be so deadly), or breed in a way that would make sensory overload and ADHD an asset, rather than toxic to productivity - well, you get my point, I hope. I got yours! It used to be inbreeding (as you say), and now it's de-evolution through the suppression of natural selection mechanisms.
But isn't that the point of technology? If we had machines to do everything for us, replicators to give us anything we wanted, and so on, how is that ruining any generation? We could spend our lives being artists, researching history, or anything else we *want* to do without fear of starving or putting up with a mean old boss. We're so tantalizingly close to this, I can't imagine why anyone would want to go back. Just a few short generations, and humanity will have the means to do essentially whatever it wants.
Unless we also have a way to suppress millions of years of mammalian (in general) and advanced primate (specifically) evolution, some kid born three or four generations from now that still has his pointy eye-teeth, predator's senses and sensibilities, and pack-protecting urges - but who has no outlet for any of that - is going to do exactly what I think a lot of them are doing today: go slightly crazy. You can't take every (or even most) adolescent's nearly superhuman gusto for life and channel it entirely into art, research, or even mountain climbing. I suppose that challenging, competitive sports area good outlet (or would be, if we weren't squashing them into one big "everyone is special, everyone's the best" festival right at the ages when actually striving against some fairly low-risk adversity is hugely helpful, developmentally).
Essentially: unless you change human nature (biologically, I'm talking - behavior and perception as heavily influenced by our DNA), making the world like one big nursery/playground for adults is going to produce ever more sociopathic human BSODs. I wouldn't rant about it, but I think, with a little perspective, now, I actually see it happening. The challenge, in the scenario you describe, is to generate sufficient adventure and adversity to scratch all of those primal itches without needing to fend off religious fanatics or killer luddites in hijacked planes in order to flex that bit of deep-seated programming.
you simply CANNOT dismiss the fact that, even when the top of one of the falling towers starts to fall at an angle, away from the rest of the building, somehow it spontaneously turns to dust and debris instead of falling as one chunk
Try me. Watch carefully: I hereby dismiss it.
Easy, huh? You should note that you're blythely passing along things that make your point sound reasonable without (and you don't even need an "open" mind, here, just more facts) taking the reality into account.
The whole "turned to dust" canard is a great example. Sure, from a mile away on camera it might look that way, but every one of those steel beams stayed in one piece the whole way down. More to the point, though: the building's facade was made of gypsom and any sufficient distortion of the structure to which is was mounted (you know, say, like collapsing) shattered it, just as you'd expect. The entire structure was made of comparatively lightweight materials, and was essentially a hollow tube. What would have been amazing would have been some sideways force that would have caused the structure(s) to do anything but move in accordance to gravity. With the support structure heated and stressed into being useless, there was nothing to translate the downward force of the mass of the upper part of the building outwards in any particular direction. The vertical beams buckled outwards, and the mass of each floor above just kept sandwiching up, right onto the structure below.
As countless engineers have pointed out, the reason you've never seen this sort of failure before is because no building like this has ever experienced what happened. No building of that size has ever been destroyed intentionally or otherwise. But what the fire and stress did to the middle of the building was exactly a demolition crew would have done: weaken the centeral supporting structures all at the same time.
Why is it people use the phrase "open your mind" when they mean "take what I'm saying, however ridiculous, on faith, because it makes my loony position feel better by having more people not point out how wrong I am, which takes the fun out of trying to blame my idealogical opponents for something that was done by other people entirely, whose sociopathic outlook I can't personally grasp, so I'd rather project a fictional one on my local political opponents?" Why is that, anyway?
My daughter has a computer (a Macintosh running Mac OS 9). The only games she has are educational with no killing. She has a simple word processor, a complex drawing program, and other programs that create, not simulate destruction. We use Tivo Kidzone to record only programs with positive messages. So far, she doesn't watch much at the neighbor's kid's houses.
Does they know where chicken comes from? I'm not being sarcastic, here, but you're sort of setting them up for a bit of a shock the first time they turn on the news, or someone they know has a friend killed in a carjacking or something. It's not that you want that sort of unhappy reality foisted on them more than necessary, but being able to have a level-headed perspective about it is pretty important, isn't it? An informed one?
I wonder, sometimes, if the people that say if they only had a chance to have nice, quiet talk and some creative playtime with some sociopath, that that person would suddenly decide to stop being a destructive sociopath. I'm not saying that your daughters should steel themselves to deal with sociopaths, but it would be nice if they went into the world understanding that someone has to deal with them, and to respect what that involves. That way they won't resent paying taxes to hire police officers, etc. I know, sounds like a stretch - but I wouldn't mention it if I didn't perceive the trend in my own neighborhood's kids, and feel obliged to comment on it. Seems like in our area, we have either completely "street-wise" thug-wannabees, or completely sheltered kids that will be completely at the mercy of the other group once they all get to the same school. It's frustrating, that's for sure. Good on you for the gardening and dogs, though - that's stuff every kid should do and see, their entire lives.
Every generation has some aspect that is supposedly going to bring utter ruination to the future. And every generation manages to cope. I think we will be allright as long as parents bring some healthy balance to thier kids activities. When has that concept ever been new and fresh? It has always been that way.
But how many generations had their kids sitting in front of, essentially, puppet-shows (or some other analog equivalent) all day, every day? In fact, one could argue that the loonier offspring of the "idle" artistocracy and their highly entertained (but not so very challeneged, physically, etc) kids were the precursor to what we're seeing now, but across much larger swaths of the society: flacid minds, a sense of entitlement, no sense of causality or critical thinking... sort of the Caligulazation of a much wider population.
Basically, the standard of living for most of modern western society is now so high that most of us are living like (or better than) the aristrocracy of the not very distant past.
Yes, we all assume that our current generation's kids are the ones that will wreck civilization, but there's actually something TO this one, I think, at least a bit.
I admit I'd not heard of the 'twin towers' before 9/11, but up until reading your post I'd assumed that the name implied that that there were, well, two of them.
Are you saying there were 7? The news reports didn't seem to bear that out - there were clearly two in the pictures.
The "World Trade Center" was complex of multiple buildings. The two large towers (buildings 1 and 2, the "twin towers") were the most visible part of the complex. When they collapsed, the enormous crush of falling and flaming debris destroyed and damaged many surrounding buldings. Building number 7 in the complex (which I referred to simply as "7" in my comment, since I thought that was obvious, in context, given the comment I was responding to) was badly damaged as the big buildings next to it collapsed, and had a hot fire burning in it for a while, and then it collapsed a few hours later.
Many crazy folks who were initially hoping to convince others that the main two towers had been brought down as part of some sort of inside job have had their theories solidly debunked. So, they're now focusing on the collapse of the damaged #7 (which has received less critical review for the reasons I mentioned in my last comment) as some sort of last-gasp way to prop up their conspiracy theories. No, they have no basis in fact, but these people became so invested in their fabrication that when countless studies of the collapse of the two large towers dismissed their craziness, they had to find something else to keep talking about (their only alternative being to admit that they were wrong).
The best explanation is that one of the main structural beams (vertical, like the trunk of a tree) was both physically struck by some of the massive, high-speed beams that flew outwards from one of the larger collapsing towers, and was further weakened by the substantial fire that raged in 7 (don't forget the likely contributing impact of 40,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored in tanks and pipes in that building's generator systems). The best models show that weakening that central support structure, and its eventual failure from the torqued stress, would have it collapse in the middle of the building, and pull the walls right in on top of it: exactly as we've all seen happened.
Just because people can score more political points among an audience/demographic that's just as likely to also accept "aliens did it" as an explanation doesn't mean that the vanilla, stress-and-heat-damaged-steel-beams is "on par" with teams of explosive-planting spooks sneaking around the entire WTC in concert with Al Queda's hijacking crews. Do you have any idea how many people would be involved in such a thing? Suggesting that it was deliberately blown up is right up there with insisting on a fake Apollo program. The far more interesting question (not, "why did the central beams in that building fail in a fire and debris path they way it did") is "what do the people who prop up such BS theories have to gain by promoting them?" It's exactly like those people who, despite a decent background in science, cling to the "intelligent design" nonsense: they know it's BS, but they're doing their damndest to promote a BS concept because they imagine that it serves their idealogical goals (to change the political landscape in someway, at the school board level or otherwise).
The reason you haven't seen the same millions of dollars invested in studying the WTC7 collapse is because it was plainly the byproduct of the tower collapses, surrounding damage, and fires. By demonstrating that the main event (the collapse of the big towers from impact and fire stresses), we can rule out the larger conspiracy nut-case story in the first place. That's been done, so any head-scratching about the WTC7 collapse can be left to architecture and engineering grad students that get grant money and don't have some addle-brained political axe to grind.
How they just 'fell straight down'...isn't that a scientific and physical miracle??
Well, OK, that's a nerdy topic, though a proper nerd wouldn't have any need to invoke "miracles," and would simply say "not immediately how I would have thought something like that would happen."
You can read a pretty good discussion of the collapse here. The article helps you understand why the "hollow" design of the buildings, and the fact that the gypsom facade allowed the jet fuel to spill largely into the core of the building and thoroughly ignite all sorts of material already in the building (like untold tons of paper). The cross beams would have started weakening very quickly at the temperatures involved. What would have really been astounding would have been if one or both towers actually toppled to the side. The floors above the impact points did tilt some as the supports gave way, but that became a non-issue once all that mass started sandwiching down.
But since the 1920s the kinds of guns that are legal for American citizens to own haven't had a chance of impacting the outcome of any real war.
In the case of a war against (or involving) the US military, you're of course correct. But if (as the thread mentions) we were talking about a "civil" war, in the sense of opposing sectors of the general population slugging it out, then believe me that a nice deer rifle will make you plenty dead. Now, it's a little hard to imagine such a conflict since, despite the rabid, rancorous divide over some policy issues, there aren't too many things that would have the people in, say, Pennsylvania, deciding that it's time to head a few miles south and wipe out the population of a town in northern Maryland. Of course, the people from PA would win, since the people in MD would still be fumbling with their mandated trigger locks.
The only thing that I think could possibly turn that ugly would be, say, a seriously inflammatory immigration incident, or perhaps some unthinkably ugly thing involving Dearborn, Michigan. Who knows. But the north vs. south type just isn't going to find some modern equivalent in "red" vs. "blue." In the more commonly fantasized uprising sort of action, you're completely correct that the military (or even just the Guard in one state) would be way too much for your average gun owner to face. Yes, I know Red Dawn was a documentary, but we repelled that invasion already. I'm waiting for the sequel: Refried Bean Dawn.
... the main vehicle their late husband had for actually using his money was a Chase-issued Circuit City Rewards Card. So, if they don't get this resolved quickly, it will be resolved for them.
This is slashdot. Please do not cite movie-style 'head of state asks-without-asking for an assination mission' analogies, or refer to centuries-old British church smack-downs. If you can't describe this in terms of chair throwing, iPod-killing, or some form of infringement, the message is lost.
It's not about it costing them their profits, it's about whether there's room within their budget, given their profits. Small businesses (say, those with revenue of two million dollars per year) that have a gross margin of %15 (which is very high, in terms of competitive commodity-ish products sold online) will gross $300,000. Out of that comes wages, insurance, hosting costs, financial fees, lawyers, and a jillion other things. Let's say you've got 4 employees, and their gross wages and unemployment insurance expenses and whatnot are $50k each. That's $200,000 right there. Out of the $100,000 that's left, you've got to pay your corporate taxes, rent, everything else.
A good makeover of an e-commerce web presence that's tied to back office account, drop-shippers, etc., is going to cost several thousand dollars. At least. That probably kills any breathing room left in the budget, and then some. Do the math, and you'll see.
So what was your objection, again?
You make a good business case for a sound web content/dev strategy. But that's not what we're talking about, is it? We're talking about being told by a 30%-earning lawyer that you HAVE to do it a certain way, whether or not you feel like going through possibly tens of thousands of HTML-rich product descriptions (gee, many of which may actually have been written some years back, using nested tables or other things you wouldn't do today). It doesn't matter what some web operator's reason is for leaving his site the way it is, and it doesn't matter how well they understand the impact (SEO-wise, etc) that a different/better design might have. The real issue that you're bringing the government into how a private merchant presents, say, pictures of their products to private customers.
Then, finally, there's the Montgomery bus service.
If you can't tell the difference between suing a small business to force them to spend perhaps many, many thousands of dollars to support a possibly non-existent customer demographic that they weren't looking to sell to in the first place (for better or worse - it's the merchant's call as to how it sizes up its possible customer flavors) and a taxpayer funded municipal service (like busses), then perhpas it's easier to understand why you sound the way you do.
But if there are three businesses that sell a given good or service, and none of them finds it profitable to serve people with disabilities, then what happens?
Nothing. Because if doing that business isn't profitable, then by definition, doing that business loses the company money. Why not simply say the company has to "do the business" of giving out cash to anyone who says they're poor that week? Businesses don't pursue activities that lose them money, or they'd go out of business, and then you wouldn't have anyone to tell what to do. Some things they do sell turn out not to be profitable, or some marketing approaches involve "loss leader" type items... but that's not the same as being told, by lawyers who get rich off of the telling, that you have to spend $X to make it easier for a very small number of people to do some business with you that might add up to $X/10, or possibly much less.
If there's money to be made selling a particular thing to a particular demographic, someone will step up. That's how the market works. You're talking about running private businesses like local branch offices of a government entitlement program.
BTW, your race baiting nonsense is complete crap, and you know it. Being blind can logistically prevent you from actually using the facilities of a business. Being black carries no such practical burden. Your race doesn't prevent you from reaching an elevator button, presenting cash at a register, or reading the labels of what's on a shelf (or a web browser). Being blind, or in a wheelchair, etc., though can. A business that can't invest in re-making their business around a small-to-non-existent disabled clientelle is not the same as putting up a "No African-Descent Shoppers Allowed" sign.
Come out and say what you really mean: you can't distinguish between skin color difference and seeing vs. blindness. Or, you're just grinding this axe because you think that the government should be able to use private businesses (and those businesses' own money) to run what amount to entitlement programs for select groups of other people.
Likewise, that should be the company's business decision to go after the African-descent community or to disregard it - it should not be required by law.
Um... what are you saying, here... that those businesses that actively go out and cultivate a customer base that fits the black/urban audience, and that pays to advertise expressly to that audience (say, on BET, or in an NAACP newsletter, or at an "historically black college," etc) should have the law look at and influence what they're doing? If I want to start a business that only means something to people that can see, should the law require me to invest in making my sales tools useful to people that cannot, by definition, use my products - and if I don't, essentially I get my business shut down? If I'm in such a business, I should be thrilled to death if my competition spends a lot of money preparing their web sites for use by people that cannot possibly make use of their products - because that's probably a poor use of overhead, and hurts my competition to do it.
A normal website for a typical small business can be redesigned completely from scratch in a week by a part-time employee of medium intelligence who taught himself HTML and CSS in a couple of shifts. It just isn't a big deal.
Really? I've got customers that have a staff of, say, three or four people. Some of them have web sites with thousands of bits/pages/records of information that would require attention if they were forced to comply with these standards. Say, a small special-order retailer with over 10,000 items. Sure, most of the raw product data is coming from a database (prices, etc), but so is the hand-written HTML that carefully describes every item... often including images that serve as backgrounds behind other design elements, or multiple roll-over images with complex scripting, etc. It's not necessarily as easy as you imply - and for operations like that, it's prohibitive. Completely.
Smaller businesses can take years to squeeze the cost of a total site re-design out of their profits. A large, sprawling site that's been growing for years may not lend itself to anything other than a major piece of work. That's not to say the business shouldn't do it for other reasons (like SEO), but if they want to alienate some customers because for them, that's less expensive than a big IT project, that should be their call. Not a lawyers. I can't believe that any business not in the mood to do this doesn't have competition that is.
Of course, I smell some consulting blood in the water, here. On the other hand, one of my customers sells eyewear for sports. Somehow I don't think that redesigning their site for the blind is going to be high on their list. The irony is, they can still get sued anyway. Brilliant.
I think you wanted LittleGreenIdiotBalls...it's the blog down the hall on the right. Your echo will please you more there. This is Slashdot. We're interested in facts, here.
Exactly why I mentioned the lack of any facts in the comment I responded to. It's just fine to refer to "all the irregularities" that someone says "stole" the election... but the multi-year-marathon of not actually showing what they are does indeed have me annoyed and indignant. So, I trot out a couple reminders of how things actually happened, and you (again!) rather than dealing with the facts you say you want, simply go ad hominem. Not that I'm surprised, of course - since that's all there is when you don't have facts.
So how do the lesser-paid professors, cleaners etc. at that same school manage to live?
Roomates. Hyundai sedans. Little or no savings. Less dinner out, no new flat panel TV. In other words, pretty much like most people. The real thing is having fewer dependents.
So all the reports of widespread voting irregularites and voter suppression in a state governed by the GW's brother were all just a teensy-weeensy co-ink-a-dince?
"All" of the reports? Nice sweeping, and fact-less generality, there. Show the way in which the governor of that state controls the local county election boards, and we'll have more to talk about. Show the way in which the governor of that state caused the news networks to "call" that election in Gore's favor before the western-most (and least likely to vote for Gore) part of the state had even closed their polls, and we'll have more to talk about. Ooops - that worked against, Bush, not for him. The "suppression" of votes is the cry of the loser. The people who were screaming about it have a real hard time, when asked for details, what they're actually talking about. "Can't be a felon" isn't suppressing the vote, any more than dead family members voting Democratic in Ohio are legitimate votes. If you think only one side in these issues can claim "irregularities" (real or not), you're completely wrong.
The 2004 Ohio election results have recently been ordered to be held and not destroyed, since they might record yet another reversal of GW's fortunes.
"Another?"