My mom and I had this discussion/argument over winter break. She was trying to say how my little brother lied to her about the contents of Vice City when he was 13 (he's now 17) and if she'd had any idea what was in it she never would have let him get it at that age, etc etc. She was getting all indignant about how he deceived her, was such a sneaky kid, etc.
I asked if she saw the rating on the game, and she said yes, but he said that he'd played it at friends' houses and told her it was just about blah blah blah... I cut her off and asked, if he'd pointed out an R-rated movie, claiming he'd seen it at a friends' house and it wasn't that bad, would she just believe that and let him watch it with no supervision? Well of course not, she said! Luckily, at that point she had the sense to get a bit sheepish and let me rant to her about how the video game industry wouldn't be under such fire from lawmakers if parents would pay even a small amount of attention to the freaking ratings like they do to movie ratings.
I actually remember the incident in question, because I was home for a vacation soon after he got the game. I remember my sister and I watching him do something involving prostitutes in the game, and running to our mom saying "Uhhhhh.... why are you letting him play this?" and her original indignation when she realized what was going on, and the original version of the same argument wherein I pointed out to her THEN that it was an M-rated game and it was her own fault...
In our house, it was generally plain corn flakes or plain rice krispies. We were allowed sugar cereals only once in a blue moon, as a treat. My mom disdained other moms who let their kids eat them. Once when I was four, I asked my great-aunt what that white stuff was and could I taste it - she let me taste the sugar, and I said "Wow, that's really good, I hope my mom lets me have some of that sometime!"
End result? In college I was OBSESSED with sugary cereals because they'd been so taboo as a kid. I'd live on cocoa krispies for days at a time, literally. I still buy about half sugary cereals and half high-fiber cereals.
Every parenting decision can backfire. What works for one kid doesn't work for their twin brother. In the end, it's rare to actually screw a kid up so much that they don't manage to become a functioning member of society.
As another poster pointed out, it depends on what you accept as evidence. If you define evidence only as a highly-controlled experiment that has been reproduced multiple times, then no, there is no evidence. But in everyday life (and even in science sometimes, shhh, don't tell anyone!) sometimes we accept other things as evidence. If you saw a rare bird that is only sighted in your state about once a year, and took pictures of it and everything, likely that would be enough evidence for yourself that you saw that bird. If you post those pics online, they may not be enough evidence for someone else - you might have photoshopped them, or if there are no identifying landmarks then you may have taken them in another state where the bird is more common.
Now, would the fact that someone online doesn't believe you make you question whether or not you saw the rare bird? You have a photo that you remember taking in your own backyard. YOU can see that it's your own backyard. You know you don't even own photoshop. Of course you're still going to believe that you saw the damn bird. You've got enough evidence for yourself, but possibly not enough evidence to convince anyone else.
Maybe not everyone needs a "chain of logical arguments" to convince them that God exists? Or of other things - I don't have any logical arguments to convince me that my husband loves me. Logically, it's just as likely that having and raising children is very very important to him, and he believes that I will be an excellent mother, and so he wants to take good care of me and make me happy so that I will help him raise children. That could, potentially, be indistinguishable from him actually loving me, but still I believe that he does love me. Amazingly enough, being a scientist does not automatically meant that I must be 100% logical in all things - I am a human scientist, after all, not Vulcan.
You also do not have to believe "you may not question that" to believe "He just exists." You can easily believe that you can question it all you want - but a) questioning it doesn't make it less true and b) the fact that you can't get good answers to your questions right now doesn't make it less true. Maybe someday we'll know the answers to those questions, maybe not. Maybe our piddly little brains just aren't capable of comprehending whatever it is that created God, so we can physically never know.
Personally, I'd rather have a few more kids smoke for a couple years to be cool and then be able to quit at any moment once they're over it than the current situation. How many people would continue to smoke past the peer-pressure stage (except maybe at the occasional party, etc) if they weren't at all addicted to it?
Hm, no handle for me. I'm in Firefox 2.0 on OS 10.3.9. Maybe this only works in windows FF.
It would really help if the right half of the drop-down weren't taken up by the word "Sugges..." on the first line, which for some reason also creates a big blank space on all the lines below it. They couldn't just put that as the first line, if they really need to point out that they're suggesting things to me?
I would find the drop-down suggestions a lot more useful if I could read more than the first two words. As I type in, for example "Chicago dog boarding" all I see is a list of "Chicago do... " I'm sure there must be a way to make the search space take up more of the toolbar (I don't really need that much room in the URL space, since most URLs that long are nonsense), but I don't know how and I don't really want my browser window to be the width of my screen.
It wasn't so much that she wouldn't let me do the Student Council stuff. But I DIDN'T do it, then she accused me of doing it just b/c I was playing with fonts, then I SHOWED her that I wasn't doing it, then she still told the SC teacher that I HAD done it. All because she apparently didn't realize that I could change the fonts on my stories (for her), not just on the flyers I wanted to work on.
The poor teacher finally took us to one side and explained that some kids where going to fail that class if we kept it up.
Heh, that is classic. As much as some people whine that having different levels of classes is elitist, it really does make it easier on the teachers.
I believed it because it reminded me too much of what happened when I was in high school...
WARNING: PERSONAL ANECDOTE AHEAD!
In my English class (circa 1995 or 1996), we were in the computer lab typing up stories. Having finished writing and typing my stories with about half the class time left, I asked the teacher if I could use the time to work on some flyers for a Student Council event. She said no. So I sat there staring at my finished stories, and started playing with the fonts and font colors on them for something to do.
The teacher came over and yelled at me for working on the flyers she told me not to work on. I explained to her that this wasn't a flyer, this was my story I wrote for her, see the story there on the screen?
The next day after student council (which was a class at my HS called Civil Leadership), the teacher wanted to talk to me. It seems my English teacher (who was friends with the SC teacher) had told her that I was doing student council work in her class after she told me not to! When I explained the situation to the SC bitch teacher, she said that I "shouldn't put myself in situations where my integrity could be questioned." WTF?
I wound up getting a B in SC that semester. I also got a B in English, because after that incident I stopped turning in any homework. Luckily, I got a different English teacher the next semester, and those were the only 2 Bs I got in high school.
I can better make my own informed decisions vis-a-vis said information if I know who is communicating it to me.
This is true. And how often do you know who wrote a particular Wikipedia article? You don't know if that article you just read is by someone with a PhD on the topic, some college freshman who read one book on it for a paper and now considers himself an expert, or someone with a vested interest in making sure you have a particular opinion on the topic.
I'm not saying it's good that the government is trying to use the same lame astroturfing tactics as Sony. But that's the way Wikipedia works, and you can never 100% trust that someone who knows what they're talking about wrote any of it. I'm one of those that thinks they'd be better off if they at least gave *some* weight to contributions by those who can prove expertise of some kind, because of this very fact - though I also see the benefit of allowing anonymous edits.
You don't sign an agreement every time you enter. You sign once, and then eat there whenever you want all school year (or however long, dunno how long the agreements last). A lot of research is done in front of cameras - if you leave the cameras there long enough, people forget they're there. I do educational research, and you always go into the classroom a few days early and start recording (or pretending to record). By the time you're ready to collect your data, the kids have forgotten the camera's there 90% of the time. Sure, it's not perfect, but people generally can't keep their guard up through an entire class/meal, let alone several in a row once the camera has faded into the back of their mind. And if the cameras aren't visible, even better.
The fact is, behavioral science in a tightly-controlled laboratory can only tell us so much about how people function out in the real world. Behavioral/cognitive scientists are starting to realize this, and looking for better ways to research real-world behavior in a way that's decently reliable and valid. There are tradeoffs.
I think what's really at question here is whether this could cause harm. How mentally unstable would a person have to be to start with for this to send them over the edge? What if it blocks someone's ability to hear someone/something coming up behind them and they're injured? Or you're driving, your window is down, and it blocks your ability to hear another car honking and leads to an accident?
It's less like shining a flashlight in your direction and more like shining it directly into your eyes while you walk down the street.
I guess Target is doing this because of added holiday traffic. My husband and I went there last weekend and bought a bunch of toys for Toys for Tots. Their security guard asked to see my receipt, and I smiled and kinda waved it in his general direction and said "Sure, it's right here!" on my way out. He "demanded" again, and when I didn't slow down he actually got on his little walkie-talkie! We heard him say something to the effect of "...a customer that won't show me her receipt. The lady in the brown coat."
After we got back to the car, we were laughing about it. Who was he calling? His backup? He's the Target security guy! His backup is busy stocking DVDs! At least at Best Buy when they ask to see my receipt and I say "No thank you!" and keep walking, they generally just give up. (I didn't say "No thank you" in this case b/c I happened to have the receipt in the hand that was nearest the guard.)
If you're buying paperback instead of hardback, they often cost about $10-2 brand-new. I find it hard to believe that a used bookstore could sell them for the same price used. Also, library sales, garage sales, and thrift stores often have books for under $1 each, regardless of the quality or content.
But that's not what the study showed. The study showed that the people in the panic-inducing situation were NOT able to perceive the faster-moving clock, only the normally-moving one.
Though I agree with the above poster - if you know the situation isn't actually dangerous, it probably doesn't invoke quite the same adrenaline rush as when you actually think your life is in danger.
Or what if he wants to keep them around for when his kids are old enough to read them? Sure, some nonfiction will be outdated, but some won't be (or will be more interesting for its historical value) and fiction never goes out of style.
And checking them out from the library doesn't work so well if you ever move. And no guarantees you'll move somewhere where the library has that book. And if it's out of print by then, they won't be getting it.
You contradict yourself in your own post. First, you claim that 3500 books must cost $70K. Then you point out that you could get 3500 books for way cheaper by buying used, etc - where does this guy say he got every book new, and in hardcover for that matter? (Since most paperbacks are half price or less off the hardcover.) Actually he says right in TFA that he and his wife have "a great love of used bookstores." So they probably typically spend more like $5/book average, not $20. That's $17,500 - assuming he's been accumulating books for 20 years, that's under a thousand dollars a year. That's like, a nice laptop every two years, or a new digital camera plus an iPod.
Well, hey, judging from the number of people who come into bookstores looking for "a book I saw on TV... It was blue..." I'd say that must be a popular system.
If you didn't like the novel much, then there's good reason to get rid of it. However, if you liked it enough that you might actually have a conversation about it with people, you might want to actually flip through it to point things out, etc. Plus, just "knowing how it ends" doesn't mean you won't ever want to reread it - there's more to enjoy than just the ending, at least in a good book.
I've wondered the same thing. The only danger I can see is if Pepsi gets wind of the break, and does a mega-blitz of its own right then. But even so, I know people who are pretty hardcore for one or the other already (thanks in part, I'm sure, to marketing), plus campuses and restaurants with exclusive contracts, so they'd never lose all their sales.
You haven't seen all the Brain Age ads on TV? (Starts with a guy forgetting his high school buddy's name.) Or that new vision-focus-whatever one? True, those are DS, not Wii, but Nintendo *is* marketing some of its games to casual gamers.
This "ticket scalping" like attitude is pretty new to a lot of consumers...
And my entire point is that it's not. Not just is it not new, it's also not rare (see subject line) - which implies that a LOT OF PEOPLE have experienced it before. I think that you grossly underestimate the frequency at which it happened in the past, to think that this is new to most people. My mom could barely send email in 1998, yet she was the driving force behind our Beanie Baby craziness. The Wii thing is old hat to soccer moms everywhere.
Btw, stores now have those policies because of the problems with Barbies and Hot Wheels and such in the late 90s. I'm sure some stores had them before, but when eBay became big suddenly employees of Target and Toys R Us were eBay millionaires (ok, thousandaires).
Did you read what I said about the Barbies? STORE EMPLOYEES were grabbing them BEFORE they hit the shelves to scalp on eBay. eBay has been around for over a decade, you know. It was around for Beanie Babies - I sold $2000 worth of them (original cost about $250) in the summer of 1998 to fund a family trip to Disney World. Scalping toys is NOT NEW. Even Cabbage Patch Kids were sold in newspaper classifieds for $200 each back in 1984. eBay just made it easier.
In fact, if you look at when eBay really took off, there's probably an argument to be made that eBay became wildly successful because of beanie babies, not the other way around.
Not new, not rare.
on
Where are Wii?
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· Score: 2, Informative
There are few consumer goods, toys if you will, that this applies to. This "ticket scalping" like attitude is pretty new to a lot of consumers and of course they're going to blame the company directly.
It's neither new nor rare. It happens almost every Christmas to one "big toy," it's just that it's rarely something the Slashdot crowd cares about. All the way back to Tickle Me Elmo over a decade ago - and the year after that, it was the Barbie Fashion Designer CD-ROM, and then something new nearly every year since. Actually, Tickle Me Elmo was only the start of the most recent wave - ask anyone who had a kid in the early 80's how much they paid for a Cabbage Patch Kid doll, and that was pre-eBay.
Outside of Christmas, there have been plenty of "collectible" toys that have been scalped - look at Beanie Babies and Pokemon cards. I'm a Barbie collector, and in the late 90's the hobby became trendy for a bit. Employees of Target, Wal-Mart, etc would buy up dolls as soon as the boxes were open and put them on eBay before actual shoppers even got a chance at them. My dad has actually done the same for Hot Wheels.
Trust me, for most of the parents looking for a Wii, this isn't a new experience. It's just that this time, maybe it's something they'd like to play with, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I asked if she saw the rating on the game, and she said yes, but he said that he'd played it at friends' houses and told her it was just about blah blah blah... I cut her off and asked, if he'd pointed out an R-rated movie, claiming he'd seen it at a friends' house and it wasn't that bad, would she just believe that and let him watch it with no supervision? Well of course not, she said! Luckily, at that point she had the sense to get a bit sheepish and let me rant to her about how the video game industry wouldn't be under such fire from lawmakers if parents would pay even a small amount of attention to the freaking ratings like they do to movie ratings.
I actually remember the incident in question, because I was home for a vacation soon after he got the game. I remember my sister and I watching him do something involving prostitutes in the game, and running to our mom saying "Uhhhhh.... why are you letting him play this?" and her original indignation when she realized what was going on, and the original version of the same argument wherein I pointed out to her THEN that it was an M-rated game and it was her own fault...
End result? In college I was OBSESSED with sugary cereals because they'd been so taboo as a kid. I'd live on cocoa krispies for days at a time, literally. I still buy about half sugary cereals and half high-fiber cereals.
Every parenting decision can backfire. What works for one kid doesn't work for their twin brother. In the end, it's rare to actually screw a kid up so much that they don't manage to become a functioning member of society.
As another poster pointed out, it depends on what you accept as evidence. If you define evidence only as a highly-controlled experiment that has been reproduced multiple times, then no, there is no evidence. But in everyday life (and even in science sometimes, shhh, don't tell anyone!) sometimes we accept other things as evidence. If you saw a rare bird that is only sighted in your state about once a year, and took pictures of it and everything, likely that would be enough evidence for yourself that you saw that bird. If you post those pics online, they may not be enough evidence for someone else - you might have photoshopped them, or if there are no identifying landmarks then you may have taken them in another state where the bird is more common.
Now, would the fact that someone online doesn't believe you make you question whether or not you saw the rare bird? You have a photo that you remember taking in your own backyard. YOU can see that it's your own backyard. You know you don't even own photoshop. Of course you're still going to believe that you saw the damn bird. You've got enough evidence for yourself, but possibly not enough evidence to convince anyone else.
You also do not have to believe "you may not question that" to believe "He just exists." You can easily believe that you can question it all you want - but a) questioning it doesn't make it less true and b) the fact that you can't get good answers to your questions right now doesn't make it less true. Maybe someday we'll know the answers to those questions, maybe not. Maybe our piddly little brains just aren't capable of comprehending whatever it is that created God, so we can physically never know.
Personally, I'd rather have a few more kids smoke for a couple years to be cool and then be able to quit at any moment once they're over it than the current situation. How many people would continue to smoke past the peer-pressure stage (except maybe at the occasional party, etc) if they weren't at all addicted to it?
Oh really? Did you react that way to the other vaccines you were required to get to go to school? Odd, I haven't noticed any new craters...
It would really help if the right half of the drop-down weren't taken up by the word "Sugges..." on the first line, which for some reason also creates a big blank space on all the lines below it. They couldn't just put that as the first line, if they really need to point out that they're suggesting things to me?
I would find the drop-down suggestions a lot more useful if I could read more than the first two words. As I type in, for example "Chicago dog boarding" all I see is a list of "Chicago do... " I'm sure there must be a way to make the search space take up more of the toolbar (I don't really need that much room in the URL space, since most URLs that long are nonsense), but I don't know how and I don't really want my browser window to be the width of my screen.
The poor teacher finally took us to one side and explained that some kids where going to fail that class if we kept it up.
Heh, that is classic. As much as some people whine that having different levels of classes is elitist, it really does make it easier on the teachers.
WARNING: PERSONAL ANECDOTE AHEAD!
In my English class (circa 1995 or 1996), we were in the computer lab typing up stories. Having finished writing and typing my stories with about half the class time left, I asked the teacher if I could use the time to work on some flyers for a Student Council event. She said no. So I sat there staring at my finished stories, and started playing with the fonts and font colors on them for something to do.
The teacher came over and yelled at me for working on the flyers she told me not to work on. I explained to her that this wasn't a flyer, this was my story I wrote for her, see the story there on the screen?
The next day after student council (which was a class at my HS called Civil Leadership), the teacher wanted to talk to me. It seems my English teacher (who was friends with the SC teacher) had told her that I was doing student council work in her class after she told me not to! When I explained the situation to the SC bitch teacher, she said that I "shouldn't put myself in situations where my integrity could be questioned." WTF?
I wound up getting a B in SC that semester. I also got a B in English, because after that incident I stopped turning in any homework. Luckily, I got a different English teacher the next semester, and those were the only 2 Bs I got in high school.
This is true. And how often do you know who wrote a particular Wikipedia article? You don't know if that article you just read is by someone with a PhD on the topic, some college freshman who read one book on it for a paper and now considers himself an expert, or someone with a vested interest in making sure you have a particular opinion on the topic.
I'm not saying it's good that the government is trying to use the same lame astroturfing tactics as Sony. But that's the way Wikipedia works, and you can never 100% trust that someone who knows what they're talking about wrote any of it. I'm one of those that thinks they'd be better off if they at least gave *some* weight to contributions by those who can prove expertise of some kind, because of this very fact - though I also see the benefit of allowing anonymous edits.
The fact is, behavioral science in a tightly-controlled laboratory can only tell us so much about how people function out in the real world. Behavioral/cognitive scientists are starting to realize this, and looking for better ways to research real-world behavior in a way that's decently reliable and valid. There are tradeoffs.
It's less like shining a flashlight in your direction and more like shining it directly into your eyes while you walk down the street.
I guess Target is doing this because of added holiday traffic. My husband and I went there last weekend and bought a bunch of toys for Toys for Tots. Their security guard asked to see my receipt, and I smiled and kinda waved it in his general direction and said "Sure, it's right here!" on my way out. He "demanded" again, and when I didn't slow down he actually got on his little walkie-talkie! We heard him say something to the effect of "...a customer that won't show me her receipt. The lady in the brown coat."
After we got back to the car, we were laughing about it. Who was he calling? His backup? He's the Target security guy! His backup is busy stocking DVDs! At least at Best Buy when they ask to see my receipt and I say "No thank you!" and keep walking, they generally just give up. (I didn't say "No thank you" in this case b/c I happened to have the receipt in the hand that was nearest the guard.)
If you're buying paperback instead of hardback, they often cost about $10-2 brand-new. I find it hard to believe that a used bookstore could sell them for the same price used. Also, library sales, garage sales, and thrift stores often have books for under $1 each, regardless of the quality or content.
Though I agree with the above poster - if you know the situation isn't actually dangerous, it probably doesn't invoke quite the same adrenaline rush as when you actually think your life is in danger.
And checking them out from the library doesn't work so well if you ever move. And no guarantees you'll move somewhere where the library has that book. And if it's out of print by then, they won't be getting it.
You contradict yourself in your own post. First, you claim that 3500 books must cost $70K. Then you point out that you could get 3500 books for way cheaper by buying used, etc - where does this guy say he got every book new, and in hardcover for that matter? (Since most paperbacks are half price or less off the hardcover.) Actually he says right in TFA that he and his wife have "a great love of used bookstores." So they probably typically spend more like $5/book average, not $20. That's $17,500 - assuming he's been accumulating books for 20 years, that's under a thousand dollars a year. That's like, a nice laptop every two years, or a new digital camera plus an iPod.
Well, hey, judging from the number of people who come into bookstores looking for "a book I saw on TV... It was blue..." I'd say that must be a popular system.
If you didn't like the novel much, then there's good reason to get rid of it. However, if you liked it enough that you might actually have a conversation about it with people, you might want to actually flip through it to point things out, etc. Plus, just "knowing how it ends" doesn't mean you won't ever want to reread it - there's more to enjoy than just the ending, at least in a good book.
I've wondered the same thing. The only danger I can see is if Pepsi gets wind of the break, and does a mega-blitz of its own right then. But even so, I know people who are pretty hardcore for one or the other already (thanks in part, I'm sure, to marketing), plus campuses and restaurants with exclusive contracts, so they'd never lose all their sales.
You haven't seen all the Brain Age ads on TV? (Starts with a guy forgetting his high school buddy's name.) Or that new vision-focus-whatever one? True, those are DS, not Wii, but Nintendo *is* marketing some of its games to casual gamers.
And my entire point is that it's not. Not just is it not new, it's also not rare (see subject line) - which implies that a LOT OF PEOPLE have experienced it before. I think that you grossly underestimate the frequency at which it happened in the past, to think that this is new to most people. My mom could barely send email in 1998, yet she was the driving force behind our Beanie Baby craziness. The Wii thing is old hat to soccer moms everywhere.
Btw, stores now have those policies because of the problems with Barbies and Hot Wheels and such in the late 90s. I'm sure some stores had them before, but when eBay became big suddenly employees of Target and Toys R Us were eBay millionaires (ok, thousandaires).
In fact, if you look at when eBay really took off, there's probably an argument to be made that eBay became wildly successful because of beanie babies, not the other way around.
It's neither new nor rare. It happens almost every Christmas to one "big toy," it's just that it's rarely something the Slashdot crowd cares about. All the way back to Tickle Me Elmo over a decade ago - and the year after that, it was the Barbie Fashion Designer CD-ROM, and then something new nearly every year since. Actually, Tickle Me Elmo was only the start of the most recent wave - ask anyone who had a kid in the early 80's how much they paid for a Cabbage Patch Kid doll, and that was pre-eBay.
Outside of Christmas, there have been plenty of "collectible" toys that have been scalped - look at Beanie Babies and Pokemon cards. I'm a Barbie collector, and in the late 90's the hobby became trendy for a bit. Employees of Target, Wal-Mart, etc would buy up dolls as soon as the boxes were open and put them on eBay before actual shoppers even got a chance at them. My dad has actually done the same for Hot Wheels.
Trust me, for most of the parents looking for a Wii, this isn't a new experience. It's just that this time, maybe it's something they'd like to play with, too.