You are right that the same culture also affects girls. However, many more of them understand that being smart and beautiful is entirely possible, and does not exclude each other. Meanwhile, man who are both physically and mentally fit are much more rare a find.
it shouldn't be like it was in the past. Rote memorization factories
You went to a different school then. I did memorize a poem or two, and vocabulary, of course, but most of my school education was based on understanding, not memorization.
Well, the USA has thrived on draining brain from the rest of the world for most of its existence. Space program? Thank the german rocket engineers...
It's part of the american system - offer really cool universities that are way too large for ourselves (which is why they get filled up with football players and crap) so they attract the brightest minds from elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I was a "gifted child" and yes, I was bored in school, so much that my parents sent me to a psychologist (who told them there's nothing wrong with me except that I'm bored) and then to special gifted-child after-school courses. I had my first chemistry course 5 years before I had it in school, and I had computer lessons and shortly after my own computer in 6th grade, at a time when computer stuff was an optional course in high school.
And yet, I don't blame school for ruining my chances. On the contrary, I believe school should be much like it used to, i.e. roll back the dumbing down you've done to it just because you want better PISA scores. Schools purpose is to create a baseline, a solid level of basic education that later on in life you can expect everyone to have. As such, it has to be so that everyone can acquire it. Some easily, some will struggle, but it is a (low) standard and exactly because of that it is useful.
What needs to change is the attitude that school covers everything. These days, not only have people largely stopped understanding that you can (*gasp*!) educate yourself out of school, in addition to whatever you get there, but you should also (*big gasp*!!) let the school do the teaching and keep things like teaching manners and basic social skills at home with the parents who desperately need to stop thinking they can outsource the raising of a child.
If more people understood school correctly as a standardized base-level, less people would send their kids to school and think that covers their parental responsibilities and aside from that it's just feeding and housing the brat.
But in the U.S., Crawford laments, 'we focus on steering all extra money and attention toward kids who are struggling academically, or even just to the average student' and 'risk shortchanging the country in a different way.'
No, you utter imbecile. The problem of the western culture is not fund distribution. It's attitude.
Our "stars" are musicians, actors and professional athletes. Certainly people who work hard and having natural talent definitely helps - but it's not the smart, gifted people we adore in our culture. There's no science-based equivalent of the Super Bowl. The closest we get is that we sometimes thing astronauts are pretty cool.
You want more smart people in your country? I don't have a magic pill for that, but I can give you an indicator of how close you are: When the sexy girls fuck the geeks instead of the football studs, you're getting somewhere. When this map has more scientists on it than coaches, you're pretty close. When we pay two-digit millions in salary not to people who pretend to be a robot from the future on camera, or throwing an air-filled dead pig gut around, but to people who work on curing cancer or inventing new methods for energy production, then you won't have to worry about not having enough brains in the country.
The funding thing is just a small part of that culture.
Depression is one of the areas I don't like to joke about./. and the Internet in general do not count, and there are studies to back that up but I can't be arsed to google them for you. You actually need to go outside and physically meet other people to get the benefits of social activities.
Alcohol has been shown to be not effective in people suffering from depression. I'm not aware of any studies with sex, though it stands to reason that it will have short-term benefits.
Not that I'd argue pro-religion, that's on the same page as alcohol - even if it helps, you don't want all the payload unless you are already insane. Unfortunately, religions know very well how they work and do prey on the weak.
Yes, believing in some soothing bullshit lessens your stress levels, which has all kinds of benefits.
Believing aliens from outer space will save you at the last second will certainly make going into war easier to cope with as well.
Is there a difference between these? Not really, no. It's just that one is socially acceptable thanks to millenia of indoctrination, while the other one strike almost everyone as ridiculous bullshit.
See, the problem with believing in nonsense is that even if it reduces your stress and makes you feel happy and whatever else, ultimately, you still believe in nonsense and with all the downsides that has. There've been a few recent articles on that. For example, the "let's-destroy-the-planet-for-profit" mindset would have a much harder time if its proponents wouldn't believe in an afterlife and would realize this life on this planet is all we've got.
I've had this argument a hundred times, and it never changes. Yes, religion does some good. And for every good it does, it does two evils.
So they don't shoot you down. If you wanted to commit suicide in this matter, you probably don't want just the plane, you want to fly it into something (9/11 probably gave you the idea).
So no, it doesn't add up - unless some nation shot it down and doesn't want to admit it. But that's as much speculation as anything else.
Look, bud, if you don't like living in a country that promotes and supports individual liberty,
The problem with these morons is that they're endangering innocents, and not just their own kids. Your liberty ends where the life of someone else is being threatened, don't you agree?
It's not an argument when it's bullshit top to bottom. An argument requires some kind of logical chain. What religious and other faith-based nutjobs spout forth is statements, but not arguments.
We don't need to "get through to them" any more than we run advertisement campaigns to convince rapists and murderers to please behave, thank you.
These people are endangering lives of other people, first their children and second everyone else (see "herd immunity"). It's time to stop playing nice. Throw them in jail, vaccinate their kids while they're behind bars, let them go after a week with a heavy fine to pay for all the bullshit.
There's a time for being nice and cooperative and friendly, and there's a time for drawing a line in the sand and shooting everyone who crosses it. Everyone with a child knows that you can't yield all the time. Everyone who's ever been in negotiations knows that the right balance between cooperation and shows of strengths gets you the best results. There's even a program by the UN that educated diplomats that incorporates this simple strategy. And if you want to waste an hour of your time, google "Tit for tat", a simple algorithm that is proven to be the optimal strategy in iterated prisoners dilemma and works exactly this way: Reward cooperation with cooperation, punish betrayl, forgive after you've done that.
These people aren't cooperating. Time to stop cooperating with them.
No, by starting something good, you can still lead the way.
For example, yes, build a Thorium reactor. If it happens to be cheaper than coal, and you don't put silly export controls on it, India and China might just go with that instead of coal. China, meanwhile, is also deploying massive amounts of solar as we speak, because Europe and the US lead the way, did the research and then outsourced production to... China.
If you take away 37% of the supply of electricity, it will need to be replaced. This means that alternatives to coal will go up in price, and your electricity costs will go up with them.
Or maybe not. The german EEG, which is so successful that it has been copied by over 65 countries has brought so much alternative energy online that the nuclear and fossile fuel lobbyists have succeeded in convincing the current government to break its promises and cut it short ahead of time, because they were afraid the they would be driven out of business by renewable energy.
Those 37% would be replaced, and chances are the replacement would be as or even cheaper. Of course, consumer prices for electricity would still rise, after a media campaign blaming the environmentalists, but that's got nothing to do with real energy prices. If you want to know what energy costs, never look to the consumer price. That price is "what we can take and get away with" and not "what it costs". If you want to know what energy costs, look to the exchanges where the industry prices are set.
You'll be surprised. Those prices have been dropping, sometimes at the same time as consumer prices have been increased.
The coal mines don't own the coal. The states do. The mines buy permits to mine it. As soon as one mine is gone, that permit is open for whomever wants to show up and take over.
Who says they'll go.
If I were tasked to implement this plan, buying the coal mines would be the first thing to do. But I wouldn't shut them down, I'd keep mining. At... say... five kilograms per year. You'd have to check if the permits specify a minimum amount to be mined, of course. Somehow I doubt the do, because the coal industry has a lobby that's 2nd only to Hollywood and they've largely succeeded in abolishing any and all regulation.
Coal today is just as clean as other forms of energy when you factor in all the externalities.
Only on paper. Same thing with nuclear energy - a modern reactor is excellent and very safe - but thanks to nuclear power hysteria, no new reactors have been built in, for example, my country, for 25 years. So the most modern nuclear reactor we have is using late 1980s technology. If people were just a little more rational, they'd do demonstrations to replace all the reactors with modern ones, because quite honestly keeping these old pieces of crap running is 100 times more dangerous than running twice as many modern ones.
Actually, if you take into account the population size (China having more than four times as many people as the USA) then it isn't really that much of a difference. In fact, carbon emission per capita is considerably higher in the USA:
I guess we'll be building a lot more nuclear power plants, then?
I, for one, maintain that a mix of renewable and nuclear power is the future. Coal really is the absolute worst thing you could do. Its environmental impact is crazy, a coal plant actually leaks more radiation than a nuclear plant, and depending on how you get the coal, the impact on the landscape and lives of people nearby can be utterly insane.
The worst part is that their land use in general directly compete with forests, which means their CO2 impact is even higher, because forests are great in storing CO2.
Sorry, anyone who in 2014 seriously contemplates burning coal is a freaking lunatic who should be locked up and receive therapy.
Because people being out of jobs is the really important thing when you have to decide between fucking up the planet or not fucking up the planet, yes?
Funny how/. has multiple personalities. When it comes to the MPAA and RIAA, we keep telling them that analogy with the car replacing the horse carriage and to move with the times.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right that the same culture also affects girls. However, many more of them understand that being smart and beautiful is entirely possible, and does not exclude each other. Meanwhile, man who are both physically and mentally fit are much more rare a find.
it shouldn't be like it was in the past. Rote memorization factories
You went to a different school then. I did memorize a poem or two, and vocabulary, of course, but most of my school education was based on understanding, not memorization.
Well, the USA has thrived on draining brain from the rest of the world for most of its existence. Space program? Thank the german rocket engineers...
It's part of the american system - offer really cool universities that are way too large for ourselves (which is why they get filled up with football players and crap) so they attract the brightest minds from elsewhere.
True in parts and yet horribly wrong in others.
Disclaimer: I was a "gifted child" and yes, I was bored in school, so much that my parents sent me to a psychologist (who told them there's nothing wrong with me except that I'm bored) and then to special gifted-child after-school courses. I had my first chemistry course 5 years before I had it in school, and I had computer lessons and shortly after my own computer in 6th grade, at a time when computer stuff was an optional course in high school.
And yet, I don't blame school for ruining my chances. On the contrary, I believe school should be much like it used to, i.e. roll back the dumbing down you've done to it just because you want better PISA scores. Schools purpose is to create a baseline, a solid level of basic education that later on in life you can expect everyone to have. As such, it has to be so that everyone can acquire it. Some easily, some will struggle, but it is a (low) standard and exactly because of that it is useful.
What needs to change is the attitude that school covers everything. These days, not only have people largely stopped understanding that you can (*gasp*!) educate yourself out of school, in addition to whatever you get there, but you should also (*big gasp*!!) let the school do the teaching and keep things like teaching manners and basic social skills at home with the parents who desperately need to stop thinking they can outsource the raising of a child.
If more people understood school correctly as a standardized base-level, less people would send their kids to school and think that covers their parental responsibilities and aside from that it's just feeding and housing the brat.
But in the U.S., Crawford laments, 'we focus on steering all extra money and attention toward kids who are struggling academically, or even just to the average student' and 'risk shortchanging the country in a different way.'
No, you utter imbecile. The problem of the western culture is not fund distribution. It's attitude.
Our "stars" are musicians, actors and professional athletes. Certainly people who work hard and having natural talent definitely helps - but it's not the smart, gifted people we adore in our culture. There's no science-based equivalent of the Super Bowl. The closest we get is that we sometimes thing astronauts are pretty cool.
You want more smart people in your country? I don't have a magic pill for that, but I can give you an indicator of how close you are: When the sexy girls fuck the geeks instead of the football studs, you're getting somewhere. When this map has more scientists on it than coaches, you're pretty close. When we pay two-digit millions in salary not to people who pretend to be a robot from the future on camera, or throwing an air-filled dead pig gut around, but to people who work on curing cancer or inventing new methods for energy production, then you won't have to worry about not having enough brains in the country.
The funding thing is just a small part of that culture.
So you've added two or three more people to be bribed to ignore a faulty tracking device - 1 or 2 in maintenance, and someone in the control tower?
I said "99%". You came up with the other 1%. Congratulations, here's your cookie, now sod off.
Depression is one of the areas I don't like to joke about. /. and the Internet in general do not count, and there are studies to back that up but I can't be arsed to google them for you. You actually need to go outside and physically meet other people to get the benefits of social activities.
Alcohol has been shown to be not effective in people suffering from depression. I'm not aware of any studies with sex, though it stands to reason that it will have short-term benefits.
Not that I'd argue pro-religion, that's on the same page as alcohol - even if it helps, you don't want all the payload unless you are already insane. Unfortunately, religions know very well how they work and do prey on the weak.
Yes, believing in some soothing bullshit lessens your stress levels, which has all kinds of benefits.
Believing aliens from outer space will save you at the last second will certainly make going into war easier to cope with as well.
Is there a difference between these? Not really, no. It's just that one is socially acceptable thanks to millenia of indoctrination, while the other one strike almost everyone as ridiculous bullshit.
See, the problem with believing in nonsense is that even if it reduces your stress and makes you feel happy and whatever else, ultimately, you still believe in nonsense and with all the downsides that has. There've been a few recent articles on that. For example, the "let's-destroy-the-planet-for-profit" mindset would have a much harder time if its proponents wouldn't believe in an afterlife and would realize this life on this planet is all we've got.
I've had this argument a hundred times, and it never changes. Yes, religion does some good. And for every good it does, it does two evils.
How would you guarantee such a tracking device resists all possible sabotage efforts?
Not all possible, but 99% of them: Make it inaccessible from the inside of the aircraft.
Why go through the effort of 'hiding' the plane?
So they don't shoot you down. If you wanted to commit suicide in this matter, you probably don't want just the plane, you want to fly it into something (9/11 probably gave you the idea).
So no, it doesn't add up - unless some nation shot it down and doesn't want to admit it. But that's as much speculation as anything else.
Look, bud, if you don't like living in a country that promotes and supports individual liberty,
The problem with these morons is that they're endangering innocents, and not just their own kids. Your liberty ends where the life of someone else is being threatened, don't you agree?
It's not an argument when it's bullshit top to bottom. An argument requires some kind of logical chain. What religious and other faith-based nutjobs spout forth is statements, but not arguments.
Which is why I pre-ordered the book, to get it while it's still good.
I love the early Mythbusters, compared to them the recent ones are lame. Everything has its time and when it's done, then it's done.
We don't need to "get through to them" any more than we run advertisement campaigns to convince rapists and murderers to please behave, thank you.
These people are endangering lives of other people, first their children and second everyone else (see "herd immunity"). It's time to stop playing nice. Throw them in jail, vaccinate their kids while they're behind bars, let them go after a week with a heavy fine to pay for all the bullshit.
There's a time for being nice and cooperative and friendly, and there's a time for drawing a line in the sand and shooting everyone who crosses it. Everyone with a child knows that you can't yield all the time. Everyone who's ever been in negotiations knows that the right balance between cooperation and shows of strengths gets you the best results. There's even a program by the UN that educated diplomats that incorporates this simple strategy. And if you want to waste an hour of your time, google "Tit for tat", a simple algorithm that is proven to be the optimal strategy in iterated prisoners dilemma and works exactly this way: Reward cooperation with cooperation, punish betrayl, forgive after you've done that.
These people aren't cooperating. Time to stop cooperating with them.
No, by starting something good, you can still lead the way.
For example, yes, build a Thorium reactor. If it happens to be cheaper than coal, and you don't put silly export controls on it, India and China might just go with that instead of coal. China, meanwhile, is also deploying massive amounts of solar as we speak, because Europe and the US lead the way, did the research and then outsourced production to... China.
Air pollution and CO2 emissions are not the same thing. For one, CO2 happens to be invisible to the naked eye...
If you take away 37% of the supply of electricity, it will need to be replaced. This means that alternatives to coal will go up in price, and your electricity costs will go up with them.
Or maybe not. The german EEG, which is so successful that it has been copied by over 65 countries has brought so much alternative energy online that the nuclear and fossile fuel lobbyists have succeeded in convincing the current government to break its promises and cut it short ahead of time, because they were afraid the they would be driven out of business by renewable energy.
Those 37% would be replaced, and chances are the replacement would be as or even cheaper. Of course, consumer prices for electricity would still rise, after a media campaign blaming the environmentalists, but that's got nothing to do with real energy prices. If you want to know what energy costs, never look to the consumer price. That price is "what we can take and get away with" and not "what it costs". If you want to know what energy costs, look to the exchanges where the industry prices are set.
You'll be surprised. Those prices have been dropping, sometimes at the same time as consumer prices have been increased.
The coal mines don't own the coal. The states do. The mines buy permits to mine it. As soon as one mine is gone, that permit is open for whomever wants to show up and take over.
Who says they'll go.
If I were tasked to implement this plan, buying the coal mines would be the first thing to do. But I wouldn't shut them down, I'd keep mining. At... say... five kilograms per year. You'd have to check if the permits specify a minimum amount to be mined, of course. Somehow I doubt the do, because the coal industry has a lobby that's 2nd only to Hollywood and they've largely succeeded in abolishing any and all regulation.
Coal today is just as clean as other forms of energy when you factor in all the externalities.
Only on paper. Same thing with nuclear energy - a modern reactor is excellent and very safe - but thanks to nuclear power hysteria, no new reactors have been built in, for example, my country, for 25 years. So the most modern nuclear reactor we have is using late 1980s technology. If people were just a little more rational, they'd do demonstrations to replace all the reactors with modern ones, because quite honestly keeping these old pieces of crap running is 100 times more dangerous than running twice as many modern ones.
*sigh* the old strawman.
"We can't rescue all the world, so let's better not even start doing anything at all."
With that attitude, we'd still be living in caves because you can't carve an iPhone out of a rock.
Actually, if you take into account the population size (China having more than four times as many people as the USA) then it isn't really that much of a difference. In fact, carbon emission per capita is considerably higher in the USA:
http://www.theguardian.com/new...
I guess we'll be building a lot more nuclear power plants, then?
I, for one, maintain that a mix of renewable and nuclear power is the future. Coal really is the absolute worst thing you could do. Its environmental impact is crazy, a coal plant actually leaks more radiation than a nuclear plant, and depending on how you get the coal, the impact on the landscape and lives of people nearby can be utterly insane.
This is the realty of coal:
http://www.gegenstrom13.de/wp-...
http://www.allmystery.de/i/tf6...
Some of these are so large, they are clearly visible on satellite images:
http://www.spiegel.de/wissensc...
The worst part is that their land use in general directly compete with forests, which means their CO2 impact is even higher, because forests are great in storing CO2.
Sorry, anyone who in 2014 seriously contemplates burning coal is a freaking lunatic who should be locked up and receive therapy.
Because people being out of jobs is the really important thing when you have to decide between fucking up the planet or not fucking up the planet, yes?
Funny how /. has multiple personalities. When it comes to the MPAA and RIAA, we keep telling them that analogy with the car replacing the horse carriage and to move with the times.
There was a declaration of independence for the Internet some 10 or 15 years ago. Anyone remember it and got a link?