"...ever wonder why so many people try to scam the system like this?
Um, I dunno... maybe a feeling of disenfranchisement? The thought that they've been fleeced their entire lives by excess taxes to fund worthless pork? "
The fact that "people are lazy and greedy" was not present in your answer indicates to me that your issue-spinner needs to be turned down by about 100000000 rpm.
"if I take a cup and heat it up with ten times the energy I used before to cause a few bubbles, I'm not going to be surprised when it bubbles like roiling boil this time."
Nope, That much input would create a vopor sheet and gas-phase the entire cup before bubbles could form, most likely... so there'd be no bubbles at all.
This is why overconfident idiots should not be allowed to touch science if they haven't gone through at least the four-year idiot-beating process first (a BS degree, if the indirect statement is to hard on your little brain). They make statements that are flat-out wrong as 'proof' of other statements that are flat-out wrong.
Sorry about the flame, but the attempt to reduce a condensation/vortex formation to a simple temperature proportion is one of my pet peeve idiocies.
"Scientists are usually if anything very reserved about stating an opinion..."
I take it you've never talked to a scientist. Remember that they're often associated with Universities, which never shut up about their pet social activisms long enoguh to breathe.
If you're arguing that Christians shouldn't complain when you tell them that they're wrong, then by the same argument from a slightly different basis, you should shut the hell up and accept Christ into your life, because your denial of his power is, well, flat-out 2+2=7.
It's not about accepting other's viewpoints, it's about being able to respect people's worth and decide under what conditions a difference warrants conflict or suppression. The favored place (these days) to draw the line is physical impact: the size of god's beard isn't going to make your car destroy its own tires, but putting seven wheels on it (two in the front, two in the back) might. Thus, the former is worth bugging people about, the latter isn't. I gather from your post that you don't share this view, and go more for a "people disagreeing with me at all means i should bug them about it" thing.
In addendum, the Empiricism assumption (things happen in a reasonably regular and deterministic fashion) has equal logical validity to the "God's whim" assumption (things are as they are because god feels like it at the moment, we might very well not have existed three minutes ago). That is to say, none. There's no logical reason to believe that, if i toss a rock in the air 600000000 times, and it comes down each time, that if I toss it up a 600000001st time it will come down again. We just believe it, and so far (possibly by coincidence, possibly because the laws of nature we've postulated from such observations really do exist) it has held up. In the same way, God's whim seems to have taken place, either accidentally or by design, any number of times, so that assumption's held up in much the same fashion.
Ah, Philosophy. Good times. (Commence the flames by people who don't know what logical validity is.)
Which makes it particuarly interesting that most of the funding sources supporting global warming are also funding wells for environmental activists... kind of caught in the fork of their own stick, eh?
Why kill all the Jewish people now when we don't know conclusively, definitely, and exactly how their presence in the gene pool is resulting in inferior humans? How do we really know that Jews are universally evil? Needs more study. The jury is still out.
(/meta-sarcasm)
(/sarcasm)
Godwin aside, I don't think the comparison of your use of alarmism to promote amature-hour climatology to the use of alarmism to promote amature-hour eugenics is an entirely unfair one. The point is that it's "leap before you look" people like you that generally end up doing things that, in hindsight, humanity is massively ashamed of, not the cautious people that wait for certainty before messing with hugely complicated systems beyond their understanding.
Yeah, he was really limiting himself to niche software, where 'niche' is 'at least 80% of people that rely on software for a living in a way that a typewriter and file drawer couldn't cover just as well'. You know, the niche of 'things that were the reason computers were designed in the first place'.
I take it you play absolutely nothing but MMORPGs. Anything else is not a big commitment, just a way to burn excess cash for entertainment. I buy games on impulse all the time, same way I go to movies (and for about the same cost, nowadays, damn you California).
Robbery is not theft. Robbery is a subset of theft. Specifically, robbery is the subset of theft that separates fragments of bone from your skull, and sends your blood to the city sewage system without your body following it. Yes. Were I responsible for the safety of the populace in the area, I would be alarmed.
Not total thefts. Just robberies. People being more willing to beat each other to possible death for a low-powered computer sounds like a relevant statistic to me.
Robbery, as a violent crime that accounts for a lot of those murders, is pretty high up there. Note that the referenced number is not people nicking your notebook at the library while you're off finding your biology textbook. It's more the iron-pipe-to-the-head type of theft.
Do you? I'm skeptical. In fact, you're probably flat-out wrong. Unless you are restricting 'crime' to one type of crime (say, manslaughter due to misuse of a firearm) which forces the statistics in the direction you choose. To really have any kind of point, you'd need both the number of criminal incidents and the distribution of cases in both countries, which I'm going to go out on a limb and say you haven't even tried to look up.
Oh, sure, your elected officials will tell you that kind of thing, but so will ours. It means nothing without numbers and a cited source.
Loads more that 70 stolen laptops. 70 laptop robberies. Violent crime is way more important than some vagrancy from a police perspectve. Which is entirely appropriate.
Since they didn't specify, I assumed they were using lbm (pounds mass). The fact that you saw something describing the size of a cloud and immediately assumed it was lbf (pounds force) leads me to worry significantly about the rate of deteriorating education in the world today, as I wasn't in school that long ago, and even the greatest idiots in my classes knew the difference. Seriously, why would you measure a quantity of rock by a force?
Should I be? What do you think they're planning to do, bribe me into spying on my neighbors using offers of free "girls gone wild" (actual reference to my favorite type of porn replaced by more harmless stuff to avoid mockery) DVDs?
Team sports. Band, soccer, whatever. You learn to interact with people without being aloof or trying to categorize their intelligence, and you're also no longer a recluse, and thus no longer an easy target. And if it's a physical sport, the outcome of any physical fight an asshat might start is cast in much greater doubt, so they're correspondingly less likely to try.
As to why you were picked on, I'll take a wild guess and say you probably stymied any kind of social interaction outside of the academic, to the point of being unable to hold a conversation with anyone about anything other than school-work or your personal hobbies (that's how i was, anyway, and it seemed not all that uncommon). It's not the knowledge of math and english that gets you in trouble, it's the lack of knowledge on how to be pleasant and accessible in social situations.
The phrase "Some Jock" kind of reveals you as the type of asshole that looks down on anyone without a 4.0 and a Master's in Computer Science. That's exactly the kind of thing I'd reccommend working on.
I'm going to assume that was a joke, because I really don't have the scraps of faith in humanity left to handle such a monumentally stupid statement stated in seriousness without breaking down completely and going on a baby-shooting rampage to save the poor buggers from getting raised on that kind of tripe.
Livestock doesn't need to be, and generally isn't due to decreased costs, raised on arable land. I'll leave aside that your statistics were produced from this air by your magical fairy powers.
Job interview, pre-suit: "Hey, aren't you the starwars kid?" "...yeah." "Cool, that was pretty funny. Now, about your resume..."
Post-suit: "Hey, aren't you the starwars kid?" "...yeah." "Wait... you sued some people for 300k$ for non-financial 'emotional' damages, didn't you?" "um..." "I'm sorry, we here at McDonalds have a policy of not hiring severe liability risks."
His only chance will be to say something like "yeah, that was my parents, they kind of overreacted". Only time will tell if he's a clever enough person to realize that, though.
More academic is not the same thing as smarter. Generally it's the more academic kids that get picked on. Often because they are for some reason under the mistaken impression that they're smarter, which has a tendency to piss people off. (//been there)
Been on the wrong end of mild bullying and ostracism, and, while I'll admit I was annoyed at times, I went to school to learn stuff, not be best buddies with every kid in the district, and generally chose to take a 'fuck 'em' attitude about it.
I felt like walking off into the countryside and never coming back a number of times... but I didn't. That's the whole point of being human, you know, we're stronger than our chemical makeup and social position. We traded a whole lot of awesome tree-climbing ability for that, we might as well take advantage of it.
Slashdot Mirror
That "whoosh" you heard was the sound of a pretty decent joke flying over your head at high speed.
"...ever wonder why so many people try to scam the system like this? Um, I dunno... maybe a feeling of disenfranchisement? The thought that they've been fleeced their entire lives by excess taxes to fund worthless pork? "
The fact that "people are lazy and greedy" was not present in your answer indicates to me that your issue-spinner needs to be turned down by about 100000000 rpm.
"if I take a cup and heat it up with ten times the energy I used before to cause a few bubbles, I'm not going to be surprised when it bubbles like roiling boil this time."
Nope, That much input would create a vopor sheet and gas-phase the entire cup before bubbles could form, most likely... so there'd be no bubbles at all.
This is why overconfident idiots should not be allowed to touch science if they haven't gone through at least the four-year idiot-beating process first (a BS degree, if the indirect statement is to hard on your little brain). They make statements that are flat-out wrong as 'proof' of other statements that are flat-out wrong.
Sorry about the flame, but the attempt to reduce a condensation/vortex formation to a simple temperature proportion is one of my pet peeve idiocies.
"Scientists are usually if anything very reserved about stating an opinion..."
I take it you've never talked to a scientist. Remember that they're often associated with Universities, which never shut up about their pet social activisms long enoguh to breathe.
"... 99.9 percent of all climatologists ..."
That's a mighty big, spiky number, son. Did it hurt much when you were pulling it out of your ass?
If you're arguing that Christians shouldn't complain when you tell them that they're wrong, then by the same argument from a slightly different basis, you should shut the hell up and accept Christ into your life, because your denial of his power is, well, flat-out 2+2=7.
It's not about accepting other's viewpoints, it's about being able to respect people's worth and decide under what conditions a difference warrants conflict or suppression. The favored place (these days) to draw the line is physical impact: the size of god's beard isn't going to make your car destroy its own tires, but putting seven wheels on it (two in the front, two in the back) might. Thus, the former is worth bugging people about, the latter isn't. I gather from your post that you don't share this view, and go more for a "people disagreeing with me at all means i should bug them about it" thing.
In addendum, the Empiricism assumption (things happen in a reasonably regular and deterministic fashion) has equal logical validity to the "God's whim" assumption (things are as they are because god feels like it at the moment, we might very well not have existed three minutes ago). That is to say, none. There's no logical reason to believe that, if i toss a rock in the air 600000000 times, and it comes down each time, that if I toss it up a 600000001st time it will come down again. We just believe it, and so far (possibly by coincidence, possibly because the laws of nature we've postulated from such observations really do exist) it has held up. In the same way, God's whim seems to have taken place, either accidentally or by design, any number of times, so that assumption's held up in much the same fashion.
Ah, Philosophy. Good times. (Commence the flames by people who don't know what logical validity is.)
Which makes it particuarly interesting that most of the funding sources supporting global warming are also funding wells for environmental activists... kind of caught in the fork of their own stick, eh?
(sarcasm)
(meta-sarcasm)
Why kill all the Jewish people now when we don't know conclusively, definitely, and exactly how their presence in the gene pool is resulting in inferior humans? How do we really know that Jews are universally evil? Needs more study. The jury is still out.
(/meta-sarcasm)
(/sarcasm)
Godwin aside, I don't think the comparison of your use of alarmism to promote amature-hour climatology to the use of alarmism to promote amature-hour eugenics is an entirely unfair one. The point is that it's "leap before you look" people like you that generally end up doing things that, in hindsight, humanity is massively ashamed of, not the cautious people that wait for certainty before messing with hugely complicated systems beyond their understanding.
Yeah, he was really limiting himself to niche software, where 'niche' is 'at least 80% of people that rely on software for a living in a way that a typewriter and file drawer couldn't cover just as well'. You know, the niche of 'things that were the reason computers were designed in the first place'.
Yup, really limited viewpoint, there.
"...not usually an impulse purchase."
I take it you play absolutely nothing but MMORPGs. Anything else is not a big commitment, just a way to burn excess cash for entertainment. I buy games on impulse all the time, same way I go to movies (and for about the same cost, nowadays, damn you California).
Robbery is not theft. Robbery is a subset of theft. Specifically, robbery is the subset of theft that separates fragments of bone from your skull, and sends your blood to the city sewage system without your body following it. Yes. Were I responsible for the safety of the populace in the area, I would be alarmed.
Not total thefts. Just robberies. People being more willing to beat each other to possible death for a low-powered computer sounds like a relevant statistic to me.
Robbery, as a violent crime that accounts for a lot of those murders, is pretty high up there. Note that the referenced number is not people nicking your notebook at the library while you're off finding your biology textbook. It's more the iron-pipe-to-the-head type of theft.
Do you? I'm skeptical. In fact, you're probably flat-out wrong. Unless you are restricting 'crime' to one type of crime (say, manslaughter due to misuse of a firearm) which forces the statistics in the direction you choose. To really have any kind of point, you'd need both the number of criminal incidents and the distribution of cases in both countries, which I'm going to go out on a limb and say you haven't even tried to look up.
Oh, sure, your elected officials will tell you that kind of thing, but so will ours. It means nothing without numbers and a cited source.
Loads more that 70 stolen laptops. 70 laptop robberies. Violent crime is way more important than some vagrancy from a police perspectve. Which is entirely appropriate.
Since they didn't specify, I assumed they were using lbm (pounds mass). The fact that you saw something describing the size of a cloud and immediately assumed it was lbf (pounds force) leads me to worry significantly about the rate of deteriorating education in the world today, as I wasn't in school that long ago, and even the greatest idiots in my classes knew the difference. Seriously, why would you measure a quantity of rock by a force?
While he'd probably support the +5, I'd like to think the parent poster finds the 'informative' tag just as silly as I do.
"...On the other hand, I don't believe there has ever been such wide-spread corruption among the "elected" representatives..."
Your marks in history were pretty poor, weren't they?
Should I be? What do you think they're planning to do, bribe me into spying on my neighbors using offers of free "girls gone wild" (actual reference to my favorite type of porn replaced by more harmless stuff to avoid mockery) DVDs?
Team sports. Band, soccer, whatever. You learn to interact with people without being aloof or trying to categorize their intelligence, and you're also no longer a recluse, and thus no longer an easy target. And if it's a physical sport, the outcome of any physical fight an asshat might start is cast in much greater doubt, so they're correspondingly less likely to try.
As to why you were picked on, I'll take a wild guess and say you probably stymied any kind of social interaction outside of the academic, to the point of being unable to hold a conversation with anyone about anything other than school-work or your personal hobbies (that's how i was, anyway, and it seemed not all that uncommon). It's not the knowledge of math and english that gets you in trouble, it's the lack of knowledge on how to be pleasant and accessible in social situations.
The phrase "Some Jock" kind of reveals you as the type of asshole that looks down on anyone without a 4.0 and a Master's in Computer Science. That's exactly the kind of thing I'd reccommend working on.
I'm going to assume that was a joke, because I really don't have the scraps of faith in humanity left to handle such a monumentally stupid statement stated in seriousness without breaking down completely and going on a baby-shooting rampage to save the poor buggers from getting raised on that kind of tripe.
Livestock doesn't need to be, and generally isn't due to decreased costs, raised on arable land. I'll leave aside that your statistics were produced from this air by your magical fairy powers.
/'nuff said
Job interview, pre-suit:
"Hey, aren't you the starwars kid?"
"...yeah."
"Cool, that was pretty funny. Now, about your resume..."
Post-suit:
"Hey, aren't you the starwars kid?"
"...yeah."
"Wait... you sued some people for 300k$ for non-financial 'emotional' damages, didn't you?"
"um..."
"I'm sorry, we here at McDonalds have a policy of not hiring severe liability risks."
His only chance will be to say something like "yeah, that was my parents, they kind of overreacted". Only time will tell if he's a clever enough person to realize that, though.
More academic is not the same thing as smarter. Generally it's the more academic kids that get picked on. Often because they are for some reason under the mistaken impression that they're smarter, which has a tendency to piss people off. (//been there)
Been on the wrong end of mild bullying and ostracism, and, while I'll admit I was annoyed at times, I went to school to learn stuff, not be best buddies with every kid in the district, and generally chose to take a 'fuck 'em' attitude about it.
I felt like walking off into the countryside and never coming back a number of times... but I didn't. That's the whole point of being human, you know, we're stronger than our chemical makeup and social position. We traded a whole lot of awesome tree-climbing ability for that, we might as well take advantage of it.