Talk is cheap. Remember Clinton and Gore saying "The era of big government is over"?
Obama's already done something about it. He recently named Nancy Killefer to be the Chief Performance Officer, and she'll be in charge of a new office tasked with eliminating government waste and downsizing the budget. Now, there's no guarantee that he'll listen to her recommendations, but of course that begs the question of why he'd even create the office in the first place if he had no intention of eventually reducing the deficit.
RTFA. The reason that people are casually dismissing it is that this isn't even about someone on Obama's transition team, just someone advising him in an informal capacity (i.e., someone who's unpaid, and is using his own vacation time to boot). Never mind the fact that Obama's laid out the strictest ever set of ethics rules for his transition team. The fact is that there is a certain subset of./ers who actually want to see Obama become another Bush, and will cry "Corruption!" at even the slightest impropriety.
I don't like California very much, but a budget shortfall during a recession is hardly an example of a failed nanny state. Especially when you consider that that its residents receive 78 cents for every dollar they send to the federal government (i.e., it heavily subsidizes other states). It's only a nanny state in the sense that it gives money to Alabamans and Mississippians.
I really don't understand the sentiment that "those who can't do, teach." At least in math, science, and engineering, academia is by far the most competitive job market, and where the bulk of research is done.
Both Eire and Poland are in the EU, free movement of people is guaranteed.
That's easy to say, but not so easy to do. Consider the following:
1. Moving usually incurs a huge cost, both in terms of time and money. When you're moving out of the country, those costs are multiplied.
2. Moving is stressful, and most people don't like forcing that on their family.
3. The social costs are high. You'd be leaving your friends, most of your family, and basically everyone you know behind. There's a reason that most people live within driving distance of where they grew up.
4. You'd have to learn Polish.
So yeah, while you're "free" to move, you're only free to do so if you're willing to accept all of the above. I think that point #3 is the most salient one, simply because humans are social beings and while the social costs aren't easily quantified, they're easily the dominant factor for most people.
Collapsing under its regulations? Give me a break. The state is hurting because it derived 20% of its revenue from the financial sector, also known as Wall Street. Perhaps you've heard that they haven't been doing so well as of late? This had nothing to do with overregulation, and everything to do with a lack of oversight.
I know I'll murder my karma saying this, but I can't fathom the intellectual masochism that must be required to be an Internet libertarian. "The current crisis was caused by the the CRA!" Oh wait, minorities comprised a fraction of subprime loans in default. "I know, Sarbanes-Oxley was the cause! If companies had been allowed to doctor their books to fool their investors, none of this would've happened!" Wait a minute...that doesn't make much sense. "It must have been the Fed, encouraging bad loans by artificially setting interest rates!" Never mind the fact that the Fed chairman was a good friend to Ayn Rand, a self-described libertarian, and has since admitted that his philosophy was flawed.
Just face facts: the unregulated free market is not perfect or optimal. A combination of greed and flawed business models swept the housing market, and since a combination of Gramm-Leach-Bliley and a lax antitrust division at the Justice Department allowed for the formation of megaconglomerates, this crisis spread to the financial sector. This is what the people actually responsible are saying, and not some (with all due respeact) fringe group typing posts on Digg.
Pretty much the only redeeming feature it has is that its cheap.
I have two words for you: native oxide. Yes, silicon is cheap, but don't underestimate the value of being able to easily grow silicon dioxide on top of it. I would say that that is the main reason that silicon has completely dominated the industry. Of course, with Intel moving to high-k dielectrics, it may be the case that that could change soon.
While I hate network executives as much as the next guy, you can hardly blame them for the bifurcation of the final season. The writers' strike necessitated that.
Actually, this sort of spending violates general welfare, because it takes money from everyone to give it to a few.
If the Supreme Court says it's constitutional, it's constitutional (by definition). Marbury vs Madison + enumerated powers = judicial review. You may not like it, but there it is.
I'm not saying that high union wages aren't a contributor to the Big 3's problems, but placing the complete onus on the unions is just asinine. The fact is that the Big 3 have been losing sales to their foreign competitors for decades, and that has absolutely nothing to do with worker pay. They have (deservedly) gained a reputation for shoddy products, and simply aren't offering what American consumers want.
Obama voted for the resolution to strip the FISA bill of the telecom immunity provision. He may have voted for the bill even after the amendment failed, but that's just a matter of priorities. He made it very clear that he thought that the pros of extending judicial oversight outweighed the cons of telecom immunity. Absolutely nothing can be done in the Senate without compromise.
It would take either a professional team of assassins... to get anywhere near him
You say that as if there aren't people who might hire a professional team of assassins to kill the President. Anyone who has the money and the motivation to kill Obama could easily pay off a low-level Verizon staffer, or coerce them into doing so through other means (e.g., by threatening their family). IMO, the main question Verizon should be asking itself isn't whether these employees should be fired (though they probably should), it's what they can do to prevent this from happening again. Perhaps all phone records should be encrypted with multiple keys, so that no person in the company can access them alone?
Griffiths is great for a first undergraduate QM class. He may "skim the surface," but if you're discount it based on that, you may as well throw out every non-graduate text in existence. From a pedagogical standpoint, Griffiths is superb.
Hungerford, right? I'm an engineering grad student who once picked it up to learn something about group theory, but didn't even get past the first chapter because it was so dense and (from my perspective) esoteric. I know that rigor is important and all, but could you enlighten me as to what's so great about algebra? I mean, I can obviously see why analysis is important, but algebra still escapes me.
While I'd love nothing more than to blame the network execs, the dearth of quality new shows this year is a direct result of the writer's strike. There were far fewer pilots produced last year than usual.
There's a website called Metamath which does a lot of what the article is talking about. It starts from the ZFC axioms and works its way up to thousands of elementary theorems, all proved completely formally. Pretty cool, if you're in to that sort of thing.
the candidates REFUSE to attend the debate if they dont get to review the questions first. they also will refuse to answer some questions.
Why was this modded up? The first sentence is simply untrue. In every major presidential debate, the moderators make it perfectly clear that the questions were not shared with anyone prior to the event. Do you think that journalists such as Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, Tom Brokaw, or the late Tim Russert would flat-out lie to their viewers? It's true that the candidates haggle over the most minute details, such as podium height, but I think you're confusing finagling over the details of the format of the debate with knowing the questions in advance.
As for the second point, I'll admit that candidates will sometimes refuse to answer questions (Palin especially comes to mind). But as Gwen Ifill explained on MTP this week, it is not her job as moderator to force Palin to answer. It was a debate between the candidates, and therefore her role was merely to guide the questioning. Biden should have been the one to call Palin out on her non-answers. That was his failure, not Ifill's. As for your "hard" questions:
"when are you going to end this war on the middle east?"
"What are you personally going to do to fix healthcare?"
"How are you going to help address corruption in Capitol hill?"
"What is your position on Medical Marijuana? Why?"
"What are you going to do to restore the constitution and amercian rights?"
1. Was talked about extensively in the last debate, which focused on foreign policy.
2. Was talked about to an extent in the last debate, which is substantial given that it was supposed to focus on foreign policy. Will probably be a major focus of tonight's debate.
3. The fact is that this isn't a big issue for most people, especially with the economy in the tank. Nevertheless, the candidates' positions are readily available: McCain will continue the Bush administration's policies towards medical marijuana, and Obama will instruct the Justice Department to not enforce the federal laws on medical marijuana patients.
4. The way this question is worded, it will never be asked. It is loaded.
An immoral law is an immoral law. We repealed slavery laws, because they violated the Right of Liberty for african immigrants. Similarly a law that sucks $20,000 out of people's paychecks to pay a firefighter's salary, violates both the Right of Property and the Right of Liberty (it's a form of partial enslavement.)
I don't know about that. What motivation would the Democrats have to permit passage of the bill? Texas is a guaranteed red state which they have no expectation of winning, and without Texas, McCain essentially loses the election. Now, it's likely that McCain would still win even as a write-in candidate, but if the Dems are represented enough in the Texas legislature, I'd think that they'd try to block passage of the bill using any means at their disposal.
That may be true, but video games are a relatively cheap form of entertainment. For about $50, you can get tens to hundreds of hours of entertainment. That's much cheaper than a movie or a nice dinner (though it still doesn't even come close to book-level).
So fucking what? Are we really this stupid in our politics that it's now a game of crying "flip-flopper" when you just say more or less the same thing, maybe with a different emphasis?
New words scare people. Just a couple weeks ago, Obama said in a press conference that he'd be willing to "refine" his Iraq policy during his visit there, and a combination of the media and the McCain campaign jumped all over him for "flip-flopping" on Iraq. They were pretending that he had said that he was going to change his stance on the war, and so he had to give a second press conference later that day to emphasize that he had said nothing of the sort.
The media is trying to have a repeat of 2004 by painting the Democrat as a flip-flopper, when he has only waffled, as all politicians do. Even Obama's worst flip-flop, on the FISA legislation, wasn't a complete reversal: though he voted the final bill, he still voted to strip the immunity provision. He said that he thought the bill had more good than bad in it, and while we might disagree, that's just a matter of priority, not of position.
Meanwhile, McCain directly contradicts himself time and time again, and he has so far gotten off scot-free. We don't have a liberal media or a conservative media, we have a sensationalist media that caters to the lowest common denominator by trying to place the candidates into a pre-defined mold that has existed for the better part of three decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Talk is cheap. Remember Clinton and Gore saying "The era of big government is over"?
Obama's already done something about it. He recently named Nancy Killefer to be the Chief Performance Officer, and she'll be in charge of a new office tasked with eliminating government waste and downsizing the budget. Now, there's no guarantee that he'll listen to her recommendations, but of course that begs the question of why he'd even create the office in the first place if he had no intention of eventually reducing the deficit.
RTFA. The reason that people are casually dismissing it is that this isn't even about someone on Obama's transition team, just someone advising him in an informal capacity (i.e., someone who's unpaid, and is using his own vacation time to boot). Never mind the fact that Obama's laid out the strictest ever set of ethics rules for his transition team. The fact is that there is a certain subset of ./ers who actually want to see Obama become another Bush, and will cry "Corruption!" at even the slightest impropriety.
I don't like California very much, but a budget shortfall during a recession is hardly an example of a failed nanny state. Especially when you consider that that its residents receive 78 cents for every dollar they send to the federal government (i.e., it heavily subsidizes other states). It's only a nanny state in the sense that it gives money to Alabamans and Mississippians.
I really don't understand the sentiment that "those who can't do, teach." At least in math, science, and engineering, academia is by far the most competitive job market, and where the bulk of research is done.
Both Eire and Poland are in the EU, free movement of people is guaranteed.
That's easy to say, but not so easy to do. Consider the following:
1. Moving usually incurs a huge cost, both in terms of time and money. When you're moving out of the country, those costs are multiplied.
2. Moving is stressful, and most people don't like forcing that on their family.
3. The social costs are high. You'd be leaving your friends, most of your family, and basically everyone you know behind. There's a reason that most people live within driving distance of where they grew up.
4. You'd have to learn Polish.
So yeah, while you're "free" to move, you're only free to do so if you're willing to accept all of the above. I think that point #3 is the most salient one, simply because humans are social beings and while the social costs aren't easily quantified, they're easily the dominant factor for most people.
Collapsing under its regulations? Give me a break. The state is hurting because it derived 20% of its revenue from the financial sector, also known as Wall Street. Perhaps you've heard that they haven't been doing so well as of late? This had nothing to do with overregulation, and everything to do with a lack of oversight.
I know I'll murder my karma saying this, but I can't fathom the intellectual masochism that must be required to be an Internet libertarian. "The current crisis was caused by the the CRA!" Oh wait, minorities comprised a fraction of subprime loans in default. "I know, Sarbanes-Oxley was the cause! If companies had been allowed to doctor their books to fool their investors, none of this would've happened!" Wait a minute...that doesn't make much sense. "It must have been the Fed, encouraging bad loans by artificially setting interest rates!" Never mind the fact that the Fed chairman was a good friend to Ayn Rand, a self-described libertarian, and has since admitted that his philosophy was flawed.
Just face facts: the unregulated free market is not perfect or optimal. A combination of greed and flawed business models swept the housing market, and since a combination of Gramm-Leach-Bliley and a lax antitrust division at the Justice Department allowed for the formation of megaconglomerates, this crisis spread to the financial sector. This is what the people actually responsible are saying, and not some (with all due respeact) fringe group typing posts on Digg.
Pretty much the only redeeming feature it has is that its cheap.
I have two words for you: native oxide. Yes, silicon is cheap, but don't underestimate the value of being able to easily grow silicon dioxide on top of it. I would say that that is the main reason that silicon has completely dominated the industry. Of course, with Intel moving to high-k dielectrics, it may be the case that that could change soon.
True, but given that Obama has stated that energy is his number one priority, one would think that the Energy Secretary will command his attention.
While I hate network executives as much as the next guy, you can hardly blame them for the bifurcation of the final season. The writers' strike necessitated that.
Actually, this sort of spending violates general welfare, because it takes money from everyone to give it to a few.
If the Supreme Court says it's constitutional, it's constitutional (by definition). Marbury vs Madison + enumerated powers = judicial review. You may not like it, but there it is.
I'm not saying that high union wages aren't a contributor to the Big 3's problems, but placing the complete onus on the unions is just asinine. The fact is that the Big 3 have been losing sales to their foreign competitors for decades, and that has absolutely nothing to do with worker pay. They have (deservedly) gained a reputation for shoddy products, and simply aren't offering what American consumers want.
Obama voted for the resolution to strip the FISA bill of the telecom immunity provision. He may have voted for the bill even after the amendment failed, but that's just a matter of priorities. He made it very clear that he thought that the pros of extending judicial oversight outweighed the cons of telecom immunity. Absolutely nothing can be done in the Senate without compromise.
Your first mistake was reading the comments on a Youtube video.
It would take either a professional team of assassins... to get anywhere near him
You say that as if there aren't people who might hire a professional team of assassins to kill the President. Anyone who has the money and the motivation to kill Obama could easily pay off a low-level Verizon staffer, or coerce them into doing so through other means (e.g., by threatening their family). IMO, the main question Verizon should be asking itself isn't whether these employees should be fired (though they probably should), it's what they can do to prevent this from happening again. Perhaps all phone records should be encrypted with multiple keys, so that no person in the company can access them alone?
Griffiths is great for a first undergraduate QM class. He may "skim the surface," but if you're discount it based on that, you may as well throw out every non-graduate text in existence. From a pedagogical standpoint, Griffiths is superb.
Hungerford, right? I'm an engineering grad student who once picked it up to learn something about group theory, but didn't even get past the first chapter because it was so dense and (from my perspective) esoteric. I know that rigor is important and all, but could you enlighten me as to what's so great about algebra? I mean, I can obviously see why analysis is important, but algebra still escapes me.
These are all good recommendations. I'd also add that for grad-level E&M, Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics is pretty much the standard.
While I'd love nothing more than to blame the network execs, the dearth of quality new shows this year is a direct result of the writer's strike. There were far fewer pilots produced last year than usual.
There's a website called Metamath which does a lot of what the article is talking about. It starts from the ZFC axioms and works its way up to thousands of elementary theorems, all proved completely formally. Pretty cool, if you're in to that sort of thing.
Why was this modded up? The first sentence is simply untrue. In every major presidential debate, the moderators make it perfectly clear that the questions were not shared with anyone prior to the event. Do you think that journalists such as Jim Lehrer, Gwen Ifill, Tom Brokaw, or the late Tim Russert would flat-out lie to their viewers? It's true that the candidates haggle over the most minute details, such as podium height, but I think you're confusing finagling over the details of the format of the debate with knowing the questions in advance.
As for the second point, I'll admit that candidates will sometimes refuse to answer questions (Palin especially comes to mind). But as Gwen Ifill explained on MTP this week, it is not her job as moderator to force Palin to answer. It was a debate between the candidates, and therefore her role was merely to guide the questioning. Biden should have been the one to call Palin out on her non-answers. That was his failure, not Ifill's. As for your "hard" questions:
1. Was talked about extensively in the last debate, which focused on foreign policy.
2. Was talked about to an extent in the last debate, which is substantial given that it was supposed to focus on foreign policy. Will probably be a major focus of tonight's debate.
3. The fact is that this isn't a big issue for most people, especially with the economy in the tank. Nevertheless, the candidates' positions are readily available: McCain will continue the Bush administration's policies towards medical marijuana, and Obama will instruct the Justice Department to not enforce the federal laws on medical marijuana patients.
4. The way this question is worded, it will never be asked. It is loaded.
An immoral law is an immoral law. We repealed slavery laws, because they violated the Right of Liberty for african immigrants. Similarly a law that sucks $20,000 out of people's paychecks to pay a firefighter's salary, violates both the Right of Property and the Right of Liberty (it's a form of partial enslavement.)
I don't know about that. What motivation would the Democrats have to permit passage of the bill? Texas is a guaranteed red state which they have no expectation of winning, and without Texas, McCain essentially loses the election. Now, it's likely that McCain would still win even as a write-in candidate, but if the Dems are represented enough in the Texas legislature, I'd think that they'd try to block passage of the bill using any means at their disposal.
I often use language to 'sort' people, and I do not socialize with the "wassup" crowd.
You don't associate with people from ten years ago?
That may be true, but video games are a relatively cheap form of entertainment. For about $50, you can get tens to hundreds of hours of entertainment. That's much cheaper than a movie or a nice dinner (though it still doesn't even come close to book-level).
So fucking what? Are we really this stupid in our politics that it's now a game of crying "flip-flopper" when you just say more or less the same thing, maybe with a different emphasis?
New words scare people. Just a couple weeks ago, Obama said in a press conference that he'd be willing to "refine" his Iraq policy during his visit there, and a combination of the media and the McCain campaign jumped all over him for "flip-flopping" on Iraq. They were pretending that he had said that he was going to change his stance on the war, and so he had to give a second press conference later that day to emphasize that he had said nothing of the sort.
The media is trying to have a repeat of 2004 by painting the Democrat as a flip-flopper, when he has only waffled, as all politicians do. Even Obama's worst flip-flop, on the FISA legislation, wasn't a complete reversal: though he voted the final bill, he still voted to strip the immunity provision. He said that he thought the bill had more good than bad in it, and while we might disagree, that's just a matter of priority, not of position.
Meanwhile, McCain directly contradicts himself time and time again, and he has so far gotten off scot-free. We don't have a liberal media or a conservative media, we have a sensationalist media that caters to the lowest common denominator by trying to place the candidates into a pre-defined mold that has existed for the better part of three decades.