1. This one stat very neatly captures a number of my opinions about public education:
"Despite ranking 27th and 30th in math, respectively, American and Israeli students came out at the top in their belief in their math abilities..."
That's the direct result of all this "self esteem" nonsense. A bunch of mediocre people who are nevertheless entirely confident in their capabilities.
2. America's last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward...
Training? That's a rather demeaning term to apply to STEM education. I feel personally insulted. Training is what you do to a dog or when you're teaching someone how to operate a piece of equipment or perform any other menial task. The author is implying that STEM education is somehow based on "training" and therefore precludes critical thinking and creativity?
F*** him. If you could design a test to determine who's better at "critical thinking" I'd bet money that the engineers would out-perform the liberal arts majors.
"There is no chance of another glacial period occurring until CO2 levels drop well below 300 ppm again."
Even a small scale nuclear war could do it. National Geographic did an article a few years ago where it was suggested that 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons could very well reverse the near term warming trend. That assumed a certain amount of ash and soot from secondary burning however.
Where do you get this crap about Iran being "crazy"? Fox News? Israeli and U.S. government propaganda? Iran is not "crazy" and U.S. intelligence analysts have said that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran. Even IF Iran had a weapons program, they are not "crazy" enough to use a nuke against the USA or Israel and doom themselves to complete annihilation in the inevitable counterattack. If oil was my only major export, I wouldn't want to burn it for domestic power production either. The real reason is that the USA government uses a ridiculous and short sighted double standard in its foreign(and domestic) policy.
If the consumers like it, couldn't they raise prices? It might also allow the early adopter to grab market share until the competitors ketch up. If your condiment bottle does something cool that the competitor's doesn't, I'll buy it and pay a premium.
Business owners should be able to "deny services to individuals" based on whatever criteria that the business owner chooses. Yes, that includes race, gender, hair color, sexual orientation or whatever else the owner wants to dream up. We shouldn't need to argue this on the basis of "religious freedom". It should be about "freedom" in the most general sense. Same with the "Hobby Lobby" case. Forget religion. Government has no legitimate authority to dictate the terms of a health benefits package that an employer offers to their employees.
IBM isn't actually producing a lot these days. Their PC and X86 server businesses have already been sold to Chinese companies. They're divesting themselves of their semiconductor business as well. I assume they'll keep the P-series and Z-series servers for a while, but "International Business Software and Services" would be a much more appropriate name for the company.
Agreed. People already move about the world completely immersed in what's happening on their smart phones. The fact that you need a certain screen size to have a usable interface and enjoyable experience puts a serious limit on the evolution of that technology. I think there's also going to be a saturation point in the app space when the "cool" has worn off. Something like Google Glass has got to be the next logical extension.
Snowden gave everything he had to journalists. He didn't bring any digital storage media with him when he went to Russia precisely because he didn't want anyone else getting access to the raw data. Whatever 'intel' he could provide has already been published in the pages of The Guardian.
Interesting. I was not aware that there was a debate about the practice of quarantine. The idea of "moving" infected, or possibly infected people certainly seems counter-intuitive.
Washing hands? These primitive savages still haven't figured out that you should keep human waste in a central location far away from your water supply and that you shouldn't bathe in water that you're later planning to drink.
"...few organizations are capable of moving thousands of people, some of them infected, to different locations on the globe"
Why in the hell would you want to move infected people to different locations on the globe? Furthermore, why would you move '1000's of people together when some of them might be infected? Putting a few sick people on a crowded bus or a plane is a great way to spread disease.
The typical response to a disease outbreak is quarantine because you want to keep the infection localized and to keep sick people away from others. I can understand how you might want to have resources in place to quickly transport medical professionals and other experts along with necessary equipment to respond to an outbreak. but moving infected people? That doesn't make much sense.
Interesting article and some good URLs at the bottom.
I always thought the idea that "ebonics" was a separate language was a bogus excuse for not learning "proper" English. I didn't know I was implicitly subscribing to "prescriptivism". If language is defined by "how people use it", then descriptivism would suggest that it really is a separate language. You couldn't possibly take an ebonics speaker and a typical New England yankee and, for the purpose of descriptivism, identify them both as "native speakers" of English.
Excellent point. I was thinking exclusively about the spoken word, but when you said "reading" I realized that incorrect grammar would find it's way into text as well. I would definitely inhibit my reading ability if I was suddenly exposed to books and articles that contained prolific grammatical errors. +1 insightful if I had points and could resist commenting.
"It is well past time to consign grammar pedantry to the history books."
Me and him be disagreein'. It's a given that language is always going to be dynamic and evolving. We see the proliferation of neologisms and common misspellings of words and phrases(e.g. cancelled) become so common that they end up being acceptable. There must be some sort of foundation however.
"People should not be stigmatized for the way they speak..."
Wrong. I can understand getting over things like "comprised of" and "cancelled" as being too overwhelming to eradicate. I can't deal with improper use of they're, their and there, double negatives and improper verb conjugation. Those should definitely be stigmatized
"I can't get no satisfaction" is a bloody song, not a speech. It works because "I can't get any satisfaction" doesn't roll off the tongue quite so smoothly. That doesn't mean we should dispense with the conventional use. Completely discarding grammar would be a quantum leap backward in effective communication, which is already suffering in the electronic age,
Irregardless of what he think language should be comprised of, do he thinks we's be wanting too tolerating verbal chaos?
"Banking laws historically have been among the most useful of all laws."
No laws are useful if the government refuses to enforce them. Leading up to 2008, they weren't even enforcing laws against fraud being perpetrated by bankers. They were definitely ignoring rampant securities fraud with the CDS and MBS stuff. In the midst of the disaster, the FDIC refused to follow its "prompt corrective action" mandate. Government also refused to investigate and prosecute thousands of instances of forgery, perjury and the filing of false affidavits related to the mortgage loan mess. Utter and complete fail by the government.
I'd rather have an unregulated system and knowingly accept the risks than have a federal government "regulated" banking system where you never know if the regulations will be enforced. I guarantee that if we had a free market banking system, I'd be earning more than 0.25% on my money market accounts. How good are federal banking laws when everyone who saves is being robbed on a daily basis?
The people that run big corporations are bound by law to maximize the profits of their shareholders. Your subject line says it all. It should come as no surprise that they put profit above all else. What makes you think they give a damn or should give a damn about the "needs and rights of everyone else"?
By contrast, the government is NOT bound by law to serve corporations. They're supposed to be serving the public. So, who are the bad guys here? The people that are doing exactly what we should expect them to do, or the people that are betraying the public to serve special interests?
I constantly hear the refrain that we need the federal government and federal regulators to protect us from the evil corporations.
From what I see, we're paying federal employees to either do nothing (SEC, OTS, CFTC, etc.) or to actively undermine our best interests (BLM, NSA, DofA, FDA, etc.)
A considerable fraction of federal regulators, especially the financial regulators, either came from or will go to the very companies they are supposed to be regulating! They refuse to enforce the laws for fear of jeopardizing their future employment prospects on Wall St.
We might as well fire them all as pay them for doing worse than nothing.
Don't you think that the ACLU and other plaintiffs are well aware of the arguments that the government has used in previous cases? I'm not saying that they'll win, but they've obviously got something more than what they had with ACLU v. NSA or Amnesty v. Clapper.
I'm certainly cheering for Wikimedia, et al. Of course the odds are against them when you have the government deciding how much power the government has. The ACLU lawyers are no dummies however. This time around they must have something that they believe can be used to demonstrate legal standing. They're not going to file a new case that the government will be able to shut down using the exact same strategies used to kill the previous cases. Remember also that none of the Snowden revelations had come out prior to ACLU v. NSA or Amnesty v. Clapper.
In an earlier post I made it clear that this idea about a correlation between firearms availability and suicide attempts is completely bogus. Also, the idea of making it a crime to have unlocked firearms in a home is totally insane.
Something I might be willing to consider is adding people who are admitted to an emergency room after a suicide attempt to the NICS database. At least temporarily. (NICS database contains the list of people who are prohibited from buying firearms).
Just thought of this, but maybe we should also allow people to get themselves added voluntarily! I've got no issue with that. "I think I'm a danger to myself your honor and I'd like to limit my own ability to acquire a firearm." I think they'd have to be insane to do that, but it would be their choice.
I'd be very worried about the implementation, but I think it could work. Impose a very rigid criteria for adding a person and give them a chance to argue against it in court. Then provide an inexpensive way for the person to get their name removed. Or maybe they're automatically removed after 1 year or something?
You don't think that libertarians "care" about their families, friends and other human beings in general? I beg to differ. But getting to the point, I think we're talking about this firearms/suicide thing in the context of public policy. i.e. allowing the government to mandate what we can and can't do in our own homes, right?
I certainly sympathize with someone who is so unhappy that they are contemplating suicide, but there is no clear link between availability of firearms and attempted suicide. Only that people who use a firearm in the attempt are more successful. Therefore, making it a crime for 330 million people to have unlocked firearms in their home is not demonstrating how much I "care" for the.02% of people who are suicidal.
".... every single day there is at least one innocent child in this county who is shot as a direct result of an irresponsible owner."
I assume you're talking about "irresponsible" but otherwise law-abiding citizens, not criminals. What's your definition of "child"? Anti-gun groups will frequently define anyone under 21 as a "child" to pad their data. As if an 18 year old gang-banger is a "child".
Let's suppose anyone under 14 y/o is a "child", which makes it convenient to analyze CDC data:
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of thoughts.
1. This one stat very neatly captures a number of my opinions about public education:
"Despite ranking 27th and 30th in math, respectively, American and Israeli students came out at the top in their belief in their math abilities..."
That's the direct result of all this "self esteem" nonsense. A bunch of mediocre people who are nevertheless entirely confident in their capabilities.
2. America's last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward...
Training? That's a rather demeaning term to apply to STEM education. I feel personally insulted. Training is what you do to a dog or when you're teaching someone how to operate a piece of equipment or perform any other menial task. The author is implying that STEM education is somehow based on "training" and therefore precludes critical thinking and creativity?
F*** him. If you could design a test to determine who's better at "critical thinking" I'd bet money that the engineers would out-perform the liberal arts majors.
"There is no chance of another glacial period occurring until CO2 levels drop well below 300 ppm again."
Even a small scale nuclear war could do it. National Geographic did an article a few years ago where it was suggested that 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons could very well reverse the near term warming trend. That assumed a certain amount of ash and soot from secondary burning however.
Where do you get this crap about Iran being "crazy"? Fox News? Israeli and U.S. government propaganda? Iran is not "crazy" and U.S. intelligence analysts have said that there is no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran.
Even IF Iran had a weapons program, they are not "crazy" enough to use a nuke against the USA or Israel and doom themselves to complete annihilation in the inevitable counterattack.
If oil was my only major export, I wouldn't want to burn it for domestic power production either.
The real reason is that the USA government uses a ridiculous and short sighted double standard in its foreign(and domestic) policy.
If the consumers like it, couldn't they raise prices? It might also allow the early adopter to grab market share until the competitors ketch up.
If your condiment bottle does something cool that the competitor's doesn't, I'll buy it and pay a premium.
Business owners should be able to "deny services to individuals" based on whatever criteria that the business owner chooses. Yes, that includes race, gender, hair color, sexual orientation or whatever else the owner wants to dream up. We shouldn't need to argue this on the basis of "religious freedom". It should be about "freedom" in the most general sense. Same with the "Hobby Lobby" case. Forget religion. Government has no legitimate authority to dictate the terms of a health benefits package that an employer offers to their employees.
IBM isn't actually producing a lot these days.
Their PC and X86 server businesses have already been sold to Chinese companies. They're divesting themselves of their semiconductor business as well. I assume they'll keep the P-series and Z-series servers for a while, but "International Business Software and Services" would be a much more appropriate name for the company.
Agreed. People already move about the world completely immersed in what's happening on their smart phones. The fact that you need a certain screen size to have a usable interface and enjoyable experience puts a serious limit on the evolution of that technology. I think there's also going to be a saturation point in the app space when the "cool" has worn off. Something like Google Glass has got to be the next logical extension.
Snowden gave everything he had to journalists. He didn't bring any digital storage media with him when he went to Russia precisely because he didn't want anyone else getting access to the raw data.
Whatever 'intel' he could provide has already been published in the pages of The Guardian.
"20 years ago, my house was made of biodegradable wood. It is still usable today."
+1 Funny
Accidentally modded -1 Overrated.
Drat.
Interesting. I was not aware that there was a debate about the practice of quarantine. The idea of "moving" infected, or possibly infected people certainly seems counter-intuitive.
Washing hands? These primitive savages still haven't figured out that you should keep human waste in a central location far away from your water supply and that you shouldn't bathe in water that you're later planning to drink.
"...few organizations are capable of moving thousands of people, some of them infected, to different locations on the globe"
Why in the hell would you want to move infected people to different locations on the globe? Furthermore, why would you move '1000's of people together when some of them might be infected? Putting a few sick people on a crowded bus or a plane is a great way to spread disease.
The typical response to a disease outbreak is quarantine because you want to keep the infection localized and to keep sick people away from others. I can understand how you might want to have resources in place to quickly transport medical professionals and other experts along with necessary equipment to respond to an outbreak. but moving infected people? That doesn't make much sense.
Interesting article and some good URLs at the bottom.
I always thought the idea that "ebonics" was a separate language was a bogus excuse for not learning "proper" English. I didn't know I was implicitly subscribing to "prescriptivism". If language is defined by "how people use it", then descriptivism would suggest that it really is a separate language. You couldn't possibly take an ebonics speaker and a typical New England yankee and, for the purpose of descriptivism, identify them both as "native speakers" of English.
Excellent point. I was thinking exclusively about the spoken word, but when you said "reading" I realized that incorrect grammar would find it's way into text as well. I would definitely inhibit my reading ability if I was suddenly exposed to books and articles that contained prolific grammatical errors.
+1 insightful if I had points and could resist commenting.
"It is well past time to consign grammar pedantry to the history books."
Me and him be disagreein'. It's a given that language is always going to be dynamic and evolving. We see the proliferation of neologisms and common misspellings of words and phrases(e.g. cancelled) become so common that they end up being acceptable. There must be some sort of foundation however.
"People should not be stigmatized for the way they speak..."
Wrong. I can understand getting over things like "comprised of" and "cancelled" as being too overwhelming to eradicate. I can't deal with improper use of they're, their and there, double negatives and improper verb conjugation. Those should definitely be stigmatized
"I can't get no satisfaction" is a bloody song, not a speech. It works because "I can't get any satisfaction" doesn't roll off the tongue quite so smoothly. That doesn't mean we should dispense with the conventional use. Completely discarding grammar would be a quantum leap backward in effective communication, which is already suffering in the electronic age,
Irregardless of what he think language should be comprised of, do he thinks we's be wanting too tolerating verbal chaos?
"Obama Administration Wants More Legal Power"
Leave it at that.
"Banking laws historically have been among the most useful of all laws."
No laws are useful if the government refuses to enforce them. Leading up to 2008, they weren't even enforcing laws against fraud being perpetrated by bankers. They were definitely ignoring rampant securities fraud with the CDS and MBS stuff. In the midst of the disaster, the FDIC refused to follow its "prompt corrective action" mandate. Government also refused to investigate and prosecute thousands of instances of forgery, perjury and the filing of false affidavits related to the mortgage loan mess. Utter and complete fail by the government.
I'd rather have an unregulated system and knowingly accept the risks than have a federal government "regulated" banking system where you never know if the regulations will be enforced. I guarantee that if we had a free market banking system, I'd be earning more than 0.25% on my money market accounts. How good are federal banking laws when everyone who saves is being robbed on a daily basis?
The people that run big corporations are bound by law to maximize the profits of their shareholders. Your subject line says it all. It should come as no surprise that they put profit above all else. What makes you think they give a damn or should give a damn about the "needs and rights of everyone else"?
By contrast, the government is NOT bound by law to serve corporations. They're supposed to be serving the public. So, who are the bad guys here? The people that are doing exactly what we should expect them to do, or the people that are betraying the public to serve special interests?
I constantly hear the refrain that we need the federal government and federal regulators to protect us from the evil corporations.
From what I see, we're paying federal employees to either do nothing (SEC, OTS, CFTC, etc.) or to actively undermine our best interests (BLM, NSA, DofA, FDA, etc.)
A considerable fraction of federal regulators, especially the financial regulators, either came from or will go to the very companies they are supposed to be regulating! They refuse to enforce the laws for fear of jeopardizing their future employment prospects on Wall St.
We might as well fire them all as pay them for doing worse than nothing.
Don't you think that the ACLU and other plaintiffs are well aware of the arguments that the government has used in previous cases?
I'm not saying that they'll win, but they've obviously got something more than what they had with ACLU v. NSA or Amnesty v. Clapper.
I'm certainly cheering for Wikimedia, et al. Of course the odds are against them when you have the government deciding how much power the government has.
The ACLU lawyers are no dummies however. This time around they must have something that they believe can be used to demonstrate legal standing. They're not going to file a new case that the government will be able to shut down using the exact same strategies used to kill the previous cases. Remember also that none of the Snowden revelations had come out prior to ACLU v. NSA or Amnesty v. Clapper.
In an earlier post I made it clear that this idea about a correlation between firearms availability and suicide attempts is completely bogus. Also, the idea of making it a crime to have unlocked firearms in a home is totally insane.
Something I might be willing to consider is adding people who are admitted to an emergency room after a suicide attempt to the NICS database. At least temporarily. (NICS database contains the list of people who are prohibited from buying firearms).
Just thought of this, but maybe we should also allow people to get themselves added voluntarily! I've got no issue with that. "I think I'm a danger to myself your honor and I'd like to limit my own ability to acquire a firearm." I think they'd have to be insane to do that, but it would be their choice.
I'd be very worried about the implementation, but I think it could work. Impose a very rigid criteria for adding a person and give them a chance to argue against it in court. Then provide an inexpensive way for the person to get their name removed. Or maybe they're automatically removed after 1 year or something?
Just a thought.
You don't think that libertarians "care" about their families, friends and other human beings in general? I beg to differ. But getting to the point, I think we're talking about this firearms/suicide thing in the context of public policy. i.e. allowing the government to mandate what we can and can't do in our own homes, right?
I certainly sympathize with someone who is so unhappy that they are contemplating suicide, but there is no clear link between availability of firearms and attempted suicide. Only that people who use a firearm in the attempt are more successful. .02% of people who are suicidal.
Therefore, making it a crime for 330 million people to have unlocked firearms in their home is not demonstrating how much I "care" for the
".... every single day there is at least one innocent child in this county who is shot as a direct result of an irresponsible owner."
I assume you're talking about "irresponsible" but otherwise law-abiding citizens, not criminals.
What's your definition of "child"? Anti-gun groups will frequently define anyone under 21 as a "child" to pad their data. As if an 18 year old gang-banger is a "child".
Let's suppose anyone under 14 y/o is a "child", which makes it convenient to analyze CDC data:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/n...
For 2013. Deaths by accidental discharge of firearms:
Age : Number
0- 1 : 3
1-4 : 27
5-14 : 39
Doesn't exactly square with one "every day" and I think that even age '14' is a bit of a stretch in defining a "child".
If that law ever gets enacted in my country, I will hang a rifle from the ceiling in front of my bay windows and report myself to the authorities.
Molon Labe