Grow up, girl, Get a cute boyfriend to hump your brains out on a regular basis and you won't feel the need to go around with a fucking pot on your head.
You do know that while sex is enjoyable and all that, it really is not the solution to all of life's problems, and not everyone you disagree with is suffering from sexual frustrations. This is not totally unlike telling a woman to "get back in the kitchen (or bedroom)", or telling a young person to "go back to the kid's table", or telling a black person to "get back out into the fields". While it might be an effective technique to belittle others, It is dismissive, petty, rude, and does little to actually advance the discussion.
While you might like to think that you can tell what everyone's sincerely held beliefs might be - you really can't. While you might like to be the arbiter of what is important and what is not important - others are going to disagree with you. Clearly in this case, this person does sincerely believe that this issue is important to them - important enough to go through all the legal necessities to get this type of ruling.
This is just another thinly veiled attack on Christianity and other religions.
No, it is not. It is actually a very clever way to highlight the importance of the separation between church and state.
The very first part of the First Amendment is that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" and, making explicit exceptions for religious attire in legislation breaks not only the spirit but also the letter of that text.
Making an exception in the law for religious reasons (like in this case, no head gear except for religious reasons) undermine that very principle...
Not always. Sometimes the First Amendment gives grounds for challenging legislation to prove that there is a legitimate reason for "prohibiting the free exercise therof". If there is a law, regulation, or other governmental requirement that can be shown to unreasonably impact the "free exercise" of someone's religion, then the First Amendment comes into play, and the courts might correctly strike down such laws and/or do whatever other things courts can do to prevent such unreasonable impact.
A similar case happened recently in Canada. The courts denied a man's right to wear a colander in a government ID photo.
Why?
The official verdict stated that nowhere in Pastafarian dogma does it say that adherents must wear a colander at all times. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
I'd love to see a reference. Of course one could easily counter that while Reformed Pastafarians do not require the colander, the Orthodox Pastafarians do. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Stripped? We're talking about showing a face. Treating people as equals trumps protection of fairy tales, er, I mean religion.
Stripped of the covering that they feel is properly modest.
Just because YOU are fine with uncovering your face for all to see does not mean that everyone is. Similarly, some people do not want everyone to see their naked chest, and many (but not all) are uncomfortable exposing their genitalia. There is no "logical" reason to keep these covered up, and there are examples of cultures where covering these body parts is no big deal.
Potentially, treating people as "equal" could mean placing equal importance on people's feelings of privacy and/or modesty, it does not necessarily mean treating everyone identically.
With all that said, I don't have any Solomonic solution to this type of situation where a person's desire to remain covered could work against a legitimate "state" desire for ease of identification. I suppose it is fortunate we don't typically identify each other by the shape of our penises or vulva, but I suppose if we did than there would not be as much of a social taboo against allowing them to be seen....
I Had someone using my social security number for work once upon a time. Their company had a mandated retirement program. The IRS never complained about my taxes, even when I e-filed. One year I got a check in the mail for ~$5000 from a company I had never heard of, nor worked for.
As an expat US Citizen, maybe I should try to get some illegal immigrant in the USA to use my SSN to do some work to build up my social security credits which have not been growing while I am out of the US....
The solution is to randomly insert images in the x-rays that are false positives. To keep screeners alert, these false positives need to happen about 5% of the time.
That's one reason that every now and then, a bag gets sent back through the x-ray machine without being opened, despite not having any contraband in it.
The Freakonoics podcast last week talked about boredom. One of the ways to make these types of tasks more interesting, and probably improve the effectiveness is to "gameify" it. Maybe something like this would work: As each tray goes through, the screen displays the image and the screener presses a red button for "bad stuff" and a green button for "everything is ok". Each time the red button is pressed but no "bad stuff" is found in later screening, the "player" looses points. Each time the red button is pressed and "bad stuff" stuff is found in later screening, the screener gets points. Now comes the part that makes it work: since we want to deduct points (presumably a lot of points) on occasions when the screener lets "bad stuff" pass with a press of the green button, but for actual items carried by travellers we do not know who might be carrying the bad stuff so we insert known images of "bad stuff containing" trays (and maybe known images of trays with no "bad stuff"). When the screener encounters these images, they can be scored appropriately, and these known images allow for calibration of the screener's effectiveness. The system can add the "virtual trays" at a rate that keeps the screeners alert, and the penalties for flagging a "clean" tray as dirty can discourage being overly cautious.
Tie the points into some small reward like free lunch, or better yet have them contribute towards some team points totals to get the powers of competition and tribal grouping to focus attention and effectiveness would probably go up as well. Remove people from the screening job who cannot do it well enough.
If implemented, we would probably have to work hard at preventing cheating - making the virtual tray images fit into the regular images in such a way that the screener cannot tell which is which, making sure that other members of the "team" do not somehow help the screener in a way that messes the system up, etc.
To generate "no bad stuff" images for the system you would need to pack some bags with no bad stuff in it, but for "bad stuff" images you could use both bags packed with "bad stuff" in addition to images of actual traveller bags that got flagged by a screener and then were found to have "bad stuff" in them.
All of this presupposes that there is an actual desire to effectively find all the things that are prohibited. I suspect that this is not actually the case. Sure, most people are happier if they feel that knives and guns are not carried by any travellers, but "the powers that be" probably all know that the list of prohibited items is needlessly long. Actually ferreting out all of these things probably would slow things down way too much for no actual improvement in safety. To catch all of the "bad stuff" containing virtual images for example, you probably need to flag every bag that might possibly have a "bad thing" obscured by another thing - it is probably impossible to catch all of the "red" images without also flagging lots of "green" images, which would result in lots of further screening of "clean" trays.
Oh and of course this is not 100% within your control due to different quality of teaching, but you don't want to get screwed from the ground up by being taught from a fundamentally different material than everyone else to begin with.
That does sound like a challenge.
Of course the whole idea that grades should have any importance beyond helping the instructor and sudent gain insight into progress and how to futher their learning is an issue so fundamentally mixed up within our educational systems that it twists the way we look at almost every aspect of those systems. The proper idea of "we should/should not do such-and-such because it will help/hinder students' learning" is so easly morphed into "we should/should not do such-and-such because it will help/hinder students' grades", further driving the idea that the grading is the important outcome.
And the problem is? Students that can choose between the classes can now get to chose based on book price as well.
The problem is when student's can't chose between the classes and then when it comes to sitting the Exam for Maths101 they were all taught in different ways using different content. Was my teacher awesome? How do I know?
And the folks who took the course the year before or the year later will also have different experiences. So what?
Usually in places where Maths101a is taught by a different instructor than Maths101b, the evaluations are done independantly by each instructor, with nothing more in common between then then the courses taught in different years. To expect the identical experience when taking courses taught by different instructors is probably unwise.
It is well documented that all you need to do to push the reproduction rate below replacement is to have comprehensive sex education and easy access to birth control.
We will probably have to move to ever more generous paid family leave policies just to keep the population stable.
So fuck off with the discredited Malthusianism.
Sure, birth rates are falling due increased urbanization and all that stuff - that is pretty clear. Are they falling fast enough to give us a max population figure that allows for the rest of the planet's ecosystem to thrive? Not so clear. Saying that we should be seriously studying the impact our population is likely to have on the planet is not really "discredited Malthusianism".
That's what I always wonder when I hear someone ask "Where have you been on June 26th 2005"? Fuck, I barely remember where I have been on a specific day last week!
The podcast "Serial" which revisits the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, and the 2000 conviction of Adnan Masud Syed for that murder. It is clear that a huge number of people could not recall details about the time of the murder, and that the details from people who were in the same room witnessing the same events are significantly different.
It is a very engaging series. For me at least I am left with almost no confident idea of who did it.
I'm sure Orange County residents are fine with wise use of tax money. It will cost over 30 million to install, it might save up to a million per year.
How long is that battery life?
How is this a use of tax money? A private company installing something that they think will save them money? Or maybe they are reselling electricity to their tenants and this will generate revenue. Of course I did not read the article very closely, so I could be wrong. Please correct me if I am.
The relationship between the kilogram and the liter was the most elegant thing in the metric system, so why break it?
This doesn't break it. Any changes to the precise value of the kilogram are going to be so small that you can safely continue to use the idea that one litre of water has a mass of one kilogram. Changing the definition of the metre from one based on the earth, to the reference piece of metal, to waveleghts of a particular type of light, to a distance light moves in one second did not change the litre-kilogram relationship because the litre-kilogram relationship in practice cannot be examined to the level of accuracy of the other relationships.
What I don't get it, shouldn't the kilogram have been defined and redefined then as the weight of a cubic dm of water each of these times then too? Why is there an attempt to base this on Avogadro's or Plank's constant?
The difficulty at various times in the past was that the accuracy available using various deffinitions was different. If we defined the kilogram of mass as being equal to the mass of one litre of water, the uncertainties in that definition would have been much greater than the uncertainties in measuring a standard chunk of metal and replicating that. The uncertainties arries in the purity of water obtainable, the temperature, pressure, humidity effects that would come into play, the uncertainties in creating a vessel with the exactly correct volume.
If your scales are accurate to nano-grams but your standard is only accurate to micro-grams, then you have a problem.
If you are using a chunk of metal, than your standard is going to be as accurate as your scales and you only have to worry about making sure your standard is not changing over time (which is why they treated it with such care). Once you have a standard definition that can be measured as accurately as the standard physical object, then the object becomes superfluous, but before that point it is better to just use the standard physical object.
The point is that the "benefit" people have from the metric system is that it's base 10. The Imperial system as used in the US is base 10 when it's actually useful to be base 10 and not base 10 the rest of the time.
The real "benefit" is that the system is used by more than 6 billion people (18%), while the US comprises only about a third of a billion people (. In an ecconomic comparison, the US GDP is about 17 Trillion, while the world GDP is around 77 Trillion (22%)
Unless you think your arguments are strong enough to convince everyone else to switch from SI to US, the argument for switching just to be like everyone else is pretty strong.
I think you missed the point. People in France speak and think in French because that's what they're used to. Force them to adopt English as their national language and you'd have riots and pandemonium. Even if it held officially, people would use French over English anyway. That's what it's like for the common man to change their language of measurement.
Very true, but every other country in the world has switched, going through some pain in the process, but comming out of it eventually. Let us spare our great-grandchildren the pain and do it now quickly rather than continue to spread it out over the next dozen decades.
We have already lost this fight. Bit by bit, parts of every industry that interacts with the rest of the world has slowly moved to metric. The relatively small pain of this slow transition integrated over the huge time it is occuring is much less than the greater pain over the shorter transition period that every other country that previously used a non-metric measurement system ended up experiencing.
You don't see Americans arguing over the size of a pint or a pound. "A pint is a pound the world around." So there.
I'm laughing at the superior measuring system.
I am pretty sure that the "American" units have all been defined in relationship to the SI units. All the refinements of definition happen on the SI side of things and just get passed over to the US customary units side. Basically the US has been completely metric for a long time, and just divides all the lengths by (2.54 cm/inch) - which totally makes sense.
In my day, if you wanted to be mean to another driver, you broke his headlights, cracked his windshield and pissed in his gas tank. Now THAT was mean.
You do understand these are electric vehicles. There isn't a gas tank now!!! So pissing in it won't work!... but I'm all for "break headlights, crack windshield, then ask them to 'please' move their vehicle. [much sarcasm people]
Pissing into the charging port is probably a bad idea too.
Easy work to move cars into charging stations and shuffle them around as the day goes by, put keys in a kiosk. A bit of coding and scheduling algorithms and a smartphone app would allow the valet to move cars efficiently and make the best use of a limited number of stations. And could be price competitive with adding many more charging stations.
This does sound like a good idea. Politically it is usually easier to fund a capital expense than an ongoing labour one - people get more excited about building some structure than about paying to maintain it.
Perhaps there is some underpaid schmuck who already is in the area sweeping the floor and the like and we could just add this to their job?
It's the teachers job to make science fun, not the schools.
Well, the school, the district, and the state all have the job of supporting the teachers by way of training, hiring, and rewards systems - all of which can greatly impact how easy it is for the teacher to do that job. The community, the family, and of course the students themselves all have important and large infleuences on outcomes. As much as we would like to think that one amazing teacher can magically turn things around ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), it really is not that easy.
There is also the danger of selling something as "fun" in the way that going to a carnival might be "fun" versus selling it as something that is "rewarding" like perhaps the efforts necessary to train as a team to win a race, or the preparations necessary to do tasks like rock-climbing or other challenging tasks. If you tell someone "This thing is FUN!" then it seems much more likely that when they encournter aspects that are not effortless and completely entertaining, they will (rightly) decide that it is not "fun" and have much less chance beliving that is worthwhile.
Coaches generally don't tell the players that "running lines" or doing pushups is "fun", but the players believe that doing those tasks is worthwhile and necessary to do what they want to do - get better at their sport and do well in the competitions. Almost nothing we do is "fun" in every aspect. Helping people to develop the ability to get satisfaction from doing a task well, and recognizing the benifits of focussed effort should be a primary goal of our general educational system. Having the student understand why they are doing whatever they are doing might also go a long way towards providing motivation for the activities. Having the instructors understand the purpose of activites as well is probably worthwhile too...
With that said, unless one is trying some revers psychology or something, we shoud be trying as much as possible to limit the unpleasant aspects of learning in all areas. Pushups might be necessary in order to build athlete strength, but we do not have to do them on a field of broken glass.
It doesn't take 7 billion people to feed, clothe, shelter, and even communicate with 7 billion people.
So what do we do? We are TOO efficient for everyone to earn a living. So do we just murder the people who are not "needed?" Do we let them starve? Do we have massive unnecessary works to employ the unemployable? I am all for suggestions, but when society doesn't really need as many workers as it has, you have to either change the idea of work, or kill off some of the workers.
Alberta just put the royalties into general revenue and spent it. Now that the price of oil has collapsed they are facing a huge budget deficit and have nothing to show for it. (Well, some infrastructure may have been built that wouldn't have.)
I think the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund has managed to do a bit of good. But it doesn't look like it has been as effective as Norway or Alaska's systems.
not that it's an aberration for a state to write you a check just because it has some valuable resources.
"The State" doesn't have any goddamn valuable resources. The people who live in the state have those resources. It's called "the commons".
Who owns the air over your head? Who owns the motherfucking light on a sunny day? If the state you live in has oil, on public lands then it belongs to the citizens of that state.
It certainly seems like a worthwhile use of state resources - take the state income and split it amoungst the residents to do with as they wish.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, I love one of the blocks that could map to my place: "drones totally toasted" ;)
Not that anyone would go to Iceland anyways, but you just gave your physical location to within 4.2 meters on an internet forum.
Or at least *someone's* physical location.
Grow up, girl, Get a cute boyfriend to hump your brains out on a regular basis and you won't feel the need to go around with a fucking pot on your head.
You do know that while sex is enjoyable and all that, it really is not the solution to all of life's problems, and not everyone you disagree with is suffering from sexual frustrations. This is not totally unlike telling a woman to "get back in the kitchen (or bedroom)", or telling a young person to "go back to the kid's table", or telling a black person to "get back out into the fields". While it might be an effective technique to belittle others, It is dismissive, petty, rude, and does little to actually advance the discussion.
While you might like to think that you can tell what everyone's sincerely held beliefs might be - you really can't. While you might like to be the arbiter of what is important and what is not important - others are going to disagree with you. Clearly in this case, this person does sincerely believe that this issue is important to them - important enough to go through all the legal necessities to get this type of ruling.
No, it is not. It is actually a very clever way to highlight the importance of the separation between church and state.
The very first part of the First Amendment is that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;" and, making explicit exceptions for religious attire in legislation breaks not only the spirit but also the letter of that text.
Making an exception in the law for religious reasons (like in this case, no head gear except for religious reasons) undermine that very principle ...
Not always. Sometimes the First Amendment gives grounds for challenging legislation to prove that there is a legitimate reason for "prohibiting the free exercise therof". If there is a law, regulation, or other governmental requirement that can be shown to unreasonably impact the "free exercise" of someone's religion, then the First Amendment comes into play, and the courts might correctly strike down such laws and/or do whatever other things courts can do to prevent such unreasonable impact.
A similar case happened recently in Canada. The courts denied a man's right to wear a colander in a government ID photo.
Why?
The official verdict stated that nowhere in Pastafarian dogma does it say that adherents must wear a colander at all times. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
I'd love to see a reference. Of course one could easily counter that while Reformed Pastafarians do not require the colander, the Orthodox Pastafarians do. Or maybe it was the other way around.
Stripped? We're talking about showing a face.
Treating people as equals trumps protection of fairy tales, er, I mean religion.
Stripped of the covering that they feel is properly modest.
Just because YOU are fine with uncovering your face for all to see does not mean that everyone is. Similarly, some people do not want everyone to see their naked chest, and many (but not all) are uncomfortable exposing their genitalia. There is no "logical" reason to keep these covered up, and there are examples of cultures where covering these body parts is no big deal.
Potentially, treating people as "equal" could mean placing equal importance on people's feelings of privacy and/or modesty, it does not necessarily mean treating everyone identically.
With all that said, I don't have any Solomonic solution to this type of situation where a person's desire to remain covered could work against a legitimate "state" desire for ease of identification. I suppose it is fortunate we don't typically identify each other by the shape of our penises or vulva, but I suppose if we did than there would not be as much of a social taboo against allowing them to be seen....
I Had someone using my social security number for work once upon a time. Their company had a mandated retirement program. The IRS never complained about my taxes, even when I e-filed. One year I got a check in the mail for ~$5000 from a company I had never heard of, nor worked for.
As an expat US Citizen, maybe I should try to get some illegal immigrant in the USA to use my SSN to do some work to build up my social security credits which have not been growing while I am out of the US....
The solution is to randomly insert images in the x-rays that are false positives. To keep screeners alert, these false positives need to happen about 5% of the time.
That's one reason that every now and then, a bag gets sent back through the x-ray machine without being opened, despite not having any contraband in it.
The Freakonoics podcast last week talked about boredom. One of the ways to make these types of tasks more interesting, and probably improve the effectiveness is to "gameify" it. Maybe something like this would work: As each tray goes through, the screen displays the image and the screener presses a red button for "bad stuff" and a green button for "everything is ok". Each time the red button is pressed but no "bad stuff" is found in later screening, the "player" looses points. Each time the red button is pressed and "bad stuff" stuff is found in later screening, the screener gets points. Now comes the part that makes it work: since we want to deduct points (presumably a lot of points) on occasions when the screener lets "bad stuff" pass with a press of the green button, but for actual items carried by travellers we do not know who might be carrying the bad stuff so we insert known images of "bad stuff containing" trays (and maybe known images of trays with no "bad stuff"). When the screener encounters these images, they can be scored appropriately, and these known images allow for calibration of the screener's effectiveness. The system can add the "virtual trays" at a rate that keeps the screeners alert, and the penalties for flagging a "clean" tray as dirty can discourage being overly cautious.
Tie the points into some small reward like free lunch, or better yet have them contribute towards some team points totals to get the powers of competition and tribal grouping to focus attention and effectiveness would probably go up as well. Remove people from the screening job who cannot do it well enough.
If implemented, we would probably have to work hard at preventing cheating - making the virtual tray images fit into the regular images in such a way that the screener cannot tell which is which, making sure that other members of the "team" do not somehow help the screener in a way that messes the system up, etc.
To generate "no bad stuff" images for the system you would need to pack some bags with no bad stuff in it, but for "bad stuff" images you could use both bags packed with "bad stuff" in addition to images of actual traveller bags that got flagged by a screener and then were found to have "bad stuff" in them.
All of this presupposes that there is an actual desire to effectively find all the things that are prohibited. I suspect that this is not actually the case. Sure, most people are happier if they feel that knives and guns are not carried by any travellers, but "the powers that be" probably all know that the list of prohibited items is needlessly long. Actually ferreting out all of these things probably would slow things down way too much for no actual improvement in safety. To catch all of the "bad stuff" containing virtual images for example, you probably need to flag every bag that might possibly have a "bad thing" obscured by another thing - it is probably impossible to catch all of the "red" images without also flagging lots of "green" images, which would result in lots of further screening of "clean" trays.
Oh and of course this is not 100% within your control due to different quality of teaching, but you don't want to get screwed from the ground up by being taught from a fundamentally different material than everyone else to begin with.
That does sound like a challenge.
Of course the whole idea that grades should have any importance beyond helping the instructor and sudent gain insight into progress and how to futher their learning is an issue so fundamentally mixed up within our educational systems that it twists the way we look at almost every aspect of those systems. The proper idea of "we should/should not do such-and-such because it will help/hinder students' learning" is so easly morphed into "we should/should not do such-and-such because it will help/hinder students' grades", further driving the idea that the grading is the important outcome.
But I digress....
And the problem is? Students that can choose between the classes can now get to chose based on book price as well.
The problem is when student's can't chose between the classes and then when it comes to sitting the Exam for Maths101 they were all taught in different ways using different content. Was my teacher awesome? How do I know?
And the folks who took the course the year before or the year later will also have different experiences. So what?
Usually in places where Maths101a is taught by a different instructor than Maths101b, the evaluations are done independantly by each instructor, with nothing more in common between then then the courses taught in different years. To expect the identical experience when taking courses taught by different instructors is probably unwise.
Bullshit.
It is well documented that all you need to do to push the reproduction rate below replacement is to have comprehensive sex education and easy access to birth control.
We will probably have to move to ever more generous paid family leave policies just to keep the population stable.
So fuck off with the discredited Malthusianism.
Sure, birth rates are falling due increased urbanization and all that stuff - that is pretty clear. Are they falling fast enough to give us a max population figure that allows for the rest of the planet's ecosystem to thrive? Not so clear. Saying that we should be seriously studying the impact our population is likely to have on the planet is not really "discredited Malthusianism".
Only 'cause the slave owners noticed it's cheaper to not house and feed your slaves but instead pay them a fraction of that cost in salary.
Well, they didn't notice it themselves, they had to be forced to do so, but they did eventually figure it out.
That's what I always wonder when I hear someone ask "Where have you been on June 26th 2005"? Fuck, I barely remember where I have been on a specific day last week!
The podcast "Serial" which revisits the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee, and the 2000 conviction of Adnan Masud Syed for that murder. It is clear that a huge number of people could not recall details about the time of the murder, and that the details from people who were in the same room witnessing the same events are significantly different.
It is a very engaging series. For me at least I am left with almost no confident idea of who did it.
http://serialpodcast.org/
Clearly we should all be wearing body cams at all time.
I'm sure Orange County residents are fine with wise use of tax money. It will cost over 30 million to install, it might save up to a million per year.
How long is that battery life?
How is this a use of tax money? A private company installing something that they think will save them money? Or maybe they are reselling electricity to their tenants and this will generate revenue. Of course I did not read the article very closely, so I could be wrong. Please correct me if I am.
The relationship between the kilogram and the liter was the most elegant thing in the metric system, so why break it?
This doesn't break it. Any changes to the precise value of the kilogram are going to be so small that you can safely continue to use the idea that one litre of water has a mass of one kilogram. Changing the definition of the metre from one based on the earth, to the reference piece of metal, to waveleghts of a particular type of light, to a distance light moves in one second did not change the litre-kilogram relationship because the litre-kilogram relationship in practice cannot be examined to the level of accuracy of the other relationships.
What I don't get it, shouldn't the kilogram have been defined and redefined then as the weight of a cubic dm of water each of these times then too? Why is there an attempt to base this on Avogadro's or Plank's constant?
The difficulty at various times in the past was that the accuracy available using various deffinitions was different. If we defined the kilogram of mass as being equal to the mass of one litre of water, the uncertainties in that definition would have been much greater than the uncertainties in measuring a standard chunk of metal and replicating that. The uncertainties arries in the purity of water obtainable, the temperature, pressure, humidity effects that would come into play, the uncertainties in creating a vessel with the exactly correct volume.
If your scales are accurate to nano-grams but your standard is only accurate to micro-grams, then you have a problem.
If you are using a chunk of metal, than your standard is going to be as accurate as your scales and you only have to worry about making sure your standard is not changing over time (which is why they treated it with such care). Once you have a standard definition that can be measured as accurately as the standard physical object, then the object becomes superfluous, but before that point it is better to just use the standard physical object.
The point is that the "benefit" people have from the metric system is that it's base 10. The Imperial system as used in the US is base 10 when it's actually useful to be base 10 and not base 10 the rest of the time.
The real "benefit" is that the system is used by more than 6 billion people (18%), while the US comprises only about a third of a billion people (. In an ecconomic comparison, the US GDP is about 17 Trillion, while the world GDP is around 77 Trillion (22%)
Unless you think your arguments are strong enough to convince everyone else to switch from SI to US, the argument for switching just to be like everyone else is pretty strong.
I think you missed the point. People in France speak and think in French because that's what they're used to. Force them to adopt English as their national language and you'd have riots and pandemonium. Even if it held officially, people would use French over English anyway. That's what it's like for the common man to change their language of measurement.
Very true, but every other country in the world has switched, going through some pain in the process, but comming out of it eventually. Let us spare our great-grandchildren the pain and do it now quickly rather than continue to spread it out over the next dozen decades.
We have already lost this fight. Bit by bit, parts of every industry that interacts with the rest of the world has slowly moved to metric. The relatively small pain of this slow transition integrated over the huge time it is occuring is much less than the greater pain over the shorter transition period that every other country that previously used a non-metric measurement system ended up experiencing.
You don't see Americans arguing over the size of a pint or a pound. "A pint is a pound the world around." So there.
I'm laughing at the superior measuring system.
I am pretty sure that the "American" units have all been defined in relationship to the SI units. All the refinements of definition happen on the SI side of things and just get passed over to the US customary units side. Basically the US has been completely metric for a long time, and just divides all the lengths by (2.54 cm/inch) - which totally makes sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
In my day, if you wanted to be mean to another driver, you broke his headlights, cracked his windshield and pissed in his gas tank. Now THAT was mean.
You do understand these are electric vehicles. There isn't a gas tank now!!! So pissing in it won't work! ... but I'm all for "break headlights, crack windshield, then ask them to 'please' move their vehicle. [much sarcasm people]
Pissing into the charging port is probably a bad idea too.
Easy work to move cars into charging stations and shuffle them around as the day goes by, put keys in a kiosk. A bit of coding and scheduling algorithms and a smartphone app would allow the valet to move cars efficiently and make the best use of a limited number of stations. And could be price competitive with adding many more charging stations.
This does sound like a good idea. Politically it is usually easier to fund a capital expense than an ongoing labour one - people get more excited about building some structure than about paying to maintain it.
Perhaps there is some underpaid schmuck who already is in the area sweeping the floor and the like and we could just add this to their job?
It's the teachers job to make science fun, not the schools.
Well, the school, the district, and the state all have the job of supporting the teachers by way of training, hiring, and rewards systems - all of which can greatly impact how easy it is for the teacher to do that job. The community, the family, and of course the students themselves all have important and large infleuences on outcomes. As much as we would like to think that one amazing teacher can magically turn things around ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), it really is not that easy.
There is also the danger of selling something as "fun" in the way that going to a carnival might be "fun" versus selling it as something that is "rewarding" like perhaps the efforts necessary to train as a team to win a race, or the preparations necessary to do tasks like rock-climbing or other challenging tasks. If you tell someone "This thing is FUN!" then it seems much more likely that when they encournter aspects that are not effortless and completely entertaining, they will (rightly) decide that it is not "fun" and have much less chance beliving that is worthwhile.
Coaches generally don't tell the players that "running lines" or doing pushups is "fun", but the players believe that doing those tasks is worthwhile and necessary to do what they want to do - get better at their sport and do well in the competitions. Almost nothing we do is "fun" in every aspect. Helping people to develop the ability to get satisfaction from doing a task well, and recognizing the benifits of focussed effort should be a primary goal of our general educational system. Having the student understand why they are doing whatever they are doing might also go a long way towards providing motivation for the activities. Having the instructors understand the purpose of activites as well is probably worthwhile too...
With that said, unless one is trying some revers psychology or something, we shoud be trying as much as possible to limit the unpleasant aspects of learning in all areas. Pushups might be necessary in order to build athlete strength, but we do not have to do them on a field of broken glass.
It doesn't take 7 billion people to feed, clothe, shelter, and even communicate with 7 billion people.
So what do we do? We are TOO efficient for everyone to earn a living. So do we just murder the people who are not "needed?" Do we let them starve? Do we have massive unnecessary works to employ the unemployable? I am all for suggestions, but when society doesn't really need as many workers as it has, you have to either change the idea of work, or kill off some of the workers.
Good points!
Alberta just put the royalties into general revenue and spent it. Now that the price of oil has collapsed they are facing a huge budget deficit and have nothing to show for it. (Well, some infrastructure may have been built that wouldn't have.)
I think the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund has managed to do a bit of good. But it doesn't look like it has been as effective as Norway or Alaska's systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The State" doesn't have any goddamn valuable resources. The people who live in the state have those resources. It's called "the commons".
Who owns the air over your head? Who owns the motherfucking light on a sunny day? If the state you live in has oil, on public lands then it belongs to the citizens of that state.
It certainly seems like a worthwhile use of state resources - take the state income and split it amoungst the residents to do with as they wish.