All schools get donations but MIT has done a lot better than the rest. This suggests that MIT is better at allocating money than other mediocre schools. So from a perfectly rational perspective giving money to the most effective organization makes a lot of sense.
Actually, it suggests that MIT is better at fundraising than "other mediocre schools". Granted, it might be easier to raise funds if you allocate your money "better", but it does not seem completely obvious to me that the original poster's goal was to give money to institution with the most effective fundraising organization. I suspect they were hoping to have the largest positive benefit to the largest number of individuals - probably in the educational field. If that is the case, university education is probably not the most effective use of resources. With a national high school graduation rate of something like 70% - probably the best thing to do is to try to address the front end of the educational pipe with elementary and secondary school initiatives.
My understanding was that it is not true that any of these places are "cheap" for anyone - they just strive to make their take as much as the student can be bled for. If they charge only what the applicant can "afford to pay", and the students or families are left with significant loans needing repayment after the fact than that hardly seems "cheap". OK, I guess for someone like Bill Gates, their sliding price scale doesn't reach up high enough to really make it painful, but if you cannot afford "full price" they are willing to drop the price just enough that you can pay it, but no lower.
I suppose there is nothing really unethical about setting their tuition price at whatever level they want. The 1991 "price fixing" lawsuit did not make them out to be completely above board though. http://www.google.ca/search?q=ivy+league+price+fixing
One of the interesting things is a study a decade or so ago (find it yourself) that showed that people accepted to one of the "top tier" schools who instead when to pretty much any place else, were as "successful" as those who went to the top tier school. The conclusion was that the top tier graduates were better not because of the school, but rather the school was selecting exceptional people, who on average, would have exceptional outcomes if they went somewhere cheaper too. There are some amazing people and amazing opportunities at "Top Tier U", no doubt. There are also amazing people and opportunities at "Springfield State School" as well - and graduates of good ole SSS spend considerably less money in meeting them. The rational economic argument probably precludes attending TTU over SSS.
If you look at the various endowments per student level, it does seem a bit strange that a place like Princeton which has almost $2 million dollars for EACH STUDENT in the bank, finds that it needs to charge more than state schools which seem to get only as much as $15k per student support from the state. Surely Princeton is managing to get better than $15k from that $2million? Heck a 1% return is $20k!
SUNY Cortland wants something like $5k in tuition, and only expects someone to spend $22k for tuition, fees, room, board, books, etc. Princeton wants $37k for just tuition, and estimates that it will be over $52k for room, board, fees, etc.
People can spend a lot of time discussing the question of whether or not the extra $30,000 PER YEAR for Princeton is "worth it", but the question in my mind is why does Princeton charge the premium at all? I can see why they can charge it (people think it is worth that much) but what is their reasoning behind setting the particular price that they do? Isn't their non-profit mandate something like "making the world better by educating lots of people real good"? Are they spending that extra 30k (plus whatever their $2million investments are bringing in) on things that they think do that? Are they wasting money on things that don't really help that goal much? Too many middle managers? Too many janitors? Does SUNY just spend its money way more efficiently? Regardless of whether or not Princeton students are getting $30k more value than SUNY students, does Princeton actually spend $30k (plus endowment monies) more on each student when providing them with services?
Then again, having someone hack into your "secured" system to do this leaves you in an even worse position as it would be a real tough thing to prove your innocence then. I guess we should all just disconnect everything and live alone in a cave.
Spend 30k now only to have to wait ten years to break even? By then, you'll probably be in another house, in another city.
I don't know that a 10% tax-free return on investment is anything to sneeze at. It also seems less volatile that most equities - the downside risk is that your local power costs are perhaps going to dramatically decrease? If the summary is has any validity, it seems as though moving is not much of an issue as the house value would have increased to offset some or all of the investment.
Where I live (50km south of Canberra, Australia), we're paying ~20 of your Earth cents for a kWh during the day around here, so if you assume 7kWh per day from a 1kW solar installation (not that hard here, as we get a lot of sun), it takes 14 years to earn back $3900. Electricity will certainly go up in cost during that time, but I wonder whether you wouldn't be better putting $4000 into some safe-ish investment and concentrating on reducing your energy usage instead.
7kWh x $0.20 x 365 = $511/year. That looks like 7.63 years to get to $3900. To "match" that, your $3900 would need to be invested to get a 13.1% yearly return in order to generate $511. 13% is not easy to come by.
One often overlooked factor for energy saving or generating investments is that money saved is equivalent to a tax-free income. If you take your $3900 and manage to get a return of $511/year you would have to pay taxes on that income. I don't really know what the average tax rate is in Australia, but Wikipedia seems to indicate that for every dollar earned over $3700, it is 30% (15% at $6k, 30% at $37k, 37% at $80k and 45% at 180k). Assuming your income is between $37k and $80k, you actually need an investment return of $730 so that when you pay your 30% ($219) you are left with the desired $511. $730 is a bit more than 17.1% of $3900 by the way.
I gather that solar water heating is the real way to make a "safe" investment for most moderate climates like the USA. The systems are very simple and relatively inexpensive. Even in upstate NY, estimates are that 50% of one's water heating can be provided by a solar system. Particularly for those who heat their water with electricity those can be pretty significant cost savings.
But as you say - before any new system is installed, caulking of cracks and insulation (with maybe some shade tree planting for the long term) has an even quicker return on investment.
Dealing with big numbers like that what difference does it make if it is 10^33 or 10^30?
I think they just standardized a bit earlier than other fields. Since the astronomers aren't actually doing anything with their research other than research (ie. there is not much industrial output from knowing how heavy the sun is, etc. so they aren't having to give their results to engineers to make into products) they probably started using cgs well before any other branch of science had moved away from pints and pounds.
"E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.'
I thought that the imperial pint was 20 imperial fluid ounces and is equivalent to about 568 mL (U.S. version is 16 U.S. fluid ounces and is equivalent to about 473 mL). Was "1984" written for the US market? Was the old fellow Winston chats with an American ex-pat?
I can't quite figure out why "two-liter" became the norm there instead of the approximately equal "half-gallon"
Because they sold it as a 2-liter (0.52 gal) and not as a half-gallon (1.89 L).
In other words, the metric unit is the nice round number and the imperial equivalent is the ugly decimal at the end. A better question is: why didn't they just start selling milk in 4 liter jugs?
I am guessing that it is because milk is pretty much a local commodity - it doesn't ship very far - so you don't sell it across multiple regions. Soda pop does. Additionally the milk industry was well established when the most recent round of metrification started back in the 1960s or 70s.
When you are designing a bunch of equipment to make and fill your new fancy plastic bottles around the world, probably metric is the way to go. Is milk sold in 1L UHT pasteurized boxes in the US anywhere, or are they done in quart boxes? They ship well.
Imperial measurements seems more natural to me, so why should I learn to have intuition about a new system that is equally arbitrary.
There is a certain amount of convenience in having a standard. Particularly in light of international trade, there are significant costs associated with multiple incompatible standards.
Now answer me quickly how to construct a vessel measured in US inches that holds exactly one US gallon? And how much will it weigh in US pounds? Can you derive other measurements like a Fahrenheit scale or calories out of that?
Fortunately, a quart is just 6% shy of a litre, and 1 kg is about 2.2 lbs so if you don't want exact values, I could make a pretty good gallon container using my metric skilz. And if you are insisting on exact construction, I don't think using your index finger as your decimeter ruler is going to cut it. For the temperatures, I always have to pull out the calculator and go with 32 freeze, 212 boil and work from there. Is a calorie 4.17 J?
No measurements are "natural" or "inborn" - getting used to any new system is probably about equally difficult. What SI has going for it is that it is really a "system" that is designed around fairly well thought out principles that can be fairly easily explained. The "Imperial System" is really more like an "Imperial Set" - none of the measurement units are designed to work together - each (length, volume, time, mass, etc.) developed on its own and was later cludged together as people realized that it was useful to do so.
Eventually as always the US can be counted on doing the right thing, after exhausting all the other options.
The DVD player I think was $75, but might have been as high as $100. The VCR was a gift I think, in about 1995, and it might have been $300 - it was "stereo"!
You do have a valid point that the current costs are no too unreasonable, but the comparison is not really between the BR and 4 lattes, but rather between a BR player and (a DVD player and 4 lattes). For us, it currently is not, and we don't even drink lattes. If we were gifted with a BR player (with component outputs) we could certainly use it in place of our current DVD player, but it wouldn't actually add anything to our current viewing ability with our crappy TV video and audio, and would necessitate us disposing of the old DVD player (I suppose http://www.freecycle.org/ would find it a home, but even that is a bit of work). So going to a BR player really only has the advantages of being prepared for our eventual TV upgrade. That TV upgrade is currently off in the future, when likely the BR player will be even cheaper and possibly more useful, so for today there is virtually no reason to upgrade for us (and I suspect may others for similar reasons).
Sure, the early models cost big bucks, and the current models are pretty affordable, but if you want people to REPLACE a currently working device, then you'll have a whole bunch of people who won't think it is worth the cost to do so unless that cost is pretty low. We have a cheap 10 year old DVD player hooked to a 15 year old CRT, along with a VCR and a Series 2 TiVo in a room with a maximum seating distance of maybe 2.5m. While I WANT to get the latest and greatest of everything, given our usage patterns and more importantly that everything currently still works, it is hard to justify doing so.
Sales taxes are to help pay the state for overall services related to businesses in the community or state. But the state has provided zero services to the online merchant I purchased from. The only thing that makes a slight bit of sense is the use of roads to deliver packages but that is baked into taxes the shipping company pays and thus baked into shipping costs.
Sales taxes are to help pay the state for overall services, not just for services related to businesses. We pay taxes on our Big Belly Burgers downtown so that we can have state inspectors make sure our power plants don't explode, not just so we can fund food inspectors.
There are lots of arguments that I think are legitimate about sales taxes in general, but the idea that charging residents sales taxes for out of state purchases is somehow unfair rather than unworkable, inefficient, or difficult seems pretty silly in my mind.
$500 a year would kill some really small hobby-type businesses whose revenues around in the $500 range.
Yeah, but I bet someone could spend $500 a year and provide lookups for others at a few cents per transaction, and places like PayPal and Google checkout would provide similar services.
Alternatively the sates could simplify their taxing system for out-of-state businesses, or provide free lookup tables.
its an official fbi document, on official fbi site, stating that an official usaf investigator has had told an official fbi agent that 3 saucers were recovered in roswell.
Actually I read it as an official FBI document, on official FBI site, stating that an informant, one "Mr. [redacted]", stated that an official USAF investigator said that 3 saucers were recovered in Roswell. I doubt very much that some guy saying that the USAF knows stuff is strong evidence for much of anything.
I think you are not giving your first grader enough credit. You are probably correct that this particular situation is best suited to kids in maybe the third grade or later, I do recommend you give your six-year-old a bit more opportunity to explore self entertainment on a regular basis. It is a learned skill that will be very useful throughout his life.
Limiting the formal commercial after-school care to just one day per week and making use of an after school sports program, trading off with other parents, and doing a bit of the "pick them up from school and let them self-entertain while I finish off my day" on the other days has freed up significant money in our household with a 2nd and 5th grader this year. Before school is not an issue as they walk to school before my 09:00 "start" to my day.
I've largely given up on contributing to Wikipedia. Over the past few years as I have put in a couple of hours of adding content to a variety of topics I have repeatedly found that content removed by someone claiming a lack of notability or usefulness or perceived advertisement or whatever. Wikipedia is great for keeping track of Dr. Who episodes and comic book characters, but the politics of adding useful information to actual real world places is just ridiculous. The "deletionists" have largely driven me away.
We should be putting solar power in by default, and using other sources if solar fails, period.
Sure, but why stop there? Obviously it would make WAY more sense to have them grow their own food, too. Two floors out of every three should be farms! And, of course, they should process their own sewage by default.....
Actually that wouldn't be a bad thing - when the building is the size of a small town or city one could certainly have a number of specialists doing all of those things. I think slashdot had an article about farms in scyscrapers a while ago but I can't be bothered to find it.
That said, there's a lot of evidence that Cuba is a lot better place for most of its residents than, say, Haiti or the Dominican Republic.
The question though is whether the system is any better to be in than any other particular system. If ours is better than we're justified in trying to change them. If not, then not. The disparity between the wealthy and the masses in Cuba is very, very sharp. I think you can determine the health of a governmental system by the differences between the lowest, median, average, and maximum incomes...
The US does not do too well on those disparity measurements unfortunately.
Off topic, but if a person is speaking about 12am as a time in the future, can they refer to it as "today?"
Man, I hate that time. I can never recall if 12am is noon (just one minute after 11:59 AM) or midnight (one minute after 11:59 PM) and even if I was confident which was which I can never be sure that all those other idiots out there know what's what.
If I have to refer to either of these times I usually use "noon" or "midnight" to be less likely to be understood, and if I have to schedule something to that time with various compute pull-down menus and number entry fields I usually just use 11:59 instead.
My seven year old son loves the idea that "1+1= window" because if you take the digits 1 and 1 (in the appropriate font of course) and superimpose but them close to the left and right sides of the "+" symbol, and over that put a big "=" symbol so that you end up with a square divided into four quarters - not totally unlike a widow with four panes of glass.
Also if you take the digit "2" and write it backwards over top of a frontwards "2" you get a diagram of a fish swimming upwards. so "2+2 = fish".
"3+3" sometimes makes an "8" with this reversing graphical addition, and "4+4" might make an "H".
He loves this "looking at things from another perspective" type of stuff. I hope he doesn't irritate someone else enough to get himself beat up....
Slashdot Mirror
All schools get donations but MIT has done a lot better than the rest. This suggests that MIT is better at allocating money than other mediocre schools. So from a perfectly rational perspective giving money to the most effective organization makes a lot of sense.
Actually, it suggests that MIT is better at fundraising than "other mediocre schools". Granted, it might be easier to raise funds if you allocate your money "better", but it does not seem completely obvious to me that the original poster's goal was to give money to institution with the most effective fundraising organization. I suspect they were hoping to have the largest positive benefit to the largest number of individuals - probably in the educational field. If that is the case, university education is probably not the most effective use of resources. With a national high school graduation rate of something like 70% - probably the best thing to do is to try to address the front end of the educational pipe with elementary and secondary school initiatives.
http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?measure=23
But what do I know?
My understanding was that it is not true that any of these places are "cheap" for anyone - they just strive to make their take as much as the student can be bled for. If they charge only what the applicant can "afford to pay", and the students or families are left with significant loans needing repayment after the fact than that hardly seems "cheap". OK, I guess for someone like Bill Gates, their sliding price scale doesn't reach up high enough to really make it painful, but if you cannot afford "full price" they are willing to drop the price just enough that you can pay it, but no lower.
I suppose there is nothing really unethical about setting their tuition price at whatever level they want. The 1991 "price fixing" lawsuit did not make them out to be completely above board though.
http://www.google.ca/search?q=ivy+league+price+fixing
One of the interesting things is a study a decade or so ago (find it yourself) that showed that people accepted to one of the "top tier" schools who instead when to pretty much any place else, were as "successful" as those who went to the top tier school. The conclusion was that the top tier graduates were better not because of the school, but rather the school was selecting exceptional people, who on average, would have exceptional outcomes if they went somewhere cheaper too. There are some amazing people and amazing opportunities at "Top Tier U", no doubt. There are also amazing people and opportunities at "Springfield State School" as well - and graduates of good ole SSS spend considerably less money in meeting them. The rational economic argument probably precludes attending TTU over SSS.
If you look at the various endowments per student level, it does seem a bit strange that a place like Princeton which has almost $2 million dollars for EACH STUDENT in the bank, finds that it needs to charge more than state schools which seem to get only as much as $15k per student support from the state. Surely Princeton is managing to get better than $15k from that $2million? Heck a 1% return is $20k!
http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?measure=36#
SUNY Cortland wants something like $5k in tuition, and only expects someone to spend $22k for tuition, fees, room, board, books, etc. Princeton wants $37k for just tuition, and estimates that it will be over $52k for room, board, fees, etc.
http://www2.cortland.edu/cost-aid/student-accounts-office/tuition-and-costs/
http://www.princeton.edu/admission/financialaid/cost/
People can spend a lot of time discussing the question of whether or not the extra $30,000 PER YEAR for Princeton is "worth it", but the question in my mind is why does Princeton charge the premium at all? I can see why they can charge it (people think it is worth that much) but what is their reasoning behind setting the particular price that they do? Isn't their non-profit mandate something like "making the world better by educating lots of people real good"? Are they spending that extra 30k (plus whatever their $2million investments are bringing in) on things that they think do that? Are they wasting money on things that don't really help that goal much? Too many middle managers? Too many janitors? Does SUNY just spend its money way more efficiently? Regardless of whether or not Princeton students are getting $30k more value than SUNY students, does Princeton actually spend $30k (plus endowment monies) more on each student when providing them with services?
Then again, having someone hack into your "secured" system to do this leaves you in an even worse position as it would be a real tough thing to prove your innocence then. I guess we should all just disconnect everything and live alone in a cave.
Hey, that's a pretty neat tool.
Spend 30k now only to have to wait ten years to break even? By then, you'll probably be in another house, in another city.
I don't know that a 10% tax-free return on investment is anything to sneeze at. It also seems less volatile that most equities - the downside risk is that your local power costs are perhaps going to dramatically decrease? If the summary is has any validity, it seems as though moving is not much of an issue as the house value would have increased to offset some or all of the investment.
Where I live (50km south of Canberra, Australia), we're paying ~20 of your Earth cents for a kWh during the day around here, so if you assume 7kWh per day from a 1kW solar installation (not that hard here, as we get a lot of sun), it takes 14 years to earn back $3900. Electricity will certainly go up in cost during that time, but I wonder whether you wouldn't be better putting $4000 into some safe-ish investment and concentrating on reducing your energy usage instead.
7kWh x $0.20 x 365 = $511/year. That looks like 7.63 years to get to $3900. To "match" that, your $3900 would need to be invested to get a 13.1% yearly return in order to generate $511. 13% is not easy to come by.
One often overlooked factor for energy saving or generating investments is that money saved is equivalent to a tax-free income. If you take your $3900 and manage to get a return of $511/year you would have to pay taxes on that income. I don't really know what the average tax rate is in Australia, but Wikipedia seems to indicate that for every dollar earned over $3700, it is 30% (15% at $6k, 30% at $37k, 37% at $80k and 45% at 180k). Assuming your income is between $37k and $80k, you actually need an investment return of $730 so that when you pay your 30% ($219) you are left with the desired $511. $730 is a bit more than 17.1% of $3900 by the way.
I gather that solar water heating is the real way to make a "safe" investment for most moderate climates like the USA. The systems are very simple and relatively inexpensive. Even in upstate NY, estimates are that 50% of one's water heating can be provided by a solar system. Particularly for those who heat their water with electricity those can be pretty significant cost savings.
But as you say - before any new system is installed, caulking of cracks and insulation (with maybe some shade tree planting for the long term) has an even quicker return on investment.
Dealing with big numbers like that what difference does it make if it is 10^33 or 10^30?
I think they just standardized a bit earlier than other fields. Since the astronomers aren't actually doing anything with their research other than research (ie. there is not much industrial output from knowing how heavy the sun is, etc. so they aren't having to give their results to engineers to make into products) they probably started using cgs well before any other branch of science had moved away from pints and pounds.
Then again, I could be full of it.
"E could 'a drawed me off a pint,' grumbled the old man as he settled down behind a glass. 'A 'alf litre ain't enough. It don't satisfy. And a 'ole litre's too much. It starts my bladder running. Let alone the price.'
I thought that the imperial pint was 20 imperial fluid ounces and is equivalent to about 568 mL (U.S. version is 16 U.S. fluid ounces and is equivalent to about 473 mL). Was "1984" written for the US market? Was the old fellow Winston chats with an American ex-pat?
I can't quite figure out why "two-liter" became the norm there instead of the approximately equal "half-gallon"
Because they sold it as a 2-liter (0.52 gal) and not as a half-gallon (1.89 L).
In other words, the metric unit is the nice round number and the imperial equivalent is the ugly decimal at the end. A better question is: why didn't they just start selling milk in 4 liter jugs?
I am guessing that it is because milk is pretty much a local commodity - it doesn't ship very far - so you don't sell it across multiple regions. Soda pop does. Additionally the milk industry was well established when the most recent round of metrification started back in the 1960s or 70s.
When you are designing a bunch of equipment to make and fill your new fancy plastic bottles around the world, probably metric is the way to go. Is milk sold in 1L UHT pasteurized boxes in the US anywhere, or are they done in quart boxes? They ship well.
Imperial measurements seems more natural to me, so why should I learn to have intuition about a new system that is equally arbitrary.
There is a certain amount of convenience in having a standard. Particularly in light of international trade, there are significant costs associated with multiple incompatible standards.
Now answer me quickly how to construct a vessel measured in US inches that holds exactly one US gallon?
And how much will it weigh in US pounds?
Can you derive other measurements like a Fahrenheit scale or calories out of that?
Fortunately, a quart is just 6% shy of a litre, and 1 kg is about 2.2 lbs so if you don't want exact values, I could make a pretty good gallon container using my metric skilz. And if you are insisting on exact construction, I don't think using your index finger as your decimeter ruler is going to cut it. For the temperatures, I always have to pull out the calculator and go with 32 freeze, 212 boil and work from there. Is a calorie 4.17 J?
No measurements are "natural" or "inborn" - getting used to any new system is probably about equally difficult. What SI has going for it is that it is really a "system" that is designed around fairly well thought out principles that can be fairly easily explained. The "Imperial System" is really more like an "Imperial Set" - none of the measurement units are designed to work together - each (length, volume, time, mass, etc.) developed on its own and was later cludged together as people realized that it was useful to do so.
Eventually as always the US can be counted on doing the right thing, after exhausting all the other options.
The DVD player I think was $75, but might have been as high as $100. The VCR was a gift I think, in about 1995, and it might have been $300 - it was "stereo"!
You do have a valid point that the current costs are no too unreasonable, but the comparison is not really between the BR and 4 lattes, but rather between a BR player and (a DVD player and 4 lattes). For us, it currently is not, and we don't even drink lattes. If we were gifted with a BR player (with component outputs) we could certainly use it in place of our current DVD player, but it wouldn't actually add anything to our current viewing ability with our crappy TV video and audio, and would necessitate us disposing of the old DVD player (I suppose http://www.freecycle.org/ would find it a home, but even that is a bit of work). So going to a BR player really only has the advantages of being prepared for our eventual TV upgrade. That TV upgrade is currently off in the future, when likely the BR player will be even cheaper and possibly more useful, so for today there is virtually no reason to upgrade for us (and I suspect may others for similar reasons).
Sure, the early models cost big bucks, and the current models are pretty affordable, but if you want people to REPLACE a currently working device, then you'll have a whole bunch of people who won't think it is worth the cost to do so unless that cost is pretty low. We have a cheap 10 year old DVD player hooked to a 15 year old CRT, along with a VCR and a Series 2 TiVo in a room with a maximum seating distance of maybe 2.5m. While I WANT to get the latest and greatest of everything, given our usage patterns and more importantly that everything currently still works, it is hard to justify doing so.
Does Wikipapia get its map data from Google? Too bad they don't seem to use http://openstreetmap.org/
Sales taxes are to help pay the state for overall services related to businesses in the community or state. But the state has provided zero services to the online merchant I purchased from. The only thing that makes a slight bit of sense is the use of roads to deliver packages but that is baked into taxes the shipping company pays and thus baked into shipping costs.
Sales taxes are to help pay the state for overall services, not just for services related to businesses. We pay taxes on our Big Belly Burgers downtown so that we can have state inspectors make sure our power plants don't explode, not just so we can fund food inspectors.
There are lots of arguments that I think are legitimate about sales taxes in general, but the idea that charging residents sales taxes for out of state purchases is somehow unfair rather than unworkable, inefficient, or difficult seems pretty silly in my mind.
$500 a year would kill some really small hobby-type businesses whose revenues around in the $500 range.
Yeah, but I bet someone could spend $500 a year and provide lookups for others at a few cents per transaction, and places like PayPal and Google checkout would provide similar services.
Alternatively the sates could simplify their taxing system for out-of-state businesses, or provide free lookup tables.
The ability to cheat does not mean that everyone does in fact do so.
Neither does it mean, of course, that significant fractions of the population won't do so either....
its an official fbi document, on official fbi site, stating that an official usaf investigator has had told an official fbi agent that 3 saucers were recovered in roswell.
Actually I read it as an official FBI document, on official FBI site, stating that an informant, one "Mr. [redacted]", stated that an official USAF investigator said that 3 saucers were recovered in Roswell. I doubt very much that some guy saying that the USAF knows stuff is strong evidence for much of anything.
"registry itself exists to protect people by making it easier to track potential re-offenders"
Not that there is much evidence to suggest that it actually increases safety to any appreciable extent, or is a cost effective way to do so.
"No way"?
I think you are not giving your first grader enough credit. You are probably correct that this particular situation is best suited to kids in maybe the third grade or later, I do recommend you give your six-year-old a bit more opportunity to explore self entertainment on a regular basis. It is a learned skill that will be very useful throughout his life.
Limiting the formal commercial after-school care to just one day per week and making use of an after school sports program, trading off with other parents, and doing a bit of the "pick them up from school and let them self-entertain while I finish off my day" on the other days has freed up significant money in our household with a 2nd and 5th grader this year. Before school is not an issue as they walk to school before my 09:00 "start" to my day.
good point
I've largely given up on contributing to Wikipedia. Over the past few years as I have put in a couple of hours of adding content to a variety of topics I have repeatedly found that content removed by someone claiming a lack of notability or usefulness or perceived advertisement or whatever. Wikipedia is great for keeping track of Dr. Who episodes and comic book characters, but the politics of adding useful information to actual real world places is just ridiculous. The "deletionists" have largely driven me away.
We should be putting solar power in by default, and using other sources if solar fails, period.
Sure, but why stop there? Obviously it would make WAY more sense to have them grow their own food, too. Two floors out of every three should be farms! And, of course, they should process their own sewage by default. ....
Actually that wouldn't be a bad thing - when the building is the size of a small town or city one could certainly have a number of specialists doing all of those things. I think slashdot had an article about farms in scyscrapers a while ago but I can't be bothered to find it.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-rise-of-vertical-farms
That said, there's a lot of evidence that Cuba is a lot better place for most of its residents than, say, Haiti or the Dominican Republic.
The question though is whether the system is any better to be in than any other particular system. If ours is better than we're justified in trying to change them. If not, then not. The disparity between the wealthy and the masses in Cuba is very, very sharp. I think you can determine the health of a governmental system by the differences between the lowest, median, average, and maximum incomes...
The US does not do too well on those disparity measurements unfortunately.
Off topic, but if a person is speaking about 12am as a time in the future, can they refer to it as "today?"
Man, I hate that time. I can never recall if 12am is noon (just one minute after 11:59 AM) or midnight (one minute after 11:59 PM) and even if I was confident which was which I can never be sure that all those other idiots out there know what's what.
If I have to refer to either of these times I usually use "noon" or "midnight" to be less likely to be understood, and if I have to schedule something to that time with various compute pull-down menus and number entry fields I usually just use 11:59 instead.
My seven year old son loves the idea that "1+1= window" because if you take the digits 1 and 1 (in the appropriate font of course) and superimpose but them close to the left and right sides of the "+" symbol, and over that put a big "=" symbol so that you end up with a square divided into four quarters - not totally unlike a widow with four panes of glass.
Also if you take the digit "2" and write it backwards over top of a frontwards "2" you get a diagram of a fish swimming upwards. so "2+2 = fish".
"3+3" sometimes makes an "8" with this reversing graphical addition, and "4+4" might make an "H".
He loves this "looking at things from another perspective" type of stuff. I hope he doesn't irritate someone else enough to get himself beat up....