The reason this phrase is so catchy is that it's counter-intuitive, and easily proven to be true. People love to use it as a "gotcha" phrase, PRECISELY because in regular life correlation does in fact usually imply causation.
I agree, and this cannot be overstated. I worry that the use of this phrase is almost more dangerous than the mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation.
To be precise, in most of the examples people love to trot out, correlation does imply causation, just not direct causation. A and B might be correlated because they are both caused by the same thing. While a correlation between obesity and TV watching doesn't imply that TV watching causes obesity, the correlation is good evidence that one causes the other or that there is a third thing, laziness perhaps, that causes both.
Of course there are counter examples to this assumption, called Reichenbach's principle, but they are even more rare.
This. The falling sky proponents love to pretend that it's all a done deal yet the entire model fails to adequately account for previous warm periods, nor the fact that CO2 is merely plant food. (photosynthesis, how does it work?)
Even if you accept the premises that 1) the climate is warming and 2) that human produced CO2 is to blame, taking the entire thing a step farther to say that we can effectively mitigate the problem by radical geoengineering means is a step way beyond credibility. That we SHOULD do such a thing is absurd in the extreme.
The law of unintended consequences patiently waits.
You think it's a bad idea to seed the oceans with iron, because our interfering with the natural ecosystem might have unintended consequences. So instead, you're suggesting that we should do nothing to stop our interfering with the natural ecosystem by pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the air.
When talking about Universities, people often tend to have this reaction that seems at home in the private world. If Starbucks doesn't want me to connect to Change.org and are providing me with free internet service, they should have the right to block that site. After all, they have no obligation to provide me with internet service in the first place, so they are free to limit the access.
As pointed out by others, the first major difference here is that ASU is partially funded by Arizona tax payers and therefore operates by different rules. But, more importantly, ASU is a *university* and universities should operate by different rules. Good universities are either government entities or non-profits with a mission to educate students with the interest of developing them into well-educated citizens. Unfettered access to different ideas is absolutely critical to that process. A university that restricts access to free speech is simply failing at its primary mission: preparing students to be active participants in a democratic society. It's not a matter of whether ASU gets government money or not, it's that ASU has a mission that they are actively thwarting.
One woman had a miscarriage as a direct result of being kicked in the stomach repeatedly by police. (And, yes, she told be police she was pregnant, and that she was trying to escape to protect her unborn child.)
This is the often-overlooked benefit of top schools. The most talented students tend to learn a lot from one another, and so you want to surround yourself with the smartest peers you can. If all the smart people were going to North-South Nowhere State University at Tinyville, that's where you should go. But they're not. They're all going to the "top" programs. So, if your smart, you should go there too.
There's no 'state-provided' street or sidewalk on which this business is taking place, nor a state-built thoroughfare upon which a consumer has to travel to visit a store.
Maybe your Amazon purchases are delivered by teleportation, but mine come via UPS or USPS. They use trucks, the kind that travel on roads. They often come to my city via planes that fly in airspace regulated by the FAA.
Yes, the US gov't invented the internet, but for at least the last dozen years every iota of bandwith on which our (consumer's) signals travel is paid for commercially, and the costs passed down to either we the consumers (through our ISPs) or the businesses (through their providers)
Yeah, thank god the government invented the internet so they don't ever have to invent anything ever again. We can stop paying taxes now because we've reached the end-of-days. Nope, no new ideas the government could fund with our tax dollars today.
- whatever actual physical location a business has somewhere, the services that they consume (fire, police, etc.) from the government are already paid for in their property taxes. Self-evidently there's no need for police services for the sorts of store loss-prevention actions (shoplifters, etc) for internet stores.
What about other forms of fraud like credit-card fraud? Large scale fraud that involve transactions that go across state lines are investigated by the FBI. Should someone pay for that?
People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
You're simply wrong about this. True the NIH requires submission to open access journals, and I trust you know what your talking about with the NSF. But these are not the only tax-based sources of research funding. First, there are non-U.S. sources. Even in the U.S. there are the departments of defense, education, and energy which fund huge amounts of research. Defense and energy do a lot in science and technology. On top of that you have state universities that are funded (less and less) by tax dollars from their states. They often support the research of their faculty with that money.
Take a look at the top journals in many fields. We are very, very far from free access to scientific research.
The "college is a waste of time" thing is purely economic advice, nothing anti-intellectual about it.
College might be a waste of time if you view the only benefit of college as increasing your earning potential. But, this view of college is anti-intellectual. There are other benefits to college other than monetary, and some people are willing to pay for them.
Most of what you do for money is bad for your bottom line. Buying that TV? That won't make you money. Going to the movies? Waste of money. But I'll bet you do some of those things. Why? Because the item or service you receive in return is valuable to you -- more valuable than the money you exchange for it. The same could be said in college. While the money you invest will not increase your earning potential proportionally, it still might be worth it if you value the intellectual rewards you get while there.
Freed from the normal constraints of supply and demand, tuition prices are no longer tracking closely to the cost to provide an education.
This is preposterous. If it was really the case that tuition exceeded the cost of operating the university, state funding and private endowments wouldn't be necessary. What crazy statistics did you use to determine this claim? Or did you just make it up because it sounded good?
The most impressive counter protests I've seen have involved soliciting donations. The Topeka symphony (I think) put out a person who was asking people to pledge $1/hour that WBC spent protesting to the Human Rights Campaign. That way every hour they spent protesting gave money to anti-homophobia organizations.
In those days everyone was a philosopher. But the heirs of historical philosophers are not those who call themselves philosophers today; rather, they're the followers of the he best and most successful branch of philosophy, natural philosophy - which we now regard as the distinct discipline of science.
What makes you say that?
There are plenty of contemporary philosophers who are active participants in science and who would be appropriately called natural philosophers. Now- a-days they're more often called "naturalists" (named by W.v.O. Quine). Contemporary philosophers, and citations to them, regularly show up in scientific journals.
While the greek word philosophia literally means "friend of wisdom", the common-day philosopher tends to stare at their naval and wonder if they even exist
Which "common day" philosophers are you referring to? How much common day philosophy have you read? I think it's fair to say that this problem is near death and has been for a long time. The problem was made famous by Descartes of course, but he's hardly "common day."
I - personally - find it frustrating that we listen to the naval-staring philosopher, and forget what wisdom is in the same moment.
I'm happy to hear that you think people listen to philosophers. How many people do you know that spend their time worry about the problem of existence instead of something else?
Your attitude about philosophers is common, people take an intro to philosophy course that focuses on rationalist thought of the 15th century and assume they now know the state-of-the-art of philosophy. Somehow people don't realize how stupid this is, even though they wouldn't dare assume they understood contemporary physics after taking physics 101. Philosophy has a very long history of contributing to major scientific breakthroughs. Here are a few:
1. Einstein, throughout his life, credited many philosophers including Hume and Kant with inspiring him to come up with special and general relativity.
2. Neils Bohr invented his preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics because we was inspired by Kant.
3. Adam Smith was a "moral philosopher." Before him economics didn't exist.
4. Psychology wasn't it's own discipline until very recently. Before that it was philosophy.
Meanwhile IT guys are basically treated like janitors.
The irony of your comment is that it reproduces exactly the line of thinking that you criticize. You realize that janitors, by having physical access to almost all parts of a business, are capable of more havoc than IT folks. They often have physical access to all the same systems that IT people do and much more. If potential to cause damage should correlate with compensation, I'd argue that the janitors should get paid the most in any organization.
University is a waste of money for most people who go
I hate these sorts of claims because they are absolute nonsense. How can you know if my university degree was a waste of money for me? Do you know how much I value the things I learned (both in and out of the classroom) at the university? No, of course not, because you don't know me. It's like looking at someone you've never met and saying that they were stupid to go eat at some particular restaurant.
Usually, these sort of studies assume that the only reason anyone would go to college is to improve their lifetime earning potential and then compare the average change in earning to the cost of the university. While this is an important consideration, it shouldn't be the prevailing one, and more importantly it shouldn't be translated into the only potential thing of value that might come out of a university education. We are all not mindless money generating machines that simply wish to take the quickest route to a buck. Some of us want to enjoy the journey too.
I am a far better person for my university education. Even if it cost me money in the long run, I'm happy I went.
The previous discussion is why the base rate fallacy is so dangerous. According to wikipedia, the base rate for autism is 6 / 1,000. That means a random child has a 0.6% chance of having autism. A test that raises that to 5% is a huge improvement (almost an order of magnitude).
Some people have speculated that the population explosion in African and Asian countries is caused by high mortality rates. When parents need children for farming, working, or for dowries -- and when there is a relatively high risk of the child dying before puberty -- people opt to have a lot of children to ensure that they survive to be productive.
I'm not saying I believe it, but one has to be careful in assuming that a decrease in mortality will necessarily mean an increase in population.
I find this defense of high speed trading odd -- it puts the cart before the horse. Liquidity is not a good in itself which should be promoted above all else. Liquidity in a market is important so that the price can correctly reflect the value of the thing being traded -- without liquidity a person may want to buy or sell without someone on the other end and thus the price may not reflect the actual value.
But, if high frequency trading creates liquidity but does so by also introducing price distortions (like a sudden crash), then we *should* get rid of high frequency trading so that we can maintain correct (and mostly stable) prices.
"Reading both sides" is not always a good way to find out the truth. If one side is willing to lie and the other isn't, then you won't get a balanced sense of the situation from reading both sides. Your view will be slanted toward the side willing to lie.
Perhaps no news outlet will outright lie (perhaps), but I am very confident that Fox News is perfectly willing to report things with the slimest of corroboration as cold, hard fact if it suits their political agenda. I don't mean to pick on right, there are plenty of left wing organizations that do the same too.
My point is simply that reading a bunch of different sources is not guaranteed to give you an accurate picture of the world. More broadly, this is why I think news aggregation, like google news, cannot take the place of a single, good news source.
Google news is no substitute for a good newspaper. First, a good newspaper should do the aggregation for you, and so should duplicate what google's doing. Second, a *good* newspaper should provide a balanced, fact checked commentary on the news events. The problem with google news is that they include every major news source without preference for reliability.
If the NYT and Fox News are covering the same story, I want to read the NYT coverage and not Fox News. I don't trust FN, and I do trust NYT (at least I trust them more).
This is completely right. Just because a particular vehicle for speech doesn't allow *all* speech doesn't imply that it's not a vehicle for public debate about certain topics. The newspaper doesn't print porn, does that mean that newspapers are not involved in an active democracy? Or that any attempt to censor a newspaper doesn't effect free speech because the newspaper doesn't allow a totally unvetted expression of ideas?
Thinking about free speech in this all-or-nothing way is not productive, and it tends to alienate people from supporting free speech because they feel like they have to support porn.
The city is just acting stupidly by threatening to tax the students and tuition fees. It should simply reduce police and fire services to the univ neighbourhoods and ask the univs to hire private security for protection and refuse to maintain things like synchronized traffic lights and traffic by pass and other such things.
They do. Both CMU and Pitt have private police forces. And you don't think that things like Pitt games bring venue to the city? The city seems to think so.
Also it should charge market rates for their sewer connections, water supplies and use of public spaces for utilities. The univs will come back begging to give up their tax exempt status and agree to pay real estate taxes like all other residents and businesses are paying. In fact if their tax exempt status is revoked, almost all the businesses and private property owners will see a big reduction in their tax bills.
I would hope you think we should also charge churches real estate taxes. I feel pretty confident all the churches take up more real estate than the universities. I wonder what the public reaction to that would be?
Blame the greedy CMU that charges 48000$ a year from their students,
Greedy? CMU has a *tiny* endowment compared to their status (only 10% of their operating budget). None of student tuition goes to the endowment, its all used to operate the university. And, of course, many students seem very happy to pay it. I wish that universities didn't have to charge that much, but I think it's unfair to call CMU greedy.
refuses to bear its fair share of the cost of providing civic services passing the burden on the shrinking tax base.
It's not the shrinking tax base that's to blame. Its the city mismanagement of it's pension fund. "That need stems from decades of questionable management of the city's pension fund, which holds around one-third of the $899 million it should to cover future obligations."
What do you mean students don't pay taxes like other residents? Do they get exemptions from sales and gas taxes? Do their landlords not pay property taxes that get included in the rents they pay? If they take jobs in the city don't they pay state income taxes that get partially recycled to the city?
Not only do they pay state taxes, but the city of Pittsburgh has an income tax (not an insignificant one either). In addition Carnegie Mellon along with other non-profits in the city *voluntarily* contribute money to the city to help pay for services. Many university students stay in the city after they graduate, getting jobs, etc. Of course the employees of these universities pay a lot of taxes. Even more, universities like Carnegie Mellon attract businesses. Several businesses (including Google and Intel) have offices on Campus and have employees (who pay taxes).
This is an utterly absurd attempt to cover a budget shortfall by preying on those who have little political power. They mayoral election just happened two weeks ago in Pittsburgh, so the students who are angry about this will have moved on by the next time there is an election. Many of them aren't registered to vote in the city anyway.
Absolutely! I have students that take notes on computer, and I think it's a terrible idea. First there is the problem of equations. In the class I teach we introduce a lot of symbols, so even if you have a fast system you would have to find the symbols in a big list. By the time you do, you're probably behind.
Second, note taking is a tool which helps you learn the material better. Transcribing the notes later helps significantly more, because now you get to revisit the material with fresh eyes. Something that may have seemed obvious initially may seem less so when you transcribe them. Now you can go to the next lecture an ask questions from the previous class. (As a professor, I'm *very* impressed when students do this, because it proves to me that they did something other than drink beer between the end of the last class and the beginning of the next.)
Finally taking notes on a computer provides you with many distractions. I know lots of students who claim "I don't get distracted from using a computer", but then my grader or another student informs me the were surfing the web, reading email, IMing, etc. Save yourself from having to avoid these and just use paper.
This is the standard response I always see to people questioning day traders (or to the more recent high-frequency trading). Liquidity is a good thing, so that those who want to buy can and those who want to sell can. But, as I recall, day traders are a recent invention. Is there any real evidence that the market had insufficient liquidity before day traders? Why isn't the vast amount of trading done for slightly longer term investments sufficient to create liquidity? And don't go telling me we need liquidity from day traders to support other day traders.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason this phrase is so catchy is that it's counter-intuitive, and easily proven to be true. People love to use it as a "gotcha" phrase, PRECISELY because in regular life correlation does in fact usually imply causation.
I agree, and this cannot be overstated. I worry that the use of this phrase is almost more dangerous than the mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation.
To be precise, in most of the examples people love to trot out, correlation does imply causation, just not direct causation. A and B might be correlated because they are both caused by the same thing. While a correlation between obesity and TV watching doesn't imply that TV watching causes obesity, the correlation is good evidence that one causes the other or that there is a third thing, laziness perhaps, that causes both.
Of course there are counter examples to this assumption, called Reichenbach's principle, but they are even more rare.
This. The falling sky proponents love to pretend that it's all a done deal yet the entire model fails to adequately account for previous warm periods, nor the fact that CO2 is merely plant food. (photosynthesis, how does it work?)
Even if you accept the premises that 1) the climate is warming and 2) that human produced CO2 is to blame, taking the entire thing a step farther to say that we can effectively mitigate the problem by radical geoengineering means is a step way beyond credibility. That we SHOULD do such a thing is absurd in the extreme.
The law of unintended consequences patiently waits.
You think it's a bad idea to seed the oceans with iron, because our interfering with the natural ecosystem might have unintended consequences. So instead, you're suggesting that we should do nothing to stop our interfering with the natural ecosystem by pumping huge amounts of CO2 into the air.
Seems consistent.
When talking about Universities, people often tend to have this reaction that seems at home in the private world. If Starbucks doesn't want me to connect to Change.org and are providing me with free internet service, they should have the right to block that site. After all, they have no obligation to provide me with internet service in the first place, so they are free to limit the access.
As pointed out by others, the first major difference here is that ASU is partially funded by Arizona tax payers and therefore operates by different rules. But, more importantly, ASU is a *university* and universities should operate by different rules. Good universities are either government entities or non-profits with a mission to educate students with the interest of developing them into well-educated citizens. Unfettered access to different ideas is absolutely critical to that process. A university that restricts access to free speech is simply failing at its primary mission: preparing students to be active participants in a democratic society. It's not a matter of whether ASU gets government money or not, it's that ASU has a mission that they are actively thwarting.
One woman had a miscarriage as a direct result of being kicked in the stomach repeatedly by police. (And, yes, she told be police she was pregnant, and that she was trying to escape to protect her unborn child.)
http://open.salon.com/blog/fingerlakeswanderer/2011/11/22/pregnant_protester_who_was_beaten_miscarries
Is that enough violence for you? Or would you like more before you regard this as despicable?
This is the often-overlooked benefit of top schools. The most talented students tend to learn a lot from one another, and so you want to surround yourself with the smartest peers you can. If all the smart people were going to North-South Nowhere State University at Tinyville, that's where you should go. But they're not. They're all going to the "top" programs. So, if your smart, you should go there too.
There's no 'state-provided' street or sidewalk on which this business is taking place, nor a state-built thoroughfare upon which a consumer has to travel to visit a store.
Maybe your Amazon purchases are delivered by teleportation, but mine come via UPS or USPS. They use trucks, the kind that travel on roads. They often come to my city via planes that fly in airspace regulated by the FAA.
Yes, the US gov't invented the internet, but for at least the last dozen years every iota of bandwith on which our (consumer's) signals travel is paid for commercially, and the costs passed down to either we the consumers (through our ISPs) or the businesses (through their providers)
Yeah, thank god the government invented the internet so they don't ever have to invent anything ever again. We can stop paying taxes now because we've reached the end-of-days. Nope, no new ideas the government could fund with our tax dollars today.
- whatever actual physical location a business has somewhere, the services that they consume (fire, police, etc.) from the government are already paid for in their property taxes. Self-evidently there's no need for police services for the sorts of store loss-prevention actions (shoplifters, etc) for internet stores.
What about other forms of fraud like credit-card fraud? Large scale fraud that involve transactions that go across state lines are investigated by the FBI. Should someone pay for that?
People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
You're simply wrong about this. True the NIH requires submission to open access journals, and I trust you know what your talking about with the NSF. But these are not the only tax-based sources of research funding. First, there are non-U.S. sources. Even in the U.S. there are the departments of defense, education, and energy which fund huge amounts of research. Defense and energy do a lot in science and technology. On top of that you have state universities that are funded (less and less) by tax dollars from their states. They often support the research of their faculty with that money.
Take a look at the top journals in many fields. We are very, very far from free access to scientific research.
The "college is a waste of time" thing is purely economic advice, nothing anti-intellectual about it.
College might be a waste of time if you view the only benefit of college as increasing your earning potential. But, this view of college is anti-intellectual. There are other benefits to college other than monetary, and some people are willing to pay for them.
Most of what you do for money is bad for your bottom line. Buying that TV? That won't make you money. Going to the movies? Waste of money. But I'll bet you do some of those things. Why? Because the item or service you receive in return is valuable to you -- more valuable than the money you exchange for it. The same could be said in college. While the money you invest will not increase your earning potential proportionally, it still might be worth it if you value the intellectual rewards you get while there.
Freed from the normal constraints of supply and demand, tuition prices are no longer tracking closely to the cost to provide an education.
This is preposterous. If it was really the case that tuition exceeded the cost of operating the university, state funding and private endowments wouldn't be necessary. What crazy statistics did you use to determine this claim? Or did you just make it up because it sounded good?
The most impressive counter protests I've seen have involved soliciting donations. The Topeka symphony (I think) put out a person who was asking people to pledge $1/hour that WBC spent protesting to the Human Rights Campaign. That way every hour they spent protesting gave money to anti-homophobia organizations.
In those days everyone was a philosopher. But the heirs of historical philosophers are not those who call themselves philosophers today; rather, they're the followers of the he best and most successful branch of philosophy, natural philosophy - which we now regard as the distinct discipline of science.
What makes you say that?
There are plenty of contemporary philosophers who are active participants in science and who would be appropriately called natural philosophers. Now- a-days they're more often called "naturalists" (named by W.v.O. Quine). Contemporary philosophers, and citations to them, regularly show up in scientific journals.
While the greek word philosophia literally means "friend of wisdom", the common-day philosopher tends to stare at their naval and wonder if they even exist
Which "common day" philosophers are you referring to? How much common day philosophy have you read? I think it's fair to say that this problem is near death and has been for a long time. The problem was made famous by Descartes of course, but he's hardly "common day."
I - personally - find it frustrating that we listen to the naval-staring philosopher, and forget what wisdom is in the same moment.
I'm happy to hear that you think people listen to philosophers. How many people do you know that spend their time worry about the problem of existence instead of something else?
Your attitude about philosophers is common, people take an intro to philosophy course that focuses on rationalist thought of the 15th century and assume they now know the state-of-the-art of philosophy. Somehow people don't realize how stupid this is, even though they wouldn't dare assume they understood contemporary physics after taking physics 101. Philosophy has a very long history of contributing to major scientific breakthroughs. Here are a few:
1. Einstein, throughout his life, credited many philosophers including Hume and Kant with inspiring him to come up with special and general relativity.
2. Neils Bohr invented his preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics because we was inspired by Kant.
3. Adam Smith was a "moral philosopher." Before him economics didn't exist.
4. Psychology wasn't it's own discipline until very recently. Before that it was philosophy.
Meanwhile IT guys are basically treated like janitors.
The irony of your comment is that it reproduces exactly the line of thinking that you criticize. You realize that janitors, by having physical access to almost all parts of a business, are capable of more havoc than IT folks. They often have physical access to all the same systems that IT people do and much more. If potential to cause damage should correlate with compensation, I'd argue that the janitors should get paid the most in any organization.
University is a waste of money for most people who go
I hate these sorts of claims because they are absolute nonsense. How can you know if my university degree was a waste of money for me? Do you know how much I value the things I learned (both in and out of the classroom) at the university? No, of course not, because you don't know me. It's like looking at someone you've never met and saying that they were stupid to go eat at some particular restaurant.
Usually, these sort of studies assume that the only reason anyone would go to college is to improve their lifetime earning potential and then compare the average change in earning to the cost of the university. While this is an important consideration, it shouldn't be the prevailing one, and more importantly it shouldn't be translated into the only potential thing of value that might come out of a university education. We are all not mindless money generating machines that simply wish to take the quickest route to a buck. Some of us want to enjoy the journey too.
I am a far better person for my university education. Even if it cost me money in the long run, I'm happy I went.
The previous discussion is why the base rate fallacy is so dangerous. According to wikipedia, the base rate for autism is 6 / 1,000. That means a random child has a 0.6% chance of having autism. A test that raises that to 5% is a huge improvement (almost an order of magnitude).
Some people have speculated that the population explosion in African and Asian countries is caused by high mortality rates. When parents need children for farming, working, or for dowries -- and when there is a relatively high risk of the child dying before puberty -- people opt to have a lot of children to ensure that they survive to be productive.
I'm not saying I believe it, but one has to be careful in assuming that a decrease in mortality will necessarily mean an increase in population.
They're not people, nor are they moral actors, meaning there is no real good/evil associated with the company.
No evil associated with a company?
I find this defense of high speed trading odd -- it puts the cart before the horse. Liquidity is not a good in itself which should be promoted above all else. Liquidity in a market is important so that the price can correctly reflect the value of the thing being traded -- without liquidity a person may want to buy or sell without someone on the other end and thus the price may not reflect the actual value.
But, if high frequency trading creates liquidity but does so by also introducing price distortions (like a sudden crash), then we *should* get rid of high frequency trading so that we can maintain correct (and mostly stable) prices.
"Reading both sides" is not always a good way to find out the truth. If one side is willing to lie and the other isn't, then you won't get a balanced sense of the situation from reading both sides. Your view will be slanted toward the side willing to lie.
Perhaps no news outlet will outright lie (perhaps), but I am very confident that Fox News is perfectly willing to report things with the slimest of corroboration as cold, hard fact if it suits their political agenda. I don't mean to pick on right, there are plenty of left wing organizations that do the same too.
My point is simply that reading a bunch of different sources is not guaranteed to give you an accurate picture of the world. More broadly, this is why I think news aggregation, like google news, cannot take the place of a single, good news source.
Google news is no substitute for a good newspaper. First, a good newspaper should do the aggregation for you, and so should duplicate what google's doing. Second, a *good* newspaper should provide a balanced, fact checked commentary on the news events. The problem with google news is that they include every major news source without preference for reliability.
If the NYT and Fox News are covering the same story, I want to read the NYT coverage and not Fox News. I don't trust FN, and I do trust NYT (at least I trust them more).
This is completely right. Just because a particular vehicle for speech doesn't allow *all* speech doesn't imply that it's not a vehicle for public debate about certain topics. The newspaper doesn't print porn, does that mean that newspapers are not involved in an active democracy? Or that any attempt to censor a newspaper doesn't effect free speech because the newspaper doesn't allow a totally unvetted expression of ideas?
Thinking about free speech in this all-or-nothing way is not productive, and it tends to alienate people from supporting free speech because they feel like they have to support porn.
The city is just acting stupidly by threatening to tax the students and tuition fees. It should simply reduce police and fire services to the univ neighbourhoods and ask the univs to hire private security for protection and refuse to maintain things like synchronized traffic lights and traffic by pass and other such things.
They do. Both CMU and Pitt have private police forces. And you don't think that things like Pitt games bring venue to the city? The city seems to think so.
Also it should charge market rates for their sewer connections, water supplies and use of public spaces for utilities. The univs will come back begging to give up their tax exempt status and agree to pay real estate taxes like all other residents and businesses are paying. In fact if their tax exempt status is revoked, almost all the businesses and private property owners will see a big reduction in their tax bills.
I would hope you think we should also charge churches real estate taxes. I feel pretty confident all the churches take up more real estate than the universities. I wonder what the public reaction to that would be?
Blame the greedy CMU that charges 48000$ a year from their students,
Greedy? CMU has a *tiny* endowment compared to their status (only 10% of their operating budget). None of student tuition goes to the endowment, its all used to operate the university. And, of course, many students seem very happy to pay it. I wish that universities didn't have to charge that much, but I think it's unfair to call CMU greedy.
refuses to bear its fair share of the cost of providing civic services passing the burden on the shrinking tax base.
It's not the shrinking tax base that's to blame. Its the city mismanagement of it's pension fund. "That need stems from decades of questionable management of the city's pension fund, which holds around one-third of the $899 million it should to cover future obligations."
What do you mean students don't pay taxes like other residents? Do they get exemptions from sales and gas taxes? Do their landlords not pay property taxes that get included in the rents they pay? If they take jobs in the city don't they pay state income taxes that get partially recycled to the city?
Not only do they pay state taxes, but the city of Pittsburgh has an income tax (not an insignificant one either). In addition Carnegie Mellon along with other non-profits in the city *voluntarily* contribute money to the city to help pay for services. Many university students stay in the city after they graduate, getting jobs, etc. Of course the employees of these universities pay a lot of taxes. Even more, universities like Carnegie Mellon attract businesses. Several businesses (including Google and Intel) have offices on Campus and have employees (who pay taxes).
This is an utterly absurd attempt to cover a budget shortfall by preying on those who have little political power. They mayoral election just happened two weeks ago in Pittsburgh, so the students who are angry about this will have moved on by the next time there is an election. Many of them aren't registered to vote in the city anyway.
Absolutely! I have students that take notes on computer, and I think it's a terrible idea. First there is the problem of equations. In the class I teach we introduce a lot of symbols, so even if you have a fast system you would have to find the symbols in a big list. By the time you do, you're probably behind.
Second, note taking is a tool which helps you learn the material better. Transcribing the notes later helps significantly more, because now you get to revisit the material with fresh eyes. Something that may have seemed obvious initially may seem less so when you transcribe them. Now you can go to the next lecture an ask questions from the previous class. (As a professor, I'm *very* impressed when students do this, because it proves to me that they did something other than drink beer between the end of the last class and the beginning of the next.)
Finally taking notes on a computer provides you with many distractions. I know lots of students who claim "I don't get distracted from using a computer", but then my grader or another student informs me the were surfing the web, reading email, IMing, etc. Save yourself from having to avoid these and just use paper.
This is the standard response I always see to people questioning day traders (or to the more recent high-frequency trading). Liquidity is a good thing, so that those who want to buy can and those who want to sell can. But, as I recall, day traders are a recent invention. Is there any real evidence that the market had insufficient liquidity before day traders? Why isn't the vast amount of trading done for slightly longer term investments sufficient to create liquidity? And don't go telling me we need liquidity from day traders to support other day traders.