Kindergarten was originally a German idea to help children transition from home to public schooling, and was a lot more like nursery school or preschool is now. At some point it became standardized and mandatory in the US and lost most of the distinction between it and primary school.
I was making a different point, but that's true as well: the strengthening of copyright has been a key political issue of the entertainment industry, and that industry strongly favors progressive causes.
That's correct but also misleading. People who are in the entertainment industry donate to individual Democratic candidates more than Republicans, but as far as industry lobbying goes it's pretty even. They've got their hands up both puppets' backs. My Senator Orrin Hatch has been the point man for Hollywood in the Senate for decades now, and he's as right-wing as it gets.
He was merely using IP law as a pretext for acting up. Even if he had succeeded and gotten off free, it wouldn't have changed anything about IP law.
As for this....I don't even now what to say. It's depressing that people actually think this. I hope you're just a bit ignorant and not actually that cynical.
Please read up on Aaron Swartz. The guy was an exemplary citizen. Remember the fuss that was raised to stop SOPA and the Protect IP Act? His organization, Demand Progress, were critical in organizing opposition to those acts, and have done a great deal for advancing other "progressive" causes. He actually had done real work to change IP law in our country, rather than you or I who just bitch about it on the internet.
Swartz was a great guy, and the way he was treated by the justice system was absolutely abhorrent.
Holy non sequitur, batman! So you think it was those damned progressives that caused copyright to become a federal issue? I'm pretty sure that's been in the constitution from the beginning. Grind your axe somewhere else, guy, it is not germane to this conversation.
Seeing as how mandatory minimum sentencing and the gradual criminalization of our society (and thus the increased power of federal prosecutors) over the last 40 years has been pushed most zealously by supposedly anti-government right-wingers, I'm confused how "progressivism" can be blamed for the aggressiveness of the DOJ in any way, shape or form.
I guess you could consider it non-partisan if you look at it slant-eyed. The left-wing (governmentally speaking) is nearly as pro-corporate as the right, but your rant has more or less nothing to do with the subject at hand. Aaron Swartz wasn't trying to take people's guns away. He was fighting for sane IP laws.
I recently finished "A year amongst the Persians" by edward granville brown (a (free) librivox recording) and if I were trying to pick a piece of american geography like Iran they could do worse than Houston.
None of Iran's major cities are on the coast and both South Florida and East Texas are flat as a pancake. You'd be hard pressed to pick two American cities that are less similar to Iranian cities geographically.
Both of those reasons are valid, but wouldn't you like to know the actual cost of that insurance and rewards program? It could be that you're getting fleeced, and could be spending that extra ~5% or whatever it comes out to in a more efficient way.
I'm 26 and the first programming language I learned was QBasic, followed by VB6. Presumably the author is around my age, although possibly a bit older.
Does it become more refined if you have multiple APs, though? If my phone is at 60% signal strength of AP#1 and changes to 90% signal strength at AP#2, that seems like it could give you enough information to piece together a reasonable estimate of location.
Have you found anything good to replace it? My local public music station just switched formats a few months ago and I find myself listening to a lot fewer new bands these days as a result.
It wasn't even just being arrested and beaten for civil disobedience. Hard-line segregationists openly murdered civil rights activists and their families, bombing homes and churches, all the while being praised and shielded by their communities.
The sit-ins were a cake walk compared to what happened to the folks in Alabama and Mississippi.
I have no argument along the lines of hypocrisy in government, but if Obama and Clinton were normal folks when they were doing cocaine and smoking weed, that sort of negates your argument, doesn't it? I can see Kennedy and Bush. Both of them came from powerful families and Bush especially did some shady things before entering public office, but neither Clinton nor Obama had those powerful connections until much later in life. It's not like they were doing lines in the Oval Office, you're talking about drug use that happened when they were very young men.
Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama come from privileged backgrounds. Obama was raised by a single mother, Clinton's father died when he was three months old and he grew up in an abusive household. Although they were both extremely well educated, all of that education was paid for by merit scholarships.
The Laffer curve, while an inarguable *concept*, doesn't actual help us in any way set tax policy because nobody knows where the tax rate that most efficiently produces revenue actually lies. Knowing that the graph is of a quadratic shape doesn't help at all if you don't know what the formula looks like.
You'll notice that the Laffer curve is always used to argue for lower tax rates, not higher, but the US individual tax rate is actually significantly *lower* than the most optimal tax rates predicted by most academic studies. Most of those studies put it in the 65-70% range, and I don't see many people that love to use the Laffer curve in arguments saying we should raise tax rates.
Secondly, this is talking about sales tax and VAT, *not* income tax. The Laffer curve has little to do with consumption taxes. Having a high taxation rate for different sorts of consumption taxes can actually have substantial benefits depending on what you're trying to do. Norway does have an extraordinarily high sales tax. AFAIK it is one of the highest in the world, which leads to lots of interesting behavior from their citizens as they try to avoid those taxes. It also leads to decreased consumption and more judicious use of resources.
Either way, Norway is usually at or near the top of the list for everything from education, health care, income equality, poverty, corruption and most everything else by just about any sort of metric that measures the effectiveness of government, so they're obviously doing something right.
The moral to the story is, if you think your protest is organic, and it ends up being huge, it probably isn't organic. It's astroturf. Someone's bankrolling it. Things like the march on Washington lead by MLK are the exception rather than the rule.
That's actually a really bad example. The march on Washington was organized by the AFL-CIO (it was technically called the March on Washington for *Jobs* and Freedom), the NAACP, CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and the Urban League.
In fact, most of the successful protests in the civil rights movement were not as spontaneous as you might imagine from folklore. Rosa Parks' refusal to sit at the back of the bus is often painted as a spur of the moment decision, but it was highly deliberate. Mrs. Parks was an active civil rights leader at the time, serving as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, a group that had long planned a bus boycott to apply political pressure to end discriminatory practices in public services.
There was actually an incident earlier in the year where a young African American woman refused to give up her seat in exactly the same manner as Mrs. Parks, but the NAACP decided not to use her as the figurehead for the bus boycott because she was a teenager with children out of wedlock. They figured that it would be difficult to rally the community around the girl, and that her illegitimacy would be an easy target for white criticism. Rosa Parks, a well-educated and wholly respectable citizen, was a much more useful figurehead.
Your advice is very, very sound, though. Mass protests are all organized by *somebody* and you better damn sure know every angle of the who, what, and why of the event you're attending before you jump in. Although sometimes it's difficult. I doubt most of the attendees in the Seattle WTO riots had any idea it was going to turn violent. The large majority of the people there were peaceful and had no idea the police and subversives would turn the whole damn thing into a battle.
In rugby, 11.3 concussions occur per 100 players, per season. No information on how those concussions were distributed among the players.
In football, 15.3% of players sustained concussions per season. No information on how many concussions each of those players, on average or in total, sustained.
Being concussed once *drastically* raises the likelihood that you will be concussed again. It is extremely likely that far fewer than 11.3% of rugby players sustain a concussion each season, and also extremely likely that football players incur far more than 15.3 concussions per 100 player-seasons. The numbers are not comparable.
The gear isn't the only difference. Even before modern pads and helmets football was played quite differently to rugby. Rugby certainly isn't any less challenging or physically demanding, but the frequency of one-on-one collisions at high force is quite a bit lower due to the difference in the way the games are actually played. In football, getting tackled is more or less inevitable on any play, and the ballcarrier will often run directly into a defender full-force to try and gain a few yards. The forward pass also causes the quarterback or receiver to be hit while defenseless, which seems to be rare in a rugby match.
It's not that football players hit harder. I doubt that they do. Never having played rugby I don't actually know, but they look like they're hitting pretty damn hard.
I do agree that in rugby you have less leading with the head, but this is also strongly discouraged in football by rule and by common sense and certainly doesn't happen on nearly every play. This is much less due to concussions and more to do with spinal injuries, though. If you're leading with your head, you *will* hurt your neck and probably badly.
Not to mention, lots of big issues that are raised go under the radar. There were some pretty huge things on the table in the 2000 election (changes in foreign policy, medicare part D, environmental issues, financial regulation, No Child Left Behind) that were clearly articulated by Bush's campaign platform, but most voters either ignored or did not realize the significance of these changes.
You're right, but it's not because of graphics. The Wii has shown that you can be clearly behind on graphics and it doesn't particularly matter. Little Jimmy doesn't want to play "video games." Little Jimmy wants to play Zelda. Or Black Ops 2. Or Final Fantasy, or whatever it is.
Consoles live and die by their branding, and the lion's share of that comes from their games. This has been true since at least the PSX.
If they can get quality games that people actually want to play, they will be successful. I have my doubts about their ability to compete with any of the established players in this regard, and if they're just porting phone games then what the hell is the point of buying a standalone console?
Well, in my defense, you *do* sound like a boomer with the whole "kids these days" rant.:)
It's not like I can't sympathize. I also think kids these days are unusually stupid, and I'm only 26! That's just a natural part of growing old and has nothing to do with the actual merit or lack thereof of this generation of kids. Some of them are incredibly talented, some of them are scum, but most are exactly the same as every other human being that's ever lived. If anything, people are getting smarter as time goes on, but that's another conversation.
I was sort of aiming for sarcastic rather than vitriolic, but I didn't take the time to write it that well. I was trying to show my own rant as another example of the silly inter-generational prejudice that exists, but I don't know that my sarcasm came through that clearly. Either way, I look forward to the days when I too can rant about how stupid kids are while vastly overestimating my adolescent work ethic and academic abilities!
It's the norm for commercially raised beef to be finished on a majority corn diet, which is field corn grown specifically for that purpose. Sileage makes up a relatively small amount of cattle diets.
Chicken feed I'm not as knowledgeable about, but AFAIK it's much the same.
Even if they're raised on rangeland they're probably shipped off to Kansas and Colorado and finished on corn. It's rare that beef in the American market avoids commercial yards at some point, and unless you live in a rural ranching area you have to pay a pretty penny for it.
Most of the meat eaten in the US is beef and chicken. What do we feed most of the beef and chicken? There's some forage, sure. But the majority of it is corn and soy, grown on commercial farms. This is particularly true in large-scale commercial lots where the overwhelming majority of our meat is produced.
And I hate to burst your bubble, but alfalfa doesn't come falling out of the sky into fully formed hay bails. You have to plant it, fertilized it, and harvest it like all the other crops. That requires arable land, water, gasoline, and labor costs that could easily be used in a much more efficient way than producing meat, which was the GP poster's point.
But I guess having a understanding of basic economics makes us stupid goddamn hippies.
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Kindergarten was originally a German idea to help children transition from home to public schooling, and was a lot more like nursery school or preschool is now. At some point it became standardized and mandatory in the US and lost most of the distinction between it and primary school.
That's correct but also misleading. People who are in the entertainment industry donate to individual Democratic candidates more than Republicans, but as far as industry lobbying goes it's pretty even. They've got their hands up both puppets' backs. My Senator Orrin Hatch has been the point man for Hollywood in the Senate for decades now, and he's as right-wing as it gets.
As for this....I don't even now what to say. It's depressing that people actually think this. I hope you're just a bit ignorant and not actually that cynical.
Please read up on Aaron Swartz. The guy was an exemplary citizen. Remember the fuss that was raised to stop SOPA and the Protect IP Act? His organization, Demand Progress, were critical in organizing opposition to those acts, and have done a great deal for advancing other "progressive" causes. He actually had done real work to change IP law in our country, rather than you or I who just bitch about it on the internet.
Swartz was a great guy, and the way he was treated by the justice system was absolutely abhorrent.
Holy non sequitur, batman! So you think it was those damned progressives that caused copyright to become a federal issue? I'm pretty sure that's been in the constitution from the beginning. Grind your axe somewhere else, guy, it is not germane to this conversation.
Seeing as how mandatory minimum sentencing and the gradual criminalization of our society (and thus the increased power of federal prosecutors) over the last 40 years has been pushed most zealously by supposedly anti-government right-wingers, I'm confused how "progressivism" can be blamed for the aggressiveness of the DOJ in any way, shape or form.
I guess you could consider it non-partisan if you look at it slant-eyed. The left-wing (governmentally speaking) is nearly as pro-corporate as the right, but your rant has more or less nothing to do with the subject at hand. Aaron Swartz wasn't trying to take people's guns away. He was fighting for sane IP laws.
None of Iran's major cities are on the coast and both South Florida and East Texas are flat as a pancake. You'd be hard pressed to pick two American cities that are less similar to Iranian cities geographically.
Both of those reasons are valid, but wouldn't you like to know the actual cost of that insurance and rewards program? It could be that you're getting fleeced, and could be spending that extra ~5% or whatever it comes out to in a more efficient way.
I'm 26 and the first programming language I learned was QBasic, followed by VB6. Presumably the author is around my age, although possibly a bit older.
Does it become more refined if you have multiple APs, though? If my phone is at 60% signal strength of AP#1 and changes to 90% signal strength at AP#2, that seems like it could give you enough information to piece together a reasonable estimate of location.
Have you found anything good to replace it? My local public music station just switched formats a few months ago and I find myself listening to a lot fewer new bands these days as a result.
It wasn't even just being arrested and beaten for civil disobedience. Hard-line segregationists openly murdered civil rights activists and their families, bombing homes and churches, all the while being praised and shielded by their communities.
The sit-ins were a cake walk compared to what happened to the folks in Alabama and Mississippi.
I have no argument along the lines of hypocrisy in government, but if Obama and Clinton were normal folks when they were doing cocaine and smoking weed, that sort of negates your argument, doesn't it? I can see Kennedy and Bush. Both of them came from powerful families and Bush especially did some shady things before entering public office, but neither Clinton nor Obama had those powerful connections until much later in life. It's not like they were doing lines in the Oval Office, you're talking about drug use that happened when they were very young men.
So.....not sure what you mean then. That they went to elite schools?
Or rather Obama's father abandoned the family, he was raised by his mother, step-family, and grandparents.
Neither Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama come from privileged backgrounds. Obama was raised by a single mother, Clinton's father died when he was three months old and he grew up in an abusive household. Although they were both extremely well educated, all of that education was paid for by merit scholarships.
Where to begin......
The Laffer curve, while an inarguable *concept*, doesn't actual help us in any way set tax policy because nobody knows where the tax rate that most efficiently produces revenue actually lies. Knowing that the graph is of a quadratic shape doesn't help at all if you don't know what the formula looks like.
You'll notice that the Laffer curve is always used to argue for lower tax rates, not higher, but the US individual tax rate is actually significantly *lower* than the most optimal tax rates predicted by most academic studies. Most of those studies put it in the 65-70% range, and I don't see many people that love to use the Laffer curve in arguments saying we should raise tax rates.
Secondly, this is talking about sales tax and VAT, *not* income tax. The Laffer curve has little to do with consumption taxes. Having a high taxation rate for different sorts of consumption taxes can actually have substantial benefits depending on what you're trying to do. Norway does have an extraordinarily high sales tax. AFAIK it is one of the highest in the world, which leads to lots of interesting behavior from their citizens as they try to avoid those taxes. It also leads to decreased consumption and more judicious use of resources.
Either way, Norway is usually at or near the top of the list for everything from education, health care, income equality, poverty, corruption and most everything else by just about any sort of metric that measures the effectiveness of government, so they're obviously doing something right.
The vast majority of gun *crimes* are drug related, but the majority of gun *deaths* are not. Big difference.
That's actually a really bad example. The march on Washington was organized by the AFL-CIO (it was technically called the March on Washington for *Jobs* and Freedom), the NAACP, CORE, the Southern Christian Leadership Council, and the Urban League.
In fact, most of the successful protests in the civil rights movement were not as spontaneous as you might imagine from folklore. Rosa Parks' refusal to sit at the back of the bus is often painted as a spur of the moment decision, but it was highly deliberate. Mrs. Parks was an active civil rights leader at the time, serving as secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP, a group that had long planned a bus boycott to apply political pressure to end discriminatory practices in public services.
There was actually an incident earlier in the year where a young African American woman refused to give up her seat in exactly the same manner as Mrs. Parks, but the NAACP decided not to use her as the figurehead for the bus boycott because she was a teenager with children out of wedlock. They figured that it would be difficult to rally the community around the girl, and that her illegitimacy would be an easy target for white criticism. Rosa Parks, a well-educated and wholly respectable citizen, was a much more useful figurehead.
Your advice is very, very sound, though. Mass protests are all organized by *somebody* and you better damn sure know every angle of the who, what, and why of the event you're attending before you jump in. Although sometimes it's difficult. I doubt most of the attendees in the Seattle WTO riots had any idea it was going to turn violent. The large majority of the people there were peaceful and had no idea the police and subversives would turn the whole damn thing into a battle.
In rugby, 11.3 concussions occur per 100 players, per season. No information on how those concussions were distributed among the players.
In football, 15.3% of players sustained concussions per season. No information on how many concussions each of those players, on average or in total, sustained.
Being concussed once *drastically* raises the likelihood that you will be concussed again. It is extremely likely that far fewer than 11.3% of rugby players sustain a concussion each season, and also extremely likely that football players incur far more than 15.3 concussions per 100 player-seasons. The numbers are not comparable.
The gear isn't the only difference. Even before modern pads and helmets football was played quite differently to rugby. Rugby certainly isn't any less challenging or physically demanding, but the frequency of one-on-one collisions at high force is quite a bit lower due to the difference in the way the games are actually played. In football, getting tackled is more or less inevitable on any play, and the ballcarrier will often run directly into a defender full-force to try and gain a few yards. The forward pass also causes the quarterback or receiver to be hit while defenseless, which seems to be rare in a rugby match.
It's not that football players hit harder. I doubt that they do. Never having played rugby I don't actually know, but they look like they're hitting pretty damn hard.
I do agree that in rugby you have less leading with the head, but this is also strongly discouraged in football by rule and by common sense and certainly doesn't happen on nearly every play. This is much less due to concussions and more to do with spinal injuries, though. If you're leading with your head, you *will* hurt your neck and probably badly.
Not to mention, lots of big issues that are raised go under the radar. There were some pretty huge things on the table in the 2000 election (changes in foreign policy, medicare part D, environmental issues, financial regulation, No Child Left Behind) that were clearly articulated by Bush's campaign platform, but most voters either ignored or did not realize the significance of these changes.
You're right, but it's not because of graphics. The Wii has shown that you can be clearly behind on graphics and it doesn't particularly matter. Little Jimmy doesn't want to play "video games." Little Jimmy wants to play Zelda. Or Black Ops 2. Or Final Fantasy, or whatever it is.
Consoles live and die by their branding, and the lion's share of that comes from their games. This has been true since at least the PSX.
If they can get quality games that people actually want to play, they will be successful. I have my doubts about their ability to compete with any of the established players in this regard, and if they're just porting phone games then what the hell is the point of buying a standalone console?
It depends on the town. I got both versions growing up. Two of the small towns I grew up in were hideous places, the other was a pretty nice place.
Well, in my defense, you *do* sound like a boomer with the whole "kids these days" rant. :)
It's not like I can't sympathize. I also think kids these days are unusually stupid, and I'm only 26! That's just a natural part of growing old and has nothing to do with the actual merit or lack thereof of this generation of kids. Some of them are incredibly talented, some of them are scum, but most are exactly the same as every other human being that's ever lived. If anything, people are getting smarter as time goes on, but that's another conversation.
I was sort of aiming for sarcastic rather than vitriolic, but I didn't take the time to write it that well. I was trying to show my own rant as another example of the silly inter-generational prejudice that exists, but I don't know that my sarcasm came through that clearly. Either way, I look forward to the days when I too can rant about how stupid kids are while vastly overestimating my adolescent work ethic and academic abilities!
It's the norm for commercially raised beef to be finished on a majority corn diet, which is field corn grown specifically for that purpose. Sileage makes up a relatively small amount of cattle diets.
Chicken feed I'm not as knowledgeable about, but AFAIK it's much the same.
Even if they're raised on rangeland they're probably shipped off to Kansas and Colorado and finished on corn. It's rare that beef in the American market avoids commercial yards at some point, and unless you live in a rural ranching area you have to pay a pretty penny for it.
Because Americans eat a lot of goat meat, right?
Most of the meat eaten in the US is beef and chicken. What do we feed most of the beef and chicken? There's some forage, sure. But the majority of it is corn and soy, grown on commercial farms. This is particularly true in large-scale commercial lots where the overwhelming majority of our meat is produced.
And I hate to burst your bubble, but alfalfa doesn't come falling out of the sky into fully formed hay bails. You have to plant it, fertilized it, and harvest it like all the other crops. That requires arable land, water, gasoline, and labor costs that could easily be used in a much more efficient way than producing meat, which was the GP poster's point.
But I guess having a understanding of basic economics makes us stupid goddamn hippies.