All health care is eventually a black hole that you throw money down and have it disappear. I don't think we should really be in it for the profit angle.
On the other hand, I don't want the government in it. Not because I don't want people to get "free" medicine, but because I think the government will screw it up, or worse, obtain control over the lives of the people who are supposed to be keeping it in check. It will constantly be a battle between people who are trying to give more and more away to keep getting elected, and people who try to "reform" the programs with a giant sledgehammer.
I've heard them talking tough about him, but I haven't heard anyone state he's getting tried for treason, let alone summarily executed. I'd have to ask for a citation on that one.
I agree that he's certainly going to be brought up on some charges, but I'd imagine that would surprise no one. He may or may not have to do some time in the Federal pen. He did break the law, no matter what his reasons were.
To be honest, I don't think he's in any danger of his life whatsoever. If they haven't killed him yet, they're not going to kill him now. He'd just be a martyr. That would make no sense.
I did not compare them. I acknowledged that they had a superficial similarity (ie. people oppressed to some degree by invading conquerors), but that there are specific differences which caused the actual situations to differ. Then I discussed them very briefly. Since it was too briefly to make an impression, here's the specifics.
If the Chinese and Tibetans had fought a two hundred year war for domination of the Chinese mainland or even just Tibet, the result would probably be exactly the same as the natives in the US had to deal with. That is not what happened, however.
No one is stating that the Tibetans didn't mind, but they were rolled over pretty quickly and relatively painlessly. There wasn't really much opportunity for atrocity on either side. The natives in the US were not rolled over quickly or easily. And they definitely fought back on occasion savagely. They gave as good as they got. Justified or not, that sort of back and forth for a long period is going to generate serious ill feeling and extreme tactics on both sides.
The Chinese-Tibet conflict is not marked in that manner. Nobody's Chinese grandpappy was scalped by some Tibetan warrior, so there's no real hate to generate the same policies. The Chinese oppress the Tibetans to some degree, but atrocity would not serve Chinese interests for a more or less docile Tibetan population. While some people, particularly in the West, might want Tibet freed, there is really no question of Chinese control over the entirety of Tibet. There is no constant simmering conflict which is periodically breaking out into no holds barred warfare.
Point is, you're comparing the situation of the Tibetans to the treatment of natives in the US which differs in both background, scale, and severity. The history behind those conflicts has significant differences which directly inform how the two situations are treated. There is no reason to believe that the sort of situation that Tibet is in right now would have any cause for the Chinese to act in the same manner as the Americans did with natives.
While Petraeus did get dealt with relatively lightly, he resigned his job, and his government career is over. He also accepted the judgement of the system on what he did.
Note that Snowden fled before he could be dealt with by the system. So we don't actually know how he would have been dealt with. Right now, he's basically a fugitive. Would Petraeus have been less of a fugitive if he ran off with his journalist girlfriend to Russia to avoid prosecution?
I do agree that an arrest is very unlikely, but if Clinton left herself open to anything that would lead up to an indictment or arrest, she would likely have enough trouble to torpedo her candidacy, especially if it comes out before the primary.
I'm not sure Clinton should go to jail. I can't believe someone her age and in her higher management position truly understood all of the implications of having a server. What *she* is probably guilty of is being an affluent person who is probably used to getting her way and with technical advisers who should have known better but who did not advise her properly. I imagine that Mrs. Clinton believes she has "people" for making sure that her email is delivered to her in the most convenient manner possible. Those people failed.
Of course, she's still technically responsible, but it does feel like a tempest in a teapot *unless* she was shown to be communicating with that server in order to have government related conversations off the books. In that event, I would expect her to be slapped down hard.
Don't worry. The Democratic party is still working hard to set up the Clinton coronation.
As long as the boat isn't rocked too much, Clinton is our winner in this election.
That could change if they managed to indict Clinton somehow, or Biden joined the race. I don't think Bernie, on his own, will be able to unseat Clinton.
That said, I am not sure that Jeb would beat Bernie. On the other hand, Bernie would get exactly nothing done unless they seriously changed the make-up of Congress.
The Republicans are in a bad state, but they'd re-unite to deal with a President Sanders. An actual socialist is probably something they hate even more than each other.
I have to admit.... I'd be more concerned about my automated vehicle defending itself from clever theft than I would be about it being in an accident with me in it.
I think that in most cases, you'd turn over manual control or at least selective control for parking or other decisions that would be made at slow speeds. Especially in the beginning.
Alternately, vehicles might simply do a drop off for the user and be programmed to enter a specific assigned parking spot which might well be a mile away, but within relatively close distance for pickups. You wouldn't want to walk that distance, but you could call the vehicle over from a spot that far away.
An automated vehicle with avoidance software and sensors can easily be better at avoidance than most humans. For one thing, they will actually notice the rapid approach of an out of control vehicle on an intercept course with your vehicle even when you aren't paying attention or if they are coming out of your blind spot.
More to the point, if you're in a situation where another driver is going to hit you because they're out of control, if a computer couldn't get you out of the way, why do you think a human would be any better? In any case where a computer could not get out of the way, the human wouldn't have been able to either. The wreck in that case was going to happen no matter what you did or who was driving.
In that case, the question becomes not "how can we tolerate automated vehicles while there are crazy drivers on the road?" Rather it becomes, "why do we tolerate crazy drivers on the road?". Humans who cannot drive well are not an argument against introducing automated vehicles that do drive well.
Presumably, the replacement of the driving software will be a service and inspection item. You would not rely on the owner upgrading the software. Nor would I think the user would even be able to unless they were qualified to do so.
Further, the GPS being wrong sometimes is because the GPS is a system that has not been tested nor intended for automated control of the vehicle. There is an acceptable level of error in such a system because there is the requirement that a human driver be behind the wheel.
An auto-driving car might use GPS, but it also uses sensors like radar and cameras to ensure that you don't just drive into the other lane.
Also, the fact that GPS is hilariously wrong sometimes has not prevented it from being incredibly common. If autonomous vehicles can demonstrate usefulness in some key cases, their shortcomings in other specific cases will be overlooked or worked around.
There are the guys who love the hardware, and the guys who love the scripting. Most admins did both, of course, but you could usually tell which side they tended to come down on.
Now that the hardware has been abstracted away in the cloud, the need for hardware admins in businesses who use cloud apps is much less, but the need for automation is now through the roof.
You still need the guys who like playing with the OS and the hardware to work in data centers and support the cloud shops, of course. However, I think there is more of a growth market for the automation admins (ie. DevOps).
That's why there is the perception that DevOps is just sysadmin work. It is, at least at the root of it. A DevOps admin is more focused on using APIs to create infrastructures than an admin who just ties together things with scripts. It is more of a specialization, but it is a growth area.
Apples and oranges. The Tibetians, for the most part, did not resist at all and there was a history of Tibet being associated with China.
The Natives in America were ultimately beaten and dispossessed, but while the fight may have seen their inevitable defeat in the long term, it was not at all one-sided in terms of tactical victories and even savagery.
If the Tibetians and Chinese had the same history, I think you might see a much different treatment of the Tibetans. There is no indication from history that the Chinese are any more loath to use extreme measures against those they consider a threat. In some senses, they would consider tactics like that to be practical, if they had deemed them necessary.
I liked the first couple of seasons of Andromeda. It was always a little campy, but it had some interesting ideas, for instance Tyr and the Nietzschians. It also had a decent ensemble, despite having the overwhelming presence of Kevin Sorbo in the center of it.
Unfortunately, it teetered off the deep end somewhere in season three. That's what happens when your showrunner gets replaced and your star asserts his authorit-ay to alter the show.
No, it is a prize because it is an important field of study.
And no, it's not anti-scientific. Economics can and does have scientific principles applied to it. You can apply the scientific method to economics as much as anything else.
The real problem with economics is the sheer number of variables. It is the study of very, very complex behavior. There is no reason to believe that economics could not become a harder science. The problem is that it is more like weather modeling than physics. You would need the capability to model an incredible amount of variables to make adequate predictions.
Some economists break things down as much as they can to discover smaller, more predictable mechanisms. Others try and use modelling methods to find more general trends. Without a grasp of all of the variables, and the ability to do that computation, however, the predictive capacity of economics is much lower than other sciences. That doesn't mean it isn't done scientifically.
On the other hand, there are people who are in the economic astrology business. They use their magical swami hat to generate theories out of thin air based on their personal beliefs about the market and politics. Those people are in more abundance in economics because economics is not a harder science due to lower predictive capability, but there have also been "magical" thinkers in physics and other harder sciences as well.
I think it is silly, in any event, to malign any award for being "not really a Nobel". The Economics Nobel is a high award for economics, but that's all. I don't think anyone is suggesting that this means that the winner has "outscienced" the winner of the Chemistry award.
Yes, warp drive is critical for exploration and expansion, but the actual warp core is only needed for the enormous constant energy demands of a warp drive contained with in a small area. You probably wouldn't be able to use the output of a warp core effectively for most normal power grids. There'd be too much energy to store and a whole planet probably doesn't use that much energy under normal circumstances.
Supposedly even the impulse drives can be run by banks of fusion plants.
I always thought it was interesting that while everyone always obsessed about the warp core, I don't even remember them mentioning fusion generators aboard, although according to some tech manuals, they had something like 40 or so aboard a Galaxy-class. Shows you how far they've gotten that fusion is so advanced that no one really worried about it much.
The only thing you probably need an antimatter core for would be FTL and defenses. And planets might well only use giant super capacitors hooked up to a lot of fusion plants for that. They have the space to house less compact energy generation and you can't eject an anti-matter core from your planet and have it harmlessly explode behind you.
None of the things you suggest require a government to accomplish.
Yes, we would likely need standards and regulations to deal with things like pollution, but can't you think of any other way to achieve that goal than a general government?
The problem is that things are either seen as "the government does it, or nobody does it". Part of that is why governments are becoming unmanageable. You're combining the policing, defense, and welfare functions all in one ever-growing institution which is increasingly being led by figureheads.
I'm not saying we leave all those things to the "free market", but I'd think we would be better off by exercising our imaginations a little more than creating a government department for everything.
The only reasons for a million acre estate are removed when the estate is both not real and easily produced.
The large estate is there to produce actual privacy and separation from the rest of the world. If you are a door away from the confines of a crowded dystopia, then the virtual estate may still have some psychological value, but not likely. You're not really off in the country, you're in your squalid apartment in the middle of the projects and the crack addicts can still break in and steal all your stuff.
The estate is also there because before money was accessible in larger amounts, the only real wealth and serious investment possibility was land. So, if you're sitting on millions of acres of it, you are not only rich, you're ostentatiously so. Since that has changed, then lots of land has become not the best way to be rich, but it does have the value of showing that you are "old money".
I do think actual land would have value in an economy like Trek, but given the size of the universe, chances are good that you could have a serious chunk of a class M planet for not too much effort. As long as you didn't expect it to have a lot of infrastructure or Starfleet protection.
Seems like being a colonist in Trek is pretty much the most dangerous thing Federation citizens can do with all the colonies that keep being blown up.
And what goofball builds a colony in a Neutral Zone?
There's nothing confusing about it. It's like everything else.
You stand a higher chance of getting banged if you take that sort of risk, but it's a risk. And even if they fuck like crazed, consenting weasels, it isn't necessarily "happily ever after".
Think about all the sexual abuse accusers out there. At least some of them are likely people who played the game, got what they thought wanted, and then realized later that they were actually "molested". I'm not one to dismiss accusations of molestation lightly, but probability states that at least some of them are actually false charges. And if you did take that risk with a partner, then no matter how good the sex was, you just set yourself up for trouble down the road.
Also, when others in your field see you making moves on students or subordinates, your reputation can suffer. Even if he or she really wants it, you're now pegged as a creep. Just look at this guy. Even assuming all of the anonymous girls are lying about him, he's been seen in public doing creepy things. It doesn't matter if each and every girl he massaged got hot and rode him for the next three weeks afterward. He's still got a reputation for that shit.
Seriously, sex isn't all that hard to come by. Probably less so for some famous academic. The only way to end the whole "playing hard to get" stereotype is to refuse to play that game. Especially when you are in a position where you could do real harm if you are wrong about her real intentions, or even if you're right and still manage to fuck yourself over.
The professor is in a position of power, or at least respect, in an organization like a university. He shouldn't be hitting on the students. Period.
I know there is a long history of professors banging co-eds, and sometimes that's fully consensual between adults, but even so, professors should not be playing cat and mouse intimacy with their peers let alone their students. This is a workplace matter, not a mating dance. If a woman does want to get busy with a professor, and is playing a coy game with him, who cares? It isn't unmanly for him to refuse to play the game, it's professional for him to refuse to become involved. Surely a professor should not be taking a page from the caveman manual on intergender relationships to justify his pursuit.
As a manager, I don't get to give my female employees massages, and I'd demur even if a particularly attractive one straight up asked me to. Why? Because the workplace is the wrong place for that and I have a substantial effect on her career if we were to get involved or if there was even the suggestion that we were involved. So why are professors supposed to be special? Do they have no professional ethics?
All that should be necessary is that there are witnesses to the behavior. The woman herself shouldn't even need to come forward if third parties can vouch for it.
I admit that there is a potential for issues when anonymous claims are made. There does need to be a way of dealing with that fairly and honestly. You should be allowed to face your accuser if accused of such a crime, but at the same time, there has to be understanding that the victims are in a difficult position.
Everyone needs to know how to operate a computer. That does not mean they need to know how to code.
That's like saying that literacy requires everyone to know how to write novels or encyclopedias.
The thing is? It seems easier to get normal computer literacy today for kids than it ever was for kids to become reading literate. Kids with devices these days figure this stuff out on their own.
We probably could use more coders, but not *everyone*. Just add more money for more seats for quality CS programs for kids who are motivated and interested. And maybe add some money to *introduce* kids to the idea of coding to see if they like it after exposure and more motivated kids join CS classes. But let's not make this a "requirement".
This is certainly the way politics work, although I have to admit even I was astounded on the backpedaling Obama has done in comparison to what his campaign rhetoric was.
Mind you, I knew it was all slick marketing to begin with, but even I thought he'd try to pretend to put up more of a fight.
If you want someone who pretends really hard to look like they will follow through on their promises, the Republicans seem the better bet. Too bad what they are pretending to care about is retarded half the time.
But there's gay marriage, so I guess it's all okay now.
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All health care is eventually a black hole that you throw money down and have it disappear. I don't think we should really be in it for the profit angle.
On the other hand, I don't want the government in it. Not because I don't want people to get "free" medicine, but because I think the government will screw it up, or worse, obtain control over the lives of the people who are supposed to be keeping it in check. It will constantly be a battle between people who are trying to give more and more away to keep getting elected, and people who try to "reform" the programs with a giant sledgehammer.
I've heard them talking tough about him, but I haven't heard anyone state he's getting tried for treason, let alone summarily executed. I'd have to ask for a citation on that one.
I agree that he's certainly going to be brought up on some charges, but I'd imagine that would surprise no one. He may or may not have to do some time in the Federal pen. He did break the law, no matter what his reasons were.
To be honest, I don't think he's in any danger of his life whatsoever. If they haven't killed him yet, they're not going to kill him now. He'd just be a martyr. That would make no sense.
I did not compare them. I acknowledged that they had a superficial similarity (ie. people oppressed to some degree by invading conquerors), but that there are specific differences which caused the actual situations to differ. Then I discussed them very briefly. Since it was too briefly to make an impression, here's the specifics.
If the Chinese and Tibetans had fought a two hundred year war for domination of the Chinese mainland or even just Tibet, the result would probably be exactly the same as the natives in the US had to deal with. That is not what happened, however.
No one is stating that the Tibetans didn't mind, but they were rolled over pretty quickly and relatively painlessly. There wasn't really much opportunity for atrocity on either side. The natives in the US were not rolled over quickly or easily. And they definitely fought back on occasion savagely. They gave as good as they got. Justified or not, that sort of back and forth for a long period is going to generate serious ill feeling and extreme tactics on both sides.
The Chinese-Tibet conflict is not marked in that manner. Nobody's Chinese grandpappy was scalped by some Tibetan warrior, so there's no real hate to generate the same policies. The Chinese oppress the Tibetans to some degree, but atrocity would not serve Chinese interests for a more or less docile Tibetan population. While some people, particularly in the West, might want Tibet freed, there is really no question of Chinese control over the entirety of Tibet. There is no constant simmering conflict which is periodically breaking out into no holds barred warfare.
Point is, you're comparing the situation of the Tibetans to the treatment of natives in the US which differs in both background, scale, and severity. The history behind those conflicts has significant differences which directly inform how the two situations are treated. There is no reason to believe that the sort of situation that Tibet is in right now would have any cause for the Chinese to act in the same manner as the Americans did with natives.
While Petraeus did get dealt with relatively lightly, he resigned his job, and his government career is over. He also accepted the judgement of the system on what he did.
Note that Snowden fled before he could be dealt with by the system. So we don't actually know how he would have been dealt with. Right now, he's basically a fugitive. Would Petraeus have been less of a fugitive if he ran off with his journalist girlfriend to Russia to avoid prosecution?
I do agree that an arrest is very unlikely, but if Clinton left herself open to anything that would lead up to an indictment or arrest, she would likely have enough trouble to torpedo her candidacy, especially if it comes out before the primary.
I'm not sure Clinton should go to jail. I can't believe someone her age and in her higher management position truly understood all of the implications of having a server. What *she* is probably guilty of is being an affluent person who is probably used to getting her way and with technical advisers who should have known better but who did not advise her properly. I imagine that Mrs. Clinton believes she has "people" for making sure that her email is delivered to her in the most convenient manner possible. Those people failed.
Of course, she's still technically responsible, but it does feel like a tempest in a teapot *unless* she was shown to be communicating with that server in order to have government related conversations off the books. In that event, I would expect her to be slapped down hard.
Don't worry. The Democratic party is still working hard to set up the Clinton coronation.
As long as the boat isn't rocked too much, Clinton is our winner in this election.
That could change if they managed to indict Clinton somehow, or Biden joined the race. I don't think Bernie, on his own, will be able to unseat Clinton.
That said, I am not sure that Jeb would beat Bernie. On the other hand, Bernie would get exactly nothing done unless they seriously changed the make-up of Congress.
The Republicans are in a bad state, but they'd re-unite to deal with a President Sanders. An actual socialist is probably something they hate even more than each other.
I have to admit.... I'd be more concerned about my automated vehicle defending itself from clever theft than I would be about it being in an accident with me in it.
I agree with the possible part.
However, I don't like to make the mistake of underestimating the luddites and NIMBY crowds.
I think that in most cases, you'd turn over manual control or at least selective control for parking or other decisions that would be made at slow speeds. Especially in the beginning.
Alternately, vehicles might simply do a drop off for the user and be programmed to enter a specific assigned parking spot which might well be a mile away, but within relatively close distance for pickups. You wouldn't want to walk that distance, but you could call the vehicle over from a spot that far away.
An automated vehicle with avoidance software and sensors can easily be better at avoidance than most humans. For one thing, they will actually notice the rapid approach of an out of control vehicle on an intercept course with your vehicle even when you aren't paying attention or if they are coming out of your blind spot.
More to the point, if you're in a situation where another driver is going to hit you because they're out of control, if a computer couldn't get you out of the way, why do you think a human would be any better? In any case where a computer could not get out of the way, the human wouldn't have been able to either. The wreck in that case was going to happen no matter what you did or who was driving.
In that case, the question becomes not "how can we tolerate automated vehicles while there are crazy drivers on the road?" Rather it becomes, "why do we tolerate crazy drivers on the road?". Humans who cannot drive well are not an argument against introducing automated vehicles that do drive well.
Presumably, the replacement of the driving software will be a service and inspection item. You would not rely on the owner upgrading the software. Nor would I think the user would even be able to unless they were qualified to do so.
Further, the GPS being wrong sometimes is because the GPS is a system that has not been tested nor intended for automated control of the vehicle. There is an acceptable level of error in such a system because there is the requirement that a human driver be behind the wheel.
An auto-driving car might use GPS, but it also uses sensors like radar and cameras to ensure that you don't just drive into the other lane.
Also, the fact that GPS is hilariously wrong sometimes has not prevented it from being incredibly common. If autonomous vehicles can demonstrate usefulness in some key cases, their shortcomings in other specific cases will be overlooked or worked around.
There have always been two sorts of sysadmins.
There are the guys who love the hardware, and the guys who love the scripting. Most admins did both, of course, but you could usually tell which side they tended to come down on.
Now that the hardware has been abstracted away in the cloud, the need for hardware admins in businesses who use cloud apps is much less, but the need for automation is now through the roof.
You still need the guys who like playing with the OS and the hardware to work in data centers and support the cloud shops, of course. However, I think there is more of a growth market for the automation admins (ie. DevOps).
That's why there is the perception that DevOps is just sysadmin work. It is, at least at the root of it. A DevOps admin is more focused on using APIs to create infrastructures than an admin who just ties together things with scripts. It is more of a specialization, but it is a growth area.
You could probably do both, if you were able to end certain programs.
Other developed countries have done all of those things and more. They just happened to do them in the past. And not even the distant past.
I'm not sure where you are getting any of that, or do you believe that history doesn't extend back farther than fifty years or so?
Apples and oranges. The Tibetians, for the most part, did not resist at all and there was a history of Tibet being associated with China.
The Natives in America were ultimately beaten and dispossessed, but while the fight may have seen their inevitable defeat in the long term, it was not at all one-sided in terms of tactical victories and even savagery.
If the Tibetians and Chinese had the same history, I think you might see a much different treatment of the Tibetans. There is no indication from history that the Chinese are any more loath to use extreme measures against those they consider a threat. In some senses, they would consider tactics like that to be practical, if they had deemed them necessary.
I liked the first couple of seasons of Andromeda. It was always a little campy, but it had some interesting ideas, for instance Tyr and the Nietzschians. It also had a decent ensemble, despite having the overwhelming presence of Kevin Sorbo in the center of it.
Unfortunately, it teetered off the deep end somewhere in season three. That's what happens when your showrunner gets replaced and your star asserts his authorit-ay to alter the show.
No, it is a prize because it is an important field of study.
And no, it's not anti-scientific. Economics can and does have scientific principles applied to it. You can apply the scientific method to economics as much as anything else.
The real problem with economics is the sheer number of variables. It is the study of very, very complex behavior. There is no reason to believe that economics could not become a harder science. The problem is that it is more like weather modeling than physics. You would need the capability to model an incredible amount of variables to make adequate predictions.
Some economists break things down as much as they can to discover smaller, more predictable mechanisms. Others try and use modelling methods to find more general trends. Without a grasp of all of the variables, and the ability to do that computation, however, the predictive capacity of economics is much lower than other sciences. That doesn't mean it isn't done scientifically.
On the other hand, there are people who are in the economic astrology business. They use their magical swami hat to generate theories out of thin air based on their personal beliefs about the market and politics. Those people are in more abundance in economics because economics is not a harder science due to lower predictive capability, but there have also been "magical" thinkers in physics and other harder sciences as well.
I think it is silly, in any event, to malign any award for being "not really a Nobel". The Economics Nobel is a high award for economics, but that's all. I don't think anyone is suggesting that this means that the winner has "outscienced" the winner of the Chemistry award.
Yes, warp drive is critical for exploration and expansion, but the actual warp core is only needed for the enormous constant energy demands of a warp drive contained with in a small area. You probably wouldn't be able to use the output of a warp core effectively for most normal power grids. There'd be too much energy to store and a whole planet probably doesn't use that much energy under normal circumstances.
Supposedly even the impulse drives can be run by banks of fusion plants.
I always thought it was interesting that while everyone always obsessed about the warp core, I don't even remember them mentioning fusion generators aboard, although according to some tech manuals, they had something like 40 or so aboard a Galaxy-class. Shows you how far they've gotten that fusion is so advanced that no one really worried about it much.
The only thing you probably need an antimatter core for would be FTL and defenses. And planets might well only use giant super capacitors hooked up to a lot of fusion plants for that. They have the space to house less compact energy generation and you can't eject an anti-matter core from your planet and have it harmlessly explode behind you.
None of the things you suggest require a government to accomplish.
Yes, we would likely need standards and regulations to deal with things like pollution, but can't you think of any other way to achieve that goal than a general government?
The problem is that things are either seen as "the government does it, or nobody does it". Part of that is why governments are becoming unmanageable. You're combining the policing, defense, and welfare functions all in one ever-growing institution which is increasingly being led by figureheads.
I'm not saying we leave all those things to the "free market", but I'd think we would be better off by exercising our imaginations a little more than creating a government department for everything.
The only reasons for a million acre estate are removed when the estate is both not real and easily produced.
The large estate is there to produce actual privacy and separation from the rest of the world. If you are a door away from the confines of a crowded dystopia, then the virtual estate may still have some psychological value, but not likely. You're not really off in the country, you're in your squalid apartment in the middle of the projects and the crack addicts can still break in and steal all your stuff.
The estate is also there because before money was accessible in larger amounts, the only real wealth and serious investment possibility was land. So, if you're sitting on millions of acres of it, you are not only rich, you're ostentatiously so. Since that has changed, then lots of land has become not the best way to be rich, but it does have the value of showing that you are "old money".
I do think actual land would have value in an economy like Trek, but given the size of the universe, chances are good that you could have a serious chunk of a class M planet for not too much effort. As long as you didn't expect it to have a lot of infrastructure or Starfleet protection.
Seems like being a colonist in Trek is pretty much the most dangerous thing Federation citizens can do with all the colonies that keep being blown up.
And what goofball builds a colony in a Neutral Zone?
Or failing that, perhaps they could not read gender politics into a three letter file extension.
All they have to do is reduce tweets down to 40 characters and they'll need fewer people. Makes perfect sense.
There's nothing confusing about it. It's like everything else.
You stand a higher chance of getting banged if you take that sort of risk, but it's a risk. And even if they fuck like crazed, consenting weasels, it isn't necessarily "happily ever after".
Think about all the sexual abuse accusers out there. At least some of them are likely people who played the game, got what they thought wanted, and then realized later that they were actually "molested". I'm not one to dismiss accusations of molestation lightly, but probability states that at least some of them are actually false charges. And if you did take that risk with a partner, then no matter how good the sex was, you just set yourself up for trouble down the road.
Also, when others in your field see you making moves on students or subordinates, your reputation can suffer. Even if he or she really wants it, you're now pegged as a creep. Just look at this guy. Even assuming all of the anonymous girls are lying about him, he's been seen in public doing creepy things. It doesn't matter if each and every girl he massaged got hot and rode him for the next three weeks afterward. He's still got a reputation for that shit.
Seriously, sex isn't all that hard to come by. Probably less so for some famous academic. The only way to end the whole "playing hard to get" stereotype is to refuse to play that game. Especially when you are in a position where you could do real harm if you are wrong about her real intentions, or even if you're right and still manage to fuck yourself over.
In the context of this case, I quite agree.
The professor is in a position of power, or at least respect, in an organization like a university. He shouldn't be hitting on the students. Period.
I know there is a long history of professors banging co-eds, and sometimes that's fully consensual between adults, but even so, professors should not be playing cat and mouse intimacy with their peers let alone their students. This is a workplace matter, not a mating dance. If a woman does want to get busy with a professor, and is playing a coy game with him, who cares? It isn't unmanly for him to refuse to play the game, it's professional for him to refuse to become involved. Surely a professor should not be taking a page from the caveman manual on intergender relationships to justify his pursuit.
As a manager, I don't get to give my female employees massages, and I'd demur even if a particularly attractive one straight up asked me to. Why? Because the workplace is the wrong place for that and I have a substantial effect on her career if we were to get involved or if there was even the suggestion that we were involved. So why are professors supposed to be special? Do they have no professional ethics?
All that should be necessary is that there are witnesses to the behavior. The woman herself shouldn't even need to come forward if third parties can vouch for it.
I admit that there is a potential for issues when anonymous claims are made. There does need to be a way of dealing with that fairly and honestly. You should be allowed to face your accuser if accused of such a crime, but at the same time, there has to be understanding that the victims are in a difficult position.
Everyone needs to know how to operate a computer. That does not mean they need to know how to code.
That's like saying that literacy requires everyone to know how to write novels or encyclopedias.
The thing is? It seems easier to get normal computer literacy today for kids than it ever was for kids to become reading literate. Kids with devices these days figure this stuff out on their own.
We probably could use more coders, but not *everyone*. Just add more money for more seats for quality CS programs for kids who are motivated and interested. And maybe add some money to *introduce* kids to the idea of coding to see if they like it after exposure and more motivated kids join CS classes. But let's not make this a "requirement".
This is certainly the way politics work, although I have to admit even I was astounded on the backpedaling Obama has done in comparison to what his campaign rhetoric was.
Mind you, I knew it was all slick marketing to begin with, but even I thought he'd try to pretend to put up more of a fight.
If you want someone who pretends really hard to look like they will follow through on their promises, the Republicans seem the better bet. Too bad what they are pretending to care about is retarded half the time.
But there's gay marriage, so I guess it's all okay now.