I'm not sure what sort of paperwork it takes to apply for a greencard through the lottery system because my wife applied as, well, my wife. That stack of paperwork was about six inches high, and the fees eventually ammounted to just under three thousand dollars. That's not counting the fees for the attorney advising us, nor three trips to cities 400 and 150 miles away to be interviewed and fingerprinted twice. The initial outlay in effort and cash was rather big too, but I'm afraid I can't remember it, as I've done my best to block this giant pain in the butt from my memory. So, yep, if the initial application is anything like the initial application I filed, with it's big nonrefundable fees, then sure people who got selected to apply have every right to be mad for being yanked around emotionally AND having lots of time and money wasted.
I'll give a reason not to do all that scanning: Time. The OP is just asking about household bills and stuff. The first bill I get every month is my utility bill. When I open that envelope, I label it with month and year, and then all the other bills and receipts go into (big-ticket receipts go into a permanent file with the user's manuals; sometimes those get scanned). At the end of the month it goes into the back of the filing cabinet. At the end of the year, I shred the envelopes from two years before while I'm doing some other work at my desk. This process takes less time than scanning and only about six inches of space in the back of my filing cabinet. Sure I could scan them. But I don't generally need these. Maybe once a year do I have to dig around in the pile; Quicken puts me in the ball park, and then I riff through an envelope or two. I realized a long time ago that it's easy to fetishize computers and get into overkill, let the tool become an end rather than a means.
The sheetrock mite is a species of the well-documented stone louse genus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVKsbeayihI. I'm sorry I'm not able to provide an English translation.
"My stupid PE coach made me run around in circles three or four times a week and pick up and put down pointless heavy weights on a bench. I have never had to do any of these things in real life. These pointless 'exercises' did not have and have never had any connection to real life. I want my money back!"
It's too bad that this happened at Auburn, as it's often otherwise a negative example. It is, after all, the school where a prof. recently bowdlerized Huck Finn by editing out the word "nigger," a moved decried by people a sensitive to race issues as Ishmael Reed. Now that's "scholarship" you don't want to imitate. I could offer further reasons that no program wants to imitate Auburn, but saying too much would cause problems for friends.
For what it's worth to this discussion, a liberal arts master's is very easy to obtain. It's just two years of relatively simple work, no matter the field. IF anyone is willing to gamble on graduate study in the liberal arts, a master's is a relatively small risk in terms of time-to-degree (earning time lost) and tuition cost. The doctorate, which tends to take significantly longer than 5 years, is a much bigger gamble (7 is becoming typical). Frankly I think a large part of our problem is expanded access to graduate degrees. The market has become diluted. Factor in the decreasing demand because of changes in employment practices at universities, and the problem is even more depressing. Graduate students and nontenure faculty are teaching the courses that were once taught by tenure-line faculty. Humanities education is being treated like a business, as a growth industry, which in some respects it is, and as a place where personnel cost-cutting can take place, which it can, because it can "cannibalize" its future by treating young graduates as short-term, high-labor employees to be burned-out and discarded. The long-term impact of this is likely to be negative for the field in terms of pursuit of knowledge and possibly in terms of the value of the educations offered.
Dozens of applicants for professorships? I've applied for teaching/generalist English professorships in the last year for which there have been 500-800 applicants. No kidding. Those are extreme cases, but most searches, even in specialist areas, are netting at least 150 applications. I think that, right now, any humanities field is a bad bet. In my current department, we've lost about 4 tenure-track lines, and we're having a hard time gaining them back, and these are core areas: early modern British lit, composition, and ESL. It's worse for art history, especially given the teaching expectations. And then the people in German and other languages are seeing entire programs of study wiped out of existence. I don't want to play "who's more miserable?" because there's enough misery going around for everyone to get a share. But the humanities are really suffering for employment now because of the trend toward nontenured, lower-paying teaching roles and the fact that most programs don't have external funding. Whether that equates to more misery or not, I don't know. But it's tough, almost impossible, to get a job paying a living wage, and I don't advise pursuing graduate study in the humanities at this time.
I'm rankled by the stereotyping too. I'm skinny, over-educated, drive an economical car, bike to work when I can, etc. BUT there's a reason for the stereotype. As an aggregate, we are more obese, own more stupid crap, are more consumerist. We start more wars, etc.. That said, it's a bit ironic that such criticism comes from a British person, as that nation relinquished its own hegemonic, imperial role very reluctantly. U.S. atrocities like slavery and Native American "removal" can be set alongside attempts to exterminate the Irish, the mass transportations to Australia, the machine-gunning of Indians, etc.. Yes, but, yes but. I dunno. Certainly I think the U.S. suffers from exceptionalism, isolation, consumerism. So, yeah. That doesn't mean we're all that way, nor that some of us don't struggle against it. Myself, I get fed up with the obnoxious Britons I meet abroad who tax me with every "American" failing, demanding that I account for George H.W. Bush's policies, or Clinton's, or the general offensive "American" this that or the other. It seems to me that this in part is a paradoxically chauvinist presumption stemming from the fiction of a "special relationship" (what I like to think of as the "Blair on his knees puckering" policy). That is, the Brits like this (not all of them by any stretch) seem to presume that the U.S. is a sort of first cousin with a family obligation to account for its dark sheep behavior.
Anonymous Coward may want to look into the U.S. role in supporting the Taliban. I was reading about U.S. support of them back in the mid-90s, when they were just one, though a major, group of "freedom fighters" harassing the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Maybe. If I write a bunch of reviews and encyclopedia articles, I'm not going to get tenure. That's considered more bush league than Ivy League. Peer reviewed journals and book publications will always be the way to tenure. And that's right. Academics at research institutions shouldn't necessarily spend time on presenting information to the public. It's good that some do, certainly. But if you spend your time writing popular pieces, it's hard to spend time running your lab, doing research, writing books and articles, presenting at conferences, reading other researchers' work, training the next generation of professors and researchers, looking for new blood in the form of grad students and new faculty, writing grant proposals, charming donors, teaching classes, working on committees, trying to keep the college from raiding your department's money, and, as always, finding a parking spot. You know, all that piddly stuff.
Yep. That's why I stopped editing. I spent years studying a few figures in literature, reading in archives, talking to the actual people, reading every damn thing they ever wrote, and I write some text on Wikipedia. Then some bozo comes along and edits my work away. And, of course, all that wasted energy did absolutely nothing to advance my career. I know that everyone thinks we just sit around smoking pipes or something, but I'm busy as hell. And working on Wikipedia is basically charity work. Having your very hard-earned knowledge questioned or spurned by someone who actually might have a point is one thing. That happens all the time. But having it tossed by some knucklehead, again and again.... Why bother?
1) people who drive economy cars will be taxed the same as those driving V12 trucks, sports cars, and heavy luxury sedans. Not to mention minivans and SUVs, which also consume more fuel. 2) rural people will be paying more because they have to drive more. 3) Oil companies won't be suffering as much because there won't extra incentive to reduce consumption. 4) There won't be an increased incentive to build more fuel-efficient vehicles and public transit (again, good for oil). 5) There's little most will be able to do about it; you can lighten your lead foot, inflate the tires, even buy another vehicle more cheaply than you can buy a new home closer to where you work. 6) Even though the big, heavy vehicle puts more wear on the road and requires wider lanes, it will be taxed the same as the tiny tin box. Conclusion: Basically a flat tax for cars, and just as "fair" as a flat tax always is, disproportionately burdening those on the lower end of the income scale. I'll file this away in the same sad little corner as the proposal to eliminate federal food assistance for families of people on strike.
Ha! Are you surprised that you were helping turn the Big Orange Screw? Even today a certain university we know is abusing software licensing provisions, encouraging students to download versions of software that only have faculty licenses. It's not that they train staff to lie. They just don't tell faculty and staff they're doing anything wrong by encouraging students to download the stuff. That's enough when you have faculty who (no lie, and this guy's young enough to know better) think that hooking your laptop's vga port to the overhead is called PowerPoint....
I don't think it's just computer nerds/techs who suffer this. I used to be in the situation of being a nerd who could also fix cars and do household repairs. And I also owned a truck. It was a nightmare of people wanting free help, free transport..... And my girlfriend was a doctor; she and all of her doctor friends complained about never being off the clock. People really do expect diagnoses in the line at the coffee shop. And now I'm a former editor and current English prof. I've learned to never tell strangers what I do, or I'll end up with some knucklehead pitching a book to me in the line at the post office.
I do think that computer fixers have it hard in that most people seem to think that fixing a machine is a matter of instantly backing up the porn and/or pirated music to The Cloud and then pouring in a new box of magic dust. Of course, that said, most of the people pitching books to me or asking me to edit manuscripts--often telling me that we'll get rich together--have no clue about the work involved or the difficulty of actually getting something to press, not to mention how little money there is to be made. Everyone thinks they'll be the next J.K. Rolling-in-Money.
I don't want to be a snot, but I think part of the problem really is the narrowness of the audience. From my perspective, the only way the sentence "Watchmen is pretty heavy stuff both from a philosophical and situational perspective" makes sense if you precede it with "For a comic book..." or "AS a comic book...." Most of the reason Watchmen is interesting is because of what it has to say about comic books. As a critique of the Reagan era, the movie came too late. The Reagan-era was already at that point repeating itself as farce. Anyway, so, to my mind, you're have to be a certain age, and still interested in comic books. That's definitely me, and it's many people here. But it's not really my students--who uniformly didn't get it, or care about it, UNLESS they were some sort of comic bookstore nerd already. That last category was ready to watch it on some sort of meta- level, happy to think about in the terms of the nostalgia the film's opening invites. But it couldn't be effective solely on the terms of nostalgia, because it was insisting on thinking about nostalgia, unlike say Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, yet again, it was thinking in terms of the comic book medium. I think one reason V for Vendetta did better is because it plays--not just with Thatcherite England's fascist flirtations--but with the extremely familiar Orwell 1984 narrative, one so popular that even that the (somewhat dopey) famous Apple ad could trade on it.
To which of the standard libertarian views do you adhere? Wikipedia lists nine.... My point here and above is that claims about orthodoxy are a useful way to police an image but they are often deceptive, intentionally or unintentionally.
The people I just read above taking exception to the federal government using the commerce clause to prosecute this guy.... They're not libertarians then? Maybe they're liebertarians or libretarians or something else?
OK. That was a little snarky, but the assertion to which I'm responded is too funny. Liberal, right-winger, or what-have-you, people don't come out and openly say that they want to protect child molesters, or companies making exploding toothbrushes, or snaggled-toothed halfwits with epic gun collections. No, they come out in public to talk about big gubmint or mean rich people or the Consteatution. And they may not even hear the 60-cycle hum of the cognitive dissonance between their ears. (This includes everyone, including yours truly.)
So, of course, a libertarian isn't going to come out and say "What this country needs is more sketchy guys threatening a smackdown because you don't like the fraudulent crap they sold you." No, libertarians are more likely to come out plucking one of the well-worn 5 or 6 strings on their little lyre, just like the rest of us.
I live near Oak Ridge, and they had a problem about two years ago with radioactive duck droppings. The facilities from WW2 are sometimes poorly documented. So there were some unknown of pipes running under a small pond. Radioactive stuff leaked, plants grew from that soil, ducks ate it, and then waddled around the area doing what ducks do(o). It was moderately expensive to clean up. Though I think worth the cost in (grim) chuckles. The clean-up of the whole facility up there has been going on for some time, and will likely continue. I'm not all surprised to read about radioactive rabbit poo at Hanford. Lucky it's not pigeons....
I don't think your idea is such a bad one. I don't think it would every get implemented in the US. The main reason is how much it would cost. The next reason is that very few people actually care that much about education. Not only would the religious types howl, but many "average" people in the states are deeply suspicious of learning, especially when it is controlled by the state.
OO.o does have collaborative track changes: edit menu, changes, record. It visually marks the change and records the author of that change, just as in Word. It also allows you to insert editorial comments, just as in Word.
Anyone know the status of Medicare/insurance payments for those Wii balance boards or Wii fit or whatever that turned out to be as good as or better than the specialized medical thingummies that cost a mint? I haven't heard about that in some time....
Slashdot Mirror
Why would it matter where the user was born?
I'm not sure what sort of paperwork it takes to apply for a greencard through the lottery system because my wife applied as, well, my wife. That stack of paperwork was about six inches high, and the fees eventually ammounted to just under three thousand dollars. That's not counting the fees for the attorney advising us, nor three trips to cities 400 and 150 miles away to be interviewed and fingerprinted twice. The initial outlay in effort and cash was rather big too, but I'm afraid I can't remember it, as I've done my best to block this giant pain in the butt from my memory. So, yep, if the initial application is anything like the initial application I filed, with it's big nonrefundable fees, then sure people who got selected to apply have every right to be mad for being yanked around emotionally AND having lots of time and money wasted.
I'll give a reason not to do all that scanning: Time. The OP is just asking about household bills and stuff. The first bill I get every month is my utility bill. When I open that envelope, I label it with month and year, and then all the other bills and receipts go into (big-ticket receipts go into a permanent file with the user's manuals; sometimes those get scanned). At the end of the month it goes into the back of the filing cabinet. At the end of the year, I shred the envelopes from two years before while I'm doing some other work at my desk. This process takes less time than scanning and only about six inches of space in the back of my filing cabinet. Sure I could scan them. But I don't generally need these. Maybe once a year do I have to dig around in the pile; Quicken puts me in the ball park, and then I riff through an envelope or two. I realized a long time ago that it's easy to fetishize computers and get into overkill, let the tool become an end rather than a means.
Well, I worry that, like the B-2, the F-35 will be mission-incapable due to expense and maintenance requirements.
The sheetrock mite is a species of the well-documented stone louse genus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVKsbeayihI. I'm sorry I'm not able to provide an English translation.
"My stupid PE coach made me run around in circles three or four times a week and pick up and put down pointless heavy weights on a bench. I have never had to do any of these things in real life. These pointless 'exercises' did not have and have never had any connection to real life. I want my money back!"
Looks like I should have taken the time to read the article before posting....
It's too bad that this happened at Auburn, as it's often otherwise a negative example. It is, after all, the school where a prof. recently bowdlerized Huck Finn by editing out the word "nigger," a moved decried by people a sensitive to race issues as Ishmael Reed. Now that's "scholarship" you don't want to imitate. I could offer further reasons that no program wants to imitate Auburn, but saying too much would cause problems for friends.
For what it's worth to this discussion, a liberal arts master's is very easy to obtain. It's just two years of relatively simple work, no matter the field. IF anyone is willing to gamble on graduate study in the liberal arts, a master's is a relatively small risk in terms of time-to-degree (earning time lost) and tuition cost. The doctorate, which tends to take significantly longer than 5 years, is a much bigger gamble (7 is becoming typical). Frankly I think a large part of our problem is expanded access to graduate degrees. The market has become diluted. Factor in the decreasing demand because of changes in employment practices at universities, and the problem is even more depressing. Graduate students and nontenure faculty are teaching the courses that were once taught by tenure-line faculty. Humanities education is being treated like a business, as a growth industry, which in some respects it is, and as a place where personnel cost-cutting can take place, which it can, because it can "cannibalize" its future by treating young graduates as short-term, high-labor employees to be burned-out and discarded. The long-term impact of this is likely to be negative for the field in terms of pursuit of knowledge and possibly in terms of the value of the educations offered.
Dozens of applicants for professorships? I've applied for teaching/generalist English professorships in the last year for which there have been 500-800 applicants. No kidding. Those are extreme cases, but most searches, even in specialist areas, are netting at least 150 applications. I think that, right now, any humanities field is a bad bet. In my current department, we've lost about 4 tenure-track lines, and we're having a hard time gaining them back, and these are core areas: early modern British lit, composition, and ESL. It's worse for art history, especially given the teaching expectations. And then the people in German and other languages are seeing entire programs of study wiped out of existence. I don't want to play "who's more miserable?" because there's enough misery going around for everyone to get a share. But the humanities are really suffering for employment now because of the trend toward nontenured, lower-paying teaching roles and the fact that most programs don't have external funding. Whether that equates to more misery or not, I don't know. But it's tough, almost impossible, to get a job paying a living wage, and I don't advise pursuing graduate study in the humanities at this time.
I'm rankled by the stereotyping too. I'm skinny, over-educated, drive an economical car, bike to work when I can, etc. BUT there's a reason for the stereotype. As an aggregate, we are more obese, own more stupid crap, are more consumerist. We start more wars, etc.. That said, it's a bit ironic that such criticism comes from a British person, as that nation relinquished its own hegemonic, imperial role very reluctantly. U.S. atrocities like slavery and Native American "removal" can be set alongside attempts to exterminate the Irish, the mass transportations to Australia, the machine-gunning of Indians, etc.. Yes, but, yes but. I dunno. Certainly I think the U.S. suffers from exceptionalism, isolation, consumerism. So, yeah. That doesn't mean we're all that way, nor that some of us don't struggle against it. Myself, I get fed up with the obnoxious Britons I meet abroad who tax me with every "American" failing, demanding that I account for George H.W. Bush's policies, or Clinton's, or the general offensive "American" this that or the other. It seems to me that this in part is a paradoxically chauvinist presumption stemming from the fiction of a "special relationship" (what I like to think of as the "Blair on his knees puckering" policy). That is, the Brits like this (not all of them by any stretch) seem to presume that the U.S. is a sort of first cousin with a family obligation to account for its dark sheep behavior.
Anonymous Coward may want to look into the U.S. role in supporting the Taliban. I was reading about U.S. support of them back in the mid-90s, when they were just one, though a major, group of "freedom fighters" harassing the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Maybe. If I write a bunch of reviews and encyclopedia articles, I'm not going to get tenure. That's considered more bush league than Ivy League. Peer reviewed journals and book publications will always be the way to tenure. And that's right. Academics at research institutions shouldn't necessarily spend time on presenting information to the public. It's good that some do, certainly. But if you spend your time writing popular pieces, it's hard to spend time running your lab, doing research, writing books and articles, presenting at conferences, reading other researchers' work, training the next generation of professors and researchers, looking for new blood in the form of grad students and new faculty, writing grant proposals, charming donors, teaching classes, working on committees, trying to keep the college from raiding your department's money, and, as always, finding a parking spot. You know, all that piddly stuff.
Yep. That's why I stopped editing. I spent years studying a few figures in literature, reading in archives, talking to the actual people, reading every damn thing they ever wrote, and I write some text on Wikipedia. Then some bozo comes along and edits my work away. And, of course, all that wasted energy did absolutely nothing to advance my career. I know that everyone thinks we just sit around smoking pipes or something, but I'm busy as hell. And working on Wikipedia is basically charity work. Having your very hard-earned knowledge questioned or spurned by someone who actually might have a point is one thing. That happens all the time. But having it tossed by some knucklehead, again and again.... Why bother?
1) people who drive economy cars will be taxed the same as those driving V12 trucks, sports cars, and heavy luxury sedans. Not to mention minivans and SUVs, which also consume more fuel. 2) rural people will be paying more because they have to drive more. 3) Oil companies won't be suffering as much because there won't extra incentive to reduce consumption. 4) There won't be an increased incentive to build more fuel-efficient vehicles and public transit (again, good for oil). 5) There's little most will be able to do about it; you can lighten your lead foot, inflate the tires, even buy another vehicle more cheaply than you can buy a new home closer to where you work. 6) Even though the big, heavy vehicle puts more wear on the road and requires wider lanes, it will be taxed the same as the tiny tin box. Conclusion: Basically a flat tax for cars, and just as "fair" as a flat tax always is, disproportionately burdening those on the lower end of the income scale. I'll file this away in the same sad little corner as the proposal to eliminate federal food assistance for families of people on strike.
Ha! Are you surprised that you were helping turn the Big Orange Screw? Even today a certain university we know is abusing software licensing provisions, encouraging students to download versions of software that only have faculty licenses. It's not that they train staff to lie. They just don't tell faculty and staff they're doing anything wrong by encouraging students to download the stuff. That's enough when you have faculty who (no lie, and this guy's young enough to know better) think that hooking your laptop's vga port to the overhead is called PowerPoint....
I don't think it's just computer nerds/techs who suffer this. I used to be in the situation of being a nerd who could also fix cars and do household repairs. And I also owned a truck. It was a nightmare of people wanting free help, free transport..... And my girlfriend was a doctor; she and all of her doctor friends complained about never being off the clock. People really do expect diagnoses in the line at the coffee shop. And now I'm a former editor and current English prof. I've learned to never tell strangers what I do, or I'll end up with some knucklehead pitching a book to me in the line at the post office. I do think that computer fixers have it hard in that most people seem to think that fixing a machine is a matter of instantly backing up the porn and/or pirated music to The Cloud and then pouring in a new box of magic dust. Of course, that said, most of the people pitching books to me or asking me to edit manuscripts--often telling me that we'll get rich together--have no clue about the work involved or the difficulty of actually getting something to press, not to mention how little money there is to be made. Everyone thinks they'll be the next J.K. Rolling-in-Money.
I don't want to be a snot, but I think part of the problem really is the narrowness of the audience. From my perspective, the only way the sentence "Watchmen is pretty heavy stuff both from a philosophical and situational perspective" makes sense if you precede it with "For a comic book..." or "AS a comic book...." Most of the reason Watchmen is interesting is because of what it has to say about comic books. As a critique of the Reagan era, the movie came too late. The Reagan-era was already at that point repeating itself as farce. Anyway, so, to my mind, you're have to be a certain age, and still interested in comic books. That's definitely me, and it's many people here. But it's not really my students--who uniformly didn't get it, or care about it, UNLESS they were some sort of comic bookstore nerd already. That last category was ready to watch it on some sort of meta- level, happy to think about in the terms of the nostalgia the film's opening invites. But it couldn't be effective solely on the terms of nostalgia, because it was insisting on thinking about nostalgia, unlike say Raiders of the Lost Ark. However, yet again, it was thinking in terms of the comic book medium. I think one reason V for Vendetta did better is because it plays--not just with Thatcherite England's fascist flirtations--but with the extremely familiar Orwell 1984 narrative, one so popular that even that the (somewhat dopey) famous Apple ad could trade on it.
To which of the standard libertarian views do you adhere? Wikipedia lists nine.... My point here and above is that claims about orthodoxy are a useful way to police an image but they are often deceptive, intentionally or unintentionally.
The people I just read above taking exception to the federal government using the commerce clause to prosecute this guy.... They're not libertarians then? Maybe they're liebertarians or libretarians or something else? OK. That was a little snarky, but the assertion to which I'm responded is too funny. Liberal, right-winger, or what-have-you, people don't come out and openly say that they want to protect child molesters, or companies making exploding toothbrushes, or snaggled-toothed halfwits with epic gun collections. No, they come out in public to talk about big gubmint or mean rich people or the Consteatution. And they may not even hear the 60-cycle hum of the cognitive dissonance between their ears. (This includes everyone, including yours truly.) So, of course, a libertarian isn't going to come out and say "What this country needs is more sketchy guys threatening a smackdown because you don't like the fraudulent crap they sold you." No, libertarians are more likely to come out plucking one of the well-worn 5 or 6 strings on their little lyre, just like the rest of us.
OK. I have to find a copy of "Hot Frogs on the Loose." I'll be calling the campus radio station from my office tomorrow....
I live near Oak Ridge, and they had a problem about two years ago with radioactive duck droppings. The facilities from WW2 are sometimes poorly documented. So there were some unknown of pipes running under a small pond. Radioactive stuff leaked, plants grew from that soil, ducks ate it, and then waddled around the area doing what ducks do(o). It was moderately expensive to clean up. Though I think worth the cost in (grim) chuckles. The clean-up of the whole facility up there has been going on for some time, and will likely continue. I'm not all surprised to read about radioactive rabbit poo at Hanford. Lucky it's not pigeons....
I don't think your idea is such a bad one. I don't think it would every get implemented in the US. The main reason is how much it would cost. The next reason is that very few people actually care that much about education. Not only would the religious types howl, but many "average" people in the states are deeply suspicious of learning, especially when it is controlled by the state.
OO.o does have collaborative track changes: edit menu, changes, record. It visually marks the change and records the author of that change, just as in Word. It also allows you to insert editorial comments, just as in Word.
Anyone know the status of Medicare/insurance payments for those Wii balance boards or Wii fit or whatever that turned out to be as good as or better than the specialized medical thingummies that cost a mint? I haven't heard about that in some time....