This is in the Puget Sound. An engine breaking down just means that the coast guard has to come bail you out. And they're never far off. Sure, you might drift around, but you're not likely to drift very far as they'll get to you before you drift into the shipping lanes.
What's more, if you're out in a storm, it's because you were exercising poor judgement, it's hard to get so far out into the Sound that you're more than a half hour away from someplace you can lay anchor.
From the article, it sounds like he was being a condescending dick and nobody in their right mind argues with customs over something like that as it's the customs officer that would be making the determination as to whether or not you're being truthful. If you don't agree with the determination, then there are procedures in place, it's usually easier not to argue unless they're being unreasonable or violating the spirit of the law.
They're main concern is that you're being truthful with them, if the documentation has the correct price and you give that to the customs agent, they're not going to be confiscating the boat as you provided them with the appropriate information.
In this case, it was an error that she made, and I'm not sure I understand the line of reasoning for his refusal to sign the forms, when it was clear that he himself wasn't falsifying any information. He should have just signed off on it and taken the boat. They're not going to be able to confiscate it over that kind of a technicality when he provided accurate forms to back up the sales figures.
Canadian boats are unlikely to be any less expensive than American ones are. The Canadian Dollar and US Dollar have been at parity for several years now to within a cent or two. Any cost savings like that would likely be eaten up by the additional transportation costs.
By your reasoning the only way for the government to be OK is to not have any law enforcement or courts at all. Because there'd be no point in having them if they can't arrest or prosecute anybody.
Yes, plea-bargaining is a problem, but you make it sound like everybody is equally likely to be in that position, when the reality is that if you're not around criminals, it's unlikely that this will even come into play. Stay away from organized crime and the likelihood of ending up like that goes down drastically.
This is one case where somebody is abusing their power. In any system you're going to have a few bad apples that spoil the bunch.
I'm not suggesting that this is the only case where the DSHS abuses it's power, but claiming that one example means something is just plain silly. It's the collection of incidents where they fail to properly train and supervise their agents which is where you see a problem.
The problem is that the system has changed since the carbon was taken out of the system. Reintroducing it in such massive quantities over such a short period of time changes things too rapidly for species to adapt to.
Methane emissions are a very serious problem as well, but that has fuck all to do with power generation. You can use methane to produce power, but that's got nothing to do with being carbon neutral.
Coal isn't clean though. This would clean up the side of the equation where you're burning it. But, it would do absolutely nothing for the mining aspect of it. Which is a huge mess as it stands. If you want to burn things for energy, you're better off starting with something like trees which are mostly carbon neutral as it is.
Sure, it's technically clean if you ignore the incredible damage that it reeks on the landscape, but it's definitely not clean in a practical sense.
It is a complaint burning out so many teachers so quickly makes it hard for any of them to develop the experience to do a stellar job. Those first years of teaching is where a teacher has the most capability to adjust and change to be good.
Chasing them out of the profession by last in first out layoffs and lack of support isn't something which is desirable. Not to mention the constant training and retraining as district priorities change.
That's not the case in most parts of the US. In most states the median pay for teachers falls below the median pay in general. For people here in WA, it's about 78% of the median pay for the state.
What's more, that's all households, not just ones with advanced degrees either. The figures would be even worse if they excluded the households with just a diploma or less.
Most other fields aren't so heavily dependent upon a group of people for performance. If I were a doctor, each patient is individually somebody I would be working with. Each patient is independent of the other patients. So if most or all of the patients were getting better that would probably reflect on me. Same if they weren't.
With teaching, you have far less control, if the principal isn't backing you up, then you're going to have problems with discipline. The students often times don't care because they won't see the consequences of failure in any real way until later on. Sure, they might get an F, but that doesn't really mean anything to them until they need that knowledge and don't have it.
The argument isn't about whether or not performance pay is a valid way of motivating people, the argument is over how you can do that in a fair way. If I have really good students, hitting the marks is probably going to be relatively easy, but if I'm dealing with inner city, childrend of drug abusing parents, there could well be nothing that I could do in order to get them to improve themselves.
Or, to put it another way, a teacher in HS will get about 5 hours a week with a class, students will be doing other things for 163 hours a week, you do the math. If those students aren't taking things seriously, there's very little that the teacher can do about outside distractions. But, merit pay would punish teachers the same whether there's a hostile homelife or not.
The only problem with most 16:9 and 16:10 monitors is that typical OSes don't handle them very well. This is less of a problem with laptops than with large monitors. I have a 24" and a 22" monitor and because of the way the OS handles things, it means that I have to work around the fact that the browser and all the rest of the software assumes that I want to use the full width of the monitor. Which, I don't, the range within which vision is sharp is about half the width of the monitors.
This is one advantage of *NIX, it's relatively straight forward to solve the problem through the xorg.conf.
If you filter out the MS astroturfers, a netbook is a low cost, minimalist computer with low specs that's mostly useful for the net.
MS had a cow when Asus had success with the Eee PC line and started to apply pressure to release Windows netbooks. At which point, the whole definition was pretty much broken as the specs had to be just about doubled to make that work with XP and the cost went above what normal people would pay.
As for your definition, that would include UMPCs as well, which is sort of a problem.
Indeed, I used to work security at a loading dock for a high rise, and you'd be surprised how many courier services there are out there that do just that. Mostly small batches of mail on demand moving them between a small number of addresses. They can't legally use the mailboxes, but it's a moot point.
USPS does generally do a much better job with packages than with mail in my experience. But, that's highly dependent upon whose route you're on and how closely the postmaster general is watching.
I always have to laugh at the assertion that the US should go metric. Apart from scientific measurements, the metric system provides far less benefit than most people suggest.
I've lived in the US and China and honestly, it makes very little practical difference whether you use imperial measures or metric ones in day to day life. You don't generally translate a km into m and you don't generally translate mi into ft. In fact, I can't recall the last time I did that which wasn't a contrived exercise to make the metric system look good. If you've got a distance of miles, it's unlikely that you need the precision that can be had from using feet. Likewise, if you're giving feet, it's unlikely that changing that into miles is going to be very helpful. And on the rare occasions where you need to, you can use a calculator.
Which is moot as you generally don't really care about how far things are in terms of distance, you're generally more interested in how far things are in terms of time, and converting mph to hours and kmph to hours is a wash, neither is better than the other one is.
With temperature, you have a sense of the temperature when you're comfortable and you compare it with the current temperature. The end points make very little difference in terms of ease of use.
When all is said and done, apart from contrived examples that one never encounters in the real world, the metric system has no benefit for normal everyday life. There, I said it. And certainly not enough to justify throwing out an entire country's infrastructure or replace it.
That's not actually true. The USPS has always been at a disadvantage versus private enterprise. They're legally required to send a 1st class envelope anywhere in the country for the same price, regardless of actual cost to provide the service.
Checkbook? You mean something that's small and likely to not be on the premises as all?
Stripping an entire apartment of all the electronics is something that requires a fair amount of skill to do, without being caught in the act. Five TVs, 3 laptops and the like aren't something you can just put under your coat and walk out with like jewelery.
This wasn't a smash and grab if they got this much stuff. Five TVs alone would be too much for a smash and grab to get. The really good guys, know where people typically store jewelery and valuable items and would likely have stuck with just a few high value, easily fenced items.
If their arms weren't too full for the desktop, it's a fairly good bet that they knew what they were doing.
You mean the folks that oppose even reasonable things like background checks and waiting periods on gun purchases? And hand wave away any effort to introduce reasonable limitation on magazine size?
Actually, computers are a lot more valuable to criminals than to people on Craig's list. I'm guessing that if they stole the computer, they were probably hoping to get ID information and log ins off the HDD and didn't have time to disassemble the computer to just get at that.
Still, I'm a bit surprised that they would risk that given that they already took laptops.
To be fair, I'm American and I use the word burgled as buglarized is such a hideous word. I have no idea how long it's going to take to convert the rest of the country though.
And if teachers were paid a rate of pay commensurate with the level of education, continuing training and time spent working, it would probably be easier to retain them. Not to mention the lack of proper support staff.
Anybody taking a teaching job in the US for an entitled life long career is making a serious mistake. Teacher burn out is such that nearly half the teachers leave the profession in the first 5 years.
Slashdot Mirror
This is in the Puget Sound. An engine breaking down just means that the coast guard has to come bail you out. And they're never far off. Sure, you might drift around, but you're not likely to drift very far as they'll get to you before you drift into the shipping lanes.
What's more, if you're out in a storm, it's because you were exercising poor judgement, it's hard to get so far out into the Sound that you're more than a half hour away from someplace you can lay anchor.
From the article, it sounds like he was being a condescending dick and nobody in their right mind argues with customs over something like that as it's the customs officer that would be making the determination as to whether or not you're being truthful. If you don't agree with the determination, then there are procedures in place, it's usually easier not to argue unless they're being unreasonable or violating the spirit of the law.
They're main concern is that you're being truthful with them, if the documentation has the correct price and you give that to the customs agent, they're not going to be confiscating the boat as you provided them with the appropriate information.
In this case, it was an error that she made, and I'm not sure I understand the line of reasoning for his refusal to sign the forms, when it was clear that he himself wasn't falsifying any information. He should have just signed off on it and taken the boat. They're not going to be able to confiscate it over that kind of a technicality when he provided accurate forms to back up the sales figures.
Canadian boats are unlikely to be any less expensive than American ones are. The Canadian Dollar and US Dollar have been at parity for several years now to within a cent or two. Any cost savings like that would likely be eaten up by the additional transportation costs.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit.
By your reasoning the only way for the government to be OK is to not have any law enforcement or courts at all. Because there'd be no point in having them if they can't arrest or prosecute anybody.
Yes, plea-bargaining is a problem, but you make it sound like everybody is equally likely to be in that position, when the reality is that if you're not around criminals, it's unlikely that this will even come into play. Stay away from organized crime and the likelihood of ending up like that goes down drastically.
This is one case where somebody is abusing their power. In any system you're going to have a few bad apples that spoil the bunch.
I'm not suggesting that this is the only case where the DSHS abuses it's power, but claiming that one example means something is just plain silly. It's the collection of incidents where they fail to properly train and supervise their agents which is where you see a problem.
The RIAA is run by the music industry. Of course they're only representing the views of music industry experts.
The problem is that the system has changed since the carbon was taken out of the system. Reintroducing it in such massive quantities over such a short period of time changes things too rapidly for species to adapt to.
Methane emissions are a very serious problem as well, but that has fuck all to do with power generation. You can use methane to produce power, but that's got nothing to do with being carbon neutral.
Coal isn't clean though. This would clean up the side of the equation where you're burning it. But, it would do absolutely nothing for the mining aspect of it. Which is a huge mess as it stands. If you want to burn things for energy, you're better off starting with something like trees which are mostly carbon neutral as it is.
Sure, it's technically clean if you ignore the incredible damage that it reeks on the landscape, but it's definitely not clean in a practical sense.
It is a complaint burning out so many teachers so quickly makes it hard for any of them to develop the experience to do a stellar job. Those first years of teaching is where a teacher has the most capability to adjust and change to be good.
Chasing them out of the profession by last in first out layoffs and lack of support isn't something which is desirable. Not to mention the constant training and retraining as district priorities change.
That's not the case in most parts of the US. In most states the median pay for teachers falls below the median pay in general. For people here in WA, it's about 78% of the median pay for the state.
http://www.freeby50.com/2010/07/teacher-pay-vs-median-incomes-by-state.html
What's more, that's all households, not just ones with advanced degrees either. The figures would be even worse if they excluded the households with just a diploma or less.
Most other fields aren't so heavily dependent upon a group of people for performance. If I were a doctor, each patient is individually somebody I would be working with. Each patient is independent of the other patients. So if most or all of the patients were getting better that would probably reflect on me. Same if they weren't.
With teaching, you have far less control, if the principal isn't backing you up, then you're going to have problems with discipline. The students often times don't care because they won't see the consequences of failure in any real way until later on. Sure, they might get an F, but that doesn't really mean anything to them until they need that knowledge and don't have it.
The argument isn't about whether or not performance pay is a valid way of motivating people, the argument is over how you can do that in a fair way. If I have really good students, hitting the marks is probably going to be relatively easy, but if I'm dealing with inner city, childrend of drug abusing parents, there could well be nothing that I could do in order to get them to improve themselves.
Or, to put it another way, a teacher in HS will get about 5 hours a week with a class, students will be doing other things for 163 hours a week, you do the math. If those students aren't taking things seriously, there's very little that the teacher can do about outside distractions. But, merit pay would punish teachers the same whether there's a hostile homelife or not.
The only problem with most 16:9 and 16:10 monitors is that typical OSes don't handle them very well. This is less of a problem with laptops than with large monitors. I have a 24" and a 22" monitor and because of the way the OS handles things, it means that I have to work around the fact that the browser and all the rest of the software assumes that I want to use the full width of the monitor. Which, I don't, the range within which vision is sharp is about half the width of the monitors.
This is one advantage of *NIX, it's relatively straight forward to solve the problem through the xorg.conf.
If you filter out the MS astroturfers, a netbook is a low cost, minimalist computer with low specs that's mostly useful for the net.
MS had a cow when Asus had success with the Eee PC line and started to apply pressure to release Windows netbooks. At which point, the whole definition was pretty much broken as the specs had to be just about doubled to make that work with XP and the cost went above what normal people would pay.
As for your definition, that would include UMPCs as well, which is sort of a problem.
Indeed, I used to work security at a loading dock for a high rise, and you'd be surprised how many courier services there are out there that do just that. Mostly small batches of mail on demand moving them between a small number of addresses. They can't legally use the mailboxes, but it's a moot point.
USPS does generally do a much better job with packages than with mail in my experience. But, that's highly dependent upon whose route you're on and how closely the postmaster general is watching.
I always have to laugh at the assertion that the US should go metric. Apart from scientific measurements, the metric system provides far less benefit than most people suggest.
I've lived in the US and China and honestly, it makes very little practical difference whether you use imperial measures or metric ones in day to day life. You don't generally translate a km into m and you don't generally translate mi into ft. In fact, I can't recall the last time I did that which wasn't a contrived exercise to make the metric system look good. If you've got a distance of miles, it's unlikely that you need the precision that can be had from using feet. Likewise, if you're giving feet, it's unlikely that changing that into miles is going to be very helpful. And on the rare occasions where you need to, you can use a calculator.
Which is moot as you generally don't really care about how far things are in terms of distance, you're generally more interested in how far things are in terms of time, and converting mph to hours and kmph to hours is a wash, neither is better than the other one is.
With temperature, you have a sense of the temperature when you're comfortable and you compare it with the current temperature. The end points make very little difference in terms of ease of use.
When all is said and done, apart from contrived examples that one never encounters in the real world, the metric system has no benefit for normal everyday life. There, I said it. And certainly not enough to justify throwing out an entire country's infrastructure or replace it.
That's not actually true. The USPS has always been at a disadvantage versus private enterprise. They're legally required to send a 1st class envelope anywhere in the country for the same price, regardless of actual cost to provide the service.
Checkbook? You mean something that's small and likely to not be on the premises as all?
Stripping an entire apartment of all the electronics is something that requires a fair amount of skill to do, without being caught in the act. Five TVs, 3 laptops and the like aren't something you can just put under your coat and walk out with like jewelery.
This wasn't a smash and grab if they got this much stuff. Five TVs alone would be too much for a smash and grab to get. The really good guys, know where people typically store jewelery and valuable items and would likely have stuck with just a few high value, easily fenced items.
If their arms weren't too full for the desktop, it's a fairly good bet that they knew what they were doing.
He's planning to buy a gun and test the SYG defense.
Or, perhaps commit insurance fraud, who knows.
You mean the folks that oppose even reasonable things like background checks and waiting periods on gun purchases? And hand wave away any effort to introduce reasonable limitation on magazine size?
Actually, computers are a lot more valuable to criminals than to people on Craig's list. I'm guessing that if they stole the computer, they were probably hoping to get ID information and log ins off the HDD and didn't have time to disassemble the computer to just get at that.
Still, I'm a bit surprised that they would risk that given that they already took laptops.
To be fair, I'm American and I use the word burgled as buglarized is such a hideous word. I have no idea how long it's going to take to convert the rest of the country though.
That's true, and that's why I continue to vote against GOP candidates and policies.
And if teachers were paid a rate of pay commensurate with the level of education, continuing training and time spent working, it would probably be easier to retain them. Not to mention the lack of proper support staff.
Anybody taking a teaching job in the US for an entitled life long career is making a serious mistake. Teacher burn out is such that nearly half the teachers leave the profession in the first 5 years.
Not true, if you get a union security job around here you don't need a degree and you get paid probably $13 an hour.
But yes, that's what happens when you cut funds for higher education and ship all the good paying jobs overseas and bust the unions.