This "Institute for Creation Research" is a funny looking 'academic' institute from a look over its website.
The link "Departments" has sections like "Online Store" "Press" and "About ICR". Very odd. My university has 'departments' like "Faculty of Arts" "Business School" and "Department of Maths and Computing".
I wonder what type of courses they teach in their listed 'departments'? This is not the kind of academic institution I am familiar with...
.. and for the majority of us who've led active lives, lived in cities, gone to rock concerts, walked past building sites on the way to work, been too close to screaming babies... well by the time we're 25 our hearing is that damaged that there's no point spending that much money anyway on cans.
Really, where and how do these audiophiles live? are they all wrapped in cotton wool from the day they are born and hide away in country retreats? Because I would have thought the general noise levels most of us are subjected to damage our hearing to the degree that it's really not worth spending too much money on headphones beyond finding ones that are comfortable. I am 42 and the vast majority of people my age or younger have grown up as a teenager with some sort of personal sound system and cheap headphones stuffed into their ears at too high a volume for several years. iPods have moved that demographic much wider as well now.
Anybody give me some stats on amount of average hearing loss past 20 or so? My suspicion is that the vast majority of high end headphones put out an extended range audio frequencies that can't be entirely heard by the majority of their purchasers.
Perhaps the people in other fields are being polite and showing interest in what you've done, as well as a degree of being impressed by you teaching yourself to program. Well done, keep learning, keep going for it, but also remember to listen and learn from others as well.
Clearly it's made you feel good that people have told you you're doing well. Perhaps also learn these social skills to help you in situations you'll find yourself in at university and beyond - consider how to find the positive in your peers rather than referring to them as "fucking retarded". Try to see things from their perspective, they may have some valuable insights to offer you.
I am prepared to believe that LaTeX is better than Word, or anything else on the planet. But I think an important issue here is not what the poster thinks is best, but what his community thinks is best.
The very fact that the question is being asked suggests the poster is a junior member of their community. Which means that they'll need to fit in with the senior members of the community or not get accepted and invited to join in collaborations.
So they need to bear in mind what the current preference is amongst the senior professors etc and fit in with them. Maybe if they've got the time and energy they can embark on persuading their professors to dedicate time and energy to changing to LaTeX but they got to be pragmatic. As a PhD student I can tell you that you're grateful enough sometimes that you can get time from your busy supervisors to have them read your document drafts in their favoured formats.
The thought of handing in a draft to a senior academic in a format they can't use and saying "I'd like you to read and contribute to this and by the way learn to use a better software package, stupid!" doesn't bear thinking about...:-)
Ask around your colleagues and more senior peers (lecturers, supervisors, professors). See what they use for their collaborative work.
If you're looking for a longer term academic career, check out what conferences and journals in your fields ask for.
When I started my PhD I asked around and found out that the students in disciplines that used a lot of mathematical notations, formulae, equations etc prefered LaTeX, but everybody else (the majority) used Microsoft Word. That's still true. People do their 70,000 word theses in Word, submit jointly co-authored papers in Word.
Use what your community uses, these are the people you will be handing in work to, sending drafts for comments, writing shared reports. No point upsetting them by sending them a document in a format they are not used to dealing with.
Out of interest, when's the last time anybody undertook "a serious assault" on bases up the road from you? (is this mainland USA, European country, Iraq...?).
"3 strikes and you're out" - isn't this the kind of cowboy movie world that George W Bush lived in and now we're thankfully past? Up there with trying to explain world geopolitics in terms of "good guys and bad guys" and "you're either with us or against us".
Surely we can have a more nuanced response to legal / political situations now you've got somebody with a brain running the USA?
Incidently, where does "3 strikes and you're out" come from? is it a baseball term? Sorry, not familiar with baseball over here in the UK. The only people carrying baseball bats here are folks who are up to no good and their bats probably have never made contact with a baseball, only other people's knees or heads...
Depends on the price of gas? Here in the UK we pay approx 0.90 GBP for a litre, = 0.90 x 1.42 (Pounds to Dollars) x 3.785 (Litres to US gallons) = 4.84 US dollars a gallon.
This is much less than a few months ago when gas here reached close to 1.20 GBP a litre and with the pound being stronger at that time it was over 8 dollars a US gallon.
Would you consider a gas/electric hybrid if gas was 8 dollars a gallon in the USA?
"At 18 you should be old enough to decide whether to go to class or not"
But if you say you'll turn up and don't it's the teachers that the newspapers scream about rather than the slacker teenagers who got wasted the night before and don't turn up.
I don't know what they pay teachers but whatever it is, it's not enough.
"Simplicity and intuitiveness for the end user (both newbie and expert)"
Maybe this will be won by the most blinged-up interface but there's hope here that the competition organisers get some well thought out entries which help guide the users through the configuration of their routers.
Some installs are jargon heavy and just assume you know what all the options mean, little to no explanation or help. I've spent many hours sweating over some WRT GUIs that have (to me as a relative beginner) had meaningless options. I really really want to use these excellent installs but I get really put off by zero-to-poor documentation or explanations of what all the options are.
A simple interface with excellent documentation and guidance would be worth the prize.
"most of the world uses metric measures, whereas in the US (and elsewhere?), feet, inches, quarts, and pounds persist. "
USA, Burma, and Liberia are the three countires that use Imperial measures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units">A few other countries use Imperial measures alongside metric but officially, pretty well everywhere uses metric. Certainly if you were sending a contractor the specification for a job in all the countries apart from USA/Burma/Liberia you'd be doing so in metric.
"(Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could save more than $300 million a year by shutting down its presses and buying every subscriber a Kindle)."
Third world labourers wage bills significantly lower than those in developed countries: your company will save money by closing down local presses and giving people output from developing countries.
More news on this channel shortly, don't look away!
"then just about every network administrator in the world could be charged with the same "crime" "
Somebody want to tell Mr. Venezia that US law doesn't cover the whole world? Maybe he should get a passport and travel a bit, or at least read wikipedia and discover there are other countries out there beyond the US borders that have their own jurisdictions.
Heck even Bush occasionally admitted the USA couldn't just invade everywhere.
Folk who get caned on dope do drive. I've been to a fair few parties where people have been smoking then drive home, on roads where you'll be driving between 30 to 60mph.
Problem with driving stoned is it's like driving drunk - your reaction times will be badly impaired. Like booze, there's not so much a problem with people who are completely out of their head at a party -they aren't going anywhere but to sleep in the corner of the room - it's the folk who've only had a couple and think they are fine enough to drive.
Don't drive if you've been smoking dope. I don't give a toss if you smash yourself up but don't kill or maim passengers or other innocent people on the road.
A few years ago (2002) I was cycling home in Hackney, East London, when a group of teenagers dragged me off my bike, kicked me in and stole my bike. Luckily a woman in a flat opposite heard the noise and called the police. Also I managed to get to my feet and flag down a passing biker who helped me chase down the kids and get my bike back.
Met. police investigated the case and told me they couldn't use the CCTV footage- the event was all captured on CCTV - as the quality was too low to be of any use.
Great bloody use of my council tax that was, putting in all those CCTV cameras if they don't actually work well enough to do what they are supposed to do.
So even beyond all the ethical discussions of whether CCTV cameras should be around to film people, and if it's a worthwhile use of public money, they don't even work!
4 years living in a 1729 vicarage in the middle of the UK, rented, Grade 2* listed. One netgear ADSL/wifi box covered the house just fine, bounced its signals 'through' the 2 foot thick solid stone walls to different rooms, and for people who really wanted a cable, we just ran ethernet cable discretely round the edges of the hall, up the stair and into people's rooms. Lift the carpets gently and run the cable underneath and along the skirting boards.
Not sure what listing status your parents' house is, I don't know about what's covered under Grade 1, but I'm pretty sure you are allowed to run cables under the carpet and tack them to the walls, get some sympathetic ducting etc. Grade 2 says exterior only has to be cleared for planning permission. You can drill holes through interior walls without needing clearance as long as you follow common sense and general building regs (which are there to stop you killing yourself, in practice nobody's going to haul you up as long as you aren't incredibly stupid and try to run electricity near water, etc).
If you can't put cable down - and I am guessing this might be to do more with your mum and dad having beautiful interior period decor and not wanting anything post 1850 around the place rather than building regs (they've got electric cables right? so they've cleared permission previously to drill holes) - then get wifi in, maybe use something like dd-wrt or openwrt and link together a couple of boxes to hop around the rooms.
My guess your issue is more to do with it being your parents house and what they will or won't allow than government regulations;-)
interesting - do you guys over the pond use tons for big numbers or do you stick to pounds all the way up? Curious about the expression "123,000 pounds" - isn't that something like 100 tons or so? (he says plucking a figure out the air and being lazy;-) )
Here we'd say kg for small numbers, but once we'd got to a thousand we'd shift to (metric) tons, e.g. "over 123 tons" not "over 123,000 kg". Or is that domain specific? do some things get measured in pounds all the way up, but others you shift into talking about tons? What do you measure aircraft carriers etc in? millions of pounds?
Great news though on the main topic, it will keep some university researchers happily employed for a good while!
I work as a technology and education researcher in a UK university. We work alongside local schools. When we go in to work with the teachers, and the school students (aged 11-18), it's considered polite to dress appropriately. This means smart shirt, sometimes jacket and good trousers. Occasionally we go to funding meetings, it's considered polite to dress up for these as well - open necked suit and occasionally a tie as well. More formal dress is also considered polite if we're doing presentations to VIPs the university wants to show round.
Agreed that where things made doesn't reflect their quality. However my original posting was noting that people often choose "good enough" over "high quality" and are not always bothered about the conditions in which the things are made. This article, after all, is about the concern some people have over the working conditions in Chinese factories producing keyboards. Similarly the clothing industry is often under scrutiny for tolerating poor working conditions in its factories in developing countries. Your postings suggest that you don't give too much thought about the conditions in which your jeans and tshirts are made. It's worth looking into.
Name brands - not for me buddy, never really been a big thing (apart from being fond of the 42 year old Singer Gazelle;-) ) - got a garage full of my grandfather's and great grandfather's tools to show that. Proper, well made, hand tools. Totally agree with you, buy quality whenever you can. Alas a lot of people are happy to buy throw away stuff. I think we're in agreement on most points, I think you just didn't pick up that I was pulling out some high end goods rather than day to day examples of quality.
The stuff I actually buy is more like choosing De Walt/ Makita or equivalent quality power tools over the discount brands, fair trade cotton tshirts rather than Tescos/Wal-Mart cheap packs of dubious origin, solid wood furniture over particle board/plastic veneer wherever possible. But this is where I understand folk have to compromise. I've just been recommended a company for solid oak kitchen work surfaces, they cost something like £300 instead of the Ikea particle board version for £45.
I think we should aim to try to buy as high quality as we can afford and also accept paying some level of premium to ensure better working conditions for the people in the manufacturing process.
My point was that quality costs so I picked some lovely over the top examples. Also I was emphasising purchasing local. Quality costs, and I agree with you, most people don't give a damn about quality or ethics and buy cheap.
Aston Martin - used to produce their cars 5 miles from where I live, now a bit further away at Gaydon (50 miles or so?). Very nice cars. Actually I have a 42 year old Singer Gazelle which runs very nicely.
Suits - I work in a university so normally relaxed dress but sometimes I have to wear a suit for meetings. You don't get much respect from some people for turning up in a geek tshirt. I agree it's the person inside that matters but you can't fight the world on this one every day and get business done. It comes with the territory.
I find it ironic given the title of this whole thread that you suggest "t-shirts are cheap" as a solution - doh! where do you think the tshirts and jeans are made and under what working conditions?
I agree with you, buy quality whenever you can. But sometimes people can't afford quality and are in a position to only buy cheaper goods to get by with.
The big problem though is that people are seduced by "good enough" that is produced in poor work conditions and would rather pay 50 dollars for "good enough" than 500 dollars for quality/fair trade / supporting local businesses. That's how the supermarkets make their money.
I'd like to go with quality every time but I don't have the money to buy a locally built Aston Martin car, have solid oak hand crafted furniture at home and wear Saville Row hand made suits.
Sorry, I forgot the tag, I hoped the last sentence of my post might indicate I wasn't posting entirely seriously and not bothering trying to build an entirely watertight argument...
Paranoid folks in Russia on the other hand might argue that the US satellite, having power, was directed into the Russian satellite to prove that the USA has the capacity to take out Russian military satellites as and when it wishes, and that it chose to do so in a less confrontational way by taking out a no longer functional satellite. Using a functional commercial satellite clearly shows that the US government and can turn any US company assets to its use so Russia better beware, the US power is greater than it seems.
If you're paranoid you can argue anything to fit into your world view:-)
"What's depressing about the Tories winning the next election?"
I was a teenager then in the job market in the last big depression in the 1980s, was in Newcastle Upon Tyne at the time. I saw what the Tory attitude towards people was then (Thatcher: "there is no such thing a society" Norman Tebbit: people who don't have jobs are lazy and if they just got on their bike they'd get one ) - and I don't see much change in their attitudes now. The Tories decimated the industrial parts of the UK in the 80s while their mates made 'loadsamoney' and I don't see that anything different will happen this time round. If you're out of a job, sod you, you're lazy and we don't care about you. On the bright side there's a second golden age of squatting empty houses and a vibrant music scene (lots of unemployed young people ) ahead.
"Do you really want another five years of Labour?" .
Between a devil and a hard place on this one really, agreed they've made a bit of a hash of it. But at least they pay lip service to believing in society (which alas is rather at odds at their "we can-out Tory the Tories at setting up an authoritarian state" approach to 'security'). The Tories are a least honest about being a bunch of public school educated rich people who think the rest of us are the lower classes and should be treated as such.
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This "Institute for Creation Research" is a funny looking 'academic' institute from a look over its website.
The link "Departments" has sections like "Online Store" "Press" and "About ICR". Very odd. My university has 'departments' like "Faculty of Arts" "Business School" and "Department of Maths and Computing".
I wonder what type of courses they teach in their listed 'departments'? This is not the kind of academic institution I am familiar with...
.. and for the majority of us who've led active lives, lived in cities, gone to rock concerts, walked past building sites on the way to work, been too close to screaming babies... well by the time we're 25 our hearing is that damaged that there's no point spending that much money anyway on cans.
Really, where and how do these audiophiles live? are they all wrapped in cotton wool from the day they are born and hide away in country retreats? Because I would have thought the general noise levels most of us are subjected to damage our hearing to the degree that it's really not worth spending too much money on headphones beyond finding ones that are comfortable. I am 42 and the vast majority of people my age or younger have grown up as a teenager with some sort of personal sound system and cheap headphones stuffed into their ears at too high a volume for several years. iPods have moved that demographic much wider as well now.
Anybody give me some stats on amount of average hearing loss past 20 or so? My suspicion is that the vast majority of high end headphones put out an extended range audio frequencies that can't be entirely heard by the majority of their purchasers.
Perhaps the people in other fields are being polite and showing interest in what you've done, as well as a degree of being impressed by you teaching yourself to program. Well done, keep learning, keep going for it, but also remember to listen and learn from others as well.
Clearly it's made you feel good that people have told you you're doing well. Perhaps also learn these social skills to help you in situations you'll find yourself in at university and beyond - consider how to find the positive in your peers rather than referring to them as "fucking retarded". Try to see things from their perspective, they may have some valuable insights to offer you.
I am prepared to believe that LaTeX is better than Word, or anything else on the planet. But I think an important issue here is not what the poster thinks is best, but what his community thinks is best.
The very fact that the question is being asked suggests the poster is a junior member of their community. Which means that they'll need to fit in with the senior members of the community or not get accepted and invited to join in collaborations.
So they need to bear in mind what the current preference is amongst the senior professors etc and fit in with them. Maybe if they've got the time and energy they can embark on persuading their professors to dedicate time and energy to changing to LaTeX but they got to be pragmatic. As a PhD student I can tell you that you're grateful enough sometimes that you can get time from your busy supervisors to have them read your document drafts in their favoured formats.
The thought of handing in a draft to a senior academic in a format they can't use and saying "I'd like you to read and contribute to this and by the way learn to use a better software package, stupid!" doesn't bear thinking about... :-)
Ask around your colleagues and more senior peers (lecturers, supervisors, professors). See what they use for their collaborative work.
If you're looking for a longer term academic career, check out what conferences and journals in your fields ask for.
When I started my PhD I asked around and found out that the students in disciplines that used a lot of mathematical notations, formulae, equations etc prefered LaTeX, but everybody else (the majority) used Microsoft Word. That's still true. People do their 70,000 word theses in Word, submit jointly co-authored papers in Word.
Use what your community uses, these are the people you will be handing in work to, sending drafts for comments, writing shared reports. No point upsetting them by sending them a document in a format they are not used to dealing with.
Out of interest, when's the last time anybody undertook "a serious assault" on bases up the road from you? (is this mainland USA, European country, Iraq...?).
"3 strikes and you're out" - isn't this the kind of cowboy movie world that George W Bush lived in and now we're thankfully past? Up there with trying to explain world geopolitics in terms of "good guys and bad guys" and "you're either with us or against us".
Surely we can have a more nuanced response to legal / political situations now you've got somebody with a brain running the USA?
Incidently, where does "3 strikes and you're out" come from? is it a baseball term? Sorry, not familiar with baseball over here in the UK. The only people carrying baseball bats here are folks who are up to no good and their bats probably have never made contact with a baseball, only other people's knees or heads...
"...cost(s) too much for the gas savings"
Depends on the price of gas? Here in the UK we pay approx 0.90 GBP for a litre, = 0.90 x 1.42 (Pounds to Dollars) x 3.785 (Litres to US gallons) = 4.84 US dollars a gallon.
This is much less than a few months ago when gas here reached close to 1.20 GBP a litre and with the pound being stronger at that time it was over 8 dollars a US gallon.
Would you consider a gas/electric hybrid if gas was 8 dollars a gallon in the USA?
"At 18 you should be old enough to decide whether to go to class or not"
But if you say you'll turn up and don't it's the teachers that the newspapers scream about rather than the slacker teenagers who got wasted the night before and don't turn up.
I don't know what they pay teachers but whatever it is, it's not enough.
"Simplicity and intuitiveness for the end user (both newbie and expert)"
Maybe this will be won by the most blinged-up interface but there's hope here that the competition organisers get some well thought out entries which help guide the users through the configuration of their routers.
Some installs are jargon heavy and just assume you know what all the options mean, little to no explanation or help. I've spent many hours sweating over some WRT GUIs that have (to me as a relative beginner) had meaningless options. I really really want to use these excellent installs but I get really put off by zero-to-poor documentation or explanations of what all the options are.
A simple interface with excellent documentation and guidance would be worth the prize.
"most of the world uses metric measures, whereas in the US (and elsewhere?), feet, inches, quarts, and pounds persist. "
USA, Burma, and Liberia are the three countires that use Imperial measures. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units">A few other countries use Imperial measures alongside metric but officially, pretty well everywhere uses metric. Certainly if you were sending a contractor the specification for a job in all the countries apart from USA/Burma/Liberia you'd be doing so in metric.
"(Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could save more than $300 million a year by shutting down its presses and buying every subscriber a Kindle)."
Third world labourers wage bills significantly lower than those in developed countries: your company will save money by closing down local presses and giving people output from developing countries.
More news on this channel shortly, don't look away!
"then just about every network administrator in the world could be charged with the same "crime" "
Somebody want to tell Mr. Venezia that US law doesn't cover the whole world? Maybe he should get a passport and travel a bit, or at least read wikipedia and discover there are other countries out there beyond the US borders that have their own jurisdictions.
Heck even Bush occasionally admitted the USA couldn't just invade everywhere.
sorry, typo, I meant don't smoke and drive! but don't smoke and drink and drive either...! :-)
Folk who get caned on dope do drive. I've been to a fair few parties where people have been smoking then drive home, on roads where you'll be driving between 30 to 60mph.
Problem with driving stoned is it's like driving drunk - your reaction times will be badly impaired. Like booze, there's not so much a problem with people who are completely out of their head at a party -they aren't going anywhere but to sleep in the corner of the room - it's the folk who've only had a couple and think they are fine enough to drive.
Don't drive if you've been smoking dope. I don't give a toss if you smash yourself up but don't kill or maim passengers or other innocent people on the road.
A few years ago (2002) I was cycling home in Hackney, East London, when a group of teenagers dragged me off my bike, kicked me in and stole my bike. Luckily a woman in a flat opposite heard the noise and called the police. Also I managed to get to my feet and flag down a passing biker who helped me chase down the kids and get my bike back.
Met. police investigated the case and told me they couldn't use the CCTV footage- the event was all captured on CCTV - as the quality was too low to be of any use.
Great bloody use of my council tax that was, putting in all those CCTV cameras if they don't actually work well enough to do what they are supposed to do.
So even beyond all the ethical discussions of whether CCTV cameras should be around to film people, and if it's a worthwhile use of public money, they don't even work!
4 years living in a 1729 vicarage in the middle of the UK, rented, Grade 2* listed. One netgear ADSL/wifi box covered the house just fine, bounced its signals 'through' the 2 foot thick solid stone walls to different rooms, and for people who really wanted a cable, we just ran ethernet cable discretely round the edges of the hall, up the stair and into people's rooms. Lift the carpets gently and run the cable underneath and along the skirting boards.
Not sure what listing status your parents' house is, I don't know about what's covered under Grade 1, but I'm pretty sure you are allowed to run cables under the carpet and tack them to the walls, get some sympathetic ducting etc. Grade 2 says exterior only has to be cleared for planning permission. You can drill holes through interior walls without needing clearance as long as you follow common sense and general building regs (which are there to stop you killing yourself, in practice nobody's going to haul you up as long as you aren't incredibly stupid and try to run electricity near water, etc).
If you can't put cable down - and I am guessing this might be to do more with your mum and dad having beautiful interior period decor and not wanting anything post 1850 around the place rather than building regs (they've got electric cables right? so they've cleared permission previously to drill holes) - then get wifi in, maybe use something like dd-wrt or openwrt and link together a couple of boxes to hop around the rooms.
My guess your issue is more to do with it being your parents house and what they will or won't allow than government regulations ;-)
hahaha nice one :-) we of course measure them in grams or occasionally gills displacement.
What's that in less historic money? ;-)
interesting - do you guys over the pond use tons for big numbers or do you stick to pounds all the way up? Curious about the expression "123,000 pounds" - isn't that something like 100 tons or so? (he says plucking a figure out the air and being lazy ;-) )
Here we'd say kg for small numbers, but once we'd got to a thousand we'd shift to (metric) tons, e.g. "over 123 tons" not "over 123,000 kg". Or is that domain specific? do some things get measured in pounds all the way up, but others you shift into talking about tons? What do you measure aircraft carriers etc in? millions of pounds?
Great news though on the main topic, it will keep some university researchers happily employed for a good while!
I work as a technology and education researcher in a UK university. We work alongside local schools. When we go in to work with the teachers, and the school students (aged 11-18), it's considered polite to dress appropriately. This means smart shirt, sometimes jacket and good trousers. Occasionally we go to funding meetings, it's considered polite to dress up for these as well - open necked suit and occasionally a tie as well. More formal dress is also considered polite if we're doing presentations to VIPs the university wants to show round.
Agreed that where things made doesn't reflect their quality. However my original posting was noting that people often choose "good enough" over "high quality" and are not always bothered about the conditions in which the things are made. This article, after all, is about the concern some people have over the working conditions in Chinese factories producing keyboards. Similarly the clothing industry is often under scrutiny for tolerating poor working conditions in its factories in developing countries. Your postings suggest that you don't give too much thought about the conditions in which your jeans and tshirts are made. It's worth looking into.
Name brands - not for me buddy, never really been a big thing (apart from being fond of the 42 year old Singer Gazelle ;-) ) - got a garage full of my grandfather's and great grandfather's tools to show that. Proper, well made, hand tools. Totally agree with you, buy quality whenever you can. Alas a lot of people are happy to buy throw away stuff. I think we're in agreement on most points, I think you just didn't pick up that I was pulling out some high end goods rather than day to day examples of quality.
The stuff I actually buy is more like choosing De Walt/ Makita or equivalent quality power tools over the discount brands, fair trade cotton tshirts rather than Tescos/Wal-Mart cheap packs of dubious origin, solid wood furniture over particle board/plastic veneer wherever possible. But this is where I understand folk have to compromise. I've just been recommended a company for solid oak kitchen work surfaces, they cost something like £300 instead of the Ikea particle board version for £45.
I think we should aim to try to buy as high quality as we can afford and also accept paying some level of premium to ensure better working conditions for the people in the manufacturing process.
My point was that quality costs so I picked some lovely over the top examples. Also I was emphasising purchasing local. Quality costs, and I agree with you, most people don't give a damn about quality or ethics and buy cheap.
Aston Martin - used to produce their cars 5 miles from where I live, now a bit further away at Gaydon (50 miles or so?). Very nice cars. Actually I have a 42 year old Singer Gazelle which runs very nicely.
Suits - I work in a university so normally relaxed dress but sometimes I have to wear a suit for meetings. You don't get much respect from some people for turning up in a geek tshirt. I agree it's the person inside that matters but you can't fight the world on this one every day and get business done. It comes with the territory.
I find it ironic given the title of this whole thread that you suggest "t-shirts are cheap" as a solution - doh! where do you think the tshirts and jeans are made and under what working conditions?
I agree with you, buy quality whenever you can. But sometimes people can't afford quality and are in a position to only buy cheaper goods to get by with.
The big problem though is that people are seduced by "good enough" that is produced in poor work conditions and would rather pay 50 dollars for "good enough" than 500 dollars for quality/fair trade / supporting local businesses. That's how the supermarkets make their money.
I'd like to go with quality every time but I don't have the money to buy a locally built Aston Martin car, have solid oak hand crafted furniture at home and wear Saville Row hand made suits.
So like many people I make compromises.
Sorry, I forgot the tag, I hoped the last sentence of my post might indicate I wasn't posting entirely seriously and not bothering trying to build an entirely watertight argument ...
Paranoid folks in Russia on the other hand might argue that the US satellite, having power, was directed into the Russian satellite to prove that the USA has the capacity to take out Russian military satellites as and when it wishes, and that it chose to do so in a less confrontational way by taking out a no longer functional satellite. Using a functional commercial satellite clearly shows that the US government and can turn any US company assets to its use so Russia better beware, the US power is greater than it seems.
If you're paranoid you can argue anything to fit into your world view :-)
"What's depressing about the Tories winning the next election?"
I was a teenager then in the job market in the last big depression in the 1980s, was in Newcastle Upon Tyne at the time. I saw what the Tory attitude towards people was then (Thatcher: "there is no such thing a society" Norman Tebbit: people who don't have jobs are lazy and if they just got on their bike they'd get one ) - and I don't see much change in their attitudes now. The Tories decimated the industrial parts of the UK in the 80s while their mates made 'loadsamoney' and I don't see that anything different will happen this time round. If you're out of a job, sod you, you're lazy and we don't care about you. On the bright side there's a second golden age of squatting empty houses and a vibrant music scene (lots of unemployed young people ) ahead.
"Do you really want another five years of Labour?" .
Between a devil and a hard place on this one really, agreed they've made a bit of a hash of it. But at least they pay lip service to believing in society (which alas is rather at odds at their "we can-out Tory the Tories at setting up an authoritarian state" approach to 'security'). The Tories are a least honest about being a bunch of public school educated rich people who think the rest of us are the lower classes and should be treated as such.
It is indeed depressing.