Giving prisoners meaningful jobs, that are not punitive - or simply profit centers for for-profit prison sweat-shop factories - is actually a very good idea. Farming is not a career today, but it is a rewarding activity that would be very good for developing discipline and productive behavior. It is odd that you find the idea laughable.
The OP did not state it very well, but it would appear that he has in mind the fact that the cost of keeping a person in prison is more than the cost of sending them to college, year for year.
Of course with the school age population of Great Britain (which does not count college age people) being about 18% of the total, and its prison population amounting to 0.14% of the population, a ratio of 130-to-1 it would be incredible for the absolute cost of imprisoning the second to exceed the cost of educating the first. But the difference in spending ratios, as you present them is telling: 20-1 vs 130-1. The cost of prison is 6.5 times higher per person.
Carter killed reprocessing with an executive order. Reagan lifted the order.
But, as you say, there wasn't enough financial incentive to restart reprocessing in the US, so we've just stuck with new fuel ever since.
Gerald Ford "killed reprocessing" with a Presidential directive to shut down reprocessing in October 1976. But there was no plant to shut down at that point. (It is true that Carter also issued an Executive Order, but shutting down something that was already shut down, and forbidding something already forbidden means no change in the status quo).
The U.S. only ever had one reprocessing plant (as opposed to a weapons plutonium extraction plant) which was at West Valley, New York which was shut down in 1972 due to contamination problems, then abandoned by its operator Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. in 1975 rather than clean it up. So private industry had already screwed up and washed its hand of a commercial and environmental disaster, ending U.S. reprocessing, before Ford ever issued his Directive.
If commercial re-processors require a subsidy to build a plant, what does that say about the commercial viability of the whole idea?
It would be interesting to see a real engineering analysis of the effect of different metals on golf performance (a driving machine would provide real data). But in the case of titanium actually providing some sort of advantage to the golfer this could be mostly preserved by simply putting a thin stainless steel facing on the striking surface. And this would preserve what is no doubt the real advantage of these clubs - generating sales for the manufacturer and retail chain.
It's a big leap to say 'titanium clubs may cause sparks' to 'they caused these 2 fires'.
If you read TFA, and not just the TFS, you will discover that in both of the cases the golfers knew that their clubs had started the fires and said so!
They just weren't believed.
So this is no "theory" - it is simply confirmation of the cause already stated by the (unsuspecting and no doubt quite surprised) perpetrators.
Can't we just compromise and pick an alkali metal close to 33?
That would be Rubidium at 37. It is also solid at room temperature (but would melt in the sun at 39C/103F) and also reacts violently with water. The higher the atomic number of the alkali metal the more violent the reaction. Sodium really isn't very impressive - a small piece doesn't really burn it just sizzles. Potassium (atomic number 19) burns though (and potassium does not melt until 63C/146F). Everything higher than potassium is likely to explode.
May cause sparks when they hit a rock. I haven't noticed many rocks on the greens of golf courses, but I'm not a golfer. Also, if a shower of sparks came off your club and started a conflagration wouldn't you notice?
And of course, greens - being watered and cut regularly - don't burn. But roughs sure do. And that is where the two fires started - in the dry rough where there were most definitely rocks. The CBS news last night showed one of the actual locations where the brush fire started and, yes, it was full of rocks.
Here is the source for the "debunking": an Iranian news site - Mashreghnews.ir asserting that this is a prop for a movie about the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 (hope you have Google translate activated).
However Flight 655 was shot down by the guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes (CG-49), and the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier was not involved. The U.S was not about to deploy an aircraft carrier battle group to the narrow, mine-filled waters of the Straits of Hormuz, nor would that kind of firepower have been any use for the tanker traffic policing mission. So it seems the Iranian news site is probably passing along disinformation (or rank speculation) about the test target ship being built.
The summary is full of stuff, but I won't say what.
The United States Navy has, as its primary air-delivered weapons test site - also used for training, a facility out in the Mojave Desert called the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station. On that test base (larger than Rhode Island) is a test location called "R-Range" (R is for radar). Out on R-Range is a sort of ship shaped hill called Sea Site that bristles with ship electronics. It is used for testing targeting systems and training -- and it is intended to be a reasonably realistic simulation of a ship equipped with all manner of electronic gear, radar, communications, electronic counter-measures, etc. And it is a hill out in the desert.
This somewhat sub-scale ship is a far more realistic test and training target than that hill out in the desert.
And this business of "field information cards" is especially worrisome. A cop can write down anything on a card he likes, and since no action is taken on a card, its very existence would be unknown to you - unless he/she choses to show it you. There is no way of knowing what (mis)information is being generated about you by any random cop. One wonders whether this data, once "in the system" is ever completely, totally purged.
For every enlightened academic feminist who studies the prior, current and future dis-empowerment of women, or the non-academic feminist who simply wants to elevate and equalize the standing of women in society, there tend to be a dozen or so Rebecca Watsons; i.e. pseudo-intellectual, hates with the passion of a thousand suns anything that carries a pair of balls.
Actually the ratio is the reverse of what you imagine (and then some). Those 'pseudo-intellectual man-haters' that dominate your consciousness are rarities in real academia, and have little credibility. They do get most of the popular press though since they feed the media desire for viewer attracting 'controversy' and attention is often what they really seek. And the right-wing media industry thrives on giving them massive exclusive coverage - a credible feminist would never get a single mention or a second of air-time on Fox or Limbaugh.
Here is a very detailed account of the trajectory data now available from Reuters. Maybe someone on this board knows air routes in South East Asia and can provide analysis or pointers to useful maps?
Are you really so biologically illiterate that you are confusing my statement with the common "natural is good" fallacy? Geez.
Easy there pardner. Don't go throwing around accusations of "biological illiteracy" when your premise ("sleep deprivation common throughout human history") has zero support. Before the age of lamps staying up all night would be quite rare, and would not have become particularly prevalent until the age of electric lighting made light cheap and abundantly available at night.
And since all kinds of things humans were subjected to in prehistory still cause us injury the notion of this broad form of argument is fundamentally flawed.
> anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable
> in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.
I think that's overly vague. Us animals have very resilient bodies. Our muscles get damaged during exercise but years of hard exercise doesn't wear our muscles away.
Ummm... years of hard exercise most definitely does cause permanent injury, Google "overuse injury" to see as many links on it at as you care to read. Athletes are forced to end careers all the time for this reason. And then there is Osteoarthritis which causes permanent disability due to bone damage from overuse.
You are clearly a reasonably intelligent and capable person, and that doesn't go away with age. It does become harder to memorize things as you age...
There are changes in brain memory processes in normal aging, but as a blanket statement about what will happen, I find this to be untrue. The key to maintain the ability to learn is to constantly learn as a normal part of daily life. This keeps you in the habit of learning, allows you to continuously acquire new ways of learning, and even more important - gives you a continuously increasing framework of interconnected facts and areas of knowledge to associate with new things. These things can actually make learning easier with age. The same studies that measure memory decline with age show that staying mentally active actually protects against this.
The broader your knowledge of computer science and software technology the easier it is to pick up "new" things. Often they are not new at all, and when they are, they are always built on things you already know. You should continuously broaden your knowledge. You should also see yourself continuously climbing up the software development skill level. If you aren't a better, more knowledgeable, programmer today than you were last year, then you aren't doing it right (most programmers, sadly, aren't doing it right).
If you associate learning with being "in school", then you are in trouble for sure. A lot of people seem to only acquire information effectively "when taught" and for them, I suspect it is a downhill slide once they leave school. This is one of the chief causes suspected of age related learning problems - people becoming rusty at learning since they don't make it part of their daily life ( as Wikipedia puts it "memory strategies are used less by older adults as they move further away from the educational system").
Another commonly cited factor is believing that learning is harder when you are older. This is definitely a self-fulfilling prophesy, and there are external cultural factors reinforcing this. Any time someone in the 50s forgets something - people are quick to term it a "senior moment", when in a 25 year old they would not draw any conclusion about mental deficit. Seeing young programmers frequently forget things (didn't complete that task, forget to start that overnight job, forget to check the log, etc., etc.) that I don't forget, I think a lot of claims about mature adult memory problems are straight-up ageism.
The silliest thing about this press release is that it seems to ignore the fact that most car batteries (and certainly almost all large battery packs) are recycled and scrubbed so their components can be reused in new batteries.
And this proposal prevents that eventual fate how?
Getting more use of the batteries, as batteries, before recycling them is a much more efficient use of resources, and the money invested in those batteries.
And, taking the premise that inequality is bad, then this is bad. In fact, under that premise, meritocracy itself is bad because it awards benefits to those who already have an advantage of some sort.
The west's obsession with both meritocracy and equality is hilariously impossible.
Balancing two competing but important objectives? Impossible?
No, it is the basic problem of all life. If you can't do that, you can't do anything of value.
Note the poster has framed this to push the view that it is "worrying about inequality" that must be bad, not inequality itself.
And of course the premise that attacking inequality must necessarily also attack meritocracy is a false framing. Crony capitalism has far more to do with inequality than "meritocracies" of any sort.
The only problem I have with immigration is non-working ones who effectively leech off of the dole system and take advantage of our birthright citizenship loophole (which few countries have.) So called anchor babies by being a citizen automatically entitle their parents to welfare benefits...
So basically you hate the people who exist in your fantasies. I am sure a good fantasy-hating makes you feel all warm inside.
One perfect example of this I see on a daily basis is the expectation that one should either live independently or live in a single family household. This is a common thing in the US, but it is extremely uncommon throughout most of the world, even in other first world countries....
Citation please?
Oh, here's one! Apparently the average family household unit size in the entire OECD (basically, the community of industrialized nations) is about 2.6, which is almost exactly the same as that for the U.S.! In other words, far from being unusual in first world countries, we are strictly average!
So, no, you are just making stuff up that you think sounds plausible.
I thought he'd been laughed out of Washington DC following the mortgage securities fiasco.
...
As long as you are saying what serves the interests of Big Business and people of fabulous wealth, inherited and otherwise, you will always be a respected commentator whose words command solemn attention, and be widely reported.
In the New York Times Conservative columnist was opining last June that what the what the lower economic brackets really need is to develop a "rich inner life" and derive joy and satisfaction from whatever they have, rather than "focus on external wealth". if they are unhappy with their lot they have only themselves to blame.
That's right folks, the solution to extreme inequality is for the poor to learn to make themselves happy! Just as the solution for inequality for Greenspan is to compress the Middle Class downward, make those who aren't struggling a lot, struggle a lot more.
No, no don't look at the rich and super-rich! You're just making yourself unhappy - shame on you! Trust us you don't want, and shouldn't have a bigger share of the rewards of your labor, really those that have the most really need more of what you have
In other news, the New York Times had a front-page article comparing the health and longevity of two groups of Americans living close to each other - one wealthy and one poor. Guess what? The poor are in poor health and die sooner.
That's right. Inequality is killing people. Telling them to be happy ain't going to make them live longer, and making the upper middle class poorer won't do it either.
It is quite apparent the plutocrats have an army of sycophants ready bury us in platitudes to divert any attention from how the entire nation is rigged to their advantage.
'You can't kid a kidder. Having been a lobbyist, he knows all their tricks,' says Blair Levin.
So this is what we've been reduced to? The disconsolate wish, having turned the regulatory body over to one of the kleptarchs, that he will discover not only his duty to society but also unbiased objectivity, and turn on his own? A ray of hope so thin strains my credulity.
I don't know, if done right it can go really well. See Joseph Kennedy and the initial SEC. He may actually be on the up and up, only time will tell.
Too true. People can surprise you. But there is a reason why it is a surprise.
Slashdot Mirror
Giving prisoners meaningful jobs, that are not punitive - or simply profit centers for for-profit prison sweat-shop factories - is actually a very good idea. Farming is not a career today, but it is a rewarding activity that would be very good for developing discipline and productive behavior. It is odd that you find the idea laughable.
The OP did not state it very well, but it would appear that he has in mind the fact that the cost of keeping a person in prison is more than the cost of sending them to college, year for year.
Of course with the school age population of Great Britain (which does not count college age people) being about 18% of the total, and its prison population amounting to 0.14% of the population, a ratio of 130-to-1 it would be incredible for the absolute cost of imprisoning the second to exceed the cost of educating the first. But the difference in spending ratios, as you present them is telling: 20-1 vs 130-1. The cost of prison is 6.5 times higher per person.
It was politics, now it's economics.
Carter killed reprocessing with an executive order. Reagan lifted the order.
But, as you say, there wasn't enough financial incentive to restart reprocessing in the US, so we've just stuck with new fuel ever since.
Gerald Ford "killed reprocessing" with a Presidential directive to shut down reprocessing in October 1976. But there was no plant to shut down at that point. (It is true that Carter also issued an Executive Order, but shutting down something that was already shut down, and forbidding something already forbidden means no change in the status quo).
The U.S. only ever had one reprocessing plant (as opposed to a weapons plutonium extraction plant) which was at West Valley, New York which was shut down in 1972 due to contamination problems, then abandoned by its operator Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc. in 1975 rather than clean it up. So private industry had already screwed up and washed its hand of a commercial and environmental disaster, ending U.S. reprocessing, before Ford ever issued his Directive.
If commercial re-processors require a subsidy to build a plant, what does that say about the commercial viability of the whole idea?
It would be interesting to see a real engineering analysis of the effect of different metals on golf performance (a driving machine would provide real data). But in the case of titanium actually providing some sort of advantage to the golfer this could be mostly preserved by simply putting a thin stainless steel facing on the striking surface. And this would preserve what is no doubt the real advantage of these clubs - generating sales for the manufacturer and retail chain.
It's a big leap to say 'titanium clubs may cause sparks' to 'they caused these 2 fires'.
If you read TFA, and not just the TFS, you will discover that in both of the cases the golfers knew that their clubs had started the fires and said so!
They just weren't believed.
So this is no "theory" - it is simply confirmation of the cause already stated by the (unsuspecting and no doubt quite surprised) perpetrators.
Atomic number sodium = 11.
Atomic number cesium = 55.
Can't we just compromise and pick an alkali metal close to 33?
That would be Rubidium at 37. It is also solid at room temperature (but would melt in the sun at 39C/103F) and also reacts violently with water. The higher the atomic number of the alkali metal the more violent the reaction. Sodium really isn't very impressive - a small piece doesn't really burn it just sizzles. Potassium (atomic number 19) burns though (and potassium does not melt until 63C/146F). Everything higher than potassium is likely to explode.
May cause sparks when they hit a rock. I haven't noticed many rocks on the greens of golf courses, but I'm not a golfer. Also, if a shower of sparks came off your club and started a conflagration wouldn't you notice?
And of course, greens - being watered and cut regularly - don't burn. But roughs sure do. And that is where the two fires started - in the dry rough where there were most definitely rocks. The CBS news last night showed one of the actual locations where the brush fire started and, yes, it was full of rocks.
Here is the source for the "debunking": an Iranian news site - Mashreghnews.ir asserting that this is a prop for a movie about the shoot-down of Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 (hope you have Google translate activated).
However Flight 655 was shot down by the guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes (CG-49), and the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier was not involved. The U.S was not about to deploy an aircraft carrier battle group to the narrow, mine-filled waters of the Straits of Hormuz, nor would that kind of firepower have been any use for the tanker traffic policing mission. So it seems the Iranian news site is probably passing along disinformation (or rank speculation) about the test target ship being built.
The summary is full of stuff, but I won't say what.
The United States Navy has, as its primary air-delivered weapons test site - also used for training, a facility out in the Mojave Desert called the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station. On that test base (larger than Rhode Island) is a test location called "R-Range" (R is for radar). Out on R-Range is a sort of ship shaped hill called Sea Site that bristles with ship electronics. It is used for testing targeting systems and training -- and it is intended to be a reasonably realistic simulation of a ship equipped with all manner of electronic gear, radar, communications, electronic counter-measures, etc. And it is a hill out in the desert.
This somewhat sub-scale ship is a far more realistic test and training target than that hill out in the desert.
And this business of "field information cards" is especially worrisome. A cop can write down anything on a card he likes, and since no action is taken on a card, its very existence would be unknown to you - unless he/she choses to show it you. There is no way of knowing what (mis)information is being generated about you by any random cop. One wonders whether this data, once "in the system" is ever completely, totally purged.
For every enlightened academic feminist who studies the prior, current and future dis-empowerment of women, or the non-academic feminist who simply wants to elevate and equalize the standing of women in society, there tend to be a dozen or so Rebecca Watsons; i.e. pseudo-intellectual, hates with the passion of a thousand suns anything that carries a pair of balls.
Actually the ratio is the reverse of what you imagine (and then some). Those 'pseudo-intellectual man-haters' that dominate your consciousness are rarities in real academia, and have little credibility. They do get most of the popular press though since they feed the media desire for viewer attracting 'controversy' and attention is often what they really seek. And the right-wing media industry thrives on giving them massive exclusive coverage - a credible feminist would never get a single mention or a second of air-time on Fox or Limbaugh.
Thanks! That is what I was looking for.
Here is a very detailed account of the trajectory data now available from Reuters. Maybe someone on this board knows air routes in South East Asia and can provide analysis or pointers to useful maps?
Are you really so biologically illiterate that you are confusing my statement with the common "natural is good" fallacy? Geez.
Easy there pardner. Don't go throwing around accusations of "biological illiteracy" when your premise ("sleep deprivation common throughout human history") has zero support. Before the age of lamps staying up all night would be quite rare, and would not have become particularly prevalent until the age of electric lighting made light cheap and abundantly available at night.
And since all kinds of things humans were subjected to in prehistory still cause us injury the notion of this broad form of argument is fundamentally flawed.
> anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable > in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.
I think that's overly vague. Us animals have very resilient bodies. Our muscles get damaged during exercise but years of hard exercise doesn't wear our muscles away.
Ummm... years of hard exercise most definitely does cause permanent injury, Google "overuse injury" to see as many links on it at as you care to read. Athletes are forced to end careers all the time for this reason. And then there is Osteoarthritis which causes permanent disability due to bone damage from overuse.
You are clearly a reasonably intelligent and capable person, and that doesn't go away with age. It does become harder to memorize things as you age...
There are changes in brain memory processes in normal aging, but as a blanket statement about what will happen, I find this to be untrue. The key to maintain the ability to learn is to constantly learn as a normal part of daily life. This keeps you in the habit of learning, allows you to continuously acquire new ways of learning, and even more important - gives you a continuously increasing framework of interconnected facts and areas of knowledge to associate with new things. These things can actually make learning easier with age. The same studies that measure memory decline with age show that staying mentally active actually protects against this.
The broader your knowledge of computer science and software technology the easier it is to pick up "new" things. Often they are not new at all, and when they are, they are always built on things you already know. You should continuously broaden your knowledge. You should also see yourself continuously climbing up the software development skill level. If you aren't a better, more knowledgeable, programmer today than you were last year, then you aren't doing it right (most programmers, sadly, aren't doing it right).
If you associate learning with being "in school", then you are in trouble for sure. A lot of people seem to only acquire information effectively "when taught" and for them, I suspect it is a downhill slide once they leave school. This is one of the chief causes suspected of age related learning problems - people becoming rusty at learning since they don't make it part of their daily life ( as Wikipedia puts it "memory strategies are used less by older adults as they move further away from the educational system").
Another commonly cited factor is believing that learning is harder when you are older. This is definitely a self-fulfilling prophesy, and there are external cultural factors reinforcing this. Any time someone in the 50s forgets something - people are quick to term it a "senior moment", when in a 25 year old they would not draw any conclusion about mental deficit. Seeing young programmers frequently forget things (didn't complete that task, forget to start that overnight job, forget to check the log, etc., etc.) that I don't forget, I think a lot of claims about mature adult memory problems are straight-up ageism.
That locals like to urinate on the Blarney Stone seems almost as well-known as kissing the Stone.
In other words - you wouldn't catch me kissing it.
At least the urine is sterile. The same cannot be said for the lips that are kissing it.
The silliest thing about this press release is that it seems to ignore the fact that most car batteries (and certainly almost all large battery packs) are recycled and scrubbed so their components can be reused in new batteries.
And this proposal prevents that eventual fate how?
Getting more use of the batteries, as batteries, before recycling them is a much more efficient use of resources, and the money invested in those batteries.
Well said. Mod the AC up please!
And, taking the premise that inequality is bad, then this is bad. In fact, under that premise, meritocracy itself is bad because it awards benefits to those who already have an advantage of some sort. The west's obsession with both meritocracy and equality is hilariously impossible.
Balancing two competing but important objectives? Impossible?
No, it is the basic problem of all life. If you can't do that, you can't do anything of value.
Note the poster has framed this to push the view that it is "worrying about inequality" that must be bad, not inequality itself.
And of course the premise that attacking inequality must necessarily also attack meritocracy is a false framing. Crony capitalism has far more to do with inequality than "meritocracies" of any sort.
...
The only problem I have with immigration is non-working ones who effectively leech off of the dole system and take advantage of our birthright citizenship loophole (which few countries have.) So called anchor babies by being a citizen automatically entitle their parents to welfare benefits...
So basically you hate the people who exist in your fantasies. I am sure a good fantasy-hating makes you feel all warm inside.
One perfect example of this I see on a daily basis is the expectation that one should either live independently or live in a single family household. This is a common thing in the US, but it is extremely uncommon throughout most of the world, even in other first world countries....
Citation please?
Oh, here's one! Apparently the average family household unit size in the entire OECD (basically, the community of industrialized nations) is about 2.6, which is almost exactly the same as that for the U.S.! In other words, far from being unusual in first world countries, we are strictly average!
So, no, you are just making stuff up that you think sounds plausible.
I thought he'd been laughed out of Washington DC following the mortgage securities fiasco.
...
As long as you are saying what serves the interests of Big Business and people of fabulous wealth, inherited and otherwise, you will always be a respected commentator whose words command solemn attention, and be widely reported.
In the New York Times Conservative columnist was opining last June that what the what the lower economic brackets really need is to develop a "rich inner life" and derive joy and satisfaction from whatever they have, rather than "focus on external wealth". if they are unhappy with their lot they have only themselves to blame.
That's right folks, the solution to extreme inequality is for the poor to learn to make themselves happy! Just as the solution for inequality for Greenspan is to compress the Middle Class downward, make those who aren't struggling a lot, struggle a lot more.
No, no don't look at the rich and super-rich! You're just making yourself unhappy - shame on you! Trust us you don't want, and shouldn't have a bigger share of the rewards of your labor, really those that have the most really need more of what you have
In other news, the New York Times had a front-page article comparing the health and longevity of two groups of Americans living close to each other - one wealthy and one poor. Guess what? The poor are in poor health and die sooner.
That's right. Inequality is killing people. Telling them to be happy ain't going to make them live longer, and making the upper middle class poorer won't do it either.
It is quite apparent the plutocrats have an army of sycophants ready bury us in platitudes to divert any attention from how the entire nation is rigged to their advantage.
'You can't kid a kidder. Having been a lobbyist, he knows all their tricks,' says Blair Levin.
So this is what we've been reduced to? The disconsolate wish, having turned the regulatory body over to one of the kleptarchs, that he will discover not only his duty to society but also unbiased objectivity, and turn on his own? A ray of hope so thin strains my credulity.
I don't know, if done right it can go really well. See Joseph Kennedy and the initial SEC. He may actually be on the up and up, only time will tell.
Too true. People can surprise you. But there is a reason why it is a surprise.