There's a lot of people out there who try to instill some sense of worth in students. They may not wish to see you flipping burgers or bagging groceries. Those people are genuinely rare
Maybe I was lucky, but I felt that I had a good many teachers who really cared about their students, and wanted to see them learn and succeed. Sure, there were some awful teachers in the mix, but I really felt they were outnumbered by the dedicated ones.
Um, you might expand your own horizons. Try reading Marshall Macluhan, for example. He posited that the reason for the growth of structured classrooms in the late 19th century was to provide a ready stream of workers for factories, who could 1) read enough to understand simple instructions, 2) do some simple arithmetic to keep records, and, most important, 3) be conditioned to sit at a bell, eat lunch at a bell, go home at a bell, etc. Employing his maxim "The medium is the message", he felt that the actual content of most classes was meaningless compared to the impact of rows of desks, submission to authority, and living to an artificial schedule, just as the message of the car (highways, suburbs, dependence on oil) is orders of magnitude more important than the content of any given automobile (unless I'm in it, of course).
My friend, I agree and disagree with you. I agree that commodity-backed money would be a good idea, but I disagree with your assertion that Keynesian economics caused the problem in the first place.
Keynes said to run deficits during bad times and surpluses during good times. Unfortunately, many governments interpreted this to mean "run deficits all the time". Again, I urge you and other readers to look to Canada. During both Liberal and Conservative governments, national debt was paid down for the last decade of good times. Now that we're in a recession, we're back to a deficit, as Keynes would have suggested but we're likely to weather it better and with fewer long term effects because of the discipline to pay down debt when we could. Keynes was no fool, and it's a mistake to say that the misguided policies followed by people who claim to have learned from Keynes are his fault.
Democratic philosophy = Socialism, and
Republican philosophy = Fascism.
As a Canadian conservative, I was so dismayed to see how quickly the Republicans folded into a neo-Fascist mode after 9/11. The TSA, Patriot Act, no-fly list, Gitmo, no warrant wire taps - as someone who had grown up in an overly governed Canada, and looked to the US as the beacon of a resolute freedom, these were multiple betrayals and disappointments of what I thought the US stood for. I truly hope the US can refind its footing, although the prospects for that under President Bambam are dismal.
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Um, isn't this the classic definition of communism? And isn't it a travesty that in
a supposedly free market economy, the government enacts legislation that allows firms
to act in (their own self interest) in overtly perverted ways? Just askin..
Its our fault that our economy is in the shitter. Its everyone else's fault that their economy is in the shitter.
As a Canadian, may I respectfully disagree? All of our major banks are solvent; in fact, our largest five banks all rank within the top 50 safest banks in the world, according to a study done by World Financial Digest. While some individual Canadians may have invested in CDO's, CDS's, and Bernie Madoff's "funds", our major institutions have little or no exposure. Our wheat still grows, our trees are still logged, and our oil wells still pump. Where are we being screwed? In the auto sector, where US problems flow across the border; in our softwood, paper, and logging sector, where both US protectionism and flagging demand flow across the border; in our tourism sector, as US visitors (by far the majority) can no longer afford to take vacations anywhere, let alone Canada, so your problems again flow across the border.
While the US government was racking up record deficits, Canada was paying down its debt under both Liberal and Conservative governments. The current government was able to pay down debt AND reduce the national sales tax from 7% to 5% until the US financial system imploded. Now we're back in deficit mode, thanks to you.
And, while off-topic, an often-thrown insult to Canadians from the US is that the US does all the fighting. Well, here is a relative comparison, using Canada's 33 million population as a base:
Population: Canada:1 UK:2 US:10
Afghan deaths: (actual) Canada 116 UK 152 US 677
Seems to me that Canadians are doing more than their fair share of the fighting and dying in Afghanistan.
So, as I said in my opening, I respectfully disagree - if the Canadian economy is in the shitter, it is very much due to external events which mostly occurred in the US. On behalf of my countrymen, may I say "F*** you very much"?
From TFA: "In developed nations, paper is the third-largest industrial greenhouse gas emitter, behind the steel and chemical industries."
Oh, really? Not according to the US government. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/usinventoryreport.html Paper doesn't even show up, and all of the "industrial" processes (as opposed to home heating, electricity generation, and transportation) make up less than 7% of US emissions, so paper-making is barely a roundoff error. I'm not arguing that the paper companies aren't taking advantage of a loophole, but to suggest that this is having any meaningful impact on emissions one way or the other is ludicrous.
Re:Here's a better idea
on
Cellular Repo Man
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd agree except that - unless my memory is playing tricks on me - the subsidized phones started way back when there were dozens of carriers serving various regions of the US. It took off not because of carrier greed, but because consumers were more willing to sign up with little initial outlay.
It was a bit of both, actually. The rural carriers especially were interested in grabbing fat roaming fees ($5-6 a minute was not uncommon!), which is why the lawyers had a field day doing cookie cutter cellular applications for people hoping to win the lottery, build a few towers, and then sell out to a large company later. The large carriers, like the Baby Bells and McCaw were interested in getting as many subscribers as possible, since the lock-in factor at the time (no number portability especially) was pretty high. The larger carriers started selling phones through agents, to whom they paid a bounty for each new subscriber. If memory serves, it was on the order of $500-600. Agents, in turn, would turn a portion of that bounty to the new sub, via a discount on the phone price.
I remember selling Motorola flip phones for $5,000 Cdn for a while, but the price quickly plummeted because of these bounties. At the time, our network was completely saturated in Toronto; it wasn't unusual to have to make four or five attempts to get dial tone. One night, after many drinks, an agent decried our company's strategy of not increasing the bounties. "Cash flow! Cash flow!" he garbled "You can't get a f**ing dial tone anyway! Get as many subs as you can so you can soak up the monthly fees!" Eventually network build-out caught up with demand, but the agent proved prescient; we were losing money, and were eventually taken over by another firm.
Oh, this is utter balderdash. I worked for a large cell phone provider in Canada, and we were always scrambling to adjust our billing plans to keep up with market demands for different plans for different needs. (The fact that our billing system was provided by Cincinnati Bell, and we didn't have source code meant a minimum 12-week turnaround for the simplest changes didn't help.)
On the other hand, asking customers what new features they wanted was an exercise in futility. First, more than half didn't know how to operate ANY of the existing features (such as memory dial) besides SEND and END. And when you asked what they wanted, they had no clue. Their only experience with phones was picking up and answering, or dialing, and that was the only metaphor they could apply to their cellphones.
And I think that's the way it is with most tech devices. Who knew they wanted/needed a spreadsheet until Visicalc showed up? Who knew they wanted a graphical interface until the Mac showed up (OK, Xerox did it first, but they never really tried to market it)? The browser? TiVo? The truth is the vast majority have to be shown something before their internal paradigm shifts sufficiently to create a market. That's why companies have to advertise - to open people's minds to possibilities most of the public could never imagine. That's why visionaries who do dream up successful new ideas, like, say, e-bay, get paid hundreds of millions. Of course, the flip side is if no one likes your idea, someone loses hundreds of millions, which is why it's a such a crap shoot. People who think it's all a big business conspiracy have ZERO idea of how business actually works.
That all said, I think the idea of giving some company the right to disable my laptop over a possible billing error blows big time, and I would never buy it.
We're already knee deep in this shit in Canada. (Google "Richard Warman" and "human rights commission".) This clown makes a living out of suing people for $50 G's a pop for posting - or even linking to - things he doesn't like. We already had a major magazine sued for posting the Islamic cartoons; thankfully, that one got tossed. Orwell was right:
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
We picked 18. At 18 you can vote, you can marry, and you are liable for the entirety of your own actions
Yep, but you can't buy an alcoholic beverage or cigarettes. You can die for your country, though. And don't get me started on the ridiculous marijuana laws.
Back in the days before the day, like the late 1900's, universal electric motors were sold with various attachments, such as clothes washer, butter churn, etc., because "why would anyone need more than one electric motor?". Think of it as a glorified KitchenAid. Once inexpensive, safe, and compact electric motors, the universal product died an unspectacular death.
Like me, for instance. On my non-touchscreen cellphone, my fat old fingers can barely key in a phone number on the tiny keys without making an error one out of three times. As for reading the screen - phone numbers are big enough, but when I have to start reading the messages in the miniscule (and non-adjustable) font provided, I have to pull out an extra powerful pair of reading glasses.
On the other hand, the cleverly designed remote for my TV/DVD/cable box is set up so that I can literally operate it with my eyes closed. The buttons are configured so that you identify them by feel alone, through a combination of button size, style, and raised markings. As another poster noted, when you're lying in bed, half asleep, and you want to turn on the sleep feature on your set, it's nice to to not have to turn on the light and activate the higher brain functions when you want to drift off to the mellifluous sounds of South Park.
Tiny and smaller may be great for you younguns, but it's not always an improvement as you get older.
Why not just hire techs from India or Dubai? They're used to living in 40C temps, and what you save on salaries and air conditioning, you can spend on replacing processor failures!
Yeah, because I'm always having to deal with saturated brine. I can't tell you how many times I've gone out driving in sub-zero temperatures and nearly skidded on all that saturated brine ice.
Obviously, you've never driven in Toronto, where, given the massive amounts of salt dumped on our roads at the first sign of snowfall, you often end up driving on EXACTLY that. (Snow falls, salt dump, heat from spinning tires creates brine, temp drops even more overnight - boom, spinouts galore on the on and off ramps in the morning; somehow, 0F is easier to remember than -17.778C - and yes, I had to look it up.)
Much the same exists in Canada. We have a national and ten provincial "Human Rights Commissions" (HRC's), which are ostensibly there to protect human rights (e.g. discrimination in housing, employment, etc.), but which have recently had a number of high profile cases where people posting Internet comments have been accused of racism, etc. In one noted case, a member of the HRC anonymously trolled on a site, and then charged some of the responders with human rights violations.
In another, noted author Mark Steyn was charged when a Canadian news magazine printed an excerpt from his "America Alone", whose thesis was that demographics in Europe are overwhelmingly showing that "native" French, Dutch, German, etc. women are having children at a below replacement rate, while immigrant Muslim women were having four, five, or six children each. By simply projecting those trends, Steyn noted that in a few decades, many so-called European countries would have large Muslim populations of voting age, and that that may result in the imposition of sharia law, etc. after Muslims take control of the legislature.
These HRC's seem to used increasingly to stifle free speech, not support it. MiniTruth, anyone?
I understand the need to have different logon/passwords, but geez - some sites are going nuts. My bank and my credit card company wanted to put me through TWO logons each, using different ID's and passwords. And of course, if you forget, neither of them will email you your password; you have to phone tech support, sit on hold for 10-20 minutes, and wait for tech support to reset the password, which takes another 20-30 minutes to take effect. So, just to check my card balance, what should have been a 30-second endeavour turns into an hour-long PITA.
And I'm not so naive as to write them on a post-it stuck to the bottom of my keyboard, or write them backwards on the back of my credit card. And I did try your suggestion of storing them in a file, but since the ones I forget are sites that I visit infrequently, I forgot the name of the freakin' file! (And again, I'm not so stupid as to name the file "passwords" or "pw", or similar.)
Finally, the solution that worked for me was using one ID/password combo for sites that don't represent any security issues (e.g. Slashdot), another combo for sites that I don't particularly want people to snoop on (e-mail), and another one with an exceptionally hard password for sites that I really want to keep private, like banking and credit cards. But I wish there was an easier way.
Kudos on the subtle working in of Orwellian references. I'm just waiting for the mandatory telescreens. Let's see - complete FTTH installs, and one more 9/11 act - I'd say the over/under is five years.
Quite seriously - I think there are going to be auto plants in Canada and the US going for quite reasonable prices (i.e. much less than a billion) in the very near future. The Canadian government (where many assembly plants are) would definitely provide bridge loans to anyone with a credible business plan. In addition, Canadian-based Magna is one of the largest parts makers in the world, and they have already expressed some interest in partnering with Ford on an advanced hybrid. If one of the modern Chrysler or GM assembly plants became available, Magna owner Frank Stronach has a big enough ego that he might take a chance. Details here:
If speeding is so dangerous, why are Autobahn death and accident rates so much lower than US highways?
To answer my own question: it's much more difficult to get a license in Germany - you actually have to learn how to drive, including such almost unheard practices as getting your fat ass out of the left hand lane instead of blocking it at 55 mph, it's illegal to pass on the right except during traffic jams (and then can only be done at slow speeds), if there's an accident, drivers near the left lane move as far left as they can, and drivers on the right move as far right as they can; this creates an empty centre lane for emergency vehicles. It's completely unlike North America, where they only seem to care if you can make a left-hand turn at the light, and parallel park without hitting the curb.
There actually are speed limits on some sections of the Autobahn, and they post wet-weather "advisories", which you would be ignorant to exceed. But in dry weather and clear conditions, they seem able to drive at 130 km/h (about 81 mph), or even faster, while enjoying lower accident rates.
Education is the key; teach people how to drive and there would be far fewer accidents.
You could always check her history file, and see where she's been going. Of course, when she finds out you're spying on her, she'll probably run away and become a pole dancer...
But seriously, I use Adblock Plus, and I haven't seen a porn or pop-up ad in months.
I was second in line at a red light a few years back, and some woman who was putting on lipstick rammed into me at 30 km/h. The shock was so great, my foot slipped off the brake pedal, and I hit the car in front of me. My insurance company only wanted to pay for the damage to the rear of my car; the adjuster told me I was obviously stopped too close to the car in front. What?! I had to take it up to their ombudsman before they agreed to pay. I changed companies the next year.
Slashdot Mirror
He's the executive producer of the new Food Network show "What Would Brian Boitano Make"?
Maybe I was lucky, but I felt that I had a good many teachers who really cared about their students, and wanted to see them learn and succeed. Sure, there were some awful teachers in the mix, but I really felt they were outnumbered by the dedicated ones.
Um, you might expand your own horizons. Try reading Marshall Macluhan, for example. He posited that the reason for the growth of structured classrooms in the late 19th century was to provide a ready stream of workers for factories, who could 1) read enough to understand simple instructions, 2) do some simple arithmetic to keep records, and, most important, 3) be conditioned to sit at a bell, eat lunch at a bell, go home at a bell, etc. Employing his maxim "The medium is the message", he felt that the actual content of most classes was meaningless compared to the impact of rows of desks, submission to authority, and living to an artificial schedule, just as the message of the car (highways, suburbs, dependence on oil) is orders of magnitude more important than the content of any given automobile (unless I'm in it, of course).
Keynes said to run deficits during bad times and surpluses during good times. Unfortunately, many governments interpreted this to mean "run deficits all the time". Again, I urge you and other readers to look to Canada. During both Liberal and Conservative governments, national debt was paid down for the last decade of good times. Now that we're in a recession, we're back to a deficit, as Keynes would have suggested but we're likely to weather it better and with fewer long term effects because of the discipline to pay down debt when we could. Keynes was no fool, and it's a mistake to say that the misguided policies followed by people who claim to have learned from Keynes are his fault.
Democratic philosophy = Socialism, and Republican philosophy = Fascism. As a Canadian conservative, I was so dismayed to see how quickly the Republicans folded into a neo-Fascist mode after 9/11. The TSA, Patriot Act, no-fly list, Gitmo, no warrant wire taps - as someone who had grown up in an overly governed Canada, and looked to the US as the beacon of a resolute freedom, these were multiple betrayals and disappointments of what I thought the US stood for. I truly hope the US can refind its footing, although the prospects for that under President Bambam are dismal.
Um, isn't this the classic definition of communism? And isn't it a travesty that in a supposedly free market economy, the government enacts legislation that allows firms to act in (their own self interest) in overtly perverted ways? Just askin..
As a Canadian, may I respectfully disagree? All of our major banks are solvent; in fact, our largest five banks all rank within the top 50 safest banks in the world, according to a study done by World Financial Digest. While some individual Canadians may have invested in CDO's, CDS's, and Bernie Madoff's "funds", our major institutions have little or no exposure. Our wheat still grows, our trees are still logged, and our oil wells still pump. Where are we being screwed? In the auto sector, where US problems flow across the border; in our softwood, paper, and logging sector, where both US protectionism and flagging demand flow across the border; in our tourism sector, as US visitors (by far the majority) can no longer afford to take vacations anywhere, let alone Canada, so your problems again flow across the border.
While the US government was racking up record deficits, Canada was paying down its debt under both Liberal and Conservative governments. The current government was able to pay down debt AND reduce the national sales tax from 7% to 5% until the US financial system imploded. Now we're back in deficit mode, thanks to you.
And, while off-topic, an often-thrown insult to Canadians from the US is that the US does all the fighting. Well, here is a relative comparison, using Canada's 33 million population as a base:
Population: Canada:1 UK:2 US:10
Afghan deaths: (actual) Canada 116 UK 152 US 677
Seems to me that Canadians are doing more than their fair share of the fighting and dying in Afghanistan.
So, as I said in my opening, I respectfully disagree - if the Canadian economy is in the shitter, it is very much due to external events which mostly occurred in the US. On behalf of my countrymen, may I say "F*** you very much"?
Oh, really? Not according to the US government. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/usinventoryreport.html Paper doesn't even show up, and all of the "industrial" processes (as opposed to home heating, electricity generation, and transportation) make up less than 7% of US emissions, so paper-making is barely a roundoff error. I'm not arguing that the paper companies aren't taking advantage of a loophole, but to suggest that this is having any meaningful impact on emissions one way or the other is ludicrous.
It was a bit of both, actually. The rural carriers especially were interested in grabbing fat roaming fees ($5-6 a minute was not uncommon!), which is why the lawyers had a field day doing cookie cutter cellular applications for people hoping to win the lottery, build a few towers, and then sell out to a large company later. The large carriers, like the Baby Bells and McCaw were interested in getting as many subscribers as possible, since the lock-in factor at the time (no number portability especially) was pretty high. The larger carriers started selling phones through agents, to whom they paid a bounty for each new subscriber. If memory serves, it was on the order of $500-600. Agents, in turn, would turn a portion of that bounty to the new sub, via a discount on the phone price.
I remember selling Motorola flip phones for $5,000 Cdn for a while, but the price quickly plummeted because of these bounties. At the time, our network was completely saturated in Toronto; it wasn't unusual to have to make four or five attempts to get dial tone. One night, after many drinks, an agent decried our company's strategy of not increasing the bounties. "Cash flow! Cash flow!" he garbled "You can't get a f**ing dial tone anyway! Get as many subs as you can so you can soak up the monthly fees!" Eventually network build-out caught up with demand, but the agent proved prescient; we were losing money, and were eventually taken over by another firm.
On the other hand, asking customers what new features they wanted was an exercise in futility. First, more than half didn't know how to operate ANY of the existing features (such as memory dial) besides SEND and END. And when you asked what they wanted, they had no clue. Their only experience with phones was picking up and answering, or dialing, and that was the only metaphor they could apply to their cellphones.
And I think that's the way it is with most tech devices. Who knew they wanted/needed a spreadsheet until Visicalc showed up? Who knew they wanted a graphical interface until the Mac showed up (OK, Xerox did it first, but they never really tried to market it)? The browser? TiVo? The truth is the vast majority have to be shown something before their internal paradigm shifts sufficiently to create a market. That's why companies have to advertise - to open people's minds to possibilities most of the public could never imagine. That's why visionaries who do dream up successful new ideas, like, say, e-bay, get paid hundreds of millions. Of course, the flip side is if no one likes your idea, someone loses hundreds of millions, which is why it's a such a crap shoot. People who think it's all a big business conspiracy have ZERO idea of how business actually works.
That all said, I think the idea of giving some company the right to disable my laptop over a possible billing error blows big time, and I would never buy it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Yep, but you can't buy an alcoholic beverage or cigarettes. You can die for your country, though. And don't get me started on the ridiculous marijuana laws.
Back in the days before the day, like the late 1900's, universal electric motors were sold with various attachments, such as clothes washer, butter churn, etc., because "why would anyone need more than one electric motor?". Think of it as a glorified KitchenAid. Once inexpensive, safe, and compact electric motors, the universal product died an unspectacular death.
On the other hand, the cleverly designed remote for my TV/DVD/cable box is set up so that I can literally operate it with my eyes closed. The buttons are configured so that you identify them by feel alone, through a combination of button size, style, and raised markings. As another poster noted, when you're lying in bed, half asleep, and you want to turn on the sleep feature on your set, it's nice to to not have to turn on the light and activate the higher brain functions when you want to drift off to the mellifluous sounds of South Park.
Tiny and smaller may be great for you younguns, but it's not always an improvement as you get older.
Why not just hire techs from India or Dubai? They're used to living in 40C temps, and what you save on salaries and air conditioning, you can spend on replacing processor failures!
I think the OP meant cubic cubits...
Obviously, you've never driven in Toronto, where, given the massive amounts of salt dumped on our roads at the first sign of snowfall, you often end up driving on EXACTLY that. (Snow falls, salt dump, heat from spinning tires creates brine, temp drops even more overnight - boom, spinouts galore on the on and off ramps in the morning; somehow, 0F is easier to remember than -17.778C - and yes, I had to look it up.)
OK, but at -40F, spit goes "clink" too. Now I'm really confused!
In another, noted author Mark Steyn was charged when a Canadian news magazine printed an excerpt from his "America Alone", whose thesis was that demographics in Europe are overwhelmingly showing that "native" French, Dutch, German, etc. women are having children at a below replacement rate, while immigrant Muslim women were having four, five, or six children each. By simply projecting those trends, Steyn noted that in a few decades, many so-called European countries would have large Muslim populations of voting age, and that that may result in the imposition of sharia law, etc. after Muslims take control of the legislature.
These HRC's seem to used increasingly to stifle free speech, not support it. MiniTruth, anyone?
And I'm not so naive as to write them on a post-it stuck to the bottom of my keyboard, or write them backwards on the back of my credit card. And I did try your suggestion of storing them in a file, but since the ones I forget are sites that I visit infrequently, I forgot the name of the freakin' file! (And again, I'm not so stupid as to name the file "passwords" or "pw", or similar.)
Finally, the solution that worked for me was using one ID/password combo for sites that don't represent any security issues (e.g. Slashdot), another combo for sites that I don't particularly want people to snoop on (e-mail), and another one with an exceptionally hard password for sites that I really want to keep private, like banking and credit cards. But I wish there was an easier way.
Kudos on the subtle working in of Orwellian references. I'm just waiting for the mandatory telescreens. Let's see - complete FTTH installs, and one more 9/11 act - I'd say the over/under is five years.
http://auto.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090305.whautobuzz0305/GAStory/specialGlobeAuto/home
To answer my own question: it's much more difficult to get a license in Germany - you actually have to learn how to drive, including such almost unheard practices as getting your fat ass out of the left hand lane instead of blocking it at 55 mph, it's illegal to pass on the right except during traffic jams (and then can only be done at slow speeds), if there's an accident, drivers near the left lane move as far left as they can, and drivers on the right move as far right as they can; this creates an empty centre lane for emergency vehicles. It's completely unlike North America, where they only seem to care if you can make a left-hand turn at the light, and parallel park without hitting the curb.
There actually are speed limits on some sections of the Autobahn, and they post wet-weather "advisories", which you would be ignorant to exceed. But in dry weather and clear conditions, they seem able to drive at 130 km/h (about 81 mph), or even faster, while enjoying lower accident rates.
Education is the key; teach people how to drive and there would be far fewer accidents.
But seriously, I use Adblock Plus, and I haven't seen a porn or pop-up ad in months.
I was second in line at a red light a few years back, and some woman who was putting on lipstick rammed into me at 30 km/h. The shock was so great, my foot slipped off the brake pedal, and I hit the car in front of me. My insurance company only wanted to pay for the damage to the rear of my car; the adjuster told me I was obviously stopped too close to the car in front. What?! I had to take it up to their ombudsman before they agreed to pay. I changed companies the next year.