If you play with the definition of things then you can make the numbers be whatever you want. Read a report last week that more than 1/3 of those were people that were dropped at the beginning of the year (which means there's very little real gain in number of people insured), and 1/4 hadn't actually paid. So the number is just a topical headline that they feed the media so they can pat their backs, but breaks down under serious scrutiny. Like "we've deported more illegal immigrants than the previous administration". Truth is they changed the definition of "deported" to count people who were stopped at the border and turned around, which had never been counted as a deportation before. Meanwhile the Border Patrolman's union is complaining that the administration and DHS/ICE are making their job nearly impossible, but the media won't cover them, and they actually kicked the leader of the union out of congressional hearings.
But they're the most transparent EVER!
That's what this kind of initiative says. The implication is that it's the teacher's faults boys are doing better than girls at programming and they need to deliberately do more to even the odds. Is the female graduation rate lower because they're dumber and need more help from teachers? Are the teachers actively discriminating against girls? Or is the disparity because there are less girls interested in this field for entirely different and varying reasons? A doctor that asks the patient detailed questions and tries to find the root cause and then prescribe a drug is usually more successful than the one who just asks what you're feeling and writes a prescription to see what happens. Can't help but wonder if they investigated the source and magnitude of the disparity before putting together a misguided initiative like this.
"This is the future, and your vehicle will talk to other vehicles whether you like it or not."
*This is the future, and your car will have a backup camera whether you like it or not.
*This is the future, and we've "proven" eating beef is evil and you will have to eat plants, whether you like it or not.
*This is the future, and your privacy is a luxury which you will be forced to give up for the "greater good", whether you like it or not.
*This is the future, and "evil" money doesn't exist so you will live by an advanced, centrally controlled credit system which is "fair and equitable" whether you like it or not.
*This is the future, and the government will have its hands in all aspects of your life whether you like it or not.
Nazi eugenics were the future too, until people realized that its practical implementation boiled down to genocide. Now they're an ugly part of the past that should remind us we can't fix human. But doesn't stop "the enlightened ones" from trying because it makes us feel good. Now I'm not against the future. I have more LED bulbs in my house than most people, and I'm going to get a Tesla as soon as I can afford one. I hate red lights as much as anyone, but how much of our humanity will we give up for the sake of "the future". Let's just be careful with this line of thought where we must sacrifice everything for a Utopian future that will never exist.
That one is provable definitively every time even after some genius tries to make headlines and get a grant by trying to redefine "down". On the other hand, when you consider that the end of the last Ice Age predated the invention of the SUV by a few thousand years then you kinda have to stay open to different possibilities and keep an eye not just on the data, but also the assumptions that lead to the data. Particularly when there are so many variables and inputs.
I know how tempting it is to "tweak" a model to get the answer you want; I did it in college. And maybe that's part of it; these scientists should get out and actually be employed for a while instead of making a career out of being in an academic environment where the perception of what's at stake is more abstract.
Either way, calling science "settled" should be treated with great care. There was a time when disagreeing with "settled" science meant your ass.
You mean the United Kingdom? It's still there and seems pretty strong to me. The citizens, for the most part, seem to love their nationalized secondary education system. They tried moving back to a private system for a few years but hated it and switched back again.
"Seems" being a very appropriate term. Every "progressive" system is easy to get used to while ignoring the fiscal realities behind it. The U.S.'s $90 Trillion in unfunded liabilities come to mind. That's the conservative estimate; $120T according to more aggressive figures.
Eventually they'll find something soft and squeeze and then they'll own me. That's terrific! Let's also further minimize risk, so I have no idea what is wise and what isn't. This way I get to make others pay for my prospect-less liberal arts degree. That's so nice of them! Now everybody will get into college, even the less scholarly types who would be better off in trade schools, and graduation rates will plummet, and this new super efficient government program will be paying for those who flunk out and will exempt them from paying anything since they didn't graduate because the over achievers oppressed them somehow and they are the ones who should pay for drop-outs anyways. That's so sustainable!
We should make everything "communal"! Just like they did in that union that isn't there anymore. Or that other country that's still there imprisoning its dissenters and running them over with tanks. I love my Brave New World!
That's the key to success? Sounds like conservative values to me. Especially when the author says "Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking."
Among other detriments, contemporary American thinking assigns virtue to victimhood; a fallacy, for sure. It gives disadvantaged people a false moral high ground and one-sided sense of entitlement; an excuse factory. "Blame the system". Mean while the system has grown to be more of what it has been before, and people are still thriving and overcoming their hurdles.
Karl Marx is still dead wrong (see Communist Manifesto). Instead of going with it, he lamented progress as an enabler of the rich to get richer. For a guy who admired Darwin's work, his philosophy advocated protesting and complaining instead of adapting to survive and thrive, while he himself took advantage of the system. He had his sugar daddy Engels, and his wife's multiple inheritances to keep him going, while telling other people that the rich were screwing everyone.
The reason many immigrant groups thrive and surpass their previous is because they come here seeing not a system that is going to screw them, but a system they can take advantage of when they can, and a system they can go around when they can. Must be better than where they came from, otherwise they wouldn't see an incentive to being here.
You don't need the most expensive surfboard to ride the waves; to certain degrees of success and form you can even ride them with just a plank of wood. Anything is better than standing in the shore pouting while throwing stones at other surfers. Go out there and wipe out once or twice. I already wiped out once for a lack of Puritan impulse control, and I'm getting ready to go back out again and see what happens this time.
I wanted to setup my devel environment exactly once and use it on my home desktop, my travel laptop and be able to hand it off to my development partner and have him use the exact same environment.
Assuming both workstations are adequate resource-wise (RAM, CPU) to host a VM that runs all your devel tools then an external HDD with a VM disk works pretty well in my experience. I setup my repo on the HDD and I can clone the whole HDD and put a copy in my fire safe with my other drives.
I'd get a USB 3.0 or another fast link that both stations support. And get a big enough disk to host a big enough virtual disk file to make it static. The dynamic virtual disk file seems to slow the VM down too much. And remember that you have to keep enough padding for temp files for things like program setups, etc.
I like Virtual Box's networking and host/guest sharing options. I setup a host only link to connect to my remote repo to keep another backup of the repo.
My 2 cents...
Yes, they would have. Maybe not in the same fashion, but Blockbuster was one of the companies that was in bed with Enron when Enron was getting into the broadband bandwidth trading business. Interesting that both are now history.
"Who alone has reason to *lie himself out* of actuality? He who *suffers* from it." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
