It's not the size, it's the scale. Back then things were built with future in mind. These days it's about solving today's problem and screw tomorrow because we don't want to be seen spending more than we need.

Famously the Sydney harbour bridge in the 30s was built with 8 lanes, 2 trains, and a dedicated cycle track and pedestrian track. These days we solve congestion problems by spending millions to widen a road by one lane, only to have to start the project again when we're finished because in the 5 years it took to widen the road the traffic has increased yet again.

The CEO being new doesn't narrow things down much in this case.

Maybe the new CEO is getting rid of the bottom performing 20%.
Maybe the new CEO is reducing headcount by 20%.

Either case is common for new management, but both cases are handled very VERY differently from all sorts of legal perspectives.

You can't fire a faculty member because outside the scope of his duties he expresses an opinion you don't like -- even if it's a clearly crackpot opinion. If you could, Stanford would have kicked Linus Pauling out when he became a Vitamin C crackpot.

The difference, though, is that Pauling was a sincere crackpot -- brilliant people are often susceptible to crackpottery because they're so used to being more right than their neighbors. Dr. Oz is a snake-oil salesman; when he's faced with people who are educated -- not necessarily scientists but critical thinkers -- in a forum he doesn't control, he speaks in a much more equivocal fashion. That shows he knows the language he uses on his show and in his magazine is irresponsible.

So selling snake-oil isn't crackpottery, it's misconduct. But somebody's got to find, chapter and verse, the specific institutional rules of conduct Dr. Oz's misconduct violates. There will have to be due process, particularly if he's a tenured professor, which will probably require lesser disciplinary measures than dismissal be tried first.

or do you just stand against genetic engineering as we currently practice because you have an ignorant fear of what you don't understand?

I stand against genetically modified crops because I don't want fucking multinationals to own the intellectual property rights over basic foodstuffs.

this is what you represent:

And this is what you represent:

http://www.usnews.com/news/ene...

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/...

http://www.chemicalindustryarc...

Because make no mistake, those are the people who will own those rights. And they're the people saying GMOs will feed the hungry when GMOs are mainly targeted to countries where there are no hungry people.

I personally don't give a shit whether or not GMOs are safe. Hell if I cared about whether or not my food is safe, I wouldn't have eaten that burrito this afternoon from a street cart on Milwaukee Avenue run by the lady with prison tattoos. I care about what kind of sleazy motherfuckers are going to be gaining even greater wealth and political power from their iron grip on our food supply.

And, I'm also more than a little offended by people who say that consumers don't have a right to know the provenance of the food they eat. As if you've become some new arbiter of what information consumers may be allowed to base their purchasing decisions on. If I don't want to buy green socks, I don't have to buy green socks, even though they are every bit as safe as the grey socks I prefer. Does that mean that sock consumers must now not be allowed to see the color of the fucking socks in the package, because after all, green socks are functionally the same as grey socks? And if I don't want to buy GMO food, and you are hell bent against me finding out whether my food is from GMOs, we have a problem. Not because I'm denying some eternal law of Science, but because fuck you, I'm the one paying for that food. My purchasing your food is not some part of the social contract, and Monsanto making profit beyond the dreams of avarice is not part of some social contract, it's a simple consumer transaction. So if I want to know whether that sweet corn has been soaking in some Roundup lab experiment shit that has to be used in greater and greater amounts just to make the cockroaches drop dead, you'd better be prepared to tell me or no goddamn sale.

It's funny that our consumer economy has made a fucking religion out of people's purchasing preferences, but as soon as someone says, "Hey, I'd like to know if this food product came out of Doctor Motherfucking Frankenstein's lab" he is told, "No, you are not allowed to have that information. Just purchase and believe. Even worse, when a company did decide to state on their label that their products did not contain GMOs, motherfucking Monsanto sued them. Fortunately, they lost, but I don't think for a minute that this won't be revisited. When someone is so desperate to hide a single fact, to the point of spending billions fighting legislative and grass roots efforts just to make sure there is this one, single, scientifically-verifiable fact, that food product X contains genetically modified organisms that makes me suspicious as hell. Because when did it become "pro-science" to hide information from people?

Also, the studies on GMO safety have been extremely narrow, looking for toxicity and certain types of cancer-causing effects. There have been no studies at all on people who've eaten GMOs for 20 years, because they've only been selling GMOs to people for 20 years. Further, no studies on the overall health of people eating GMOs or life expectancy of people eating GMOs or effect of GMOs on developing children or senior citizens. Not a fucking one. And I don't know what's up where you live, but judging from the people I see walking the streets who eat the foods most likely to come from GMOs (ie: prepared foods), I would say it's not a shining endorsement of the health-giving benefits of GMOs.

So knock off the ad hominem attacks on people who want labels on food or who don't want to pay license fees for sweet potatoes. The use of "anti-science" accusations for this kind of thing is actually devaluing peoples' respect for science. That's how you get these whacko anti-vaxers and people who think the earth revolves around the sun. To a great extent the arrogant attitudes of scientific mouthpieces in fields as diverse as astrophysics, climate science and the gold-plated jackoffs who do "agricultural sciences" in campus buildings named after the owners of chemical companies who have created some of the deadliest substances on earth are actually causing people to lose respect for "Science" (as if it were some monolithic council of elders), and that's a bad outcome.

So knock if off before you get someone hurt. And just put the goddamn label on the package, OK? If you're so ashamed of where that food comes from, well that tells me something, too.

Think instead of huge sprinkler systems that spray millions of gallons you had a few solar powered robots running around spraying just the right amount of water on each plant right when the needed it, not too much and not too little.

Robots, bitches.

Anything not to admit what's happening.

QED, AC.

Not sure what reagan has to do with racisim

1. Reagan opposed all civil right legislation.

Reagan's transformation from actor to serious political figure began in the 1960s, first with a nationally televised speech on behalf of presidential candidate Barry Goldwater and then with his election as governor of California. This was also the decade in which the civil rights bills that ended legalized racism were passed ... and Reagan was on record opposing all of them, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Reagan continued this pattern as president by gutting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), fighting the extension of the Voting Rights Act, vetoing the Civil Rights Restoration Act (which required all recipients of federal funds to comply with civil rights laws) and initially opposing the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (he changed his tune when it passed Congress with a veto-proof majority).

2. Reagan vetoed and anti-apartheid bill.

Reagan further tarnished his record on racial equality when he vetoed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which imposed economic sanctions on South Africa that could only be lifted when that country abolished apartheid. Although Reagan argued this was because he worried the sanctions would prompt the South African government to respond with "more violence and more repression," critics pointed to his administration's close relationship with the apartheid regime, well-known belief that anti-apartheid groups like the African National Congress were Communistic, oversight of the decision to label Nelson Mandela as a terrorist and weakening of a UN resolution condemning apartheid.

Ronald Reagan was one of the most racist presidents we had in the post-WWII period. He and Nixon are 1a and 1b on that list.

http://mic.com/articles/85379/...

I'm having flashbacks to grammar school

Well, consider yourself lucky. I'm having flashbacks to the time I took three hits of yellow double-dome and thought I was Doctor Octopus. When I finally came down, I was naked under a railway crossing and covered in a substance that was eerily similar to sweet and sour sauce.

But enough about the good old days.

Sure but first lets do a study on race designation to see if it's worthwhile. In the case of gender it has already been done, and gender segregation appears to be significantly benefit the learning environment.

The key is choice. I would have been supremely pissed if there was only one choice, but there's not.

Yeah I know. I totally wanted to go to an all girls school when I was younger, but alas I am male.
But really that was unfair. The local all girls school had far better grades, why shouldn't I be allowed to go there?

Now I have a question for you: Would your sun benefit from going to a programming school setup for an all girls environment taught specifically in ways to maximise female learning?

People are not the same. This is just one step towards personalised learning. Find your son an appropriate school elsewhere, because I guarantee you there will be nothing magical about sending him to this school. If for some reason people don't hire people because they didn't attend this school, then start to worry.

I live in a country where about half of the schools are mixed, and the other half is one of either single genders. Some teachers union (my wife is a teacher I don't know exactly what the source was) did a study and determined that gender segregation benefits girls in terms of academic performance, but hurts boys for the same.

The wife's guess (who has taught at mixed and gender segregated schools) is that boys get competitive around girls, which seems to make some sense.

Age for one. It's been down there for over 60 years now, so a lot of it has decayed.

As someone above pointed out, the half-life Pu-239 is 24000 years. I don't think you can say that a "lot of it" has decayed in 60 years.

We can't get any large projects completed today. Not the International Space Station, a large hadron collider, or anything of that sort.

The origin of both of those projects was over a decade-and-a-half ago. And the LHC was built by Europeans, where the anti-government rhetoric hasn't reached the AM-Radio fever pitch that it has here in the US. You see a lot less of the "Get government out of my Medicare" sentiment in Europe than in the U S of A, where a gun for every person is the reason there is zero crime.

The statement was that we couldn't get those large projects completed today unless they can be shown to create a massive and ongoing profit to some rent-seeking corporation with legislators and governors in their pocket.

Song of the South isn't racist or offensive or anything. It's just not a very good movie.

It's just a simple tale of how slavery wasn't as bad as all that and how well the white landowners got along with their help.

The movie is racist enough that Disney stopped listing it in their film catalog, in 1980. If folks during the Reagan administration thought it was a little over-the-edge, I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that the Song of the South minstrel show was probably kinda racist.

What's wrong with Song of the South?

There it is. The contingent from Stormfront heard from.

It's Friday at Slashdot, when 8chan empties out and rises to smite all those SJWs who don't appreciate the educational value of racial slurs.