Wrong link. You meant to point to this page, I think. (Your page addresses the salaries of probation officers, agricultural inspectors, and lots of other jobs, but not teachers.) The AFT's numbers show that schoolteachers, on average, make -slightly more- than $50,000/year. While I agree they're badly underpaid, one should also bear in mind that they don't work year-round and get much more vacation than most workers. They do work long hours, but so does everyone else.

Again, I agree their pay is abysmal when compared to their responsibilities and the qualifications we need from them. I can't help but feel our schools'd be in far better shape if we fired, say, 80% or so of the administration and gave their salaries to the teachers.

I daresay the authors helped a little.

Well, sure, but let's give Schnickies the courtesy of treating it as shorthand for a class of accidents. The overpass suicide, the drunk driver swerving in from another lane, the giant tumbleweed, the falling rock, and so forth. A deer in mid-train is a bit of a stretch, but there's any number of obstacles that could appear behind the lead car. It's a reasonable enough issue, if a poor choice for the specific case.

TFA is mistaken. The abstract says they were at 70%, which is fairly intense for an obese, sedentary person. The regimen was designed to burn 500 calories a pop.

The folks in this study were under close supervision, exercising fairly intensely. It's fun to trot out your favorite lines about exercise but that's not really applicable here.

While it's fun to trot out pet peeves, the study in this article controlled for that.

Eh? It talks about them in some depth. It notes that RI's patents are pending so it can't sue until they issue, but it can amend them to strengthen a potential action. It has some discussion of their copyrights, as well.

Well, yes, at least indirectly. A portion of our taxes go toward buying food for the poor. It's called "food stamps", and I believe every state has such a program.

And occasionally the government has a bright idea. When farmers are having pricing troubles, the government sometimes purchases a portion of their crops at a low cost to give to the poor. This raises the price of those crops and simultaneously feeds hungry folks. Society as a whole benefits (since farms create wealth and help provide security for the country, so it really is bad for them to fail).

Finally, the government gives tax breaks to people and companies that assist the poor through charity. Some of these charities help the poor get regular meals. Most folks, whether they agree with the above programs or not, seem to agree that this system is useful.

So, yeah, in our society I have the right to compel folks to feed me. I can't walk into farmers' homes and help myself from their fridges, no, but throughout the nation, at both the federal and state levels, we've voted to make sure people have access to food regardless of their financial circumstances.

Spoken like someone who has never read past the Preamble. Article 1, Section 8:

Emphasis mine, in case you have trouble reading all that, too.

That was such a fascinating story, I called up John O'Connor, Water Superintendent for DeQueen. Despite almost two decades with the city's water department, he knows nothing of such a man and denies that the city has used dowsing in his tenure or, to his knowledge, in his lifetime. Nor is he familiar with any local legends of such a thing. Since the department employs only 70 people, I'm pretty sure Mr. O'Connor is familiar with them all.

I assume your father-in-law's acuity with the "witchin' sticks" is equally fictitious, and that your personal experience is simple wishful thinking.

I, too, voted "blank". I used about:mozilla for years, since before Firefox, but with FF3 I was compelled to change over to about:robots.

Sure, and I agreed that speedometers are rough. You even missed some significant stuff like temperature and tire pressure. (Changing tire sizes, which you mentioned, isn't really a factor tho', since in theory you're required to recalibrate after doing so: That's a user error, not a fault of the device.)

Speedometers in the US can be off by as much as 5% coming out of the factory, and it's not uncommon for them to be operating with a 10% margin of error. No argument that they're not precise. I just wanted to raise the point that mathematics aren't a factor; the errors are due to limitations in engineering, manufacturing, and consumer budgets, not in our ability to calculate.

Are you insane? We have as exact a value for pi as we need, far more accurate than any machine tools we can construct. Accurate enough to measure the entire universe down to Planck values, if it comes to that. Speedometers are rough, but it ain't because we don't know enough digits of pi.

Well, neither of them, but that's neither here nor there.* The trouble with the analogy is that I don't ask my accountant for social justice and civil liberty protections. The other trouble with it is that you're stacking the deck: There's quite a few successful community college grads and failed Harvard men.

Would you choose the accountant who has a family with good connections and old frat brothers in the biz, or the one who grew up in a trailer park but made good for himself? What if the only one you heard about was the former?