One woman had a miscarriage as a direct result of being kicked in the stomach repeatedly by police. (And, yes, she told be police she was pregnant, and that she was trying to escape to protect her unborn child.)
Is that enough violence for you? Or would you like more before you regard this as despicable?
This is the often-overlooked benefit of top schools. The most talented students tend to learn a lot from one another, and so you want to surround yourself with the smartest peers you can. If all the smart people were going to North-South Nowhere State University at Tinyville, that's where you should go. But they're not. They're all going to the "top" programs. So, if your smart, you should go there too.
There's no 'state-provided' street or sidewalk on which this business is taking place, nor a state-built thoroughfare upon which a consumer has to travel to visit a store.
Maybe your Amazon purchases are delivered by teleportation, but mine come via UPS or USPS. They use trucks, the kind that travel on roads. They often come to my city via planes that fly in airspace regulated by the FAA.
Yes, the US gov't invented the internet, but for at least the last dozen years every iota of bandwith on which our (consumer's) signals travel is paid for commercially, and the costs passed down to either we the consumers (through our ISPs) or the businesses (through their providers)
Yeah, thank god the government invented the internet so they don't ever have to invent anything ever again. We can stop paying taxes now because we've reached the end-of-days. Nope, no new ideas the government could fund with our tax dollars today.
- whatever actual physical location a business has somewhere, the services that they consume (fire, police, etc.) from the government are already paid for in their property taxes. Self-evidently there's no need for police services for the sorts of store loss-prevention actions (shoplifters, etc) for internet stores.
What about other forms of fraud like credit-card fraud? Large scale fraud that involve transactions that go across state lines are investigated by the FBI. Should someone pay for that?
People without subscriptions are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research
Is true for very little current research.
You're simply wrong about this. True the NIH requires submission to open access journals, and I trust you know what your talking about with the NSF. But these are not the only tax-based sources of research funding. First, there are non-U.S. sources. Even in the U.S. there are the departments of defense, education, and energy which fund huge amounts of research. Defense and energy do a lot in science and technology. On top of that you have state universities that are funded (less and less) by tax dollars from their states. They often support the research of their faculty with that money.
Take a look at the top journals in many fields. We are very, very far from free access to scientific research.
The "college is a waste of time" thing is purely economic advice, nothing anti-intellectual about it.
College might be a waste of time if you view the only benefit of college as increasing your earning potential. But, this view of college is anti-intellectual. There are other benefits to college other than monetary, and some people are willing to pay for them.
Most of what you do for money is bad for your bottom line. Buying that TV? That won't make you money. Going to the movies? Waste of money. But I'll bet you do some of those things. Why? Because the item or service you receive in return is valuable to you -- more valuable than the money you exchange for it. The same could be said in college. While the money you invest will not increase your earning potential proportionally, it still might be worth it if you value the intellectual rewards you get while there.
Freed from the normal constraints of supply and demand, tuition prices are no longer tracking closely to the cost to provide an education.
This is preposterous. If it was really the case that tuition exceeded the cost of operating the university, state funding and private endowments wouldn't be necessary. What crazy statistics did you use to determine this claim? Or did you just make it up because it sounded good?
The most impressive counter protests I've seen have involved soliciting donations. The Topeka symphony (I think) put out a person who was asking people to pledge $1/hour that WBC spent protesting to the Human Rights Campaign. That way every hour they spent protesting gave money to anti-homophobia organizations.
In those days everyone was a philosopher. But the heirs of historical philosophers are not those who call themselves philosophers today; rather, they're the followers of the he best and most successful branch of philosophy, natural philosophy - which we now regard as the distinct discipline of science.
What makes you say that?
There are plenty of contemporary philosophers who are active participants in science and who would be appropriately called natural philosophers. Now- a-days they're more often called "naturalists" (named by W.v.O. Quine). Contemporary philosophers, and citations to them, regularly show up in scientific journals.
While the greek word philosophia literally means "friend of wisdom", the common-day philosopher tends to stare at their naval and wonder if they even exist
Which "common day" philosophers are you referring to? How much common day philosophy have you read? I think it's fair to say that this problem is near death and has been for a long time. The problem was made famous by Descartes of course, but he's hardly "common day."
I - personally - find it frustrating that we listen to the naval-staring philosopher, and forget what wisdom is in the same moment.
I'm happy to hear that you think people listen to philosophers. How many people do you know that spend their time worry about the problem of existence instead of something else?
Your attitude about philosophers is common, people take an intro to philosophy course that focuses on rationalist thought of the 15th century and assume they now know the state-of-the-art of philosophy. Somehow people don't realize how stupid this is, even though they wouldn't dare assume they understood contemporary physics after taking physics 101. Philosophy has a very long history of contributing to major scientific breakthroughs. Here are a few:
1. Einstein, throughout his life, credited many philosophers including Hume and Kant with inspiring him to come up with special and general relativity.
2. Neils Bohr invented his preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics because we was inspired by Kant.
3. Adam Smith was a "moral philosopher." Before him economics didn't exist.
4. Psychology wasn't it's own discipline until very recently. Before that it was philosophy.
Meanwhile IT guys are basically treated like janitors.
The irony of your comment is that it reproduces exactly the line of thinking that you criticize. You realize that janitors, by having physical access to almost all parts of a business, are capable of more havoc than IT folks. They often have physical access to all the same systems that IT people do and much more. If potential to cause damage should correlate with compensation, I'd argue that the janitors should get paid the most in any organization.
University is a waste of money for most people who go
I hate these sorts of claims because they are absolute nonsense. How can you know if my university degree was a waste of money for me? Do you know how much I value the things I learned (both in and out of the classroom) at the university? No, of course not, because you don't know me. It's like looking at someone you've never met and saying that they were stupid to go eat at some particular restaurant.
Usually, these sort of studies assume that the only reason anyone would go to college is to improve their lifetime earning potential and then compare the average change in earning to the cost of the university. While this is an important consideration, it shouldn't be the prevailing one, and more importantly it shouldn't be translated into the only potential thing of value that might come out of a university education. We are all not mindless money generating machines that simply wish to take the quickest route to a buck. Some of us want to enjoy the journey too.
I am a far better person for my university education. Even if it cost me money in the long run, I'm happy I went.
The previous discussion is why the base rate fallacy is so dangerous. According to wikipedia, the base rate for autism is 6 / 1,000. That means a random child has a 0.6% chance of having autism. A test that raises that to 5% is a huge improvement (almost an order of magnitude).
Some people have speculated that the population explosion in African and Asian countries is caused by high mortality rates. When parents need children for farming, working, or for dowries -- and when there is a relatively high risk of the child dying before puberty -- people opt to have a lot of children to ensure that they survive to be productive.
I'm not saying I believe it, but one has to be careful in assuming that a decrease in mortality will necessarily mean an increase in population.
They're not people, nor are they moral actors, meaning there is no real good/evil associated with the company.
"Ninety percent of baseball is half mental." -- Yogi Berra
