No, I understood what you meant to say. I think you're the one that doesn't understand me :)

Like I said, regular marijuana use before 16 does not imply any of those things you said.

Let's say 10% of kids 14-16 are classified as "troubled" (whatever the hell that means, but I'm just using numbers as an example). Of those, 40% are regular marijuana users. Let's say 90% are "normal." Of those, 10% are regular marijuana users. That means, 4% of kids are "troubled" students who regularly use marijuana, 9% are "normal" kids who regularly use marijuana. That means 70% of the kids who are smoking weed are perfectly normal high school students who are trying out marijuana.

Now in that situation, the statement "troubled kid are more likely to be marijuana users" and "marijuana use does not suggest that the kid is troubled" are both true statements. That is what I am saying is what is actually happening. Obviously I just pulled the numbers out of my butt, but the example holds true.

Dang. They didn't teach any of the stuff at Carnegie Mellon? Did they not have software engineering classes in the curriculum? I would expect more from a top rate CS school like that.

I went to Utah and we had a solid two course software engineering sequence. Nothing terribly advanced, but did go over design patterns, naming conventions, testing, and error handling/logging. I don't remember covering anything about version control or extensibility. The beginning CS courses were taught in Java and we learned javadoc, although IIRC we weren't actually graded on comments, just reminded that we should be writing them.

I know it was a rhetorical question, but over the last dozen years the ideological right wing has grown incredibly powerful. Moderates in the Republican party have been pushed out, and anyone who doesn't conform is voted out in the primaries.

But it's not just the Republicans anymore. Beginning in response to the clusterfuck that was the Bush presidency, the far left has grown more powerful and over the last election cycle or two the same thing has started happening to the Democrats. So unfortunately now we have two parties that have become incredibly polarized ideologically. The moderates have been pushed out or retired and very few centrists remain in the legislative branch. Although the Republicans still rate a higher on the crazy scale, *both* parties have become less willing to compromise. And since neither side has a clear mandate, we have arrived at the situation at hand where we can't even pass basic legislation.

++. Can you find work in the industry without a degree? Absolutely, but you will find a lot more open doors if you have that piece of paper.

I actually had a full-time offer from a company I interned at for 3 years with stellar recommendations from everyone I worked for during that time period. HR wouldn't let me take the job until after I had graduated, and I had three years experience and positive performance reviews!

...you're misrepresenting what I said. I never said that "a teenager smoking marijuana implies X, Y, and Z".

I'm not misrepresenting it. That's nearly word-for-word exactly what you said:

It's also a socioeconomic red flag that suggests a lot of confounders: these kids came from the wrong side of the tracks, they've had crappy and neglectful parenting, they've dropped out of school or are on the verge of doing so.

See? That's literally exactly what you said, right down to the x,y, z structure of the statement. The only difference is you used the word suggest rather than imply.

The issue I take with that is that regular marijuana does not imply either 1) the kid is poor 2) they have neglectful parents or 3) they are failing at school. In my personal experience all of those things are wildly off-base, and I've never seen any scientific study that shows otherwise.

Yes, because marijuana is mostly illegal and people have a tendency to self-medicate, kids who are troubled are going to be more likely to use drugs. But marijuana use is so commonplace that this fact in no ways implies any of those things you are suggesting. Maybe in extreme cases where you have kids starting at age 12 or earlier, where recreational drug use is still an exceptional case, but 15 or 16 is a perfectly normal age for an average high schooler to start experimenting with marijuana use.

You are vastly underestimating the prevalence of marijuana use. Check this survey out. 36 percent of high school seniors report having smoked marijuana in the past year, 23 percent in the past month, and 6.5 percent are daily users. These *are* the kids that are taking AP Calc and gunning for the Ivy League.

You are correct that disadvantaged or troubled kids are statistically more likely to be using drugs, but everything you say after "socieconomic red flag" in your original post is so wildy off base it almost seems like you're trolling. Very successful people are regular marijuana users, most of those people started in their teens, and they are not in any way statistical outliers. The idea that a teenager smoking marijuana implies that they had poor parents or are on the verge of failing out of school is absurd.

Also, if you're 210 lb. at 24% body fat, that means you have 159.6 lb. lean mass. If you're at 10% body fat (which is about as low as most people can get without extreme dieting or marathon training) you'd be at 177.3 lb. That puts you at 30 lb. overweight, even using an extremely stringent standard.

You're missing my entire point. There is no "average" definition for overweight, and there is no standard definition for highly active. You can make generalizations when you're talking about populations, but when you're talking about individuals you have to take their individual circumstances and individual athletic and aesthetic goals into account.

20-22% is the minimum limit where you start to see negative health effects, and 25-30% is where you start to see dramatic negative health effects. Getting below 20% body fat is not going to make you healthier by any study I've ever seen. "Aiming for 15% body fat" doesn't mean anything as far as health is concerned.

FWIW, I do olympic-style lifting 3 times a week, and play sports 2-4 times a week. I *am* highly active. And if you saw me walking down the street, you definitely wouldn't think I was obese. I look like a big guy who lifts weights. But by some measures, I am obese. I also fall into the overweight category, but I guarantee that I am much, much healthier than the average person who is "skinny fat" but falls in the normal BMI range while eating a poor diet and avoiding exercise.

You can't capture all of that information in any one measurement, which is why you have to take into account the scope and limitations of whatever measurement you are using. BMI is a useful tool, but it is only useful in a very limited way. Body fat is more useful, but even that is not a proxy measurement for overall fitness.

Eat less.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

I have the same thing. My friends all think I'm ridiculous for working so hard to lose weight since I look normal and I'm very active. But I'm just under 25% body fat and 225-230 lbs. I may not be a huge lardass, but that's definitely an unhealthy body fat percentage.

I do sympathize with the anti-BMI feelings, though. It is only useful for people that are sedentary, and even then it is very generalized and can be misleading for people with certain body types. BMI is useful in the sense that it is incredibly easy to compute, especially for population-wide studies. But other, more descriptive measurements are far more useful and marginally more difficult to measure, particularly with regard to individual health.

For example, my BMI puts me at borderline Obese Class I and Obese Class 2, but by body fat percentage I'm on the borderline between average and overweight.

I strongly suspect you don't lose much weight just by exercise alone (although it may give you a better fat/muscle ratio).

Any sort of exercise is going to boost your appetite as well, so it all depends on how well you control your appetite. Something as simple as jogging for half an hour every day can cause you to lose quite a bit of weight, but it only works if you keep your intake at the same level.

Really? Who was "terrorized" last week? Steven Crowder got punched in the face after taunting union protesters, but he was being intentionally confrontational towards them and those people were arrested by the police and denounced by the unions. That's hardly terrorism.

And there actually is something stopping a union lead from taking advantage of his constituents. Unions are democratic. And while they are far from perfect institutions, like I said, to claim that unions are just as bad as corporations with regard to the working man, that the petty politics and corruption that exist in the major unions are even in the same realm as that tactics corporations have used against workers for the better part of two centuries, is patently outrageous.

Using SSNs for identification is foolish as well. They are not guaranteed to be unique identifiers (multiple people are sometimes issued the same SSN by the government and a whole lot more use someone else's SSN illegally), and not everybody is guaranteed to have one.

The system as designed was perfectly fine, because they never planned on using it for ID. But it's still operating largely as it did when it was first implemented even though it's now an ID card, so there are some half-assed hacks being made to try and make it marginally more secure. The government needs to just make a national ID card and be done with it.

How is that any different than the environment in the 70s and the 80s? That didn't stop them then. Go watch Harlan County, USA, and get back to us.