Why is it you say you don't find ELIZA to be that effective as a program?

I predict the guy at Home Depot working the paint mixer will be a top performer.

This hasn't been shown by the data. Viewers are shown a limited number of ads. If women get a lot of women specific ads, they'll get fewer gender neutral ones.

My experience from tutoring math for years: I would get home school students who had surpassed their parents math skills. So there is some self selection bias of good students with parents who care enough to pursue additional math/physics through tutoring.

The level of socialization of homeschooled children that I tutored was superior in virtually every way. Whether they were homeschooled for religious reasons or not, they were well adjusted young *adults*, far more mature than the regular teenagers I know from tutoring and coaching on a daily basis. Homeschooled kids grew to be adults. They interact with me as an adult. They took on responsibilities in a much more adult fashion -- scheduling tutoring times, paying me directly, etc...

Everyone likes to hate on the religious nuts and lump all of homeschooling in with it, but that was never my experience. Also, as far as socialization goes, they typically aren't locked in a room all day. There are abundant resources and communities surrounding homeschooling that have the kids interacting with others on a daily basis.

My opinion (and my kids are in public school) is that the hate for public school is just hate with virtually no foundation. There may be examples of some homeschooling craziness out there, but it's probably under the rates of public school drug dealing, murders, assaults, etc...

They have a word for alternative medicine that works: medicine.

The key in the case of vouchers is that public funds are being spent by the public. While you may disagree with what is being taught, as long as they meet the standards of the state's education, these schools should continue to receive those funds. Dictating what religious values they may or may not teach would itself be a an establishment of religion.

The kids don't belong to the government and the money doesn't belong to the government. Let the crazies teach what they want to teach.

Additionally:

I paid more for my car because of airbags. Because of them, I can't seat a kid in the front seat. "The back seat is the safest place for a kid to sit" you say? It's the safest place for my wife to sit too, but I don't make her sit back there. I don't get a choice in the matter because my usage is dictated by the government.

Same thing with seat belts. We have basically the same seat belts we had 30 years ago. They can't make those better? They must be so good they're also used in F1, NASCAR and Indy. Not even close. Government regulation has completely stopped any effort to make seat belts safer for regular drivers by making any such innovation a liability to whoever tries it.

Most places in the US, the taxi service is highly regulated not merely for safety but for the purpose of excluding competition. The common "regulation" is that a new taxi service must show customer demand that requires their new service. This is typically overseen by a board of their competitors who never seem to agree that they need another competitor.

You're spot on about the near impossibility of starting a new cab in a lot of major US cities. The price of a medallion for a cab in NYC is roughly $360k for an independent operator. They have a fixed number and nobody else is allowed to participate, regardless of need or service availability.

The concept of "everyone should play by the same rules" is pointless with some groups are grandfathered in and allowed to play.

Having read some discussions of Uber in Sweden, I think, regulation just meant a proper license, posting fares and insurance. All relatively reasonable requirements of a regular taxi service. There are issues with the posting of fares as Uber is a one-off service of unique trips, but that's perhaps an issue of updating the law. There is still the problem of traditional taxi services using the law to prevent a new service from coming into existence. They aren't truly interested in the customer who this law is supposed to support.

We pay regularly for police response. We don't pay one big bill after the police show up. You present exactly the opposite case of how the environmental bills are split up (or not split up). We bear the costs of police, fire, education as a society. Some bones show up on a property which are deemed valuable to society (deemed valuable by some small group and some bureaucrats in actuality) and single land owners are responsible for the whole cost.

It is your greed that thinks someone else should pay for something you value.

Fundamentally, it is putting a value on the site, but putting the cost on the finder. The cost should be borne by those who value it, if that means "the people" then the government should come in and pick it up, possibly even paying the owner of the land for the use.

In this case, the government only values it as far as the owner can pay for it.

So we can't be free to go without a seat belt because we aren't allowed to be free from government interference in the medical marketplace?

Really, once you accept that a government hand in health care grants the government authority to dictate our actions, there is virtually nothing which is beyond the scope of the government.

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You put them in the rumble seat or the bed of the pickup and you can't hear a peep out of them.

A pile of money in Apple's account is significantly better for shareholders than sending it to the IRS when it wasn't owed.