Well, I read in the newspaper the other day, that someone at the Repulican party convention had compared George Dubya Bush favourably as on par with Winston Churchill as a great war-time leader. PULLLUEEEEEASSSSE! Winston Churchill managed to rally a disheartened nation to his side, through his fiery rhetoric. He is widely recognized as one of th
Just curious, but again using generalizations, do you think that it is possible that some families that are more "well off" feel the need to protect a certain image and thus are quite careful about harshly rebuking their children in public while "poor" families feel they have no image to be concerned with due to their socioeconom
Again, people, it's definately a generalization. There's lots of nice poor folks out there - hell, some might have seen my many posts defending the poor on these very shores. No, I'm not in law enforcement. Nor am I a social worker. Nevertheless, I have found what I stated to be *generally* (a gross generalization, to be sure) true. When I'm working in the rich part of town, almost all the parents talk to their children in quiet ton
Does that mean we shouldn't bother? No. If I were emperor, I would require every house to have a solar cell put on its roof. I think that's a great idea and have often wondered why cities and counties haven't demanded that in their building codes. They're often the ones to lead this kind of change, the
Now, bear in mind, I am very skeptical that the earth's temperature is being significantly affected by CO2 emissions. I'm confused. Your sub-title says global warming is moving from theory to fact, yet here you seem to argue the opposite. What's up?
Just to clarify the rules here - you've got to post something that's bizarre on the other side too (liberal). Otherwise, the umpire will have to make an unfavourable ruling! JW
In my full-time job, I often appear at people's homes unexpectedly and have the opportunity to view their homes from top to bottom. That means I get to see a slice of life as it exists for those people, at that moment. I also get to see the full-price spectrum - from the wealthy through to the poor. And what I hate most about the poor is the way
But it once did. Now, not so often .... anyway, any examples you can think of? JW
Why is it that "Conservatives" these days promote little conservation, but instead tend to be the most voracious consumers? Why do "Liberals" tend to support legislation impeding liberal trade with other nations? Why do Conservatives tend to argue that any form of legislation promoting environmental conservation is bad, while Liberals think that
CO2 is known to increase heat retention and therefore cause global warming, but so what? Many other greenhouse gases are far better at this. CO2 is not the major player. This is not true. While there are sustances much better at trapping heat than CO2 (such as methane, and CFCs for instance), the shea
We should be making sure that our poor have the essentials -- and they do. I thought I'd comment on this, in light of the UN report - here, they show that a person with an income at less than one half the median is more likely to die early (before 60 years old) in the US than in any other westernized co
But when you manufacture statistics based on what % of the households fall below the half-the-median mark, that is meaningless. I'm not disagreeing with much of what you say - absolute poverty is what counts the most - but to say that this statistic is meaningless isn't quite true either, imo. Countries
Hi Brad, A couple of comments and observations: 1. You rented a whole house for $500 a month - wow! Most places I know of you couldn't get a one or two bedroom apartment for that price. 2. Utilities of $100 per month would be also very, very, cheap. My tenants average $100-$120 month, for an 800 sq.ft. unit - with mild winters (much milder than Michigan). So as far as that goes, I very much doubt that would be the norm.
You have to weigh the cure with the illness though. In so doing if you overestimate the danger, you settle for more dangerous fixes, and risk harming yourself more with solutions. Yes, I've seen some bizarre things proposed to try to ameliorate global warming. One, would be to fertilize the ocean with m
Oops, double-checked my memory via the internet. Turns out the "nuclear kid" was a Princeton junior, and the year was 1977 not 1978 - read the fascinating story here ... Link JW
Nothing wrong with believing in a hypothesis. Nothing wrong with trying to prove a hypothesis. But when you assume that your hypothesis is a foregone conclusion, and blindly hold up every disjointed detail you can find as proof, whether you ca
Bill Joy (co-founder Sun Microsystems, Chief Scientist [until he recently quit the post]) "Our problem is no longer "going faster," getting to the future as fast as possible, but rather dealing with limits - limiting our own greed to avoid disaster in the environment and limiting what rogue individuals and stat
Cliche or not, it's really hard to ignore the mess we're making of things. One practically has to shut off contact with all forms of news to be able to effectively ignore it. Ignorance is bliss, so they say. I often wonder how people can pretend things aren't pretty f***ed up. I find that quite interesting and would like to see the some science on how people can manage to ignore that. Anyway a couple of your statements aren't factually correc
1. Using just a 5-gallon bucket and a 3-gallon bucket, can you put four gallons of water in the 5-gallon bucket? (Assume that you have an unlimited supply of water and that there are no measurement markings of any kind on the buckets.) Yes. Fill the five gallon bucket full. Pour from there into the three gallon bucket, until full. This leaves two gallons in the 5G bucket. Empty the 3G bucket. Now pour the 2 gallons from the 5G bucket into the
Science shouldn't be so susceptable to that, especially in such an enourmously complex system as the earth. Why not? "Science" is simply about applying a logical method to look at any question of curiousity. We certainly didn't make our huge advances in the last 100 years by ignoring things that bo
oops, sorry, i wus having some trouble with my computer - then I tried to delete it ... well, the story goes on and on ...
I imagine having a site populated with well-written blogs will attract more people paying for those premium accounts (when that happens). Sites populated with crappy blogs would, I suppose, have trouble charging anything for premium accounts. So in the sense that popular bloggers here are building up the popularity of this "free" site - I suppose thinking about those folks like their important customers wouldn't hurt the bottom line (when it arrives in
But then Yuri gave his head a shake, as he noticed Cammi didn't seem interested in his Alpha 6 days. He looked at her wistfully, wondering what it would be like if they could develop some real rapport. Yuri knew the reason that he couldn't be as intense as her, was that he just couldn't shake the feeling that the separation from his wife was only temporary. He just seemed to drift in and out of things, always letting others control the outc
To those of you old enough to remember, don't these times remind you of the early 1970s? 1. Oil price escalation amid supply concerns; 2. Evidence of inflation, amid weakness in job growth (anybody remember the term coined for this? "Stagflation"); 3. An increasingly unpopular war begun for what turned out to be, in retrospect, dubious reasoning;<
Mig, I love your thoughtful posts. One a while back (Jujitsu of the mind??) helped me - a line that went something about that the dog doesn't worry about every ant scurrying by - or something to that effect. JW
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