Which was at least partly in the book: ""Good heavens! Can you ask! Goblins fighting and biting in the dark, everybody falling over bodies and hitting one another! You nearly chopped off my head with Glamdring, and Thorin Was stabbing here there and everywhere with Orcrist. All of a sudden you gave one of your blinding flashes, and we saw the goblins running back yelping. You shouted 'follow me everybody!' and everybody ought to have followed. We thought everybody had. There was no time to count, as you know quite well, till we had dashed through the gate-guards, out of the lower door, and helter-skelter down here. And here we are-without the burglar, confusticate him!""
Bill Gates is new money, but his father has considerable wealth as well. If those two weren't as committed to philanthropy as your average billionaires are, then the children of Bill and Melinda Gates would inherit several enormous fortunes.
The Koch Brothers inherited from their father, and the five Waltons on the list inherited from theirs. That means over half of the wealthiest individuals in America inherited a considerable fortune.
In forty years this list will no doubt the heirs of other fortunes.
> It certainly can be and these days it's doing more harm than good but part of what was great about the news is that it took the burden of thinking away from people.
No, it's the truth. Absurd is taking a single sentence of what I wrote and pretending like that was my entire point. Put that in context and you'll understand how it isn't absurd (didn't Joel recently write about that too).
The news is about reporting facts but facts are meaningless without context. Journalists take facts and put them into the proper context so that we don't have to. This isn't a new idea. It's been around for as long as there's been news and while some hacks do it badly and purposely distort the facts it doesn't mean doing it in and of itself is a bad thing.
I stand by what I said. Unless you've got a whole lot of time on your hands it's awful hard to put facts into context the way journalists do. I'm glad they take the work out of it for me because I have a job and I need to eat and I don't have time to play reporter and get my own facts so that I can some pure ideal version of the news. But I still need the news because I need to make informed decisions about things that affect me like where political candidates stand, how the new health care law affects me and if they recalled my car or some toy because the engine spontaneously explodes or the toy has some chemical that's going to kill my kid. I want to hear these things from people whose jobs it is to find out these things and not from Joe Schmoe who works at the local Walmart who read it from a guy who works for the guy that some news is about.
Re: recent health care legislation. I can help you there.
If you gross > $350k/year it is not good for you personally, if you gross <$ 100k a year it is a great law for you personally.
Spend 15 minutes talking to a Canadian, an American without insurance and medical bills, and anybody rich enough to have been able to afford health care at the mayo clinic, and you would discover this.
The meta point I'm trying to make here, is that we would be better served by discovering these things on our own, than into buying the propaganda around "death panels" or believing Obama when he says we won't make you wait in line for health care - both positions advocated by the various mainstream media channels.
Perhaps not to you. Depends on where you stand on personal vs. political.
Personal: how much do your impressions of a candidate's personal qualities (trustworthiness, courage, honor, etc.) determine your vote.
Political: how much do your political desires, i.e., policies the candidates have pledged to adopt that will influence our interpersonal (political) lives (taxes, social services, regulations, etc.) determine your vote.
Because of your the question, I'm guessing your vote is determined by the political.
The most cynical about politics (e.g., all politicians are corrupt) tend to be the most political.
And vice versa: the candidate will choose the right thing to do, because he is so intelligent, trustworthy, knowledgable, honorable, etc., etc. It may not be what I think is the right thing to do, but he is so intelligent, trustworthy, knowledgable, honorable, etc., etc., he will know better than me.
I feel like Hacker News is probably dominated by political voters. But not everyone feels the same as Hacker News habituants. And to play devil's advocate, if I were faced with the collapse of the financial system in 2008, and I were told "Decide." My response would be, "Err." I might not want to be so political in my thinking. I might just want to choose someone who seems great and say, "Deal with it."
And of course, as with so many determinations made by us wonderful beings called humans, it is almost never an either/or determination, and there is a rich interplay between the two that is hard to fathom let alone to model. If you fundamentally don't trust a person, it won't matter how much their political agenda matches your own. Also, "the personal is political."
If someone points out someone else I admire is a criminal, I would approach it a different way. It has less to do with what I want to call archetypal and more to do with the historically observable fact that what is legal is not always what is moral. Murder, torture, slavery, etc. These have all been legal in some past (or present) context. The possibility that someone who is acknowledged as a decent person could be a "criminal" is no surprise to me, and I'd rather argue to that point than dismiss the whole argument.
And even if I support abortion rights, the act is technically killing. A 'life' is terminated. Regardless, I'd point out that murder holds a different connotation that implies hatred or ill-will (or "malice aforethought") toward the victim. Same with euthanasia.
Why not take these as opportunities to explore the meanings and limits of a word? One person's definition of what is the archetypal murderer or thief or racist may easily differ from yours depending on their own experiences.
Exactly! Once you've heard that someone's opinions disagree with your worldview, why read anything that person has to say? Sounds like a good way to live.
> Our schools are not failing students because they are too hard. They fail because few schools expect anything from their students and shy away from challenging their minds.
I think this is close to the mark, albeit vague. Challenging their minds in what way? Such a statement could be misinterpreted as, "We need more rigorous test standards!" or some other specific solution that does not necessarily meet the goal.
From personal experience, for classes other than upper-level math at my college, people would constantly ask questions like, "Is this going to be on the test?"
And I was always annoyed by that. It seemed indicative of the meaninglessness of our education, and I can see why math classes are so difficult for people who learn this pattern rather than the subjects. I don't know how different it is at Ivy League or other schools perceived as high in quality, but when the majority of testing is multiple-choice, true-false, or fill-in-the-blank, it becomes easy to look at everything you learn as a task of rote memorization. It's like that saying: when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The difference with math that makes it so "hard" is you often can't rely on rote memorization. You have to actually learn the material (or understand algorithms and memorize steps to finding solutions with different initial conditions). People get discouraged (probably early on) by the fact that the skills they use for academic success elsewhere do not always work with math, and I think they associate those negative emotions with "math is hard."
I don't know the solution, but I think people need to at least realize that rote memorization is not indicative of learning. It's an uncomfortable realization because so many of our metrics for academic success rely on the assumption that memorization equals learning or understanding.
Of course, that's unlikely. The status quo is always easier. Why do we expect so little from adults?
Don't forget the "Kickstrap Only" OLCG on the Scaffolding page. It misses the point of Bootstrap's fluid nesting that does a much better demo of the same functionality halfway down the page.
