I am not one for public marriage proposals, but I don’t have a problem with this one if the bride doesn’t. This, on the other hand, is smackworthy. Coincidentally, a character in my first novel proposed along these lines. If I ever go back and clean that novel up, I have long-since decided that he won’t have. On the other hand, legos are a winner.
The Economist has a good article on spectrum, Verizon’s acquisition of it, and whether the whole thing is being handled like it should.
This is yet another reason I hate DRM. Look, if you want to sell it to us, then sell it to us. If you’re leasing it to us, then lease it to us. But don’t pretend you’re selling when you’re leasing. (Note: The Bruce Willis angle was bunk.) Copyright enforcement on the whole does lead to funny incidents like this.
Josh Barro proposes a “Race to the Top” for housing. I wish I could get on board with this as I support building up in addition to building out. I just don’t like using the federal purse strings to do it.
The Washington Post has a good post about sexual abuse by women against boys and how differently we respond to it. A more thorough look at the science behind pedophilia.
From 2006: A look at the awful coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Which the media still brags about.
I, too, hate this “fact-checking” fad. Investigating claims and putting them in context is helpful, but trying to grade a fact-check is a recipe for bias.
A mom doesn’t like the boy who is legally sniffing around her seventeen year old daughter. So what does she do? The invents a fifteen year old to entrap him and send him off to prison. Not that the perp acted with a great deal of class here, but the whole thing rubs me the wrong way.
Nooks are being banned from libraries because blind people can’t read them. This can be fixed with text-to-speech, which the Kindle offers. But oddly enough, you can’t just offer Kindles to some and Nooks to others. It’s like banning books that aren’t in brail.
President Clinton is concerned about the number of Americans enrolled in college. According to the Economist, he shouldn’t be.
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Text-to-speech isn’t offered on all ebooks–it’s something the publisher (or author if self-published) has to enable. For those who have sold the audio books of the novels (or are hoping to do so) turn that feature off.
I haven’t really used T2S much, but my impression is that it is a ridicuously poor substitute for an audiobook. Seems that a lot of them that have audiobooks still have T2S available. I’ll start looking more closely.
Josh Barro is probably not a moron. But he plays one on the internet.
Those who can borrow can do so at extremely low rates, but many first-time buyers lack the credit necessary to qualify.
Oh, that’s the salient feature of people who can’t qualify for a mortgage: they’re “first time buyers”!
State and local governments are often resistant to up-zoning. Incumbent homeowners are wary of construction noise and new demands on local services. They also know that restricting the supply of new housing will drive up the price of their own homes.
That’s why states and localities need a federal nudge to allow more building.
Liberalism in a nutshell: people like their communities the way they are; therefore, the federal government must foist change upon them.
On the one hand, women should be held to the same standards as men in the eyes of the law.
On the other, some things about the article bother me.
“People do not often recognize the harm this does to a boy.â€
This is never actually elaborated or supported. In fact, it’s the last we hear of actual harm.
The boys keep the abuse quiet, either out of guilt or, in some cases, because they believe such incidents are a rite of passage to adulthood.
The article never quite says that the boys may be deeply ambivalent about the experience.
When Gamble went to the boy, the teenager reached for a condom and then was sexually assaulted in his own bed.
In another context, Sheila once pointed out the inherent weaseliness of the term “sexually assaulted”.
And of course I can’t help pointing out that the perps in all three cases were single moms living in DC.
Mmmmm . . .
Liberalism in a nutshell: people like their communities the way they are; therefore, the federal government must foist change upon them.
Worth noting that Barro isn’t a liberal. Fair point about the claim about those that can’t get loans. I have to confess that I am not particularly enthusiastic about allowing communities to design themselves completely. I just don’t like the alternatives.
If Katrina had hit a poor, white trailer-park town in, say, the Florida Panhandle, and white refugees and white public officials had offered the media tales of rape and murder, would any of us have doubted their “eyewitness” or “official” accounts?
There’s no simple answer.
Maybe not, but I will say this: I will flat guarantee you that, had the media swallowed uncritically the official reports in the above scenario, subsequent revelations would not now be an occasion for media introspection. They would be an occasion for one paragraph on the “Corrections” page, and then the MSM would be off telling us how the TEA Party was responsible for the Aurora massacre or something.
Maybe not, but I will say this: I will flat guarantee you that, had the media swallowed uncritically the official reports in the above scenario, subsequent revelations would not now be an occasion for media introspection.
Maybe, though even as it is the media is still patting itself on the back for its histrionic, inaccurate reporting. Which actually surprises me a little because given the racial dynamics I would sort have expected at least more introspection. If not at themselves, but at the foolish and racist public for believing these news reports.
The Tea Party Aurora thing was pretty shameful, though I will at least give them credit for addressing it quickly. In contrast to the census-taker who killed himself in Kentucky, wherein it was evidence of simmering violence on the right until suddenly it wasn’t a story anymore.
“At the large research universities, the subsidization of graduate students is monstrously large,†Vedder said. “A student in a Ph.D. program sits in seminars of six and eight students taught by a professor making $150,000 a year and gets an extremely costly education.”
This is misleading. There may be marquee lecturers who get paid $150K for lecturing, but in general, any faculty member making that kind of money does it by bringing lots of funded research projects to the university.
Back at UC Berkeley, where he’s starting his freshman year, Howard Chiao, who is from Taiwan, already feels like the university takes advantage of international students.
“Sometimes I just feel a little bit like the school is trying to take too much money from us,†Chiao said. “It’s really a huge burden for us.â€
Um . . . Mr. Chiao seems not to understand why, exactly, he was invited to attend a public, state supported university in California. It wasn’t for his sparkling personality. Ditto for the out-of-state American students.
The inter-departmental, inter-year subsidies are admittedly more difficult to justify, but the problem is making sure you don’t make things worse by eliminating subsidies in one direction but keeping them in the other. For instance, grad students are subsidized by undergraduates . . . but grad students help run research programs that bring in money and equipment that undergraduates often use.
This is misleading.
That’s a good point. Especially for the sciences (then again, those outside of the sciences are unlikely to be making that much, I’d imagine).
Um . . . Mr. Chiao seems not to understand why, exactly, he was invited to attend a public, state supported university in California. It wasn’t for his sparkling personality. Ditto for the out-of-state American students.
Well, that’s not necessarily the only reason. My alma mater aggressively recruits out-of-staters with aggressive scholarships (which is how Web ended up in Colosse). Clancy was recruited with full-rides from a lot of out-of-state schools. So there’s the prestige factor.
When it comes to international students, though, I wouldn’t doubt that to be less the case.