w00pla

This seems like a really bad article - trying to compare "white supremacy" to "gender stereotypes".

There is a huge difference between a child killing himself (suicide) and lynching. The author should maybe consult a dictionary if he/she does not see a difference. The author also seems to be a proponent for “legal solutions” to playground taunts – this is just ridiculous.

Everyone has stereotypes and prior beliefs, society and subgroups have many unspoken rules. This clearly is not the place for laws to regulate stereotypes and beliefs. Everyone gets bullied and everyone gets taunted (I was too).

The question should be why the depression in children was not noticed by either their teachers or their care-givers. Surely someone would notice if something was seriously wrong with a child?

Another problem that is often overlooked and not adequately addressed is the incidence of depression in children.

I guess this author had a prior axe to grind though.

> Of the ongoing conflicts with 1000+ deaths per year, 6 are in Asia and only 2 are in Africa.

Can you give a citation?

As an example, South Africa is basically engaged in a civil war with itself (22,000+ people die violent deaths).

Zimbabwean life expectancy fell by more than 20 years - more people die there. Zim is basically a civil war (which nobody would acknowledge). Eastern DRC - easily more than a thousand, the same with Sudan.

Also note that sub-Sahara Africa only has a population of 700 million. Asia has a population that is two to three times larger.

> The coup in niger was for an actual breach of democracy - the democratically elected president tried to overstay his term, and he was stopped by the military.

You are ignoring a few things - the ruling parties is becoming incredibly intertwined with government (i.e. it is not democratic anymore, even if they hold elections). Sure, it is a bit more stable - but I doubt that it is better.

There were also recent coups in Mauritania, Madagascar.

> Africa's most robust economies, such as those in Ghana, Botswana, and South Africa

South Africa is not nearly seeing a “brain gain”. We lose qualified professionals to first world countries, yet only get semi-qualified people from other African countries (a nett loss for Africa). Along with the little qualified people that we get from other African countries, we also get 4 million+ illegal immigrants.

At almost all research institutions, the average age is high. South African universities (the best in the continent) are dropping spectacularly off international rankings (e.g. Shanghai Jiao Tong world ranking). All research indicates that South African research is declining in both quality and quantity (e.g. this article: http://www.up.ac.za/academic/iti/SA_Research_publication_rec... and other articles by the same author).

By and far, the industries in many African countries are driven by mining, with the state creating an artificial middle class of useless civil servants.

The apparent growth that Africa experienced in the past 5 years is just an extension of the commodity boom – the same structural problems remain. Corruption is still there, education is still shit, etc… It can be said that the countries are more stable – but that is all.

They leave out the Angolan example – the majority of investment in that country is done by Chinese companies in exchange of oil.

> Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest black entrepreneur, has also cashed in on this consumer culture, with a net worth of $2.5 billion, according to Forbes.

They also leave out the part that he is heavily connected with the ruling party of Nigeria. There are many entrepreneurs such as this – basically African Oligarchy (other examples are Tokyo Sexwale, Patrice Motsepe, etc…).

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I may sound negative, but I really have doubts in the past year about the future of South Africa in particular. It seems that corruption is now completely untamed and the ruling party are infighting on who gets the spoils of the government tenders (so called “tenderpreneurs”). The Mbeki government at least had the decency to try and hide the corruption.

Secondary education is basically on the verge of death (in spite of ever increasing allocation of budgets) and the government is doing its best to destroy the last functional universities.

People on all sides of the spectrum in SA are starting to get sick of the system. White people are sick of crime and taxation, poor black people are sick of living in squalor (with nothing changing in the past 20 years). There have recently been quite a few flair-ups of “service delivery” protests (black people that protest because nothing is done to their plight – e.g. in Balfour, Baberton, Khutsong etc..).

Can they then at least pick one scraping site from all the others (to prevent duplicate information)?

Although this is perfectly legal, there is quite a few big sites that scrapes Wikipedia and adds ad-sense. If you are searching for a narrow topic, page 1-2 is WP and WP copies.

As a sidenote - I see that Google Search has upvotes, comments and deletes in the search - yet it does not seem as if anyone uses it. Why? Why can't the user at least blacklist sites?

The question is: why doesn't google do anything about this? There are countless such pages. Why not just blacklist domains? Or artificially give them lower pagerank?

Or is it okay as long as they get ad-sense money?

That is true. The UK's highly skilled VISA system is much better - if you have a certain education + X years experience you get a visa and you can work and change jobs. With the US system, you can't even change jobs (if you quit, you have to find a new job in a short time, otherwise you get kicked out).

> I was actually fortunate enough to attend a presentation that the first author gave just a couple of days ago.

Extremely off topic: I remember implementing an algorithm from the second author almost 10 years ago (before soul-crushing college and work) of the second author (when he was at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill). The algorithm was called " View-Dependent Simplification of Arbitrary Polygonal Environments" (from here http://luebke.us/#Papers). The algorithm was quite awesome – it allowed view-dependent simplification – even for indoor environments.

The seat should be half-reclined (not movable). The most important thing is that the seat should be solid. Nothing is worse than sitting on a 12 hour flight in front of a guy that kicks your seat (or sticks his feet on your armrests).

China already produces a lot of people with higher skills (design & development, etc...). It is probably going to be fine.

African countries should start to worry - the time when the development goes from

commodities -> manufacturing -> development

to industrialize your country is coming to an end. In most African countries there are no industrial development (taking advantage of low cost labour). The economy is commodities& subsistence farming.

> The CEO of Wal-Mart has, at any given time, thousands of delivery trucks on the roads, trucks that contribute to traffic congestion, increase the risk of accidents, cause potholes, and spit out harmful emissions into the atmosphere.

Doesn't the USA have corporate tax? Shouldn't corporate tax (and things such as fuel levies and business levies) pay for the cost of roads?

> However they're the religion that best learnt (even if by force) that science must be respected.

The notion that there is (or must be) a conflict between religion and science is fallacious. It is an idea currently extremely popular with 20 y/o know-it-all angry atheists – but it is far from the truth.

Another popular related idea is that “you can’t be religious and be a scientist” and that religious people are of lower intelligence (the latter is usually proved with a pseudo-scientific “statistical” argument).

> My point is rather that without evidence and facts it gets much easier to manipulate debates with ideologies.

My biggest problem is that popular secular humanists try to pass of their ideology as “science” – and doing it on the public dime too (while working at educational institutions). Neither the church nor certain secular humanists have a monopoly on the truth or scientific fact.

> I see the debates on forums and blogs as being mostly heavy on opinions and weak on facts. And I see religion as a form of ideology.

Most internet debates are nothing but a circle jerk. I increasingly see pop-atheism as an ideology too. Nothing ruins social sites (such as reddit.com, digg.com) as quickly as the influx of angry close-minded atheists.

That is one of the things that make ycnews nice – there aren’t that many ideologues, and even those that are there, are well mannered and moderate.

Maybe. The advantage of private schools is more choice. The problem (at least here) is that public school teachers are unmotivated and discipline (of both teachers and students) is often lacking.

It seems that public schools cater for the lower 40% of the population.

My problem is not bullying per se, but the atmosphere around it. A school should not be sport centric (as many schools are).

The Catholic Church is scarily in tune with the latest scientific thought (I say this as a protestant).

I would not be surprised if they have an army of economists.

I’m not American, but these things seem universal – sport jocks (rugby, football, etc…), ineffectual unionized teachers and anti-intellectualism. It seems public education systems are everywhere uninspiring at best.

That doesn’t really sound like a convincing argument. Didn’t Hitler use state organs (such as public schools and public broadcast) to further his agenda?

> How would you feel about this case if the home schooling did not involve Christians (Note: I'm not religious myself.), but radical Moslems?

You are talking about hypothetical radical groups as a “scare tactic”. Most Muslims who go to religious schools end up as pretty responsible adults. I doubt that trying to send devoted Muslims to public school (and then trying to force them to not wear headscarves – such as in France) will help anything.

> What if it were about Nazis indoctrinating their kids with hate?

Again, this is extremely rare (if non-existent). Also, is it the state’s prerogative to teach children moral values and political values, or is it the parent’s duty?

Don’t you think that public schools will reflect the ruling party’s ideology? (This happens in many countries). So in effect, would you rather let the ruling party teach your kids moral and political values than the parent? (Take a look at the content of history books in many countries to see this).

Here is the problem with public school – it seems that it is an anti-intellectual place. I was bullied quite a lot in school (I was skinny, academically inclined and have extremely bad eye sight).

It seems that bullies single out people who do well academically to bully. In a lot of public schools, it seems that the focus is more on sport (and other activities) than education. In some public schools, teachers are lazy – due to the lack of performance evaluation and strong unions.

I marked one of my own record exams because the teacher was too lazy to mark it himself. He was angry at me because I insisted to have the subject in higher grade (he pushed everyone to take standard grade so that he doesn’t have to compose two tests).

Certainly, a private school would be better. But parents should have the choice on how their children are schooled (whether in private school, home school or religious school). It seems that every group wants children to be schooled in their public schools to teach them their ideology. This is BS.

The government should be forced to give vouchers to people who send their children to private school (instead of forcing to pay twice for education if they don’t want the mediocre government education).

It may be easier to teach your cat not to leave cat turds lying around than to teach your robot not to run over them...

I've heard (don't know if it is true) that the first sections of the bible were only oral history. Most of it only got written up during the exile in Babylon.

I don't know if it is true or not, but I think it should be taken into account that such things might happen.

It is pretty impressive though that Jews have a 3000? year history - which is pretty unique. My people were still clobbering Romans over the head with blunt instruments 1500 years back.

Also pretty impressive that they have a history that is 3000 years old - yet I can't seem to find 12 year old Geocity pages...

\offtopic

For someone that has a Kindle/KindleDX/Nook: How good is the Kindle/Kindle DX for technical books? I want to buy one (since I am immigrating and will lose all my textbooks).

Is it good for technical books - since the page turn speed is apparently very slow? Will the iPad be better for this?

> Not big of a deal, until someone who is pregnant, immunocompromised, or of adult age with lowered/no immunity to chicken pox gets

Immunocompromised and old people (and high risk people such as doctors and nurses) should be vaccinated if they did not have Chicken Pox as a child. The same goes for yearly flu vaccines (which are only given to people that are immunocompromised or old).

But there is no reason to immunize everyone else.

> but it is quite selfish to think it's only about the child in question.

That is an extremely bad argument (and usually used to justify the removal of a parent's responsibility over his child).

> But parents will take that as an excuse to not vaccinate their kids until their kids have probably had sex, at which point it might be of reduced use as your kid might already have been exposed. Is that really something that should be acceptable?

A parent is a child’s guardian until the child is of age. You mentioned HPV. Yet that is a perfectly preventable disease. Why not let the parent’s decide for their children – and then let the child decide for him/herself when they are of age.

Btw, the phenomenon of teenagers having unprotected sex with multiple partners is a consequence of dysfunctional American culture. In many other countries it does not happen this way. I recently read a story about a school in Oregon (if I recall correctly) that gave out condoms to 13 year old children. This is fairly shocking.

Most countries with these problems have high unemployment - so increasing the number of healthy workers would not do anything for their problems.

> 2. We test vaccines exhaustively and have decades of field data about them.

Other medicines are also tested. The problem with vaccines are that they are incredibly widely used (millions of kids get them). Thalidomide also managed to get to the market in the past (and was deemed safe) – and severely affected thousands of people.

So, the barrier of safety for vaccines should be much higher than general medicine.

> 3. Children receive vaccines only against diseases which are very dangerous to children and not impossible to get.

The problem is the long vaccination schedule in the USA. It is much larger than most other first world countries. This vaccination schedule still doesn’t include the extra shit that is pawned off by private doctors.

A good example in the adult schedule with which I am familiar is Hepatitis A. In most sensible countries, only health workers are immunised for HepA (you need periodic booster shots, etc…). Yet it is on the USA’s vaccination schedule. Hepatitis A is rarely fatal (only in people with reduced immune systems).

Another example is chicken pox – the symptoms are mild (especially in children) and you get immunity from one instance. I had chicken pox and it wasn’t that big a deal.

Now, another problem I have is that every time a person with a baby goes to a doctor, he tries to pawn off vaccines – some of which are not on the schedule and most of which are not necessary. This is BS.

So, to make my point clear:

1. Vaccines are extremely valuable and necessary and are a modern day miracle

2. Vaccines should not be used to remove any diseases which may cause discomfort – vaccines should not be on the schedule if the disease is not life threatening.

3. It is the parent’s choice and obligation to check its vaccines. Don’t trust a doctor that says “trust me” or wants to pawn of this season’s newest (and most expensive) vaccine. Parents should take charge of their children’s health care.

4. Since vaccines are widely used (all small children) the bar for new vaccines should be higher. New vaccines should not be mandatory or on the list.

The problem is not with vaccination - but the amount of vaccines (which is getting pretty ridiculous).

Many of those famous books are famous only because people read them and feel cultured and sophisticated (IMHO).

You have never used a Nokia N70/N73. I press a button and then go for a coffee break.

Or just a USB port to plug in a mouse.

What would also be nice is that if it has a USB port so that you can download movies/books from your PC to the tablet. And it also should charge through USB...

There is only one reason: books.

I have a shipload of textbook that I will lose when I go overseas. One textbook easily costs $100+. A tablet or kindle like thing would work perfectly.

At the moment the kindle's page turn speed is too low for a technical book though.

> I don't use AdBlock. I use a popup blocker, but I think if I am looking at a website I should at least give them the basic revenue of viewing the advertizing.

I block gifs and Flash. It is moronic to have text on screen and then have something that is moving in the corner of your eye. You simply can't read it (and if you can, it is not enjoyable).

Why do you guys work with a GPA system? Why not use percentages?

What is a 4.0 GPA in percentage?

There are some striking similarities.

> In our case all candidates are reasonably corrupt.

Our previous batch of rulers at least had the decency to try and hide their corruption. This president is pretty open about it.

> What we do know for sure is that he's a pretty good manager,

Our president not. He has grade 3 and is just seen as a populist.

> The biggest problem I think is a bit different. I'm very very scared by the politicization of public institutions. Top management is always chosen based on party, and automatically so is middle management. This breeds a brand of bureaucracy interesting more in politics than in getting things done, and the more it lasts the lower the mindset seeps.

This is extremely similar. In my country it is called “cadre deployment” and is an official position. The ruling party employ their members (cadres) at all public institutions to follow the ruling party’s will. This includes but is not limited to all branches of national, provincial and local government, including places such as hospitals and government owned companies (such as electricity utilities).

So, these people are employed on the basis of where they are in the ruling party – and not based on competence. They then also ensure that the whole institution is politicised.

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There are two other things, which I do not know if it happens in Romania. The first is an extremely well politically connected oligarchy which are members of the ruling party. They get government contracts (and are favoured by government policy) while they give money to the ruling party and members. Does this happen there?

Another thing we have is the ruling party’s “investment arm” (Chancellor house) which holds stake in many tenders given by government. (The government therefore give tenders indirectly to the ruling party).