High-performance lumberjacking.

That Binford almost got away from them.

One more thought that I had:

Before Tesla, electric cars were niche marketed as adequate. In the sense that if you were a person very highly motivated to be "green", you could get one, drive around short distances, and in general enjoy a small subset of the versatility of an internal combustion gas guzzling car. You could get by, but in general life with an electric car was a step back from life with a gas car.

The reason Tesla is amazing is that it flipped that on its head. You're not sacrificing anything, you don't need an attitude of "I can use a bit less and take one for the team" for a Tesla to appeal to you. Everything I watch about the Model S says it is a fast, high-performance, fun to drive, luxurious car -- objectively BETTER than a similarly priced gas-powered car to most users (who can afford one, but that will include more and more people over time).


Same thing goes for home solar and other "green energy". Adoption rates are NEVER going to soar when solar is "adequate". And then only adequate if you make very big lifestyle changes like cutting back on heating and cooling, using low-draw appliances, etc. etc.

But as Tesla is doing to cars, maybe this can do to energy. Musk is saying NO, you don't have to cut back. You don't have to settle for less. You don't have to take one for the team. Install some (currently fairly expensive) solar panels and 1, 2, or however many of our power packs, and you can have a BETTER experience than being on the grid, paying high bills every month and dealing with the occasional outage, etc.

I guarantee that pitch will do more to push the adoption of green energy than 10 years of Al Gore living in a mansion and flying around constantly on a private jet to give $100,000 lectures explaining why everybody else needs to cut back or we're all going to melt...

It's funny when you really think about it. Ferrari's "entry-level", the 458, and it's various packages, are so high performing they match the Enzo and LaFerrari (stupid name). It doesn't make sense to produce the $1 million plus cars

It was a complete set up and prank - The salesman was NOT in on the prank. I'm going to call this REAL!!

"...But the incident wasn’t as spontaneous as it appeared. According to the owner of the car dealership where the video was filmed the setup started long before Steve met Gordon. It was also reveled that the actual car used didn’t belong to the dealership.
Jeff Gordon and Pepsi MAX go to a car dealership where a disguised Jeff Gordon takes an unsuspecting car salesman on the test drive of his life. #GordonTestDrive
Pepsi MAX & Jeff Gordon Present: "Test Drive"

“We started early in the morning,” dealership owner Wayne Troutman said in an interview with the syndicated show ‘RightThisMinute’. “Probably 6:30 in the morning that they did that video and they were there until dark that night. They supplied the car it was a very high performance car since they knew they would be going with some special tricks with that one."

Troutman praised his unknowing salesperson Steve.

"He did a great job,” Troutman said. “He fell right in to it and a lot of his reactions were very realistic because they were. Once he realized he'd been punked he settled down, but he was really hot when he came back in as you could see from the video. In fact he actually went out on another normal ride with Jeff.”

In fact Troutman added that Gordon himself had a great deal of involvement with the project.

"Jeff had a lot of input in this,” he said. “Not only to the car that was selected to the disguise to the…he actually tried to ahead of time pick the salesman he thought would be the best one to try to pull the prank on. We actually loaned Jeff a 1998 Chevy Venture Van to ride in so he looked like he was another normal North Carolina redneck."
http://www.examiner.com/article/what-happened-behind-the-scenes-of-jeff-gordon-s-pepsimax-prank?cid=rss

Ze Germans. Ja ja ja! Derp: why would anyone want to drive this fast? Because its exhilarating particularly if you own a high performance car. Clearly Derp owns a geo metro or something. It's the deep question as: why would anyone need a gun? Sigh, I weep for humanity. Oh yeah, because we fucking can. Remember, going slow doesn't mean it's safer and won't kill anyone.

interesting look at the bottom of a high performance sports car. Without the flat bottom, the car would create lift and more easily flip over at high speeds.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'bmw m5, bullet, high performance, art' to 'bmw m5, bullet, high performance, art, glass, water, smash' - edited by spoco2

My first question was, "Why is the front wheel moving?"
My second question was, "Why is the quick release moving???"

@EvilDeathBee According to the story linked in the video details, it eliminates the greasy chain, which I guess is a turn-off for some. I'm gathering since the story said nothing about efficiency, speed, nor high performance that this is strictly for the casual cyclist market.

Incidentally, there are plenty of chain-free bicycle designs. This won't be the last.

>> ^chilaxe:

@Porksandwich
I'm talking about north-east Asians (Chinese/Hongkongese/Chinese-Singaporeans, Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese). Other Asians don't have the same significantly consistent high performance.
Increases in school spending don't significantly correlate with increases in student performance. You can't change someone's nature to make them like to read, and bad teachers & old textbooks can't turn a driven person with a good attitude into someone who doesn't like to read.


Praising athletics while scorning academics is a common trend in the US. It is most definitely disheartening to see the programs that only a small fraction of the student body participate in getting the lion's share of the budget. And increases in school spending also tend to get funneled away from the absolute educational needs and maintenance of the buildings to large projects such as a new school being built or new sports complex. It happens time and time again that the money ends up being spent on things that fall under the umbrella of "school budget" but are not directly related to education.

And I would agree that you can't change someone's nature, but you could spend time trying to identify their interests and fostering those. Math and Science are great, we need more but as you said you can't change their natural inclinations. Bad teachers are notorious for forcing material by the standard means rather than try to find out what would best suite them. Perhaps you need to see things written to retain knowledge, but you write slowly....and the teacher continues to throw a lot of information at you faster than you can write. That is not serving the purpose of education, and it is no big inconvenience or time sink to the class for the teacher to hand out a basic packet to follow along and add additional information to allow people to keep up. Hell I had college professors do this, so you could make your own notes on the subject but still have an organized list of topics pertinent to the lesson.

So short version: School spending does not mean spending toward education. Bad teachers can stunt progress of students through a number of means. Hell a person with a heavy foreign accent can make it hell on earth trying to follow along or do the required homework if they never write it down. A person who can learn in spite of all of this, probably has parents who've given them the time and means to do so or may even know much on the subjects themselves. An immigrant with uneducated parents who may only speak but not read or write English is going to find this much more difficult.

If my parents had taken me out of the US and into Mexico where very little was taught in English, and my parents spoke rough Spanish and couldn't read or write in Spanish....I'd find myself struggling as well. Especially if there was no time to tutor after school because I had to be home for chores or an after school job to make ends meet. Only an extremely exceptional person could prevail through that, and I refuse to believe that all Asians of the categories you mention have no additional help outside of school. And that may be where the focus should lie immigrants not of those categories, helping establish this foundation for their cultural groups and filling it with people who are familiar with their common backgrounds and beliefs to help them adapt. If they are naturalized, you are stuck with them now.....and just throwing them under the bus because they aren't the Asians types you hoped for as immigrants is not going to solve it. If they are willing to work and not undermining society through malice...they can be worked with to find a place for them. This goes for both natural born citizens and former immigrants.....ignoring huge swathes of your population is not a good idea.

Anyway, I don't view immigration as a national problem. Sure it has some influence on the overall problems the country faces, especially illegals. But the core of our problems are related to greed as has been stated, but policies that ignore the people and favor the profit machines whether they be individuals or corporations in spite of the people. And that's where the favor towards Socialism is springing up in the young, Capitalism may have worked but it is no longer allowing the young to establish a life that would even come close to that of their parents. They are reducing the opportunity chance as time goes on for each new generation by these choices. So I don't blame anyone for wanting to throw out what these decision makers cling to as sacred in favor of trying something else that may restore a little sanity into the system. After all, your citizenry needs a way to support itself without being a member of the armed forces, born wealthy, or just plain lucky.

It has nothing to do with their Asian heritage, and everything to do with immigrant characteristics and culture. African immigrants are actually the highest achieving group in the States:




According to America's national Census Bureau, close to 44% of Africans living in the US have a college degree, compared to 23% of the US population, making them the community with the highest rate of academic achievement in the States. A Reuters Africa Journal report by Marie Lora.

>> ^chilaxe:

@Porksandwich
I'm talking about north-east Asians (Chinese/Hongkongese/Chinese-Singaporeans, Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese). Other Asians don't have the same significantly consistent high performance.
Increases in school spending don't significantly correlate with increases in student performance. You can't change someone's nature to make them like to read, and bad teachers & old textbooks can't turn a driven person with a good attitude into someone who doesn't like to read.

@Porksandwich

I'm talking about north-east Asians (Chinese/Hongkongese/Chinese-Singaporeans, Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese). Other Asians don't have the same significantly consistent high performance.

Increases in school spending don't significantly correlate with increases in student performance. You can't change someone's nature to make them like to read, and bad teachers & old textbooks can't turn a driven person with a good attitude into someone who doesn't like to read.

@Porksandwich

I guess you didn't click the link? Replacing a naturally high-performing population with the least skilled members of less skilled societies is why California now permanently has the stupidest academic scores in the country.

The application of the death penalty should be massively increased. The prison population should be massively reduced, by freeing the people who don't belong in it and by killing the creatures who don't belong outside it. Indefinite and long-term sentences should be abolished.

Kill the useless, free the innocent, and give the remainder a genuine second chance where they are well treated as first class citizens and have access to all the help and tools they need to regenerate themselves into whole people.

Everyone who leaves prison, which should always be after a few years at most, should do so with a high standard of education and training, cash in their pocket, a career lined up if that's what they want, an investment in their society, someone they can call for help if they need it, plus their dignity and a pride in what they've become. A very few do this now, usually thanks to the help of mostly religious charities, and it works.

Rehabilitative efforts are worthless unless they're targeted on those who can benefit from them. We don't have infinite resources to throw at mostly hopeless cases in the belief that some of them will get better. Prison is either somewhere to dump criminals indiscriminately or it's somewhere that makes them better, a real social endeavour - it can't be both. So if you want it to be the latter you should be campaigning not to abolish the death penalty, but for a thousandfold increase in executions.

We have the potential to build a mechanism by which defective, low-performance, harmful individuals are turned into exceptional, high-performance, beneficial ones. The death penalty isn't what's wrong with the modern justice system; it's just one of the more clumsily applied elements of one big clumsy, failing monstrosity, which needs to be completely re-engineered.

@swedishfriend

1. "Compared to their native Swedish peers, immigrant students, on average, have weaker education outcomes at all levels of education. Nearing the end of compulsory education, at age 15, there are very significant performance disadvantages for immigrant students." Source.



2a. Generally, in the modern era, the achievement gap between the descendants of immigrants and the host population correlates with the achievement gap between the immigrants' nation of origin and the host nation. For example, expect US achievement gaps to be with us for the long-term:
NYT: "Triumph Fades on Racial Gap in City Schools"

2b. US school test scores are virtually the best in the world once you break down test scores by region of ancestry. Asian Americans do better than Asians in Asia; Latino Americans do better than Latinos in Latin America; African Americans do better than Africans in Africa; European Americans do better than Europeans in Europe. The illusion that US scores aren't the best in the world is caused by the demographic composition of the US, not by US school policy.

2c. Indeed, as expected from the US's dominance of international test scores (once broken down by country of origin), descendants of Swedes living in Minnesota significantly outperform Swedes living in Sweden. (Search that post for "achievement gap" to read more about the achievement gap in Sweden between natives and descendants of immigants.)



3. Exceptions: US Muslims, such as Iranian-Americans, significantly outperform other US groups, including the majority group, because they were drawn from high performers in their country of origin, such as scientists.