^Why do people shut off their ability to reason when discussing teachers? Could it be that right-wing think tanks have been at the throat of every social service that doesn't directly benefit the super-rich for 3 decades now? Probably, and apparently they've been successful, since it is generally acceptable to bash an entire profession without any empirical evidence or even basic logic.

So let me simplify:

More Experience > Less Experience
Professional > Non-Professional
More Competition > Less Competition

Do you disagree with this?

Logically, here is how teachers would be ranked in terms of general quality based on this (hopefully) uncontroversial logic.

1. High level Prep Schools
2. Public Schools/Charter Schools
3. Private Schools/Catholic Schools
4. Home-school

That's not to say that there aren't good home-school teachers and terrible prep school teachers, but generally, the more you pay a position, the more competitive that position becomes. Major League baseball players > minor league baseball players. No controversy there, right?

I have no doubt that swampgirl is a great teacher. She has all of the qualities that make a teacher great: smart, thoughtful, inquisitive, confident, principled, good with words, quirky and funny. I would guess that she has probably grown to respect teachers more, rather than less over the course of her own teaching. Teaching just a handful of kids poses plenty of challenges, let alone dealing with hundreds. I'm thankful to have read her writings on home-schooling, as I'd only been familiar with the 'religious shut in' variety before.

Anyway, I didn't really want to jump into this conversation until I saw the teacher bashing. It's a noble profession that is under assault from the same people that brought you the Iraq War, Wiretapping, torture and the biggest national debt in history. Whether they teach home-school or school-school, teachers are the good guys.

quote from another blog by mespo727272:

"continually disrupted his classroom environment by breaking wind and shutting off several computers."

I had no idea that flatulence would affect electronics this way.


lol

"It's when they try and take our firearms and right to bear arms away is when we should be worried. I doubt that will ever happen without some kind of very large conflict within our own country."

All of our guns won't do us any good if our own government decides to shut off the power and stop the food trucks from running. And, yeah, some people can live off the land, but most of the population lives in urban and suburban areas. It's far more likely that people will turn their guns on each other rather than the government. All the gov't would have to do is wait until the smoke clears, then pick up the guns from the ashes.

I call bullshit! A)why is the camera there and B)in my 44 years I have never seen one of these DIY places that did not require you to hold a trigger for the water to spray....you let go the water shuts off.

I feel like this technology is totally supressed.

We have the power to rid ourselves of the usual power grid. You know? When they send you a bill for $95 a month even when you took pains to shut off every light and power cord.

But the Power Grid don't like that.

"We can't live without oil!" (snicker).

"A black man cain't never be an NFL coach." I heard that shit too.

I heard a lot of "cain't never" coming out of ignorant mouths.

So what is all that goo under rich people's investments?

Nutty bastards in robes.

Its actually 1024 bytes to a megabyte, and 1024 mb to a gb, and 1024 gb to a tb...etc...

Makes a big difference if you have a download limit

Hes not quite right about bandwidth allocation with P2P / Torrent apps, while true some trackers do keep an allocation diet based off of share ratio, not all do.

I can totally shut off my upload bandwidth on quite a lot of trackers (if you know the right networks), and if there is enough available bandwidth in the swarm (that is, enough people uploading the file I want without saturation), I can max out my download speeds.

And to comment on insufficient network performance, your ISP can only garuntee a set speed on their network. If you are attempting to download data from a network outside of your ISP's control (eg. a file hosted internationally), and you are going shit slow...its not your ISP's fault. The internet is comprised of quite a lot of ISP's, which autonomously administer their own small portion of the greater collective. Any time you cross those boundaries, you are subject to the traffic shaping policies of the owner of the network you transit.

>> ^jimnms:
You're asking Doc to produce stats to back up how many people are obese because of medical conditions, yet lacking those stats you boldly claim that "the vast majority of fat people are fat due to lack of self control, NOT by a mental or physical defect." Where are your stats to back that up?

I don't disagree that some people are fat because they are lazy, but just because SOME people are lazy, it doesn't mean they're ALL lazy.

My mother has a condition, don't know the name, but basically her stomach never shuts off the "I'm hungry" signal. Imagine every waking hour of your life feeling hungry, even knowing you just ate. Do you think you could have the self control to resist your body telling you it's hungry all the time?

And you're doing even worse, you're taking ONE CASE, your mother, and trying to extrapolate that to everyone else.

From the wiki entry on obesity:

Most researchers have concluded that the combination of an excessive nutrient intake and a sedentary lifestyle are the main cause for the rapid acceleration of obesity in Western society in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Diseases which cause obesity haven't suddenly skyrocketed, but the number of fat people have. It's the lifestyle for the VAST majority of people.

I never said that ALL are lazy, you did, I said MOST were. There are SOME who have conditions like your mother, and that's terrible, but what makes it worse is all the fat, lazy people who are fat due to pure laziness and bad eating who then try to garner some sort of sympathy for their 'condition'. This takes away any sympathy most of us have for those like your mother who truly do have a condition.

As such you should dislike the lazy fat even more than most, because they make your mother's life even worse.

>> ^spoco2:
To Doc: Yes there are SOME people who have a medical condition which causes them to have weight issues, but I'd like to see some stats, and I think we'd find that sweet bugger all fat people are fat due to a medical issue, most are fat due to eating too much and doing too little. They just use the few medical conditions as excuses.
Payback: No, that's not his definition at all... in the vast majority of cases fat people are fat due to lack of self control, NOT by a mental or physical defect. Epileptics have some bad 'wiring', and obsessive-compulsives have a disorder. The vast majority of fat people are fat by, in effect, choice. They've chosen to not exercise, they've chosen to eat more than they need, they've chosen to not make the effort to lose the weight that will kill them off early.
No sympathy I'm afraid.


You're asking Doc to produce stats to back up how many people are obese because of medical conditions, yet lacking those stats you boldly claim that "the vast majority of fat people are fat due to lack of self control, NOT by a mental or physical defect." Where are your stats to back that up?

I don't disagree that some people are fat because they are lazy, but just because SOME people are lazy, it doesn't mean they're ALL lazy.

My mother has a condition, don't know the name, but basically her stomach never shuts off the "I'm hungry" signal. Imagine every waking hour of your life feeling hungry, even knowing you just ate. Do you think you could have the self control to resist your body telling you it's hungry all the time?

Ah, cool cool - I think I've seen the giant sign from off the 401 for that one too if it's the same one I'm thinking of.

In reply to this comment by Raigen:
No, sir, I work at the Schneiders facility in Kitchener.

In reply to this comment by Krupo:
Dude, I was planning on writing on ode to the bacon factory next to the 400. Is that where you work?

In reply to this comment by Raigen:
I think someone is both retarded and not trained properly. I also work in a distrubtion warehouse for Maple Leaf Foods. There's sprinkler lines, ammonia pipes, incoming and outgoing waterlines, you name it. The first thing I was shown when I got my Narrow Aisle Stacker license was the emergency sprinkler shut off valves. In case you break one, you run to this room by the take-off belts and shut off three valves which will stop the water from doing, well, what we all just saw.

My question... why didn't he just leave the damn thing once he stopped the water the first time?

There... done, water isn't coming out any more... oh, wait, if I just wiggle this... .OH SHIT!

But as many others have said, that's what shut off valves are for.

No, sir, I work at the Schneiders facility in Kitchener.

In reply to this comment by Krupo:
Dude, I was planning on writing on ode to the bacon factory next to the 400. Is that where you work?

In reply to this comment by Raigen:
I think someone is both retarded and not trained properly. I also work in a distrubtion warehouse for Maple Leaf Foods. There's sprinkler lines, ammonia pipes, incoming and outgoing waterlines, you name it. The first thing I was shown when I got my Narrow Aisle Stacker license was the emergency sprinkler shut off valves. In case you break one, you run to this room by the take-off belts and shut off three valves which will stop the water from doing, well, what we all just saw.

Dude, I was planning on writing on ode to the bacon factory next to the 400. Is that where you work?

In reply to this comment by Raigen:
I think someone is both retarded and not trained properly. I also work in a distrubtion warehouse for Maple Leaf Foods. There's sprinkler lines, ammonia pipes, incoming and outgoing waterlines, you name it. The first thing I was shown when I got my Narrow Aisle Stacker license was the emergency sprinkler shut off valves. In case you break one, you run to this room by the take-off belts and shut off three valves which will stop the water from doing, well, what we all just saw.

I think someone is both retarded and not trained properly. I also work in a distrubtion warehouse for Maple Leaf Foods. There's sprinkler lines, ammonia pipes, incoming and outgoing waterlines, you name it. The first thing I was shown when I got my Narrow Aisle Stacker license was the emergency sprinkler shut off valves. In case you break one, you run to this room by the take-off belts and shut off three valves which will stop the water from doing, well, what we all just saw.

I've had something similar to this happen to me (I didn't break the sprinkler, someone else did), but I had the common sense enough to shut off the water main. Everyone else took off running because the sprinklers hiss for a bit until the water can be properly primed through them, so everyone thought it was a gas leak.

Upvote for him grabbing the small ladder and contemplating whether or not that would do the trick to get him up there. LOL.

>> ^quantumushroom:
Fluidized sand is just normal sand with compressed) air being pumped in. It acts like a liquid until the air is shut off, then it acts like normal sand again.

But in this experiment they shut off the air before dropping the ball. The sand was just very loosely stacked. Have a read of the article published in Nature in Dec 2004, it's only one page so I've put it up: here