> College admissions could really do with some sort of objective criteria
Like GPA and SAT/ACT scores? Because they tried that. Secondary education is too easy and variable in the US, and Harvard can't really do much about that.
> If your work harder than anyone else you'll still not get recognized because you're not claimed to be smart, cultured, pretty or interesting enough.
Err, that's not at all what she said or even implied.
That's the point: they didn't work harder than anyone else applying to Harvard. They can't make decisions based on GPA/ACT/SAT scores, because everyone has the same top scores.
Hypothetically, and probably not that far off: So you have 10,000 applicants for a class of 2,000 and 8,000 of those applicants are valedictorians with extremely high SAT/ACT scores and they've managed to check all the regular boxes (played sports, instruments, etc.). How are you going to cull 6,000 applicants?
It was a similar story in Seattle. Frequently you'd call both yellow cab and orange cab (the two major cab companies) because you only expected one of them to show up within a reasonable time frame (which of course only exacerbated the problem).
> Post teens were adults with adult incomes but not adult responsibilities, like kids, for quite a few years, usually.
Hmm, not sure I agree with that really.
I agree with most of your sentiment about elimination of entry-level jobs and extended education, but I think the natural response (and the response we see) is for women to have children at older ages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_maternal_age).
It used to be the case that you'd graduate high school and start having children in your early 20s, so I'm not sure I agree that there was ever a time when it was "socially acceptable" to be an adult with an adult income and no children for several years.
IIRC the federal government really doesn't offer plea bargains, right? And federal sentencing is pretty rigid, so he probably would have served ~80 years.
As I mentioned above, that's definitely not the case in the outer boroughs of New York (Manhattan in some cases too, depending on where you are, though I don't know that for certain).
There have been weeks at a time where I've had to walk in the street because the sidewalks were just inaccessible or sheets of ice, which makes proximity to the train station all the more important.
Yeah, that sucks. If it takes you 12 minutes normally to walk 1 km (assuming 5 km/h, which is a normal walking speed), now it takes you 24 minutes to and from the station in the winter.
So you're spending 45 minutes a day just walking to and from the station. If the rest of your commute is 30 minutes (train + walking to work from train), you're commuting for nearly two hours (1:48) every day vs. 1:24 during the summer.
That's assuming you don't also walk slower from the train station to work, which would make it even more of a timesink.
If you lived right near the station, it would be 60 minutes every day, winter or summer.
I mean yeah, it's only an extra 30-60 minutes a day (and your point was really only about winter so we'll be fair and say 30 minutes a day), but shit, I'm not going to turn my nose up at that. I'd definitely pay a small premium to get that time back every single weekday.
Walking sucks in the winter. It's never ridiculously cold (certainly not midwest or Canada cold), but windchill is frequent and kinda nasty if you have literally any skin exposed.
Especially in the outer boroughs (not so much in Manhattan), snow doesn't get cleaned up very quickly either. Walking can definitely be a bit of an obstacle course - ice, snow banks blocking the sidewalk, etc.
Anyway blah blah blah first world problems, just my perspective on it.
> Funding schools through property taxes is an easy explanation for that one
Though if it wasn't for that it would be through a local school levy, or a fundraiser, or any number of other seemingly harmless methods of transferring money from parents to the school.
Even dumb ideas off the top of my head like "Wealthy parent A purchases 300 textbooks and donates them to the school so the school can spend that money on higher salaries for teachers" are probably legal ways for wealthy parents to supplement their local school.
Like a wise princess once said, "The more you tighten your grip, the more [wealthy parents] will slip through your fingers."
> As soon as the elite can segregate them-self from public systems like schools and hospitals
Ehh, I mostly agree with your first point but I think it's kind of a pipe dream to think it could be otherwise. Go visit a public school in a place like Greenwich, CT and then go visit a public school in the Bronx. Both technically public schools, but students have a clear advantage in one vs the other.
Sure, Bill Gates's kids aren't going to public school probably even in Greenwich. Still, let's not pretend that the elite only go to private schools, or that they wouldn't congregate in wealthy areas to make public schools essentially private.
Inequalities will always exist as long as people can use their assets to gain advantages for themselves/their families, and trying to force it otherwise against an unwilling populace is likely to just exacerbate the problem in other ways (see: Suburban flight).
Oh god, please don't do this. This is worse than "We decided to go a different direction," because at least that takes less time to read.
If you're not going to provide substantive feedback ("we felt like your performance on the nearest-neighbor problem was pretty rough and were looking for a more optimized solution") then just give the one liner and be done with it.
We get it: you're hamstrung because of legal liabilities. That's fine. Don't make it worse by making us read a paragraph that isn't going to be helpful for the future.
Ouch, this is clearly meant to be (at least somewhat) tongue-in-cheek. Calling it "drug abuse" is a little extreme unless you're familiar personally with the author.
It doesn't seem like it's affecting his life in an incredibly detrimental way, supposing that at some point when the hoopla of a book release dies down he stops drinking every night (and even then, the quantity consumed is an incredibly important component).
> The tensions arise, such as with firearms laws, because states don't see eye to eye on those issues so they get to dictate exactly how things work in their own states
That causes some AWFUL problems for people traveling between states, which is incredibly common nowadays because of air travel.
Google for the myriad of really terrible stories involving people accidentally traveling to New Jersey with a firearm. In at least a few cases they were forced to travel to New Jersey because of an airline mistake (unexpected layovers, misplaced luggage, etc.). Reciprocity is a much bigger issue than you're making it out to be.
> The extreme example counter response is never far behind in political discourse.
"States Rights" almost always comes up as an argument in the context of human rights violations. I don't think it's too extreme to remind people of that.
> There's a whole host of other policies that don't though.
Where's that line get drawn? If I frame marijuana as a human rights issue (see: the racial discrepancies in conviction rates for drug offenses), does it become ok for the federal government to resolve then?
> They are crises because they have to be balanced.
Errr no? There are plenty of states that are "balanced" only because the federal government gives them copious amounts of money, well in excess of their GSP.
They're "balanced" but to call it anything other than artificially balanced is silly.
> There's a wide gap between those issues and virtually every other policy in the country being effected by a broad reading of the interstate commerce clause.
Those are the primary issues anti-federalists bring up when States' rights comes up as a discussion, both historically and currently (not slavery obviously, but same-sex marriage is an incredibly recent one).
If you're talking about things like the drinking age (which isn't even really a mandate, just an extreme carrot on a stick), then sure, whatever - but who cares? Those are trivial issues in comparison.
> This approach creates a more unified country because people are able to make their own decisions and live with them.
I don't know why you would assume that: There's a whole host of tensions that come with decisions made at the state level. Reciprocity is a huge one that comes up semi-frequently (for example with firearm laws).
> People are able to move within the country to states with policies more in line with their own views.
"Just move" is an ok answer if your beef is, say, with Oregon's gas pumping laws.
It's a really awful answer if your problem is that your state allows "separate but equal" bathrooms for black people. Those suffering at the hands of those extreme policies are also the least likely to have the means to move.
> States have to have balanced budgets
I don't know why you think that. State budget crises aren't unknown or even all that uncommon.
> There's a push in this country lately to do everything at a Federal level though
Because for most of the history of the United States, human rights issues have only been resolved at the federal level. Slavery, segregation, women's suffrage, and same-sex marriage have all been framed as "States Rights" issues.
Incest - maybe. There's a clear harm involved there (inbreeding depression) that's much more substantive than anything used to argue against gay marriage.
Polygamy - We probably will revisit our stance on polygamy in decades to come. Historically it's been used in a way that's profoundly imbalanced towards women (i.e. almost exclusively polygyny), but it's not hard to imagine a future where that's not the case.
Maybe. I think it would cause a very serious disruption to bring a guy like Terry into a normal team dynamic. The CIA delusions alone would make most people understandably uncomfortable, to say nothing of the racism.
With a very patient and understanding manager, a very isolated workspace or maybe a couple very patient and understanding coworkers, and probably someone filtering all of his communication, it would be workable. I can see why Terry would not want to be an environment like that, of course.
That's not to say that someone wouldn't take a chance on him given his strong technical ability, but I'm not sure most people would look on that decision in retrospect as a good one.
Hey! I'm sorry to hear that people treated you poorly. That's really shitty and in an ideal world people would treat you as an individual, and not as a representative of a disease.
> John Forbes Nash Jr
That's not really fair - John Nash was an exceptional person in a myriad of different ways. He's very much an exceptional case in the same way that Stephen Hawking is very much an exception when it comes to ALS.
In general, it's a pretty poor idea to confront someone suffering from disorganized thinking caused by schizophrenia about that disorganized thinking (maybe not in a clinical context, I wouldn't know). Just because John Nash was able to function to a high degree without medication doesn't mean that everyone will be able to, or that it's fair to hold everyone to that standard.
Like GPA and SAT/ACT scores? Because they tried that. Secondary education is too easy and variable in the US, and Harvard can't really do much about that.