You know, I was wondering how you could go from governor to speaker of the house. I guess I combined all of Wisconsin's shitty, nationally-relevant politicians into one.
Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats
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GasBandit
Staff member
Actually, the speaker doesn't have to be a sitting representative. Anyone can be speaker of the house, if they get the votes.
True, but it has never happened yet.
For two projects (I read the article, it's two, not just 1 development), what's the overhead on getting the machines in there to harvest, and paying the wages for... how many weeks there for how many people? If it took 4 weeks for, half a dozen people with modern logging machinery? Something tells me that "profit" number there is eaten up by wages and fuel for the machines, but I could be way off.
It doesn't look that profitable to me on first glance, but I know nothing about that industry. Does anybody here have possible logging numbers?
Yeah, I have to agree... wood that hasn't been harvested is worth less than wood that HAS been harvested because harvesting the wood has costs. We can disagree about how much they should have paid for the wood to be harvested (and yes, they probably should have payed something more like $22.5-25k) but they did NOT make 93k in profit. They probably made, at most, half that after expenses.
Ah, then yeah, sure.
I fully agree that it needs to be CLOSELY examined, but I've also seen such mundane things as "let's hire a logging company to clear the stuff from near the highways, and the payment is that they get to keep the timber." That's happened in Canada in many National and Provincial parks. It's normal, and works for everybody, because it's cleared X distance from the road for safety. The TransCanada Highway in Banff National Park is a good example of this, as is in Tera Nova park in Newfoundland (no I'm not kidding on that name, think about it, and groan at the pun).
Open season on logging however, is not a good thing. They're meant to be preserves, but at the same time sometimes it's cleared before other new development as simple as a parking lot, or could be people paying to get cheap (though probably not that cheap) lumber.
Where does this fall? Who the fuck knows. Not enough information IMO. Sensationalism, but not much real information.
Dave
Staff member
And I give you: Politics in the Animal Kingdom
Particularly the last method, STV, would be great. Ranked is BETTER than First Past the Post, but STV is even better IMO, which appears to be what the post is meaning by "multiple winners". But ranked is better than nothing if only one representative in the first place.
And especially in light of the recent federal election here, in which 40% of the vote got 100% of the power (this is not a new thing), I have sympathy for that kind of thing up here as well.
Fair enough, but it would also have support of any representatives from an area where there is a measurable amount of independent and/or 3rd party support that they think they can grab on the 2nd-choice part of a ballot, thus making it good for them.
Enough? Probably not, but it's a thing.
GasBandit
Staff member
Unfortunately, how things work in Washington is party leadership can either reward you with committee appointments if you toe the line, or organize to make you (the congressman/senator) isolated and irrelevant if you don't. So even the most grassroots of candidates gets to the Capitol, they get eaten up by the machine and have to play ball - or get blackballed. There's even a designated party position explicitly named "party whip" whose main responsibility it is to go around to the troublesome independently-minded party members and wrestle them into voting the way party leadership wants - or else.
"Party Whip" is a thing just about everywhere. They have varying amounts of power.
Martin Shkreli ($750 drug guy) does Reddit AMA to try and save his reputation, gets schooled by an actual doctor. Idiot suggested that he wanted to remake the drug he bought to prevent folate inhibition, not knowing the drug's entire function was to promote this. So not only did he try to extort cancer patients, he didn't even understand how what he bought worked.
It'll just be another arms race. The drones already have magnetometers, accelerometers, and gyroscopes, so they can do pretty good dead reckoning. If communications is cut, today's drones shut down and drop to the ground as shown in the video, but tomorrow's drones will return to a designated area instead, even without GPS or communications.
Further, the jammer shown, if it does jam GPS frequencies, violates a whole number of laws. It may be that law enforcement could be allowed to use it, but generic home owns won't.
Also, pointing one of those at an airplane will get you a visit from several agencies.
So, just in case you all weren't sure how I felt about Scott Walker- What an asshole. Its amazing the shit this guy is getting away with. Putting limitations on investigating corruption is probably the most transparent thing he's ever done.
That person needs to be punched in the dick.Common Core strikes again?
"No, 5 times 3 is not 5 plus 5 plus 5, it is 3 plus 3 plus 3 plus 3 plus 3, so you get it wrong."
You can hire Volus mercenaries for that.
Actually, I think I understand what they are trying to do there... while 5+5+5 is technically correct, it's not simplest form. You always use the lowest possible factors and build to higher ones when using factorization, so they want to encourage this sort of thought process NOW with repeated addition so that high school algebra and geometry will be easier when you need to start using factorization to break down large numbers via multiplying smaller numbers together to find LCD for fractions. It's just one of those things that only make sense when you look at later processes you have to do in school.
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GasBandit
Staff member
Boy, 3 x 50 is going to be a real bitch.
Ignoring the fact that NO teacher would teach a multiple of 10 that way, Common Core is really only an elementary teaching method.
However, Common Core will probably do a better job of explaining why you just copy the zeros over, for the kids who don't just "get" math.
Which is why Common Core looks so inconsistent at the lower levels: they know kids will use the faster method if they understand it for small numbers (which is fine), but it's equally important they understand that 3 X 50 is also 2 x 3 x 5 x 5 and how to apply that to when they start doing LCD of fractions later. It actually makes sense in that regard: everything Common Core does is about getting kids to pass their college entry exams, so it's designed to share processes and build on them. But because it does this, the lowest level stuff looks absolutely insane to people like us who were just forced to memorize multiplication tables like cave men. I wasn't even taught how to factor until I started taking college classes! It would have made middle and high school math so much easier.
You americans are just screwed up. I remember fractions and factorization from grade 3.
And as for the marking, ENFORCING stupidity like above will absolutely screw over the student when it comes to things like algebra, where the name of the game is reorganizing variables. If they don't understand early on that both forms are the same, they're MORE screwed later, not less.
And hell, estimation and doing as FEW operations as necessary is better than adding many times. More steps = more opportunity for error. I'm not saying that the "repeated addition strategy" is bad, in fact I think it's a good way to teach basic multiplication, but it's even better to show "Remember 2*8 is 8 sets of 2, and you can add that, but it's also 2 sets of 8, which is only adding once!" Something tells me that this teacher would get pissed of at Gauss too for being too fast at adding all the numbers from 1 to 100.