I did not know that was a hot vacation spot. But, even if it is, it has the advantage of being foreign and exotic. That can’t describe Oklahoma except in a negative sense.
Or they use a device like a Tablo to get free OTA TV with all the advantages of streaming to devices, no subscription needed. I've done this for several years. I can be out working in the yard and pull out my phone to watch couple minutes of a football game on ABC or whatever, as long as I'm in WiFi range.
The conservative perspective is not, and has never been, that poor people deserve to stay poor. It is that I can and will give my money to poor people, and you're free to do likewise, but we're not going to point a gun at old Steve and make him do the same.
Now that gun-pointing redistribution programs are fully entrenched, some people are still trying to have some say - ANY say - in where their money goes.
> The conservative perspective is not, and has never been, that poor people deserve to stay poor.
It's a good thing I didn't say it was then, isn't it? I'll help you, if you really want to try to strawman what I said, it would be closer to: "the conservative perspective is that bad people deserve to be poor."
But I do think "poor people stay poor" is the net effect of conservative policies, because they prioritize other things over lifting people out of poverty, as you're doing in this post.
Instead they focus on lifting the "right people" out of poverty. Because that's the main reason to be able to pick and choose your charity: to make sure it goes to the people you think deserve it, or will use it right, or so on.
I think to be a conservative in this sense you actually have to first believe the myth that money you are taxed was yours to begin with, and you aren't merely a temporary holding container. After that myth dissolves, the whole anti tax conservative ethos logically falls apart. If you want more money, lowering taxes is objectively backwards. Just ask for a raise if you aren't happy with your pay or seek out a better job.
All allocation of property, including maintaining the status quo, involves the use of social convention backed by force. There are many people who would happily not live on the streets if a massive gun-pointing programme on behalf of property owners didn't evict them and deter them from finding another nice presently-unoccupied property.
(Smarter conservative arguments focus on utilitarian claims that [forms of] redistribution reduce incentives to grow the economy and build houses, rather than dubious moral claims that Uncle Sam pointing his tax collectors at Steve is somehow more immoral than Steve pointing his bailiffs at tenants)
Biblical eyewitness testimony also requires multiple witnesses:
> One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth: at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established.
Witnessing falsely was rightly a very big deal to them. It's one of the Ten Commandments, right up there with worshipping idols or committing murder. And according to the following verses of this passage, anyone who witnesses falsely will receive the exact same punishment that the accused would have received.
I was surprised that the post numbers appear to be sequential, and that there would be ~30M. Over 15 years of HN, that's ~5K posts/day, and about 200 new posts/hour. Things accrue. I'd estimate that HN is well north of 300K readers/day ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581
edit - it looks like each comment has its own item id. So posts are both new items and comments. That makes more sense to me in terms of scale.
And yet, this book, along with The Count of Monte Cristo, Grapes of Wrath, and quite a number of other tomes are assigned in high schools by teachers/school districts. Those educators think they are providing some kind of service by trying to force feed young people books that cannot really be understood in a meaningful way by the vast majority of people with ~15 years of life.
It wasn't until a decade after college that I picked up another Steinbeck novel. and after finishing Cannery Row, the only question i could ask myself was, WTF were my teachers thinking assigning Grapes of Wrath vs some of his much shorter, less complex works that could be read in a couple days. The whole book is shorter than the section of Grapes that most people describe as being the slog you have to get through to enjoy the rest of the novel.
I read a lot, and I can say with a fair bit of confidence the one long lasting result of assigning these books in HS is to guarantee most people have a life long repulsion for long "classics".
> HS literature cirriculum having zero relatability to students so they're unable to comprehend why the books are "great"
I've called it "an overdose of Dead Poet's Society" before. Shakespeare plays, Steinbeck, Moby-Dick: they'll all make the majority of the class tune out if they're presented as a treatise on the human condition. Shakespeare is meant to be performed on a stage, not read from a book. Discuss his codification of character archetypes and plot tropes, perhaps even some wordplay choices. At 16 years old, "a treatise on the human condition" is pretentious puffery. Even those teacher's pets who take it seriously are merely LARPing as well-rounded individuals.
You're lumping in Steinbeck with Shakespeare and Moby-Dick? His topics are much more relevant to what is going on for many students today and the language is much less dated.
In my specific case, it was due to going to one of the better-off suburban school districts. Even though it was obvious that the characters were stuck in a Dickensean world at the intellectual level, none of us had the real-world experience to get what it's like to be a migrant farm worker at the gut level or even to suddenly have perspective of our less-affluent classmates.
My dislike of how Shakespeare was taught in HS is from a different angle. The problem wasn't that the stories were unrelatable: that was during the peak of my fantasy-reading years. I disliked how much focus was put on the iambic pentameter as some special sauce for "understanding what it means to be human" and other overdoses of the Dead Poet Society ethos.
The local schools have gotten a lot more into contemporary novels and I'm all for it. I see occasional grumblings on the FB groups but no one has managed to change the curriculum.
I love classics and every time I read one there's a moment when I think to myself "I'm so glad no one is going to make me write an essay on this." I don't have to try to pull out the major themes, I don't have to discuss about the character's motivations, I don't have to consider the novel in the context of what was going on in the writer's life time. I can just let it wash over me, I can just enjoy it.
It's a miserable and joy-killing way to approach reading. Even as I look back to the books I read in High School I don't think any every became my favorites. The Great Gatsby is a fine book but when I look back on it I remember all the sections where we had to point out 'symbolism'. What a drag.
Of the many possible "classics" to throw at teenagers I feel Moby Dick is far from the worst option. At least it has some humor to it, and on one layer it is just an adventure at sea; its not just pure pathos. And compared to many others its relatively short novel, especially if you skip some of the non-essential whaling chapters.
I imagine the goal was to expose students to something they'd otherwise perhaps never read. My school favored shorter stuff like the Old Man and the Sea... which I did love regardless, but I guess can have the same problem of not connecting with younger readers.
In order to be excited some small part of you must be bored or as Melville explains it ...
“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
Viasat also heavily throttles video streams, so as not to allow a user to accidentally reach their monthly data cap in the first day or two.
I currently average 25-30 Mbps on speedtest.net and 700 kbps (not a typo) on fast.com. And still I reach the data cap in two weeks or less. Fortunately (?) it's a soft cap, not a hard one. All it means is no streaming anything in the evening till the month rolls over. (And, perversely, you don't want to do any large downloads until after hitting the cap!)
I don't understand where this question is coming from. How many Americans have you met who believe the moon landings were fake? For me that number is 0.
Beware of polls showing a small percentage of people believe something. Anything under 10% is subject to the Lizardman's Constant[0]; i.e., there are enough pranksters, people who misheard the question, et cetera, to form a measurable part of the population.
