natnat

16 ms·

121.
by natnat 16y ago
David Foster Wallace majored in English (and philosophy), and I think he's a great novelist. Most older novelists didn't study English because English literature wasn't considered a serious scholarly pursuit until fairly recently.
122.
by natnat 16y ago
UPS turned a profit of $3.126 billion last year. FedEx made $1.321 billion. UPS has higher profit margins than FedEx as well.
123.
by natnat 16y ago
If something like this does come to exist, the easiest way to do it would probably be with electrodes attached to the skin around your vocal muscles. When we think in words, we make many of the muscle movements that that we make when speak
124.
by natnat 16y ago
I don't think a financial incentive for leakers would be a good thing. Wikileaks works fine without offering anyone money.
125.
by natnat 16y ago
That last argument was about tax cuts, though, and not military health care spending. Even if we held military spending constant, it still would have been irresponsible to cut taxes because there was no corresponding spending cut that ensur
126.
by natnat 16y ago
Russia is problematic in that its government is notoriously corrupt and controlled by the mob and Russian business interests, but its workers are not poor (and therefore cheap) enough for foreign investors to be able to overlook Russia's po
127.
by natnat 16y ago
People assume that democrats are more interested in campaign finance reform because most serious attempts to reform campaign finance laws have been spearheaded by Democrats and opposed by establishment Republicans. Every senator who voted a
128.
by natnat 16y ago
The Minerals Management Service (now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement) is a pretty good example of that as it is. It's in charge of enforcing environmental regulations and such for oil companies, but it's a
129.
by natnat 16y ago
Yes, but that happened when the U.S. was going through tremendous economic growth and labor was in demand. These days, there are tens of millions of unemployed workers ready to take your place if you start doing things your employer doesn't
130.
by natnat 16y ago
I don't think DDoS is violent at all. It doesn't physically hurt anyone, and it doesn't damage the property of people who aren't involved in censoring Wikileaks. Nonviolent protest doesn't need to just be complaining. Everyone does that, an
131.
by natnat 16y ago
SOX compliance is also really expensive for smaller businesses, though, and it makes IPO's seem like a bad idea unless the company can be really, really huge. Companies with more than $5B in revenue only spent 0.6% of their revenue on SOX c
132.
by natnat 16y ago
I suppose that's true if you consider the interests of Iran or North Korea to be just as valid as the interests of the western world. If the U.S. and Iran/North Korea were two equally evil governments fighting only for their own self-intere
133.
by natnat 16y ago
They usually quantify attractiveness by asking a bunch of (ideally) randomly-selected people to rate the attractiveness of a bunch of photos of people. Datasets of things like this are often published in tables of norms that researchers can
134.
by natnat 16y ago
You can get a R.N. degree at a community college in three or four years. Getting a job at as a teacher requires just as much education plus certification, which usually requires a bachelor's degree plus additional classes plus a bunch of st
135.
by natnat 16y ago
Counterpoint: China While China today isn't nearly as bad as the USSR was, their authoritarian government that still jails and executes political opponents hasn't stopped their political stability and economic success.
136.
by natnat 16y ago
There are two sides to that coin, though. Cutting government spending often reduces tax revenue as well. Government workers and contractors pay tax like everyone else, but accounts of the money saved by cutting the program never takes into
137.
by natnat 16y ago
I generally agree that there is way too much corporate control of the American government, but this is a pretty great example of how laws sometimes do nothing but hurt corporations. Because I don't want to put up with this bullshit, I will
138.
by natnat 16y ago
There may be a few billion dollars to be made by some investment banks and hedge funds in carbon trading, but keep in mind that as of today, three of the six largest companies by market cap are oil companies (ExxonMobil, PetroChina, Royal D
139.
by natnat 16y ago
Red Hat/Novell/Canonical could add/change Linux features just as easily as Microsoft could add to or change Windows. The Linux community isn't just a bunch of people who are writing code for the fun of it.
140.
by natnat 16y ago
When you're looking at a line chart that starts at zero, it's very difficult to really understand what's going on unless there's a really huge amount of variability in the data. For example, charts of stock prices virtually never start at z