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It seems like he's been avoiding the antiscience stuff recently (going back into the latter part of the last season) and he listed NASA as a good thing about the US in the last episode. Maybe he's learned.
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Jan 31, 2011 01:24
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I don't always agree with Cornel West but he is one of the best guests ever on these kinds of shows. Need him, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and a fired-up Anthony Wiener all at the same time.
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Feb 13, 2011 02:56
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That's Canada though. Here, if you work for the government you will get paid worse than in the private sector. The benefits are good and somewhat make up for this; if you get rid of those there is absolutely no reason to work in the public sector unless you're so passionate and well-off that it doesn't matter you're getting paid for poo poo. But the Republicans have managed to convince everyone that working for the government is a free ride to awesome pay for no actual effort. The only people who actually are in that situation are the assholes the Republicans support. I agree that teachers unions make it too hard to get rid of bad teachers, but that is the rearranging deck chairs part of education reform. There are much bigger problems, such as teachers getting paid dick in most places. You wouldn't have nearly as much of a problem with bad teachers if the salary was high enough to attract more qualified people into teaching.
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Feb 20, 2011 00:38
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Coal isn't radioactive! 
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Mar 24, 2011 11:11
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It's kind of hard to be on her side after teaching in Asia for a while. Most of my students are maladjusted to some degree or another, and none of them have any concept of creativity. The schools here have something called moral education. I asked what that was, they explained it--it's basically what it sounds like, teaching kids right and wrong and stuff about society. I told them we don't have that kind of class in the US because it's the job of the parents. They told me they have it here because parents rarely see their kids, so there's no way for them to handle it alone. The kids are in school from 9 AM to 10 PM, six days a week, between the public school and the private ones they go to in the evening. And my kids are, apparently, not as maladjusted as most. I know teachers here who have students that'll just snap in class, crying uncontrollably, or babbling random English words for a bit before they get control of themselves again. And we're talking nine year olds here, middle school is worse and high school is three years of spending sixteen hours a day every day prepping for exams, from what I've heard. They sleep 4-6 hours a day and spend the rest of it studying. And yeah, they take tests very well. But ask them to put together a sentence that isn't something they've memorized, or to draw a picture without any guidelines, and you just get blank stares.
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May 22, 2011 14:36
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I don't know what kind of salaries there are. There's a convenience store or a cell phone store literally every block though so it seems like there are plenty of no-skill jobs. It's about more than money though, failing would be shameful. Opting out isn't likely to happen, I don't think it would even occur to them. Your parents are older than you and they have authority, so you do whatever they tell you to do. You don't have a choice and you don't question it. However, failing obviously will happen. What ends up happening is grade manipulation and passing kids along whether or not they deserve it. I'm not allowed to give Ds or Fs, for example. So, I have a number of kids who refuse to pay attention at all and don't know anything. They'll get 5/100 on a test. That's a C. Whether or not they learn anything isn't as important as the appearance that they're learning something, at least in English class. I don't know how that works when they have to pass the national English exams. Second highest suicide rate in the world. I bet a lot of those are kids who couldn't handle the expectations in the school system.
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May 24, 2011 02:29
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Most of them don't seem too depressed at least. It helps that they don't know anything different, this is just how it is. They won't find out that kids in the west spend half as much time in school until it's too late. I try to go easy on them a little and not get angry just because they have such lovely childhoods. But a lot of them are fun and happy all the time, I don't know how but they are. We're drat lucky to be born in the west though, I can't imagine never having had a childhood.
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May 24, 2011 12:47
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ParagonParadox27 posted:Name one running for president. Can't do it? The Republicans are good at politics, I don't think their real candidate has announced yet. I suspect they're letting people have at this list of poo poo for a while and then the Republican Jesus will emerge right before the primaries. I don't know who that would be, but I can't see the GOP being this dumb. They're lovely at governing but good at winning.
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Jul 22, 2011 07:04
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I am totally gay for Neil Degrasse Tyson and I loved him immediately answering the gay math problem. Also gay for Bourdain. Good way to go out on the season. I do appreciate when they have a teabagger like that guy on, still ignorant but someone you can actually have a conversation with, instead of the usual screaming douchebag.
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Aug 6, 2011 08:31
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I don't want the show to be an echo chamber, but they also need to stop having Republicans on because they're all one giant loving talking point and bullshit. There are a few conservatives that are good guests, capable of having an actual debate and conversation, they should just rotate them.
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Oct 15, 2011 10:51
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I did enjoy the bit where Bill responded to the douchebag with "First, he never said we were leaving Afghanistan, you made that up, second..."
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Oct 17, 2011 00:18
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inignot posted:Maher should stop having conservatives on the panel and just allocate one seat to a huge, terrible looking 1950s computer called "the conservotron 5000" that will intermittently spout conservative talking points in a robot voice. This is a legitimately good idea and I would love it. That or some comedian on the panel with a stack of conservative talking point notecards. They can compare the experience to having an actual real life Republican with them.
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Oct 21, 2011 01:52
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Ron Christie is somehow more of a piece of poo poo than Grover Norquist but goddamn I couldn't stop laughing when Maher told everyone to calm down and shut the gently caress up.
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Oct 29, 2011 11:18
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Nobody ever talks about the quality of graduates though. I've been working in education in Asia for a bit, and from my perspective any time you see a statistic about how China or South Korea is doing better than the US, it's bullshit. Massive grade inflation here is standard practice. No one fails. Universities have a 98% graduation rate. Kids here become fantastic memorize-regurgitate test taking machines but are utterly helpless if you give them a problem that requires any critical thought. I live in Hyundai's manufacturing city and know some engineers there who confirmed it works like this for them too. When Hyundai needs to design a new ship, they hire German, Norwegian, and American engineers to do it. They live here and take care of all the troubleshooting and any redesigns needed. Korean engineers are excellent at making things, but give them something that requires creativity and they're stumped, so they hire us for that. American education is far better than the 16TH IN THE WORLD news stories lead people to believe. The cost is a problem, the quality isn't so much.
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Nov 14, 2011 01:12
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readingatwork posted:Partially true. American education is great... if you are lucky enough to grow up in a nice neighborhood and wealthy enough to get into a decent university. If you are poor and in a lovely neighborhood you are right hosed. Poor people getting screwed is a universal truth, sadly. Here, they can't afford private tutoring so they only go to school eight hours a day Monday through Saturday, whereas the rich kids go to school for twelve.
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Nov 14, 2011 01:42
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punk rebel ecks posted:Does this apply to Japan and Singapore too? Japan has it too, but to a lesser extent. By American standards they're still very rote and suck at creativity, but by Asian standards they're creative. Japan invents a lot more stuff than most countries over here, and they have counterculture and stuff that Korea generally lacks. Singapore I know nothing about. My first-hand experience is in Korea, but as best as I can tell it's more or less true everywhere in East Asia, just the degree is different. Korea is probably at the bottom of the creativity scale, and they're aware of it. One Nobel prize winner, ever, and good luck finding something in the last hundred years invented in Korea. It's easy to find stuff made in Korea, but even when you live here, finding something invented here is very difficult. It's something that's recognized as a problem by the Koreans, but they don't seem to know what to do about it. I don't either, I do my little part by forcing my students to be creative, despite all the pain it causes me. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Nov 14, 2011 |
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Nov 14, 2011 07:44
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Also it takes a while. I've lived in Korea for a year now and having English options is hugely important. I'm more functional in the language all the time, but it would be years before I could entirely abandon English in my day to day life. Couple that with new people arriving all the time and there's always a need for those second language options. Immigrants to the US are a lot more likely to already know English (or to be motivated to learn--English is obviously vastly more useful than Korean) than someone going to Korea is to speak Korean, but the principle's the same.
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Jan 31, 2012 11:32
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I teach English in South Korea, here they start mandatory English education in third grade. Of course, the Korean education system sucks generally and is especially terrible at teaching languages, but it's something.
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Feb 1, 2012 01:29
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Learning any language is valuable since it helps you learn another, and students may have a talent for it that they would otherwise have never discovered if it weren't forced in school.
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Feb 1, 2012 03:11
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zVxTeflon posted:Ok pick the 3 that are offered nationwide and why you chose them. It doesn't matter what you pick, that's the point. My three personal minimum offerings would be Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. They're very different languages, all three are highly useful (Spanish because of location, all three because of the number of native speakers), and both Chinese and Arabic are rather difficult for an English speaker so the slower pace of high school level language classes would be valuable. You could also substitute Urdu for Arabic, but I'm operating on the assumption Indians are more likely to be functional in English than an average Arabic speaker. I personally learned German, which I enjoyed a lot but given that everyone in Germany under the age of 40 or so speaks flawless English I'm not going to argue it's especially useful.
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Feb 1, 2012 03:25
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I love NDT but I wish he'd mention how absolutely goddamn miniscule the NASA budget is more. It's always the "we could spend that money here!!!" poo poo, and people think NASA gets like 25% of the federal budget. NASA's yearly budget is seriously like eight days in Afghanistan.
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Mar 4, 2012 03:19
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etalian posted:But why spend money on high tech toys not designed for killing and maiming other people? Because NASA invents guidance systems that make your weapons more accurate! 
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Mar 5, 2012 10:44
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I liked this Republican guy, they should have him on more. How is it that Reagan is when everything really went wrong yet it seems most of the people who actually worked for Reagan are the reasonable conservatives now?
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Apr 1, 2012 04:02
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It's safe to eat, it's just terrible crap. And the pictures are kinda gross, but once lab-grown meat becomes cheap enough to be mass produced it's going to have the same issue even though it'll be a huge environmental win.
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Apr 22, 2012 03:58
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PJ is at least capable of being funny and entertaining while he's being wrong.
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Apr 23, 2012 00:55
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85 and I know Bobcat. Kids these days.
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May 6, 2012 04:57
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Overtime with Bill, Bobcat, and Arsenio just loving around was the best.
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May 8, 2012 02:48
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spankmeister posted:But how did he get like this, did he have a stroke or something? I dunno, maybe being 95 years old had something to do with it.
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Jun 24, 2012 10:50
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Coulter's such an over the top troll at this point that it turned into self parody.
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Oct 14, 2012 05:55
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adebisi lives posted:Did anyone else notice when Harris said AR-15's were great for home defense because the bullets were less likely to penetrate walls? That actually isn't bullshit, an AR-15 bullet is very light and tumbles in such a way that it won't penetrate well. Something like a .45 pistol has a much better chance of going through walls. Not saying this is a good reason to have an AR-15 around the house but it's not bullshit.
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Feb 5, 2013 04:40
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It was originally because a common thing to do with second/third/fourth/whatever sons in medieval noble houses was send them to the church. But if those sons had kids, now you had potential pretenders to challenge inheritances. So priests can't marry or have kids and you eliminate that problem. Has absolutely nothing to do with the religion and never did.
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Mar 24, 2013 11:15
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He has a point that there are good blue collar jobs out there and the education system is way too focused on saying everyone needs to go to college. My cousin wasted a bunch of time kicking around and going to college when it just wasn't for him. He eventually went to a trade school, learned to weld, and now makes like seventy dollars an hour. The schools need to evaluate students more honestly. The kid who is bad at school doesn't necessarily need to go work at McDonald's forever, steer him into a trade where he can make a good living without needing to be academic.
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Jul 15, 2013 14:17
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If Islam is the issue, wouldn't you expect to see the most problems in the countries with the biggest Muslim populations? I mean, if nothing else this is an obvious piece of logic. Islam is the problem, therefore more Muslims = more problems. But the two biggest Islamic countries are Indonesia and India, and in both cases the kind of poo poo that goes on in the Middle East is very rare. Of the top five Muslim population countries, Pakistan is the only one that fits the image. Bangladesh is fine, and Egypt is in flux now but has generally been quite moderate. Modern radical Islam largely stems from the Iranian Revolution and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, which proved its effectiveness as a tool to fight foreign imperialist forces. The US flat out encouraged radicalism in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, glad that didn't come back to bite us in the rear end or anything.
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Oct 27, 2013 08:46
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richardfun posted:What the hell happened to Reihan Salam? I remember him as being one of the most insufferable returning guests on Real Time. No, I was dreading it when I saw he was on but he was perfectly fine. I don't know what happened but I'm okay with it.
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Nov 17, 2013 17:08
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Also the stuff was already radioactive. And everyone forgets about reprocessing. If the waste is still highly radioactive, then it has a lot of energy in it that can still be extracted! Once you've used the poo poo out of that fuel the radioactivity is minimal. Fission isn't great but we are in crisis mode here, we have to do something big right now and fission is what we have.
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May 18, 2014 05:30
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That is true and it's the anti-nuclear argument I take seriously. Physics you can trust; people you can't.
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May 18, 2014 05:39
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Isn't it pretty much just Wahabists? There are extreme Shiites too but it seems like 95% of the problems go back to Saudi Arabia and Wahabism.
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Nov 7, 2014 14:51
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What conservatives have been on in the past few years who aren't total shitbags? It's got to be less than ten. Michael Steele is the only one I can think of offhand. I don't want an echo chamber but it is absurd. You could have a cardboard cutout of Reagan in one chair with the same ten Fox News talking points stapled to it and it would be indistinguishable from 99% of the conservative guests. I'd take people being terrible if they were doing it with an original thought.
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May 3, 2015 08:08
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ApexAftermath posted:The "republican guy" on the panel was pretty weak. What dweeb to come on the show and not have even a vague awareness of current events. He was okay I thought. He seemed to have thought out his views and had things to say instead of just spitting Fox News talking points. He can be on the list of conservative guests who aren't douchebags.
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May 17, 2015 03:37
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Vodos posted:Sorry but he belongs on that list very much, that's the bell curve dude. He thinks black people are genetically dumb and lazy. Rapper dude gave him poo poo for that right after he sat down, which surprised me, I didn't expect much from him but he was the best guest. Oh, I didn't know that was that guy. Now I feel dumb.
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May 17, 2015 06:44
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