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At least he got a trial.

Yeah. In Canada. Meanwhile, next door...

I'm still planning on voting for him. I think that the two party system we have is inherently broken.

I don't endorse candidates in a race in which I don't have an interest, but let me propose another option for you.

Realistically, either Obama will be re-elected or (slightly less likely) Romney will be elected. Nothing will stop that. Your best bet now is to get someone else in the presidential debates who will ask the right questions and shake things up. That someone else is not Ron Paul. To get into the debate under the current rules, you need to poll 15% nationally. There's only one person who is even close to that: Buddy Roemer, who is currently at 7%.

I have no idea what his platform is, but Lawrence Lessig is backing him, so he's clearly an anti-corruption candidate.

You can vote for whomever you like in November, but you might want to follow the Lessig path in the mean time.

Not only did Bruce demonstrate how useless the security at MSP is, but it's his home airport. My guess is that the TSA want all this extra 'security' to keep tabs on him.

...and so is Wikileaks for taking it seriously.

No, the primary problem is poverty.

If you control for socioeconomic status, a whole lot of the differences in testing just go away.

But, you say, isn't America a rich country? Yes, it is, but we also have a huge poverty and especially child poverty problem. Not just in relative terms, but also in absolute terms due to high inequality. Within the OECD, we have above average poverty and child poverty (absolute meaning that most OECD countries have a lower percentage of the population live below the US poverty line). We also have lots more wealthy people, of course, but that doesn't make children with low SES learn better, while the educational benefits of high SES eventually hit diminishing returns.

In short, standardized tests largely test the socioeconomic status of the student body, and not the quality of schools or teachers.

This particular test also appears to be norm-referenced rather than criterion-referenced, so it's a poor choice for evaluating student or teacher performance in different states (whereas it might be useful for comparing school curricula in different states; e.g., to critique California's science curricula).

Of course, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't also fix other problematic aspects of our educational system, but "let's dissolve teacher unions and throw out the bad teachers" isn't going to fix much. For starters, you'd either end up doing very little or end up with a teacher shortage: because being a teacher in America, as opposed to, say Finland is a comparatively low-status, low-income profession. Note that low-income is relative; it's not that teachers are necessarily starving, but the income you make based on a MAT degree is much lower than what you can get out of many other graduate degrees -- so, why go into teaching unless you're either (1) truly motivated or (2) can't hack it elsewhere? Contrast that with Finland, where teachers are well-paid, highly regarded people; a graduate degree is required (though university education is basically free) along with additional practical training; as a result, Finnish schools get to pick from the best of the best.

If they start adding product placement on Game of Thrones I'll give up on TV completely.

The key difference, of course, is that you pay extra to see GoT. I just wish HBO wasn't owned by Time Warner, so they could sell HBO Go to me directly without having to worry about impacting the revenue of their other channels (sold as packages to the cable/satellite companies).

I don't usually reply to religious talk, but analytical thinking is something that most religious people lack... or they wouldn't believe in an invisible fairy in the sky, an immaculate conception, etc. People are fooled because they want to believe in something, i.e. "religion is the opiate of the masses". Although I feel pity for your child-mind, there's not much I can do to educate an adult who has been indoctrinated into the cult of religion already. That's regrettable, but it's tolerable so long as you keep your beliefs to yourself and don't bother the rest of us with your drivel. So do us a favor and keep your religion private, as your Bible has commanded you to do. Or seeing that you're from the Memphis, Tennessee area, go watch Deliverance one more time or dress up in some Confederate garb and re-enact a war you lost, I don't care. Christ -on-a-stick, I unfortunately lived in that area for a few years and couldn't wait to get back to civilization!

In the meantime, here's an informative article for you. I hope the big words aren't too much: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/study-of-the-day-even-the-religious-lose-faith-when-they-think-critically/256402/

Music lobby group, the BPI, welcomed the move, saying music creators 'deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else'

Then maybe there should be some laws against the record labels which don't even pay the artists shit?

and calling for those who use The Pirate Bay to illegally download content to 'explore the many digital music services operating ethically and legally in the UK.'"

I invite those slimy pigs to make a legal and ethical living themselves.

You may be right. And of course there are other arguments for eliminating corporate taxes. Some good ones are in this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/10/why-we-should-eliminate-the-corporate-income-tax/65351/

Personally I'm giving it up to another 5 years, but if things haven't dramatically changed by then, there's going to be little hope of finding somewhere safe and freedom loving to move

- Yeah, good luck with that in 5 years.

In case you missed it, IRS wants the right to seize your passport.

That's right, IRS wants to be able to prevent you from getting a passport and even to be able to stop you from getting out of the country. Imagine: you come to the airport or maybe you drive towards Mexican or Canadian border and you have to go through the border patrol. All of a sudden you find out that your passport has been revoked.

Apparently you could be stopped this way before if you owed more than $2500 in child support payments, but now IRS wants to extend that to anybody who owes an amount in taxes that is 50K or above.

QUOTE:

It all started last fall, when Senator Barbara Boxer introduced the "Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act" (or "MAP-21" as it's now called), to reauthorize funds for federal highway and transportation programs. While that doesn't sound like anything having to do with your taxes, the bill includes a little-noticed section that allows the State Department to "deny, revoke or limit" passport rights for any taxpayers with "serious delinquencies."

Here's how it would work. If someone owed more than $50,000 in back taxes, the IRS would be able to send their name over to the passport office for suspension, provided that the IRS already either filed a public lien or a assessed a levy for the outstanding balance. The bill does provide a few exceptions though. For example, if a person has set up a payment plan (that they're paying in a timely manner), is legitimately disputing the debt, or has an emergency situation or humanitarian reason and must travel internationally, they may be able to leave for a limited time despite their unpaid taxes.

Oh, by the way, MAP-21 HAS PASSED. IRS now owns you, citizen.

--

Also just a little while back they increased the payment that one needed to make to get a renunciation of citizenship form. It used to cost exactly 0.

Now it costs 450USD to submit that form.

So think about it:

1. Right now the cost of that form is 450USD.
2. It's 50K in tax debt that would prevent you from getting a passport.

BUT... when did government ever STOP with something, once the nose of the camel made it under the tent?

The cost of that citizen revocation form can climb to an amount that in principle can easily be EQUAL TO YOUR SHARE OF NATIONAL DEBT.

That's right. You are born into this national debt (after all, your ancestors have voted themselves a little something known as 'social contract', which made YOU their slave).

So you are born into this 'social contract', and it's basically your share of national debt + WHATEVER ELSE. "Whatever else" can be any amount of taxes that the federal government may deem you be liable for, so they can say: we cannot allow you to leave the country, citizen, until you give us enough money to cover your portion of 'social contract', never mind the national debt.

You think in a totalitarian society you'll ever be able to make that kind of money?

Also: that citizen renunciation form - unless you are cool with filing your US taxes forever, even if you don't live in the USA, you'll want to get rid of that burden. Why is it a burden? Nobody wants to do business with you outside of USA, that's why. You won't be able even to have a bank account, nobody wants the hustle of dealing with your government.

But to prevent you from getting that form, the amount you may have to shell out for it may again rise over and over again, totally indefinitely, to

Wrong. They won't cost 6800.

China's slice of the iPad is only 3%: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/which-countries-make-money-off-the-ipad/251654/
Similar for the iPhone: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2011/12/24/china-makes-almost-nothing-out-of-apples-ipads-and-i/

Multiply that by 10x and and the iProducts would be at most 30% more expensive. Most of the people buying them now would probably still be buying them at that higher price.

Of course, from what I see the US workers are not worth paying 10x more for. Judging from the many Slashdot posts by US people the average worker is unlikely to be even worth 3x more (the best on the other hand are a different story). Compare your pay here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17543356

In some countries there is a better hope since they are educating a higher percentage of their population to higher levels, that way they can stay ahead of the cheap labour (Vietnam etc) and upcoming more sophisticated and efficient robots. In contrast the USA is on the track where a minority rule over a mostly mediocre poorly educated majority. Your rulers don't care of course - it works well for them. Well educated voters will just make their lives more difficult. But you and the rest of the voters should care.

The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance"

You don't think that this sort of remark ... might be part of the reason global warming has such a bad rep. Let's run you through a basic application of statistical science here.

When we make a measurement, you're essentially placing a sensor in a noisy environment. If we make the wrong assumption that the noise is random (this is wrong, but hopefully close enough. Yes, hopefully). So you take many measurements and use a number of techniques to fix this data, including several that are essentially fraud (I can see the guy at this station wasn't taking his medicine these days, let's just drop that data - type of "fixing"). Then you test a hypothesis against that data. This does not result in "a warming trend" or "a cooling trend" it results in 2 numbers : chance that the temperature has risen -> p, chance that the temperature has not risen -> !p (hey sue me, slashdot does not implement latex and I'm not about to look up the correct UTF symbol for not). You might also calculate a value "q", the chance that the temperature has dropped. And this also gives you !q.

What may amaze you is that p > !p AND q > !q. So we're dealing with a guess here. The convention is that unless p > 95%, we don't say temperature has risen. For most data sets, p 50%).

Note that even this 95% is a concession of the scientific world to statistical sciences, and there's a huge problem with statistical sciences. By contrast, the canonical example of an exact science, physics, only considers a measurement reasonable when it passes a significance of six sigma (which is 99.9999998027% certain). That is *NOT* enough to declare something the truth within physics, the only thing that is enough for that is a mathematically consistent theory that passes repeatable experiments (and even then it usually takes 10 years or more).

Read that link. Think about the fact that climate science is in fact much more limited in what it can experiment with than medical science. Experiments are impossible. Today's data is unreliable to the point where ~10% of the data points are flat-out wrong before correction. Data going back thousands of years is used, and nobody really knows it's reliability (and the tree ring issue certainly seems to suggest a lot of factors we don't know are at play here) ...

So can you please understand that if it's not statistically significant, it didn't happen. Credibility is a huge problem already, please don't screw it by being wrong 50% of the time. No, not even if you mean well.

You're not helping.

Exactly. Men might even become obsolete pretty soon:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135/

Indeed, he's even been complaining for some years that the National Review is too soft on racial issues. Here's a discussion from 2003 lamenting how younger conservatives are putting pressure on NR to avoid racialist discussion that older NR readers would've once been okay with.

Thanks for the reply. One can wonder sometimes if there are other factors like ideology or a current relative distribution of power that some people think more important than either happiness or material productivity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm

But, it may overall just be more easily explained by ignorance. Or possibly because what plutocratic management is so often about is not encouraging high absolute levels of productivity or creativity in a society but in getting productivity and creativity focused on narrowly defined business objectives -- objectives that benefit those who already socially have control of a lot of resources and claim rents from them? So, even if absolute productivity is lower with "carrot and stick", it is productivity those who claim rents can benefit from... Of course, that explanation would not sit well with the high priests of unfettered capitalism or their most devout followers:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/

John Ioannidis, a medical statistics researcher on a small island in the Aegean, leads a group that has done significant work in this area. Here is an article in The Atlantic about his work.

From the article: ". . . Ioannidis laid out a detailed mathematical proof that, assuming modest levels of researcher bias, typically imperfect research techniques, and the well-known tendency to focus on exciting rather than highly plausible theories, researchers will come up with wrong findings most of the time. Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right."

These findings are no surprise to those who have been following medical science and research for the past decades. See for example what Dr John Ioannidis has to say about the consistency, accuracy and honesty (or lack thereof) of medical science in general: "as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed","There was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations of a small number of cases", "he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings" - and not just in epidemiological (statistical) studies, but also in randomized, double-blind clinical trials: "Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals ... 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials."

Gary Taubes too denounced this accumulation of bias back in 2007: compliance bias, information bias, confirmation bias, etc. routinely introduce non-uniform effects that can be bigger than what you try to measure. And you cannot compensate for them because you cannot quantify them.

As Sander Greenland, one of the editor/authors of Modern Epidemiology, wrote in chapter 19 "Bias Analysis":

Conventional methods assume all errors are random and that any modeling assumptions (such as homogeneity) are correct. With these assumptions, all uncertainty about the impact of errors on estimates is subsumed within conventional standard deviations for the estimates (standard errors), such as those given in earlier chapters (which assume no measurement error), and any discrepancy between an observed association and the target effect may be attributed to chance alone. When the assumptions are incorrect, however, the logical foundation for conventional statistical methods is absent, and those methods may yield highly misleading inferences. Epidemiologists recognize the possibility of incorrect assumptions in conventional analyses when they talk of residual confounding (from nonrandom exposure assignment), selection bias (from nonrandom subject selection), and information bias (from imperfect measurement). These biases rarely receive quantitative analysis, a situation that is understandable given that the analysis requires specifying values (such as amount of selection bias) for which little or no data may be available. An unfortunate consequence of this lack of quantification is the switch in focus to those aspects of error that are more readily quantified, namely the random components.

Systematic errors can be and often are larger than random errors, and failure to appreciate their impact is potentially disastrous. The problem is magnified in large studies and pooling projects, for in those studies the large size reduces the amount of random error, and as a result the random error may be but a small component of total error. In such studies, a focus on “statistical significance” or even on confidence limits may amount to nothing more than a decision to focus on artifacts of systematic error as if they reflected a real causal effect.

Found it! It's from All You Need Is Love: How the terrorists stopped terrorism in The Atlantic. Their own generals wanted to break up Black September, but couldn't come up with a way to get these ridiculously dedicated terrorists to stop:

My host, who was one of Abu Iyad's most trusted deputies, was charged with devising a solution. For months both men thought of various ways to solve the Black September problem, discussing and debating what they could possibly do, short of killing all these young men, to stop them from committing further acts of terror.

        Finally they hit upon an idea. Why not simply marry them off? In other words, why not find a way to give these men -- the most dedicated, competent, and implacable fighters in the entire PLO - a reason to live rather than to die? Having failed to come up with any viable alternatives, the two men put their plan in motion. ...

      So approximately a hundred of these beautiful young women were brought to Beirut. There, in a sort of PLO version of a college mixer, boy met girl, boy fell in love with girl, boy would, it was hoped, marry girl. There was an additional incentive, designed to facilitate not just amorous connections but long-lasting relationships. The hundred or so Black Septemberists were told that if they married these women, they would be paid $3,000; given an apartment in Beirut with a gas stove, a refrigerator, and a television; and employed by the PLO in some nonviolent capacity. Any of these couples that had a baby within a year would be rewarded with an additional $5,000.

        Both Abu Iyad and the future general worried that their scheme would never work. But, as the general recounted, without exception the Black Septemberists fell in love, got married, settled down, and in most cases started a family...the general explained, not one of them would agree to travel abroad, for fear of being arrested and losing all that they had -- that is, being deprived of their wives and children. 'And so', my host told me, 'that is how we shut down Black September and eliminated terrorism. It is the only successful case that I know of.'

That was the view from the inside, dunno how it squares with your knowledge. But that's the source I had, for what it's worth.

or maybe they just could implement finland's education system.... http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/ http://www.amazon.com/Finnish-Lessons-Educational-Change-Finland/dp/0807752576

Actually, little to do with I-10. I recall they were checking out I-40 in Tennessee. (That is just the first link from googling 'tsa tennessee highway')

Since no one has flown a plane into a building under their watch it's hard to say that they are ineffective

Correlation does not equal causation. For instance, do you know what else we've improved since then? Cockpit security. And we have increased civilian awareness about the dangers of successful plane hijackings.

Besides, none of this is an excuse to violate people's privacy.

What is the Greek story about a bloke rolling a stone uphill all day only to lose it at night? This thread reminds me of that. You have a national security branch set up to look intothe secret private lives of all politicians and scientists etc, run by a nancy boy, and they only succeeded in hounding Oppenheimer. They missed the plot to kill JFK and the advice about 9/11. Yet it is still the #1 US secret police farce. Any number of corrupt an intrusive firms have been invited into the American administration of the Internet and given free rein. Why should the rest of the world expect things to change? Take a look at this: http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/02/the-civil-war-part-1-the-places/100241/ Scroll right arrow to #12. For all the Arab Springs and the Occupy Wall Streets... Nothing ever changes.

"There were also less than 0.1% of the current population of the area, and they had little use for wood beyond using it as a basic structural material and occasional fuel for heat."

Exactly. The amount of resources was very abundant relative to the need, and so people did not have to work very hard to get wood. Now apply that idea to cheap energy from LENR, and cheap 3D printing, and cheap nanotech material recycling, and cheap service robotics, and so on.

The human imagination is indeed the "ultimate resource" as economist Julian Simon said:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/

With about seven billion people on the planet, many connected to the internet, we have more collective imagination than ever. So as a species, we are in that sense wealthier than ever...

"Again: China is developing a middle class. As China exits the cheap-labor market, many more countries are willing and able to pick up the slack"

China was the biggest single cheap labor pool around. Most of the remaining places for cheap labor have very little infrastructure. So, how long is that trend going to last?

Also, at some point, it does not matter how cheap the labor is if the quality standards can not be met for some reason. Related article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/01/making-it-in-america/8844/?single_page=true
"Tony explains that Maddie has a job [in the USA] for two reasons. First, when it comes to making fuel injectors, the company saves money and minimizes product damage by having both the precision and non-precision work done in the same place. Even if Mexican or Chinese workers could do Maddie's job more cheaply, shipping fragile, half-finished parts to another country for processing would make no sense. Second, Maddie is cheaper than a machine. It would be easy to buy a robotic arm that could take injector bodies and caps from a tray and place them precisely in a laser welder. Yet Standard would have to invest about $100,000 on the arm and a conveyance machine to bring parts to the welder and send them on to the next station. As is common in factories, Standard invests only in machinery that will earn back its cost within two years. For Tony, it's simple: Maddie makes less in two years than the machine would cost, so her job is safe -- for now. If the robotic machines become a little cheaper, or if demand for fuel injectors goes up and Standard starts running three shifts, then investing in those robots might make sense. "

So, even in the USA, many jobs could be completely automated if we wanted to. Ask yourself, it is really better that this single parent is away from her young children to save a $100,000 capital investment by someone? Would not the USA be a better place if the robot was doing that work and this person could spend more time with her children, friends, and neighbors? How many jobs are like that, or worse are just counter-productive like Bob Black wrote about in 1985 and others in the 1960s?

The cost of advanced robotics is also dropping very rapidly. Even toys are more and more pressed into service in real productive applications:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/03/13/1426252/lego-mindstorms-used-to-make-artificial-bones

"There is no vast conspiracy to defeat your idealistic vision..."

Did I say there was? Although it is true there are forces against it... As well as forces for it.

"... there are only the economic realities of efficiency and cost. The automation you envision will only happen when it becomes effective and inexpensive and not a moment before."

Well, total economic realities involve all externalities which should include things like pollution costs, health costs, social benefits costs for displaced

I can't help but feel like this article is just designed to put the idea into millions of readers' heads that you can go into a casino with a strategy or method or system and take home millions at the blackjack table.

It might help if you read the article, then you'd lose that feeling.

I think this is the only quote I needed to lose the feeling of heading to a blackjack table to be a millionaire:
"He had to pony up $1 million of his own money to start, but, as he would say later: “You’d never lose the million. If you got to [$500,000 in losses], you would stop and take your 20 percent discount. You’d owe them only $400,000.” "

So he was already a millionaire... actually, multi-millionaire, because he had one million to just hand to the casino to play a game.

The whole article they make him sound like Joe the Plumber that just played one day and won millions. Nothing could be further from the truth, this guy reaches in his pocket and hands out a million dollars to play a game.

While I can't comment on Sweden specifically, the sort of paranoid, blinkered thinking in the parent is at least part of the reason why state-funded schools in little countries like Finland are kicking the crap out of their USA counterparts. One alternative is to, y'know, make the schools actually *good*:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/january/finnish-schools-reform-012012.html

etc.

The Mayans were probably not having a significant impact on their own weather

Or, y'know, they were.

(I smell some green cultist with an agenda).

Or, y'know, scientists.

The reality of the Mayan collapse was based on the confluence of population growth and soil depletion.

Or, y'know, not that. YMMV.

It's funny too that no one ever publishes how they got those numbers.

Absolutely. Also, no one ever searches on Google, even for just 10 seconds, to find information like this article which details how they got the numbers, including links to iSupply teardowns and so on.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/how-much-would-the-ipad-2-cost-if-it-were-made-in-the-us-about-1-140/238508/

I posted below that I think he's referring to this article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/how-much-would-the-ipad-2-cost-if-it-were-made-in-the-us-about-1-140/238508/

You can read it yourself and argue with the authors over their methodology.

But essentially they estimate 9 hours of labor to manufacture, at a Chinese rate of $1.11/hr vs a US rate of $32.53/hr. That's $10 (China) vs $292.77 (US).

The entire reason "cost of labour is a tiny part of the cost of the electronic devices" is BECAUSE they are manufactured overseas.

Perhaps you were thinking of this article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/how-much-would-the-ipad-2-cost-if-it-were-made-in-the-us-about-1-140/238508/

They estimate $1140... if they price at a level that retains the same gross margin. Whether or not people would buy it if it were that much is entirely another matter.

The article also estimates the iPad 2 would cost $617.77 using various averages for U.S. manufacturing/mining/construction compensation. That's still a profit (using $729 for the 32gb iPad 2 WiFi + 3g, just not as much of one.

And it's only two because nobody ever bothered with rock'n roll.

Rules and Regulations for Public Dance Halls ("no beating of drum to produce jazz effect") and also, Nazi hatred for jazz (I think this one is my favorite: "so-called jazz compositions may contain at most 10% syncopation; the remainder must consist of a natural legato movement devoid of the hysterical rhythmic reverses characteristic of the barbarian races and conductive to dark instincts alien to the German people (so-called riffs)"...)

Seriously...
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

Fundamentally, education is a social (and socialization) process. It has to come from the community. Middle-class teachers commuting to poor neighborhoods will rarely bridge the cultural gap needed to form a successful connection between teacher and student.

Beyond that, metrics get in the way of the intangibles that represent what really matters about learning. Kids these days are super-stressed and need down-time that isn't tied to a performance metric.

Eliminate screen time K-8. They get enough (too much) of it at home. There is zero competitive advantage in having a nation of kids that can use a mouse and click on icons all day. It's the most basic of skills to learn- no one is 'left behind' by an absence of screen time.
Double the time spent on physical education, with a focus on getting *outdoors*. Get some vitamin D and fresh air.
Bring back music and arts programs. So many intangible benefits- de-stressors, creative outlets, social engagement, neural development, etc, etc.

I spent hundreds of hours in band rehearsals. When I wasn't in rehearsal I ran cross-country. I paid a small amount of attention to homework and graduated first in my high-school class and then first in my engineering class. If I'd been educated under some standardized test regime I would have missed out on some of the most educational social encounters of my life. Fundamentally, I was successful because I felt I was part of a community that cared about success. Also, I was taught by teachers I could relate to.

FWIW I went to public school. Private schools were relatively rare, growing up. There was the sense that if you had to go to private school it was because you were struggling in the public system- a weak student who needed more 1:1 time. Times have certainly changed...

As in many areas, perhaps the United States doesn't need to invent anything radically new, just copy what works elsewhere.

Before someone mods you down, the head of the Finish education system (rated at the top), completely agrees with you -- they specifically avoid the competition aspects of education:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/what-americans-keep-ignoring-about-finlands-school-success/250564/

With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

It's about cooperation, not competition. They let the teachers judge the progress, not standardized testing from on-high. There are no private schools. There are no fees for education (other than taxes).

Citation needed. If people believed as you did, there would never be any innovation...

Also, you raise a false dillemma. Vast amounts of financial capital in our society have tied themselves up into energy sources they can more easily control. It's a mindset that won't invest much in alternatives, and will invest in politics to keep their control in place (like preventing laws regulating coal pollution).

Actually, I live in a fairly energy efficient house (partially passive solar), so I am practicing that I preach to some extent (not perfectly). The state of the art in home construction these days in cold climates is to have lots of efficiency and no furnace:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html?_r=1
"DARMSTADT, Germany â" From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace."

I also eat pretty low on the food chain, that saves lots of energy and water and medical costs and pollution and animal suffering and so on.
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/2002html_summer/article6.htm

I provided lots of links to people putting time and money into alternatives, and they just continue to improve. The fact that GE is predicting solar will be cheaper that coal in five years despite how coal is subsidized so much (including by not having to pay for the health costs or environment destruction costs) just shows how good renewables are.
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/29/ge-solar-power-cheaper-than-fossil-fuels-in-5-years/

Coal did not pay its true cost in 1993:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/12/the-true-cost-of-coal/4566/

Coal does not pay its true cost now (perhaps half a trillion dollars a year):
http://www.skepticalscience.com/true-cost-of-coal-power.html
http://www.desmogblog.com/true-cost-coal-half-trillion-dollars-year

And that is what makes it so hard "economically" to sell alternatives.

So, it is indeed hard to compete against such a tilted playing field, true. That is a missing issue in your comment about "so you do it", unpaid externalities.

In fact, if you reread my comment, you will see I said "No one said it was going to be easy"... That is why it is now a socio-economic issue more than a technical issue. We have plenty of technology if we wanted to use it. And it would overall be cheaper to use it overall across our society, and then alternatives would be adopted faster when gasoline was $20 a gallon with externalities priced in (we'd all drive electric cars pretty fast) or when coal electricity was $0.50 a kilowatt-hour (we'd all switch to wind and other renewables plus energy efficiency real fast). But that does not happen because we don't pay up front. Instead we pay on our health insurance bills, or in national debt to fund a war machine, or future environmental destruction that needs to be fixed, and so on...

Iran has funded all kinds of terrorism in the world

And how many democracies has the U.S. government overthrown? How many dictators supported? How many civilian airliners shot down? How many scientists murdered?

People in glass houses....

I knew about Stratfor, but hadn't heard much about them recently until the leak. This article in the Atlantic describes the situation pretty well, you are paying for what used to be called newspaper coverage:

The Atlantic: Stratfor is a joke and so it Wikileaks for taking it seriously

Here's another:
ForeignPolicy.com: Wake me when Wikileaks publishes the Illuminati emails

Remember Wikileaks always over promotes everything they release....

This story cracks me up. STRATFOR is a joke (example-- 10 years ago the founder predicted the US would fight its next war against JAPAN). The fact that Wikileaks thinks that publishing emails stolen by Anon. is a blow for freedom confirms that Wikileaks is a bigger joke than Stratfor, striving to seem relevant while Julian A. awaits trial for rape. This story is like the Weekly World News unmasking the dark plots of Amway, and the fact that /. published a complete garble of Stratfor as a US government intelligence agency just makes /. look equally stupid.

For a great article on this mess:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/02/stratfor-is-a-joke-and-so-is-wikileaks-for-taking-it-seriously/253681/

Trying to fix HTML is like trying to graft arms and legs onto hamburger. There's got to be something better-- but XML is the same thing and worse. EMBEDDED MARKUP IS A CANCER. (See my article "Embedded Markup Considered Harmful", WWW Journal, 1997 or 1998.) The Web is a special effects race, FANFARES ON SPREADSHEETS! JUST WHAT WE NEED!. (Instead of dealing with the important structure issues-- structure, continuity, persistence of material, side-by-side intercomparison, showing what things are the same.) This is cosmetics instead of medicine. We are reliving the font madness of the eighties, a tangent which did nothing to help the structure that users need who are trying to manage content. The Xanadu® project did not "fail to invent HTML". HTML is precisely what we were trying to PREVENT-- ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management. The "Browser" is an extremely silly concept-- a window for looking sequentially at a large parallel structure. It does not show this structure in a useful way.

(emphasis added).
Ted raises some interesting points; it is hard for me to think that HTML is the be-all and end-all of information.
I don't know that his "zigzag" thing is ever going to get traction, but

There's evidence either way, and it points to forgery. The most incisive and in-depth analysis I've seen comes from Megan McArdle of The Atlantic, herself a supporter of AGW. 16 Feb 2012, Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake?. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/. 17 Feb 2012, Heartland Memo Looking Faker by the Minute. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/. 21 Feb 2012, Peter Gleick Confesses to Obtaining Heartland Documents Under False Pretenses. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/peter-gleick-confesses-to-obtaining-heartland-documents-under-false-pretenses/253395/.

There's evidence either way, and it points to forgery. The most incisive and in-depth analysis I've seen comes from Megan McArdle of The Atlantic, herself a supporter of AGW. 16 Feb 2012, Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake?. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/. 17 Feb 2012, Heartland Memo Looking Faker by the Minute. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/. 21 Feb 2012, Peter Gleick Confesses to Obtaining Heartland Documents Under False Pretenses. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/peter-gleick-confesses-to-obtaining-heartland-documents-under-false-pretenses/253395/.

There's evidence either way, and it points to forgery. The most incisive and in-depth analysis I've seen comes from Megan McArdle of The Atlantic, herself a supporter of AGW. 16 Feb 2012, Leaked Docs From Heartland Institute Cause a Stir—but Is One a Fake?. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/. 17 Feb 2012, Heartland Memo Looking Faker by the Minute. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/. 21 Feb 2012, Peter Gleick Confesses to Obtaining Heartland Documents Under False Pretenses. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/peter-gleick-confesses-to-obtaining-heartland-documents-under-false-pretenses/253395/.

Gleick's announcment Feb 20: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/peter-gleick-admits-to-deception-in-obtaining-heartland-climate-files/
McArdle's Article: Feb 19: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/
Pielke's tweet Feb 18: http://twitter.com/#!/RogerPielkeJr/status/170542669007818752

Gleick has confessed to lying to obtain the documents; they were not leaked. You have to work inside an organization to leak documents, like the original ClimateGate emails. Megan McCardle of the Atlantic makes a strong case that the main document is forged.

I agree that Megan McArdle's analysis of this document is interesting and worth reading.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/

For a document that supposedly is a glimpse to the inside machinations of a bunch of corporate suits, it sure has an odd tone.

See also the followup:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/

The metadata and timestamp analysis is interesting as well.

steveha

I agree that Megan McArdle's analysis of this document is interesting and worth reading.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/leaked-docs-from-heartland-institute-cause-a-stir-but-is-one-a-fake/253165/

For a document that supposedly is a glimpse to the inside machinations of a bunch of corporate suits, it sure has an odd tone.

See also the followup:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/02/heartland-memo-looking-faker-by-the-minute/253276/

The metadata and timestamp analysis is interesting as well.

steveha

Some pretty interesting and pretty detailed analysis of the memo here.

I'm inclined to say the memo is probably fake given all the weirdness surrounding it, and given who the "leaker" is.

Anybody remember the Atlantic story from a while ago about Pakistan transporting its nukes?

It was presented as "Oh noes, they move their nukes in ordinary trucks instead of military convoys. Maybe we should invade them and secure their arsenal."

Lo and behold, the DoE is using the same method in the US.

+5 insightful? Seriously? You folks don't see any difference between the internal security of the US and that of Pakistan?

There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence it's faked. Every document in the bundle except the strategy memo and an IRS document was printed to PDF in the central time zone. The IRS document was printed to PDF in GMT-4. The strategy memo was scanned in with an Epson scanner to a PDF by someone in the Pacific time zone. All documents except the strategy memo and a board directory were printed to PDF on January 16, the day before a board meeting. The board directory was printed January 25. The strategy memo was created at 3:41 PM on February 13. If you want more, read over here. In short, it really looks like someone got a bunch of real documents and then threw something in to sex it up a bit.

No, it looks like somebody prepared a lot of documents for a board meeting and handed them out as PDFs (in addition to paper), and later others produced more documents, one of which was send out by snail mail and archived as a PDF by one receiving party. That's exactly how management works.

Anybody remember the Atlantic story from a while ago about Pakistan transporting its nukes?

It was presented as "Oh noes, they move their nukes in ordinary trucks instead of military convoys. Maybe we should invade them and secure their arsenal."

Lo and behold, the DoE is using the same method in the US.

There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence it's faked. Every document in the bundle except the strategy memo and an IRS document was printed to PDF in the central time zone. The IRS document was printed to PDF in GMT-4. The strategy memo was scanned in with an Epson scanner to a PDF by someone in the Pacific time zone. All documents except the strategy memo and a board directory were printed to PDF on January 16, the day before a board meeting. The board directory was printed January 25. The strategy memo was created at 3:41 PM on February 13. If you want more, read over here.

How do these dates, time zones and scanner types recorded in the PDFs suggest that some of these docs are fakes and some are original? Are you suggesting that the time zone discrepancy indicates that?

There is actually a pretty significant amount of evidence it's faked. Every document in the bundle except the strategy memo and an IRS document was printed to PDF in the central time zone. The IRS document was printed to PDF in GMT-4. The strategy memo was scanned in with an Epson scanner to a PDF by someone in the Pacific time zone. All documents except the strategy memo and a board directory were printed to PDF on January 16, the day before a board meeting. The board directory was printed January 25. The strategy memo was created at 3:41 PM on February 13. If you want more, read over here.

In short, it really looks like someone got a bunch of real documents and then threw something in to sex it up a bit. The problem for them is that they did it so damned badly. The problem for Heartland is that they're acting like dicks toward a lot of people, when they should be upending heaven and hell to find the memo forger and crucifying him for libel.