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Obama Wants Broadband, Computers Part of Stimulus
damn_registrars writes "President-elect Barack Obama announced in his radio address that his administration's economic stimulus package will include investing in computers and broadband for education. 'To help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.'
He also said it is 'unacceptable' that the US ranks 15th in broadband adoption." No doubt with free spyware and internet filtering. You know... for the kids.
Yeah, sure will provide a ton of jobs to the Chinese who manufacture these things.
Not that I believe investing in education is bad, but passing it off as an economic stimulus is disingenuous.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Was that really necessary to get the story across?
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
It is a fallacy that you need computers in schools. Teach the kids reading, writing and math skills, the rest can come later. Computers are a drain on schools with already tight budgets. We went to moon with engineers and scientists who did not have computers.
Conservative, mod down for violating
"To help our children compete in a 21st century economy"
It's bad enough that I have to compete with cheap "offshore" labor, now I gotta compete against someone willing to work for pokemon cards??
It would be great if the local cable or phone company could run their lines just 1 block further from my nearest neighbor so I could get broadband.
Maybe Obama can make it happen!
You're nothing; like me.
He also wants to use broadband for health care facilities.
Since I know that most of you don't RTFA and the summary is lacking that point, I figured I'd point it out.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
In grade school, we had a handful of Apple IIs (for AppleWorks, Oregeon Trail, Reader rabbit, and a few other educational titles). In high school, the library had a couple computers for the card catalog and CD-ROM encyclopedia, and there were a couple GW Basic/word processing rooms. So why do students need the internet for learning? Wikipedia is nice, but most schools are (rightfully) banning it. Instead of teaching math, should they just give out calculators and provide training for how to press the buttons on a McRegister? If people are graduating high school with a 6th grade level education, all the broadband in the world won't help them.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
No doubt with free spyware and internet filtering. You know... for the kids.
Slashdot: News For Nerds (That Can Never Be Happy About Anything)
How many people here are truly opposed to some sort of filtering in computers in school? While the idea of some sort of imposed filter on my internet connection at home is very bothersome to me, I don't have a problem with attempts to keep inappropriate material off of computers in schools.
My biggest concern about it would be that generally the filtering systems aren't that hard to work around, so hopefully the school systems won't waste money buying into a really expensive product that ends up not working any better than a cheaper alternative.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
1. Take a bunch of money out of the economy.
2. Shuffle it though an inefficient bureaucracy .
3. Put what remains back into the economy.
4. ???
5. Economic recovery.
This is the same argument folks in the US use to justify the lack of public transport.
The fact is that the US is 80% urban and suburban, so getting decent services to those folks (in both broadband and public transport) shouldn't be a problem. What is the problem, with internet connectivity anyway, is the deeply entrenched telecoms companies with their local monopolies.
exactly. but i remember hearing a story in the late 90s about the guy who founded Qwest was heir to a railroad company or something. basically, he sold off all the land around the tracks except for a certain number of feet on either side of the tracks. the trains were then outfitted with something that would automatically lay fiber.
this could be total crap, but i don't know.
"If for any reason you're not satisfied with our service, I hate you."
Well, despite being an Obama supporter (as am I), Taco is being pragmatic. Eric Holden could be his Attorney General, and he's all for net censorship. Plus this is the Democrats we're talking about; the old guard is salivating at the prospect of getting all their old nanny state legislation back on the plate.
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
The goal should be to give one computer to each and every student and have a free network full of free information. China is not an excuse to avoid that. The economics of the result will be tremendous and dwarf the pety costs involved. It will create greater cultural wealth for everyone, greater oportunities and greater ability to exploit those oportunities.
Such goals can only be achieved in freedom. Indiana shows that free software is cheaper and a free network is also required for knowledge to really flow. Napster showed that we can have any piece of culture available for the trivial cost of allowing people to share. Wikipedia and the internet archive show that people are ready, willing and able to create works and share them without the "protection" of copyright.
I work with lots of good Chinese and Indian software engineers. Most never saw a computer before University. They did have a rigorous and old-fashioned education, with lots of math and logic.
I also know talented hackers who got into programming as kids/teenagers, and benefited from the fast dev cycle of Apples, TRS-80s, etc.
But giving kids the latest and greatest computers is not going to help anything. The important stuff can be learned on a 486.
Chinese and Indian schools value the academic achievers, while American schools value the funny, the athletic and the socially gifted. That is why those countries are beating us.
Use that money to give cash payouts to the teachers (not the schools) whose kids have the greatest degree of improvement in their region, with "improvement" defined as a conrete metric. Here in Baltimore, for example, the city has a graduation rate of approximately 40%, and our literacy rate is also very low. Stupid investments in "broadband" and "computers" won't help these kids, but highly incented teachers just might. The teachers' unions would never stand for it (in fact they'd label it discriminatory), but you need highly skilled, motivated people to reach these kids on a one-on-one basis. If cash can attract the best folks for the job, I say go for it. They've tried everything else here for decades, including paying the students themselves for good grades, and nothing has worked.
Have them log into Monster.com, et al, and see what the salaries are for various fields, including jobs for those with a "mere diploma", and they will become more interested in College Prep and getting good grades.
So, we go from a guy who cuts taxes and then over-spends to a guy who won't cut taxes but still over-spends. Time will tell, but I have a feeling that Obama's spending will exceed Bush's, just as George "Smaller Government" Bush's exceeded Clinton's. I have a feeling Obama's will be roughly in proportion to the difference in their tax policies. I suppose this is an improvement. Kinda.
What will it take for the electorate to become too ashamed (or at least angry) to keep voting for these people? To paraphrase Penn Jillette, if we keep voting for the lesser of two evils and we're just going to keep getting evil.
-Peter
IMHO, it's teacher's unions. The complete resistance towards standardized measures of their members' expertise in _doing their jobs_ is appalling, to say the least. Combine that with exorbitant retirement benefits weighing down on school budgets, and it's no wonder the current public schools can't do their job.
Want to reform education in this country? Take back the schools from the unions, or at least provide vouchers for school choice and competition.
I also think we waste too much money on the lowest-performers and don't spend enough on the highest-performers, but that's a different problem.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
No offense, but if you think that you can do Math on a calculator, your arguements for better education are kinda weakened. Calculators (yes even graphing ones) are a way to get around the tedium of simple arithmetic, a way to skip past the dark ages and get to the meat of critical, logical thinking.
I analyze water flow patterns as it relates to insurance risk for a living... a mathematical job to be sure. When calculating the trajectory of a projected river overflow, I grab my scientific calculator, and I think back in sympathy for my 4th grade self, who was tortured by moronic ciriculum focused on creating mindless times table memorization, which I could not do...
The main advantage humans have over other animals is that our history and our technology make it possible to learn in one lifetime what could not otherwise be possible in a hundred lifetimes. "Back to basics" is how humanity self-destructs. Give them a pile of computers, have them teach the teacher.
To be honest, *private* school didn't help me. (I don't think I'm qualified to speak for everyone else who attended my school. I'm not that familiar with how the rest of their lives worked out for them.)
I attended a private school between 7th. grade and sophmore year of high school. Today, looking back, I can safely say those were 4 of the worst years of my life. The combination of faculty who insisted on running things in a fascist military style, while often doing a questionable job of teaching the material, plus the abundance of "spoiled, rich kids" did nothing for me. Switching to a public school, after MUCH begging and pleading to my parents, was the BEST move I made.
The school systems DO waste a lot of people's time and money. I just don't think it's always fair to single out "public schools" as the only problems. Private schools currently have the ability to make themselves look good "on paper" by refusing or kicking out anyone who doesn't help them keep an artificially good image. They also tend to hide behind their religious affiliations. (EG. "Come on now, Johnny. Your school can't be THAT bad! You're being taught by Catholic brothers!")
A student's diet and sleeping habits are much more important than having a computer with broadband. Can we get a stimulus that promises a well-balanced diet and a Posturepedic bed for all??
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Are you familiar with the term "false dichotomy"? Besides, using the obvious FDR comparison, the only way out of is war - the public works programs, contrary to what you read in your erroneous grade school textbooks, simply didn't work all that well in terms of recovery.
Instead, let's use the Japan comparison. In that case, we should do:
3. Let all these firms fail, take the hit quickly, and move on.
The Japanese did:
4. Never acknowledge you have a problem, let recession/stagnation go on for 10 years.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
Hoover Dam, anyone? You may want to check out The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes. She lists in detail with quotes the big spending projects of Hoover and FDR meant to stimulate the economy, and the result these projects had on the economy.
When Obama announced that he was going to start the largest public works program since the Interstate system, I thought he might be talking about an interstate high speed rail network.
Though, after looking through his proposal, I don't see anything about high speed trains. I think a train network would kill many birds with one stone:
- it would provide a fast alternative to flying, which I hate.
- it would cut down on carbon emissions since trains are much more efficient than cars or planes.
- it could do for the country what the interstate system did in the last half of the last century.
- it would create lots of jobs spread out across the country
If this was a story about Bush no one would be complaining. But Messiah Obama, on the other hand... he's untouchable.
Not sure about trains outfitted with automatic fiber laying machinery, but I know about specially made train cars that lay fiber. The nice thing about railroads and fiber is that at the turn of last century, railroads were giving large swaths of right of way for running tracks from town to town. So the railroads usually connect towns together, the same towns that are perhaps wanting digital connectivity. Also, many lines used to have multi track routes, and these have been reduced to reduce maintenane and then you have wide areas where you can lay fiber without much fear of running into many obstacles. This allows easier connections of towns by running cables along the railroad right of way.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
No, I believe you basically heard correctly. I remember that being one of Qwest's competitive advantages at the time they got started. When everyone else was stuck negotiating for rights to use other people's land to place their fiber cabling, Qwest could usually just use the "right of way" land along the sides of the train tracks instead.
I think in the end though, it didn't change much of anything for the "end user/customer". Eventually, the big telcos all found ways to get things cabled up where they wanted to cable them up. Qwest might have gotten it done for less money initially, but they all have similar costs of operation and pricing models today.
Did you miss the (rather conspicuous) use of the word "broadband"? Our network infrastructure sucks quite badly, and if he's talking about upgrading it, that's a lot of domestic blue-collar jobs.
If POBE is really serious, he'll look at giving us real broadband, like the premises fibre that Korean consumers enjoy. If he does that, Corning will have to de-mothball a factory or two, and a lot of people will be needed to dig ditches and pull cable. Sounds pretty stimulating to me.
Growing up, I was greatly helped by the teachers in my public school. My third grade teacher for noticing how I aced the reading test and decided to give me the advanced reading test. I aced that one also. I credit her for putting me on a track where I enjoyed learning instead of being frustrated in school. It is quite possible that all of my success in life could be traced back to her in some form.
Since public school helped me, I guess your "never helped anybody" claim is false.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Oh my Gosh. Here I am the most right wing guy on slashdot and I'm about to go and defend Obama's proposals for infrastructure spending in general, and national broadband and school computing in particular.
a. ubiquity creates new industries. If broadband is something nearly everyone has in the USA, then, you have a much easier time making a business case for a new kind of service. The USA has built railroads with federal help before, knowing that putting railroads would pump the economy, and it did. Then, roads did the same thing. Broadband won't be any different.
b. computers in schools works. Yes, a lot of kids play games on school computers but there will be those kids who are not as well off but interested in learning to program that will use them. I know I'm grateful to all the computer stores and schools back in the 1980s that let me learn programming in the lab and I think that there's other kids like me out there.
Note that I wouldn't restrict this to just computers. I would like to see schools have shop classes with real presses, CNC machines, and other tools of the art so that kids can get some hands on real things prior to joining the real world.
c. My stock retort to other conservatives that would oppose this government spending would be, you had no problem spending 2.5T on building schools and broadband in Iraq, but why can't you support that in the USA?
d. Hands on experience in computing and manufacturing is a national security issue. The USA needs to know how to manufacture its own goods. I would offer as exhibit A, World War II. It's handy for national security when you have a ton of manufacturing centers that can be quickly converted to produce for wartime needs. Indeed, has the USA had a better manufacturing base, maybe we wouldn't have had to wait for five years and four thousand dead to get decent armoured vehicles into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By extension, those who pine for the old cold war days with Russian and for a stronger NATO should also be reminded that a part of our military obligation to our alliance partners is to have an economy capable of sustaining manufacturing in the event our allied economies are destroyed. It benefits Europe if the USA is capable of manufacturing its own products as that know-how can be shared with the continent.
So yeah, I think Obama's on the right track with a big infrastructure stimulus. I think Republicans would be better suited to argue what to build, rather than not to build at all, given that they already blew several times Obama's figure on rebuilding Iraq.
This is my sig.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883617.html
Please shut up. You have no clue what you're talking about. It's almost like you need an education. While education is part of the doctrinal system, the reality is that you have more chance of success at whatever you're doing whether the degree gets you a foot in the door or if you meet other people in your field and develop relationships. Even without all that, you typically make more money with a higher education. These facts escape you because you are too lazy to learn before speaking.
Almost every single technological breakthrough has occurred where? In government or university research labs funded by the state. You would not be typing on a computer and sending a message through the internet without it. The Human Genome Project was a government research program. Every time you take a flight you're riding in a modified bomber, researched with government funds.
So with all due respect, shut the fuck up. Really. Your ignorance is the problem, not spending money on education.
Public school never helped anybody.
Ridiculous. You honestly think that every single person who went through the public school system is no better off than if they had received no education at all?
I went to a private elementary school, public high school, and public university. The public university was by far the most useful of the three. The other two are on roughly equal footing as "somewhat decent". They both wasted enormous amounts of time but they did provide some useful things in return.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
My wife is a HS English teacher in Washington state. If Obama want to seriously help schools, priority 1 should be to put a bullet in Bush's collossal screw up that is "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB). It's too flawed to "fix" other than flat out removal. Bush has been too stupid to admit it's a failure and correct it (just like everything else he's done), so this is the only option.
Next, in Washington state there's a bill called the Becca bill that requires the little monsters to be contained by the state in schools up until age 18 because some stupid brat ran away from school and got herself killed. Unfortunately, this also means that kids that would rather quit and go jockey a McRegister between times passing the bong are instead required to stay in school and suck up resources they don't care about. Get rid of this in Washington state (and similar laws in other states) and teachers can look the kids in the eye and tell them to leave and come back when (if) they care about learning something.
Then, get back to helping the kids that are going to do something with themselves.
Last but not least, get rid of the stupid state teaching certificates in all 50 flavors. There's a shockingly fantastic National Board Certification (federal gov't too... go figure!) program that uses a peer evaluation system to focus teachers on becoming good teachers IN PRACTICE in their own environment. My wife did this certification and is now contributing to the mentoring portion. Interestingly enough, teachers who can't "reach these keeds" don't cut it in these programs because it requires them to learn, grow, and be self-reflective about how they teach and continue to grow, unlike the the rubber stamp Master's degree (a.k.a "Masters in Ed.") programs that set teachers up for either a check-mark in the "has masters" box and unwarranted pay raise or a future as yet another worthless administrator (and a MUCH greater unwarranted pay raise).
Bottom line, schools need more funding to train and retain good teachers. "Education" has a latin root word "educare" meaning "to bring out". It's not about throwing stuff at kids and hoping it sticks. It's about bringing out the best. You've never needed broadband or computers to do that.
*** Sigs are a stupid waste of bandwidth.
And where are we getting the money for this, again?
Given that the Iraq war has cost a bit over six hundred billion dollars so far, and is estimated to top out at over 1.2 trillion dollars, "from stopping the Iraq war" is a good start to answering the question where the money will come from. You know, you could do a lot with four hundred million dollars a day.
Anybody here old enough to remember the candidates talking about what they were going to do with the budget surplus, back in 2000? Or is that just some forgotten ancient history? Surplus... what a concept!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You forgot #3: let the market correct itself and move on.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Installing advanced broadband in schools and hospitals is similar to a plan being implemented in Canada for rolling out advanced broadband nationwide. (By advanced broadband, I mean gigabit or better, bidirectional.)
Connecting public facilities provides an infrastructure that can later be extended to homes and small businesses. New York State, under a project that involved Cornell University, either studied or actually implemented a multi-school-district network that allows enriched and advanced courses to be taught remotely that could not be justified for an individual school.
Broadband installation in hospitals enables telemedicine, in which expert remote consultation is available for difficult cases, and lays the groundwork for installing an advanced hospital information system network. Such a network would cut costs and improve performance in medicine. I've been told there are two excellent hospital information systems in existence, one developed by Kaiser and the other developed by the Veterans Administration and available as open source software.
Finally, someone is listening to what has been discussed for many years and is working to get it done.
There are two ways out of a recession as large as what we are facing:
That's a myth. War is not good for an economy.
What the Second World War did for the U.S. economy was to turn the nation into a place of shortages and rationing-- food rationing, gas rationing, even tire rationing... a lot of things didn't have to be rationed, because nobody had money to buy things like new cars.
The one "good" thing that the war did for the U.S. was to give people a rationalization for the shortages and ration-coupons: they were sacrificing to win the war. The economy was terrible, but people felt good about scarcity, because it was for a cause.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...why don't you give us teachers:
--Money for books and basic school supplies (paper, binders, text books).
--Salary budgets so we can have more than one specialist (Gym, Music, Art, reading) per 4 elementary schools. These specialists spend their lives going from one school to the next
--Librarians. Most in our district were 'let go' due to budgetary reasons and now parents/volunteers are doing the work. Parents/volunteers are no replacement for someone with 20yrs of experience as a librarian.
--Raises so we can live within 30miles of our school (same goes for Firefighters and Police officers).
I don't need computers when I'm teaching YOUR kids how to read and write, when I barely have enough for books and have to buy school supplies (dry erase markers, paper, binders) out of my own pocket.
Obama is talking about broadband because it's "Sexy". It wouldn't get any attention if he said, "I'm going to make sure all of our teachers have enough textbooks, paper and supplies to teach our kids how to read, write and do arithmetic." Why doesn't he say this, because schools are funded at the state level.... and the towns/states referendums for tax increases to pay for this equipment (books/pencils) are voted down, year after year. The only schools around here that have sufficient supplies are in the higher income towns because the parents are willing to donate $5000....
So y'all quit your yapping.
Or does free government broadband smell and taste like free government cheese?
Ick.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Schools teach more that just math, reading and writing... ...
Schools needs to teach how to use computers too... Schools educates kids how to interact as a part of society. I think adults who can type on a keyboard, have bigger issues, than those who can't write an entire sentence grammatically correct...
Today, you can't even get a monkey job at a factory unless you can count and type the number of totally identical items you've produced any given day
Well, viewed generously, not until fairly late in the 1929-1933 recession, in the immediate wake of the 1929 crash he didn't do much, in 1930 he favored fairly moderate federal stimulus while asking state and local government to provide more stimulus, later he tried more significant stimulus (though still focussed on direct aid to capital with some public works), but the recession that started in 1929 didn't turn around until after Roosevelt began truly massive stimulus combined with more aggressive bank regulation to restore confidence in institutions. (Though, at least arguably, the more significant stimulus of the Hoover attempted toward the end, did play a big role, since the trough wasn't far into Roosevelt's efforts.)
One might expect that people now would prefer not to have a four year recession that even another four subsequent years of strong top-line growth will still leave overall conditions so bad that it'll be called a "depression".
They will probably never learn that because nothing so simple is true. Whether government spending has a stimulative effect or not depends on whether the spending is in an area where the funds will have a higher velocity in the domestic economy than wherever the funds were taken from (whether taxed, borrowed, or transferred from other government spending.)
If wealthy Americans have a low marginal propensity to spend, and are investing largely overseas, then taxing them and spending on labor intensive projects in the domestic economy that have their own economic utility and where most of the workforce will have a high marginal propensity to spend on goods that are supplied domestically (at least in the immediate sense, e.g., at retail) is likely to have a stimulative effect. Even more stimulative, if economic conditions have driven down direct foreign investment in US private capital markets, is borrowing money from abroad for the same purpose.
OTOH, taxing people with a higher marginal propensity to spend and transferring funds to Americans with a lower marginal proposenity to spend (as, in effect, the massive bank bailouts with little control on use have done) is exactly the opposite of stimulative.
The reason american schools struggle is because WE TAKE EVERYBODY.
If you're a vegetable who can't feed yourself. You go to school.
If you can't read by the age of 12 you go to school.
If you are incapable of speaking to another classmate. You go to school.
In every other country they take you out of school and put you into programs not called 'school'. So when the testing people come around lo and behold the students test better.
We don't cream our our results like most other countries. Also I would hardly call the retirement benefits of the school system "exorbitant". Most teachers retire well into their 60s. And most teachers make less money and receive substantially less retirement benefits than a plumber.
Teachers are often masters degree holders. They're the most highly educated and under payed segment of our population.
So let's standardize... How? States rights advocates don't want the government nosing into their curriculums. And do you really think that a government mandated school curriculum with government designed tests and government assigned work is going to create a great education system?
How do we hold teachers accountable? So much of it is dependent on the abilities of the students. So much of it is constrained by politics and emotion. I would love to hear how to make teachers accountable. What's your idea? I went to a private school and half the teachers were terrible a few were great. They were fully 'accountable' and ununionized. That's just the way the world is. Some are good some are bad. Good luck finding an empirical way to determine the "goodness" of a teacher.
The Hoover Dam was first proposed, by Hoover, granted, in 1922. His predecessor as President, Calvin Coolidge, signed the bill authorizing it in 1928; it was never a depression recovery project per se, the money had already been allocated before there was a Depression.
Contra Amity "You're all a bunch of whiners" Shlaes, who's work has been effectively discredited by anyone who cared to think about it for five minutes.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Most? Really? I don't think so... An immigrant construction worker I read about recently (in Economist, I think), was making $1000 per week, sending $600 per month to his wife and children back home. Hardly "most".
(Because of the economic downturn, according to the article, the guy's last transfer was only $100.)
Would you be able to substantiate your statement? Thanks...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I though the election was over?? Wait, never mind, he has already starting running for 2012.
"A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers." Hayek
Then again there is that whole thing about leaving babies to die that somehow survived abortion....
I know which one I think is worse.
Now to be back on topic.
HOW THE HELL CAN WE AFFORD THIS? This isn't the time to have more social programs? Does anyone here think that forcing this upon our kids and having the government run broadband is a good idea? Lets see, what operating system do you think they will all run? Think Apple, Linux LOL! So much for selection. This smells bad of payoffs.
Last time I checked Obama has voted for a massive bailout of the banking system and now will "probably" vote to bailout the auto industry. So NOW he wants to start another social program? Do we really want to saddle ourselves with more debt? This looks like a solution in search of a problem. We do have massive problems with some of our public schools but throwing laptops at them isn't going to help them at all.
I hope and pray Obama isn't that stupid to think that this idea would work, however I get the feeling this is only the beginning of bad ideas to come.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
we cant even seem to do that right... BTW basics include reading, math, history, and civics...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
But, but, but throwing more money and computers will magically fix the system, won't it? You mean all those administrators and unions who never seemed to give a shit about the students before will not suddenly start caring because Obama waved his +5 Charisma wand across the arc of the moral universe? The deuce you say!
The overhead of private health insurers averages 35%. The overhead of Medicare is 3%.
The median tuition for their member private day schools in 2005-2006 in the United States was close to $14,000 for grades 1 to 3, $15,000 for grades 6 to 8 and $16,600 for grades 9 to 12. Public schools average cost per student is $13340, and they take everyone, including the very expensive special-needs kids.
The problem with government run programs is not that they're inefficient. They're nearly always more efficient, because they don't have to make profit, and culturally it's unacceptable for the chief officers to self-deal like US CEOs do.
The real problem with government programs is that they're inflexible and rarely innovative. Which means they should only be used for industries for which there is a known, steady, need: Libraries, Schools, Roads, Bridges, Power, Healthcare, a bare-minimum forced retirement savings program (Social Security). Everything else should be done privately.
Oh, I know. Taco did his snark, and you were modded +5 Insightful, because of the Republican/Libertarian cult of the CEO. But just remember that if you're ideology actually worked, Obama wouldn't have to be working so hard to bail us out of the economic mess you got us into.
Short answer: We can't. We can't really afford anything at this juncture.
Long answer: We can. There are certain things that private industry absolutely sucks at doing. This is simply the federal government stepping in to do for itself what it should've done a long time ago.
I agree that the bailout sucks, though it seems like a necessary evil at this point. (If the banking system fails, we're really fucked.) Instead, try blaming the people who made the whole thing necessary in the first place.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Maybe you should talk to your administration and union before asking ME for more money.
Why, in addition to my property taxes, do I have to provide a mandatory school supply list designed to keep the teacher in chalk AND kids who can't afford to buy their own crap? I give to charity in church. "charity" in public school is just a hidden tax.
Four years ago when my local school board was crying for more money, I attended one of their open hearings. I asked quite simply, have you done any auditing internal or external of current spending. The answer was 'no'. The referendum didn't pass. Yet, the darn fire department got their first new truck in 20 years (ok, 18, but still).
In exchange for higher pay, are you willing to work 8 hours a day doing community service in the summer? The union screamed high holy murder when this was suggested.
In summary, look in before out. You might find a more receptive crowd around election time if you can demonstrate real belt tightening and real reform efforts aimed at the primary mission of educating children instead of bureaucracy growing and union power building.
Of course, I know you specifically are not the root of evil, but as a poster child simply asking for more money is NOT the way to go.
Didn't we already give large wads of cash to the private sector for a backbone that never materialized?
that leaves American workers free to, you know, do the thinking that's required to make these products
The flaw in your line of reasoning is that, you assume that somehow the American worker can think better than his Chinese counterpart. It's the height of hubris to build America into this "knowledge" economy and let manufacturing go to do it, because, Chinese people are just as smart as we are.
when in fact government can only redistribute wealth from productive uses to unproductive ones
That's actually not true. The government establishes an infrastructure which allows for wealth to be created. Microsoft could not exist without copyright law as applied to software, and it is the government that created that. Nor could Microsoft exist without a knowledgeable work force to build on... public education is also something government does, and, the government has, since the 1940s, supported the university system as part of a need to beat the germans and then the russians at the tech game. Government is the arteries on which the capillaries of commerce flow.
This is my sig.
As for computers, even as a CS major we used shared computer labs. Most schools today already have enough PCs spread around classrooms to make a substantial computer lab or two, and any PC older than 5 years old is perfectly good for both tasks, and are being given away for free everywhere.
Agreed. My high school got brand new HP computers with new LCDs nearly every year while I was there. The entire network was locked down, no roaming accounts (yes it was all Windows), a terrible content filtering system (I disagree it is necessary! Give up already), and hardly enough space on the server for all those 'Windows Movie Maker' projects (120 GB). Half the time, students had no idea how to use WMM so they saved their work as a project, never encoded it, tried to bring it around and found out that does NOT work. The school taught no concepts which I had already learned (in this case, video encoding and what it does). Secondly, the school was a big Microsoft proponent as the classes it taught were almost all for Microsoft products, and the ONLY time they used free software was when they needed audio-editing software and could not find anything good that was cheap but also good. They chose Audacity (I give credit for this move). Schools generally do not trust free software as they do not think it will be quality software. THAT is a big problem. So they stick with licensing Windows (usually through a volume licence), Office (same as above), and all the rest of their software. What browser did the teacher have students use for what should be called 'HTML class'? IE, of course. Sure, MS gives incentives as always but parents need to understand the implications of being locked into MS software, which they never will because they have Windows at home, at work, everywhere nearly. Maybe even their phone and their console (Xbox/Xbox 360).
If it were up to me, would have been desktops (for things like multimedia) and terminals (for small tasks like web browsing and typing documents) all connected to a Linux server with a large hard drive. That is cheaper than buying new PCs every year for literally no reason (the old computers were fine, what's not is running Windows).
Also, if schools want to prevent students from running their games (EXEs), run Linux and do not install Wine.
Now for a game of point-counterpoint:
The economics of the result will be tremendous and dwarf the petty costs involved. It will create [...].
Really? Based in which economic theory and/or evidence do you state this?
Such goals can only be achieved in freedom.
Which freedoms are necessary? Freedom to trade however you like, or freedom from the formation of monopolies? Freedom to route customer packets however you like, or freedom of information?
Napster showed that we can have any piece of culture available for the trivial cost of allowing people to share.
Common sense argues that if we all stop paying musicians and actors, they'll get some other day jobs. A few will do their old job as a hobby, with hobbyist results.
Wikipedia and the internet archive show that people are ready, willing and able to create works and share them without the "protection" of copyright.
Would you be happy with only the works available under a license allowing their redistribution? Would they satisfy your needs?
I want Guitar Hero. I want The Hobbit. I want The Grudge. I want Disturbed. I want a flash plug-in and fast video drivers.
Spoken like a person who has never driven across the United States. There are regions where you can drive for miles and never see anything except a couple random cows grazing. Comparing this 2500-mile wide federation versus a small country no bigger than Delaware makes ZERO sense. It's like comparing a pumpkin versus a pea... totally illogical.
First, I have driven many times across the US, and while there are huge regions where there's nothing, that's a complete and total red herring with regards to broadband deployment. The only thing those empty regions need is a big fat backbone crossing them to connect the population centers on either side. And our backbone is fine. A lot of it is lying dark simply because it isn't needed, so there's extra capacity there in case we ever fix the situation in the population centers. So the issue of us being a 2500-mile-wide federation is already solved.
Second, we do have sections of the country where the area is as small and the density as high as whatever country you're thinking of, so then what's the excuse? Look at New York City. Here we have 20,000,000 people close enough together that the "wide federation" argument is completely irrelevant, yet still solely considering NYC broadband is pathetic compared to other countries. How could that possibly not be a big enough market? How could the size of the United States possibly be a reason for anemic broadband in New York? Or LA? Or Houston, Dallas, Chicago, and so on and so on.
No. Country size or overall density is not the reason our broadband sucks. Because even when all those factors are resolved, it still sucks.
The enemies of Democracy are
Sniff...I'm so proud of you, stork. But you do realize you're going to have to give up your wingnut merit badge for being rational, right?
I'll keep the wingnut merit badge. I actually wrote a letter to National Review entitled "Obama is more conservative than you are." The best tell tale proof of this is to go have a look at Reagan's 196x speech to the RNC, or even his 1980 convention speech, as compared to Obama's victory speech, and honestly, you'd find that they aren't really saying anything differently.
Conservatism is supposed to about rationality and let you liberals get all dreamy eyed about the rosy world of the future. But, my friends in the conservative movement are married to a model of enterprise and trade that has, by any reasonably -conservative- standard of assessment, have failed. How can you defend the idea of global investment and free trade when it has so obviously failed, not once, but repeatedly, over the last few decades. This bank bailout is not the first the USA has had to do... remember RTC?
I mean, the whole point of conservatism is a sort of a nationalism in disguise, but how can you be a nationalist when you favor an economic policy that leaves our cities torched so that you can drive a slightly better kind of imported car. Can't see the family values in families unemployed, can't see the patriotism in supporting the rights of foreign companies over american ones. Don't see the community in an economic policy that leaves communities devastated at the whims of investment banks.
It's like, the most ridiculous thing I saw at the NRO was something to the effect of "free trade is the american way, so therefor, I will buy a japanese car and let detroit fend for itself."... like, woah... last time I checked, and i don't mean to pick on the japanese, but, its salient, that the UAW membership is far more likely to have Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than the fraternity of MBA graduates on Wall Street. Like, I don't get how union guys get such a beating for asking for, gasp, $17/hour and health care, and that's the reason the USA is in trouble?
If you are going to wave the flag, wave it for everyone in the land. That's what I say.
This is my sig.
First on supplies: Do you think that every kid should have to supply their own paints/crayons etc for art class?
Whether I believe it or not does not change the fact that this is the reality in my district.
Do you think that every kid should have to bring in their own basketball/kickball?
The school board cut gym (PE outside the midwest) in their tit for tat spat when the referendum failed. Somehow that jeopardized some funding and it had to come back. In the interim, yes, there was a parent run physical activity program immediately after school.
Should a elementary/middle/high school make kids pay for their own books every year just like students do in college?
I pay a book rental fee which is actually quite reasonable. But this is still in addition to my taxes. I pay for the book, then pay for the upkeep of the stable with an additional 'hidden' tax.
Also, do you think that while the cost of goods purchased has increased, AND the numbers of students attending our schools have increased, that by having us cutback on funding; we'll somehow people able to find sufficient money?
Growing student population implies population growth in general, hence additional tax revenue.
Cost of goods go up with inflation, but so do the property taxes. Point being there are a lot of things that can be done to remediate inflation like a buyer's consortium, or direct negotiation with vendors. Some school districts do very well in these matters.
Traditionally, however, school districts suck at saving money because their capital and operations budgets have been turned into patronage by pols and apathetic/unknowledgeable constituency.
Also, while I will complain about the salaries of administration, their salaries come out of a completely different budget than either my salary OR those used to pay for supplies and books?
A 'budget' is just an arbitrary classification in an accounting system. The source of the money does not change depending on what column you put it in. There are specific exceptions that vary with geography, but they are usually well known. For instance, in my area new housing impact fees must go into a building fund that the districts cannot use for operations.
Throwing money at problems does not solve them. Most private schools do a lot better with fewer dollars spent per child. They do this by putting the money directly 'into' the students. Public school can't model this directly because they do not have the option to cherry pick students and parents. What can be done is mimicking their penchant to cut out Stupid Stuff and focus on education.
Computers in classrooms are fairly useless except for attendance, and solitaire during planning periods. Student access to computers and structured time with them is beneficial, but only as an adjunct to and in furtherance of the fundamentals of the three R's.
There is absolutely no reason why any computer-education program should not be using computer setup with Edubuntu or some other GNU/Linux variant with all the open source education software pre-loaded. It's cheaper and there's massive amounts of free information for learning how to run it, keep it running, and even make it run better. Students who learn this stuff and use the same system to learn more and more and it's all free and fully accessible to them.
Then, there's the various ways the systems can be implemented. There's LTSP for thin clients, there's standalone, networked fat clients, and there are multi-head single Chassis system feeding multiple users on the minimum additional hardware of an LCD, a keyboard, and a mouse.
And learning the basics and not teaching an application means they know what a spreadsheet is, they know what a filesystem is, a wordprocessor, and they can know far far more about the system and software than other systems will let them.
So, where can we kindly suggest to Obama that his people look long and hard at Edubutu and/or GNU/Linux and open source software?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I have many relatives in southern Europe, who are somewhat surprised by our high standards of living when it comes to materialism, which seem vaguely wasteful to them. Things like running A/C at 72 when you live in a climate that's typically 90s in the summer, living in homes that are on average 2350 square feet (all of which has to be air-conditions or heated, of course), driving inefficient cars, owning strangely large numbers of gigantic televisions, etc.
When it comes to the things you mentioned, though, they're actually ahead. They work fewer hours on average than Americans, get better health care, much more vacation, more stringently policed working conditions, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Strangely enough almost all furniture in the us (IKEA exempted) is made here in the US. Commerical furniture is one of those strange animals that even with cheap gas it's cheaper to build it here and ship it straight from the manufacturer to the final location than it is to mass produce in china, warehouse and distribute. Certian types of banquet and folding chairs are imported, but imports don't even have 50% of the market here. Something to think about next time you're sitting at the doctor's office, at the DPS, school or church.
Interesting you should mention windows - there's actually an active sit-in for a vinyl window plant in chicago right now. I know there's at least one vinyl window factory in washington state still active - my friend's dad owns it. Plywood is also produced locally in most cases. There are some rare hardwood plywood veneers made in china and india but most residential building materials (not including fasteners) are still produced here in the US.
moox. for a new generation.