I agree but there needs to be a point made about allerting people that their cell phones will not work. Earlier posters have suggested a sort of "vigilante" effort by other movie goes, which should be clearly unnacceptable. If theatres jam phones, thats fine, and yes would simply entail a sacrifice for people with certain conditions, but it wouldn't be fine if people were caught off guard by it because no one told them it was there until they realized it themselves when they couldn't make/receive a legitimately important call.
I'm an atheist but even I know the answer to that one. It's called the bible. And because christians consider it to be the word of god, it pretty much trumps everything else. Rethink your post with an "and he gave us this blessed book that was his truth to us all and it said (implied) 6000 years" and add that to the crafted history and the only conclusion you can come to (assuming bible is treated as gosple - is that a pun? anyhow..) is that something is wrong with the evidence, unless of course you want to believe the bible is false, which like I said is off the table for christians. No one wants to worship a dishonest god, so there is no way anyone would behave as you suggest.
Mmm... I hate to be the bat to the eagle of your dreams (particularly because I share them), but Universal's legal team isn't retarded. Any deals made with apple will use phrasings that imply absolutely zero responsibility, debt, or loss of rights for the record company. Trading a pittance tax for their entire libraries... particularly by accident... unfortunately there's no way in hell. Their sin is greed, not stupidity.
Well sure, but you know that's not really the same thing New Orleans being destroyed is mostly a function of infrastructure, whereas, say, san fransisco going up in a flash of nuclear fire is a function of lives lost AND infrastructure. But you are right, our priorities are out of order.
And I wasn't really addressing this particular instance in and of itself, I was more responding to the more general pro-surveillance stance of the parent
I'm not advocating for the right of a maniac to run outside and start screaming. I'm advocating for the right to raise your voice without immediately getting the attention of police officers. I don't think people should always have to bite their tongues in public for fear of catching unwanted attention. This is regulating loud speech at what feels to me like a too pervasive level. And yes, having an officer watch you is bad even if you don't think you are a criminal (this is most of us I hope), because you don't know all the laws, much less the interpretations of the vaguely worded ones (which is what we're talking about with noise in public I suspect).
Don't mod this guy's argument up. Not only is it filled with straw men (See:" is life a stupid hollywood b-grade movie, where all government officials are nefarious schizophrenic's fantasy life cardboard cutout villains" for one) and emotional appeals (See: "well, how about if you live in a poor crime-ridden neighborhood and you can't even leave your house without being threatend with rape, mugging, and general loutish violent behavior on a daily basis?" for one), but its the same damn argument we hate when we get from politicians except now somehow its fooling us because it comes from a regular person.
The safest place would be a high-security prison, as always, and policies that make it more and more difficult to exist if you are not quiet, well adjusted, and "part of the system" are bad. This is one of them, becaues now apparently if I get mad I no longer have the right to yell or I get police attention. I guess I better become the type of person that won't be tempted to yell... so I guess I better never get mad... so I guess I better not care about anything too much that I might ever get upset over...
The argument against this type of stuff is never that it is totally ineffective at its stated goal. I'm sure this type of stuff can and will cut down on certain types of crime. Maybe even significantly. The argument against it is that it is a bad trade, and that we need to attack the causes of crime, instead of treating everyone like slaves (I mean I can't yell anymore or I get the police looking at me? Come on.), just because some people still become criminals.
Don't run away from your stance on privacy just because someone points out that some people get hurt because the police aren't allowed to monitor everything. It's called the price of a free society.
I'm not going to bother to check, because come on. Of course making a fraudulent license is illegal. Or maybe the law says that's fine as long as you don't lie about your age. Get real. Maybe there's no law against showing it to clubs (specifically), but there sure are laws against making it in the first place.
Ok, but you should be aware that doesn't make any ethical or moral sense (though some engineering sense). The whole question is whether you're killing something sacred. I can't think of a reason why something becomes less of a person because they were going to die anyway.
I don't want to dis NASA (because I like them too), but come on. All these missions are multi-billion dollar expeditions. If after billions of dollars of development, no one has thought, hey, maybe we should build these things so that we can give them new instructions if something comes up, and maybe we should make them so they can listen to diverse sets of radio broadcasts, they'd be real assholes.
Again, I like NASA a lot, and they do some very impressive engineering, but if you're impressed because they don't make "fire and forget" spacecraft, I think that's really more a statement on low expectations for our space program.
I'm not sure whether you're right or wrong, but I've always wanted to ask, how is that really different from sperm and eggs unmerged? I mean they both have potential too... Why is the cuttoff at zygote and not father back?
I'm sorry, that has to be the dumbest movie plot scenario I have ever heard. Honestly the idea of weaponizing asteroids is so stupid and so inefficient and so unneccassary I probably won't be able to read slashdot for a week now. My god.
Sure I guess my point was that if the police want to throw you in jail for looking like someone who committed a crime, they don't need some database of license photos to do it. They already have that capability.
I, as a law abiding citizen on the other hand, should not be immediately thrown under suspicion just because my face is somewhat similar to a blurry CCTV image, which is what the false positive rate could cause.
That's not really a valid complaint in and of itself. The system already works with you being a suspect for looking like whoever committed the crime. That's what wanted posters are about, what "have you seen this man" questions are about, etc. It's not like criminals pose for cameras, so using imperfect pictures of them to find them will always involve false positives, even if its only humans involved. So the fact that said system is receiving some computer aid to help LEO's isn't bad in and of itself.
What would make it bad would be if it were abusive and wildly inaccurate. A "calling all cars, be on the lookout for a black male between 4'9" and 6'5", ages 18-35, weighing 100 to 350 pounds." If the system is used fairly, and police understand that people the system fingers are fairly likely to be law abiding citizens and should therefore be treated with courtesy and respect, I think it will work fine.
I think the myth that what we need to do to help extremely poor nations is to mail them food needs to be put to rest. One of the worst problems in africa (or bangladesh) is population growth. People see 20 million hungry and so they send food and pat eachother on the back. And then that 20 million swells because of the artificially increased food supply. And now we have 30 million hungry people.
I'm glad to see a little more of the "teach a man to fish" philosophy at work in developing nations, rather than simply continuing to mortgage the future by fostering unsustainable population growth without a corresponding rise in productivity. People (like the author of this article apparently) need to stop being so lazily short-sighted.
Good at thinking long term... And this explains the huge investments in nuclear, i.e. fission, power. Or wait, are they investing in stupid PR technologies like windmills? I know when chevron runs adds saying they care and have donated $200 million dollars to finding clean, renewable energy sources it sounds nice and all, but all these large companies have annual revuans in the hundreds of billions (and profits in the 10's) and so thats pretty much just advertising money.
Why would the company leadership care anyway? It's not like they're going to be there when oil becomes unprofitable (Which is long after it becomes scare, for obvious reasons I hope, it becomes more profitable before it becomes less). Don't believe the damn ads. No company, is planning 20 years into the future, particularly not an american company. When they start spending 3 and 5 billion dollars, that will be the indication that they actually care. Until then, its just money to get people like you to like them.
Soo... there's the old adage that big claims need big evidence, and Bussard currently has rather an excess of one and a lack of the other. but for someone who chooses to discredit him for not being a bit short on concrete, verifiable data, your post itself is completely science free. In a discussion that is entirely dependant on science (his last prototype's malfunction is unfortunate and perhaps suspicious, but is by no means proof of hackery), I don't understand why people find what amounts to an emotional evaluation of his work useful.
Your criticisms are mostly ad hominem, e.g. his "Incessant groveling for cash" - he does not grovel incessantly, in fact in the Google lecture he admits to giving up on the search for funding. Should he have just packed his bags when his funding was cut (it should be noted that it was all navy energy research funding, not him in particular)? He also defends the malfunction quite reasonably (it was one not a series as you suggest), and considering the supposedly successful prototype was only tested a few times at useful power levels, small amounts of data are also not unreasonable.
If he's a quack, so be it. But let's actually add to the debate by citing facts, not armchair opinions that essentially a love of science fiction == hack (Remember how people used to dream about a better and wonderful future? That used to actually be a fairly american quality and he is of that generation).
I don't try and discredit ID proponents just by calling them assholes. I point to the fact that it is a scientifically sterile non-theory and that there is a wide body of evidence supporting evolution. He wasn't working alone in his basement, he had a pretty impressive team (Jim Benson immedialely hired them after funding dissapeared) that would have complained publicly if he was lying about his results. Treat his science as you would any other, and fight it with evidence, or restrain your tongue.
I actually wound up reading most of that paper. And I probably should have layed off that ad hominem stuff in earlier posts:D, I was in a bad mood, so my apologies. But that having been said,
In short without copyright, authors still get paid, sometime more than with it.
That also would seem to imply that most of the time authors earned less, but that's not my real point. I don't think citing success with a copyright-free model more than a century ago is really good evidence. In fact, most of the paper has a tendancy to, rather than describe realistic ways in which a modern market would work sans copyright, give examples of intellectual works produced in the past when/where copyrights (or patents) didn't exist.
It's hard to really challenge that example regardless because he's quite vague about actual numbers, and there's no real way to make a judgement about what would have happened to the book industry if England itself decided to drop copyright. Anyway his whole point about publishers still making some quantity of money is moot without actual numbers because all he did was narrow down income to publishers in a no-copyright environment from somewhere above zero but of course below the amount they would make with copyright. There's no way to evaluate what kind of industry an unknown amount of money would sustain.
But if you or I had to guess, I think we could agree that in a market where everyone is selling the exact same thing (no more monopolies), that sans people getting an edge on competitors through inovations on the medium of the book itself, margins become razor thin. And no one is going to pay anyone to write books. It's unfortunately a case of the prisoners dilemma, where as a publisher it is always worse for me if I pay for new works. I won't waste space writing it out, its a quick mental exercise.
And lastly, I thought of another pro-copyright example. Computer games I think (at least no MMORPG style ones) are a perfect example in this digital age because without copyright, I guarantee that that industry would go under. Or at least have a hell of a time of it.
Anyhow, I actually really appreciated the intelligent debate, and even if I don't know exactly what protection there should exist in the form of copyrights, I hope I've made at least a convincing argument that we should be suspicious of claims that there should be no copyright. It seems appealing because everyone hates price gouging corporations keeping them from something that the marginal cost of reproducing is essentially nil, but I think less protection, and not no protection, is the answer.
Normally I would never respond to a post attached to a story that's fairly old at this point, but I'm annoyed enough that I will. I already admitted that copyright is over protective of minority rights. On the other hand, the "alternative business models will be granted by the fairy that speaks to me in my dreams" line of thinking really needs to stop. Again, copyright as it exists lasts too long and is too protective. But seriously, toss me a suggestion as to how a novelist is now supposed to make money? Not through selling books. And if you say someone will pay them to write the book, I say think again because why would I pay someone to write a book when I can just wait for someone else write that check and reap the same benefit?
That was an easy obvious example. I am writing from a laptop running linux. I love open source, I contribute to open source. But not having rights over intellectual property is stupid.
I don't really see what the problem is. It would be weird if they were "stalking" hanaford's (which is a mid size grocery store chain if you don't know). But consider that at a market cap of 286 billion dollars, Microsoft is larger and more powerful than many nations, and all of a sudden that level of attention doesn't seem so unreasonable.
I think you are confused on what copyright protects. No body has (to my knowledge) suggested that the works of da Vinci or Picasso were dependant on copyright - copyright didn't exist and somehow art was made. Copyright protects commercial art. The point of copyright for the public good is that society has found out (despite your opinion) that when art can be profitable, a lot more of it is made, and that this is worth it to society even if we must now pay for it. Earlier posters are correct in saying the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of personal profitability, but please consider that (for example) none of the movies or tv you watch would exist without rights over the material. Art composed by people who will create it regardless of whether said creation requires they live in poverty constitutes only a small portion of all modern art, and it's ignorant to pretend otherwise.
...nearly all the negative effects of opiates are due to their [il]legal status
No offense, but please cut the fucking shit. Negative effects for who? Sure heroin is non-toxic biologically, but it does have the unfortunate tendency to turn people into zombies that only want want more heroin when they don't have any, and only want to sit around and enjoy heroin when they do.
Go read about the Opium Wars if you want a good real life example. Being on caffeine is not the same as being on heroin. Instead of saying stupid things from the comfort of your insulated suburban home, go out and actually see someone with heroin in them. They are not productive at all. Let me repeat: having caffeine in you (a stimulant) is in no way similar to having heroin in you (a depressant). I can't believe this shit got modded insightful.
I give this idea a B. I guess someone won't be getting a raise!
Competitive and universal schooling is hard
on
More A's, More Pay
·
· Score: 1
What you suggest is a good idea with unfortuantely extremely difficult implementation given the requirement that schooling be universally free, available and of comparable quality. What happens when corporations decide not to run a school in your area because it wouldn't be profitable?
It seems like the government does a poor job, and to some extent it does, but if the government stepped out, or even some distance away, the school system would turn into the health care system pretty fast. Some couldn't get it, there would be widespread gouging, and the crap with bad standardized testing would only get worse when it was corporate bottom line involved.
The real solution is to provide vouchers to encourage kids to go to private schools, while still keeping the public schools around. Ideally, as more can afford private schools, their availability will increase, and as the state will have more money to teach fewer students (for some reason it is not common knowledge that vouchers save a great deal of money, but read up on them if you don't believe me), quality there will improve as well.
This is not a free market problem because of its requirements, but the free market can be used very effectively through a voucher program. So vote for it when it comes up on your county ballot!
Slashdot Mirror
I agree but there needs to be a point made about allerting people that their cell phones will not work. Earlier posters have suggested a sort of "vigilante" effort by other movie goes, which should be clearly unnacceptable. If theatres jam phones, thats fine, and yes would simply entail a sacrifice for people with certain conditions, but it wouldn't be fine if people were caught off guard by it because no one told them it was there until they realized it themselves when they couldn't make/receive a legitimately important call.
I'm an atheist but even I know the answer to that one. It's called the bible. And because christians consider it to be the word of god, it pretty much trumps everything else. Rethink your post with an "and he gave us this blessed book that was his truth to us all and it said (implied) 6000 years" and add that to the crafted history and the only conclusion you can come to (assuming bible is treated as gosple - is that a pun? anyhow..) is that something is wrong with the evidence, unless of course you want to believe the bible is false, which like I said is off the table for christians. No one wants to worship a dishonest god, so there is no way anyone would behave as you suggest.
Keep fighting the good fight though.
Mmm... I hate to be the bat to the eagle of your dreams (particularly because I share them), but Universal's legal team isn't retarded. Any deals made with apple will use phrasings that imply absolutely zero responsibility, debt, or loss of rights for the record company. Trading a pittance tax for their entire libraries... particularly by accident... unfortunately there's no way in hell. Their sin is greed, not stupidity.
Well sure, but you know that's not really the same thing New Orleans being destroyed is mostly a function of infrastructure, whereas, say, san fransisco going up in a flash of nuclear fire is a function of lives lost AND infrastructure. But you are right, our priorities are out of order.
And I wasn't really addressing this particular instance in and of itself, I was more responding to the more general pro-surveillance stance of the parent
I'm not advocating for the right of a maniac to run outside and start screaming. I'm advocating for the right to raise your voice without immediately getting the attention of police officers. I don't think people should always have to bite their tongues in public for fear of catching unwanted attention. This is regulating loud speech at what feels to me like a too pervasive level. And yes, having an officer watch you is bad even if you don't think you are a criminal (this is most of us I hope), because you don't know all the laws, much less the interpretations of the vaguely worded ones (which is what we're talking about with noise in public I suspect).
Don't mod this guy's argument up. Not only is it filled with straw men (See:" is life a stupid hollywood b-grade movie, where all government officials are nefarious schizophrenic's fantasy life cardboard cutout villains" for one) and emotional appeals (See: "well, how about if you live in a poor crime-ridden neighborhood and you can't even leave your house without being threatend with rape, mugging, and general loutish violent behavior on a daily basis?" for one), but its the same damn argument we hate when we get from politicians except now somehow its fooling us because it comes from a regular person.
The safest place would be a high-security prison, as always, and policies that make it more and more difficult to exist if you are not quiet, well adjusted, and "part of the system" are bad. This is one of them, becaues now apparently if I get mad I no longer have the right to yell or I get police attention. I guess I better become the type of person that won't be tempted to yell... so I guess I better never get mad... so I guess I better not care about anything too much that I might ever get upset over...
The argument against this type of stuff is never that it is totally ineffective at its stated goal. I'm sure this type of stuff can and will cut down on certain types of crime. Maybe even significantly. The argument against it is that it is a bad trade, and that we need to attack the causes of crime, instead of treating everyone like slaves (I mean I can't yell anymore or I get the police looking at me? Come on.), just because some people still become criminals.
Don't run away from your stance on privacy just because someone points out that some people get hurt because the police aren't allowed to monitor everything. It's called the price of a free society.
Ok.... but then it won't scan properly. Swipe a damn piece of cardboard instead if all you want is for it to not display your age.
I'm not going to bother to check, because come on. Of course making a fraudulent license is illegal. Or maybe the law says that's fine as long as you don't lie about your age. Get real. Maybe there's no law against showing it to clubs (specifically), but there sure are laws against making it in the first place.
Ok, but you should be aware that doesn't make any ethical or moral sense (though some engineering sense). The whole question is whether you're killing something sacred. I can't think of a reason why something becomes less of a person because they were going to die anyway.
I don't want to dis NASA (because I like them too), but come on. All these missions are multi-billion dollar expeditions. If after billions of dollars of development, no one has thought, hey, maybe we should build these things so that we can give them new instructions if something comes up, and maybe we should make them so they can listen to diverse sets of radio broadcasts, they'd be real assholes.
Again, I like NASA a lot, and they do some very impressive engineering, but if you're impressed because they don't make "fire and forget" spacecraft, I think that's really more a statement on low expectations for our space program.
I'm not sure whether you're right or wrong, but I've always wanted to ask, how is that really different from sperm and eggs unmerged? I mean they both have potential too... Why is the cuttoff at zygote and not father back?
I'm sorry, that has to be the dumbest movie plot scenario I have ever heard. Honestly the idea of weaponizing asteroids is so stupid and so inefficient and so unneccassary I probably won't be able to read slashdot for a week now. My god.
Sure I guess my point was that if the police want to throw you in jail for looking like someone who committed a crime, they don't need some database of license photos to do it. They already have that capability.
That's not really a valid complaint in and of itself. The system already works with you being a suspect for looking like whoever committed the crime. That's what wanted posters are about, what "have you seen this man" questions are about, etc. It's not like criminals pose for cameras, so using imperfect pictures of them to find them will always involve false positives, even if its only humans involved. So the fact that said system is receiving some computer aid to help LEO's isn't bad in and of itself.
What would make it bad would be if it were abusive and wildly inaccurate. A "calling all cars, be on the lookout for a black male between 4'9" and 6'5", ages 18-35, weighing 100 to 350 pounds." If the system is used fairly, and police understand that people the system fingers are fairly likely to be law abiding citizens and should therefore be treated with courtesy and respect, I think it will work fine.
I think the myth that what we need to do to help extremely poor nations is to mail them food needs to be put to rest. One of the worst problems in africa (or bangladesh) is population growth. People see 20 million hungry and so they send food and pat eachother on the back. And then that 20 million swells because of the artificially increased food supply. And now we have 30 million hungry people.
I'm glad to see a little more of the "teach a man to fish" philosophy at work in developing nations, rather than simply continuing to mortgage the future by fostering unsustainable population growth without a corresponding rise in productivity. People (like the author of this article apparently) need to stop being so lazily short-sighted.
Good at thinking long term... And this explains the huge investments in nuclear, i.e. fission, power. Or wait, are they investing in stupid PR technologies like windmills? I know when chevron runs adds saying they care and have donated $200 million dollars to finding clean, renewable energy sources it sounds nice and all, but all these large companies have annual revuans in the hundreds of billions (and profits in the 10's) and so thats pretty much just advertising money.
Why would the company leadership care anyway? It's not like they're going to be there when oil becomes unprofitable (Which is long after it becomes scare, for obvious reasons I hope, it becomes more profitable before it becomes less). Don't believe the damn ads. No company, is planning 20 years into the future, particularly not an american company. When they start spending 3 and 5 billion dollars, that will be the indication that they actually care. Until then, its just money to get people like you to like them.
Soo... there's the old adage that big claims need big evidence, and Bussard currently has rather an excess of one and a lack of the other. but for someone who chooses to discredit him for not being a bit short on concrete, verifiable data, your post itself is completely science free. In a discussion that is entirely dependant on science (his last prototype's malfunction is unfortunate and perhaps suspicious, but is by no means proof of hackery), I don't understand why people find what amounts to an emotional evaluation of his work useful.
Your criticisms are mostly ad hominem, e.g. his "Incessant groveling for cash" - he does not grovel incessantly, in fact in the Google lecture he admits to giving up on the search for funding. Should he have just packed his bags when his funding was cut (it should be noted that it was all navy energy research funding, not him in particular)? He also defends the malfunction quite reasonably (it was one not a series as you suggest), and considering the supposedly successful prototype was only tested a few times at useful power levels, small amounts of data are also not unreasonable.
If he's a quack, so be it. But let's actually add to the debate by citing facts, not armchair opinions that essentially a love of science fiction == hack (Remember how people used to dream about a better and wonderful future? That used to actually be a fairly american quality and he is of that generation).
I don't try and discredit ID proponents just by calling them assholes. I point to the fact that it is a scientifically sterile non-theory and that there is a wide body of evidence supporting evolution. He wasn't working alone in his basement, he had a pretty impressive team (Jim Benson immedialely hired them after funding dissapeared) that would have complained publicly if he was lying about his results. Treat his science as you would any other, and fight it with evidence, or restrain your tongue.
I actually wound up reading most of that paper. And I probably should have layed off that ad hominem stuff in earlier posts :D, I was in a bad mood, so my apologies. But that having been said,
That also would seem to imply that most of the time authors earned less, but that's not my real point. I don't think citing success with a copyright-free model more than a century ago is really good evidence. In fact, most of the paper has a tendancy to, rather than describe realistic ways in which a modern market would work sans copyright, give examples of intellectual works produced in the past when/where copyrights (or patents) didn't exist.
It's hard to really challenge that example regardless because he's quite vague about actual numbers, and there's no real way to make a judgement about what would have happened to the book industry if England itself decided to drop copyright. Anyway his whole point about publishers still making some quantity of money is moot without actual numbers because all he did was narrow down income to publishers in a no-copyright environment from somewhere above zero but of course below the amount they would make with copyright. There's no way to evaluate what kind of industry an unknown amount of money would sustain.
But if you or I had to guess, I think we could agree that in a market where everyone is selling the exact same thing (no more monopolies), that sans people getting an edge on competitors through inovations on the medium of the book itself, margins become razor thin. And no one is going to pay anyone to write books. It's unfortunately a case of the prisoners dilemma, where as a publisher it is always worse for me if I pay for new works. I won't waste space writing it out, its a quick mental exercise.
And lastly, I thought of another pro-copyright example. Computer games I think (at least no MMORPG style ones) are a perfect example in this digital age because without copyright, I guarantee that that industry would go under. Or at least have a hell of a time of it.
Anyhow, I actually really appreciated the intelligent debate, and even if I don't know exactly what protection there should exist in the form of copyrights, I hope I've made at least a convincing argument that we should be suspicious of claims that there should be no copyright. It seems appealing because everyone hates price gouging corporations keeping them from something that the marginal cost of reproducing is essentially nil, but I think less protection, and not no protection, is the answer.
Normally I would never respond to a post attached to a story that's fairly old at this point, but I'm annoyed enough that I will. I already admitted that copyright is over protective of minority rights. On the other hand, the "alternative business models will be granted by the fairy that speaks to me in my dreams" line of thinking really needs to stop. Again, copyright as it exists lasts too long and is too protective. But seriously, toss me a suggestion as to how a novelist is now supposed to make money? Not through selling books. And if you say someone will pay them to write the book, I say think again because why would I pay someone to write a book when I can just wait for someone else write that check and reap the same benefit?
That was an easy obvious example. I am writing from a laptop running linux. I love open source, I contribute to open source. But not having rights over intellectual property is stupid.
I don't really see what the problem is. It would be weird if they were "stalking" hanaford's (which is a mid size grocery store chain if you don't know). But consider that at a market cap of 286 billion dollars, Microsoft is larger and more powerful than many nations, and all of a sudden that level of attention doesn't seem so unreasonable.
I think you are confused on what copyright protects. No body has (to my knowledge) suggested that the works of da Vinci or Picasso were dependant on copyright - copyright didn't exist and somehow art was made. Copyright protects commercial art. The point of copyright for the public good is that society has found out (despite your opinion) that when art can be profitable, a lot more of it is made, and that this is worth it to society even if we must now pay for it. Earlier posters are correct in saying the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of personal profitability, but please consider that (for example) none of the movies or tv you watch would exist without rights over the material. Art composed by people who will create it regardless of whether said creation requires they live in poverty constitutes only a small portion of all modern art, and it's ignorant to pretend otherwise.
Go read about the Opium Wars if you want a good real life example. Being on caffeine is not the same as being on heroin. Instead of saying stupid things from the comfort of your insulated suburban home, go out and actually see someone with heroin in them. They are not productive at all. Let me repeat: having caffeine in you (a stimulant) is in no way similar to having heroin in you (a depressant). I can't believe this shit got modded insightful.
I give this idea a B. I guess someone won't be getting a raise!
What you suggest is a good idea with unfortuantely extremely difficult implementation given the requirement that schooling be universally free, available and of comparable quality. What happens when corporations decide not to run a school in your area because it wouldn't be profitable?
It seems like the government does a poor job, and to some extent it does, but if the government stepped out, or even some distance away, the school system would turn into the health care system pretty fast. Some couldn't get it, there would be widespread gouging, and the crap with bad standardized testing would only get worse when it was corporate bottom line involved.
The real solution is to provide vouchers to encourage kids to go to private schools, while still keeping the public schools around. Ideally, as more can afford private schools, their availability will increase, and as the state will have more money to teach fewer students (for some reason it is not common knowledge that vouchers save a great deal of money, but read up on them if you don't believe me), quality there will improve as well.
This is not a free market problem because of its requirements, but the free market can be used very effectively through a voucher program. So vote for it when it comes up on your county ballot!