Seems to me that if we just quit the stupid war on drugs, the need for guns (since a great amount of violence is attributed to the drug trade) would be greatly reduced.
My premise: let people fuck themselves up (drugs); don't let them fuck others up (guns). If heroin is $1.00 for a day's supply (and it would be, were it legal... it's stupidly easy to produce) there'd be no need to rob old ladies to get a fix.
Now that I'm in the process of learning Scala, I wish I'd learned Lisp first. I started with Perl.
In my opinion, a good computer science curriculum would include a brief introduction to imperative programming (because it's simple to grasp) then move into a more in-depth treatment of functional programming, and finish up with an overview of OOP. OOP is nice, but to really make programs modular and the different parts of the program independent and idempotent requires a more functional style.
Going straight to OOP from imperative programming is a recipe for learning to build hard-to-maintain systems with all kinds of weird side effects.
I knew that they were not long for the world when I realized that they'd hopped onto the "premium cables" bandwagon. I haven't set foot in a Circuit City since I went in casually looking for a set of RCA cables, and found that the bastards didn't even *carry* a set priced at less than $30. Not only that, but the employees were utterly obnoxious when I pointed out how stupid this was.
I ended up getting them at Radio Shack for about $3. Any company that relies upon its customers to be absolute idiots SHOULD go out of business.
I'd personally prefer there be someone in charge of pushing open standards and technological efficiency in government.
Remember, the U.S. government uses a hell of a lot of technology. The CTO is not about mandating what private citizens or corporations use; it's a position that helps guide *government* use of technology. Having worked as a programmer for NOAA, I can say that having someone competent in this post is BADLY needed. Right now government computer systems are a horrendously disorganized mishmash patchwork of proprietary and open-source software using antique data formats. There are MASSIVE inefficiencies and redundant work being done by separate agencies. Take geospatial data systems, for example - NOAA alone uses every system you've ever heard of plus eight or ten different homegrown monstrosities, all to serve essentially the same functions. Every group gets funding for their tech independently, and so there's no coordination. Interoperability is essentially nonexistent.
With respect to paying for health care, you're already suffering from redistribution of wealth; it's just that right now it's the insurance companies and the hospitals that are doing the redistributing instead of the government.
Every time somebody goes to the emergency room who can't afford to pay, the hospital ends up eating the cost. Of course, they don't really eat it; they just pass it on to their paying patients and consequently the insurance companies.
The idea with universal health care is that it's a lot more efficient for people to have preventative care, or to be able to go to the doctor before things get so serious that they end up in the hospital. You're already paying for the treatment of the uninsured through your premiums; if anything, if we can reduce the need for emergency services it should *lower* your premiums.
Capitalism and barter are fundamentally co-dependent systems; you depend upon the well-being of the people who grow your food, and they depend on your ability to buy it from them. I guess all that I'm trying to say is that recognizing our interdependence is as important as recognizing our individualism.
Self-reliance is critically important, but when the ideology of self-reliance warps into cynical greed and refusal to help others, I don't think it does anyone any good.
To improve public schools, you need a system with proper feedback -- success should be rewarded, failure punished, and "success" should mean educated students. But that's hard to do even with a blank slate. You can't get there at all and preserve the current system.
My mother is a teacher, and based upon her experience I have an idea about how to add a reasonable feedback loop to public education. Essentially, you institute a policy that performance reviews of teachers are conducted not by administrators, but by the teachers who inherit their students. Teachers know exactly who isn't doing their job properly in the preceding grades. Peer review is being used successfully by a number of big companies; I'm not sure that there's any particular reason it couldn't work for schools as well.
While it's not perfect, this approach would have the benefits of potentially being palatable to the teacher's union, and you wouldn't have the problems that teaching to standardized tests brings. More than that, though, you have a real incentive for teachers to honestly evaluate their colleagues - because when a teacher receives students that are well prepared, his or her job is much easier. At the same time, they know that the better they do at preparing their students, the more likely they are to be rated highly by others down the line.
This approach provides both the carrot and the stick, reduces the need for standardized tests (which the unions hate) and would be cheap to implement. Also, since teachers are usually familiar with the personal problems of the students they inherit, so they have a good context in which to evaluate how well those students' previous teachers have done in preparing them for the next grade.
There are of course potential problems with students who move around a lot, and this would likely only really work well in the primary grades, but then again the primary grades are probably the most important in terms of shaping a child's habits.
A does of harsh reality is the only way to fix it at this point.
How is "a dose of harsh reality" going to fix the cultural problems we have surrounding education? As I see it, the problem is not that the consequences of failing to value an education are not harsh enough. It's that people fail to take into account the long-term consequences of *not* placing a high enough value on education.
Of course, short-term thinking isn't just a problem for education; it's a problem in every domain.
Maybe, just maybe, basing compensation on performance might be more beneficial then say oh I don't know, union negotiated contracts where the only way to fire someone is to catch them with a 12 year old?
Sounds great!
That's why school boards are local institutions, and why state and local races are pretty important. The tools that federal officials have to "manage" education are way too blunt and unwieldy to be at all effective.
Without a creator, aren't we left with the following possibilites?: 1. What exists has always existed, or 2. What exists simply came into existence out of nothing, for no reason.
Replace "What exists" with "The creator" and maybe you'll understand the problem. Why should the existence of anything be dependent upon will or intent?
You do realize that Democratic get-out-the-vote campaigns are focused on Democratic voters, right? There may be some exceptions when it comes to principally Democratic strongholds, like university towns, but all such activities are targeted, either individually or collectively.
We have lists of support. We do everything in our power to ensure that those supporters vote.
My conclusion after the 2000 election was that the best I can do is lobby for IRV or a Condorcet system to be used at the local level. If we can get it started locally, that it can propagate upward until enough people are comfortable enough to change election laws at a federal level, or perhaps even amend the federal Constitution. Until such a time, however, I'm holding my nose and voting lesser evils. Fortunately, I don't feel like I have to hold my nose all that hard this year.
Yes. I don't have health insurance either. Or car insurance. That's by choice, because I can save money by not paying for the insurance premiums. Instead I pay-out cash for everything (actually credit card, but it still comes out of my pocket).
I sure hope you've got a couple hundred grand saved up so that if you get hit by a car or something and have to spend months in the hospital, you're not going to fall back on the rest of us to pick up your tab. If not, then you're gambling with *my* money.
Or perhaps you'd have the decency to just go ahead and die for your principles?
It was also far more expensive then as well. They weren't making house calls to middle class families. Poor people would never get more than what ever Mom knew.
Ah, the good old days! Boy, I wish that it could be like that again!
No one is "deserving" of death. It just happens live the weather. And it's not just the poor. We ALL die. It's an equal opportunity outcome.
You obviously haven't watched a close friend die as a result of poverty and inadequate health care, as I have. I was in high school at the time, so there was little I could do to help. He was 62, and died of cancer; because he didn't have health insurance, he never went to doctors and his cancer wasn't detected until it was far too late.
It's all theoretical until it happens to you, or someone close to you. As others have said elsewhere here, providing universal health care is about basic human dignity.
The man-hours that went into building everything are as gone as the smoke from the explosions, though. THAT is the opportunity cost that we have paid - millions of hours of productive time spent on death and destruction instead of on things that could improve people's lives.
Agreed... so fix the problem, rather than work around it. Make it easy to fire government workers.
My great fantasy is that whoever gets in to office cuts the size of government by 15% - not by cutting budget, but by announcing across-the-board layoffs. Get rid of the layabouts and bureaucrats - having worked in government, everybody in an organization knows who they are, but there isn't the organizational will to get rid of the deadwood. But in reality, it's a minority that's the problem... so just go by pay grade, and cut 15% at every level. I assure you, the government would become MORE productive if this were done, not less.
I would love to be able to do that - put some money down as part of my vote to get a bug fixed instead of just putting in a ticket and hoping. It'd provide an awesome way for canonical to prioritize their tickets, too.
I think what it comes down to is that technology is changing too fast these days for the Debian release cycle. If you want to be using the latest tools, you're simply out of luck unless you want to be constantly building and supporting your own debs.
"Server-grade" depends upon what it is that you want to serve, and for a lot of companies, that doesn't mean using tools that were current three years ago.
Where did I say anything about equality of income or equality of outcome?
The simple fact is that today there is *not* equality of opportunity for everyone - where you are born, and the parents you are born to has a huge influence on someone's prospects in life. Now, there are a lot of factors there that the government can't do anything about, but as a society it is possible for us to provide high-quality health care and education to everyone - and we should.
I think that the fact that public schools are funded largely by property taxes is an atrocity - this inherently means that the schools in the poorest neighborhoods are also of the worst quality. This perpetuates the cycle of ignorance that keeps an unfortunately high percentage of the population dumb and poor.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me that if we just quit the stupid war on drugs, the need for guns (since a great amount of violence is attributed to the drug trade) would be greatly reduced.
My premise: let people fuck themselves up (drugs); don't let them fuck others up (guns). If heroin is $1.00 for a day's supply (and it would be, were it legal... it's stupidly easy to produce) there'd be no need to rob old ladies to get a fix.
Now that I'm in the process of learning Scala, I wish I'd learned Lisp first. I started with Perl.
In my opinion, a good computer science curriculum would include a brief introduction to imperative programming (because it's simple to grasp) then move into a more in-depth treatment of functional programming, and finish up with an overview of OOP. OOP is nice, but to really make programs modular and the different parts of the program independent and idempotent requires a more functional style.
Going straight to OOP from imperative programming is a recipe for learning to build hard-to-maintain systems with all kinds of weird side effects.
I knew that they were not long for the world when I realized that they'd hopped onto the "premium cables" bandwagon. I haven't set foot in a Circuit City since I went in casually looking for a set of RCA cables, and found that the bastards didn't even *carry* a set priced at less than $30. Not only that, but the employees were utterly obnoxious when I pointed out how stupid this was.
I ended up getting them at Radio Shack for about $3. Any company that relies upon its customers to be absolute idiots SHOULD go out of business.
Hey, why not Randall Munroe (the author of xkcd)? The guy is clearly brilliant, and understands the modern web as well as anybody.
I'd personally prefer there be someone in charge of pushing open standards and technological efficiency in government.
Remember, the U.S. government uses a hell of a lot of technology. The CTO is not about mandating what private citizens or corporations use; it's a position that helps guide *government* use of technology. Having worked as a programmer for NOAA, I can say that having someone competent in this post is BADLY needed. Right now government computer systems are a horrendously disorganized mishmash patchwork of proprietary and open-source software using antique data formats. There are MASSIVE inefficiencies and redundant work being done by separate agencies. Take geospatial data systems, for example - NOAA alone uses every system you've ever heard of plus eight or ten different homegrown monstrosities, all to serve essentially the same functions. Every group gets funding for their tech independently, and so there's no coordination. Interoperability is essentially nonexistent.
With respect to paying for health care, you're already suffering from redistribution of wealth; it's just that right now it's the insurance companies and the hospitals that are doing the redistributing instead of the government.
Every time somebody goes to the emergency room who can't afford to pay, the hospital ends up eating the cost. Of course, they don't really eat it; they just pass it on to their paying patients and consequently the insurance companies.
The idea with universal health care is that it's a lot more efficient for people to have preventative care, or to be able to go to the doctor before things get so serious that they end up in the hospital. You're already paying for the treatment of the uninsured through your premiums; if anything, if we can reduce the need for emergency services it should *lower* your premiums.
Capitalism and barter are fundamentally co-dependent systems; you depend upon the well-being of the people who grow your food, and they depend on your ability to buy it from them. I guess all that I'm trying to say is that recognizing our interdependence is as important as recognizing our individualism.
Self-reliance is critically important, but when the ideology of self-reliance warps into cynical greed and refusal to help others, I don't think it does anyone any good.
Good luck with that. Personally, I think that subsistence farming sucks, but hey, maybe that's just me.
To improve public schools, you need a system with proper feedback -- success should be rewarded, failure punished, and "success" should mean educated students. But that's hard to do even with a blank slate. You can't get there at all and preserve the current system.
My mother is a teacher, and based upon her experience I have an idea about how to add a reasonable feedback loop to public education. Essentially, you institute a policy that performance reviews of teachers are conducted not by administrators, but by the teachers who inherit their students. Teachers know exactly who isn't doing their job properly in the preceding grades. Peer review is being used successfully by a number of big companies; I'm not sure that there's any particular reason it couldn't work for schools as well.
While it's not perfect, this approach would have the benefits of potentially being palatable to the teacher's union, and you wouldn't have the problems that teaching to standardized tests brings. More than that, though, you have a real incentive for teachers to honestly evaluate their colleagues - because when a teacher receives students that are well prepared, his or her job is much easier. At the same time, they know that the better they do at preparing their students, the more likely they are to be rated highly by others down the line.
This approach provides both the carrot and the stick, reduces the need for standardized tests (which the unions hate) and would be cheap to implement. Also, since teachers are usually familiar with the personal problems of the students they inherit, so they have a good context in which to evaluate how well those students' previous teachers have done in preparing them for the next grade.
There are of course potential problems with students who move around a lot, and this would likely only really work well in the primary grades, but then again the primary grades are probably the most important in terms of shaping a child's habits.
A does of harsh reality is the only way to fix it at this point.
How is "a dose of harsh reality" going to fix the cultural problems we have surrounding education? As I see it, the problem is not that the consequences of failing to value an education are not harsh enough. It's that people fail to take into account the long-term consequences of *not* placing a high enough value on education.
Of course, short-term thinking isn't just a problem for education; it's a problem in every domain.
Maybe, just maybe, basing compensation on performance might be more beneficial then say oh I don't know, union negotiated contracts where the only way to fire someone is to catch them with a 12 year old?
Sounds great!
That's why school boards are local institutions, and why state and local races are pretty important. The tools that federal officials have to "manage" education are way too blunt and unwieldy to be at all effective.
Without a creator, aren't we left with the following possibilites?:
1. What exists has always existed, or
2. What exists simply came into existence out of nothing, for no reason.
Replace "What exists" with "The creator" and maybe you'll understand the problem. Why should the existence of anything be dependent upon will or intent?
You do realize that Democratic get-out-the-vote campaigns are focused on Democratic voters, right? There may be some exceptions when it comes to principally Democratic strongholds, like university towns, but all such activities are targeted, either individually or collectively.
We have lists of support. We do everything in our power to ensure that those supporters vote.
Hey, so did I.
That was a sobering experience.
My conclusion after the 2000 election was that the best I can do is lobby for IRV or a Condorcet system to be used at the local level. If we can get it started locally, that it can propagate upward until enough people are comfortable enough to change election laws at a federal level, or perhaps even amend the federal Constitution. Until such a time, however, I'm holding my nose and voting lesser evils. Fortunately, I don't feel like I have to hold my nose all that hard this year.
Yes. I don't have health insurance either. Or car insurance. That's by choice, because I can save money by not paying for the insurance premiums. Instead I pay-out cash for everything (actually credit card, but it still comes out of my pocket).
I sure hope you've got a couple hundred grand saved up so that if you get hit by a car or something and have to spend months in the hospital, you're not going to fall back on the rest of us to pick up your tab. If not, then you're gambling with *my* money.
Or perhaps you'd have the decency to just go ahead and die for your principles?
It was also far more expensive then as well. They weren't making house calls to middle class families. Poor people would never get more than what ever Mom knew.
Ah, the good old days! Boy, I wish that it could be like that again!
</sarcasm>
No one is "deserving" of death. It just happens live the weather. And it's not just the poor. We ALL die. It's an equal opportunity outcome.
You obviously haven't watched a close friend die as a result of poverty and inadequate health care, as I have. I was in high school at the time, so there was little I could do to help. He was 62, and died of cancer; because he didn't have health insurance, he never went to doctors and his cancer wasn't detected until it was far too late.
It's all theoretical until it happens to you, or someone close to you. As others have said elsewhere here, providing universal health care is about basic human dignity.
The entire goal of the system (stop death) is unobtainable, and the governments will bankrupt themselves trying.
So, what you're saying is that under the current system (which has the same problem) the poor are the ones more deserving of death?
The same thing that anyone does when they're let go - they reinvent themselves, and maybe work a little harder for whoever hires them next.
It is absolutely not the government's (and by extension the taxpayer's) job to provide secure employment for the lazy.
The man-hours that went into building everything are as gone as the smoke from the explosions, though. THAT is the opportunity cost that we have paid - millions of hours of productive time spent on death and destruction instead of on things that could improve people's lives.
Agreed... so fix the problem, rather than work around it. Make it easy to fire government workers.
My great fantasy is that whoever gets in to office cuts the size of government by 15% - not by cutting budget, but by announcing across-the-board layoffs. Get rid of the layabouts and bureaucrats - having worked in government, everybody in an organization knows who they are, but there isn't the organizational will to get rid of the deadwood. But in reality, it's a minority that's the problem... so just go by pay grade, and cut 15% at every level. I assure you, the government would become MORE productive if this were done, not less.
I would love to be able to do that - put some money down as part of my vote to get a bug fixed instead of just putting in a ticket and hoping. It'd provide an awesome way for canonical to prioritize their tickets, too.
I think what it comes down to is that technology is changing too fast these days for the Debian release cycle. If you want to be using the latest tools, you're simply out of luck unless you want to be constantly building and supporting your own debs.
"Server-grade" depends upon what it is that you want to serve, and for a lot of companies, that doesn't mean using tools that were current three years ago.
Where did I say anything about equality of income or equality of outcome?
The simple fact is that today there is *not* equality of opportunity for everyone - where you are born, and the parents you are born to has a huge influence on someone's prospects in life. Now, there are a lot of factors there that the government can't do anything about, but as a society it is possible for us to provide high-quality health care and education to everyone - and we should.
I think that the fact that public schools are funded largely by property taxes is an atrocity - this inherently means that the schools in the poorest neighborhoods are also of the worst quality. This perpetuates the cycle of ignorance that keeps an unfortunately high percentage of the population dumb and poor.
Now there's a damn good suggestion.