i hate to rain on your parade, but CIA world factbook put's Canada's total oil production is only about 4 million barrels per day, and the US consumption at just over 20 million barrels per day.
I don't know by who's definition "the bulk of" = app 20%, but not mine.
"Search for "porn addiction" and be educated. A lot of our brain wiring is devoted to seeking orgasms. Taken to excess, certain people basically can't get what they need anymore in real life and start living in a porn-fueled fantasy world that real life can never live up to, and that makes it very difficult to form real attachments. Porn is a relationship with all frosting and no cake."
OK, first of all, take a deep look at the sort of studies you're referring to. A great deal of them are garbage, or are driven by somebody with an agenda.
But, as many others have pointed out, the fact that some people have problems with alcoholism is not grounds for booze prohibition. Same logic applies with porn.
You're totally right on the money on (A). USD is the currency that oil is denominated in, and it's lost 30% of it's value relative to the Euro or Yen or even the Canadian dollar.
Which, of course means, god help the US economy if OPEC starts denominating oil in euros or something...
Yes, well, maybe, anyway... There's a good chance that OPEC nations are lying through their teeth about reserves, but that's a separate discussion.
But all I mean about 'inventories' is that deBeers et. al. have GIANT inventories of diamonds, because they like to buy up the surplus in any given year.
I don't see anything like that going on with oil. If it's speculators pushing up the price only, then the only way to keep the prices high is for somebody to be buying and hoarding whatever commodity you're talking about.
Now, I'm not an oil economist or something, so I could be missing something here, but it doesn't look like there's anybody hoarding oil at $136/barrel.
The classic example of speculators raising the price _and keeping it high_ is DeBeers/diamonds. And we all know they have enormous inventories of diamonds, because they buy up any surplus any given year.
These guys are the modern equivalent of the Pinkertons in the 19th century.
They're getting an easy ride from law enforcement because they were in discussion with at least one Attorney General where they basically offered to do what would quite likely be entrapment if the FBI did it (OK, that's debatable) but even aside from that, they have expertise that many law-enforcement agencies lack.
Wow, way to twist my words around to spin it in favor of your ideological position.
"So basically you didn't have time to teach people what you wanted to teach them because they had failed to already learn the basic material which is covered by the tests.
And from the way you quickly started teaching towards the test, you yourself knew that they were completely unprepared to show a knowledge of basic skills."
This assumes that the test is an accurate reflection of basic or fundamental skills, an assertion that you have offered no evidence for.
If you _do_ have evidence that standardized tests are a good way to measure someone's comprehension of say, pre-calculus algebra, or basic Newtonian physics, then I'd love to hear it. But in my experience, the skills that make you good at taking a standardized test are not the same as understanding the material.
For example, one of the best 'hacks' for standardized test-taking is to go over things like how to rapidly fill in those little circles with a pencil, and strategies to ensure that you're putting the answers in the right place. It's basically a pointless distraction and completely unrelated to learning, but it's one of the first thing anybody prepping for say, the SATs will cover.
There's a finite amount of time. Time you spend on "test-taking skills" is time you're not spending getting your students to really have a fundamental grounding in trig or something.
But don't take my word for it - talk to a first-year calculus or physics professor. Ask them about how students are coming in from high school and they need to go over the unit circle with them in calc. 101.
" "Why the fuck else would they put up with working in the public school system?" because the pay is actually pretty decent when you factor in actual time worked compared to other fields,"
OK, sure, it's competitive with some other middle-class professions. But up here in BC, Canada, teachers start in the 30-40K range.
Which means, for example, why would anybody with a math or CS degree enter the school system?
At any rate, what I'm saying isn't that teachers make crap all the time in all jurisdictions - I'm saying that someone motivated primarily by money would be in a different line of work.
"but teaching just the test is evidence of poor teaching and/or a poorly written test, not a flaw with standardized testing as a concept. "
I agree with you, basically on this. But it's a non-trivial problem to make "non-poorly-written tests." Can you show me a decent example of a good standardized test? Like, maybe there are some jurisdictions where it works.
But like the man-friendly lesbian in 'chasing amy', I have yet to see them. Can you point me at one?
Across all OECD countries, across all demographics, the single best predictor of a student's academic success is the income level of their parents. Which, let's face it, makes sense. Higher incomes are correlated with higher education levels. So if your parents don't read, well, they're unlikely to read to their parents. If you're working 3 crappy jobs to pay the rent, you don't have a lot of time for the PTA.
So if you take a sample made up of people who can afford a 5-figure annual tuition, what do you think's gonna happen?
And, "lower cost per student?" What fucking color is the sky in the world you live in? Maybe you mean 'lower cost to the taxpayer'? But TANSTAAFL.
Uh, do you work in the school system? Do you have any experience or evidence to back your assertion that "teaching to the test" is a silly cliche? I worked as a tutor for math/physics/chemistry for high-school students while I was in university, and I can tell you that teaching to the test is a very real problem. I can give you lots of examples where I wanted to spend more time on making sure a student had a genuinely good fundamental comprehension of a subject, to make sure that they'd be properly prepared for university level courses, but because of preparing for standardized tests I had to settle for a 'good enough' rote repetition approach.
This leaves them not really understanding trig or algebra fundamentals but just memorizing a series of steps that will allow them to do one of the handful of 'types of problems' that you can expect to see on the test.
This is, of course, a problem that exists with testing in general to some degree. But the greater the separation between the person writing the test and the students, the worse this problem is. When you create an incentive to produce higher test scores, the focus becomes test scores, not actual learning. Testing, like democracy, is a 'worst of all systems - except for all the other ones' approach. It's not really a great way to run learning, but there aren't a lot of other options save really radical ideas like free schools. So focusing on tests as the end all and be all is misguided, at best.
Personally, given that many people in favor of standardized testing seem to be the sort who, philosophically, think that publicly funded schools are a communist plot, I can't help but wonder if there's a hidden agenda to deliberately sabotage the public school system, so that then in a few years, one can say "Well, they're really not working, so let's just privatize the schools'.
While it might be convenient amongst a certain fraction of the political spectrum to pretend that teachers are just lazy, overpaid selfish closet-socialists who are only in it for themselves and for the money, and that's why they fight tooth and nail against standardized tests, that doesn't hold up for 10 seconds. If somebody was motivated by selfish motives and money, what the fuck would they be doing working as a teacher? Why not do a commerce degree/mba/law degree and then go work for an investment bank if all you wanted was money?
I'm not saying there aren't lousy teachers. There really are. There's a lot of burnt-out teachers who have given up caring. But a great deal of teachers are in it for the love of it. Why the fuck else would they put up with working in the public school system?
There _MIGHT_ be a place for standardized tests at the much younger grade levels in say, math or reading comprehension (say, up to about grade 6 or so), but even then there's plenty of better ways to address problems. Standardized tests turns kids into robots, at best, kills creativity, and is indicative of someone peddling easy answers. So let's give a complex problem the respect it deserves.
What we need is sort of a "de-industrialization" of schools. The goals of a public school system in a democracy articulated by guys like Thomas Jefferson are not well served by Taylorism/'scientific management'. What we need is varied curricula and more individual attention based on the fact that people learn at different rate, and have different strengths and weaknesses. A school system is not a Ford assembly line.
Well, maybe Moore's an asshole, but maybe he took one look at things like that fucking abortion they made of "From Hell" and wanted to stop them from gang-raping his work.
And, y'know, it doesn't make somebody an asshole for not wanting a movie made of their work. Maybe he thinks that his work doesn't translate from one medium to another. He's not under an obligation to help make a movie of his work just because somebody else sold the rights. Writers are not indentured servants.
"Because it forces some to pay for the bad choices others make. Because it drives up prices. If you think health care is expensive, wait until it's free."
Yeah, nice neo-con talking points.
Too bad there isn't any evidence to back that up.
Total health care spending per capita in the USA is much higher than in Canada.
But how about a compromise: can we socialize health care in the same way we socialize that tap water? In other words, can we socialize it on a municipality-by-municipality basis?
Actually, your analogy of tap water vs. bottled water hits the nail right on the head. it may just be the best analogy I've heard yet on the issue.
How can you? You're spending time posting on Slashdot instead of working more hours to earn money for charity, aren't you? And that's a matter of not wanting to give away more of *your own* time and money; imagine how much easier it is to ethically justify a decision not to give away *other people's* time and money.
OK, let me back up. to clarify, I didn't mean you, specifically and personally.
More of a generalized sense of you/we/us, if that makes sense.
I mean, in any western developed country, it's hard to justify a system where somebody might die 'cause they can't afford chemotherapy or something, and that the status quo isn't really acceptable.
One other thought: I think emergency care isn't really the sticky point, you probably won't get turned away if you show up at an emergency room with a gunshot wound. It's the chronic or more long-term care (think MS, IBS, diabetes, etc).
Of course, medicine in general doesn't deal well with chronic conditions, much better adapted to acute care.
Um, Canada's not a good example of what a single-payer health care system looks like, thanks to basically steady cuts to funding since about 1995.
The Canadian system works basically OK, most of the time. But it's going downhill ever since Paul Martin decided to balance the budget by transferring the most expensive costs of government services to the provinces. Of all the OECD countries that have a single-payer system, Canada's is arguably the worst. It doesn't even cover pharamceuticals.
If you look at what France or Germany or Australia or the Scandinavian countries have as a "socialized" health care system, it's dramatically better.
Oh, and by the way - they all have better health care outcomes and healthier populations that the USA.
I guess I got two questions for those who oppose socialized health care: 1) Why does socialism bother you in health care, something everybody needs, eventually, but you're (presumably) not bothered about other socialized things like roads and firefighters and police and the military? Your municipal tap water is "socialized", but it works pretty well, I think.
2) How can you ethically justify having people die because they can't afford treatment?
Somebody should say something about how when you're driving a wheeled vehicle then the weight of the vehicle rests on the ground, but if you're talking aircraft, some force needs to keep you in the air, contrary to what gravity would prefer.
So barring some sort of energy storage system that's orders of magnitude better than what we got now, and orders of magnitude cheaper, it's not gonna be practical.
I figured out where that statistic about the B-2 came from, it's from the documentary "Why We Fight", came out a couple years back (post invasion of Iraq, anyway...), talks about how, "when war is this profitable, you'll get more war".
That and the fact that most leaders in power since the 90's have been born after WWII. Those who lived thru it, even as a child, remember just how bad war can get. People like Bush and Cheney, however, don't have first-hand memories of the firestorm at Dresden, for example. (not that this is specific to the current admin., or to the GOP or anything)
It's not about violence, or porn, or catching pedophiles. If it accomplishes anything on those fronts, that's a side-bonus.
Reminds me of how for the B-2 bomber, at least one component is manufactured in every single state. Who wants to run for re-election saying they closed a plant and cost X number of jobs?
Alexis de Tocquville said something about how the US will remain a republic, at least until congress figures out that they can bribe the people with their own money.
It's not about actually catching pedophiles, that's more like a side benefit if it actually happens.
This is about keeping the flow of federal money flowing. Reminds me of how I read somewhere that there's at least one component of the B-2 bomber built in every single state in the US. That way, who wants to cancel it?
Alexis de Toqueville said something about how the US republic will survive as long as congress doesn't figure out they can bribe the people with their own money.
So, um, if I use a vm, how exactly does this unique identifier work?
One way or the other, they talk about not wanting to give details because then it might make it easier to circumvent, um, that suggests they're talking about "security through obscurity", i.e., on a par with hiding your house key under a house plant.
Interestingly, if you take a look at the growth of social security costs, almost all of the growth is due to rising health care costs.
Now, we can expect health care spending nationally to increase as the baby boomers get older, but the rate of increase in health care costs is faster in the US than anywhere else. The japanese, for example, have universal coverage (although it's not just as simple as the canadian or UK system) for everybody, and get 3X as many MRIs as Americans, but their health care costs aren't going up.
So, um, something like universal health care will probably take care of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
i hate to rain on your parade, but CIA world factbook put's Canada's total oil production is only about 4 million barrels per day, and the US consumption at just over 20 million barrels per day.
I don't know by who's definition "the bulk of" = app 20%, but not mine.
"Search for "porn addiction" and be educated. A lot of our brain wiring is devoted to seeking orgasms. Taken to excess, certain people basically can't get what they need anymore in real life and start living in a porn-fueled fantasy world that real life can never live up to, and that makes it very difficult to form real attachments. Porn is a relationship with all frosting and no cake."
OK, first of all, take a deep look at the sort of studies you're referring to. A great deal of them are garbage, or are driven by somebody with an agenda.
But, as many others have pointed out, the fact that some people have problems with alcoholism is not grounds for booze prohibition. Same logic applies with porn.
You should really be reading this:
http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/
You're totally right on the money on (A). USD is the currency that oil is denominated in, and it's lost 30% of it's value relative to the Euro or Yen or even the Canadian dollar.
Which, of course means, god help the US economy if OPEC starts denominating oil in euros or something...
Yes, well, maybe, anyway... There's a good chance that OPEC nations are lying through their teeth about reserves, but that's a separate discussion.
But all I mean about 'inventories' is that deBeers et. al. have GIANT inventories of diamonds, because they like to buy up the surplus in any given year.
I don't see anything like that going on with oil. If it's speculators pushing up the price only, then the only way to keep the prices high is for somebody to be buying and hoarding whatever commodity you're talking about.
Now, I'm not an oil economist or something, so I could be missing something here, but it doesn't look like there's anybody hoarding oil at $136/barrel.
Then where are the inventories?
The classic example of speculators raising the price _and keeping it high_ is DeBeers/diamonds. And we all know they have enormous inventories of diamonds, because they buy up any surplus any given year.
So where are the oil inventories?
These guys are the modern equivalent of the Pinkertons in the 19th century.
They're getting an easy ride from law enforcement because they were in discussion with at least one Attorney General where they basically offered to do what would quite likely be entrapment if the FBI did it (OK, that's debatable) but even aside from that, they have expertise that many law-enforcement agencies lack.
Wow, way to twist my words around to spin it in favor of your ideological position.
"So basically you didn't have time to teach people what you wanted to teach them because they had failed to already learn the basic material which is covered by the tests.
And from the way you quickly started teaching towards the test, you yourself knew that they were completely unprepared to show a knowledge of basic skills."
This assumes that the test is an accurate reflection of basic or fundamental skills, an assertion that you have offered no evidence for.
If you _do_ have evidence that standardized tests are a good way to measure someone's comprehension of say, pre-calculus algebra, or basic Newtonian physics, then I'd love to hear it. But in my experience, the skills that make you good at taking a standardized test are not the same as understanding the material.
For example, one of the best 'hacks' for standardized test-taking is to go over things like how to rapidly fill in those little circles with a pencil, and strategies to ensure that you're putting the answers in the right place. It's basically a pointless distraction and completely unrelated to learning, but it's one of the first thing anybody prepping for say, the SATs will cover.
There's a finite amount of time. Time you spend on "test-taking skills" is time you're not spending getting your students to really have a fundamental grounding in trig or something.
But don't take my word for it - talk to a first-year calculus or physics professor. Ask them about how students are coming in from high school and they need to go over the unit circle with them in calc. 101.
"
"Why the fuck else would they put up with working in the public school system?" because the pay is actually pretty decent when you factor in actual time worked compared to other fields,"
OK, sure, it's competitive with some other middle-class professions. But up here in BC, Canada, teachers start in the 30-40K range.
Which means, for example, why would anybody with a math or CS degree enter the school system?
At any rate, what I'm saying isn't that teachers make crap all the time in all jurisdictions - I'm saying that someone motivated primarily by money would be in a different line of work.
"but teaching just the test is evidence of poor teaching and/or a poorly written test, not a flaw with standardized testing as a concept. "
I agree with you, basically on this. But it's a non-trivial problem to make "non-poorly-written tests." Can you show me a decent example of a good standardized test? Like, maybe there are some jurisdictions where it works.
But like the man-friendly lesbian in 'chasing amy', I have yet to see them. Can you point me at one?
Across all OECD countries, across all demographics, the single best predictor of a student's academic success is the income level of their parents. Which, let's face it, makes sense. Higher incomes are correlated with higher education levels. So if your parents don't read, well, they're unlikely to read to their parents. If you're working 3 crappy jobs to pay the rent, you don't have a lot of time for the PTA.
So if you take a sample made up of people who can afford a 5-figure annual tuition, what do you think's gonna happen?
And, "lower cost per student?" What fucking color is the sky in the world you live in? Maybe you mean 'lower cost to the taxpayer'? But TANSTAAFL.
Uh, do you work in the school system? Do you have any experience or evidence to back your assertion that "teaching to the test" is a silly cliche? I worked as a tutor for math/physics/chemistry for high-school students while I was in university, and I can tell you that teaching to the test is a very real problem. I can give you lots of examples where I wanted to spend more time on making sure a student had a genuinely good fundamental comprehension of a subject, to make sure that they'd be properly prepared for university level courses, but because of preparing for standardized tests I had to settle for a 'good enough' rote repetition approach.
This leaves them not really understanding trig or algebra fundamentals but just memorizing a series of steps that will allow them to do one of the handful of 'types of problems' that you can expect to see on the test.
This is, of course, a problem that exists with testing in general to some degree. But the greater the separation between the person writing the test and the students, the worse this problem is. When you create an incentive to produce higher test scores, the focus becomes test scores, not actual learning. Testing, like democracy, is a 'worst of all systems - except for all the other ones' approach. It's not really a great way to run learning, but there aren't a lot of other options save really radical ideas like free schools. So focusing on tests as the end all and be all is misguided, at best.
Personally, given that many people in favor of standardized testing seem to be the sort who, philosophically, think that publicly funded schools are a communist plot, I can't help but wonder if there's a hidden agenda to deliberately sabotage the public school system, so that then in a few years, one can say "Well, they're really not working, so let's just privatize the schools'.
While it might be convenient amongst a certain fraction of the political spectrum to pretend that teachers are just lazy, overpaid selfish closet-socialists who are only in it for themselves and for the money, and that's why they fight tooth and nail against standardized tests, that doesn't hold up for 10 seconds. If somebody was motivated by selfish motives and money, what the fuck would they be doing working as a teacher? Why not do a commerce degree/mba/law degree and then go work for an investment bank if all you wanted was money?
I'm not saying there aren't lousy teachers. There really are. There's a lot of burnt-out teachers who have given up caring. But a great deal of teachers are in it for the love of it. Why the fuck else would they put up with working in the public school system?
There _MIGHT_ be a place for standardized tests at the much younger grade levels in say, math or reading comprehension (say, up to about grade 6 or so), but even then there's plenty of better ways to address problems. Standardized tests turns kids into robots, at best, kills creativity, and is indicative of someone peddling easy answers. So let's give a complex problem the respect it deserves.
What we need is sort of a "de-industrialization" of schools. The goals of a public school system in a democracy articulated by guys like Thomas Jefferson are not well served by Taylorism/'scientific management'. What we need is varied curricula and more individual attention based on the fact that people learn at different rate, and have different strengths and weaknesses. A school system is not a Ford assembly line.
Well, maybe Moore's an asshole, but maybe he took one look at things like that fucking abortion they made of "From Hell" and wanted to stop them from gang-raping his work.
And, y'know, it doesn't make somebody an asshole for not wanting a movie made of their work. Maybe he thinks that his work doesn't translate from one medium to another. He's not under an obligation to help make a movie of his work just because somebody else sold the rights. Writers are not indentured servants.
The act is way too broad.
It's section 13.1 that says something like "any published materials that are likely to expose a person or group to hatred or contempt".
I read a book a few years back "IBM and the Holocaust". Wouldn't that book expose IBM employees to "hatred and contempt".
"Likely to expose" is big enough to land a 747 in. And the truth or probable belief in the truth is not a defense.
That's a matter of opinion.
But it sure is amusing to see the slashdot summary refer to it as "...Canadian Tabloid the National Post..."
"Because it forces some to pay for the bad choices others make. Because it drives up prices. If you think health care is expensive, wait until it's free."
Yeah, nice neo-con talking points.
Too bad there isn't any evidence to back that up.
Total health care spending per capita in the USA is much higher than in Canada.
But how about a compromise: can we socialize health care in the same way we socialize that tap water? In other words, can we socialize it on a municipality-by-municipality basis?
Actually, your analogy of tap water vs. bottled water hits the nail right on the head. it may just be the best analogy I've heard yet on the issue.
How can you? You're spending time posting on Slashdot instead of working more hours to earn money for charity, aren't you? And that's a matter of not wanting to give away more of *your own* time and money; imagine how much easier it is to ethically justify a decision not to give away *other people's* time and money.
OK, let me back up. to clarify, I didn't mean you, specifically and personally.
More of a generalized sense of you/we/us, if that makes sense.
I mean, in any western developed country, it's hard to justify a system where somebody might die 'cause they can't afford chemotherapy or something, and that the status quo isn't really acceptable.
One other thought: I think emergency care isn't really the sticky point, you probably won't get turned away if you show up at an emergency room with a gunshot wound. It's the chronic or more long-term care (think MS, IBS, diabetes, etc).
Of course, medicine in general doesn't deal well with chronic conditions, much better adapted to acute care.
Um, Canada's not a good example of what a single-payer health care system looks like, thanks to basically steady cuts to funding since about 1995.
The Canadian system works basically OK, most of the time. But it's going downhill ever since Paul Martin decided to balance the budget by transferring the most expensive costs of government services to the provinces. Of all the OECD countries that have a single-payer system, Canada's is arguably the worst. It doesn't even cover pharamceuticals.
If you look at what France or Germany or Australia or the Scandinavian countries have as a "socialized" health care system, it's dramatically better.
Oh, and by the way - they all have better health care outcomes and healthier populations that the USA.
I guess I got two questions for those who oppose socialized health care:
1) Why does socialism bother you in health care, something everybody needs, eventually, but you're (presumably) not bothered about other socialized things like roads and firefighters and police and the military? Your municipal tap water is "socialized", but it works pretty well, I think.
2) How can you ethically justify having people die because they can't afford treatment?
Somebody should say something about how when you're driving a wheeled vehicle then the weight of the vehicle rests on the ground, but if you're talking aircraft, some force needs to keep you in the air, contrary to what gravity would prefer.
So barring some sort of energy storage system that's orders of magnitude better than what we got now, and orders of magnitude cheaper, it's not gonna be practical.
I figured out where that statistic about the B-2 came from, it's from the documentary "Why We Fight", came out a couple years back (post invasion of Iraq, anyway...), talks about how, "when war is this profitable, you'll get more war".
That and the fact that most leaders in power since the 90's have been born after WWII. Those who lived thru it, even as a child, remember just how bad war can get. People like Bush and Cheney, however, don't have first-hand memories of the firestorm at Dresden, for example. (not that this is specific to the current admin., or to the GOP or anything)
It's not about violence, or porn, or catching pedophiles. If it accomplishes anything on those fronts, that's a side-bonus.
Reminds me of how for the B-2 bomber, at least one component is manufactured in every single state. Who wants to run for re-election saying they closed a plant and cost X number of jobs?
Alexis de Tocquville said something about how the US will remain a republic, at least until congress figures out that they can bribe the people with their own money.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail right on the head.
It's not about actually catching pedophiles, that's more like a side benefit if it actually happens.
This is about keeping the flow of federal money flowing. Reminds me of how I read somewhere that there's at least one component of the B-2 bomber built in every single state in the US. That way, who wants to cancel it?
Alexis de Toqueville said something about how the US republic will survive as long as congress doesn't figure out they can bribe the people with their own money.
But I thought that pedophiles used tor or freenet or wi-fi slurping?
So, what, the goal is to catch pedophiles that aren't tech-savy?
So, um, if I use a vm, how exactly does this unique identifier work?
One way or the other, they talk about not wanting to give details because then it might make it easier to circumvent, um, that suggests they're talking about "security through obscurity", i.e., on a par with hiding your house key under a house plant.
Interestingly, if you take a look at the growth of social security costs, almost all of the growth is due to rising health care costs.
Now, we can expect health care spending nationally to increase as the baby boomers get older, but the rate of increase in health care costs is faster in the US than anywhere else. The japanese, for example, have universal coverage (although it's not just as simple as the canadian or UK system) for everybody, and get 3X as many MRIs as Americans, but their health care costs aren't going up.
So, um, something like universal health care will probably take care of the problem.