I didn't contradict myself in the slightest. I said it's perfectly fair for one person to end up rich and one person to end up poor from the same starting block. I said it's unfair when one person starts with the deck loaded against them and has no real chance of getting to a better position and another is handed everything on a silver platter and they end up in the predictable situation of one remaining in the gutter and one remaining on top and their actual abilities and drive being utterly irrelevant.
Yes you want to give you children everything. But they haven't earned it. If they've been handed it all. they are no more deserving of it than any random ghetto kids. If they do well in life, if they win over others who haven't been given a decent education or upbringing then they haven't won on their own merit, they've won because you've given them help or their competition has been hobbled.
Your children are not you, they are separate entities but they benefit massively from your success. Other children suffer horribly due to their parents failure in the same way, not their own.
It is the way things are that they get handed an advantage for(from their point of view) free. This is not conductive to an efficient competitive environment. Weaklings do well because they've been pushed and the capable fail because they're being held back.
Now of course in practice there's no way to stop this, people being free to spend their money how they like and all.
The more generations the worse it get. Take this to it's conclusion over many many many generations and you get an inept nobility who are held aloft by their inherited money and can almost never fall. Looking at history this is a bad idea and a massive waste.
Give everyone a good grounding and a decent education so that they can, if they have the drive, compete with the kids of successful people even if their own parents were complete wastes of skin.
Where I live university places are purely merit based, it's considered the same as first or second level education as an essential. The details aren't important but students score between 0 and 600 points. Everyone does their exams, everyone gets points, everyone lists their university preferences. if their are 100 places in the course and 200 people apply then the 100 people who have the highest points get the places. University tuition is paid for by the state just like high schools are paid for by the state.
There are still complaints that high income families tend to do better due to better private schools yada yada yada but the effect is more limited. It works great.
Want a good job? then to get into a relevant course you have to work hard. Daddies money won't buy you a degree.
Fail a year? you pay your tuition yourself for the repeat to stop wasters from sponging off the system. Want to do more than one degree? Again on your own head, the state only pays for 1 3rd level course.
Its efficient and ruthlessly fair. The most capable and driven people get the courses, wasters be they from a rich family or a poor family fall behind.
actually if you trace back the thread it was about someone claiming that schools shouldn't be run by the government. ie that they should be run by local communities. which is bullshit if the local community is poor as fuck.
How much is walmart paying now days? I was under the impression that is wasn't enough to raise a family which actually eats and lives under a roof without stealing a great deal from the store.
Once you have that on your employment record, its poison
And why is it worse than in other jobs? See that hints to me that being fired is so rare for teachers in comparison to other jobs that anyone who does get canned is assumed to have done something really really bad. Cut the crap of defending teachers who come to work drunk and make the turnover similar to other professions and perhaps it won't be seen as such a black mark.
Problems: viruses which bury themselves in the BIOS would still get in, any periferal with any kind of rewritable memory is a potential liability, USB ports would be a no no etc etc. easiers and cheaper to just have 2PCs in the office since then you can use off the shelf stuff rather than some custom system with hard disks which you can switch etc.
I remember playing video games with my dad and sister, looking back I just mashed the fire key while they controlled the guy(it was before the days of 2 player) but the fact that it was an activity with them rather was what made it enjoyable when I was a kid. now days I can actually play the wii with my nephews and play coop with them.
So ya, Don't just sit your kids down in front of the box, sit down with them and actually play as well. It will be worth much more to your kids.
What the fuck? So teachers are unhappy because of all the problems of this world? Pull the other one!
Road deaths are a much better reason to get depressed! Or cancer deaths! Those kill many many more people. 1 in 4 of your students will probably die of cancer but there's only a tiny chance that any of them will die from bullet wounds.
And how are teachers special in any way for these things? . Drugs, alcohol, low incomes... other crimes... drunk driving affects EVERYONE. Teachers are not special in this respect.
If teachers were fired as easily as people like you would like, then we simply wouldn't have any.
Not so, I'm all for hair-trigger firing and simply upping the pay being offered till the positions are filled with competent people.
Also where do you live? the bible belt? Some of the most popular teachers with parents and students broke almost all those rules. I'm aware of the problem of parents who think a teacher is terrible because little johnny got an F even though he's such a bright boy!
drinking in front of students after work: being drunk off your ass regularly in front of a crowd of students might cause problems but I've never heard anyone complaining about having seen teacher x IN THE PUB. Being a massive alcoholic perhaps but if it didn't affect their classes I can't see this being an issue here.
They can't have boyfriends or girlfriends: I don't even get this one, I do remember teasing a younger teacher about a girlfriend but unless there's sex in the supply closet involved this one has never been noticeable here and I've never heard of anyone being pushed out because of it.
They can't wear sexy clothing outside of work: Young teachers or old teachers? because old people are ew. I've run into some of the younger examples of my former teachers in clubs. Unless you mean *to the parent teacher meeting*.
They can't have political views: HAH! HAH I SAY! For 6 years my english teacher might as well have been teaching a global politics class. Never heard of anyone trying to push him out because of it.
You don't seem to have thought this through. People don't choose to live in poor areas, poor areas are just places where rent is low enough for them to afford to live there. For someone with no savings and probably a fair amount of debt moving from a $200 a month room in a ghetto to a $400 a month apartment in a faraway little town is a little retarded. Course then they also have to pay the local school fees(we are talking about all private schooling here) to get their kids in. Throw some more money on the pile. Course they can get a high paying job to pay for all this but wait, they grew up in some shit hole neighbourhood and got no decent education. Best they can hope for is a walmart job. Back to the ghetto they go with even more debts to their name. And that's assuming they can get someone to give them a loan to do all this traveling in the first place. Having an accent which singles you out as coming from a bad neighbourhood will pretty much keep you out of most jobs, I've personally gotten an offer for every job I've ever gone for an interview for but that in great part you can be sure is because I grew up with an accent and mannerisms which appeal to employers.
but don't worry, your world view is safe, you can keep believing that everyone else is just like you, had the same chances in life and has the same earning power and education as you.
So your parents had the money and knowhow to get to the US? Sound like they were already ahead of the curve.
I'm not trying to deny you anything, what I am saying is that there's nothing wrong with competition if people actually have a chance to do something with their abilities.
The children of people living in a ghetto did nothing to deserve being there and the children of people living in mansions did nothing to deserve being there. Unless the kid born in a trailer is Einstein then he'll never get out - by no fault of his own. Unless the kid who grew up in a mansion is a complete idiot he will stay there and even then he's probably alright. This isn't competitive, this isn't fair, this isn't moral.
If 2 people start off life with some semblance of equality I have no problem with one ending up in the gutter and one in the whitehouse based on personal drive, skill and luck, that's only fair. Making sure everyone has a decent education is only fair, if you want to give your kids an even better one then that's your choice but you have no right to keep their competitions faces ground into the mud.
All well and good but at least where I live the teachers union is corrupt as hell. I've had teachers who turn up drunk to class who they haven't been able to get rid of because the teachers union simply refused to accept that said teacher was a drunk without blood samples/breathalyzer but wouldn't allow such tests under any circumstances. She was retired from my old school after 20 years of being useless. Only time I've ever come across when all the swots, the A students, the ones who study all the time just stood up and walked out of a class, they started doing private classes outside of school simply because they were going to fail with her teaching them and never went back to her classroom.
There was even one teacher who was protected by the union after she was caught with a final year student, 18 but still completely against the rules. How did they protect her? They simply refused to accept that anything had happened and threatened industrial action if she was fired. Same deal as the drunk teacher. School:"We caught her doing this" Union:"Didn't happen" School:"Yes it did." Union:"Didn't happen!! LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALA"
Utter incompetence is not considered a valid reason to fire a teacher because as the union has stated many a time "There are no bad teachers". If the union was liquidated and all the useless teachers were simply fired on the spot it would go a long long long way towards fixing the problems with the system.
The way people talk about this you'd think schools were deathtraps with assasins lurking round every corner. There have only been a handful of school shootings.
You seem to think that all private is good. That just means that kids in the rich areas get fantastic schools with the best teachers, kids in the poor areas get a trained monkey and a bucket(with a hole in it).
In the interest of trying to give people some sembelance of an equal playing field it can be a good idea to average things out a little in education.
A government protecting your liberties so we can do things yourself is worth nothing, zero, nada, ziltch if you are born into a family with no money which can afford no eduction or healthcare. Unless of course you consider the freedom to die before your 12th birthday to be a liberty that should be protected.
The corporate world is just as bad. Hell it was a private company which screwed up on this one.
Get this through your head: "corporate" does not equal "competent". "Government" does not equal "incompetent" They are both quite capable of both and both tend towards incompetent.
Ever heard the phrase "like herding cats"? There are so many insane parents and incompetent teachers, so many nutjobs with their own little idea of how things should be that trying to move the system in any direction from the bottom is futile.
My low view of Indian experts is supported by concrete evidence.
such as? keeping in mind that that time you called dell support and talked to someone reading a script for 50 cent an hour isn't concrete evidence of the skill of millions of people.
I would agree that there are a few Indians who made it, but the majority are just fakes posing as "technological gurus".
So no different to Americans, Europeans or any other group then.
You might as well use the MIT fake dissertation generator and you'd get the same results.
the same as what? You seem to have drifted off here into crazy-on-street-corner ranting where you're forgetting that other people are not intimately familiar with the context of what you're saying.
It doesn't matter though because the truth is that Indian fag-programmers now get paid more than American professionals with superior skills and experience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2fGl9587X8 Isn't racism fun? Companies tend to outsource to India because the cost of living is so much lower that they can employ someone with equal or better skill for less money. Paying someone more money when they know less defeats the whole point. Perhaps your skills aren't as hot as you think they are if you got canned for someone living in India who's now being paid even more than you used to be paid.
You guys won. We give up. Have the jobs, they're all yours.
That's very nice of you although I feel I must point out that I'm in Europe, not India.
I just hope, for your sake, that your Asp.Net site isn't vulnerable to an SQL injection attack because that would make you look very bad. It would also make you look bad if you had code which was vulnerable to a buffer overflow.
Have we broken away from the racism bit yet or do you believe that all code written by Indians is insecure? Shockingly bad code comes from every country. It doesn't exactly take a genius to sanitise input,output and query results.
So what if they're not? you're not actively trying to get them to come to you, you're not pushing them on them in a crowded club while their too drunk to think straight. And as it stands they can get their first few doses completely free from their local dealer anyway.
Unless you're physically forced it's still your choice, I don't give a fuck about someone who's too weak willed to resist peer pressure. promiscuity isn't freedom but the freedom to be promiscuous if you wish certainly is freedom.
Landers are nothing special, they're been sent out by various countries for decades, America isn't the only country to launch them. Show me an american lander that touched down on venus.
If you're going to go into history like Teflon, Velcro and Kevlar then Penicillin and Polyester were British inventions.
You seem to have a very low view of indian experts. Remember all those indian PHDs in your local university? Ya, they're just as capable as any others.
America is not the center of the world. The Galileo system will be significantly more advanged than the american GPS. News flash: america is not best at everything. It's best at some things but the US is not the god of technology.
Well the UK is a bigger market with lax drug laws, scale makes a difference to these things as well. The cigarettes just mean that the taxes have got so high that it's worth it for criminal gangs to move them.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't contradict myself in the slightest.
I said it's perfectly fair for one person to end up rich and one person to end up poor from the same starting block.
I said it's unfair when one person starts with the deck loaded against them and has no real chance of getting to a better position and another is handed everything on a silver platter and they end up in the predictable situation of one remaining in the gutter and one remaining on top and their actual abilities and drive being utterly irrelevant.
Yes you want to give you children everything. But they haven't earned it. If they've been handed it all. they are no more deserving of it than any random ghetto kids. If they do well in life, if they win over others who haven't been given a decent education or upbringing then they haven't won on their own merit, they've won because you've given them help or their competition has been hobbled.
Your children are not you, they are separate entities but they benefit massively from your success. Other children suffer horribly due to their parents failure in the same way, not their own.
It is the way things are that they get handed an advantage for(from their point of view) free.
This is not conductive to an efficient competitive environment. Weaklings do well because they've been pushed and the capable fail because they're being held back.
Now of course in practice there's no way to stop this, people being free to spend their money how they like and all.
The more generations the worse it get.
Take this to it's conclusion over many many many generations and you get an inept nobility who are held aloft by their inherited money and can almost never fall.
Looking at history this is a bad idea and a massive waste.
Give everyone a good grounding and a decent education so that they can, if they have the drive, compete with the kids of successful people even if their own parents were complete wastes of skin.
Where I live university places are purely merit based, it's considered the same as first or second level education as an essential.
The details aren't important but students score between 0 and 600 points.
Everyone does their exams, everyone gets points, everyone lists their university preferences.
if their are 100 places in the course and 200 people apply then the 100 people who have the highest points get the places.
University tuition is paid for by the state just like high schools are paid for by the state.
There are still complaints that high income families tend to do better due to better private schools yada yada yada but the effect is more limited.
It works great.
Want a good job? then to get into a relevant course you have to work hard. Daddies money won't buy you a degree.
Fail a year?
you pay your tuition yourself for the repeat to stop wasters from sponging off the system.
Want to do more than one degree?
Again on your own head, the state only pays for 1 3rd level course.
Its efficient and ruthlessly fair. The most capable and driven people get the courses, wasters be they from a rich family or a poor family fall behind.
actually if you trace back the thread it was about someone claiming that schools shouldn't be run by the government. ie that they should be run by local communities. which is bullshit if the local community is poor as fuck.
How much is walmart paying now days? I was under the impression that is wasn't enough to raise a family which actually eats and lives under a roof without stealing a great deal from the store.
Once you have that on your employment record, its poison
And why is it worse than in other jobs? See that hints to me that being fired is so rare for teachers in comparison to other jobs that anyone who does get canned is assumed to have done something really really bad. Cut the crap of defending teachers who come to work drunk and make the turnover similar to other professions and perhaps it won't be seen as such a black mark.
I take it I've been talking to a 12 year old, a manic depressive or a 4channer.
Problems: viruses which bury themselves in the BIOS would still get in, any periferal with any kind of rewritable memory is a potential liability, USB ports would be a no no etc etc.
easiers and cheaper to just have 2PCs in the office since then you can use off the shelf stuff rather than some custom system with hard disks which you can switch etc.
*damnit another hairpiece and walking stick! I want some scale mail!*
Closest for me would be watching for snipers after playing a great deal of DoD.
I remember playing video games with my dad and sister, looking back I just mashed the fire key while they controlled the guy(it was before the days of 2 player) but the fact that it was an activity with them rather was what made it enjoyable when I was a kid. now days I can actually play the wii with my nephews and play coop with them.
So ya, Don't just sit your kids down in front of the box, sit down with them and actually play as well. It will be worth much more to your kids.
I like being an asshole in games(pushing people over, blocking their way, tripping them) though I'm really a nice person normally. :D
What the fuck? So teachers are unhappy because of all the problems of this world?
Pull the other one!
Road deaths are a much better reason to get depressed! Or cancer deaths! Those kill many many more people. 1 in 4 of your students will probably die of cancer but there's only a tiny chance that any of them will die from bullet wounds.
And how are teachers special in any way for these things? . Drugs, alcohol, low incomes... other crimes... drunk driving affects EVERYONE. Teachers are not special in this respect.
If teachers were fired as easily as people like you would like, then we simply wouldn't have any.
Not so, I'm all for hair-trigger firing and simply upping the pay being offered till the positions are filled with competent people.
Also where do you live? the bible belt? Some of the most popular teachers with parents and students broke almost all those rules. I'm aware of the problem of parents who think a teacher is terrible because little johnny got an F even though he's such a bright boy!
drinking in front of students after work: being drunk off your ass regularly in front of a crowd of students might cause problems but I've never heard anyone complaining about having seen teacher x IN THE PUB. Being a massive alcoholic perhaps but if it didn't affect their classes I can't see this being an issue here.
They can't have boyfriends or girlfriends: I don't even get this one, I do remember teasing a younger teacher about a girlfriend but unless there's sex in the supply closet involved this one has never been noticeable here and I've never heard of anyone being pushed out because of it.
They can't wear sexy clothing outside of work: Young teachers or old teachers? because old people are ew. I've run into some of the younger examples of my former teachers in clubs. Unless you mean *to the parent teacher meeting*.
They can't have political views: HAH! HAH I SAY! For 6 years my english teacher might as well have been teaching a global politics class. Never heard of anyone trying to push him out because of it.
You don't seem to have thought this through. People don't choose to live in poor areas, poor areas are just places where rent is low enough for them to afford to live there. For someone with no savings and probably a fair amount of debt moving from a $200 a month room in a ghetto to a $400 a month apartment in a faraway little town is a little retarded.
Course then they also have to pay the local school fees(we are talking about all private schooling here) to get their kids in. Throw some more money on the pile. Course they can get a high paying job to pay for all this but wait, they grew up in some shit hole neighbourhood and got no decent education. Best they can hope for is a walmart job. Back to the ghetto they go with even more debts to their name. And that's assuming they can get someone to give them a loan to do all this traveling in the first place.
Having an accent which singles you out as coming from a bad neighbourhood will pretty much keep you out of most jobs, I've personally gotten an offer for every job I've ever gone for an interview for but that in great part you can be sure is because I grew up with an accent and mannerisms which appeal to employers.
but don't worry, your world view is safe, you can keep believing that everyone else is just like you, had the same chances in life and has the same earning power and education as you.
So your parents had the money and knowhow to get to the US? Sound like they were already ahead of the curve.
I'm not trying to deny you anything, what I am saying is that there's nothing wrong with competition if people actually have a chance to do something with their abilities.
The children of people living in a ghetto did nothing to deserve being there and the children of people living in mansions did nothing to deserve being there. Unless the kid born in a trailer is Einstein then he'll never get out - by no fault of his own. Unless the kid who grew up in a mansion is a complete idiot he will stay there and even then he's probably alright.
This isn't competitive, this isn't fair, this isn't moral.
If 2 people start off life with some semblance of equality I have no problem with one ending up in the gutter and one in the whitehouse based on personal drive, skill and luck, that's only fair. Making sure everyone has a decent education is only fair, if you want to give your kids an even better one then that's your choice but you have no right to keep their competitions faces ground into the mud.
All well and good but at least where I live the teachers union is corrupt as hell.
I've had teachers who turn up drunk to class who they haven't been able to get rid of because the teachers union simply refused to accept that said teacher was a drunk without blood samples/breathalyzer but wouldn't allow such tests under any circumstances.
She was retired from my old school after 20 years of being useless.
Only time I've ever come across when all the swots, the A students, the ones who study all the time just stood up and walked out of a class, they started doing private classes outside of school simply because they were going to fail with her teaching them and never went back to her classroom.
There was even one teacher who was protected by the union after she was caught with a final year student, 18 but still completely against the rules. How did they protect her? They simply refused to accept that anything had happened and threatened industrial action if she was fired. Same deal as the drunk teacher.
School:"We caught her doing this"
Union:"Didn't happen"
School:"Yes it did."
Union:"Didn't happen!! LALALALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALALALA"
Utter incompetence is not considered a valid reason to fire a teacher because as the union has stated many a time "There are no bad teachers".
If the union was liquidated and all the useless teachers were simply fired on the spot it would go a long long long way towards fixing the problems with the system.
students to gunfire
The way people talk about this you'd think schools were deathtraps with assasins lurking round every corner. There have only been a handful of school shootings.
Problem:
You seem to think that all private is good. That just means that kids in the rich areas get fantastic schools with the best teachers, kids in the poor areas get a trained monkey and a bucket(with a hole in it).
In the interest of trying to give people some sembelance of an equal playing field it can be a good idea to average things out a little in education.
A government protecting your liberties so we can do things yourself is worth nothing, zero, nada, ziltch if you are born into a family with no money which can afford no eduction or healthcare.
Unless of course you consider the freedom to die before your 12th birthday to be a liberty that should be protected.
Hey, those 4 gig sticks are expensive! just shred everything on it and hey! free memory stick!
The corporate world is just as bad. Hell it was a private company which screwed up on this one.
Get this through your head:
"corporate" does not equal "competent".
"Government" does not equal "incompetent"
They are both quite capable of both and both tend towards incompetent.
Ever heard the phrase "like herding cats"?
There are so many insane parents and incompetent teachers, so many nutjobs with their own little idea of how things should be that trying to move the system in any direction from the bottom is futile.
as if there's a difference.
My low view of Indian experts is supported by concrete evidence.
such as? keeping in mind that that time you called dell support and talked to someone reading a script for 50 cent an hour isn't concrete evidence of the skill of millions of people.
I would agree that there are a few Indians who made it, but the majority are just fakes posing as "technological gurus".
So no different to Americans, Europeans or any other group then.
You might as well use the MIT fake dissertation generator and you'd get the same results.
the same as what? You seem to have drifted off here into crazy-on-street-corner ranting where you're forgetting that other people are not intimately familiar with the context of what you're saying.
It doesn't matter though because the truth is that Indian fag-programmers now get paid more than American professionals with superior skills and experience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2fGl9587X8
Isn't racism fun?
Companies tend to outsource to India because the cost of living is so much lower that they can employ someone with equal or better skill for less money. Paying someone more money when they know less defeats the whole point. Perhaps your skills aren't as hot as you think they are if you got canned for someone living in India who's now being paid even more than you used to be paid.
You guys won. We give up. Have the jobs, they're all yours.
That's very nice of you although I feel I must point out that I'm in Europe, not India.
I just hope, for your sake, that your Asp.Net site isn't vulnerable to an SQL injection attack because that would make you look very bad. It would also make you look bad if you had code which was vulnerable to a buffer overflow.
Have we broken away from the racism bit yet or do you believe that all code written by Indians is insecure?
Shockingly bad code comes from every country.
It doesn't exactly take a genius to sanitise input,output and query results.
due to obvious reasons.
The people doing the considering are racist rednecks with a "ghost costume" in their closets?
Seems the most obvious reason.
So what if they're not? you're not actively trying to get them to come to you, you're not pushing them on them in a crowded club while their too drunk to think straight. And as it stands they can get their first few doses completely free from their local dealer anyway.
Unless you're physically forced it's still your choice, I don't give a fuck about someone who's too weak willed to resist peer pressure. promiscuity isn't freedom but the freedom to be promiscuous if you wish certainly is freedom.
Well for robotics Japan is way ahead.
Landers are nothing special, they're been sent out by various countries for decades, America isn't the only country to launch them. Show me an american lander that touched down on venus.
If you're going to go into history like Teflon, Velcro and Kevlar then Penicillin and Polyester were British inventions.
You seem to have a very low view of indian experts. Remember all those indian PHDs in your local university? Ya, they're just as capable as any others.
America is not the center of the world. The Galileo system will be significantly more advanged than the american GPS.
News flash: america is not best at everything. It's best at some things but the US is not the god of technology.
Well the UK is a bigger market with lax drug laws, scale makes a difference to these things as well.
The cigarettes just mean that the taxes have got so high that it's worth it for criminal gangs to move them.