If the results show up "much later", then getting rid of tenure is imporant.
The b0rken accountability to which you refer is the result of a foolish compromise with Democrats. Real accountability involves parental feedback, management evaluation, and a wide lattitude of judgement.. The Democrats+unions never would have tolerated that, so we got stuck with the testing to which you refer.
Performance based acceptance is the norm in private industry. Managers must cite causes, and lawsuits do arise; but for the most part It works pretty well. I heard one time (via a manager) talk of a co-workers in another office being fired for cause (day-trading on the job). Just try firing a tenured teacher who spends half the class day-trading on their iPad. See how far you get
1. A Labor Party that represents workers whether they pay dues or not. 2. More Progressive planks in the Democratic Party platform, and polticians that won't rip those planks out of the floor everytime a Republican threatens to whip them with a wet noodle.
Both of these would be superior because they would be applied fairly to all workers, regardless of whether or not they were paying dues.
To note, we've done a lot of mixing of apples and oranges here. The discussion started with public employees, and then expanded to unions in general. Public employee unions are, IMHO, a special case. I don't like them as a matter of principal because they put the union too close to the government.
Fascism is the merger of corporations and state. Communism is the merger of unions and state.
This is one of those discussions that would (provided we could both stay civil) be a lot easier to hash out in person. You don't sound like a raging left-wing idealogue and I bet we could stay civil. I've dealt with some Leftists who literally froth at the mouth when you dare to suggest that unions aren't the greatest thing since sliced bread. You're not one of those guys; but I've got to cut this short because there's just too much typing already...
If you buy into the notion that the union is a good agent for the workers, then I can see your PoV.
Unions temporarily raised pay for some fields--as long as you weren't on strike. Then the jobs shifted to other states, and other countries.
I'm not opposed to unions as a matter of principal; but I see them as version 1.0 of a solution to the tension between labor and capital.
I'm not unaware of history either. I certainly don't want to carry us back to the 19th century laissez-faire.
OTOH, the Progressive movement of the 20th century got us things like the 8 hour workday and minimum wage. Everybody has these--whether they pay dues or not.
In other words, Rah Rah! for the workers. Unions? Meh.
It will be interesting to see what historians have to say about the unions and Free Trade 100 years from now. At the time of NAFTA, unions were actually divided. This probably has something to do with the union association with international socialist and labor movements. Some of them actually saw Free Trade as an opportunity to expand US-style labor rights to the 3rd world. Guess what happened instead?
"Quit attacking teachers". That's the soundbite you always get back. It's BS of course; but it can be effective.
When you attack the unions, you are NOT attacking teachers. The union system is corrupt. It promotes based on seniority, not performance. It protects everybody once they obtain tenure, even if they don't deserve protection. They serve to siphon off public money into the Democratic Party.
You're not attacking teachers. You're attacking a system under which many human beings become corrupt, because the system rewards laziness and corruption.
Unfortunately, that logic doesn't condense into a sound bite. "The union is not the teacher"? It just doesn't have quite the same panache as "quit attacking teachers".
I think if you look back at history, you'll see that from time-to-time America has gone through inferiority complexes in one way or another.
I seem to recall that fairly early on, we were envious of the academic establishments and music of Europe. Result? Smithsonian, classical composers emerged.
The one that is within some of our lifetimes is Sputnik. Boy, did that light a fire under our asses. We jumped all the way to the Moon.
I see this as one of the benefits of an open society. We can engage in collective handwringing over our failures, and we're the better for it.
Learning Mandarin? I saw this in the 80s. Our highschool added Japanese. How'd that work out?
The American inferiority complex is healthy. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, quite the contrary. We should listen to it. I see parallels between our present day and the Progressive era of the turn of the 20th century. Back then, corporate influence was also an issue. We tackled it then, and we can tackle it today. The way we handle it probably won't look the same; but we have the capability of handling it.
You need a government of your own to do that. I have one for you on the other side of that bridge. I am willing to sell it to you. First though, you need to buy the bridge.
The report is back sir, and the results are disturbing. Almost everybody likes sex, and a lot of them are weird. The ones that don't like sex have very strange hobbies. The ones that don't abuse illegal drugs are abusing legal drugs, and almost nobody weighs what they say or looks like their online picture. What should we do?
(boss pauses for a moment) "Don't hire anybody ever again".
Bender: Hear me, hear me! Stop eating Popplers!
Stop eating them with honey mustard sauce......stop eating them with tangy sweet and sour sauce. Stop eating the new fiesta Poppler salad. Stop taking advantage of the money-saving 12-pack. Stop enjoying Popplers on the patio, in the car, or on the boat. Wherever good times are had! Ow!
This is why suppression must be outlawed in any real patent reform.
Charging too much to license the patent is defacto suppression also. If you take out a patent, you must be willing to submit to regulatory action on your pricing scheme.
If you don't like regulation from the government, then don't seek monopolies from the government.
Multinational corporations run almost everything.
Unions run a few things.
They sponsor a show called "Congress" which is a lot like American Idol, except that the dummies paying attention to it think they're smarter than the dummies who watch Idol.
We can reduce this equation further to:
Money.
I'm not sure that we're fucked. As they say in the salvation game, "The bad news is, you're going to Hell. The good news is, you don't have to get there".
He's not cool. If he were really cool he wouldn't have a computer. He wouldn't even bother to sit next to the stinky guys in the library and use a computer. Somewhere, rolling out of bed and getting ready for the club tonight there is a really cool guy. He has no computer or phone at all and... oh crap... he's that John Travolta character from Saturday Night Fever.
OK, Let's start over. We. Are. going. to. figure. this. out--hey dummy! Yeah? Trying to figure it out isn't cool.
I haven't seen anybody else mention that there seem to be two types of 'E' in the note. One is is like a left paren with a dash to make the 'E', the other is more like a regular E.
Perhaps the way the letters are written is significant. You'd think the FBI would have thought of that and analyzed it though. You'd think their crypto guys would have experience with codes where the font matters. A font code is also simple enough for a kid to use too so it fits.
Also, as others have pointed out, better scans would help.
eBay seems like a natural monopoly to me. When you auction something, you have to pick one site. You can't auction the same item at multiple auction sites. Since everybody has to pick one, they pick what they think is the best one. For an auction "best" is closely tied to "popular" since exposure is important. Once a clear winner emerged, it was all she wrote.
Frankly, I'm surprised that eBay/paypal gets away with this monopoly. It definitely keeps me away. I'd like to see them forced to use competing payment services in particular.
Anyway, I digress. You could cross-post all your stupid updates and baby pictures to multiple sites and it wouldn't matter.
FaceBook's lock-in is switching cost. It's a lower barrier. If you're a teenager and you haven't really put anything important on FB then switching is easy. If you've put someting embarassing on FB then switching might also be desireable. You just start telling people, "Oh, I'm on the hip new NewBook" and hope they don't go looking for your old FB account.
Before FB started waging war on anonymity, a lot of people had disposable IDs. That's a market that FB can't serve.
Bakersfield has no chance of surviving. New York MSA has 19 million+ residents and LA has 17 million+ residents. The only other city north of the Isthmus larger than those two is interestingly Mexico City, which has 22.8 million.
Granted that there are a lot more people who want to live in the other three. The point is, mom-n-pop stores exist despite the onslaught of the big boxes. Internet sites are probably more egalitarian.
Someone will probably pull the plug on MySpace at some point though, if only because it's an unrewarding task to downscale from corporation to personal blog. The trip up is exciting and potentially rewarding. The trip down is the domain of archivers, fans, etc. and usually the few people that want to do it can't wrest control from the corporate shell. They always want to cling on to that little last bit. They couldn't stand to see anybody make an ordinary small biz out of it, and employ just one or two people, or a small fan site hosted by a non-profit.
I read this as an argument against the capture of the state by corporate interests, not as an argument against regulation. Who lobbied for the repeal of Glas-Steagall (sp.?) anyway.
However, I think you'd agree that the Left bumbled also. They made the mistake of assuming that cheap credit and affordable housing were the same thing.
Both sides of the aisle are greedy and world class idiots in their own special ways.
The Fed took food and fuel out of their inflation measures on the pretext that they are too volatile.
To be fair, they should measure the volatility of all goods, and take them out on the basis of volatility alone.
If they did that, I think they'd find that food and fuel have, on average been high for quite some time, and are thus not as volatile as they think. Also, the iPads and other gizmos that they are currently including in the index are even more volatile than food and fuel. When Apple decides to cut a price 50% all at once, how volatile is that?
In short, the Fed's inflation measures are widely known to be b0rked. While the paranoid bloggers may indeed be paranoid, they have a point.
Another problem with the Fed's inflation measures is that they are generally known. Speculators who depend on cheap money will "run from measurement". What do I mean? I mean that if you're a hedge fund and you have any idea how the Fed measures inflation and uses it to determine rates, then you'll make sure to invest your cheap dollars in things that the Fed doesn't measure. Hence, you go to commodities, farmland in Iowa, etc. Anything that the Fed can't measure is good for you. If you buy too many things that the Fed can measure, they'll take the punchbowl away which is exactly what you don't want.
Get it? Speculation runs from measurement. It's obvious to me. It should be obvious to those in charge yet apparently it itsn't.
Your argument doesn't have the exact form of the Scotsman fallacy; but that's the closest one I could think of.
The Soviet Union and the USA were always mixed socialist-capitalist economies. There were and are industries regulated by the state in the USA, and there was limited independant business in the USSR.
True, the USSR took state control to the extreme but those advocating regulation of finance are not suggesting that we regulate industries to the same degree the USSR did.
When I was in highschool, a friend asked me if I was interested in taking an extra-curricular course in PL/1 with him. I thought about it, and decided that by the time I got into the workforce it might be dead.
Four years from now, several of the technologies you mention will probably not be dead; but they may not be hiring newbies either. Four years? Even though tech is a lot more mature now, that's still a long time.
Academics is at its best when it sticks to the things that don't change. Teach the students stacks, queues, lists, structures, and yes even objects. Teach them in a language-neutral way. When they get out, they'll recognize these things in whatever flavor happens to be popular that year.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't get how anyone got anything done.
I'm not cognizant of how team members brought elements to completion under that scenario. FTFY.
Everybody I know who flies complains about the TSA.
So the TSA investigates everybody? Now we're back to the same absurdity as "everybody does something embarassing on FaceBook, so don't hire anybody".
Oh nevermind. Keep on with the taxpayer funded elephant repellant...
If the results show up "much later", then getting rid of tenure is imporant.
The b0rken accountability to which you refer is the result of a foolish compromise with Democrats. Real accountability involves parental feedback, management evaluation, and a wide lattitude of judgement.. The Democrats+unions never would have tolerated that, so we got stuck with the testing to which you refer.
Performance based acceptance is the norm in private industry. Managers must cite causes, and lawsuits do arise; but for the most part It works pretty well. I heard one time (via a manager) talk of a co-workers in another office being fired for cause (day-trading on the job). Just try firing a tenured teacher who spends half the class day-trading on their iPad. See how far you get
What's the alternative?
1. A Labor Party that represents workers whether they pay dues or not. 2. More Progressive planks in the Democratic Party platform, and polticians that won't rip those planks out of the floor everytime a Republican threatens to whip them with a wet noodle.
Both of these would be superior because they would be applied fairly to all workers, regardless of whether or not they were paying dues.
To note, we've done a lot of mixing of apples and oranges here. The discussion started with public employees, and then expanded to unions in general. Public employee unions are, IMHO, a special case. I don't like them as a matter of principal because they put the union too close to the government.
Fascism is the merger of corporations and state. Communism is the merger of unions and state.
This is one of those discussions that would (provided we could both stay civil) be a lot easier to hash out in person. You don't sound like a raging left-wing idealogue and I bet we could stay civil. I've dealt with some Leftists who literally froth at the mouth when you dare to suggest that unions aren't the greatest thing since sliced bread. You're not one of those guys; but I've got to cut this short because there's just too much typing already...
If you buy into the notion that the union is a good agent for the workers, then I can see your PoV.
Unions temporarily raised pay for some fields--as long as you weren't on strike. Then the jobs shifted to other states, and other countries.
I'm not opposed to unions as a matter of principal; but I see them as version 1.0 of a solution to the tension between labor and capital.
I'm not unaware of history either. I certainly don't want to carry us back to the 19th century laissez-faire.
OTOH, the Progressive movement of the 20th century got us things like the 8 hour workday and minimum wage. Everybody has these--whether they pay dues or not.
In other words, Rah Rah! for the workers. Unions? Meh.
It will be interesting to see what historians have to say about the unions and Free Trade 100 years from now. At the time of NAFTA, unions were actually divided. This probably has something to do with the union association with international socialist and labor movements. Some of them actually saw Free Trade as an opportunity to expand US-style labor rights to the 3rd world. Guess what happened instead?
"Quit attacking teachers". That's the soundbite you always get back. It's BS of course; but it can be effective.
When you attack the unions, you are NOT attacking teachers. The union system is corrupt. It promotes based on seniority, not performance. It protects everybody once they obtain tenure, even if they don't deserve protection. They serve to siphon off public money into the Democratic Party.
You're not attacking teachers. You're attacking a system under which many human beings become corrupt, because the system rewards laziness and corruption.
Unfortunately, that logic doesn't condense into a sound bite. "The union is not the teacher"? It just doesn't have quite the same panache as "quit attacking teachers".
I think if you look back at history, you'll see that from time-to-time America has gone through inferiority complexes in one way or another.
I seem to recall that fairly early on, we were envious of the academic establishments and music of Europe. Result? Smithsonian, classical composers emerged.
The one that is within some of our lifetimes is Sputnik. Boy, did that light a fire under our asses. We jumped all the way to the Moon.
I see this as one of the benefits of an open society. We can engage in collective handwringing over our failures, and we're the better for it.
Learning Mandarin? I saw this in the 80s. Our highschool added Japanese. How'd that work out?
The American inferiority complex is healthy. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, quite the contrary. We should listen to it. I see parallels between our present day and the Progressive era of the turn of the 20th century. Back then, corporate influence was also an issue. We tackled it then, and we can tackle it today. The way we handle it probably won't look the same; but we have the capability of handling it.
America. Even our inferiorty complex is great. :)
You need a government of your own to do that. I have one for you on the other side of that bridge. I am willing to sell it to you. First though, you need to buy the bridge.
The report is back sir, and the results are disturbing. Almost everybody likes sex, and a lot of them are weird. The ones that don't like sex have very strange hobbies. The ones that don't abuse illegal drugs are abusing legal drugs, and almost nobody weighs what they say or looks like their online picture. What should we do?
(boss pauses for a moment) "Don't hire anybody ever again".
...that somebody at the FBI has a sense of humor?
Bender: Hear me, hear me! Stop eating Popplers! Stop eating them with honey mustard sauce......stop eating them with tangy sweet and sour sauce. Stop eating the new fiesta Poppler salad. Stop taking advantage of the money-saving 12-pack. Stop enjoying Popplers on the patio, in the car, or on the boat. Wherever good times are had! Ow!
This is why suppression must be outlawed in any real patent reform.
Charging too much to license the patent is defacto suppression also. If you take out a patent, you must be willing to submit to regulatory action on your pricing scheme.
If you don't like regulation from the government, then don't seek monopolies from the government.
Let me reduce that equation for you:
This is how it works:
Multinational corporations run almost everything.
Unions run a few things.
They sponsor a show called "Congress" which is a lot like American Idol, except that the dummies paying attention to it think they're smarter than the dummies who watch Idol.
We can reduce this equation further to:
Money.
I'm not sure that we're fucked. As they say in the salvation game, "The bad news is, you're going to Hell. The good news is, you don't have to get there".
A better lament against the pile of poo that web design has become, I cannot find. Bravo, sir.
He's not cool. If he were really cool he wouldn't have a computer. He wouldn't even bother to sit next to the stinky guys in the library and use a computer. Somewhere, rolling out of bed and getting ready for the club tonight there is a really cool guy. He has no computer or phone at all and... oh crap... he's that John Travolta character from Saturday Night Fever.
OK, Let's start over. We. Are. going. to. figure. this. out--hey dummy! Yeah? Trying to figure it out isn't cool.
Dammit.
No, no, no. You're thinking of a guy who writes books on topology, seamanship and berry farms. We're talking Knuth here.
I haven't seen anybody else mention that there seem to be two types of 'E' in the note. One is is like a left paren with a dash to make the 'E', the other is more like a regular E.
Perhaps the way the letters are written is significant. You'd think the FBI would have thought of that and analyzed it though. You'd think their crypto guys would have experience with codes where the font matters. A font code is also simple enough for a kid to use too so it fits.
Also, as others have pointed out, better scans would help.
eBay seems like a natural monopoly to me. When you auction something, you have to pick one site. You can't auction the same item at multiple auction sites. Since everybody has to pick one, they pick what they think is the best one. For an auction "best" is closely tied to "popular" since exposure is important. Once a clear winner emerged, it was all she wrote.
Frankly, I'm surprised that eBay/paypal gets away with this monopoly. It definitely keeps me away. I'd like to see them forced to use competing payment services in particular.
Anyway, I digress. You could cross-post all your stupid updates and baby pictures to multiple sites and it wouldn't matter.
FaceBook's lock-in is switching cost. It's a lower barrier. If you're a teenager and you haven't really put anything important on FB then switching is easy. If you've put someting embarassing on FB then switching might also be desireable. You just start telling people, "Oh, I'm on the hip new NewBook" and hope they don't go looking for your old FB account.
Before FB started waging war on anonymity, a lot of people had disposable IDs. That's a market that FB can't serve.
Bakersfield has no chance of surviving. New York MSA has 19 million+ residents and LA has 17 million+ residents. The only other city north of the Isthmus larger than those two is interestingly Mexico City, which has 22.8 million.
Granted that there are a lot more people who want to live in the other three. The point is, mom-n-pop stores exist despite the onslaught of the big boxes. Internet sites are probably more egalitarian.
Someone will probably pull the plug on MySpace at some point though, if only because it's an unrewarding task to downscale from corporation to personal blog. The trip up is exciting and potentially rewarding. The trip down is the domain of archivers, fans, etc. and usually the few people that want to do it can't wrest control from the corporate shell. They always want to cling on to that little last bit. They couldn't stand to see anybody make an ordinary small biz out of it, and employ just one or two people, or a small fan site hosted by a non-profit.
Lisa (playing guitar):
We'll fight day and night
By the big cooling tower
They have the plant,
but we have the power
Lenny: Now play classical gas!
You just initiated a PC vs. Mac and an Emacs vs. Vi flamewar in one article? Are you MAD??? Don't you understand the potenia#%#$^#$^ NO CARRIER.
I read this as an argument against the capture of the state by corporate interests, not as an argument against regulation. Who lobbied for the repeal of Glas-Steagall (sp.?) anyway.
However, I think you'd agree that the Left bumbled also. They made the mistake of assuming that cheap credit and affordable housing were the same thing.
Both sides of the aisle are greedy and world class idiots in their own special ways.
The Fed took food and fuel out of their inflation measures on the pretext that they are too volatile.
To be fair, they should measure the volatility of all goods, and take them out on the basis of volatility alone.
If they did that, I think they'd find that food and fuel have, on average been high for quite some time, and are thus not as volatile as they think. Also, the iPads and other gizmos that they are currently including in the index are even more volatile than food and fuel. When Apple decides to cut a price 50% all at once, how volatile is that?
In short, the Fed's inflation measures are widely known to be b0rked. While the paranoid bloggers may indeed be paranoid, they have a point.
Another problem with the Fed's inflation measures is that they are generally known. Speculators who depend on cheap money will "run from measurement". What do I mean? I mean that if you're a hedge fund and you have any idea how the Fed measures inflation and uses it to determine rates, then you'll make sure to invest your cheap dollars in things that the Fed doesn't measure. Hence, you go to commodities, farmland in Iowa, etc. Anything that the Fed can't measure is good for you. If you buy too many things that the Fed can measure, they'll take the punchbowl away which is exactly what you don't want.
Get it? Speculation runs from measurement. It's obvious to me. It should be obvious to those in charge yet apparently it itsn't.
Your argument doesn't have the exact form of the Scotsman fallacy; but that's the closest one I could think of.
The Soviet Union and the USA were always mixed socialist-capitalist economies. There were and are industries regulated by the state in the USA, and there was limited independant business in the USSR.
True, the USSR took state control to the extreme but those advocating regulation of finance are not suggesting that we regulate industries to the same degree the USSR did.
When I was in highschool, a friend asked me if I was interested in taking an extra-curricular course in PL/1 with him. I thought about it, and decided that by the time I got into the workforce it might be dead.
Four years from now, several of the technologies you mention will probably not be dead; but they may not be hiring newbies either. Four years? Even though tech is a lot more mature now, that's still a long time.
Academics is at its best when it sticks to the things that don't change. Teach the students stacks, queues, lists, structures, and yes even objects. Teach them in a language-neutral way. When they get out, they'll recognize these things in whatever flavor happens to be popular that year.