A reason, yes. To be a catchy folkish tune. Written and became popular long after the days of company towns.
Yes, and if you actually followed the links in my post, you would discover that one person who claimed to have written the song was a coal miner at the time when unions were first being organized in Kentucky to break the stranglehold of the company towns, and the other person who claims to have written the song was the son of a coal miner -- a miner who supposedly used some of the phrases from the chorus to describe his experiences.
Of course it became popular later. But those involved in writing the lyrics had first-hand experience with company towns.
It wasn't essentially slavery. At worst it was essentially debt bondage.
There are lots of terms thrown around for putting people in a situation where they are effectively forced to work and their freedom is removed. "Debt bondage" is one. "Serfdom" and "indentured servitude" are others, and there are more. Yes, I agree there are distinctions to be made about exactly how the systems operate, but in many cases these systems have effectively very similar results as slavery. And I'm by no means the first to use this term to refer to the practices of company towns.
Slavery means a personal is held as property by another person and is made to do work with no pay. That simply wasn't how company towns operated.
I agree that the workers were not legally "owned" by the company, and therefore according to the standard definition of "slavery" they were not "slaves." But note that I did say "essentially a kind of slavery," not slavery per se.
As to how "company towns operated," the company often did in fact make a person "do work with no pay." Workers were often rewarded only with company scrip rather than money for their work, which frequently meant that they could only redeem their "pay" for items available at company-owned stores and separate company-owned town businesses. Prices were generally inflated to ensure that workers rarely were able to "save" anything (and even if they did, they couldn't spend it outside of the town, so it would be effectively worthless). In more extreme cases, companies would deliberately structure their "prices" to ensure workers were in a state of continuous debt.
The net result: a person is forced to continue working for a company indefinitely, with little hope of ever accumulating any meaningful "pay" that could ever be spent in the outside world.
Sorry, but that's SLAVERY without the technical legal "property" aspect. Workers may not have been "bought" and "sold" in the way slaves were, but in most other respects, they could be bound to serve their master. Remember also that the company towns mostly flourished before modern workers' rights, so while workers may not have been abused to the extend that slaves were on the worst plantations, they could still be made to suffer significantly.
Now, of course, many company towns weren't that bad. But many slave plantations weren't that bad either. Many companies treated their workers benevolently, and many slave owners paid for their slaves to be educated too. Conditions varied significantly for both groups. I'm not saying these two things are equivalent -- but debt bondage is still "bondage," which is another common word for slavery.
I encourage you to seek to set the historical record straight but I implore you not to exaggerate and by doing so treat another group - in this case management of company towns - as fallaciously as the group you are championing has been treated.
I appreciate the politeness of your response. But I'm frankly not sure what "group" I am supposedly "championing." I'm trying to get at the historical reality of how bad conditions COULD BE (not everywhere, maybe not even in most company towns). I do not mean at all to disparage those company managers who did indeed treat workers fairly and benevolently. But there were plenty of places where workers were abused and effectively put into "debt bondage" as you put it (a topic I actually linked to in my original post).
But to me, in extreme cases, whether or not we call that tantamount to slavery is just a matter of semantics -- someone who doesn't have freedom to make significant choices about his life and is forced to work for someone else is, to my mind, a slave. Whether the government recognizes him as "being owned" by someone else is a legalistic quibble that serves to excuse heinous practices while technically outlawing "slavery."
but the principles of science seem sound and correct over time.
How long is "over time"? From my perspective on history, scientific "principles" and methodology are continuously changing. The standards of what constituted valid "scientific argument" were vastly different over time -- Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, etc. all had incredibly different views on what constituted acceptable scientific methodology. Yes, they all collected data, and "experiments" have been performed in various ways over the centuries, but the foundational axioms of how theories related to the world, what philosophical assumptions we make about scientific arguments, etc. have changed radically, even since the dawn of the "Scientific Revolution."
And lest one claim that "Well, those guys all lived very long ago, and at least since the middle or late 1800s, we've basically been doing the same thing," I beg to differ. We've only come to understand a lot of details of statistical paradoxes and misleading aspects of data in the past century, for example. And given how central data manipulation is to most of experimental science nowadays, I have to say that the way we approach science is radically different from even a century ago. Hypotheses that would have seen perfectly legimitate in the early 1900s would be immediately thrown out today -- and not just because of changing knowledge... because of methodological issues. Scientific methods and principles continue to evolve as older methodologies are phased out, and (supposedly) better ones are discovered.
Frankly, unless you define "the principles of science" as something so vague and meaningless as "collecting data from experiments to better understand the world," I don't see how there's that much similarity to what historical figures were doing. It's a continuously evolving system, and the "principles" change to fit the current methods.
Very few are fooled. Sociologists/Psychologists/Economists can say they've 'proved' something till they're blue in the face. Nobody will take them seriously.
Umm, what are you talking about? Too many people take them seriously. Loads of people pop pills all the time because of what psychologists have decided is "normal." Heck, the livelihood of most people in most developed countries is highly dependent on the people in control of the money supply following various economic theories -- and when those theories fail, the economy tanks.
Maybe "hard scientists" won't take these things seriously. But the vast majority of people in the world seem to -- often with detrimental results due to misplaced faith in shoddy theorizing.
That said, many experiments in "soft sciences" could produce better results. In my experience reading a lot of these studies (not just in things like psychology and cognitive science, but even medical studies and health issues), one recurring major issue is misuse and misunderstanding of basic statistics. A lot of studies use a 95% confidence threshold, and exploratory studies often try out dozens and dozens of potential correlations. So they're bound to find some something that fits their "significance" threshold, even if they collected random data.
These minor (and possibly meaningless) correlations are then generally spun into some significant finding in the discussion sections and press releases (a finding that often depends on the broadest possible interpretation of some minor data blip), and pretty soon this new idea becomes established within the field when a few other studies with some minor statistical blip also seem to provide "confirmation."
Five or ten years later, somebody runs another better-designed study specifically on the topic, and it turns out there's no correlation at all. It was just a statistical ghost, or a badly designed set of data manipulations or collection... or just somebody trying to turn their crap data into something significant.
But true randomized trials with human subjects that can accurately target something specific are often difficult to fund and sometimes even impossible (or unethical) to do. Nevertheless, even with limited options for good data, we can still be more realistic and cautious about what we claim out of it. Instead, there's always a rush to ascribe great meaning to every statistical blip. To me, that's the biggest problem in the so-called "soft sciences."
Had you RTFA, you might have noticed that the very next paragraph after the sentence you quoted goes into what you accuse it of "omitting".
Umm, I did RTFA, and I still think the image of the historical "company town" brought up there is pretty skewed.
The development conjures up memories of so-called "company towns" at the turn of the 20th century, where American factory workers lived in communities owned by their employer and were provided housing, health care, law enforcement, church and just about every other service necessary.
Aww, that sounds really great! My company gives me everything! Well, let's go on to that next paragraph that you claim fills in the details:
Spending more time in the clutches of the company sphere isn't necessarily positive. One reason the old company towns eventually disappeared was that they could be overbearing to workers.
And that's it! Nothing else to say critically about this historical company towns brought up in comparison.
Sorry, but there is a lot of "omission" here. Some historical company towns were lucky enough to have reasonable benefactors running things. But in many cases, they were just slavery by another name.
Sorry, but "could be overbearing to workers" doesn't quite do justice to the historical reality.
>were provided housing, health care, law enforcement, church and just about every other service necessary.'
They were also "provided" with constantly mounting debt and money unusable anywhere else to make them docile, servile, and put them at the bosses' mercy.
Indeed. There's a reason for the chorus of the song Sixteen Tons, which tells about the plight of the coal miner in a company town:
You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go -- I owe my soul to the company store.
Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article on company towns also seems to sweep away a lot of the negative stuff -- maybe the people who wrote the summary only read about the Wikipedia version of reality.
That said, historical company towns that didn't force workers to use scrip avoided some of these issues -- but that would mean allowing workers easily to exit the town by actually paying them real money, which they could take elsewhere. Many historical companies didn't want to allow that, so no matter how benevolent the educational and social things the company provided, it was often essentially a kind of slavery.
I don't know about anyone else, but I found that bit as fascinating as the text analyzer itself. But where does laughter fit?
Yeah, while this theory of emotions surely has some good aspects, forcing ALL emotionally charged words into these categories will obviously skew the data in certain ways. When a model like this is used to classify something much more complex, the ultimate data analysis often tells you more about the model than about the data. Are we actually tracking the changes in "sadness" and "fear" over the course of Hamlet, or are we tracking some arbitrary dividing line that this model forces us to use to classify words?
Moreover, these sorts of "digital humanities" projects that just analyze a corpus by counting up occurrences of words are always incredibly limited. It's so easy to skew the data just because a character or place or something in the story happens to include a word that is "emotionally charged" in a particular way in this model.
For example, I note that "Godfather Death" is nearest to "Gambling Hansel" in terms of the "darkest story" in the study. While the story is dark, it's actually rather short and a very simple moral, with a main character who is a remarkable healer. The main character doesn't do too well at the end, but in the gamut of Brothers Grimm stories, this one doesn't have a lot of "dark" details. I assume, instead, that this story gets rated as very "dark" because one of the main characters happens to be named "Death," a word that has a very negative valence in the model. Write a happy story at a bar called "The Good Death" (referencing either bravery or sexuality), include a few other character names or place names that recur frequently but just happen to sound "negative," and I bet this algorithm will judge it "dark" too... or at least not as "positive" as the plot would suggest.
I'm not saying such studies are useless. But they really need to factor in context, multiple meanings, and especially other factors that might lead to high frequencies of their chosen "emotional" words, like proper names or other plot points that may not actually be representative of the vocabulary and emotions of the story overall. In essence, for anything meaningful to come out of word frequency studies, you actually need to read the text as well and take account things that would obviously skew the data.
The comment system is the only reason I come here. If I can no longer trace a conversation, if reading comments becomes tedious or difficult in the new interface, or if the moderation system is modified so it no longer works as well as the current model... well, yeah, I'll never be back.
Don't break the comment system. Don't futz with it too much. Don't make it seem like an "afterthought." It's central to this community. Without it (and the kind of users it attracts), this is just another crappy tech blog.
The reality is that you have generational cultures. For example, I'd bet older people smoke more too. Doesn't mean I'm going to do it when I get old. I know better now than they did at my age.
This is a crucial point. People who are 65 or over now are a generation who have had to deal with the uncertainties and complexities of investing in IRAs and other retirement accounts to save -- something their parents probably didn't have to do in the same way, since they had often had pensions. Their parents likely could throw something in a savings account or savings bonds and gradually watch the growth over the decades, but the current older generation was told to put money in mutual funds in their IRA, and they watched their money do giant roller coaster rides in 2001 and again in 2008.
Basically, everything they probably learned about finance from their parents' generation (put money in the bank or savings bonds, depend on your company pension) was becoming irrelevant by the time they retired in the past few years. And the alternative -- socking money into the market only to watch it whip around like crazy every few years as their retirement approached -- would very likely skew their perspective on risk. Particularly, given how much many of them probably lost in 2001 and/or 2008 as they got near to retirement, I bet many would be predisposed to make "bad" decisions just to avoid losses (as discussed in the article).
For the generation who lived through the Great Depression, keeping money as cash or very stable investments was common. They saved up money in cash before buying things. The retiring generation now has had to deal with very different issues, with debt proliferation, loss of pensions, and the need to deal with new kinds of investments just to retire. By the time the next generation or two retires, there will probably be various other issues.
You have no idea what you're talking about. This shutdown is not about Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare (they've tried plenty of times but this isn't one of them). Do us all a favor and do some reading.
Okay, fine -- I searched for "government shutdown" in the latest news. I clicked on the first link. It contained the following quotation straight from the Senate floor today:
"They'd rather see the government shut down than do anything to protect the American people from the consequences of Obamacare," countered Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
So, apparently if this is "not about Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare," one of the primary leaders of the Republican party seems not to have received the news.
Perhaps you could enlighten us with your wisdom about what this is about, since the half-dozen news stories I just skimmed that have been published in the past couple hours (from sources ranging across the political spectrum) all spend significant time talking about efforts to push back Obamacare.
Yes, I do realize the current bill is not actually repealing it, but merely delaying it... nevertheless, if there's some other motivation for the Republicans, they clearly are keeping it a secret to themselves.
But you seem to know what's really going on, huh? Can you be bothered to tell us all, or do you just enjoy going around and insulting everybody for the heck of it?
Mostly my comment was simply meant as a reminder that if you want to claim the moral high ground in representing the "will of the people" you should always make sure that you have more than 50% of the popular vote.
See, I don't think that's actually true. Voters don't vote for "Republican Representative To Be Determined" or "Democratic Representative To Be Determined" at the ballot box when they vote for their U.S. House representative.
They vote for a specific individual, who may be affiliated with one of those two parties (or may not), and who may have a number of views that are actually in conflict with the standard "party line" for his/her party.
"The Republican Party" may not represent "the majority of voters" counted collectively in one mass, but more than 50% of the U.S. House that agrees on an issue -- whether that 50% is composed of a party block or not -- does in fact, by definition, represent "the majority" of the people in the U.S.
In my personal opinion, I don't think either party or any group should go around saying they represent "the will of the people" unless they have some significant supermajority of U.S. voters on their side (say, 2/3 maybe). For example, in Massachusetts, Democrats occupy something like 90% of major state offices. There, I'd say, the Democrats have "the will of the people" to enact their policies for the state.
For the U.S. in general, a single party has rarely gathered that sort of unanimity. There have been "electoral landslides" in many Presidential elections, for example, but most winners usually still only get 50-60% of the vote. To me, that's hardly a "landslide" or a "strong mandate." (Dems are as guilty as Reps in making those sort of exaggerated claims.)
So, in general, I'd say neither party should be claiming to truly have "the will of the people." But, in terms of representing "the majority of the people," any group of more than 50% of House members constitutes such representation, regardless of party affiliation.
"These are jobs that do not require higher-level learning skills, critical thinking skills, or writing skills or anything of that nature," [Vedder, education expert] said in a telephone interview. [snip]
Let's go a step further, says Vedder.
"As college costs rise," he said, "people are asking: Aren't there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers?"
Hmm... so, we want to "certify" the "competence" of someone for an employer for a job that does not require "higher-level learning skills, critical thinking skills, or writing skills or anything of that nature."
Isn't that called a high school diploma? Or, maybe even an 8th-grade graduation certificate? Seriously. You should not need a bachelor's degree to work in the sort of job described here. In fact, you shouldn't even need a high-school diploma for a job that doesn't require communication skills, writing skills, etc.
Only one of my grandparents graduated high school, and most of my grandparents' siblings didn't graduate either. Most only completed 4-8 years of school. But I've read the letters they wrote to each other during WWII, which often show a better command of English than many college undergraduates whose papers I've graded. I saw what they accomplished in their lives. I also know that the ones who actually completed high school were prepared to go out and get a job that DID require some writing and communication skills, as well as some critical thinking.
No -- we absolutely should NOT have a GED for college. We need to stop this ridiculous expansion of credentials, and we need to hold to higher standards for middle school and high school. If a person with a high school diploma isn't qualified for a job that does NOT require "higher-level learning skills, critical thinking skills, or writing skills or anything of that nature," what the heck is that person qualified to do? And if the answer is "nothing," then why did this person spend 13 years in the educational system?
You should be aware that the Democrats won the congressional popular vote by around 50.7% to 49.3%, but because of gerrymandering (the practice of dividing congressional districts to subvert the will of the public), they have fewer seats in congress than the Republicans.
You should also be aware that such a thing could easily happen even if the districts were NOT gerrymandered.
For example, most state borders were not gerrymandered, yet 3 times so far we have had Presidential elections where the winner of the popular vote did not become President, as a result of the random places that state borders fall. (1876, 1888, and 2000, not counting Adams in 1824, since that election was indeterminate and went to the House.)
Any division of data into arbitrary groups can result in the phenomenon you mention, whether those groups are chosen to slant the results or not.
Both parties have tried to game the system through gerrymandering -- a practice, which I agree is deplorable. But those who did the gerrymandering were also democratically elected, so ultimately the voters did in fact vote in the people who gamed the system to elect more people. If voters actually gave a crap and voted out politicians who gerrymandered, but we were still stuck with the results, you might have a legitimate beef with the Republicans here or the results of the elections. But, frankly, unless you're going to accuse someone of election fraud, ultimately the current gerrymandered elected U.S. Congress is the result of the "will of the people" (just a "people" who don't know what the heck they're doing).
(For the record, I am not a Republican, nor do I agree with them. But the whole system is broken, and both parties are gaming it wherever they can, so I don't see anything "more illegitimate" about this Congress than any other one.)
Um, why should they? The negotiations happened when the ACA was passed in a legitimate democratic act. What the Republicans are doing now is trying to hold a gun to the countries head in an entirely undemocratic move to kill the ACA.
Unless you're saying the elections that elected the current Congress were rigged, your argument makes no sense. I do NOT agree with the Republicans, but if they were legally elected, they now have as much right to repeal a law as the Democrats had to pass one. Unless you're planning on amending the Constitution to prevent repeals of laws previously passed (a bad idea, I would think), I don't see how a new Congress undoing the efforts of a previous one can be prevented.
Now, of course, both parties gerrymander House districts to get elected, and that whole process is "undemocratic" in some sense. But it's not only the Republicans doing that either.
Lastly, one should recall that there were some unusual parliamentary maneuvers used to pass the ACA in the first place, since the (surprising) election of Scott Brown in the Senate meant that Democrats couldn't prevent a filibuster in the Senate. I'm not at all saying that the way the ACA was passed was "undemocratic," since it conformed to parliamentary procedure in Congress, but surely making an end-run around a newly elected member of the Senate (who essentially ran a campaign in one of the most liberal states in the U.S. saying that he would stop passage of the ACA) ranks pretty high on the "partisan shenanigan" meter.
I don't know if it's the same level as the current House high jinks, but claiming that one is a "legitimate democratic act" and the other is "undemocratic" (and even the act of "terrorists") is more than a little hypocritical.
Your electoral system gave the GOP a majority when they got notably less votes than the 'minority' Democrats.
Yes, well, that sort of thing can frequently happen when you design a system where you actually elect individual people to serve particular districts, rather than collectively electing a "party" for the entire nation or something. It's far from a perfect system, but the House is designed where individual representatives are supposed to speak for specific groups of voters.
Of course, gerrymandering makes it all much worse -- but that's hardly a Republican thing only.
If I was a Republican I'd be embarrassed by the fact that my party was claiming to be the majority when they majority of voters in a democratic country didn't voted for the opposition.
If I were a member of either of the two major parties, I'd be embarrassed by the way voters have been disenfranchised through gerrymandering. I don't think the Democrats should get a pass on this AT ALL. They are just as guilty of that sort of nonsense. It's just that Republicans currently are in the lead in terms of creating districts that effectively disenfranchise voters of the other party. (It's a little un-PC to note this, but Dems helped to contribute to this a little bit in previous decades, where Republicans and minority Dems occasionally teamed up to create racially gerrymandering districts that would help get minority representatives elected to Congress. While perhaps a noble cause, it also sometimes grouped too many Democrats into a single district, thereby diluting their influence on surround districts, which have now all turned Republican.)
The budget should not be a matter of party politics because anything being funded should already have been accepted by the three branches of government.
Personally, I don't think anything should be "a matter of party politics," because the two-party system itself does significant damage and sets the stage for the exact situations you're describing as problematic.
But, that said, Congress has power to make laws, and it has power to repeal them. Without a Constitutional amendment, you're never going to be able to prohibit Congress from changing its mind and trying to backpedal on something it already agreed on.
On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth to what you said in that Congress currently has conflicting laws in effect regarding the budget. All of this banter about the "debt ceiling" is nonsense, since appropriated federal funds MUST be spent -- BY LAW.
Back in the days of Nixon and before, a President actually had the option not to spend all of the budget. Effectively, he could "impound" funds, either just to save money or because he thought the spending wasn't necessary. That's not true anymore. Once appropriated by Congress, the President by law must spend the money -- if it doesn't cost enough, the President must find a way to keep spending in the appropriated categories to use up the funds.
So, the "debt ceiling" is a complete anachronism, and arguing about it is ridiculous. It's like a husband setting an autodebit for a bill on a credit card each month which is guaranteed to go over the credit limit, but the wife refuses to call up the credit card company and get them to raise the credit limit. The autodebit already MUST happen by law once Congress appropriates the funds. Refusing to authorize a raise in the debt ceiling would create a situation where the President is legally bound to do two different things (he MUST spend the money, but he's NOT authorized to do so).
So yeah, while we may not be able to prevent "party politics" around the budget completely, some aspects of the process are legal nonsense.
So it's not even that people have an "irresistible pull to build in dangerous places", it's that a large mtro area *cannot be built in a safe place*.
I agree with you for the most part, but I think you just reinforced my point. Why exactly do you want most of the population to live in "large metro areas"? It is possible -- and in fact often more environmentally sustainable -- to have smaller towns which can be closer to food sources, rather than to take food by rail and by truck across the country (which is actually what we do now).
If you moved Chicago or Houston or LA into the middle of Nebraska and they tried to meet their needs via trucks and trains, they'd actually fail. There wouldn't be enough trucks or trains. They'd use every available truck or train in the country, completely clog all surrounding roads and railways, and still their population would basically starve and run out of fuel.
Yeah, umm, you realize where a lot of that food comes from now? It is moved out of the middle U.S. by train or truck to the large cities on those big bodies of water. How the devil do you think all the food and fuel gets to the big cities now?
You're right -- if we moved ALL the big cities away from large bodies of water, it would make transportation more difficult. But as it is now, we're ALREADY moving most of that food and fuel around the middle of the U.S. by truck and rail, so putting a few bigger cities in the middle wouldn't break the network -- it might actually be more efficient to have people actually eat the food near where it's grown.
But my whole post was about how the cause of the problem was a move from rural to urban life... so I'm not sure your issue has a lot to do with what I said.
People are building in places where they probably shouldn't build. Many of the good places to build are used up, and people have an almost irresistable pull to build in dangerous places.
What exactly defines a "good place to build"? If you define it as somewhere with low flooding risk, low earthquake risk, low hurricane risk, etc., there are lots of places in the middle of the U.S. that fit that standard. There are even places with all of that and low risk of wildfires and low risk of tornadoes as well, though one has to be a bit choosy to avoid those things in the middle of the U.S. And of course freak weather is always a possibility.
Nevertheless, there are thousands upon thousands of square miles of land in the middle of nowhere that would be perfectly "good" for building with low risks to insure.
People aren't building there, though. It's not because they have an "irresistable pull to build in dangerous places." It's because we've transitioned to an urban culture and away from a rural one. Most people don't want to stake out a claim on the frontier somewhere anymore and live on all those thousands and thousands of square miles of unoccupied (and often low-risk) land.
This has nothing to do with a danger fetish. It has to do with the fact that people want to live "where the cool people live." And rural life just isn't marketed as desirable anymore.
That's why we have people piling on top of each other to live in risky places. Not because there is any lack of room for people to build and live in non-risky places.
(Now, admittedly, my comment applies specifically to the U.S., but it is applicable to many other developed countries as well, whose culture has shifted away from rural life. There are only a few countries, mostly in Europe, and perhaps increasingly in southeast Asia, where "the good places to build" have actually been "used up.")
If you're not familiar with the case, Filburn was a farmer who grew crops on his own land to be consumed by his family and his animals. It never entered ANY commercial transaction, let alone interstate commerce. But he grew more than was allowed by federal quota systems at the time. So, the feds said he had to destroy it and/or face a fine. The Supreme Court agreed.
The argument was essentially that Filburn was still affecting interstate commerce, because by growing his own wheat, he didn't buy wheat on the market... and his choice to not buy on the market affected the market. (Interesting logic.) Here's a quotation from the judgment:
But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'
Of course, this was the interpretation of the Commerce Clause post-1937, after SCOTUS had given in to FDR, who had threatened to enlarge the court so as to appoint enough judges who agreed with him.
Before 1937, your understanding of the Commerce Clause would have been accurate.
Very bad example, most of those worked much harder and longer than the people who go to "work" today.
I absolutely agree. And I have done many of the tasks you mention by hand -- it's not necessary to fell a tree that way anymore, but it's a great workout! Obviously we have the option of doing that now, instead of previous generations which had to.
I get that, and I didn't mean for my comment to imply that life was easy. (Note my next sentence after the one you quoted, where I admit that life was harder and shorter, and crime was higher in those agrarian societies, largely because of poverty and greater suffering.)
I admit that my point in the passage you quoted wasn't clear -- I was trying to point to the fact that when farmers were living in "years of plenty" and particularly in the off-seasons (winter, mostly), there could be time for other things. Often modern people have this perception of the past as a dirty horrible place where people toiled all the time to survive. The reality is that farmers, except on the frontiers of countries, weren't generally independent entities struggling alone to survive. Communities provided divisions of labor, and methods of food storage and preservation could insure against some weaker months or even a year of weaker harvest.
In more extreme climates where multiple years of bad harvests could be devastating, historians have seen interesting social cycles been years of plenty and years of famine. But in more temperate zones, towns and cities and communal food production provided at least some stability.
But that doesn't mean that in the winters where the food was stored up, all the farmers went immediately to brawling in the streets. In a stable community, life in the past was hard work, but when not working, there were often lots of pleasant possibilities for passing the time.
Instead of having one person doing a 75 hour job and 2 people doing nothing, you could have 3 people doing 25 hour jobs. That way they still contribute AND have lots of time with friends and family and do whatever they desire.
Exactly. According to productivity stats, we should already be in a place where people are working 25-hour weeks or less, rather than 40-hour weeks, assuming constant production over the past half-century or so. Instead, though worker productivity keeps rising like crazy, wages are static or rise very slowly. People actually end up working longer hours to keep up with increased social pressures to have more consumer products that are now "essential" (supposedly) for everyday life.
However in the real world, we will have one person doing a 75 hour job and have no life and 2 people have nothing and ALSO have no life, just so the person owning it all get a little bit richer.
Yes, the competitive business work ethic ends up working against everyone. We reward the mid-level executive who's willing to give up his family and work 80 hours every week to get ahead. The top-level executives in companies end up being filled with people who think that the only employees with any worth are people with that sort of dedication.
Once the mid-level guy gets to be a real executive, he might be able to afford a little more flexibility in his time. But everyone below him obviously isn't worth as much and should be willing to work 80 hours (or at least produce enough in a shorter time to qualify for working "that hard").
It ends up in a spiral where everyone feels like you can't get ahead unless you're willing to sacrifice the rest of your life to your job -- all because of a small percentage of competitive alpha males who see the only possible achievement in status, power, and money.
But this is cultural. Workers in the U.S., for example, have to deal with such expectations at most companies. There's never any expectation that increased productivity might lead to work-weeks with fewer than 40 hours or more vacation time or whatever. And even if it were offered, many workers would simply prefer a raise.
In many countries in Europe, though, taking a vacation is not viewed as an unmanly waste of time when you should be working harder and getting ahead at your job. Take a look around Germany or Italy or France in late July and early August, for example. Almost everyone seems to be on a holiday. It's not uncommon for many people to take an entire month off in the summer. Total vacation time each year is often double or triple what a normal worker has in the U.S.
And, of course, there are lots of studies that show this is actually a good thing for workers. Vacations tend to give a psychological boost that can actually increase worker productivity. Shorten the arbitrary 40-hour work-week a little, and you might even see a productivity gain.
In sum -- if we get rid of the alpha-male you're-not-committed-unless-you-never-see-your-family craziness, and actually started decreasing expected hours per week at work when productivity increased, we'd probably end up with happier people and just as much stuff. But executives and investors wouldn't get quite as rich, so it probably won't happen anytime soon....
A small percentage would improve themselves by learning new things exploring new concepts, etc. The majority however would do nothing but become restless, and that would lead slowly to fighting each other. Humans need to do something that keeps there minds and bodies occupied.
Yes, because all of the retired people in the world are always so busy murdering each other.
Exactly.
Or, for even a better example... before the feminist movement put most women in the workforce in the past 30-40 years, a lot of women tended to not "have jobs." Individual salaries were often high enough for families to be supported by one (typically male) income.
I don't recall reports of hoards of homemaker housewives fighting in the streets. Does anyone?
Women had more time for their families, more time for their homes, etc. I recall visiting my grandparents when I was a kid: the house was always immaculately kept, food was always prepared from scratch every day, etc.
I'm not saying everyone would enjoy obsessing over such things today: many people today view cooking and cleaning as chores, rather than a point of pride. To each his/her own. Other women I knew in previous generations just tended to watch soap operas all day, particularly once the kids were grown.
There are plenty of things one can find to fill the hours of the day, if you have a good attitude about it. If you don't like working around your home, go read some books. Visit a museum. Take up art or music. Join a social club. Surf the internet, or even watch TV.
The problem isn't that humans can't fill that time, or even don't have useful activities that could fill that time. Rather, the past half-century or so has trained us to think of most of the common everyday activities of previous generations as "chores," rather than simply "everyday life."
I'd love to be able to spend more time at home experimenting with cooking and baking, doing yardwork and gardening around the house, growing my own food and preserving/fermenting/canning it, doing various upkeep and projects around the house (painting, repointing the brickwork, random home maintenance), perhaps even building furniture or doing some of my own remodeling. There are some "chores" I don't particularly look forward to (like washing dishes), but many others are incredibly satisfying when you get to say, "I made this" or "I did that."
I think back to most of the people in my grandparents' generation that I knew, and they took a similar pride in what they did around their homes. Today, you use the microwave instead of the stove, get the crappy store-bought pastry instead of baking your own with real ingredients, buy the frozen dinner and the cans instead of cooking fresh food and canning your own produce. You just buy the leaf blower instead of the rake, the rototiller instead of the spade, the weed wacker instead of the hand edger. And then after you finish all your yardwork in 1/4 of the time, you spend 45 minutes working out or jogging or whatever, when you could have already had your work-out doing the yardwork in the fresh air.
I feel a sense of accomplishment when I do my own tasks for my own family or around my own home. Lots of people in previous generations did too. In fact, go back a century or a little more, and most people were farmers: their only "job" was growing food to keep themselves and their own families alive. They didn't need external "work" to make their lives interesting enough so that they weren't sitting around idle and getting into random brawls.
I'm NOT a luddite or hopeless nostalgic person arguing for a return to an agrarian world or something, where lifespans were a lot shorter, life was a lot harder, and crime rates were admittedly higher.
I AM saying that there are a lot of everyday things people could take pleasure in doing, while simultaneously making their lives better (e.g., cooking your
Of course they could pass those tests. All questions there can be solved by memorizing facts and using simplistic algorithms.
Well, then they'd be ahead of many of today's middle-school students. Remember that this is an 8th-grade test, not a high-school graduation test. At that time, most students would not go on to high school, so they were expected to go out into the world and make a practical living.
Thus, things they would need to be equipped with: good grammar and basic writing skills (including spelling/orthography), practical arithmetic skills (i.e., solving actual problems they would encounter in daily life), and basic cultural knowledge that might come up in everyday life, like geography (in an expanding economy where people took trains more often), or basic physiology and health.
I agree that the history questions don't seem that great to me, though even there one could argue that a few questions could go beyond memorization if taught appropriately ("Give an account of..." "Relate the causes and results of...") and could require a synthesis of knowledge to answer in a coherent short essay form.
But the rest isn't that bad. And the math and language questions are testing exactly the sort of competence in basic literacy and numeracy that someone needs to get a decent job -- admittedly some are outdated, particularly in the units of the arithmetic questions. I'd hope that students would master most of these language and math issues by around 6th grade, but 8th grade isn't too far off. In the rare case that a student would go on the high school, presumably there would be more questions requiring deeper levels of analysis and thought.
Anyhow, 8th grade mastery of these practical skills would be better than the situation today, where many students in college aren't able to write or use math in practical ways like this. Today we force algebra and geometry on all students when most of them manage to graduate high school without being able to analyze and solve simple arithmetic problems like this, or understanding basic finance. (And yes, I speak from experience, having taught high school math and science in the past.)
I don't disagree with your side: Social Security is important, and public schools should exist. I do question whether 13 years of mandatory schooling is best done in its current form, but that's a larger debate.
OK, and I believe literacy rate would plummet. It's great we both have beliefs, but who has evidence on their side? I do, because before we had public education, the literacy rate was a lot lower.
Please provide statistics and sources. The CIA World Factbook's reported literacy rate and the self-reporting on the census are unacceptable as sources. Most such sources today say that there is a 99% literacy rate or so in the U.S., which is based on the same unreliable data that the 1840 census was, which claimed 98% or so of those surveyed were literate in some New England states.
Those numbers are all off, at least when it comes to "literacy" beyond signing your name or knowing a few words.
Recent major literacy surveys in the U.S. (sponsored by the U.S. government) generally say that about 20% of the adult population is functionally illiterate. Those numbers are roughly equivalent to the 20-25% of adult males who were rejected from the drafts in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam due to functional illiteracy.
I'll note that the draft stats are probably the most reliable indicators of overall literacy, since the military needed men and wouldn't generally reject people unless they actually were illiterate. Moreover their standard clearly was functional illiteracy, rather than complete illiteracy, as they required soldiers to be able to understand basic written instructions in combat. Despite the huge increases in compulsory public schooling in the early 1900s, there were outcries after each draft about how large the pool of illiterates was.
The numbers haven't changed significantly over the entire past century, despite the fact that most people today are encouraged to get 13 years of schooling, as compared to a century ago, when most probably only completed 4-6 years.
Where's your huge literacy victory for public education?
Meanwhile, take it back to the early 1800s, before any compulsory public education at all in any state. Beyond census evidence, historians who have looked into this seem to find evidence of very high literacy rates, which were commented upon by visitors from Europe. Webster's spelling books, Cooper's novels, etc. sold multiple MILLIONS of copies in the 1820s, at a time when the U.S. population was only maybe 20 million. Who was reading them, unless a significant proportion of people were literate?
For free persons in the U.S. in the early 1800s, the proportion of functional literates was probably at least as high as the 80% or so we have now; for males it was often much higher (particularly in New England). The numbers started to go down in the late 1800s with the influx of lots of illiterate immigrants, but they stabilized around 75% by WWI, and have only mildly increased since.
Compulsory public education has done a lot of social good in the U.S., including getting hooligans off the street and teaching people to be docile workers, which were its primary purposes (at least for secondary education).
But raising literacy rates significantly? Probably not. Certainly not commensurate with the increase in average years of schooling over the past century.
Learning some calculus can give you insight into how the world works better than many other areas of mathematics.
I'd give that accolade to basic practical statistics, including evaluating gambling and other odds, risk, failure rates etc.
Absolutely. I'd much rather that we encouraged high school students wanting to take another math course to learn about practical statistics, probability, and data representation (and manipulation) rather than calculus.
Elementary calculus is a collection of useful tools for solving some more advanced problems that you can't solve with basic algebra. By itself, it gives you very little "insight into how the world works," unless you use it on a regular basis.
But let's face it -- when's the last time you saw an integral sign or some problem involving differentiation in the newspaper (or other mainstream media sources)? I'd hazard that greater than 95% of students who take a calculus course never use it in their everyday lives to understand anything. If they end up being a scientist or engineer of some sort, they might use it enough to get how it connects to the understanding of the complexities of the world... but for the vast, vast majority of calculus students, this will be simply lost.
On the other hand, how often do you see statistics quoted, percentages or other data breakdowns listed, graphs presented, etc. in a newspaper? The financial section alone is usually full of them. And yet unless a person took a dedicated stats course, the chances are that the only thing they know about statistics is the definition of mean, median, and mode. That is nowhere near enough knowledge to evaluate numerical arguments or information presented anywhere.
If people in general, or even journalists, were forced to take a course in statistics, we might have significantly better public arguments about just about everything. And we might have less nonsense where people just throw numbers at each other, and every side can offer their own stats that look equally plausible to the layman.
(And yes, by the way, I realize that "really" understanding statistics actually requires calculus, but I'd also argue that "really" understanding calculus and all those practical mathematical tools requires a knowledge of analysis that the vast majority of people using calculus don't understand. There are lots of things that could be taught about statistics, probability, and data representation without calculus, or perhaps by introducing some basic calculus ideas without all the detail given in a full-blown calculus course.)
And by the way, if we are trying to force some advanced math course onto a large portion of the population, I would recommend a course in statistics, probability, and data representation/manipulation far and above a basic course in calculus.
The chances that the average person is ever going to use calculus to solve a problem in his/her everyday life (i.e., outside of scientific or engineering work) is vanishingly small... unless he/she is a real nerd.
On the other hand, a knowledge of how statistics, probability, and data manipulations work will give the average person insight into numerous articles every day in the newspaper, will likely help him/her evaluate numerical arguments presented in a job situation or some financial offer in an advertisement, and will allow him/her to understand numbers that are offered in support of scientific studies, political arguments, etc. It can even help in Vegas....
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A reason, yes. To be a catchy folkish tune. Written and became popular long after the days of company towns.
Yes, and if you actually followed the links in my post, you would discover that one person who claimed to have written the song was a coal miner at the time when unions were first being organized in Kentucky to break the stranglehold of the company towns, and the other person who claims to have written the song was the son of a coal miner -- a miner who supposedly used some of the phrases from the chorus to describe his experiences.
Of course it became popular later. But those involved in writing the lyrics had first-hand experience with company towns.
It wasn't essentially slavery. At worst it was essentially debt bondage.
There are lots of terms thrown around for putting people in a situation where they are effectively forced to work and their freedom is removed. "Debt bondage" is one. "Serfdom" and "indentured servitude" are others, and there are more. Yes, I agree there are distinctions to be made about exactly how the systems operate, but in many cases these systems have effectively very similar results as slavery. And I'm by no means the first to use this term to refer to the practices of company towns.
Slavery means a personal is held as property by another person and is made to do work with no pay. That simply wasn't how company towns operated.
I agree that the workers were not legally "owned" by the company, and therefore according to the standard definition of "slavery" they were not "slaves." But note that I did say "essentially a kind of slavery," not slavery per se.
As to how "company towns operated," the company often did in fact make a person "do work with no pay." Workers were often rewarded only with company scrip rather than money for their work, which frequently meant that they could only redeem their "pay" for items available at company-owned stores and separate company-owned town businesses. Prices were generally inflated to ensure that workers rarely were able to "save" anything (and even if they did, they couldn't spend it outside of the town, so it would be effectively worthless). In more extreme cases, companies would deliberately structure their "prices" to ensure workers were in a state of continuous debt.
The net result: a person is forced to continue working for a company indefinitely, with little hope of ever accumulating any meaningful "pay" that could ever be spent in the outside world.
Sorry, but that's SLAVERY without the technical legal "property" aspect. Workers may not have been "bought" and "sold" in the way slaves were, but in most other respects, they could be bound to serve their master. Remember also that the company towns mostly flourished before modern workers' rights, so while workers may not have been abused to the extend that slaves were on the worst plantations, they could still be made to suffer significantly.
Now, of course, many company towns weren't that bad. But many slave plantations weren't that bad either. Many companies treated their workers benevolently, and many slave owners paid for their slaves to be educated too. Conditions varied significantly for both groups. I'm not saying these two things are equivalent -- but debt bondage is still "bondage," which is another common word for slavery.
I encourage you to seek to set the historical record straight but I implore you not to exaggerate and by doing so treat another group - in this case management of company towns - as fallaciously as the group you are championing has been treated.
I appreciate the politeness of your response. But I'm frankly not sure what "group" I am supposedly "championing." I'm trying to get at the historical reality of how bad conditions COULD BE (not everywhere, maybe not even in most company towns). I do not mean at all to disparage those company managers who did indeed treat workers fairly and benevolently. But there were plenty of places where workers were abused and effectively put into "debt bondage" as you put it (a topic I actually linked to in my original post).
But to me, in extreme cases, whether or not we call that tantamount to slavery is just a matter of semantics -- someone who doesn't have freedom to make significant choices about his life and is forced to work for someone else is, to my mind, a slave. Whether the government recognizes him as "being owned" by someone else is a legalistic quibble that serves to excuse heinous practices while technically outlawing "slavery."
but the principles of science seem sound and correct over time.
How long is "over time"? From my perspective on history, scientific "principles" and methodology are continuously changing. The standards of what constituted valid "scientific argument" were vastly different over time -- Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Lavoisier, Darwin, etc. all had incredibly different views on what constituted acceptable scientific methodology. Yes, they all collected data, and "experiments" have been performed in various ways over the centuries, but the foundational axioms of how theories related to the world, what philosophical assumptions we make about scientific arguments, etc. have changed radically, even since the dawn of the "Scientific Revolution."
And lest one claim that "Well, those guys all lived very long ago, and at least since the middle or late 1800s, we've basically been doing the same thing," I beg to differ. We've only come to understand a lot of details of statistical paradoxes and misleading aspects of data in the past century, for example. And given how central data manipulation is to most of experimental science nowadays, I have to say that the way we approach science is radically different from even a century ago. Hypotheses that would have seen perfectly legimitate in the early 1900s would be immediately thrown out today -- and not just because of changing knowledge... because of methodological issues. Scientific methods and principles continue to evolve as older methodologies are phased out, and (supposedly) better ones are discovered.
Frankly, unless you define "the principles of science" as something so vague and meaningless as "collecting data from experiments to better understand the world," I don't see how there's that much similarity to what historical figures were doing. It's a continuously evolving system, and the "principles" change to fit the current methods.
Very few are fooled. Sociologists/Psychologists/Economists can say they've 'proved' something till they're blue in the face. Nobody will take them seriously.
Umm, what are you talking about? Too many people take them seriously. Loads of people pop pills all the time because of what psychologists have decided is "normal." Heck, the livelihood of most people in most developed countries is highly dependent on the people in control of the money supply following various economic theories -- and when those theories fail, the economy tanks.
Maybe "hard scientists" won't take these things seriously. But the vast majority of people in the world seem to -- often with detrimental results due to misplaced faith in shoddy theorizing.
That said, many experiments in "soft sciences" could produce better results. In my experience reading a lot of these studies (not just in things like psychology and cognitive science, but even medical studies and health issues), one recurring major issue is misuse and misunderstanding of basic statistics. A lot of studies use a 95% confidence threshold, and exploratory studies often try out dozens and dozens of potential correlations. So they're bound to find some something that fits their "significance" threshold, even if they collected random data.
These minor (and possibly meaningless) correlations are then generally spun into some significant finding in the discussion sections and press releases (a finding that often depends on the broadest possible interpretation of some minor data blip), and pretty soon this new idea becomes established within the field when a few other studies with some minor statistical blip also seem to provide "confirmation."
Five or ten years later, somebody runs another better-designed study specifically on the topic, and it turns out there's no correlation at all. It was just a statistical ghost, or a badly designed set of data manipulations or collection... or just somebody trying to turn their crap data into something significant.
But true randomized trials with human subjects that can accurately target something specific are often difficult to fund and sometimes even impossible (or unethical) to do. Nevertheless, even with limited options for good data, we can still be more realistic and cautious about what we claim out of it. Instead, there's always a rush to ascribe great meaning to every statistical blip. To me, that's the biggest problem in the so-called "soft sciences."
Had you RTFA, you might have noticed that the very next paragraph after the sentence you quoted goes into what you accuse it of "omitting".
Umm, I did RTFA, and I still think the image of the historical "company town" brought up there is pretty skewed.
The development conjures up memories of so-called "company towns" at the turn of the 20th century, where American factory workers lived in communities owned by their employer and were provided housing, health care, law enforcement, church and just about every other service necessary.
Aww, that sounds really great! My company gives me everything! Well, let's go on to that next paragraph that you claim fills in the details:
Spending more time in the clutches of the company sphere isn't necessarily positive. One reason the old company towns eventually disappeared was that they could be overbearing to workers.
And that's it! Nothing else to say critically about this historical company towns brought up in comparison.
Sorry, but there is a lot of "omission" here. Some historical company towns were lucky enough to have reasonable benefactors running things. But in many cases, they were just slavery by another name.
Sorry, but "could be overbearing to workers" doesn't quite do justice to the historical reality.
>were provided housing, health care, law enforcement, church and just about every other service necessary.'
They were also "provided" with constantly mounting debt and money unusable anywhere else to make them docile, servile, and put them at the bosses' mercy.
Indeed. There's a reason for the chorus of the song Sixteen Tons, which tells about the plight of the coal miner in a company town:
You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter don't you call me, 'cause I can't go -- I owe my soul to the company store.
Unfortunately, the Wikipedia article on company towns also seems to sweep away a lot of the negative stuff -- maybe the people who wrote the summary only read about the Wikipedia version of reality.
That said, historical company towns that didn't force workers to use scrip avoided some of these issues -- but that would mean allowing workers easily to exit the town by actually paying them real money, which they could take elsewhere. Many historical companies didn't want to allow that, so no matter how benevolent the educational and social things the company provided, it was often essentially a kind of slavery.
I don't know about anyone else, but I found that bit as fascinating as the text analyzer itself. But where does laughter fit?
Yeah, while this theory of emotions surely has some good aspects, forcing ALL emotionally charged words into these categories will obviously skew the data in certain ways. When a model like this is used to classify something much more complex, the ultimate data analysis often tells you more about the model than about the data. Are we actually tracking the changes in "sadness" and "fear" over the course of Hamlet, or are we tracking some arbitrary dividing line that this model forces us to use to classify words?
Moreover, these sorts of "digital humanities" projects that just analyze a corpus by counting up occurrences of words are always incredibly limited. It's so easy to skew the data just because a character or place or something in the story happens to include a word that is "emotionally charged" in a particular way in this model.
For example, I note that "Godfather Death" is nearest to "Gambling Hansel" in terms of the "darkest story" in the study. While the story is dark, it's actually rather short and a very simple moral, with a main character who is a remarkable healer. The main character doesn't do too well at the end, but in the gamut of Brothers Grimm stories, this one doesn't have a lot of "dark" details. I assume, instead, that this story gets rated as very "dark" because one of the main characters happens to be named "Death," a word that has a very negative valence in the model. Write a happy story at a bar called "The Good Death" (referencing either bravery or sexuality), include a few other character names or place names that recur frequently but just happen to sound "negative," and I bet this algorithm will judge it "dark" too... or at least not as "positive" as the plot would suggest.
I'm not saying such studies are useless. But they really need to factor in context, multiple meanings, and especially other factors that might lead to high frequencies of their chosen "emotional" words, like proper names or other plot points that may not actually be representative of the vocabulary and emotions of the story overall. In essence, for anything meaningful to come out of word frequency studies, you actually need to read the text as well and take account things that would obviously skew the data.
Agree. 100%.
The comment system is the only reason I come here. If I can no longer trace a conversation, if reading comments becomes tedious or difficult in the new interface, or if the moderation system is modified so it no longer works as well as the current model... well, yeah, I'll never be back.
Don't break the comment system. Don't futz with it too much. Don't make it seem like an "afterthought." It's central to this community. Without it (and the kind of users it attracts), this is just another crappy tech blog.
The reality is that you have generational cultures. For example, I'd bet older people smoke more too. Doesn't mean I'm going to do it when I get old. I know better now than they did at my age.
This is a crucial point. People who are 65 or over now are a generation who have had to deal with the uncertainties and complexities of investing in IRAs and other retirement accounts to save -- something their parents probably didn't have to do in the same way, since they had often had pensions. Their parents likely could throw something in a savings account or savings bonds and gradually watch the growth over the decades, but the current older generation was told to put money in mutual funds in their IRA, and they watched their money do giant roller coaster rides in 2001 and again in 2008.
Basically, everything they probably learned about finance from their parents' generation (put money in the bank or savings bonds, depend on your company pension) was becoming irrelevant by the time they retired in the past few years. And the alternative -- socking money into the market only to watch it whip around like crazy every few years as their retirement approached -- would very likely skew their perspective on risk. Particularly, given how much many of them probably lost in 2001 and/or 2008 as they got near to retirement, I bet many would be predisposed to make "bad" decisions just to avoid losses (as discussed in the article).
For the generation who lived through the Great Depression, keeping money as cash or very stable investments was common. They saved up money in cash before buying things. The retiring generation now has had to deal with very different issues, with debt proliferation, loss of pensions, and the need to deal with new kinds of investments just to retire. By the time the next generation or two retires, there will probably be various other issues.
You have no idea what you're talking about. This shutdown is not about Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare (they've tried plenty of times but this isn't one of them). Do us all a favor and do some reading.
Okay, fine -- I searched for "government shutdown" in the latest news. I clicked on the first link. It contained the following quotation straight from the Senate floor today:
"They'd rather see the government shut down than do anything to protect the American people from the consequences of Obamacare," countered Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
So, apparently if this is "not about Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare," one of the primary leaders of the Republican party seems not to have received the news.
Perhaps you could enlighten us with your wisdom about what this is about, since the half-dozen news stories I just skimmed that have been published in the past couple hours (from sources ranging across the political spectrum) all spend significant time talking about efforts to push back Obamacare.
Yes, I do realize the current bill is not actually repealing it, but merely delaying it... nevertheless, if there's some other motivation for the Republicans, they clearly are keeping it a secret to themselves.
But you seem to know what's really going on, huh? Can you be bothered to tell us all, or do you just enjoy going around and insulting everybody for the heck of it?
Mostly my comment was simply meant as a reminder that if you want to claim the moral high ground in representing the "will of the people" you should always make sure that you have more than 50% of the popular vote.
See, I don't think that's actually true. Voters don't vote for "Republican Representative To Be Determined" or "Democratic Representative To Be Determined" at the ballot box when they vote for their U.S. House representative.
They vote for a specific individual, who may be affiliated with one of those two parties (or may not), and who may have a number of views that are actually in conflict with the standard "party line" for his/her party.
"The Republican Party" may not represent "the majority of voters" counted collectively in one mass, but more than 50% of the U.S. House that agrees on an issue -- whether that 50% is composed of a party block or not -- does in fact, by definition, represent "the majority" of the people in the U.S.
In my personal opinion, I don't think either party or any group should go around saying they represent "the will of the people" unless they have some significant supermajority of U.S. voters on their side (say, 2/3 maybe). For example, in Massachusetts, Democrats occupy something like 90% of major state offices. There, I'd say, the Democrats have "the will of the people" to enact their policies for the state.
For the U.S. in general, a single party has rarely gathered that sort of unanimity. There have been "electoral landslides" in many Presidential elections, for example, but most winners usually still only get 50-60% of the vote. To me, that's hardly a "landslide" or a "strong mandate." (Dems are as guilty as Reps in making those sort of exaggerated claims.) So, in general, I'd say neither party should be claiming to truly have "the will of the people." But, in terms of representing "the majority of the people," any group of more than 50% of House members constitutes such representation, regardless of party affiliation.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-03-11/news/ct-oped-0311-page-20120311_1_college-costs-rise-kayla-heard-college-attendance
Hmm... from that article:
"These are jobs that do not require higher-level learning skills, critical thinking skills, or writing skills or anything of that nature," [Vedder, education expert] said in a telephone interview. [snip]
Let's go a step further, says Vedder.
"As college costs rise," he said, "people are asking: Aren't there cheaper ways of certifying competence and skills to employers?"
Hmm... so, we want to "certify" the "competence" of someone for an employer for a job that does not require "higher-level learning skills, critical thinking skills, or writing skills or anything of that nature." Isn't that called a high school diploma? Or, maybe even an 8th-grade graduation certificate? Seriously. You should not need a bachelor's degree to work in the sort of job described here. In fact, you shouldn't even need a high-school diploma for a job that doesn't require communication skills, writing skills, etc.
Only one of my grandparents graduated high school, and most of my grandparents' siblings didn't graduate either. Most only completed 4-8 years of school. But I've read the letters they wrote to each other during WWII, which often show a better command of English than many college undergraduates whose papers I've graded. I saw what they accomplished in their lives. I also know that the ones who actually completed high school were prepared to go out and get a job that DID require some writing and communication skills, as well as some critical thinking.
No -- we absolutely should NOT have a GED for college. We need to stop this ridiculous expansion of credentials, and we need to hold to higher standards for middle school and high school. If a person with a high school diploma isn't qualified for a job that does NOT require "higher-level learning skills, critical thinking skills, or writing skills or anything of that nature," what the heck is that person qualified to do? And if the answer is "nothing," then why did this person spend 13 years in the educational system?
You should be aware that the Democrats won the congressional popular vote by around 50.7% to 49.3%, but because of gerrymandering (the practice of dividing congressional districts to subvert the will of the public), they have fewer seats in congress than the Republicans.
You should also be aware that such a thing could easily happen even if the districts were NOT gerrymandered.
For example, most state borders were not gerrymandered, yet 3 times so far we have had Presidential elections where the winner of the popular vote did not become President, as a result of the random places that state borders fall. (1876, 1888, and 2000, not counting Adams in 1824, since that election was indeterminate and went to the House.)
Any division of data into arbitrary groups can result in the phenomenon you mention, whether those groups are chosen to slant the results or not.
Both parties have tried to game the system through gerrymandering -- a practice, which I agree is deplorable. But those who did the gerrymandering were also democratically elected, so ultimately the voters did in fact vote in the people who gamed the system to elect more people. If voters actually gave a crap and voted out politicians who gerrymandered, but we were still stuck with the results, you might have a legitimate beef with the Republicans here or the results of the elections. But, frankly, unless you're going to accuse someone of election fraud, ultimately the current gerrymandered elected U.S. Congress is the result of the "will of the people" (just a "people" who don't know what the heck they're doing).
(For the record, I am not a Republican, nor do I agree with them. But the whole system is broken, and both parties are gaming it wherever they can, so I don't see anything "more illegitimate" about this Congress than any other one.)
Um, why should they? The negotiations happened when the ACA was passed in a legitimate democratic act. What the Republicans are doing now is trying to hold a gun to the countries head in an entirely undemocratic move to kill the ACA.
Unless you're saying the elections that elected the current Congress were rigged, your argument makes no sense. I do NOT agree with the Republicans, but if they were legally elected, they now have as much right to repeal a law as the Democrats had to pass one. Unless you're planning on amending the Constitution to prevent repeals of laws previously passed (a bad idea, I would think), I don't see how a new Congress undoing the efforts of a previous one can be prevented.
Now, of course, both parties gerrymander House districts to get elected, and that whole process is "undemocratic" in some sense. But it's not only the Republicans doing that either.
Lastly, one should recall that there were some unusual parliamentary maneuvers used to pass the ACA in the first place, since the (surprising) election of Scott Brown in the Senate meant that Democrats couldn't prevent a filibuster in the Senate. I'm not at all saying that the way the ACA was passed was "undemocratic," since it conformed to parliamentary procedure in Congress, but surely making an end-run around a newly elected member of the Senate (who essentially ran a campaign in one of the most liberal states in the U.S. saying that he would stop passage of the ACA) ranks pretty high on the "partisan shenanigan" meter.
I don't know if it's the same level as the current House high jinks, but claiming that one is a "legitimate democratic act" and the other is "undemocratic" (and even the act of "terrorists") is more than a little hypocritical.
Your electoral system gave the GOP a majority when they got notably less votes than the 'minority' Democrats.
Yes, well, that sort of thing can frequently happen when you design a system where you actually elect individual people to serve particular districts, rather than collectively electing a "party" for the entire nation or something. It's far from a perfect system, but the House is designed where individual representatives are supposed to speak for specific groups of voters.
Of course, gerrymandering makes it all much worse -- but that's hardly a Republican thing only.
If I was a Republican I'd be embarrassed by the fact that my party was claiming to be the majority when they majority of voters in a democratic country didn't voted for the opposition.
If I were a member of either of the two major parties, I'd be embarrassed by the way voters have been disenfranchised through gerrymandering. I don't think the Democrats should get a pass on this AT ALL. They are just as guilty of that sort of nonsense. It's just that Republicans currently are in the lead in terms of creating districts that effectively disenfranchise voters of the other party. (It's a little un-PC to note this, but Dems helped to contribute to this a little bit in previous decades, where Republicans and minority Dems occasionally teamed up to create racially gerrymandering districts that would help get minority representatives elected to Congress. While perhaps a noble cause, it also sometimes grouped too many Democrats into a single district, thereby diluting their influence on surround districts, which have now all turned Republican.)
The budget should not be a matter of party politics because anything being funded should already have been accepted by the three branches of government.
Personally, I don't think anything should be "a matter of party politics," because the two-party system itself does significant damage and sets the stage for the exact situations you're describing as problematic.
But, that said, Congress has power to make laws, and it has power to repeal them. Without a Constitutional amendment, you're never going to be able to prohibit Congress from changing its mind and trying to backpedal on something it already agreed on.
On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth to what you said in that Congress currently has conflicting laws in effect regarding the budget. All of this banter about the "debt ceiling" is nonsense, since appropriated federal funds MUST be spent -- BY LAW.
Back in the days of Nixon and before, a President actually had the option not to spend all of the budget. Effectively, he could "impound" funds, either just to save money or because he thought the spending wasn't necessary. That's not true anymore. Once appropriated by Congress, the President by law must spend the money -- if it doesn't cost enough, the President must find a way to keep spending in the appropriated categories to use up the funds.
So, the "debt ceiling" is a complete anachronism, and arguing about it is ridiculous. It's like a husband setting an autodebit for a bill on a credit card each month which is guaranteed to go over the credit limit, but the wife refuses to call up the credit card company and get them to raise the credit limit. The autodebit already MUST happen by law once Congress appropriates the funds. Refusing to authorize a raise in the debt ceiling would create a situation where the President is legally bound to do two different things (he MUST spend the money, but he's NOT authorized to do so).
So yeah, while we may not be able to prevent "party politics" around the budget completely, some aspects of the process are legal nonsense.
So it's not even that people have an "irresistible pull to build in dangerous places", it's that a large mtro area *cannot be built in a safe place*.
I agree with you for the most part, but I think you just reinforced my point. Why exactly do you want most of the population to live in "large metro areas"? It is possible -- and in fact often more environmentally sustainable -- to have smaller towns which can be closer to food sources, rather than to take food by rail and by truck across the country (which is actually what we do now).
If you moved Chicago or Houston or LA into the middle of Nebraska and they tried to meet their needs via trucks and trains, they'd actually fail. There wouldn't be enough trucks or trains. They'd use every available truck or train in the country, completely clog all surrounding roads and railways, and still their population would basically starve and run out of fuel.
Yeah, umm, you realize where a lot of that food comes from now? It is moved out of the middle U.S. by train or truck to the large cities on those big bodies of water. How the devil do you think all the food and fuel gets to the big cities now?
You're right -- if we moved ALL the big cities away from large bodies of water, it would make transportation more difficult. But as it is now, we're ALREADY moving most of that food and fuel around the middle of the U.S. by truck and rail, so putting a few bigger cities in the middle wouldn't break the network -- it might actually be more efficient to have people actually eat the food near where it's grown.
But my whole post was about how the cause of the problem was a move from rural to urban life... so I'm not sure your issue has a lot to do with what I said.
People are building in places where they probably shouldn't build. Many of the good places to build are used up, and people have an almost irresistable pull to build in dangerous places.
What exactly defines a "good place to build"? If you define it as somewhere with low flooding risk, low earthquake risk, low hurricane risk, etc., there are lots of places in the middle of the U.S. that fit that standard. There are even places with all of that and low risk of wildfires and low risk of tornadoes as well, though one has to be a bit choosy to avoid those things in the middle of the U.S. And of course freak weather is always a possibility.
Nevertheless, there are thousands upon thousands of square miles of land in the middle of nowhere that would be perfectly "good" for building with low risks to insure.
People aren't building there, though. It's not because they have an "irresistable pull to build in dangerous places." It's because we've transitioned to an urban culture and away from a rural one. Most people don't want to stake out a claim on the frontier somewhere anymore and live on all those thousands and thousands of square miles of unoccupied (and often low-risk) land.
This has nothing to do with a danger fetish. It has to do with the fact that people want to live "where the cool people live." And rural life just isn't marketed as desirable anymore.
That's why we have people piling on top of each other to live in risky places. Not because there is any lack of room for people to build and live in non-risky places.
(Now, admittedly, my comment applies specifically to the U.S., but it is applicable to many other developed countries as well, whose culture has shifted away from rural life. There are only a few countries, mostly in Europe, and perhaps increasingly in southeast Asia, where "the good places to build" have actually been "used up.")
" If the feds can control what you grow on your own land for consumption by your own family"
As far as anything else, you can grow what to want as long as it's not impacting people not on your property and you are using it your self.
If you are transporting food, or selling food across state lines then the feds can regulate it.
Nope. Try again. Please see Wickard v. Filburn (1942).
If you're not familiar with the case, Filburn was a farmer who grew crops on his own land to be consumed by his family and his animals. It never entered ANY commercial transaction, let alone interstate commerce. But he grew more than was allowed by federal quota systems at the time. So, the feds said he had to destroy it and/or face a fine. The Supreme Court agreed.
The argument was essentially that Filburn was still affecting interstate commerce, because by growing his own wheat, he didn't buy wheat on the market... and his choice to not buy on the market affected the market. (Interesting logic.) Here's a quotation from the judgment:
But even if appellee's activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect.'
Of course, this was the interpretation of the Commerce Clause post-1937, after SCOTUS had given in to FDR, who had threatened to enlarge the court so as to appoint enough judges who agreed with him.
Before 1937, your understanding of the Commerce Clause would have been accurate.
Very bad example, most of those worked much harder and longer than the people who go to "work" today.
I absolutely agree. And I have done many of the tasks you mention by hand -- it's not necessary to fell a tree that way anymore, but it's a great workout! Obviously we have the option of doing that now, instead of previous generations which had to.
I get that, and I didn't mean for my comment to imply that life was easy. (Note my next sentence after the one you quoted, where I admit that life was harder and shorter, and crime was higher in those agrarian societies, largely because of poverty and greater suffering.)
I admit that my point in the passage you quoted wasn't clear -- I was trying to point to the fact that when farmers were living in "years of plenty" and particularly in the off-seasons (winter, mostly), there could be time for other things. Often modern people have this perception of the past as a dirty horrible place where people toiled all the time to survive. The reality is that farmers, except on the frontiers of countries, weren't generally independent entities struggling alone to survive. Communities provided divisions of labor, and methods of food storage and preservation could insure against some weaker months or even a year of weaker harvest.
In more extreme climates where multiple years of bad harvests could be devastating, historians have seen interesting social cycles been years of plenty and years of famine. But in more temperate zones, towns and cities and communal food production provided at least some stability.
But that doesn't mean that in the winters where the food was stored up, all the farmers went immediately to brawling in the streets. In a stable community, life in the past was hard work, but when not working, there were often lots of pleasant possibilities for passing the time.
Instead of having one person doing a 75 hour job and 2 people doing nothing, you could have 3 people doing 25 hour jobs. That way they still contribute AND have lots of time with friends and family and do whatever they desire.
Exactly. According to productivity stats, we should already be in a place where people are working 25-hour weeks or less, rather than 40-hour weeks, assuming constant production over the past half-century or so. Instead, though worker productivity keeps rising like crazy, wages are static or rise very slowly. People actually end up working longer hours to keep up with increased social pressures to have more consumer products that are now "essential" (supposedly) for everyday life.
However in the real world, we will have one person doing a 75 hour job and have no life and 2 people have nothing and ALSO have no life, just so the person owning it all get a little bit richer.
Yes, the competitive business work ethic ends up working against everyone. We reward the mid-level executive who's willing to give up his family and work 80 hours every week to get ahead. The top-level executives in companies end up being filled with people who think that the only employees with any worth are people with that sort of dedication.
Once the mid-level guy gets to be a real executive, he might be able to afford a little more flexibility in his time. But everyone below him obviously isn't worth as much and should be willing to work 80 hours (or at least produce enough in a shorter time to qualify for working "that hard").
It ends up in a spiral where everyone feels like you can't get ahead unless you're willing to sacrifice the rest of your life to your job -- all because of a small percentage of competitive alpha males who see the only possible achievement in status, power, and money.
But this is cultural. Workers in the U.S., for example, have to deal with such expectations at most companies. There's never any expectation that increased productivity might lead to work-weeks with fewer than 40 hours or more vacation time or whatever. And even if it were offered, many workers would simply prefer a raise.
In many countries in Europe, though, taking a vacation is not viewed as an unmanly waste of time when you should be working harder and getting ahead at your job. Take a look around Germany or Italy or France in late July and early August, for example. Almost everyone seems to be on a holiday. It's not uncommon for many people to take an entire month off in the summer. Total vacation time each year is often double or triple what a normal worker has in the U.S.
And, of course, there are lots of studies that show this is actually a good thing for workers. Vacations tend to give a psychological boost that can actually increase worker productivity. Shorten the arbitrary 40-hour work-week a little, and you might even see a productivity gain.
In sum -- if we get rid of the alpha-male you're-not-committed-unless-you-never-see-your-family craziness, and actually started decreasing expected hours per week at work when productivity increased, we'd probably end up with happier people and just as much stuff. But executives and investors wouldn't get quite as rich, so it probably won't happen anytime soon....
What would people do without jobs?
A small percentage would improve themselves by learning new things exploring new concepts, etc. The majority however would do nothing but become restless, and that would lead slowly to fighting each other. Humans need to do something that keeps there minds and bodies occupied.
Yes, because all of the retired people in the world are always so busy murdering each other.
Exactly. Or, for even a better example... before the feminist movement put most women in the workforce in the past 30-40 years, a lot of women tended to not "have jobs." Individual salaries were often high enough for families to be supported by one (typically male) income.
I don't recall reports of hoards of homemaker housewives fighting in the streets. Does anyone?
Women had more time for their families, more time for their homes, etc. I recall visiting my grandparents when I was a kid: the house was always immaculately kept, food was always prepared from scratch every day, etc.
I'm not saying everyone would enjoy obsessing over such things today: many people today view cooking and cleaning as chores, rather than a point of pride. To each his/her own. Other women I knew in previous generations just tended to watch soap operas all day, particularly once the kids were grown.
There are plenty of things one can find to fill the hours of the day, if you have a good attitude about it. If you don't like working around your home, go read some books. Visit a museum. Take up art or music. Join a social club. Surf the internet, or even watch TV.
The problem isn't that humans can't fill that time, or even don't have useful activities that could fill that time. Rather, the past half-century or so has trained us to think of most of the common everyday activities of previous generations as "chores," rather than simply "everyday life."
I'd love to be able to spend more time at home experimenting with cooking and baking, doing yardwork and gardening around the house, growing my own food and preserving/fermenting/canning it, doing various upkeep and projects around the house (painting, repointing the brickwork, random home maintenance), perhaps even building furniture or doing some of my own remodeling. There are some "chores" I don't particularly look forward to (like washing dishes), but many others are incredibly satisfying when you get to say, "I made this" or "I did that."
I think back to most of the people in my grandparents' generation that I knew, and they took a similar pride in what they did around their homes. Today, you use the microwave instead of the stove, get the crappy store-bought pastry instead of baking your own with real ingredients, buy the frozen dinner and the cans instead of cooking fresh food and canning your own produce. You just buy the leaf blower instead of the rake, the rototiller instead of the spade, the weed wacker instead of the hand edger. And then after you finish all your yardwork in 1/4 of the time, you spend 45 minutes working out or jogging or whatever, when you could have already had your work-out doing the yardwork in the fresh air.
I feel a sense of accomplishment when I do my own tasks for my own family or around my own home. Lots of people in previous generations did too. In fact, go back a century or a little more, and most people were farmers: their only "job" was growing food to keep themselves and their own families alive. They didn't need external "work" to make their lives interesting enough so that they weren't sitting around idle and getting into random brawls.
I'm NOT a luddite or hopeless nostalgic person arguing for a return to an agrarian world or something, where lifespans were a lot shorter, life was a lot harder, and crime rates were admittedly higher.
I AM saying that there are a lot of everyday things people could take pleasure in doing, while simultaneously making their lives better (e.g., cooking your
Of course they could pass those tests. All questions there can be solved by memorizing facts and using simplistic algorithms.
Well, then they'd be ahead of many of today's middle-school students. Remember that this is an 8th-grade test, not a high-school graduation test. At that time, most students would not go on to high school, so they were expected to go out into the world and make a practical living.
Thus, things they would need to be equipped with: good grammar and basic writing skills (including spelling/orthography), practical arithmetic skills (i.e., solving actual problems they would encounter in daily life), and basic cultural knowledge that might come up in everyday life, like geography (in an expanding economy where people took trains more often), or basic physiology and health.
I agree that the history questions don't seem that great to me, though even there one could argue that a few questions could go beyond memorization if taught appropriately ("Give an account of..." "Relate the causes and results of...") and could require a synthesis of knowledge to answer in a coherent short essay form.
But the rest isn't that bad. And the math and language questions are testing exactly the sort of competence in basic literacy and numeracy that someone needs to get a decent job -- admittedly some are outdated, particularly in the units of the arithmetic questions. I'd hope that students would master most of these language and math issues by around 6th grade, but 8th grade isn't too far off. In the rare case that a student would go on the high school, presumably there would be more questions requiring deeper levels of analysis and thought.
Anyhow, 8th grade mastery of these practical skills would be better than the situation today, where many students in college aren't able to write or use math in practical ways like this. Today we force algebra and geometry on all students when most of them manage to graduate high school without being able to analyze and solve simple arithmetic problems like this, or understanding basic finance. (And yes, I speak from experience, having taught high school math and science in the past.)
I don't disagree with your side: Social Security is important, and public schools should exist. I do question whether 13 years of mandatory schooling is best done in its current form, but that's a larger debate.
OK, and I believe literacy rate would plummet. It's great we both have beliefs, but who has evidence on their side? I do, because before we had public education, the literacy rate was a lot lower.
Please provide statistics and sources. The CIA World Factbook's reported literacy rate and the self-reporting on the census are unacceptable as sources. Most such sources today say that there is a 99% literacy rate or so in the U.S., which is based on the same unreliable data that the 1840 census was, which claimed 98% or so of those surveyed were literate in some New England states.
Those numbers are all off, at least when it comes to "literacy" beyond signing your name or knowing a few words.
Recent major literacy surveys in the U.S. (sponsored by the U.S. government) generally say that about 20% of the adult population is functionally illiterate. Those numbers are roughly equivalent to the 20-25% of adult males who were rejected from the drafts in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam due to functional illiteracy.
I'll note that the draft stats are probably the most reliable indicators of overall literacy, since the military needed men and wouldn't generally reject people unless they actually were illiterate. Moreover their standard clearly was functional illiteracy, rather than complete illiteracy, as they required soldiers to be able to understand basic written instructions in combat. Despite the huge increases in compulsory public schooling in the early 1900s, there were outcries after each draft about how large the pool of illiterates was.
The numbers haven't changed significantly over the entire past century, despite the fact that most people today are encouraged to get 13 years of schooling, as compared to a century ago, when most probably only completed 4-6 years.
Where's your huge literacy victory for public education?
Meanwhile, take it back to the early 1800s, before any compulsory public education at all in any state. Beyond census evidence, historians who have looked into this seem to find evidence of very high literacy rates, which were commented upon by visitors from Europe. Webster's spelling books, Cooper's novels, etc. sold multiple MILLIONS of copies in the 1820s, at a time when the U.S. population was only maybe 20 million. Who was reading them, unless a significant proportion of people were literate?
For free persons in the U.S. in the early 1800s, the proportion of functional literates was probably at least as high as the 80% or so we have now; for males it was often much higher (particularly in New England). The numbers started to go down in the late 1800s with the influx of lots of illiterate immigrants, but they stabilized around 75% by WWI, and have only mildly increased since.
Compulsory public education has done a lot of social good in the U.S., including getting hooligans off the street and teaching people to be docile workers, which were its primary purposes (at least for secondary education).
But raising literacy rates significantly? Probably not. Certainly not commensurate with the increase in average years of schooling over the past century.
Learning some calculus can give you insight into how the world works better than many other areas of mathematics.
I'd give that accolade to basic practical statistics, including evaluating gambling and other odds, risk, failure rates etc.
Absolutely. I'd much rather that we encouraged high school students wanting to take another math course to learn about practical statistics, probability, and data representation (and manipulation) rather than calculus.
Elementary calculus is a collection of useful tools for solving some more advanced problems that you can't solve with basic algebra. By itself, it gives you very little "insight into how the world works," unless you use it on a regular basis.
But let's face it -- when's the last time you saw an integral sign or some problem involving differentiation in the newspaper (or other mainstream media sources)? I'd hazard that greater than 95% of students who take a calculus course never use it in their everyday lives to understand anything. If they end up being a scientist or engineer of some sort, they might use it enough to get how it connects to the understanding of the complexities of the world... but for the vast, vast majority of calculus students, this will be simply lost.
On the other hand, how often do you see statistics quoted, percentages or other data breakdowns listed, graphs presented, etc. in a newspaper? The financial section alone is usually full of them. And yet unless a person took a dedicated stats course, the chances are that the only thing they know about statistics is the definition of mean, median, and mode. That is nowhere near enough knowledge to evaluate numerical arguments or information presented anywhere.
If people in general, or even journalists, were forced to take a course in statistics, we might have significantly better public arguments about just about everything. And we might have less nonsense where people just throw numbers at each other, and every side can offer their own stats that look equally plausible to the layman.
(And yes, by the way, I realize that "really" understanding statistics actually requires calculus, but I'd also argue that "really" understanding calculus and all those practical mathematical tools requires a knowledge of analysis that the vast majority of people using calculus don't understand. There are lots of things that could be taught about statistics, probability, and data representation without calculus, or perhaps by introducing some basic calculus ideas without all the detail given in a full-blown calculus course.)
And by the way, if we are trying to force some advanced math course onto a large portion of the population, I would recommend a course in statistics, probability, and data representation/manipulation far and above a basic course in calculus.
The chances that the average person is ever going to use calculus to solve a problem in his/her everyday life (i.e., outside of scientific or engineering work) is vanishingly small... unless he/she is a real nerd.
On the other hand, a knowledge of how statistics, probability, and data manipulations work will give the average person insight into numerous articles every day in the newspaper, will likely help him/her evaluate numerical arguments presented in a job situation or some financial offer in an advertisement, and will allow him/her to understand numbers that are offered in support of scientific studies, political arguments, etc. It can even help in Vegas....