"Public school teacher salaries are typically directly linked with seniority, as negotiated by the union with the government (whose re-reelection the union pays for), thus they are pretty unlinked with standard market forces. The income of teachers in years 1-3 significantly bring down the median."
Yet the median public-school teacher salary is significantly higher than the median private-school teacher salary ($49,600 versus $36,300 in 2007-2008): http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55
If we continue to throw education under the corporate-model bus, then we can only expect teacher salaries to go even further down from here (and likewise, further expansion of the salary and power for the administrative/manager/PHB caste).
"High prices will provide all the pressure you want here and you don't even have to lift a finger to make it happen."
Or possibly more pressure to go to war and secure someone else's resources, in a continuation of short-term thinking. Or a score of other possibilities. The "invisible hand of the market" is just mythology/propaganda.
"... there are absolutely no insurmountable problems (most definitely including nuclear waste disposal/reuse)."
There are times when I feel that this basically boils down to a probability problem. You can have N components all of which probably work, yet chained together probably fail (e.g., 2/3 * 2/3 = 4/9). In nuclear power there are, of course, an enormous number of components, and a ghastly payoff for failure. So you can have "no insurmountable problems" and yet at the same time almost certainly run into "some non-surmounted problem".
The fact that one fails every 20 years or so is almost a worst-case scenario for our society's limited ability to deal with long-term disaster planning and risk.
"If making more money isn't the point of a college degree, why should the taxpayers subsidize you?"
Thomas Jefferson -- "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness...Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [tyranny, oppression, etc.] and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance." [Letter to George Wythe, 1786 August 13]
"Electronic eyes today remind me of Frankenstein with the way they jab electrodes from each pixel into the optic nerve and hope for the best. Some researchers claim to have solved this problem by growing fractal electrodes that mimic the way real eyes connect retinal cells to the optic nerve."
The latter would seem to be far more Frankensteinian.
Engineers seem to have a talent for (a) running totalitarian regimes, (b) participating in terrorist activities, and (c) becoming heads of end-of-days cults.
As another example, the May-21 Rapture prediction comes from Harold Camping, who has a B.S. in Civil Engineering.
Plagiarism is not illegal (subject to criminal penalties and jail). It is a form of fraud, which can be subject to institutional penalties (like fired from a job or thrown out of school).
"Plagiarism is not a crime but is disapproved more on the grounds of moral offence." -- Wikipedia, see there for citations.
"Unless you're post-filtering the water coming from the tap, it's got all sorts of stuff still in the water that can be objectionable, harmful over time, etc."
Numerous studies have found that city tap water generally safer, cleaner, has less bacteria, tastes better in blind taste tests, etc. than bottled water. The bottled water industry has numerous "bacterial and chemical contamination problems" per the NRDC.
"It's too bad we can't actually build the newer, safer designs. People might protest."
Of course, power companies will continue to run old nuclear plants so long as the decommissioning costs are so astronomically high. Which they always will be. Regardless of any new plants being built; regardless of any protests one way or the other.
"... it's beyond my comprehension as to why they did not have a proper contingency plan for tsunami, given the plant's location and the general likelihood of such a disaster."
That would be the famed "invisible hand" of the free market, eh?
"I mean, a MILLION people watched SGU last night, and that's with a whole bunch of Atlantis fans up-in-arms over it. Let's say that 1M is the audience. At $3 a month, that's $36M a year alone for SGU."
This is the same fallacy the MAFIAA use when calculating damages from alleged piracy. The percentage of viewers currently watching SGU, who are willing to pay $3 a month, is not 100%. When websites switch from free to for-pay the conversion rate is typically, what, around 5% or less?
"I know the Slashdot audience would probably trade a few dollars a month if it meant replacing wrestling and ghost-chasing shows with relicensed classics and more appropriate treatment of original content."
Uh, not only would I not do that, but: - I don't even want to watch SyFy for free, or any of those shows that you mention. - And I don't even bother to have cable of any sort. - And in fact I don't bother to own a TV anymore at all.
"Anaximander is often regarded as a precursor of the modem theory of development. He deduces living beings, in a gradual development, from moisture under the influence of warmth, and suggests the view that men originated from animals of another sort, since if they had come into existence as human beings, needing fostering care for a long time, they would not have been able to maintain their existence. In Empedocles, as in Epicurus and Lucretius, who follow in Hs footsteps, there are rudimentary suggestions of the Darwinian theory in its broader sense; and here too, as with Darwin, the mechanical principle comes in; the process is adapted to a certain end by a sort of natural selection, without regarding nature as deliberately forming its results for these ends."
These would be guys writing over 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece.
Granted that (a) 99 places in 100 will comply immediately, and (b) it costs next to nothing to send a request like this out, the cost/benefit analysis is (sadly) in favor of sending the request prior to anyone even spending time making a judgment about the character of the specific institution. That's a Tier 2 job.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm inclined to agree. Quite puzzling to make sense of it.
I would like to know what schools the OP and mother got their multiple degrees from.
OMG, you made my eyes roll so hard that my head hurts.
To me, that sounds like about the same order-of-magnitude complexity as maintaining a car or a boiler.
"Public school teacher salaries are typically directly linked with seniority, as negotiated by the union with the government (whose re-reelection the union pays for), thus they are pretty unlinked with standard market forces. The income of teachers in years 1-3 significantly bring down the median."
Yet the median public-school teacher salary is significantly higher than the median private-school teacher salary ($49,600 versus $36,300 in 2007-2008): http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=55
If we continue to throw education under the corporate-model bus, then we can only expect teacher salaries to go even further down from here (and likewise, further expansion of the salary and power for the administrative/manager/PHB caste).
"... an anti-big-brother society like America"
Sadly, I see absolutely no practical evidence for this in the modern era.
Some propaganda to the contrary, yes, but even 1984 had its "Freedom is slavery".
"High prices will provide all the pressure you want here and you don't even have to lift a finger to make it happen."
Or possibly more pressure to go to war and secure someone else's resources, in a continuation of short-term thinking. Or a score of other possibilities. The "invisible hand of the market" is just mythology/propaganda.
"... there are absolutely no insurmountable problems (most definitely including nuclear waste disposal/reuse)."
There are times when I feel that this basically boils down to a probability problem. You can have N components all of which probably work, yet chained together probably fail (e.g., 2/3 * 2/3 = 4/9). In nuclear power there are, of course, an enormous number of components, and a ghastly payoff for failure. So you can have "no insurmountable problems" and yet at the same time almost certainly run into "some non-surmounted problem".
The fact that one fails every 20 years or so is almost a worst-case scenario for our society's limited ability to deal with long-term disaster planning and risk.
"If making more money isn't the point of a college degree, why should the taxpayers subsidize you?"
Thomas Jefferson -- "I think by far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people. No other sure foundation can be devised, for the preservation of freedom and happiness...Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils [tyranny, oppression, etc.] and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance." [Letter to George Wythe, 1786 August 13]
More Jefferson quotes on education: http://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/quotations-education
"the tired old kiddie porn angle... that is certainly worse than anything!"
You've kind of drunk the Kool-Aid. Here is basically my reaction when you say that:
http://xkcd.com/883/
Yeah, it was a good bit when that happened in Sensational She-Hulk #5.
"Electronic eyes today remind me of Frankenstein with the way they jab electrodes from each pixel into the optic nerve and hope for the best. Some researchers claim to have solved this problem by growing fractal electrodes that mimic the way real eyes connect retinal cells to the optic nerve."
The latter would seem to be far more Frankensteinian.
Engineers seem to have a talent for (a) running totalitarian regimes, (b) participating in terrorist activities, and (c) becoming heads of end-of-days cults.
As another example, the May-21 Rapture prediction comes from Harold Camping, who has a B.S. in Civil Engineering.
The prediction is PM! Post meridiem. After noon.
No rapture for you, you frickin' heathen.
Absolutely NONE of those things are "copyrighted". Try again.
Plagiarism is not illegal (subject to criminal penalties and jail). It is a form of fraud, which can be subject to institutional penalties (like fired from a job or thrown out of school).
"Plagiarism is not a crime but is disapproved more on the grounds of moral offence." -- Wikipedia, see there for citations.
"Unless you're post-filtering the water coming from the tap, it's got all sorts of stuff still in the water that can be objectionable, harmful over time, etc."
Numerous studies have found that city tap water generally safer, cleaner, has less bacteria, tastes better in blind taste tests, etc. than bottled water. The bottled water industry has numerous "bacterial and chemical contamination problems" per the NRDC.
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Health/story?id=728070
http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/bw/bwinx.asp
"It's too bad we can't actually build the newer, safer designs. People might protest."
Of course, power companies will continue to run old nuclear plants so long as the decommissioning costs are so astronomically high. Which they always will be. Regardless of any new plants being built; regardless of any protests one way or the other.
"... it's beyond my comprehension as to why they did not have a proper contingency plan for tsunami, given the plant's location and the general likelihood of such a disaster."
That would be the famed "invisible hand" of the free market, eh?
"I mean, a MILLION people watched SGU last night, and that's with a whole bunch of Atlantis fans up-in-arms over it. Let's say that 1M is the audience. At $3 a month, that's $36M a year alone for SGU."
This is the same fallacy the MAFIAA use when calculating damages from alleged piracy. The percentage of viewers currently watching SGU, who are willing to pay $3 a month, is not 100%. When websites switch from free to for-pay the conversion rate is typically, what, around 5% or less?
"I know the Slashdot audience would probably trade a few dollars a month if it meant replacing wrestling and ghost-chasing shows with relicensed classics and more appropriate treatment of original content."
Uh, not only would I not do that, but:
- I don't even want to watch SyFy for free, or any of those shows that you mention.
- And I don't even bother to have cable of any sort.
- And in fact I don't bother to own a TV anymore at all.
I think there was a dating site that did just that in the last few months.
Totally agree. A proper null hypothesis would be that all life on Earth has existed unchanging forever.
"Anaximander is often regarded as a precursor of the modem theory of development. He deduces living beings, in a gradual development, from moisture under the influence of warmth, and suggests the view that men originated from animals of another sort, since if they had come into existence as human beings, needing fostering care for a long time, they would not have been able to maintain their existence. In Empedocles, as in Epicurus and Lucretius, who follow in Hs footsteps, there are rudimentary suggestions of the Darwinian theory in its broader sense; and here too, as with Darwin, the mechanical principle comes in; the process is adapted to a certain end by a sort of natural selection, without regarding nature as deliberately forming its results for these ends."
These would be guys writing over 2,500 years ago in Ancient Greece.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/evolutio/
Granted that (a) 99 places in 100 will comply immediately, and (b) it costs next to nothing to send a request like this out, the cost/benefit analysis is (sadly) in favor of sending the request prior to anyone even spending time making a judgment about the character of the specific institution. That's a Tier 2 job.
I think it's pretty unlikely without selection pressure in favor of the specific trait.