Consider that Bismarck's sister ship, the Tirpitz, kept a large chunk of the Royal Navy tied down simply by the threat that it might sail out from its base in a fjord in Norway. It was considered to be a serious threat, and treated as such, by the British. Bismarck would have been the same had it not been sunk after multiple engagements (first with the Battlecruiser Hood, and then with the torpedo bombers from Ark Royal).
The problem wasn't that they were using subs as aircraft carriers. It was that their naval doctrine was entirely focused on the Mahan-ian notion of a Decisive Battle, to the exclusion of everything else. Their submarine force, aircraft carrying or not, was seen as an adjunct to the surface fleet, and was used almost exclusively to target surface ships, a tactic that worked poorly with WW2 technology. While today an attack submarine is a regular part of a Carrier Battle Group, this wasn't the case in WW2 because submarines couldn't keep up with surface ships, whether to escort them, or to attack them.
Additionally, while convoy losses in the Pacific would have slowed the Allied advance, it wouldn't have stopped it. The US economy was not dependent on shipments of raw materials the way that Britain or Japan were.
Population growth in advanced countries is negative, as in seriously negative.
Even countries like Mexico are seeing theirs drop off. Mexico had a birth rate around 6.7 per female in 1970, today it's something like 2.2 (lower than where the US was in 1970). Now, there are still undeveloped countries in the world that have high population growth, but introduce just a smidgen of modern family planning options and medicine, and you'll see the same results.
We've got a lot of problems on planet Earth, but runaway population growth isn't going to be one of them. If anything, it's going to be the opposite, or more specifically, the economic consequences of shrinking workforces.
I can think of one organization that would be very, very interested in someone who was - but they sure wouldn't be hiring anyone that wasn't an American citizen.
To some degree also it is that one of the safeguards in the system has broken down, or is not performing as it was expected to do. Namely, the government is expected to act as a check on corporations, but we, the voters, are expected to act as the check on the government. Politicians ought to be afraid of angering the voters by engaging in corrupt activity. And yet, they're not. Who are they afraid of? They're afraid of powerful (i.e. wealthy) donors, interest and lobbying groups.
Canada is a little different in that right now the present political troubles stem in large part from a first past the post system, when votes on the center to left are being split, while those on the right are not, leading to a majority of seats going to a minority of votes. I'm simplifying a bit, and there are money and corruption issues too, but that's the biggest problem from what I've seen. The Harper government has been able to get away with a lot of this despite consistently getting at best a plurality of votes. Hopefully the next election goes differently, though I'm not holding my breath at this point.
The US, however, is having far more of a problem with money. The FPTP system there is an issue too, but the money is as much or moreso the current issue there.
Certainly, all this is rather speculative, and in cordial debate I should hope.:)
Even if you postulate a "Star Trek" economy where replicators can make everything you could possibly want, instantly, at virtually zero cost because there's effectively limitless energy, you still can have an economy. It's simply a post-scarcity economy. There will still be demand - it will simply be for different things. Things that are still 'scarce', namely those things related to human talent. Even today, people will pay more for "hand-crafted" or "artisan" stuff. That's not going to change, at least as long as it's perceived to have elevated status. I foresee in the far future, the richest people will still pay for human service staff (even if aided in the background by robots), simply as a measure of status and importance.
In such an economy (which is far more developed than the one I was postulating in earlier posts), yes, people would have to find something to do. I think most would, even if only turning to hobbies that presently can't earn them enough to live on. We would see more art, more music, more performance-related stuff. A lot would be mediocre, but hey, we'd probably also get a chance to see really good stuff that otherwise might have gotten lost.
And of course, let's not forget the Hitchhikerian:
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. "The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.' "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. "Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.
To be clear, we're not talking about a completely equal income, or anything so communistic. We're talking more like one where the basics are covered, and then your income for work you do, whether that be artistic/performance or something high-skilled, or even service jobs, is entirely discretionary.
Robots aren't going to completely replace skilled human labor, at least not until they can replace us completely - and there will still be work to do for some time. It's just that people who previously were able to work and get by on jobs that did not require particular knowledge or talent are going to be increasingly scarce, and there has to be some way to account for that other than a "let them starve and reduce the surplus population" response.
Well, certainly I should caveat that I mean "in this country, with minimal acceptable living standards."
And yes - insane numbers of people in underdeveloped countries have gone from abject poverty, living in a squalid shack with sketchy food (or on the edge of hunger even), to something better, but that's because their society is nowhere near this stage of development. They'll get there eventually, and good for them - but in the meantime, that still doesn't help someone who lives here, with our cost of living.
Now, certainly people here could probably manage to stay alive on the current actual value of labor, if they were willing to tolerate the same abysmal living conditions, but people today in the US are rightly horrified by such things, and we expect better. Our minimal living standards are high, at least compared to undeveloped or developing world nations - and that's a good thing.
It's an inevitable consequence of the advance of technology though. Someday we'll have robots doing all the work, and then things will be great (as long as we can share the benefit of that sufficiently) - the trick is getting there, because there's going to be a lot of disruptions and upending of old assumptions, like that everyone has to earn their living entirely from doing work. Make no mistake, automation/robots are going to reduce the value of unskilled labor below survival level - they pretty much already have, we just have propped it up through subsidies and price floors.
It's only going to get worse, too. What happens when we can replace truck drivers with self-driving vehicles? They won't just be cheaper, they'll be more efficient and likely safer than human drivers. Between long haul and local/regional, that's roughly 1% of the entire national workforce according to DOL.
So what can we do? Well, we can try and stop the robots and progress, but that's a dead end. No, what we need to do is switch the tax base to tax the robots, rather than workers, and use the money to create a guaranteed basic income program so everyone can survive, and then let them work on top of that for whatever they can negotiate without price floors (i.e. no minimum wage).
Mexico's birth rate has also fallen dramatically in the past few decades.
In 1970, Mexico had a birth rate of 6.72 births per female, that had been relatively stable around that level for the years prior. After that, it started to drop, and was at 2.22 births per female in 2012. By contrast, the US birth rate was 2.48 in 1970, and has dropped to 1.88 in 2012, below the replacement level of 2.
What happened? Technology, development, access to family planning/birth control/etc. The same thing has happened in every country that develops past a certain point. In some countries the birth rate has gotten so precariously low that it's having profound effects, creating an aging population with less younger workers to pay for it. We've avoided this somewhat as the US, because despite our falling birth rate, we've made up the difference with immigration. Eventually that's going to stop being the case, because we'll run out of poor places for people to immigrate from (which isn't a bad thing necessarily).
The core problem is that technology is reducing the market value of unskilled/low-skilled human labor below the level that someone can survive on. This is an inevitable consequence of automation, and it's one we're not really prepared mentally to handle, because it goes against all of our core assumptions. After all, human labor has been the core element of production since the dawn of history. We're primed to think that if you're willing to work hard, you should not just survive but get ahead, and that's not the case anymore. You can't start in the mail room and work your way up. You can't even get a mail room job most likely, because the MailBot 9000 handles that now.
We're reacting with the tools we've used in the past - subsidies and price floors, in the form of social safety net programs (which weren't meant to do that), and a minimum wage. We're going to need something better, because eventually things will start breaking even worse. What happens when consumers increasingly lack the money to buy commodities the robots produce? You start having breakdowns in the markets because price signals aren't functioning as expected.
So what do we do? Probably something like a guaranteed basic income - distribute some portion of the value of the robots' production so everyone can afford the basics to survive. At that point you can get rid of the minimum wage laws, because nobody needs to earn some minimum amount from labor to survive.
The problem is that the underlying assumptions we have about labor and its value are becoming increasingly outdated. For pretty much the entirety of human history, productivity has depended on human labor, and thus, human labor had specific value, even if unskilled. Even as we added animals and machines, you needed a human to lead/operate/drive them. The difference now is that we increasingly don't need those people any more, because the machines drive themselves. The production is no longer done by humans, it's done by robots, and as such the basic value of unskilled human labor is falling, and in a perfectly efficient market, is not enough to support that laborer.
This is a big problem, and it's only going to get worse. The pool of jobs available for people who can't somehow retrain into an advanced skill is going to shrink, and it's going to keep shrinking, regardless of whether that's fast or slow. Right now we've been propping up the old system with a measure of economic interventions - both by subsidizing the value of labor via social safety net programs, and by setting price floors via minimum wage laws. In the long run, it's not going to remain a viable solution.
What we'll eventually need to do is something like a guaranteed basic income, where everyone is given enough money for basic living expenses. You'd then be free to earn additional (disposable) income on top of that by working. This keeps people from starving and rioting, but it also preserves the market functionality of the economy, because people still have money to buy the goods the robots produce.
How do you pay for this? For one, change from taxing human labor, i.e. income, and instead tax the new source of production - robots. You could also get rid of all the other social safety net programs, because they're now redundant (and probably less efficient), and get rid of the minimum wage as it's no longer needed. When no one is forced to work to survive, markets can be allowed to freely set the price of labor, however low.
You're overestimating churn and underestimating the cost of entry into the market. How much do you think it costs to build a really good school from the ground up? A decent building even by itself isn't cheap, let alone one with proper facilities to handle lots of children, and that's not even getting into things like arts/music, nevermind basics like textbooks, computers, etc. In a market with highly static/inelastic demand, what do you think happens? Am I, the bank/wall street/venture capitalist going to lend money to someone to start one from the ground up when they might just tank massively?
Even if we assume that there's still a roughly commensurate supply simply by privatizing the existing schools in an area, who chooses who goes where? If all vouchers are equal, you don't have any price signaling, just quotas and waiting lists for the "best" schools (or possibly the most convenient), and the people who are stuck outside are screwed. And if you allow people to pay extra, well, you've just guaranteed that anyone who can't pay is going to end up with kids in bad/failing schools, at which point why did we do this again?
Good ones do. Unfortunately most of their bosses don't necessarily value that (though they value paying lip service to it), so much as they value cutting labor costs, and usually more of the short term variety, even if those short term cuts lead to much larger costs in the long run (penny wise, pound foolish, etc). So to the extent that they think it benefits them,
And yet, a significant number of the 'reformers' aren't really looking to fix the system, so much as privatize large chunks and turn a profit. Some states have gone this route, and at least in Florida there was some serious abuse of it by shady fly-by-night sorts. Even if it wasn't for that, adding a profit motive is not a panacea - sometimes it's merely someone who smells money to be had by getting government funding.
The lure of it is the contrast to union practices. Nobody wants bad or abusive teachers instructing their children, right? And unfortunately union/government jobs do tend to make it much harder to fire someone bad as well as someone undeserving. So we go to private/contracted work, whether the government pays a company to run the school, or puts in some sort of voucher program you can use to attend private school. In my experience though, the improvement is marginal at best. Yes, you can fire people faster, but at the same time, how many for profit companies do you see trying to spend what it takes to get the best workers, even at the cost of cutting their profits, and how many want the cheapest minimum standard they can find? Do they want a skilled coder with years of experience, and salary expectations to match, or do they want someone right out of school with basic knowledge of Java/Python/whatever that they can hire for half the cost? Make no mistake, when you introduce a profit motive, someone wants to profit.
So really, we'd be better served making it easier to hire/fire. My own experience with though is that the problem isn't as much with the protections themselves, as the fact that the administrators don't want to go to the trouble of documenting things, or only start doing so once things are already way out of hand. I think the parent poster is right, that the most ideal thing would be if the unions actually took the active role in trying to weed out the bad ones. Unfortunately that seems to have never been part of union culture in the US the way it has been in some other countries. We can debate why that is (I think it arises from the more adversarial relationship between management and union, whereas in many European/Asian countries the two often work very closely together), but regardless I'm not sure it's easily changed.
No, you're thinking solely from a security perspective as a coder/engineer, and you're not the type that gets to make the decision of what to purchase. It's because their executives/managers were too cheap, and wanted the "cheap/easy" solution.
Cost is a huge driver for these things, and is a large part of why Siemens and other SCADA/ICS manufacturers moved from entirely proprietary systems of the past, to using commercial off the shelf hardware for the Human-Machine Interface (HMI) and such.
And what's the most common OS in business, the one that corporate is most familiar with, and the most likely for them to choose to put into pretty much anything? Why, Microsoft Windows.
No, he's likely referring to the fact that there are more than two major parties in Canada, including one that's considerably to the left of what would be found in the US mainstream parties. He's also likely referring to the fact that the reason the Conservative Party has won the past few elections isn't that it's managed a majority of votes, but instead has won a majority of seats with a plurality of votes, due to the vote on the left being split. The Conservatives used to be split, but then the Reform Party became the Canadian Alliance and then merged with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003. The "yet" refers to the fact that the pressure in first past the post/winner take all systems is to do exactly that, because of the exact results seen since.
Here's a quick breakdown of the major Canadian Federal parties:
Conservative Party - Right Wing Liberal Party - Center-Left New Democratic Party - Left/Social Democrat
There's also the Bloc Québécois, though in the past election (2011) they failed to get more than a handful of seats.
Communism is an economic system, not a political system. The word you're looking for is Totalitarianism.
Now, it's true that the two have been synonymous in that it took a Totalitarian government to impose a communist economic system (or something close to it) in practice, but you can just as easily pair Totalitarianism with other economic systems, including Capitalism.
You're right - Seventh includes right to trial by jury in civil cases, Sixth specifies it in criminal cases. Regardless, my point was that it's a dodge around the constitutional rights of the accused.
The problem is also that the District Attorney is the one who chooses to charge someone with a crime or crimes. Grand Juries are no help - as has been noted many times before, they're entirely ineffective as a check on the DA. Also, the DA generally does not impose or choose the sentence - they merely recommend to the judge, who generally accepts that recommendation. So, the way it works is that the DA loads up the list of charges, then offers to drop most of them if you plead to one or two.
The core problem is one of perverse incentives, because we reward DAs and prosecutors not for seeing justice done, but for winning cases, regardless of whether an innocent or guilty person was locked away. They're incentivized to lock away lots of people, so they can seek higher office of some sort. At the same time, they're immunized from legal retribution for even some of the grossest, most deliberate legal misconduct, including stuff that goes far beyond any of this, like deliberately concealing evidence that an accused is innocent.
When Plea Bargains constitute something like over 90% of all sentences imposed, you know something is grossly wrong. Plea Bargaining is being used as an end run around having to grant people their Seventh Amendment rights. Sure, you can demand a trial, but if you do, we're going to throw every possible charge at you in a grossly disproportionate manner, in a trial you're probably not likely to win, especially if you're poor. Aaron actually had good legal representation, but the vast majority of criminal defendants don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless it's Clarkeian magic. Then you need a sufficiently advanced scientist to explain it.
Consider that Bismarck's sister ship, the Tirpitz, kept a large chunk of the Royal Navy tied down simply by the threat that it might sail out from its base in a fjord in Norway. It was considered to be a serious threat, and treated as such, by the British. Bismarck would have been the same had it not been sunk after multiple engagements (first with the Battlecruiser Hood, and then with the torpedo bombers from Ark Royal).
The problem wasn't that they were using subs as aircraft carriers. It was that their naval doctrine was entirely focused on the Mahan-ian notion of a Decisive Battle, to the exclusion of everything else. Their submarine force, aircraft carrying or not, was seen as an adjunct to the surface fleet, and was used almost exclusively to target surface ships, a tactic that worked poorly with WW2 technology. While today an attack submarine is a regular part of a Carrier Battle Group, this wasn't the case in WW2 because submarines couldn't keep up with surface ships, whether to escort them, or to attack them.
Additionally, while convoy losses in the Pacific would have slowed the Allied advance, it wouldn't have stopped it. The US economy was not dependent on shipments of raw materials the way that Britain or Japan were.
Population growth in advanced countries is negative, as in seriously negative.
Even countries like Mexico are seeing theirs drop off. Mexico had a birth rate around 6.7 per female in 1970, today it's something like 2.2 (lower than where the US was in 1970). Now, there are still undeveloped countries in the world that have high population growth, but introduce just a smidgen of modern family planning options and medicine, and you'll see the same results.
We've got a lot of problems on planet Earth, but runaway population growth isn't going to be one of them. If anything, it's going to be the opposite, or more specifically, the economic consequences of shrinking workforces.
I can think of one organization that would be very, very interested in someone who was - but they sure wouldn't be hiring anyone that wasn't an American citizen.
To some degree also it is that one of the safeguards in the system has broken down, or is not performing as it was expected to do. Namely, the government is expected to act as a check on corporations, but we, the voters, are expected to act as the check on the government. Politicians ought to be afraid of angering the voters by engaging in corrupt activity. And yet, they're not. Who are they afraid of? They're afraid of powerful (i.e. wealthy) donors, interest and lobbying groups.
Canada is a little different in that right now the present political troubles stem in large part from a first past the post system, when votes on the center to left are being split, while those on the right are not, leading to a majority of seats going to a minority of votes. I'm simplifying a bit, and there are money and corruption issues too, but that's the biggest problem from what I've seen. The Harper government has been able to get away with a lot of this despite consistently getting at best a plurality of votes. Hopefully the next election goes differently, though I'm not holding my breath at this point.
The US, however, is having far more of a problem with money. The FPTP system there is an issue too, but the money is as much or moreso the current issue there.
Certainly, all this is rather speculative, and in cordial debate I should hope. :)
Even if you postulate a "Star Trek" economy where replicators can make everything you could possibly want, instantly, at virtually zero cost because there's effectively limitless energy, you still can have an economy. It's simply a post-scarcity economy. There will still be demand - it will simply be for different things. Things that are still 'scarce', namely those things related to human talent. Even today, people will pay more for "hand-crafted" or "artisan" stuff. That's not going to change, at least as long as it's perceived to have elevated status. I foresee in the far future, the richest people will still pay for human service staff (even if aided in the background by robots), simply as a measure of status and importance.
In such an economy (which is far more developed than the one I was postulating in earlier posts), yes, people would have to find something to do. I think most would, even if only turning to hobbies that presently can't earn them enough to live on. We would see more art, more music, more performance-related stuff. A lot would be mediocre, but hey, we'd probably also get a chance to see really good stuff that otherwise might have gotten lost.
And of course, let's not forget the Hitchhikerian:
"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
"The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'
"'But,' says Man, 'the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'
"'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.
"Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book, Well That about Wraps It Up for God.
Yes, but the Beatles, much like Devastator or Voltron, are far greater and more powerful when combined than the sum of their individual parts.
To be clear, we're not talking about a completely equal income, or anything so communistic. We're talking more like one where the basics are covered, and then your income for work you do, whether that be artistic/performance or something high-skilled, or even service jobs, is entirely discretionary.
Robots aren't going to completely replace skilled human labor, at least not until they can replace us completely - and there will still be work to do for some time. It's just that people who previously were able to work and get by on jobs that did not require particular knowledge or talent are going to be increasingly scarce, and there has to be some way to account for that other than a "let them starve and reduce the surplus population" response.
Well, certainly I should caveat that I mean "in this country, with minimal acceptable living standards."
And yes - insane numbers of people in underdeveloped countries have gone from abject poverty, living in a squalid shack with sketchy food (or on the edge of hunger even), to something better, but that's because their society is nowhere near this stage of development. They'll get there eventually, and good for them - but in the meantime, that still doesn't help someone who lives here, with our cost of living.
Now, certainly people here could probably manage to stay alive on the current actual value of labor, if they were willing to tolerate the same abysmal living conditions, but people today in the US are rightly horrified by such things, and we expect better. Our minimal living standards are high, at least compared to undeveloped or developing world nations - and that's a good thing.
It's an inevitable consequence of the advance of technology though. Someday we'll have robots doing all the work, and then things will be great (as long as we can share the benefit of that sufficiently) - the trick is getting there, because there's going to be a lot of disruptions and upending of old assumptions, like that everyone has to earn their living entirely from doing work. Make no mistake, automation/robots are going to reduce the value of unskilled labor below survival level - they pretty much already have, we just have propped it up through subsidies and price floors.
It's only going to get worse, too. What happens when we can replace truck drivers with self-driving vehicles? They won't just be cheaper, they'll be more efficient and likely safer than human drivers. Between long haul and local/regional, that's roughly 1% of the entire national workforce according to DOL.
So what can we do? Well, we can try and stop the robots and progress, but that's a dead end. No, what we need to do is switch the tax base to tax the robots, rather than workers, and use the money to create a guaranteed basic income program so everyone can survive, and then let them work on top of that for whatever they can negotiate without price floors (i.e. no minimum wage).
Mexico's birth rate has also fallen dramatically in the past few decades.
In 1970, Mexico had a birth rate of 6.72 births per female, that had been relatively stable around that level for the years prior. After that, it started to drop, and was at 2.22 births per female in 2012. By contrast, the US birth rate was 2.48 in 1970, and has dropped to 1.88 in 2012, below the replacement level of 2.
What happened? Technology, development, access to family planning/birth control/etc. The same thing has happened in every country that develops past a certain point. In some countries the birth rate has gotten so precariously low that it's having profound effects, creating an aging population with less younger workers to pay for it. We've avoided this somewhat as the US, because despite our falling birth rate, we've made up the difference with immigration. Eventually that's going to stop being the case, because we'll run out of poor places for people to immigrate from (which isn't a bad thing necessarily).
The core problem is that technology is reducing the market value of unskilled/low-skilled human labor below the level that someone can survive on. This is an inevitable consequence of automation, and it's one we're not really prepared mentally to handle, because it goes against all of our core assumptions. After all, human labor has been the core element of production since the dawn of history. We're primed to think that if you're willing to work hard, you should not just survive but get ahead, and that's not the case anymore. You can't start in the mail room and work your way up. You can't even get a mail room job most likely, because the MailBot 9000 handles that now.
We're reacting with the tools we've used in the past - subsidies and price floors, in the form of social safety net programs (which weren't meant to do that), and a minimum wage. We're going to need something better, because eventually things will start breaking even worse. What happens when consumers increasingly lack the money to buy commodities the robots produce? You start having breakdowns in the markets because price signals aren't functioning as expected.
So what do we do? Probably something like a guaranteed basic income - distribute some portion of the value of the robots' production so everyone can afford the basics to survive. At that point you can get rid of the minimum wage laws, because nobody needs to earn some minimum amount from labor to survive.
The problem is that the underlying assumptions we have about labor and its value are becoming increasingly outdated. For pretty much the entirety of human history, productivity has depended on human labor, and thus, human labor had specific value, even if unskilled. Even as we added animals and machines, you needed a human to lead/operate/drive them. The difference now is that we increasingly don't need those people any more, because the machines drive themselves. The production is no longer done by humans, it's done by robots, and as such the basic value of unskilled human labor is falling, and in a perfectly efficient market, is not enough to support that laborer.
This is a big problem, and it's only going to get worse. The pool of jobs available for people who can't somehow retrain into an advanced skill is going to shrink, and it's going to keep shrinking, regardless of whether that's fast or slow. Right now we've been propping up the old system with a measure of economic interventions - both by subsidizing the value of labor via social safety net programs, and by setting price floors via minimum wage laws. In the long run, it's not going to remain a viable solution.
What we'll eventually need to do is something like a guaranteed basic income, where everyone is given enough money for basic living expenses. You'd then be free to earn additional (disposable) income on top of that by working. This keeps people from starving and rioting, but it also preserves the market functionality of the economy, because people still have money to buy the goods the robots produce.
How do you pay for this? For one, change from taxing human labor, i.e. income, and instead tax the new source of production - robots. You could also get rid of all the other social safety net programs, because they're now redundant (and probably less efficient), and get rid of the minimum wage as it's no longer needed. When no one is forced to work to survive, markets can be allowed to freely set the price of labor, however low.
You're overestimating churn and underestimating the cost of entry into the market. How much do you think it costs to build a really good school from the ground up? A decent building even by itself isn't cheap, let alone one with proper facilities to handle lots of children, and that's not even getting into things like arts/music, nevermind basics like textbooks, computers, etc. In a market with highly static/inelastic demand, what do you think happens? Am I, the bank/wall street/venture capitalist going to lend money to someone to start one from the ground up when they might just tank massively?
Even if we assume that there's still a roughly commensurate supply simply by privatizing the existing schools in an area, who chooses who goes where? If all vouchers are equal, you don't have any price signaling, just quotas and waiting lists for the "best" schools (or possibly the most convenient), and the people who are stuck outside are screwed. And if you allow people to pay extra, well, you've just guaranteed that anyone who can't pay is going to end up with kids in bad/failing schools, at which point why did we do this again?
Good ones do. Unfortunately most of their bosses don't necessarily value that (though they value paying lip service to it), so much as they value cutting labor costs, and usually more of the short term variety, even if those short term cuts lead to much larger costs in the long run (penny wise, pound foolish, etc). So to the extent that they think it benefits them,
And yet, a significant number of the 'reformers' aren't really looking to fix the system, so much as privatize large chunks and turn a profit. Some states have gone this route, and at least in Florida there was some serious abuse of it by shady fly-by-night sorts. Even if it wasn't for that, adding a profit motive is not a panacea - sometimes it's merely someone who smells money to be had by getting government funding.
The lure of it is the contrast to union practices. Nobody wants bad or abusive teachers instructing their children, right? And unfortunately union/government jobs do tend to make it much harder to fire someone bad as well as someone undeserving. So we go to private/contracted work, whether the government pays a company to run the school, or puts in some sort of voucher program you can use to attend private school. In my experience though, the improvement is marginal at best. Yes, you can fire people faster, but at the same time, how many for profit companies do you see trying to spend what it takes to get the best workers, even at the cost of cutting their profits, and how many want the cheapest minimum standard they can find? Do they want a skilled coder with years of experience, and salary expectations to match, or do they want someone right out of school with basic knowledge of Java/Python/whatever that they can hire for half the cost? Make no mistake, when you introduce a profit motive, someone wants to profit.
So really, we'd be better served making it easier to hire/fire. My own experience with though is that the problem isn't as much with the protections themselves, as the fact that the administrators don't want to go to the trouble of documenting things, or only start doing so once things are already way out of hand. I think the parent poster is right, that the most ideal thing would be if the unions actually took the active role in trying to weed out the bad ones. Unfortunately that seems to have never been part of union culture in the US the way it has been in some other countries. We can debate why that is (I think it arises from the more adversarial relationship between management and union, whereas in many European/Asian countries the two often work very closely together), but regardless I'm not sure it's easily changed.
No, you're thinking solely from a security perspective as a coder/engineer, and you're not the type that gets to make the decision of what to purchase. It's because their executives/managers were too cheap, and wanted the "cheap/easy" solution.
Cost is a huge driver for these things, and is a large part of why Siemens and other SCADA/ICS manufacturers moved from entirely proprietary systems of the past, to using commercial off the shelf hardware for the Human-Machine Interface (HMI) and such.
And what's the most common OS in business, the one that corporate is most familiar with, and the most likely for them to choose to put into pretty much anything? Why, Microsoft Windows.
No, he's likely referring to the fact that there are more than two major parties in Canada, including one that's considerably to the left of what would be found in the US mainstream parties. He's also likely referring to the fact that the reason the Conservative Party has won the past few elections isn't that it's managed a majority of votes, but instead has won a majority of seats with a plurality of votes, due to the vote on the left being split. The Conservatives used to be split, but then the Reform Party became the Canadian Alliance and then merged with the Progressive Conservatives in 2003. The "yet" refers to the fact that the pressure in first past the post/winner take all systems is to do exactly that, because of the exact results seen since.
Here's a quick breakdown of the major Canadian Federal parties:
Conservative Party - Right Wing
Liberal Party - Center-Left
New Democratic Party - Left/Social Democrat
There's also the Bloc Québécois, though in the past election (2011) they failed to get more than a handful of seats.
Communism is an economic system, not a political system. The word you're looking for is Totalitarianism.
Now, it's true that the two have been synonymous in that it took a Totalitarian government to impose a communist economic system (or something close to it) in practice, but you can just as easily pair Totalitarianism with other economic systems, including Capitalism.
You're right - Seventh includes right to trial by jury in civil cases, Sixth specifies it in criminal cases. Regardless, my point was that it's a dodge around the constitutional rights of the accused.
The problem is also that the District Attorney is the one who chooses to charge someone with a crime or crimes. Grand Juries are no help - as has been noted many times before, they're entirely ineffective as a check on the DA. Also, the DA generally does not impose or choose the sentence - they merely recommend to the judge, who generally accepts that recommendation. So, the way it works is that the DA loads up the list of charges, then offers to drop most of them if you plead to one or two.
The core problem is one of perverse incentives, because we reward DAs and prosecutors not for seeing justice done, but for winning cases, regardless of whether an innocent or guilty person was locked away. They're incentivized to lock away lots of people, so they can seek higher office of some sort. At the same time, they're immunized from legal retribution for even some of the grossest, most deliberate legal misconduct, including stuff that goes far beyond any of this, like deliberately concealing evidence that an accused is innocent.
When Plea Bargains constitute something like over 90% of all sentences imposed, you know something is grossly wrong. Plea Bargaining is being used as an end run around having to grant people their Seventh Amendment rights. Sure, you can demand a trial, but if you do, we're going to throw every possible charge at you in a grossly disproportionate manner, in a trial you're probably not likely to win, especially if you're poor. Aaron actually had good legal representation, but the vast majority of criminal defendants don't.
By contrast, Amtrak is spending $117 billion to upgrade the Northeast Corridor to get to a mere 350km/h.