>>You would think that a court of law would need to be consulted and signatures would have to be issued and compared, at least through the mail.
Theoretically that is what notaries and escrow is all about. Whatever notary signed off on this should lose their license. If it wasn't notarized, then the escrow company for approving a sale without notarized documents. I'm also kind of surprised the real estate agent never tried to call the guy, even if he was overseas.
I am an atheist because I refuse to spend my time on something that can not be proven, has no quantifiable useful value to me, and is championed but a bunch of men who for the most part are no better then psychics who claim to speak to the dead. There is no compelling evidence that would require me to take this more seriously then I do santa claus or those christian leaders telling every generation that their generation is the 'end times'.
We all believe in a lot of things that can't be proven. The logical positivism / Popperish notion that only scientific knowledge is valuable is one of the greatest fallacies that everyone seems to believe on Slashdot. Entire swathes of human knowledge cannot be proven scientifically. Math, History, the Arts. If you look at what the early Christians were doing in their writings, they were using logic and evidence to convince people to convert - Gentiles, especially, had no reason to care about what this random Jewish guy was doing, yet they converted anyway. Why? Logic and evidence. What evidence? "Go talk to the people who've seen these things, and ask them." It seems very odd that the religion would be founded on a lie when they're encouraging people to find out for themselves what happened.
I also came to my conclusions at a young age. I was punished for them. I was raised catholic, but allowed to read. I read all about mythology because I loved the stories. Eventually it dawned on me that if all those gods were not real and thousands (probably millions) believed in them, then it stood to reason that my god was just another story and that one day people would read the bible like I read stories about Zeus. I brought this up to my parents and my priest and instead of answered with some kind of evidence, I was told that thinking like that would be the path to hell.
Catholic, eh? Not surprising, honestly. =)
Or another way of looking at it is that humans have been having these sorts of experiences with the numinous for a long time, and have been trying to capture it in different ways. I'm not a theosophist, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.
It's not that I don't want to accept the stories. I would love for there to be a wonderful afterlife with my family instead d of the unknown. The unknown is fucking terrifying! There have been nights (after a few drinks) when I've talked with people about death. Those nights sometimes lead to sleepless thought about the fear that when this life on earth is over that I am gone. That all that will be left is what I've done here and that is almost nothing. Even eternal punishment would be better then just being gone (Such is the desire for life).
Show me a shred of real evidence that supports god and I'll believe. You must however accept that proof does not mean I'll worship god. If it is the christian god I would rather burn in hell. That god is a hateful, spiteful, jealous god and nothing in the bible has shown me any reason to give him my respect. I'm fully willing to sit down with anyone who has new and useful evidence to the existence of god and how it can benefit me (and let's face it, the worship of gods is all about benefiting one's self). I am not however interesting in creating lies to make myself sleep better at night.
Ok, since you mention the question of life after death. Why do you think it's so, that death is it - Nothingness? While it seems impossible for 'us' to ever arise from nothingness again, the only evidence that we have is that it IS possible. Before we were born, we did not exist. And yet - now we do. It seems better to say that it is more likely to happen again than to say that it is impossible.
>>Which brings us back to what, at the moment, we are probably not going to come to agreement on. We can't agree on "What works?" unless we can reasonable agree on "What are we trying to achieve?". I think we agree on some aspects of that, but we still emphasize, or accept, different goals and side-effects.
All other things aside, I think we all (including teachers, parents, and administrators) want the same things for our students. That's where I think Gatto is wrong - he's hung up on a paradigm that is years out of date in a system that reinvents itself a couple times a decade. It's like dog-years, or CPU aging in the 1990s. Saying that our educational system is designed to produce factory drones is like saying that modern CPUs are too complicated to speed up because they have a CISC architecture.
In general, I think the most important factor in education is to get kids engaged. When I teach (I guest lecture at the local community college a few times a year), when I ask questions, it's never, "Does anyone know what year George Washington was born?" because, honestly, they don't know, and I don't know, and it's not really important anyway. A much better question about George Washington would be to ask, "He's known as the father of our freedom, but he kept slaves - do you think he's a hypocrite?" or "Do you think companies should follow voluntary environmental codes, even if it means the company might go out of business?" And using the questions to drive conversation, and to get people to think.
The way the human brain works is that it remembers facts that it knows it's going to use. I could tell you every week what day George Washington was born on, and you'd forget it. UNTIL, and this is the key point, I explain that President's Day Holiday was originally based on Washington's Birthday. Since which days you get off from school are very memorable to you, you'll always remember it is in mid February some time. Likewise, if you get into an ethical discussion over George Washington's treatment of slaves, you're never going to forget the fact that he had slaves. And so forth.
I personally think that cognitive science people should take all their lessons on memory and apply it to the educational realm. Some are doing it already.
>>Not surprisingly, people get quite defensive when you do actually ask them about this stuff - and often resort to the "well, a lot of it is just stories, but I do believe in the CORE stuff" response, leaving to question what is actually core to a mythology. Dan Dennett wrote a great book about this stuff, Breaking the Spell, worth the read!
Yeah, but Dan Dennett believes in a lot of crazy stuff like the Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness, which has no basis in either neuroscience, philosophy, or psychology, and yet he's famous for writing a book called Consciousness Explained which does anything but - it argues we're not actually conscious, and we're all mistaken about it, in contrary to the only evidence that we HAVE about consciousness, namely, our own experiences in the matter.
At least he acknowledges the important of religion in human society. The other leading idiot-atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins not only don't understand religion, but they argue at great lengths against theistic strawmen that they've crafted for themselves.
>>If you believe that somehow your deity is not affected by the laws of formal logic
Actually, I believe the consensus (insomuch as there is one) is that God is bound by formal logic. Read your CS Lewis on square circles and the like.
Christians believe that science is the study of God's creation, and so there's no "conflict" between science and religion. (Again, consensus view - crazy fundy-cat is crazy.) The Bible itself uses evidence and logic to convince people to believe. At the time, it went along the lines of, "If you don't believe me, go talk with the people that saw all this shit go down."
>>Now some are more honest, they just don't want to think about it, and will become angry when pointed out that their view of the Universe is absurd.
Yes, like atheists. Who admit they don't know why there's anything instead of nothing, only that they're absolutely, positively certain that it couldn't be anything resembling God. Because they don't like the conclusion this would bring - it's more absurd than believing in UFOs or magical tree spirits.
>>Remember, even in the golden days of Greece, religion was already trying to murder science.
The same Greek scientists that developed the heliocentric theory to begin with? I'm drowning in irony.
>>Religion has been nothing but our biggest problem for at least 3000 years.
No, it's been our biggest force for good, about the only thing that transforms our society in a positive away from the selfish take-everything-you-can drive humans are so good at fulfilling.
If you're just going on body count, the biggest problem humanity has ever suffered is Socialism/Communism, but it's not politically correct to talk about that. It's only PC to beat up on religions.
>>More to the point the copper network is noisy as hell.
Yep. There was water leaking into the conduit between my house (in California) and the local box. When we activated our phone line after moving in, it dialed 9-11 4 times, made a bunch of long distance calls, and 70-some odd 411 calls. The police said it was just static when they answered, but that it traced back to our line.
>>GE needs to team up with Cree and retrofit their factory for making the next generation LED bulbs.
Lord, no. LED lights and CFLs both have horrible flicker problems - they flicker at 60Hz, I believe, which is quite noticeable. And their color spectra are all fucked too.
Fortunately I've got enough of a stock of incandescent bulbs to last for decades.
>>It's more of a problem of unintentional consequences.
Yep, it's the law of unintended consequences. Bites greens in the ass more than most people because they fundamentally don't understand normal people.
Or to put it a different way, just because the government tries to legislate out a market demand, doesn't mean that market demand goes away. See for example prohibition.
Guess how science works, dipshit? Let's assume for a second that vaccines can cause seizures in a small population of babies. If most of the doctors out there fail to report their case studies, as they're supposed to do, then we'll continue incorrectly having "proof" that vaccines don't cause seizures.
If your method can be used to draw incorrect results, your method is wrong.
I'm not sure that he considers driving an old station wagon part of the effort. That said, modern station wagons can be very fuel efficient, no different than any other model from the same line, really. It's just when you're talking antique, giant, heavy, badly engineered stuff that you get terrible mileage. I'm also not sure why you think greens (like him) are responsible for the popularity of the SUV -- it seems general human stupidity (particularly in certain areas of the world) takes most of the blame.
You see, the station wagon was (ironically enough) hated by greens back in the day for much of the same reasons SUVs are hated today. So they passed CAFE regulations which upped fleet MPG averages. Station wagons were dropped because they caused automotive manufacturers to miss their MPG targets. The market demand for being able to carry a lot of crap around in your car remained, however, so we got the modern SUV, which, as a light truck, fell under different CAFE regulations. SUVs, of course, have lower MPG ratings today than the old wood paneled station wagons.
A lot of green thinking results in things that are worse for the environment. That's why I have so little respect for them. They're also responsible for us using coal power (which spews out mercury, radiation, CO2, and particulate pollution) instead of nuclear. If we had a nuclear power supply instead of a coal one, we'd meet every target for CO2 necessary - and people could keep driving their SUVs or whatever.
Greens are responsible for global warming? Yep.
I could go on. (Greens are responsible for killing deployment of solar power here in California? Yep. Greens are responsible for blocking alternative gasoline sources? Yep.)
>>And you're again missing the point. Merely collecting random events is not data.
Actually, that's exactly how data is collected. The FDA has a system for reporting cases like this. If it is not used, then it will bias the data in favor of vaccine safety, pure and simple.
>>The FDA has regulations that require reporting of unexpected adverse effects.
I know - my wife is a pharmacist. I'm not some anti-medicine nutjob. My point is that if doctors are actively ignoring evidence to the contrary of what they think they know, then that's a problem, pure and simple.
>>Data is not the plural of anecdote. Go back to your cave troll...
Idiot.
My point was not that vaccines caused seizures, as should be obvious. The point was: if doctors a priori know that vaccines can't cause seizures, and refuse to collect data counter to their stance, then it's a self-fulfilling belief, and not scientific at all.
>>Of course the GP might be trolling us but a one time account of something that did not get logged and reported is way more interesting than a one time correlation.
Trolling? Her name is Amy, lives in San Diego, went to high school with me. She's not some mythical friend of a friend of a second cousin that someone's heard a story about.
But yeah, that's precisely my point. The pediatrician absolutely refused to entertain the notion that the vaccine could have caused the seizure, citing the lack of evidence as proof.
Interesting, but the kid's EEG was all over the place, which means that it wasn't a typical febrile seizure. It also lasted too long.
The pediatrician actually didn't know what was going on, only that it absolutely, positively, couldn't have been caused by the vaccine administered a few hours earlier.
>>but if you consider the vast numbers of people who receive vaccinations with no issues at all, the side-effect cases are extremely minute
Are they? A friend of mine had her baby immunized, took it home, and then it went into seizures a few hours later. Nearly died.
The asked the doctor in the ER if it could have been caused by the vaccines. He said, "Not a chance, there's no evidence they cause seizures." And then promptly didn't file it as a possible complication from the vaccine.
>>Pointing to one specific school that has low test scores doesn't prove much about all alternatives being worse.
I know. That's why I provided a link to the front end to the database so you can drill into it to your heart's content, if you're really curious. They have the data available in excel format, too, if you prefer not using a web frontend.
>>If I say this school has high college acceptance scores, but this school has kids who are kind to each other, which school is "better"? Which school would you send your kids to?
It's a good question, and I don't think there's one answer for everyone. We actually chose to buy a house next to the top high school in the area, even though the kids have reputations of being spoiled elitist bastards. Hopefully my wife and I can mitigate the negative while gaining the benefits of the positive for our hypothetical children.
>>Suicide rates among youth have increased threefold in the past half-century
There's a lot of confounding factors in this, and you can't just say it's because schools are more prison-like. As you say, some schools resemble minimum-security facilities these days. And some don't. It would be an interesting study to compare suicide rates / suicidal thoughts by physical appearance of the schools to see if it makes a difference - but since the prison-ish schools are uniformly poor and troubled already, it will be hard to control for all the different factors.
>>Vitamin D and Whole Foods
I know you're hung up on these issues, but the hour of sunlight kids get a day in PE is enough, unless you're living in Alaska or something. They also all drink Vitamin-D enriched milk with school lunches. The nutrition issue is a hot topic in schools these days, with a lot of schools now banning all sodas (even diet sodas) and sugary drinks on campus. Kind of a pain in the ass for people like me that travel to a lot of schools. =)
>>Still, in general, I'd agree with you, as would someone like John Holt, that people learn best from some mix of guidance and exploration, so one can make a case that people should not just flounder. I'm happy to agree on that, and to the extent free schools deserve some criticism, I've heard people say that self-motivated introverted-leaning children often get more out of them academically (while feeling left out socially), whereas extroverted leaning children often miss out academically (while they have a great time socially)
The thing is, there's a real role for teachers to play - it's much easier to learn from someone than it is to teach yourself. By 5th grade, I'd mastered all of the math available in my elementary school, so in 6th grade (it was a K-6 school), they bought an algebra textbook for me, and told me to have fun with it. My teacher couldn't teach algebra, so even though I did quite fine in the first semester of school, when I got stuck on something more complicated, I couldn't get any support, and I floundered the rest of the year.
That's perhaps an extreme example, though. A more common example would be teachers turning their students loose on the internet to "go learn". Without direction, students end up learning a lot less than if they'd just sat down for a lecture by their teacher. There's plenty of papers supporting this, too. Your notion that it's the lack of freedom that's hurting education just doesn't stand up to actual examples with giving kids total freedom.
I do agree with you, though. I do think kids are treated with a certain degree of contempt and lack of trust - teenagers especially. In my high school years, they banned off-campus lunches, for example, and instituted tardy sweeps and other, rather strict policies. I was more than happy to bail out of school at lunch every day my senior year to escape to UC San Diego for advanced math classes (I'd exhausted high school math by the end of 10th grade, and took community college calculus in 11th). But it did have a real effect on reducing truancy and tardiness, which were cutting
>>Your fallacy here is that you're assuming that extra income should be tax free, and also that you're counting child care as a tax
No, I don't think they should be tax free. But the current system is broken. Losing half your income on a marginal gain is a pretty severe disincentive to work.
I'm not counting child care as a tax. If you count child care, you're probably lose over three quarters of your nominal wages.
>>If you really feel the wealthy are getting the short end of the stick in life
I'm not saying that. My point, again, is that "taxing the rich" by targeting the top 10% of income earners is a lie, insofar as the connotations of "rich" go. To me, it's simple - if you can't afford to buy a house where you live, you're not rich. The OP was unfairly categorizing all of the people in the top 10% bracket as being worthless slugs, when I think he was really talking about people in the top fraction of the top 1%.
Slashdot Mirror
>>You would think that a court of law would need to be consulted and signatures would have to be issued and compared, at least through the mail.
Theoretically that is what notaries and escrow is all about. Whatever notary signed off on this should lose their license. If it wasn't notarized, then the escrow company for approving a sale without notarized documents. I'm also kind of surprised the real estate agent never tried to call the guy, even if he was overseas.
We all believe in a lot of things that can't be proven. The logical positivism / Popperish notion that only scientific knowledge is valuable is one of the greatest fallacies that everyone seems to believe on Slashdot. Entire swathes of human knowledge cannot be proven scientifically. Math, History, the Arts. If you look at what the early Christians were doing in their writings, they were using logic and evidence to convince people to convert - Gentiles, especially, had no reason to care about what this random Jewish guy was doing, yet they converted anyway. Why? Logic and evidence. What evidence? "Go talk to the people who've seen these things, and ask them." It seems very odd that the religion would be founded on a lie when they're encouraging people to find out for themselves what happened.
Catholic, eh? Not surprising, honestly. =)
Or another way of looking at it is that humans have been having these sorts of experiences with the numinous for a long time, and have been trying to capture it in different ways. I'm not a theosophist, but it's interesting to think about nonetheless.
Ok, since you mention the question of life after death. Why do you think it's so, that death is it - Nothingness? While it seems impossible for 'us' to ever arise from nothingness again, the only evidence that we have is that it IS possible. Before we were born, we did not exist. And yet - now we do. It seems better to say that it is more likely to happen again than to say that it is impossible.
>>Which brings us back to what, at the moment, we are probably not going to come to agreement on. We can't agree on "What works?" unless we can reasonable agree on "What are we trying to achieve?". I think we agree on some aspects of that, but we still emphasize, or accept, different goals and side-effects.
All other things aside, I think we all (including teachers, parents, and administrators) want the same things for our students. That's where I think Gatto is wrong - he's hung up on a paradigm that is years out of date in a system that reinvents itself a couple times a decade. It's like dog-years, or CPU aging in the 1990s. Saying that our educational system is designed to produce factory drones is like saying that modern CPUs are too complicated to speed up because they have a CISC architecture.
In general, I think the most important factor in education is to get kids engaged. When I teach (I guest lecture at the local community college a few times a year), when I ask questions, it's never, "Does anyone know what year George Washington was born?" because, honestly, they don't know, and I don't know, and it's not really important anyway. A much better question about George Washington would be to ask, "He's known as the father of our freedom, but he kept slaves - do you think he's a hypocrite?" or "Do you think companies should follow voluntary environmental codes, even if it means the company might go out of business?" And using the questions to drive conversation, and to get people to think.
The way the human brain works is that it remembers facts that it knows it's going to use. I could tell you every week what day George Washington was born on, and you'd forget it. UNTIL, and this is the key point, I explain that President's Day Holiday was originally based on Washington's Birthday. Since which days you get off from school are very memorable to you, you'll always remember it is in mid February some time. Likewise, if you get into an ethical discussion over George Washington's treatment of slaves, you're never going to forget the fact that he had slaves. And so forth.
I personally think that cognitive science people should take all their lessons on memory and apply it to the educational realm. Some are doing it already.
Julius Caesar died on the Ides of March.
Good luck with that one.
>>Not surprisingly, people get quite defensive when you do actually ask them about this stuff - and often resort to the "well, a lot of it is just stories, but I do believe in the CORE stuff" response, leaving to question what is actually core to a mythology. Dan Dennett wrote a great book about this stuff, Breaking the Spell, worth the read!
Yeah, but Dan Dennett believes in a lot of crazy stuff like the Multiple Drafts Theory of Consciousness, which has no basis in either neuroscience, philosophy, or psychology, and yet he's famous for writing a book called Consciousness Explained which does anything but - it argues we're not actually conscious, and we're all mistaken about it, in contrary to the only evidence that we HAVE about consciousness, namely, our own experiences in the matter.
At least he acknowledges the important of religion in human society. The other leading idiot-atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins not only don't understand religion, but they argue at great lengths against theistic strawmen that they've crafted for themselves.
>>If you believe that somehow your deity is not affected by the laws of formal logic
Actually, I believe the consensus (insomuch as there is one) is that God is bound by formal logic. Read your CS Lewis on square circles and the like.
Christians believe that science is the study of God's creation, and so there's no "conflict" between science and religion. (Again, consensus view - crazy fundy-cat is crazy.) The Bible itself uses evidence and logic to convince people to believe. At the time, it went along the lines of, "If you don't believe me, go talk with the people that saw all this shit go down."
>>Now some are more honest, they just don't want to think about it, and will become angry when pointed out that their view of the Universe is absurd.
Yes, like atheists. Who admit they don't know why there's anything instead of nothing, only that they're absolutely, positively certain that it couldn't be anything resembling God. Because they don't like the conclusion this would bring - it's more absurd than believing in UFOs or magical tree spirits.
>>Remember, even in the golden days of Greece, religion was already trying to murder science.
The same Greek scientists that developed the heliocentric theory to begin with? I'm drowning in irony.
>>Religion has been nothing but our biggest problem for at least 3000 years.
No, it's been our biggest force for good, about the only thing that transforms our society in a positive away from the selfish take-everything-you-can drive humans are so good at fulfilling.
If you're just going on body count, the biggest problem humanity has ever suffered is Socialism/Communism, but it's not politically correct to talk about that. It's only PC to beat up on religions.
>>More to the point the copper network is noisy as hell.
Yep. There was water leaking into the conduit between my house (in California) and the local box. When we activated our phone line after moving in, it dialed 9-11 4 times, made a bunch of long distance calls, and 70-some odd 411 calls. The police said it was just static when they answered, but that it traced back to our line.
>>If the low power factors of CFLs presented problems to them, they wouldn't do this, would they?
They would if congress makes them. Which they do.
>>GE needs to team up with Cree and retrofit their factory for making the next generation LED bulbs.
Lord, no. LED lights and CFLs both have horrible flicker problems - they flicker at 60Hz, I believe, which is quite noticeable. And their color spectra are all fucked too.
Fortunately I've got enough of a stock of incandescent bulbs to last for decades.
>>It's more of a problem of unintentional consequences.
Yep, it's the law of unintended consequences. Bites greens in the ass more than most people because they fundamentally don't understand normal people.
Or to put it a different way, just because the government tries to legislate out a market demand, doesn't mean that market demand goes away. See for example prohibition.
>>You're correlating random events.
Guess how science works, dipshit? Let's assume for a second that vaccines can cause seizures in a small population of babies. If most of the doctors out there fail to report their case studies, as they're supposed to do, then we'll continue incorrectly having "proof" that vaccines don't cause seizures.
If your method can be used to draw incorrect results, your method is wrong.
You see, the station wagon was (ironically enough) hated by greens back in the day for much of the same reasons SUVs are hated today. So they passed CAFE regulations which upped fleet MPG averages. Station wagons were dropped because they caused automotive manufacturers to miss their MPG targets. The market demand for being able to carry a lot of crap around in your car remained, however, so we got the modern SUV, which, as a light truck, fell under different CAFE regulations. SUVs, of course, have lower MPG ratings today than the old wood paneled station wagons.
A lot of green thinking results in things that are worse for the environment. That's why I have so little respect for them. They're also responsible for us using coal power (which spews out mercury, radiation, CO2, and particulate pollution) instead of nuclear. If we had a nuclear power supply instead of a coal one, we'd meet every target for CO2 necessary - and people could keep driving their SUVs or whatever.
Greens are responsible for global warming? Yep.
I could go on. (Greens are responsible for killing deployment of solar power here in California? Yep. Greens are responsible for blocking alternative gasoline sources? Yep.)
>>And you're again missing the point. Merely collecting random events is not data.
Actually, that's exactly how data is collected. The FDA has a system for reporting cases like this. If it is not used, then it will bias the data in favor of vaccine safety, pure and simple.
>>The FDA has regulations that require reporting of unexpected adverse effects.
I know - my wife is a pharmacist. I'm not some anti-medicine nutjob. My point is that if doctors are actively ignoring evidence to the contrary of what they think they know, then that's a problem, pure and simple.
>>Data is not the plural of anecdote. Go back to your cave troll...
Idiot.
My point was not that vaccines caused seizures, as should be obvious. The point was: if doctors a priori know that vaccines can't cause seizures, and refuse to collect data counter to their stance, then it's a self-fulfilling belief, and not scientific at all.
>>Of course the GP might be trolling us but a one time account of something that did not get logged and reported is way more interesting than a one time correlation.
Trolling? Her name is Amy, lives in San Diego, went to high school with me. She's not some mythical friend of a friend of a second cousin that someone's heard a story about.
But yeah, that's precisely my point. The pediatrician absolutely refused to entertain the notion that the vaccine could have caused the seizure, citing the lack of evidence as proof.
As I said: chicken and egg.
Interesting, but the kid's EEG was all over the place, which means that it wasn't a typical febrile seizure. It also lasted too long.
The pediatrician actually didn't know what was going on, only that it absolutely, positively, couldn't have been caused by the vaccine administered a few hours earlier.
>>Because as we all know, mere one-time correlation is the strongest form of evidence.
Because, as we all know, ignoring data is a great way to confirm presuppositions.
>>but if you consider the vast numbers of people who receive vaccinations with no issues at all, the side-effect cases are extremely minute
Are they? A friend of mine had her baby immunized, took it home, and then it went into seizures a few hours later. Nearly died.
The asked the doctor in the ER if it could have been caused by the vaccines. He said, "Not a chance, there's no evidence they cause seizures." And then promptly didn't file it as a possible complication from the vaccine.
Chicken. Egg.
>>I asked my Baby Boomer parents for their old station wagon
You know that greens like you killed the station wagon and gave us the SUV, right?
>>as I clean up their mess and learn to survive the aftermath.
What aftermath? Has there been some sort of disaster I've missed? Is driving a wood-paneled station wagon cleaning the environment somehow?
The problem with greens, is that they're by and large complete fucking idiots.
No offense.
>>There is no engineering around Peak Oil.
No?
The 1920s would like to have a talk with you:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
>>Well, the German military does have some past experience in having to manage without petroleum. : - )
Right. They used the Fisher-Tropsch process (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process) to generate oil from coal.
Or, as our lovely senator from California, Diane Feinstein put it, "An unproven, untested, and new method of generating gasoline."
Right before she voted against it in the senate.
>>Pointing to one specific school that has low test scores doesn't prove much about all alternatives being worse.
I know. That's why I provided a link to the front end to the database so you can drill into it to your heart's content, if you're really curious. They have the data available in excel format, too, if you prefer not using a web frontend.
>>If I say this school has high college acceptance scores, but this school has kids who are kind to each other, which school is "better"? Which school would you send your kids to?
It's a good question, and I don't think there's one answer for everyone. We actually chose to buy a house next to the top high school in the area, even though the kids have reputations of being spoiled elitist bastards. Hopefully my wife and I can mitigate the negative while gaining the benefits of the positive for our hypothetical children.
>>Suicide rates among youth have increased threefold in the past half-century
There's a lot of confounding factors in this, and you can't just say it's because schools are more prison-like. As you say, some schools resemble minimum-security facilities these days. And some don't. It would be an interesting study to compare suicide rates / suicidal thoughts by physical appearance of the schools to see if it makes a difference - but since the prison-ish schools are uniformly poor and troubled already, it will be hard to control for all the different factors.
>>Vitamin D and Whole Foods
I know you're hung up on these issues, but the hour of sunlight kids get a day in PE is enough, unless you're living in Alaska or something. They also all drink Vitamin-D enriched milk with school lunches. The nutrition issue is a hot topic in schools these days, with a lot of schools now banning all sodas (even diet sodas) and sugary drinks on campus. Kind of a pain in the ass for people like me that travel to a lot of schools. =)
>>Still, in general, I'd agree with you, as would someone like John Holt, that people learn best from some mix of guidance and exploration, so one can make a case that people should not just flounder. I'm happy to agree on that, and to the extent free schools deserve some criticism, I've heard people say that self-motivated introverted-leaning children often get more out of them academically (while feeling left out socially), whereas extroverted leaning children often miss out academically (while they have a great time socially)
The thing is, there's a real role for teachers to play - it's much easier to learn from someone than it is to teach yourself. By 5th grade, I'd mastered all of the math available in my elementary school, so in 6th grade (it was a K-6 school), they bought an algebra textbook for me, and told me to have fun with it. My teacher couldn't teach algebra, so even though I did quite fine in the first semester of school, when I got stuck on something more complicated, I couldn't get any support, and I floundered the rest of the year.
That's perhaps an extreme example, though. A more common example would be teachers turning their students loose on the internet to "go learn". Without direction, students end up learning a lot less than if they'd just sat down for a lecture by their teacher. There's plenty of papers supporting this, too. Your notion that it's the lack of freedom that's hurting education just doesn't stand up to actual examples with giving kids total freedom.
I do agree with you, though. I do think kids are treated with a certain degree of contempt and lack of trust - teenagers especially. In my high school years, they banned off-campus lunches, for example, and instituted tardy sweeps and other, rather strict policies. I was more than happy to bail out of school at lunch every day my senior year to escape to UC San Diego for advanced math classes (I'd exhausted high school math by the end of 10th grade, and took community college calculus in 11th). But it did have a real effect on reducing truancy and tardiness, which were cutting
>>Your fallacy here is that you're assuming that extra income should be tax free, and also that you're counting child care as a tax
No, I don't think they should be tax free. But the current system is broken. Losing half your income on a marginal gain is a pretty severe disincentive to work.
I'm not counting child care as a tax. If you count child care, you're probably lose over three quarters of your nominal wages.
>>If you really feel the wealthy are getting the short end of the stick in life
I'm not saying that. My point, again, is that "taxing the rich" by targeting the top 10% of income earners is a lie, insofar as the connotations of "rich" go. To me, it's simple - if you can't afford to buy a house where you live, you're not rich. The OP was unfairly categorizing all of the people in the top 10% bracket as being worthless slugs, when I think he was really talking about people in the top fraction of the top 1%.