That puts a stopper on the young earth creationists, but not the rest of the creationists. Most creationists already subscribe to the idea that the days of Genesis were actually eras that were million or billions of years long. They believe in the big bang. They believe that the universe is 13.6 billion years old and that the earth is between 4 and 5 billion years old, but they also believe that the first man was Adam and that he lived just over 6000 years ago. That's where the fight lies: convincing creationists of evolution.
Yes, both the US and Russia have tens of thousands of warheads, but they are mostly just dead weight. The US and Russia only have 500 ICBMs a piece and (thanks to the SALT and START treaties) none of them are multiple reentry. The US submarine and B-2 fleets are far, far too small to launch the rest of the warheads (both number in the dozens), and I doubt that Russia's strike capabiles are any better considering that they spend far less on their military. The huge nuclear arsenal is a relic of the 50s and 60s when any nuclear strike plan involved strategic air command deploying thousands of nuclear armed B-52 bombers. The idea of doing such a thing today is laughable. B-52s are sitting ducks to modern air defense systems, but B-2 stealth bombers are far too expensive to mass produce (2 billion dollars a piece). That means that the vast majority of existing warheads are dead weight. The problem is that no country wants to unilaterally destroy the excess nukes because it makes them look weak. So we have to wait for treaties like SALT and START before any weapons are destroyed, and the diplomatic process takes a long time.
Oil companies or cigarette companies certainly aren't going to go out of business any time soon, so it doesn't seem like being universally disliked hurts profits.
The entire point of my post is that when that 18 year old goes looking for his first job, he will be competing with the other group of people that is looking for entry level jobs: 22 year old college grads. How is he supposed to be get five years of experience by the age of 23 when no one will hire him as an 18 year old? Again: 23 year old HS grads with five years of development experience are a very, very rare breed.
The appropriate distinction is this:
23yo HS grad with 5 years of C++ embedded systems support and development
23yo BA degree with 0 years of C++ embedded systems support and development
No, the appropriate distinction is this:
18 year old HS grad with coursework in Intro to Programming in BASIC and AP Computer Science; self-taught C++ programmer; no work experience; reference from high school programming teacher who has never held a job in industry
22 year old college grad with course work in C++, embedded systems, databases, data structures, object-oriented software design, computation theory, etc.; two summer internships at large software firms; references from his bosses at those two internships, both with 20+ years of experience in industry, both willing to vouch that he has the qualities needed to succeed in an industry setting
23 year old high school grads with five years of software development experience simply do not exist: In the real world, no 18 year old high school grad will ever be able to get that first job where he can gain years of experience.
The status of OpenNI is a not-for-profit whose framework allows developers to create middleware and applications for a range of devices, including the Asus Xtion Pro.
Whenever a company is notified of a copyright infringing video, it has two options. It can take down the video, or it can allow the video to remain up and collect a fraction of advertizing revenue as the licensing fee. Some companies (Vevo, for example) regularly choose the latter option. GEMA did not, meaning that it refused to license it's property to Youtube.
Youtube's description is actually rather forgiving because it suggests that GEMA simply might not have gotten around to making a licensing agreement yet, while the reality is that GEMA was already presented with the option to license the works and actively refused to do so.
Who ever said using an IDE is bad? IDEs are powerful tools that improve developer productivity. The problem with the older generation of IDEs (especially older versions of Visual Studio) was that they focused too much on graphical UI builders that produced brittle, often subtly buggy UIs and unreadable code and encouraged the writing of spaghetti code. Remove the useless UI builders, and you are left with syntax highlighting, code completion, code folding, incremental compilation, and lots of other useful tools that increase productivity.
Fine, it's the oldest known rock, you pedant. It's still plenty interesting because the oldest known rocks up until know were only about 3.8 billion years old. There is the potential to learn a great deal about the early days of the earth from this rock.
Oh, and obligatory xkcd: 1194
I remember reading an article long ago that said that the Voynich manuscript was made by a con man that wanted to make some quick cash by writing down some gibberish in a book, claiming that it had mystical origins, and selling it off to someone with more money than common sense. (In this case, that person would be Emperor Rudolf II.) Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it. To me, this seems like a much more reasonable explanation than the idea that New World lanuages somehow made it into a book that was (according to Wikipedia) was written in Europe between 1404 and 1438.
Summary: Yuppie WASP thinks he knows the solution to poverty: If they would only get of their lazy bums, they wouldn't be poor anymore!
How are so who are so uninformed about the nature of poverty in the US so confident in their deluded opinions? (Wait, I know, it's because Republican rhetoric about government "entitlements.")
I'd argue that if you have exploited to the fullest the "free education" you get in the US to age 18, never done drugs nor become addicted to alcohol, etc, and neither fathered/mothered a child until you had a stable job and income post-highschool then there's no way you're working minimum-wage jobs for any sustained period of time.
If you would argue that, you'd either be a moron or someone who is so uninformed as to be totally unqualified to speak on the topic.
Education in the US is not created equal. Try being born in the inner city where the high school has a 15% graduation rate (half that of the city average) and even those who do graduate often fail to understand 7th grade level algebra. Now add on to this an alcoholic mother who kicks you out of the house whenever she gets drunk, forcing you to either 1.) spend the night with your drug dealing uncle, 2.) spend the night at a shelter where someone is stabbed to death roughly once a month, or 3.) sleep on the street. Are you going to graduate from high school?
This is not a hypothetical story. I am describing an actual person that I knew back when I volunteered with the social work department at an inner city hospital.
Let's say that you beat the odds that are overwhelmingly against you and graduate from high school. If you are like the young man that I knew, you have never even heard of the SAT. Your high school's average SAT is below 1000 (on the 2400 scale). And those that do go to a local HBCU with only a 30% graduation rate and absolutely horrendous job placement. Trade school is a more reasonable alternative, but you can't afford the tuition and financial aid for trade school is basically non-existent.
Your only option at this point is to go for jobs that will take people with a high school diploma, but you live in a city where unemployment is 147% that of the rest of the state. Odds are that the best you will be able to get is a part time job at the local McDonald's. If you work hard, in three or four years, you might work your way up to assistant manager and make a whopping $10/hr.
This will barely be enough to pay for your rent (usually about $700/month for a single bedroom, perhaps $600 after rental assistance), let alone enough to save up for an education or to pay for the cost of raising children.
If you see any way to escape this situation through hard work, please let me know. If there were any bad choices made here that resulted in their just deserts, please let me know.
Now, if you have a cellphone, and cable, kids, and you smoke, and own a house...that $24,000 starts to get pretty thin. But then, you're already living better than 2/3rds of the people on the planet, not bad for "being poor"?
1.) A lot of the people I knew back when I volunteered with social work would have killed to make $24,000 a year. The average income of the people I worked with was probably closer to $10k - $15k per year because most people were unable to find anything but part time work. 2.) Let's pretend that it is easy to make $24k/yr. So poor people in the US on average live better than sub-Saharan Africans and we call that progress? The US is the wealthiest nation in the world. We absolutely should not be comparing ourselves to the lowest 2/3rd that still
Ah, another yuppie WASP who thinks he knows how to live poor better than a poor person does. Let's put this straight.
Monthly bus pass $100
Taking the bus is only an option if you live in the city and if you live in the city, rent skyrockets. I live in a shabby apartment in an undesirable city (high unemployment, high crime rate, a public transportation system so shitty that it takes an hour and a half to make the three mile bus trip from here to downtown) and the rent for my two bedroom apartment is $1800 a month. So in this scenario, the net benefit of moving into the city and ditching the car would be negative $800 dollars a month. That and the fact that your morning commute would jump from fifteen to twenty minutes to an hour and a half.
Get a roommate
For a family of three? And how is said roommate going to afford 50% of the rent if he/she has the same minimum wage job? No, in this scenario, another family of three would have to squeeze into the second bedroom because they can't afford their own apartment either. Those are called tenements, and we decided that those were dehumanizing sometime in the 19th century.
You're raising 2 kids on $27k: you qualify for Medicaid
That much is true, but you are forgetting that every visit to the doctor equals lost wages at your hourly job. So even if you have medicaid and you have small children who are at that age where they are prone to catching colds, you can easily be "paying" $150 - $200 a month in healthcare costs due to lost wages.
Number 1: if the best work you can get is minimum wage, maybe you should put off that second kid or ask your SO to help out with expenses.
The kids were usually born before the SO (the male one most of the time) packed up and left. And if it was that easy to get the ex-SO to pay up, we wouldn't have family court.
Number 2: $20/day will feed dad+2 kids pretty well, as long as he cooks. Seriously: that's 2 pounds of chicken + 2 pounds of rice + 4 pounds of carrots and a gallon of milk, with enough left over for salt, pepper and ketchup
I'm guessing you've never heard of food desserts? I live in one. The nearest grocery store is about two miles away. It's fine for me because I have a car. But if you don't (and remember, one of your suggestions was to take the bus) it turns into an hour long bus trip each way. It's a lot easier to stop by the corner market two blocks away from your apartment, but it is also much more expensive.
If you're working 2 minimum wage jobs, you don't get the American Dream. You adjust your lifestyle. Those sacrifices will make your eventual success all the more sweet and motivate your kid(s) to rise above.
Oh god, so you are also a libertarian social darwinist. Let me tell you something: American social mobility is a myth. Poor people aren't poor because they are lazy. (Well a small fraction of them are, but that is besides the point.) They are poor because they were born poor and the US social and economic structures tend to keep it that way.
I don't think that NYT is as liberal as Stormfront is conservative, but feel free to substitute wsj.com for nytimes.com if you like that better. The point still stands IMO.
Come on, this is 2014. Youtube is a legitimate way to make announcements. The two official State of the Union videos have about a million Youtube views put together. More people watched Bill Nye's evolution/creationism debate on Youtube than live on television. Sure, there's lots of crap on Youtube, but there is plenty of crap on cable TV as well. Is NBC a bad source of news just because Jerry Springer is distributed by NBCUniversal? Is CBS a bad source of news because it broadcasts Survivor? Same thing applies to the internet. One one end, you have nytimes.com and politico.com and on the other end you have timecube.com. The fact that Timecube exists doesn't automatically discount everything else on the internet.
I believe that it's possible even in the American system. If the prosecution has new evidence that they think will prove that the defendant is guilty of the crime, they can appeal to a higher court.
Well-roundedness isn't just the buzzword that some think it to be. There is a reason that after over a century of public schooling, our country has come to such a remarkably wide consensus on what should be the core subjects. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math. These are frameworks for understanding how the natural processes of the world work and how to manipulate them. English, Foreign Language, History. These are frameworks for understanding how human processes of the world work and how to manipulate them.
Math is definitely useful for a software engineer, but does he also need to be an expert on history? No, but if he doesn't know the basics of history, one day he will read a blog about neoreactionaries and in his wide-eyed naivte, he will eat up every last bite of it. He will take these thoughts with him to the polls and the whole country will suffer for it.
History is definitely useful for a lawyer, but does he need to be an expert on biology? No, but if he doesn't know the basics of biology, one day he will find himself as a the federal judge presiding over creationism-in-schools case and when the defense says "evolution has only ever been observed on the microscopic scale," he will eat up every though of it. He will keep these thoughts in mind when he makes his ruling, and will deprive a future generation of doctors and medical researchers a proper education. The whole country will suffer for it.
I think you're talking talking about closet racists and internet trolls and similar folks, and when it comes to those people, I completely agree. But even for your average Joe who loves his kids, and and is steadfastly loyal to his buddies, the internet is an entirely different setting. It's tone deaf for one, so a comment could be completely innocuous or scathingly sarcastic depending on how you read it. Since humans often have trouble telling the difference, an AI algorithm that perfectly mimics humans will have trouble. Second, suppose you're having a conversation with a person and he says something amazingly stupid or uninformed. Do you call him a moron? No, of course not. Not even if the conversation is in a private place and no one else will know what you said. Because you empathize with the other guy to an extent. But if you have an anonymous internet post that says something equally stupid, all the sudden the human element is removed. You are just staring at a sack of words and it makes you angry. This is why we have flamewars on every forum in the internet, not just stormfront.org.
Or, to put it another way: would your wife want to sift through thousands of your work emails and memos? Probably not. So why would she want to talk to a chatbot that is trained on your work emails?
Even if these guys could make an AI algorithm that is 100% accurate if given the correct input, internet posts are not the best seed data. People tend to be dicks on the internet. I'm pretty sure most people would not like to interact with the online versions of their departed loved ones.
Tenure makes plenty of sense for college professors who had to work very hard to get it. (6 years doing the PhD, plus 3 - 4 years as a postdoc, years more as an adjunct, then anywhere from 5 - 10 as assistant professor, all the time having to be the very best or risk falling to the wayside.) And they do research. It is the research more than the teaching that needs to be free of administrators and that is what makes tenure useful. (Of course that doesn't happen in practice -- the NSF, the DoD, and other federal agencies dictate what gets researched, but I digress.)
Tenure is absolute BS for grade school teaches who all to often get it in just three or four years of mediocre work. And it doesn't do anything to ensure academic freedom because they just teach to the pre-defined state curriculum and often take lesson plans straight from the textbook because they are too lazy to do anything more substantial. No, tenure in grade schools only serves to protect incompetence.
The problem with our system is that each town funds its own schools. Property taxes would be a very fair way to fund schools if the taxes were levied at state level and then distributed according amongst the individual school districts according to their need.
Dear best buddies in government,
We want educated people at slave wages, but people keep trying to stop us. Please tie education funding to our precious H1Bs so that no one will dare to touch them.
Signed,
Bill Gates
Slashdot Mirror
That puts a stopper on the young earth creationists, but not the rest of the creationists. Most creationists already subscribe to the idea that the days of Genesis were actually eras that were million or billions of years long. They believe in the big bang. They believe that the universe is 13.6 billion years old and that the earth is between 4 and 5 billion years old, but they also believe that the first man was Adam and that he lived just over 6000 years ago. That's where the fight lies: convincing creationists of evolution.
Yes, both the US and Russia have tens of thousands of warheads, but they are mostly just dead weight. The US and Russia only have 500 ICBMs a piece and (thanks to the SALT and START treaties) none of them are multiple reentry. The US submarine and B-2 fleets are far, far too small to launch the rest of the warheads (both number in the dozens), and I doubt that Russia's strike capabiles are any better considering that they spend far less on their military. The huge nuclear arsenal is a relic of the 50s and 60s when any nuclear strike plan involved strategic air command deploying thousands of nuclear armed B-52 bombers. The idea of doing such a thing today is laughable. B-52s are sitting ducks to modern air defense systems, but B-2 stealth bombers are far too expensive to mass produce (2 billion dollars a piece). That means that the vast majority of existing warheads are dead weight. The problem is that no country wants to unilaterally destroy the excess nukes because it makes them look weak. So we have to wait for treaties like SALT and START before any weapons are destroyed, and the diplomatic process takes a long time.
Oil companies or cigarette companies certainly aren't going to go out of business any time soon, so it doesn't seem like being universally disliked hurts profits.
Woosh.
The entire point of my post is that when that 18 year old goes looking for his first job, he will be competing with the other group of people that is looking for entry level jobs: 22 year old college grads. How is he supposed to be get five years of experience by the age of 23 when no one will hire him as an 18 year old? Again: 23 year old HS grads with five years of development experience are a very, very rare breed.
No, the appropriate distinction is this:
23 year old high school grads with five years of software development experience simply do not exist: In the real world, no 18 year old high school grad will ever be able to get that first job where he can gain years of experience.
It's not Kinect specific.
Whenever a company is notified of a copyright infringing video, it has two options. It can take down the video, or it can allow the video to remain up and collect a fraction of advertizing revenue as the licensing fee. Some companies (Vevo, for example) regularly choose the latter option. GEMA did not, meaning that it refused to license it's property to Youtube.
Youtube's description is actually rather forgiving because it suggests that GEMA simply might not have gotten around to making a licensing agreement yet, while the reality is that GEMA was already presented with the option to license the works and actively refused to do so.
Who ever said using an IDE is bad? IDEs are powerful tools that improve developer productivity. The problem with the older generation of IDEs (especially older versions of Visual Studio) was that they focused too much on graphical UI builders that produced brittle, often subtly buggy UIs and unreadable code and encouraged the writing of spaghetti code. Remove the useless UI builders, and you are left with syntax highlighting, code completion, code folding, incremental compilation, and lots of other useful tools that increase productivity.
Fine, it's the oldest known rock, you pedant. It's still plenty interesting because the oldest known rocks up until know were only about 3.8 billion years old. There is the potential to learn a great deal about the early days of the earth from this rock. Oh, and obligatory xkcd: 1194
I remember reading an article long ago that said that the Voynich manuscript was made by a con man that wanted to make some quick cash by writing down some gibberish in a book, claiming that it had mystical origins, and selling it off to someone with more money than common sense. (In this case, that person would be Emperor Rudolf II.) Some linguists have said that the statistical patterns of the text match what would be expected of a natural language, but the article that I read suggested that it is possible to create a random text that looks like a natural language by randomly choosing syllables with a special table. This table of syllables is constructed in such a way that the probability of a certain syllable occurring depends on the syllable that precedes it. To me, this seems like a much more reasonable explanation than the idea that New World lanuages somehow made it into a book that was (according to Wikipedia) was written in Europe between 1404 and 1438.
Summary: Yuppie WASP thinks he knows the solution to poverty: If they would only get of their lazy bums, they wouldn't be poor anymore!
How are so who are so uninformed about the nature of poverty in the US so confident in their deluded opinions? (Wait, I know, it's because Republican rhetoric about government "entitlements.")
If you would argue that, you'd either be a moron or someone who is so uninformed as to be totally unqualified to speak on the topic.
Education in the US is not created equal. Try being born in the inner city where the high school has a 15% graduation rate (half that of the city average) and even those who do graduate often fail to understand 7th grade level algebra. Now add on to this an alcoholic mother who kicks you out of the house whenever she gets drunk, forcing you to either 1.) spend the night with your drug dealing uncle, 2.) spend the night at a shelter where someone is stabbed to death roughly once a month, or 3.) sleep on the street. Are you going to graduate from high school?
This is not a hypothetical story. I am describing an actual person that I knew back when I volunteered with the social work department at an inner city hospital.
Let's say that you beat the odds that are overwhelmingly against you and graduate from high school. If you are like the young man that I knew, you have never even heard of the SAT. Your high school's average SAT is below 1000 (on the 2400 scale). And those that do go to a local HBCU with only a 30% graduation rate and absolutely horrendous job placement. Trade school is a more reasonable alternative, but you can't afford the tuition and financial aid for trade school is basically non-existent.
Your only option at this point is to go for jobs that will take people with a high school diploma, but you live in a city where unemployment is 147% that of the rest of the state. Odds are that the best you will be able to get is a part time job at the local McDonald's. If you work hard, in three or four years, you might work your way up to assistant manager and make a whopping $10/hr.
This will barely be enough to pay for your rent (usually about $700/month for a single bedroom, perhaps $600 after rental assistance), let alone enough to save up for an education or to pay for the cost of raising children.
If you see any way to escape this situation through hard work, please let me know. If there were any bad choices made here that resulted in their just deserts, please let me know.
1.) A lot of the people I knew back when I volunteered with social work would have killed to make $24,000 a year. The average income of the people I worked with was probably closer to $10k - $15k per year because most people were unable to find anything but part time work. 2.) Let's pretend that it is easy to make $24k/yr. So poor people in the US on average live better than sub-Saharan Africans and we call that progress? The US is the wealthiest nation in the world. We absolutely should not be comparing ourselves to the lowest 2/3rd that still
Ah, another yuppie WASP who thinks he knows how to live poor better than a poor person does. Let's put this straight.
Taking the bus is only an option if you live in the city and if you live in the city, rent skyrockets. I live in a shabby apartment in an undesirable city (high unemployment, high crime rate, a public transportation system so shitty that it takes an hour and a half to make the three mile bus trip from here to downtown) and the rent for my two bedroom apartment is $1800 a month. So in this scenario, the net benefit of moving into the city and ditching the car would be negative $800 dollars a month. That and the fact that your morning commute would jump from fifteen to twenty minutes to an hour and a half.
For a family of three? And how is said roommate going to afford 50% of the rent if he/she has the same minimum wage job? No, in this scenario, another family of three would have to squeeze into the second bedroom because they can't afford their own apartment either. Those are called tenements, and we decided that those were dehumanizing sometime in the 19th century.
That much is true, but you are forgetting that every visit to the doctor equals lost wages at your hourly job. So even if you have medicaid and you have small children who are at that age where they are prone to catching colds, you can easily be "paying" $150 - $200 a month in healthcare costs due to lost wages.
The kids were usually born before the SO (the male one most of the time) packed up and left. And if it was that easy to get the ex-SO to pay up, we wouldn't have family court.
I'm guessing you've never heard of food desserts? I live in one. The nearest grocery store is about two miles away. It's fine for me because I have a car. But if you don't (and remember, one of your suggestions was to take the bus) it turns into an hour long bus trip each way. It's a lot easier to stop by the corner market two blocks away from your apartment, but it is also much more expensive.
Oh god, so you are also a libertarian social darwinist. Let me tell you something: American social mobility is a myth. Poor people aren't poor because they are lazy. (Well a small fraction of them are, but that is besides the point.) They are poor because they were born poor and the US social and economic structures tend to keep it that way.
I don't think that NYT is as liberal as Stormfront is conservative, but feel free to substitute wsj.com for nytimes.com if you like that better. The point still stands IMO.
Come on, this is 2014. Youtube is a legitimate way to make announcements. The two official State of the Union videos have about a million Youtube views put together. More people watched Bill Nye's evolution/creationism debate on Youtube than live on television. Sure, there's lots of crap on Youtube, but there is plenty of crap on cable TV as well. Is NBC a bad source of news just because Jerry Springer is distributed by NBCUniversal? Is CBS a bad source of news because it broadcasts Survivor? Same thing applies to the internet. One one end, you have nytimes.com and politico.com and on the other end you have timecube.com. The fact that Timecube exists doesn't automatically discount everything else on the internet.
Hmm, looks like you're right. I stand corrected.
I believe that it's possible even in the American system. If the prosecution has new evidence that they think will prove that the defendant is guilty of the crime, they can appeal to a higher court.
Well-roundedness isn't just the buzzword that some think it to be. There is a reason that after over a century of public schooling, our country has come to such a remarkably wide consensus on what should be the core subjects. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Math. These are frameworks for understanding how the natural processes of the world work and how to manipulate them. English, Foreign Language, History. These are frameworks for understanding how human processes of the world work and how to manipulate them.
Math is definitely useful for a software engineer, but does he also need to be an expert on history? No, but if he doesn't know the basics of history, one day he will read a blog about neoreactionaries and in his wide-eyed naivte, he will eat up every last bite of it. He will take these thoughts with him to the polls and the whole country will suffer for it.
History is definitely useful for a lawyer, but does he need to be an expert on biology? No, but if he doesn't know the basics of biology, one day he will find himself as a the federal judge presiding over creationism-in-schools case and when the defense says "evolution has only ever been observed on the microscopic scale," he will eat up every though of it. He will keep these thoughts in mind when he makes his ruling, and will deprive a future generation of doctors and medical researchers a proper education. The whole country will suffer for it.
Exactly. As soon as the number of FISA requests goes above 999, you can be sure that the government will revise the lowest range to be 0-1499.
I think you're talking talking about closet racists and internet trolls and similar folks, and when it comes to those people, I completely agree. But even for your average Joe who loves his kids, and and is steadfastly loyal to his buddies, the internet is an entirely different setting. It's tone deaf for one, so a comment could be completely innocuous or scathingly sarcastic depending on how you read it. Since humans often have trouble telling the difference, an AI algorithm that perfectly mimics humans will have trouble. Second, suppose you're having a conversation with a person and he says something amazingly stupid or uninformed. Do you call him a moron? No, of course not. Not even if the conversation is in a private place and no one else will know what you said. Because you empathize with the other guy to an extent. But if you have an anonymous internet post that says something equally stupid, all the sudden the human element is removed. You are just staring at a sack of words and it makes you angry. This is why we have flamewars on every forum in the internet, not just stormfront.org.
Or, to put it another way: would your wife want to sift through thousands of your work emails and memos? Probably not. So why would she want to talk to a chatbot that is trained on your work emails?
Even if these guys could make an AI algorithm that is 100% accurate if given the correct input, internet posts are not the best seed data. People tend to be dicks on the internet. I'm pretty sure most people would not like to interact with the online versions of their departed loved ones.
*teachers who all too often.
Haven't had my sleep today, sorry.
Tenure makes plenty of sense for college professors who had to work very hard to get it. (6 years doing the PhD, plus 3 - 4 years as a postdoc, years more as an adjunct, then anywhere from 5 - 10 as assistant professor, all the time having to be the very best or risk falling to the wayside.) And they do research. It is the research more than the teaching that needs to be free of administrators and that is what makes tenure useful. (Of course that doesn't happen in practice -- the NSF, the DoD, and other federal agencies dictate what gets researched, but I digress.)
Tenure is absolute BS for grade school teaches who all to often get it in just three or four years of mediocre work. And it doesn't do anything to ensure academic freedom because they just teach to the pre-defined state curriculum and often take lesson plans straight from the textbook because they are too lazy to do anything more substantial. No, tenure in grade schools only serves to protect incompetence.
The problem with our system is that each town funds its own schools. Property taxes would be a very fair way to fund schools if the taxes were levied at state level and then distributed according amongst the individual school districts according to their need.
An H1B tax is not really the solution IMO.
FTFY