When there's plenty of evidence that US education level is sub-par in Maths and reading compared to the rest of the industrial countries, you can't say that our schools are fantastic.
Except that there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
We only look like we are lagging behind in Math because we are comparing 90% of our students to 0.9% of some of the other countries who seems to be so much better than us. I've seen that particular slight-of-hand foisted upon the media hundreds of times.
You are one of several people who immediately went on the defensive about my comments, as if they had anything whatsoever to do with the ongoing debate with anti-evolutionists. It doesn't.
The teaching of evolution in school is a political argument. It's an argument worth having, but it has almost nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics. I'm not really interested in discussing the politics of people who perceive science as an attack on their faith. I'm far more interested in talking about science itself.
The political argument doesn't interest me much because it simply does not matter. I honestly don't care whether the guy who sells me my car "believes in" evolution or not. Those who actually need to understand the principles of evolution will study biology in college, where they will finally learn, if they have not already, that all the current "alternative theories" to the Descent of Man are complete bullshit. So while it may wound the pride of a few elitist secular humanists that there are so many rubes out there who embrace a notion of the universe which is incompatable with a well-supported scientific model, it's "no harm, no foul" as far as I'm concerned.
At least some of the religious zealots out there are acting out of fear for the eternal souls of those who disagree with them. To be a zealot over something other than religion is almost always to simply be a pomous ass who can't stand the thought that there are people out there who don't recognize them as being right.
The space between the bits that make up the molecules in their body is as empty as the space between the planets in the solar system... yet we think of ourselves as solid.
Personally, I suspect that one day we will realize that those tiny bits are not there, either. Solid matter is merely a type of energy, and energy is merely the will of the Cosmos. C.S. Lewis had no idea how right he was when he said that the world around us was nothing but mere "shadowlands," and that reality, if it exists, is something that we have not experiened yet.
The dirty little secret of our public schools is that both sides of the debate have reason to talk them down.
Lefties need to tell us that our schools suck, because they want us to pay more taxes to improve them.
Right-wingers need to tell us that our schools suck, because they think we won't accept market reforms unless we believe the current system to be "broken."
The truth is that our schools are fan-fucking-tastic. Even at at average of about ten grand per kid per year, it's a terrific bargain.
How can I say that, when private schools seem to do better with less? Simple: Every computer support person knows the 80/20 rule. 80% of your resources tend to get spent on 20% of your customers.
A private school can choose to exclude the kids which are expensive to teach. Public schools are mandated not to.
Remove those kids from the ledger, and it becomes obvious that our schools are dramatically more efficient than anybody out there is saying.
But I look around, and I don't see this "well educated society" at all.
Then you are either not looking closely enough, or you have not looked at other countries very much... or more than likely you are going off the same incomplete and misleading data sets which have been stuffed into the media from both sides for the last 30 years or so, which play a lot of games to slant things in favor of the rest of the world, but you'll never hear about it from either side of the debate because, as I said, they both have an interest in having you think the worst.
For the record, I favor privatizing the schools. Not because I think they are bad, but because I think they could do even better if exposed to Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand."
That said, I oppose voucher programs because those programs are not real privatization, nor do they introduce real market competition. They are just cash give-aways which drive education budgets up, not down.
Football season must be coming fast. When I saw the headline the the Milky Way is "not a spiral", the first thought through my head was "oh, so it's a duck."
(Europeans who didn't get the joke: I'm referrencing jargon from American football, not soccer. Let's not get our panties in a twist about what America calls its sports, m'kay?)
If that were the case, and "Eggus" meant "waffle", I believe it could be translated as "I think I am for the waffle", "I think I am to the waffle", "I think I am by means of the waffle", or several other things (I never really fully got the ablative).
Could you perhaps stretch it to mean "I think I'll have waffles"?
If so, it would seem that the person who posted it has reached a much higher stage of enlightenment than Descartes ever did. Proof of your existance pales in comparison to the thought which goes into ordering breakfast.
If you think about it, 1850 that wasn't too long ago. It seems that humanity has been full of sh%t for most of history.
We still are. 100 years from now, they will laugh at us for our crazy notions about strings, chaos, and the human genome.
Science is not, and never has been, about being right. It's about trying to find predictive models of the universe which you can rely on most of the time.
The most advanced concepts of science will most likely sound as silly as "turtles, all the way down" to people a couple generations in the future, but they are still incredibly valuable to us today.
You mean anybody who is buying a Mac, because they don't have a choice.
A "Gamer" PC System can be quite low-spec and cheap, except for the video card. You can do quite well for $500 plus the card. For the most part, gamers don't purchase dual-proc systems, for example, but with Apple that's the only route.
Only if you insist on new.
If you really do want to do the old "weak CPU, strong video card" philosophy popular among gamers, you could easilly pick up a used single-CPU G5 tower from eBay. It still won't be quite as cheap as a similarly spec'ed AMD box, but it will run quiet and have a pretty impressive motherboard.
If it's a public school, you've already got plenty of people forced to pay into the system who don't even have kids. So getting a cheap laptop back out of the deal is about the *only* direct benefit they'll ever see for the money they've funneled into the school through their taxes.
Speaking as a libertarian nut with no kids, I gotta say I *hate* this attitude.
It's just like people with kids who send their kids to private school whining about "paying twice."
The tax dollars you pay for schools is NOT a tuition fee for your kids, whether or not you have them.
The tax dollars you pay for schools is the fee you pay for the privilege of living in a well-educated society. That is your direct benefit. If you happen to have kids of your own in the system, that's just bonus.
If you don't like it, there are plenty of countries you can go to who do not provide a baseline education for all their citizens.
Oh nos! Apple laptops don't have upgradable video cards!!!1!
Well, duh.
Anybody who's likely to buy a $400 video card is probably going to buy a high-end tower to put it into. G5 towers ain't cheap, but they are really sweet rigs for the tiny assortment of games which actually run on Macs.
For those buying a mini or an iMac, the cards they come with do about as well as any $50 card you would put in a cheap game PC. I play WoW on my mini all the time, and the graphics are good enough on my sickeningly-huge projection system that I don't really mind the inability to upgrade.
Are they great cards for gaming? No. Are the good enough for most people? Yes, especially since everybody who writes games for the Mac knows exactly what handful of low-end cards to expect.
I was about to say the same thing. Macs were widely regarded as the superior game platform until Doom came along as a PC-only app.
The Doom deathmatch took nearly all gaming enthusiasts away from the Mac platform, and "PC gaming" has pretty much meant "Windows PC gaming" ever since.
A much smarter move would have been to unload them at slightly below street value. If they want to do the community a service, distribute them to local libraries or something. If I were a taxpayer in Virginia, I'd be calling for this guy's head.
Most people who use laptops plug them in. If the battery has enough juice to get from your house to the coffee shop in sleep mode, and don't mind looking around for an outlet, it's a $50 computer.
You can't play World of Warcraft on it, but for the crap that most people use laptops for, it's a heck of a deal.
Too bad I missed it. I haven't been caught in the middle of a good riot in weeks!
Completely missing from the story is one important detail:
Who was the DUMBASS from this school's administration that decided to sell 1000 laptops for less than 1/15th of what they could have fetched on eBay?
Hell, even a rip-off joint like Computer Rennaisance would have given them about $200 a pop for those things.
Whoever made this call should be fired.
Not just for causing a riot which anybody should have seen coming...
Not just for dumping those spiffy iBooks and making the teachers there settle for crappy Dells (probably Latitude 600 seris, if they are very lucky...)
All that, yes, but also for throwing away more than $700,000 dollars worth of school assets.
You, sir, are a fool, and clearly need to brush up on your history.
You, sir, are a humorless prig, and clearly need to lighten up.
(Ah, I do so enjoy these high levels of rational debate between great minds. It's like we've got our very own on-line Algonquin Round Table going on here!)
The leveling off of the impact from such pendulum swings is exactly what we have a Federal Reserve for in the first place.
Given the rather serious troubled water the Fed has gotten us through, on and off, over the last 20 years or so, I have a lot of confidence in those crusty old bankers to keep pulling the right strings to keep the trains running on time, and do it without mixing metaphors.
We can presume then that Paul Volcker (Greenspan's predecessor as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and former head of research at the World Bank) and the current head of the IMF, to pick two random examples, are not competent economists.
Given the track record of the World Bank, the IMF, and the US economy prior to Greenspan's arrival, we can pretty much presume that anyway.
1. Pay $9 to sit in new stadium-style seats and watch a near-perfect print of the film on opening weekend with a big crowd who's going out of their way to see the movie.
2. Wait 3 months to pay five bucks and see a ratty print while sitting in a ratty seat within a ratty theater, surrounded by cheapskates and bored people who have seen the movie several times, and only came to watch their favorite scenes while chatting with their friends.
3. Wait 4 months, put the movie into my NetFlix queue, and watch it in my own recliner at home with a great picture and a sound system which is superior to anything I've ever seen in a second-run theater.
Option 2 is pretty much the least attractive of the three. If I'm going to spend money to go to a movie at all anymore, I want the big spectacle.
In fact, the only movie I've seen in the theater in the last few months is the IMAX edition of Batman Begins, and it was worth every penny of the $16 I paid to get in.
What you are talking about is only a problem if you begin with the assumption that all current trends will continue forever, when there's inadequate reason to make that leap. A very common mistake.
Indeed, any truly competent economist is very worried about the situation.
No, any competent economist (as opposed to editorial writers for the New York Times) understands that trade deficits are completely irrelevant.
We are the number one importer in the world. We are also the number one exporter in the world. Furthermore, we are the number one economy in the world (Japan is #2). In other words, we are the economic envy of the world. We're rich. Filthy, stinking rich. Our "poor" people wear $100 shoes and $200 sports-logo jackets. People in northern states regard air conditioning as an "essential" rather than the extravagant luxury which most countries in similar climates would consider it to be.
All a trade deficit means is that there are a lot of US dollars floating around outside of US borders. That's a good thing.
Now, if you want to hand-wring about the federal budget deficit, that's a whole other discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of it as hooligan daycare. It keeps those little monsters off the streets until they're old enough to be drafted.
There hasn't been a draft since back in the days when troubled kids were called "hooligans."
Stop stealing jokes from the the Ike era.
When there's plenty of evidence that US education level is sub-par in Maths and reading compared to the rest of the industrial countries, you can't say that our schools are fantastic.
Except that there is plenty of evidence to the contrary.
We only look like we are lagging behind in Math because we are comparing 90% of our students to 0.9% of some of the other countries who seems to be so much better than us. I've seen that particular slight-of-hand foisted upon the media hundreds of times.
You are one of several people who immediately went on the defensive about my comments, as if they had anything whatsoever to do with the ongoing debate with anti-evolutionists. It doesn't.
The teaching of evolution in school is a political argument. It's an argument worth having, but it has almost nothing to do with science, and everything to do with politics. I'm not really interested in discussing the politics of people who perceive science as an attack on their faith. I'm far more interested in talking about science itself.
The political argument doesn't interest me much because it simply does not matter. I honestly don't care whether the guy who sells me my car "believes in" evolution or not. Those who actually need to understand the principles of evolution will study biology in college, where they will finally learn, if they have not already, that all the current "alternative theories" to the Descent of Man are complete bullshit. So while it may wound the pride of a few elitist secular humanists that there are so many rubes out there who embrace a notion of the universe which is incompatable with a well-supported scientific model, it's "no harm, no foul" as far as I'm concerned.
At least some of the religious zealots out there are acting out of fear for the eternal souls of those who disagree with them. To be a zealot over something other than religion is almost always to simply be a pomous ass who can't stand the thought that there are people out there who don't recognize them as being right.
You need to go to religion for really dumb theories.
There are no theories in religion. Gods, demons, and venerated dead ancestors are not subject to peer review.
Well... they might be, I suppose, but we can't see the findings.
The space between the bits that make up the molecules in their body is as empty as the space between the planets in the solar system... yet we think of ourselves as solid.
Personally, I suspect that one day we will realize that those tiny bits are not there, either. Solid matter is merely a type of energy, and energy is merely the will of the Cosmos. C.S. Lewis had no idea how right he was when he said that the world around us was nothing but mere "shadowlands," and that reality, if it exists, is something that we have not experiened yet.
Now don't bogart that reefer, dude. Pass it over!
The dirty little secret of our public schools is that both sides of the debate have reason to talk them down.
Lefties need to tell us that our schools suck, because they want us to pay more taxes to improve them.
Right-wingers need to tell us that our schools suck, because they think we won't accept market reforms unless we believe the current system to be "broken."
The truth is that our schools are fan-fucking-tastic. Even at at average of about ten grand per kid per year, it's a terrific bargain.
How can I say that, when private schools seem to do better with less? Simple: Every computer support person knows the 80/20 rule. 80% of your resources tend to get spent on 20% of your customers.
A private school can choose to exclude the kids which are expensive to teach. Public schools are mandated not to.
Remove those kids from the ledger, and it becomes obvious that our schools are dramatically more efficient than anybody out there is saying.
But I look around, and I don't see this "well educated society" at all.
Then you are either not looking closely enough, or you have not looked at other countries very much... or more than likely you are going off the same incomplete and misleading data sets which have been stuffed into the media from both sides for the last 30 years or so, which play a lot of games to slant things in favor of the rest of the world, but you'll never hear about it from either side of the debate because, as I said, they both have an interest in having you think the worst.
For the record, I favor privatizing the schools. Not because I think they are bad, but because I think they could do even better if exposed to Adam Smith's famous "invisible hand."
That said, I oppose voucher programs because those programs are not real privatization, nor do they introduce real market competition. They are just cash give-aways which drive education budgets up, not down.
Football season must be coming fast. When I saw the headline the the Milky Way is "not a spiral", the first thought through my head was "oh, so it's a duck."
(Europeans who didn't get the joke: I'm referrencing jargon from American football, not soccer. Let's not get our panties in a twist about what America calls its sports, m'kay?)
If that were the case, and "Eggus" meant "waffle", I believe it could be translated as "I think I am for the waffle", "I think I am to the waffle", "I think I am by means of the waffle", or several other things (I never really fully got the ablative).
Could you perhaps stretch it to mean "I think I'll have waffles"?
If so, it would seem that the person who posted it has reached a much higher stage of enlightenment than Descartes ever did. Proof of your existance pales in comparison to the thought which goes into ordering breakfast.
Three Musketeers bars have no nougat. They are fluffy whipped chocolate covered in a layer of regular chocolate.
A Milky Way bar in America is basically a Snickers bar without the peanuts.
Dammit! Now I'm hungry. Thanks a lot.
If you think about it, 1850 that wasn't too long ago. It seems that humanity has been full of sh%t for most of history.
We still are. 100 years from now, they will laugh at us for our crazy notions about strings, chaos, and the human genome.
Science is not, and never has been, about being right. It's about trying to find predictive models of the universe which you can rely on most of the time.
The most advanced concepts of science will most likely sound as silly as "turtles, all the way down" to people a couple generations in the future, but they are still incredibly valuable to us today.
You mean anybody who is buying a Mac, because they don't have a choice.
A "Gamer" PC System can be quite low-spec and cheap, except for the video card. You can do quite well for $500 plus the card. For the most part, gamers don't purchase dual-proc systems, for example, but with Apple that's the only route.
Only if you insist on new.
If you really do want to do the old "weak CPU, strong video card" philosophy popular among gamers, you could easilly pick up a used single-CPU G5 tower from eBay. It still won't be quite as cheap as a similarly spec'ed AMD box, but it will run quiet and have a pretty impressive motherboard.
If it's a public school, you've already got plenty of people forced to pay into the system who don't even have kids. So getting a cheap laptop back out of the deal is about the *only* direct benefit they'll ever see for the money they've funneled into the school through their taxes.
Speaking as a libertarian nut with no kids, I gotta say I *hate* this attitude.
It's just like people with kids who send their kids to private school whining about "paying twice."
The tax dollars you pay for schools is NOT a tuition fee for your kids, whether or not you have them.
The tax dollars you pay for schools is the fee you pay for the privilege of living in a well-educated society. That is your direct benefit. If you happen to have kids of your own in the system, that's just bonus.
If you don't like it, there are plenty of countries you can go to who do not provide a baseline education for all their citizens.
Oh nos! Apple laptops don't have upgradable video cards!!!1!
Well, duh.
Anybody who's likely to buy a $400 video card is probably going to buy a high-end tower to put it into. G5 towers ain't cheap, but they are really sweet rigs for the tiny assortment of games which actually run on Macs.
For those buying a mini or an iMac, the cards they come with do about as well as any $50 card you would put in a cheap game PC. I play WoW on my mini all the time, and the graphics are good enough on my sickeningly-huge projection system that I don't really mind the inability to upgrade.
Are they great cards for gaming? No. Are the good enough for most people? Yes, especially since everybody who writes games for the Mac knows exactly what handful of low-end cards to expect.
As a C64 owner from the 80s, I can assue you that this was far from the truth, especially when Specter VR came out for the Mac.
Networked PvP combat long before Doom.
I deeply envied my Mac-owning friends back then.
I was about to say the same thing. Macs were widely regarded as the superior game platform until Doom came along as a PC-only app.
The Doom deathmatch took nearly all gaming enthusiasts away from the Mac platform, and "PC gaming" has pretty much meant "Windows PC gaming" ever since.
A much smarter move would have been to unload them at slightly below street value. If they want to do the community a service, distribute them to local libraries or something. If I were a taxpayer in Virginia, I'd be calling for this guy's head.
Most people who use laptops plug them in. If the battery has enough juice to get from your house to the coffee shop in sleep mode, and don't mind looking around for an outlet, it's a $50 computer.
You can't play World of Warcraft on it, but for the crap that most people use laptops for, it's a heck of a deal.
Too bad I missed it. I haven't been caught in the middle of a good riot in weeks!
Completely missing from the story is one important detail:
Who was the DUMBASS from this school's administration that decided to sell 1000 laptops for less than 1/15th of what they could have fetched on eBay?
Hell, even a rip-off joint like Computer Rennaisance would have given them about $200 a pop for those things.
Whoever made this call should be fired.
Not just for causing a riot which anybody should have seen coming...
Not just for dumping those spiffy iBooks and making the teachers there settle for crappy Dells (probably Latitude 600 seris, if they are very lucky...)
All that, yes, but also for throwing away more than $700,000 dollars worth of school assets.
You, sir, are a fool, and clearly need to brush up on your history.
You, sir, are a humorless prig, and clearly need to lighten up.
(Ah, I do so enjoy these high levels of rational debate between great minds. It's like we've got our very own on-line Algonquin Round Table going on here!)
The leveling off of the impact from such pendulum swings is exactly what we have a Federal Reserve for in the first place.
Given the rather serious troubled water the Fed has gotten us through, on and off, over the last 20 years or so, I have a lot of confidence in those crusty old bankers to keep pulling the right strings to keep the trains running on time, and do it without mixing metaphors.
We can presume then that Paul Volcker (Greenspan's predecessor as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and former head of research at the World Bank) and the current head of the IMF, to pick two random examples, are not competent economists.
Given the track record of the World Bank, the IMF, and the US economy prior to Greenspan's arrival, we can pretty much presume that anyway.
The choices are:
1. Pay $9 to sit in new stadium-style seats and watch a near-perfect print of the film on opening weekend with a big crowd who's going out of their way to see the movie.
2. Wait 3 months to pay five bucks and see a ratty print while sitting in a ratty seat within a ratty theater, surrounded by cheapskates and bored people who have seen the movie several times, and only came to watch their favorite scenes while chatting with their friends.
3. Wait 4 months, put the movie into my NetFlix queue, and watch it in my own recliner at home with a great picture and a sound system which is superior to anything I've ever seen in a second-run theater.
Option 2 is pretty much the least attractive of the three. If I'm going to spend money to go to a movie at all anymore, I want the big spectacle.
In fact, the only movie I've seen in the theater in the last few months is the IMAX edition of Batman Begins, and it was worth every penny of the $16 I paid to get in.
What you are talking about is only a problem if you begin with the assumption that all current trends will continue forever, when there's inadequate reason to make that leap. A very common mistake.
Indeed, any truly competent economist is very worried about the situation.
No, any competent economist (as opposed to editorial writers for the New York Times) understands that trade deficits are completely irrelevant.
We are the number one importer in the world. We are also the number one exporter in the world. Furthermore, we are the number one economy in the world (Japan is #2). In other words, we are the economic envy of the world. We're rich. Filthy, stinking rich. Our "poor" people wear $100 shoes and $200 sports-logo jackets. People in northern states regard air conditioning as an "essential" rather than the extravagant luxury which most countries in similar climates would consider it to be.
All a trade deficit means is that there are a lot of US dollars floating around outside of US borders. That's a good thing.
Now, if you want to hand-wring about the federal budget deficit, that's a whole other discussion.
Good to know that at least one other person remembers that particular great Hollywood classic.