I think Mother Teresa had very different goals than most Westerners understand. The scale of the suffering there in Calcutta is not very well approximated by a hospital or homeless shelter in the developed world. A main purpose of the organization there was to provide a place for very sick, impoverished people to be loved and comforted while they died. In that context, the folks that wanted to send medicine and money for fancy facilities kind of misunderstood what was going on... and using an ambulance to tranport nuns just means to me that they saved the money on buying a nun-bus by using one vehicle for multiple purposes.
All I'm getting at is that recent criticisms of Mother Teresa seem to focus on the fact that she wasn't terribly interested in healing people. The thing is, she wasn't a doctor, or a nurse. Her primary skillset was providing human companionship and love to dying people. It's kind of like disparaging a therapist for not providing brain surgery - the goal is entirely different.
There's no way you can do an experiment that even remotely tests man's impact on climate. The systematic interactions of a planet's climate are beyond what we can conceive of, much less understand, right now.
This is ridiculous. By your approach, essentially none of astronomy is science, because we can't introduce variables and isolate things to understand them one at a time. We can't do "experiments" on the Sun that fit into a high school classroom form with dependent and independent variables, but through observation and measurement over time and developing models and simulations we've managed to deduce a fair amount about it. Climate science is handling things in a very similar way.
My biggest issue though is your fundamental belief that "it's too complicated, we can't understand it". If this was your attitude, we never would've left the dark ages.
Did you actually read through to the end? He handles drones, and he's right - most of them require a human to let them out of the hangar, and they certainly haven't automated the entire fueling/rearming process, so once they've exhausted what they're carrying, game over.
Philosophically, thought, it does seem quite silly, and I myself would never have regarded it as more than a mathematical curiosity, had it not been already falsified when I was born.
That's really easy to say in hindsight, when we have the benefit of being able to calculate the scale of the near universe and measure the velocities of stars. Sounds like you would've intuitively figured out gravitation if you lived before Newton, too.
The solid state model was really, really entrenched in Einstein's time. The Big Bang was mocked by Einstein and many others on the grounds of being too religious, appealing to the idea of a single moment of creation. Prior thinkers seem very naive from our enlightened positions, but we wouldn't be in the position we are without their work debating and working through theories that are now "obvious" to us.
If ants had human intelligence, I don't think coming up with the "spherical ball in space" model of Earth would be that much harder than it was for humans... both of our scales are "ant-like" compared to the size of our planet. The only real challenge I would anticipate is that ants have much less sophisticated vision, and being able to directly witness astronomical bodies was what really allowed us to begin understanding the solar system and our part in it.
Actually, the sea salt craze can be pretty directly linked to an increase in breast cancer rates. This doesn't have much to do with the sea salt per se, but the fact that it isn't iodized (gotta keep it NATURAL), so we have a greater incidence of iodine deficiency which is causing problems.
Things happen in exactly one way. Any individual person may not have the full information regarding how it happened and thus we all have our own interpretations of the 'truth', but even accepting things like the many worlds hypothesis, in any particular time line there is exactly one truth as defined to be the real physical changes that took place in the universe at the exact time in question, irregardless of who saw what. Even quantum mechanics and its inherent randomness doesn't really change the fact (you can define truth as always-past and thus all wave states have collapsed into a specific truth, or you can define truth as including the present in which case 'is in a superposition' simply becomes part of the description of the truth. In both cases, a specific definition of the truth is still available.)
That's a pretty strong statement. All the way back to special relativity, Einstein gave examples of two traveling observers that experienced the same series of events in different orders, and were each correct according to their personal perspective.
The inherent randomness of quantum mechanics doesn't seem to be the challenge to a single perceived truth - rather, it is the fact that multiple states of existence happen concurrently (Schrodinger's cat) and that classical notions of cause-and-effect are disrupted (EPR, Bell's theorem) that make it suspect to claim knowledge of one truth.
Even if you suppose that one truth exists, the human experience precludes the possibility of wholly accurate knowledge. I mean, these ideas have been kicking around since Descartes at least. At best, we can offer approximations and models with increasing predictive power. It isn't even really accurate to ask whether these models are "correct" scientifically... there's a good argument to be made that many of the subatomic particles we claim might not exist at all - we just have a model that includes them that happens to coincide very closely with the results of actual particle accelerator experiments, but there could be a much more complicated (or much simpler!) ACTUAL reality that is "really" producing the results we observe. Can we prove whether models we use are "true"? I would say no. We can merely show that they predict experimental outcomes with greater reliability than competing models.
I'm not defending the GP here, so much as saying that "truth" is complex, and getting more complex all the time as physics advances. The more we learn, the farther away it seems to be. Personally, I think that's a more interesting avenue for physics than the rigidity and certitude of classical determinism.
Meh - you aren't counting the interest break for taking a shorter term loan, or the massive equity advantage in the first years. I got about a full point off of my mortgage by going with a 15 year vs. a 30. And in that case, the financial difference between the two options was only about $300 a month. In my case, if I had chosen a 30 year mortgage, in my first year, I would've paid down the principal by about $2500. With a 15 year, I pay down about $8000. That means I pay $3600 this year to increase my net worth by $5500... a 50% return is great in anybody's book. I've also compared to other (risk-free, let's be fair) investment opportunities that could've alternatively taken advantage of that money, and nothing comes close. It's hard to compete with that kind of rate.
Towards the end of a mortgage, your payments on principal for that 30 year will be a lot closer to those of the 15 year option, but of course, by that time you've had 15 years of mortgage free living if you took the 15 year option. That isn't really that relevant though, because how many people actually live in a house for 30 years? What matters is how much equity you're building and what the outcome is for the time you actually own the home.
Think about it this way. If it really was so beneficial to take that long term mortgage, banks would increase the mortgage rates until it wasn't. They are offering 30 year mortgages to you at those rates because they can make a profit off of it, after accounting for risk, inflation, management fees, and THEIR opportunity cost.
By the way, I haven't included how that 15 year home is likely smaller/less expensive, so you have less to pay in property tax, utilities, and maintenance. Or the fact that with a 30 year, if you have a downpayment of much less than 20%, you'll be paying a fair amount in PMI a month, which will be more than halved with the shorter mortgage since you'll pay down the 15 year so quickly. That counts for another $4000 in savings over the next ~10 years. There's also the fact that many of us aren't perfectly disciplined with finances, and wouldn't choose to invest consistently. Having that higher mortgage payment means that you are for sure going to put that money in (unless things get so bad you default, which means you wouldn't have been investing either).
Bottom line is, the whole "take the difference and invest it" line is a bunch of garbage if you look at any point besides the perfect scenario 30 year time window, and doesn't necessarily hold up even then. When you are investing, you make the majority of your money at the end, and with a mortgage, you "waste" the most money on interest payments at the beginning. Which means that, if you have the house for less than 30 years and/or are not a perfect disciplinarian, you are taking it in the shorts on a 30 year, and the 15 year is going to come out better almost every time.
It seems to me that the bigger barrier is computer vision and AI issues, and I would say that as some of these things are getting closer to solved robots are very close to the "take off" point... it's arguable that it is already happening. Servos and electric motors are pretty damn good (and cheap!) and easy to control - artificial muscles have a lot of improving to do to match that. That said, the kind of uber-flexible humanoid robot that most people envision might be easier to realize if artificial muscle technology advanced.
It would distort the free market and no one would take the risk or the very hard work like 70 hour work weeks, MBAs, and other things for dozens of years without the compensation.
That's why there are no non-CEO's working 70 hour work weeks, right? Bullshit. Many of the hardest working people I know are in low paying jobs - take teachers, for one, many of whom work 70 hour weeks periodically just out of care for the students. Research shows that after a pretty modest point (70k or so), increased pay doesn't increase productivity or happiness.
Yes it does suck to be laid off at a human level, but ask yourself what are you providing? The reason you are let go is because you fix some computers. The CEO on the otherhand changes the lives of milllions of people.
If I do a poor job at work, I get let go and will have a tough time finding a new job without my previous employer's recommendation. If a CEO does a poor job, he gets a bonus and hired by one of his buddies at an even more ludicrous salary. If by "changing the lives of millions of people" you mean BSing about synergy and choosing who to lay off, there's some lives changed. However, the brilliant engineer that actually designs the product that people love will never see more than 6 figures (if that).
The free market takes care of everything if you just bud out and not interfere.
Just like it has been taking care of everything for the past 30 years, while the average person's wage decreases (in real dollars) and the CEO pay goes through the roof? Give it a couple more decades of this, combined with disappearing jobs thanks to automation and increased competition for basic resources, and things are going to get ugly. Stop defending the people (and the system) that are pissing all over you.
Ok - I agree with you mostly on your rebuttals to the OP - he(or she) was getting fairly high-and-mighty about the bible, and there is no obligation to treat any work with more "respect" than another, as far as I'm concerned. Outside of a religious context, I still think the bible is important (as in playing a significant role in the course of humanity and the lives of many humans throughout history), but someone telling you not to "disrespect" it is merely projecting religious values on others, and I certainly wouldn't defend that.
Hey, don't get all riled up here - I'm not really saying that anybody ought to like the bible, or consider its contents valuable, or even respect it. Really, I'm just saying that, according to most reasonably objective criteria that we might use to quantify the "importance" of a work, the bible is certainly going to be among the top contenders.
It seems to me that you want to call the bible unimportant because you dislike it, see inaccuracies within the text, or believe that it has had a net negative influence on humanity. That is another discussion entirely - a work can be "important" yet have had a major negative influence on humanity (indeed, it might be important specifically BECAUSE of that negative influence). Consider Mein Kampf. Accuracy shouldn't really enter into it either, because that would exclude all fiction, and that would mean that we see the Principia as less important since relativity is more factually correct. Or, the works of Aristotle - Aristotle is rightly considered an important philosopher, but his philosophy essentially set human progress back about 2000 years because he was so opposed to using factual evidence in philosophy. His theories about gravity and inertia (and hell, the number of people's teeth) were completely wrong. He and his followers actively destroyed works by previous philosophers (Democritus, Aristarchus) who were making steps in astronomy and rudimentary atomic theory that would not be matched until Copernicus and Galileo.
Please don't think that I'm trying to tell you love or respect the bible because of its intrinsic properties, age, or out of religious reverence. It is, as you say, just a book. But there's a reason that entirely non-religious scholars devote their lives to researching this book - it is undeniably an important part of human history.
I think all those measures are rather arbitrary. One book is no more important than any other.
The criteria you use to call my standards arbitrary is just as arbitrary - so there.
But seriously, claiming that no book is more important than another makes it so this isn't really a discussion worth having. You are not really talking about the bible at all then... just about a general relativistic perspective by which all value statements are subjective, and therefore you don't assign worth to them. Sure, everything is subjective when you get down to it, but we can still get some useful things done with our ultimately subjective and arbitrary perspectives. And, acting as though there are some objective quantities/qualities out there that can be known (or at least approximated well enough) facilitates much more interesting conversation and has proven to be fairly useful (in my subjective opinion).
There are methods properly called objective (as in, as objective as any physical quantity used in science) to measure a book's influence (number of citations by other sources being a great one - many scientific journals are measured by this standard). There are objective ways to measure a book's proliferation - number of copies sold/distributed/read. You could probably also even come up with some pseudo-objective measure of a book's impact on an individual... measure the economic change in that person's life as a direct result of the book (giving away money to charity, buying merchandise related to the book, dying for said book)... of course, that would be difficult to isolate, but it is in principle a knowable quantity.
My selection of influence, proliferation, and impact is arbitrary, yes, but I think it is reasonable. I'm open to hearing an alternative set of standards by which we could determine the "importance" of a work. If you are arguing that the word "important" is meaningless and arbitrary, though, I won't get in your way. That would just mean that this discussion doesn't really involve Harry Potter or the bible, but whether it is appropriate to assign values to things. It seems to me that importance is a quality that has widely understood meaning and utility and is a helpful way to guide our thinking about things like art, science, and philosophy, but you are free to think otherwise.
Why is the bible and important book exactly? Just because it's old?
Importance is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but the bible is:
1. The best selling book of all time
2. Arguably the most influential book in (and on) human history (for good or ill)
a. I mean, seriously. People have died for this book. People who died because they were so committed to what it said, and people who have killed because of it. Numerous social movements have happened because of this book. Essentially ALL of Western thought for the past several centuries has been significantly impacted by these writings.
3. One of the most complete and well-preserved specimens of ancient thought which exists today
There might be some other books that are contenders for importance to humanity, but The Hobbit and Harry Potter certainly aren't among them. Please note - I'm not saying that anybody should love this book, or that it is "good" - those things are purely subjective. By almost any objective measure, though, the bible is undeniably Important.
With regards to reforming the system, I don't disagree. Reform away. But until we can (A) get rid of teachers easier, (B) provide a choice to parents on where to PLACE their kids and (C) (don't think it's required, but certainly would help) CLOSE a failed school (let it re-open either as a charter or with new administrative/teaching staff), then I don't see reform working.
A - already happens in many places, and yet scores are not miraculously improving.
B - already exists. you can put your kid wherever the hell you want, public, private, or charter, as long as you can get them there.
C - already happens, and has been in effect for a while.
Come up with something more interesting than 90's era reform efforts that have already run their course and failed.
IT SIMPLY WORKS.
Citation needed. There are lots of dysfunctional companies with substandard workers, even though many companies only allow "At-will" employment: you don't even need a reason to fire someone, you can just get rid of them any time. Yet, mediocre people manage to stick around almost everywhere. Also, you are still entirely ignoring my contention of increasing teacher education, and how that fundamentally changes the function of pay. Paying existing teachers more isn't going to fix things. Never said it was. Argue against something I'm ACTUALLY SAYING.
It seems to me that you aren't actually interested in the problem of school reform. You seem to mostly have an axe to grind with unions, or people fighting for increased teacher pay. I don't really care one way or the other about unions, and there are some places (Michigan, for example) where teachers are payed pretty competitively (or at least were a few years ago, when I had relatives living out there). I don't think those teachers need more pay.
I speak from personal experience, though: I taught for a year, and when I changed to an industry job my salary doubled. I would've needed a PHd and 20 years as a teacher to match my current salary. I was a highly qualified science and technology teacher, from the best teacher ed program in the state. I taught robotics as an undergrad and personally developed all the software for an experiment that launched on a suborbital rocket. I started a robotics program in my first year teaching at a STEM charter school, and took a brand new high school robotics club to a college level competition. I left because I couldn't support my family on that salary, the hours were ridiculous, and I was sick of dealing with disrespectful parents (and their kids) and an unsupportive administration. My replacement? A lady with an associate's degree in who knows what. That was a win for the education system, right?
Or, do you think I should have just taken the hit for the kids, like in all those feel-good teacher movies? I'm sorry that I wasn't willing to sacrifice time and money for my family, just to educate the kids of strangers who vote against school funding every single time it is on the ballot.
Charter schools are a joke, at least in terms of education reform. Option is good, and when my daughter is old enough for high school, I wouldn't be surprised if I sent her to one, mainly because you end up with a higher proportion of kids that at least somewhat value academics, if only because most charter schools aren't the "default" for anyone - you have to choose to go there, and that automatically excludes parents (and therefore kids) that don't give a shit about education.
Considering that, it is pretty damning that charter schools don't completely trounce public schools in performance.
We are arguing about two different things here. I am arguing about reforming the system - you are arguing about finding a good school for your kids. Charter schools don't hold much promise to improve the system as a whole, in my opinion, which you seem to agree with. A charter school can be good even if charter schools, generally speaking, are no better than public schools.
Honestly, though, I have no beef with charter schools. Let's keep them. But let's not count on them to fix the problem, because data indicates that the system as a whole is failing, with or without them.
What is odd to me is that you don't see the substantial difference in the approach I've delineated vs "Just toss money at the problem". At no point have I said that schools are underfunded. I've merely said that teachers need better education, and pay commensurate with their qualifications. There are a whole bunch of ways to achieve this without giving more funding to schools. Your counterexamples of California pay increases with little performance increases don't apply. I'm not suggesting money is the problem. I'm suggesting money is one part of the problem. Adding money alone won't fix it. I have never claimed that it will, but you keep attacking your strawman on that one. Instead, attack this problem: teacher education is shit. Reform teacher education, make the career more enticing, and let's see what happens.
If you can find an example of Teacher Ed Reform + Average Pay that didn't do well (or really, any data besides Finland's example), that would be data I would be very interested in. Otherwise, please don't waste my time with irrelevant counterexamples.
Tossing more money at the problem with no improvement is more likely a symptom of the absurd real estate situation there than because of educational policy.
The thing is, schools that can't get rid of disruptive students are in bad shape - I have a friend who worked in one, (teachers were literally written up if they sent students to the office) and the scores were in the gutter. However, while that school indeed had dismal scores, plenty of schools (charter schools included) that drop disruptive students at a moment's notice are not showing the marked improvement you suggest. If this was a major problem, we would expect charter schools, on average, to perform better than public schools. In fact, on average, charter schools perform (slightly) worse: http://www.educationjustice.org/newsletters/nlej_iss21_art5_detail_CharterSchoolAchievement.htm
Truly awful teachers get canned, no problem. At least here in Colorado. I can point out multiple examples at multiple schools over the past few years. Mediocre teachers stick around, because if you choose to replace one you are more likely to get a worse candidate than a better one. This happens essentially everywhere, too - how many places have you worked that have a number of people doing the bare minimum of work to stay employed? I've yet to find a company that doesn't have this problem.
Since you are hung up on these two examples, though, and apparently aren't interested in considering the reform efforts that have worked wonders elsewhere, we might just have to agree to disagree. I think the ideas you propose are common sense, but worn-out and attempt to treat symptoms rather than the system as a whole. Finland has shown innovation and success after persistent effort. But I certainly can't force you to change your mind.
I'm not really arguing against charter schools here. I'm arguing that the solution of getting rid of bad teachers and disruptive students is feel-good rhetoric that seems sensible on the face of it but doesn't actually address the real problem.
Here's the thing: I think the problem is that our teachers aren't good enough. And that is because someone who can teach well can make much more money, be more respected, and have better work-life balance in a different field. You get exceptions that choose to make the sacrifice and stick with the career anyway, but they are rare. So, firing underperformers isn't going to fix the problem as long as you aren't offering enough to attract and keep truly qualified people. At the same time, simply offering more money won't do it, because even the potentially great teachers are going through programs that are more fluff than rigor, mostly consisting of completion grades.
If a job position in industry is chronically understaffed, has high turnover, and frequently produces poor performance, there's a very good chance that you aren't offering enough to get the type of person required. You need to increase the pay, increase the perks, decrease the hours, or otherwise do something that will allow you to attract and retain quality personnel. Simple economics are at work here, supply and demand, and it is a mystery to me why we understand that if you want the best CEO, you need to pay accordingly, but we expect to pay teachers far below their earning potential in other fields and somehow still get good results.
Of course, the example of higher paying districts showing minimal improvement in scores would be a good counterexample, except that when you adjust for cost of living, the picture changes quite a bit, and you also have to have expert teachers out there that can be attracted with higher paychecks. Which is why the other part of the approach involves better teacher training.
We need institutional change, and the thing is, the approach I delineated has been proven to work in another developed country that had scores in the gutter. Increase teacher pay, but make teacher education similarly demanding. All teachers in Finland have a master's degree, from a program that only 10% of entrants complete, and they are paid a fair wage. They are relentlessly focused on research-based instruction. Students there admire and respect teachers, and many students aspire to teach one day. This has taken their education system from the bottom of the developed world to the top, although it took decades. If you know of any other examples of widespread systemic education improvement, I'd love to hear about them.
If global temperatures on average started declining and global weather patterns became milder on average, that would certainly contradict our observations of global warming. As neither thing has happened (considering we need to track data for years or decades), the trend is alive and well. Remember, this is GLOBAL warming.
Or, would you prefer that we base our understanding of climate on your little portion of the world? I can't imagine any problems with that...
It is virtually impossible in most large cities to get rid of bad teachers *OR* disruptive students.
You are assuming that these two things are the biggest parts (or even major contributors) to the problem.
Getting rid of disruptive students is just a way of shoving the problem off elsewhere, so they can lower someone else's test scores. Students are going to be disruptive, no matter where you are. Good teachers with continual support from a solid administration is the way to handle it.
The idea of getting rid of bad teachers is a good one, but it makes a major assumption: that you will replace that teacher with a better one. This is not a safe thing to assume for several reasons. First of all, think about the kind of job teaching is. A low paying, high stress job that offers lots of vacation, but almost no recognition, and that requires ridiculous hours to do well. Doing it poorly isn't nearly as demanding (as with most things).
What kind of people are you going to get in this job?
1. Quality people who are incredibly committed, to the point of sacrificing money, family, and personal time for the children of strangers.
2. People who don't really care, can't find a better job elsewhere, and will do the bare minimum of work
Look at that job description. Who are you going to get, primarily? Worse, teachers of the first type rarely can keep up that level of commitment, and gradually but steadily start to slip more and more into the second camp.
Here's what you do to fix this:
1. Pay teachers decently. Starting wages should be close to the average wage for someone with that degree. I left teaching and my income doubled.
2. Train them much better. Require masters if you have to. I was in a highly regarded teacher ed. program and it was a joke. Every decent teacher I've talked to says the same, that their education left them woefully under-prepared.
3. Start valuing academics as a society. I don't really know how to do this, but showing that we value teachers by putting our money where our mouth is would be a good start.
Getting rid of bad teachers doesn't do anything unless you replace them with someone better. Whoever is in a position is likely the least-bad option. Good teachers are the exception, because it is an awful job that drives decent people away, or, if they stay, tends to turn them into bad teachers.
Schools aren't going to improve overnight. However, this model took Finland from low-average scores to some of the best in the world. And, it makes sense - in every other field, we accept that if you want good results, you need to find good people and pay them well. Let's use the same strategy here and see what happens.
What you just described, was hard work on the part of yourself and your parents.
Having parents that give a shit is pretty damn lucky. The problem I have with the claim of "it's the parents" is that it is a totally useless comment. Even if the parents are the problem, we still have the problem of educating the kid. If we don't, he's just going to become another shitty parent. So essentially, when you point the finger at the parent, you are essentially claiming that nothing can be done and poor people with no legitimate opportunities will continue to have poor kids with no legitimate opportunities and we should just accept it.
I've taught in a charter school, and the truth is, even if they claim to accept all kids, that isn't close to true. Charter schools don't have the same transportation options - ours didn't offer any bus service, so either parents had to have the time/resources to transport their kids/pay someone to do it, or had to live in the neighborhood. And, guess what, the charter school was in a well-off suburban neighborhood.
The administration looked for any excuse to ditch kids - the second there was a single violation, kids were expelled. I can see an argument for that, but it really ended up feeling like rather than fixing problems and helping kids that needed it, we were just sending kids that didn't conform perfectly away to be someone else's problem.
The thing is, discipline and persistence (which is really the best indicator of success) is not a thing you are born with. It would be convenient if it was, because that would allow us to accept that poverty is an unchangeable aspect of genetics and . Instead, it is a skill, a learned behavior, and it is something that you need to see modeled. You need to practice it. Kids that are unable to develop this skill because of their environment at home and/or school, do not have anything close to equal opportunity with kids who are raised by hard-working, successful parents, surrounded by peers that value academic success, and with no distractions from things like hunger, threat of emotional and/or physical harm, and unstable home situations.
The only difference is the outer shell. At least a Lexus has some upgraded innards when compared to a Toyota. With a Mac it's ZILCH. It's the same parts as you could get in a Dell.
There have been particular Dells used as hackintoshes for this very reason.
It's easier to talk nonsense when you have no clue what so ever and you have no idea what you're buying.
If you are only concerned with the electronics, perhaps. The thing is, Apple's bread and butter is mobile. And in that space, the real hardware (physical design, materials, connectors) govern the life of the machine at least as much as the computing components. My 6 year old macbook is showing a heck of a lot more resilience than any PC I've ever had, and I've had multiple PC laptops that were unusable after a year or two because of failing batteries, broken keys and switches, and dysfunctional wifi cards.
That 6 year old macbook still holds plenty of charge for light use at the coffee shop. It served as my wife's primary work machine for a couple of years. We started a photography business using it for image processing. Then I lugged it around through 4 years of university, including triple booting Linux, OSX, and Windows, while I learned Python and C++ on it and then used it as a development machine for robotics competitions in the desert. After that I took it back and forth with me for a year of teaching high school, and now it still happily sits at home for Netflix and casual browsing without an issue. It has a couple of dings and dents, but the time I have spent troubleshooting issues, fiddling with antivirus, or reinstalling the operating system? Zero.
In the same amount of time, my in-laws have been through a half dozen windows laptops, which always seem to have hardware failures or software bloat of one kind or another, that eventually cause them to go shopping for a new machine.
Yes of course, anecdote is not the singular form of data, but the truth is, to get the level of design and component quality that exists in a Mac, you are going to have to spend as much in the PC world as you do in the Mac world. Some things don't show up on a spec sheet yet add tangible value to a product... design, materials, and component quality being among them.
I have yet to use a Mac product that had significant ill-conceived interface issues, software or hardware. I've yet to use a PC that didn't. My work laptop, for instance, has inconsistent behavior between the hardware volume controls and the software ones. Sometimes the hardware controls work, sometimes they don't. The screen blinks on and off 4-5 times every time I boot it up, for no apparent purpose. It fails to connect to the monitor dock reliably and either requires me to wait for several minutes or needs a reboot to get the machine to recognize the docked KB and mouse. It has incredibly onerous antivirus software that will monopolize the machine for up to an hour (4 cores pegged, 100% cpu usage, user not allowed to shut down process) any time I want to install an executable. And, this is in a business-class computer that certainly wasn't bargain-bin priced at Bestbuy.
Thinking that the outer shell doesn't matter is just as irrational as thinking it is the only thing that matters. Quality in design is something that a lot of people value very highly for very good reason. It saves time and prevents the constant irritation of a poorly executed interface.
Honestly, the internet provides potentially more subtle opportunities for targeted bullying to occur, but there's one big positive to internet bullying: there's an indisputable record of exactly how horrid these kids are being, and the right parties can be held responsible.
Childhood is terrifying - you don't have the control, choice, autonomy, or credibility to remove yourself from really awful situations like this. I don't think that the internet changes things substantially. I'm sure that a huge portion of teen suicides from way before the internet could still be attributed on some level to bullying. The difference is, now we can prove it and hold the assholes accountable.
Yes, if we were in a simulation, we'd likely never know.
But given that we have no evidence to suggest we are, any assumptions around the notion that we are (or may be) are pretty much useless to us unless we can figure out the gaps in the simulation.
The discrete nature of quantum mechanics certainly has some interesting implications and a lot of experiments have revealed that the universe behaves in a manner that seems almost like it has been optimized to run efficiently. The Stern-Gerlach apparatus, for instance, which measures spin of an electron, will only ever reveal it to be up, or down. Never in between. It should have an infinite variety of states, much like any physical object could be be right-side-up, upside-down, or anywhere in between. This is weird, and all quantum mechanical systems (and therefore reality) display this discrete behavior on some level.
Also, the double-slit experiment shows us particles that obey wave interference rules (kind of weird) even when there is no other wave/particle to interfere with (super weird).
Last, Bell's theorem (and the EPR paper) call into question whether or not things "exist" when they are not being measured. They apparently don't remember their properties in between measurements, and you would probably agree that it is reasonable to question the existence of something without defined properties. We actually have statistical analysis that proves that those persistent properties (called hidden variables) don't exist. That is what Schrodinger's cat is actually about - attach a cat-killing apparatus to one of these indeterminate particles and you end up with an indeterminate cat. The absurdity of that was the whole point of Schrodinger's thought experiment.
It certainly would be a wise move to make sure that your universe didn't waste computational resources on parts of reality that weren't interacting.
Anyhow, all of these things show that reality is screwed up, and it doesn't take that much imagination to see quantum mechanics as one huge "gap in the simulation". Not nearly enough evidence to "prove" that we are in a simulation, but probably enough evidence to make a bit of philosophizing forgivable.
Consider - for all the incredible science done by all the rovers over the many, many years they've been there, NASA acknowledges that the same could've been done in a few weeks by a human. Not to mention the fact that spaceflight isn't and hasn't ever been primarily about science. It has been about exploration, inspiration, and pushing human (and technological) capabilities. You also neglect the fact that robotics are already expanding pretty darn fast, and that the conservative nature of space engineering (use the best hardware available that is really, really well proven) means that the kind of supercomputing and sensing that is driving robotics forward now may take decades to become portable and reliable enough to fit space
Better robots would be great, but the truth is they take forever to get the job done, and the best robots in the world don't change the fact that eventually the human race will go extinct unless it can become spacefaring. And, robots don't create stories people can connect with - if we want more space exploration funded, we need humans to be the ones going.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Mother Teresa had very different goals than most Westerners understand. The scale of the suffering there in Calcutta is not very well approximated by a hospital or homeless shelter in the developed world. A main purpose of the organization there was to provide a place for very sick, impoverished people to be loved and comforted while they died. In that context, the folks that wanted to send medicine and money for fancy facilities kind of misunderstood what was going on... and using an ambulance to tranport nuns just means to me that they saved the money on buying a nun-bus by using one vehicle for multiple purposes.
All I'm getting at is that recent criticisms of Mother Teresa seem to focus on the fact that she wasn't terribly interested in healing people. The thing is, she wasn't a doctor, or a nurse. Her primary skillset was providing human companionship and love to dying people. It's kind of like disparaging a therapist for not providing brain surgery - the goal is entirely different.
There's no way you can do an experiment that even remotely tests man's impact on climate. The systematic interactions of a planet's climate are beyond what we can conceive of, much less understand, right now.
This is ridiculous. By your approach, essentially none of astronomy is science, because we can't introduce variables and isolate things to understand them one at a time. We can't do "experiments" on the Sun that fit into a high school classroom form with dependent and independent variables, but through observation and measurement over time and developing models and simulations we've managed to deduce a fair amount about it. Climate science is handling things in a very similar way.
My biggest issue though is your fundamental belief that "it's too complicated, we can't understand it". If this was your attitude, we never would've left the dark ages.
Did you actually read through to the end? He handles drones, and he's right - most of them require a human to let them out of the hangar, and they certainly haven't automated the entire fueling/rearming process, so once they've exhausted what they're carrying, game over.
Philosophically, thought, it does seem quite silly, and I myself would never have regarded it as more than a mathematical curiosity, had it not been already falsified when I was born.
That's really easy to say in hindsight, when we have the benefit of being able to calculate the scale of the near universe and measure the velocities of stars. Sounds like you would've intuitively figured out gravitation if you lived before Newton, too.
The solid state model was really, really entrenched in Einstein's time. The Big Bang was mocked by Einstein and many others on the grounds of being too religious, appealing to the idea of a single moment of creation. Prior thinkers seem very naive from our enlightened positions, but we wouldn't be in the position we are without their work debating and working through theories that are now "obvious" to us.
If ants had human intelligence, I don't think coming up with the "spherical ball in space" model of Earth would be that much harder than it was for humans... both of our scales are "ant-like" compared to the size of our planet. The only real challenge I would anticipate is that ants have much less sophisticated vision, and being able to directly witness astronomical bodies was what really allowed us to begin understanding the solar system and our part in it.
Actually, the sea salt craze can be pretty directly linked to an increase in breast cancer rates. This doesn't have much to do with the sea salt per se, but the fact that it isn't iodized (gotta keep it NATURAL), so we have a greater incidence of iodine deficiency which is causing problems.
Things happen in exactly one way. Any individual person may not have the full information regarding how it happened and thus we all have our own interpretations of the 'truth', but even accepting things like the many worlds hypothesis, in any particular time line there is exactly one truth as defined to be the real physical changes that took place in the universe at the exact time in question, irregardless of who saw what. Even quantum mechanics and its inherent randomness doesn't really change the fact (you can define truth as always-past and thus all wave states have collapsed into a specific truth, or you can define truth as including the present in which case 'is in a superposition' simply becomes part of the description of the truth. In both cases, a specific definition of the truth is still available.)
That's a pretty strong statement. All the way back to special relativity, Einstein gave examples of two traveling observers that experienced the same series of events in different orders, and were each correct according to their personal perspective.
The inherent randomness of quantum mechanics doesn't seem to be the challenge to a single perceived truth - rather, it is the fact that multiple states of existence happen concurrently (Schrodinger's cat) and that classical notions of cause-and-effect are disrupted (EPR, Bell's theorem) that make it suspect to claim knowledge of one truth.
Even if you suppose that one truth exists, the human experience precludes the possibility of wholly accurate knowledge. I mean, these ideas have been kicking around since Descartes at least. At best, we can offer approximations and models with increasing predictive power. It isn't even really accurate to ask whether these models are "correct" scientifically... there's a good argument to be made that many of the subatomic particles we claim might not exist at all - we just have a model that includes them that happens to coincide very closely with the results of actual particle accelerator experiments, but there could be a much more complicated (or much simpler!) ACTUAL reality that is "really" producing the results we observe. Can we prove whether models we use are "true"? I would say no. We can merely show that they predict experimental outcomes with greater reliability than competing models.
I'm not defending the GP here, so much as saying that "truth" is complex, and getting more complex all the time as physics advances. The more we learn, the farther away it seems to be. Personally, I think that's a more interesting avenue for physics than the rigidity and certitude of classical determinism.
Meh - you aren't counting the interest break for taking a shorter term loan, or the massive equity advantage in the first years. I got about a full point off of my mortgage by going with a 15 year vs. a 30. And in that case, the financial difference between the two options was only about $300 a month. In my case, if I had chosen a 30 year mortgage, in my first year, I would've paid down the principal by about $2500. With a 15 year, I pay down about $8000. That means I pay $3600 this year to increase my net worth by $5500... a 50% return is great in anybody's book. I've also compared to other (risk-free, let's be fair) investment opportunities that could've alternatively taken advantage of that money, and nothing comes close. It's hard to compete with that kind of rate.
Towards the end of a mortgage, your payments on principal for that 30 year will be a lot closer to those of the 15 year option, but of course, by that time you've had 15 years of mortgage free living if you took the 15 year option. That isn't really that relevant though, because how many people actually live in a house for 30 years? What matters is how much equity you're building and what the outcome is for the time you actually own the home.
Think about it this way. If it really was so beneficial to take that long term mortgage, banks would increase the mortgage rates until it wasn't. They are offering 30 year mortgages to you at those rates because they can make a profit off of it, after accounting for risk, inflation, management fees, and THEIR opportunity cost.
By the way, I haven't included how that 15 year home is likely smaller/less expensive, so you have less to pay in property tax, utilities, and maintenance. Or the fact that with a 30 year, if you have a downpayment of much less than 20%, you'll be paying a fair amount in PMI a month, which will be more than halved with the shorter mortgage since you'll pay down the 15 year so quickly. That counts for another $4000 in savings over the next ~10 years. There's also the fact that many of us aren't perfectly disciplined with finances, and wouldn't choose to invest consistently. Having that higher mortgage payment means that you are for sure going to put that money in (unless things get so bad you default, which means you wouldn't have been investing either).
Bottom line is, the whole "take the difference and invest it" line is a bunch of garbage if you look at any point besides the perfect scenario 30 year time window, and doesn't necessarily hold up even then. When you are investing, you make the majority of your money at the end, and with a mortgage, you "waste" the most money on interest payments at the beginning. Which means that, if you have the house for less than 30 years and/or are not a perfect disciplinarian, you are taking it in the shorts on a 30 year, and the 15 year is going to come out better almost every time.
It seems to me that the bigger barrier is computer vision and AI issues, and I would say that as some of these things are getting closer to solved robots are very close to the "take off" point... it's arguable that it is already happening. Servos and electric motors are pretty damn good (and cheap!) and easy to control - artificial muscles have a lot of improving to do to match that. That said, the kind of uber-flexible humanoid robot that most people envision might be easier to realize if artificial muscle technology advanced.
*devils advocate*
Why should they be capped?
It would distort the free market and no one would take the risk or the very hard work like 70 hour work weeks, MBAs, and other things for dozens of years without the compensation.
That's why there are no non-CEO's working 70 hour work weeks, right? Bullshit. Many of the hardest working people I know are in low paying jobs - take teachers, for one, many of whom work 70 hour weeks periodically just out of care for the students. Research shows that after a pretty modest point (70k or so), increased pay doesn't increase productivity or happiness.
Yes it does suck to be laid off at a human level, but ask yourself what are you providing? The reason you are let go is because you fix some computers. The CEO on the otherhand changes the lives of milllions of people.
If I do a poor job at work, I get let go and will have a tough time finding a new job without my previous employer's recommendation. If a CEO does a poor job, he gets a bonus and hired by one of his buddies at an even more ludicrous salary. If by "changing the lives of millions of people" you mean BSing about synergy and choosing who to lay off, there's some lives changed. However, the brilliant engineer that actually designs the product that people love will never see more than 6 figures (if that).
The free market takes care of everything if you just bud out and not interfere.
Just like it has been taking care of everything for the past 30 years, while the average person's wage decreases (in real dollars) and the CEO pay goes through the roof? Give it a couple more decades of this, combined with disappearing jobs thanks to automation and increased competition for basic resources, and things are going to get ugly. Stop defending the people (and the system) that are pissing all over you.
Ok - I agree with you mostly on your rebuttals to the OP - he(or she) was getting fairly high-and-mighty about the bible, and there is no obligation to treat any work with more "respect" than another, as far as I'm concerned. Outside of a religious context, I still think the bible is important (as in playing a significant role in the course of humanity and the lives of many humans throughout history), but someone telling you not to "disrespect" it is merely projecting religious values on others, and I certainly wouldn't defend that.
Hey, don't get all riled up here - I'm not really saying that anybody ought to like the bible, or consider its contents valuable, or even respect it. Really, I'm just saying that, according to most reasonably objective criteria that we might use to quantify the "importance" of a work, the bible is certainly going to be among the top contenders.
It seems to me that you want to call the bible unimportant because you dislike it, see inaccuracies within the text, or believe that it has had a net negative influence on humanity. That is another discussion entirely - a work can be "important" yet have had a major negative influence on humanity (indeed, it might be important specifically BECAUSE of that negative influence). Consider Mein Kampf. Accuracy shouldn't really enter into it either, because that would exclude all fiction, and that would mean that we see the Principia as less important since relativity is more factually correct. Or, the works of Aristotle - Aristotle is rightly considered an important philosopher, but his philosophy essentially set human progress back about 2000 years because he was so opposed to using factual evidence in philosophy. His theories about gravity and inertia (and hell, the number of people's teeth) were completely wrong. He and his followers actively destroyed works by previous philosophers (Democritus, Aristarchus) who were making steps in astronomy and rudimentary atomic theory that would not be matched until Copernicus and Galileo.
Please don't think that I'm trying to tell you love or respect the bible because of its intrinsic properties, age, or out of religious reverence. It is, as you say, just a book. But there's a reason that entirely non-religious scholars devote their lives to researching this book - it is undeniably an important part of human history.
I think all those measures are rather arbitrary. One book is no more important than any other.
The criteria you use to call my standards arbitrary is just as arbitrary - so there.
But seriously, claiming that no book is more important than another makes it so this isn't really a discussion worth having. You are not really talking about the bible at all then... just about a general relativistic perspective by which all value statements are subjective, and therefore you don't assign worth to them. Sure, everything is subjective when you get down to it, but we can still get some useful things done with our ultimately subjective and arbitrary perspectives. And, acting as though there are some objective quantities/qualities out there that can be known (or at least approximated well enough) facilitates much more interesting conversation and has proven to be fairly useful (in my subjective opinion).
There are methods properly called objective (as in, as objective as any physical quantity used in science) to measure a book's influence (number of citations by other sources being a great one - many scientific journals are measured by this standard). There are objective ways to measure a book's proliferation - number of copies sold/distributed/read. You could probably also even come up with some pseudo-objective measure of a book's impact on an individual... measure the economic change in that person's life as a direct result of the book (giving away money to charity, buying merchandise related to the book, dying for said book)... of course, that would be difficult to isolate, but it is in principle a knowable quantity.
My selection of influence, proliferation, and impact is arbitrary, yes, but I think it is reasonable. I'm open to hearing an alternative set of standards by which we could determine the "importance" of a work. If you are arguing that the word "important" is meaningless and arbitrary, though, I won't get in your way. That would just mean that this discussion doesn't really involve Harry Potter or the bible, but whether it is appropriate to assign values to things. It seems to me that importance is a quality that has widely understood meaning and utility and is a helpful way to guide our thinking about things like art, science, and philosophy, but you are free to think otherwise.
Why is the bible and important book exactly? Just because it's old?
Importance is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but the bible is:
1. The best selling book of all time
2. Arguably the most influential book in (and on) human history (for good or ill)
a. I mean, seriously. People have died for this book. People who died because they were so committed to what it said, and people who have killed because of it. Numerous social movements have happened because of this book. Essentially ALL of Western thought for the past several centuries has been significantly impacted by these writings.
3. One of the most complete and well-preserved specimens of ancient thought which exists today
There might be some other books that are contenders for importance to humanity, but The Hobbit and Harry Potter certainly aren't among them. Please note - I'm not saying that anybody should love this book, or that it is "good" - those things are purely subjective. By almost any objective measure, though, the bible is undeniably Important.
With regards to reforming the system, I don't disagree. Reform away. But until we can (A) get rid of teachers easier, (B) provide a choice to parents on where to PLACE their kids and (C) (don't think it's required, but certainly would help) CLOSE a failed school (let it re-open either as a charter or with new administrative/teaching staff), then I don't see reform working.
A - already happens in many places, and yet scores are not miraculously improving.
B - already exists. you can put your kid wherever the hell you want, public, private, or charter, as long as you can get them there.
C - already happens, and has been in effect for a while.
Come up with something more interesting than 90's era reform efforts that have already run their course and failed.
IT SIMPLY WORKS.
Citation needed. There are lots of dysfunctional companies with substandard workers, even though many companies only allow "At-will" employment: you don't even need a reason to fire someone, you can just get rid of them any time. Yet, mediocre people manage to stick around almost everywhere. Also, you are still entirely ignoring my contention of increasing teacher education, and how that fundamentally changes the function of pay. Paying existing teachers more isn't going to fix things. Never said it was. Argue against something I'm ACTUALLY SAYING.
It seems to me that you aren't actually interested in the problem of school reform. You seem to mostly have an axe to grind with unions, or people fighting for increased teacher pay. I don't really care one way or the other about unions, and there are some places (Michigan, for example) where teachers are payed pretty competitively (or at least were a few years ago, when I had relatives living out there). I don't think those teachers need more pay.
I speak from personal experience, though: I taught for a year, and when I changed to an industry job my salary doubled. I would've needed a PHd and 20 years as a teacher to match my current salary. I was a highly qualified science and technology teacher, from the best teacher ed program in the state. I taught robotics as an undergrad and personally developed all the software for an experiment that launched on a suborbital rocket. I started a robotics program in my first year teaching at a STEM charter school, and took a brand new high school robotics club to a college level competition. I left because I couldn't support my family on that salary, the hours were ridiculous, and I was sick of dealing with disrespectful parents (and their kids) and an unsupportive administration. My replacement? A lady with an associate's degree in who knows what. That was a win for the education system, right?
Or, do you think I should have just taken the hit for the kids, like in all those feel-good teacher movies? I'm sorry that I wasn't willing to sacrifice time and money for my family, just to educate the kids of strangers who vote against school funding every single time it is on the ballot.
Charter schools are a joke, at least in terms of education reform. Option is good, and when my daughter is old enough for high school, I wouldn't be surprised if I sent her to one, mainly because you end up with a higher proportion of kids that at least somewhat value academics, if only because most charter schools aren't the "default" for anyone - you have to choose to go there, and that automatically excludes parents (and therefore kids) that don't give a shit about education.
Considering that, it is pretty damning that charter schools don't completely trounce public schools in performance.
We are arguing about two different things here. I am arguing about reforming the system - you are arguing about finding a good school for your kids. Charter schools don't hold much promise to improve the system as a whole, in my opinion, which you seem to agree with. A charter school can be good even if charter schools, generally speaking, are no better than public schools.
Honestly, though, I have no beef with charter schools. Let's keep them. But let's not count on them to fix the problem, because data indicates that the system as a whole is failing, with or without them.
What is odd to me is that you don't see the substantial difference in the approach I've delineated vs "Just toss money at the problem". At no point have I said that schools are underfunded. I've merely said that teachers need better education, and pay commensurate with their qualifications. There are a whole bunch of ways to achieve this without giving more funding to schools. Your counterexamples of California pay increases with little performance increases don't apply. I'm not suggesting money is the problem. I'm suggesting money is one part of the problem. Adding money alone won't fix it. I have never claimed that it will, but you keep attacking your strawman on that one. Instead, attack this problem: teacher education is shit. Reform teacher education, make the career more enticing, and let's see what happens.
If you can find an example of Teacher Ed Reform + Average Pay that didn't do well (or really, any data besides Finland's example), that would be data I would be very interested in. Otherwise, please don't waste my time with irrelevant counterexamples.
California is below average on teacher pay, compared to cost of living: http://www.teacherportal.com/salary/California-teacher-salary
Tossing more money at the problem with no improvement is more likely a symptom of the absurd real estate situation there than because of educational policy.
The thing is, schools that can't get rid of disruptive students are in bad shape - I have a friend who worked in one, (teachers were literally written up if they sent students to the office) and the scores were in the gutter. However, while that school indeed had dismal scores, plenty of schools (charter schools included) that drop disruptive students at a moment's notice are not showing the marked improvement you suggest. If this was a major problem, we would expect charter schools, on average, to perform better than public schools. In fact, on average, charter schools perform (slightly) worse: http://www.educationjustice.org/newsletters/nlej_iss21_art5_detail_CharterSchoolAchievement.htm
Truly awful teachers get canned, no problem. At least here in Colorado. I can point out multiple examples at multiple schools over the past few years. Mediocre teachers stick around, because if you choose to replace one you are more likely to get a worse candidate than a better one. This happens essentially everywhere, too - how many places have you worked that have a number of people doing the bare minimum of work to stay employed? I've yet to find a company that doesn't have this problem.
Since you are hung up on these two examples, though, and apparently aren't interested in considering the reform efforts that have worked wonders elsewhere, we might just have to agree to disagree. I think the ideas you propose are common sense, but worn-out and attempt to treat symptoms rather than the system as a whole. Finland has shown innovation and success after persistent effort. But I certainly can't force you to change your mind.
I'm not really arguing against charter schools here. I'm arguing that the solution of getting rid of bad teachers and disruptive students is feel-good rhetoric that seems sensible on the face of it but doesn't actually address the real problem.
Here's the thing: I think the problem is that our teachers aren't good enough. And that is because someone who can teach well can make much more money, be more respected, and have better work-life balance in a different field. You get exceptions that choose to make the sacrifice and stick with the career anyway, but they are rare. So, firing underperformers isn't going to fix the problem as long as you aren't offering enough to attract and keep truly qualified people. At the same time, simply offering more money won't do it, because even the potentially great teachers are going through programs that are more fluff than rigor, mostly consisting of completion grades.
If a job position in industry is chronically understaffed, has high turnover, and frequently produces poor performance, there's a very good chance that you aren't offering enough to get the type of person required. You need to increase the pay, increase the perks, decrease the hours, or otherwise do something that will allow you to attract and retain quality personnel. Simple economics are at work here, supply and demand, and it is a mystery to me why we understand that if you want the best CEO, you need to pay accordingly, but we expect to pay teachers far below their earning potential in other fields and somehow still get good results.
Of course, the example of higher paying districts showing minimal improvement in scores would be a good counterexample, except that when you adjust for cost of living, the picture changes quite a bit, and you also have to have expert teachers out there that can be attracted with higher paychecks. Which is why the other part of the approach involves better teacher training.
We need institutional change, and the thing is, the approach I delineated has been proven to work in another developed country that had scores in the gutter. Increase teacher pay, but make teacher education similarly demanding. All teachers in Finland have a master's degree, from a program that only 10% of entrants complete, and they are paid a fair wage. They are relentlessly focused on research-based instruction. Students there admire and respect teachers, and many students aspire to teach one day. This has taken their education system from the bottom of the developed world to the top, although it took decades. If you know of any other examples of widespread systemic education improvement, I'd love to hear about them.
If global temperatures on average started declining and global weather patterns became milder on average, that would certainly contradict our observations of global warming. As neither thing has happened (considering we need to track data for years or decades), the trend is alive and well. Remember, this is GLOBAL warming.
Or, would you prefer that we base our understanding of climate on your little portion of the world? I can't imagine any problems with that...
It is virtually impossible in most large cities to get rid of bad teachers *OR* disruptive students.
You are assuming that these two things are the biggest parts (or even major contributors) to the problem.
Getting rid of disruptive students is just a way of shoving the problem off elsewhere, so they can lower someone else's test scores. Students are going to be disruptive, no matter where you are. Good teachers with continual support from a solid administration is the way to handle it.
The idea of getting rid of bad teachers is a good one, but it makes a major assumption: that you will replace that teacher with a better one. This is not a safe thing to assume for several reasons. First of all, think about the kind of job teaching is. A low paying, high stress job that offers lots of vacation, but almost no recognition, and that requires ridiculous hours to do well. Doing it poorly isn't nearly as demanding (as with most things).
What kind of people are you going to get in this job?
1. Quality people who are incredibly committed, to the point of sacrificing money, family, and personal time for the children of strangers.
2. People who don't really care, can't find a better job elsewhere, and will do the bare minimum of work
Look at that job description. Who are you going to get, primarily? Worse, teachers of the first type rarely can keep up that level of commitment, and gradually but steadily start to slip more and more into the second camp.
Here's what you do to fix this:
1. Pay teachers decently. Starting wages should be close to the average wage for someone with that degree. I left teaching and my income doubled.
2. Train them much better. Require masters if you have to. I was in a highly regarded teacher ed. program and it was a joke. Every decent teacher I've talked to says the same, that their education left them woefully under-prepared.
3. Start valuing academics as a society. I don't really know how to do this, but showing that we value teachers by putting our money where our mouth is would be a good start.
Getting rid of bad teachers doesn't do anything unless you replace them with someone better. Whoever is in a position is likely the least-bad option. Good teachers are the exception, because it is an awful job that drives decent people away, or, if they stay, tends to turn them into bad teachers.
Schools aren't going to improve overnight. However, this model took Finland from low-average scores to some of the best in the world. And, it makes sense - in every other field, we accept that if you want good results, you need to find good people and pay them well. Let's use the same strategy here and see what happens.
"I was lucky to escape the environment, ..."
What you just described wasn't luck.
What you just described, was hard work on the part of yourself and your parents.
Having parents that give a shit is pretty damn lucky. The problem I have with the claim of "it's the parents" is that it is a totally useless comment. Even if the parents are the problem, we still have the problem of educating the kid. If we don't, he's just going to become another shitty parent. So essentially, when you point the finger at the parent, you are essentially claiming that nothing can be done and poor people with no legitimate opportunities will continue to have poor kids with no legitimate opportunities and we should just accept it.
I've taught in a charter school, and the truth is, even if they claim to accept all kids, that isn't close to true. Charter schools don't have the same transportation options - ours didn't offer any bus service, so either parents had to have the time/resources to transport their kids/pay someone to do it, or had to live in the neighborhood. And, guess what, the charter school was in a well-off suburban neighborhood.
The administration looked for any excuse to ditch kids - the second there was a single violation, kids were expelled. I can see an argument for that, but it really ended up feeling like rather than fixing problems and helping kids that needed it, we were just sending kids that didn't conform perfectly away to be someone else's problem.
The thing is, discipline and persistence (which is really the best indicator of success) is not a thing you are born with. It would be convenient if it was, because that would allow us to accept that poverty is an unchangeable aspect of genetics and . Instead, it is a skill, a learned behavior, and it is something that you need to see modeled. You need to practice it. Kids that are unable to develop this skill because of their environment at home and/or school, do not have anything close to equal opportunity with kids who are raised by hard-working, successful parents, surrounded by peers that value academic success, and with no distractions from things like hunger, threat of emotional and/or physical harm, and unstable home situations.
...except it's THE SAME CAR.
The only difference is the outer shell. At least a Lexus has some upgraded innards when compared to a Toyota. With a Mac it's ZILCH. It's the same parts as you could get in a Dell.
There have been particular Dells used as hackintoshes for this very reason.
It's easier to talk nonsense when you have no clue what so ever and you have no idea what you're buying.
If you are only concerned with the electronics, perhaps. The thing is, Apple's bread and butter is mobile. And in that space, the real hardware (physical design, materials, connectors) govern the life of the machine at least as much as the computing components. My 6 year old macbook is showing a heck of a lot more resilience than any PC I've ever had, and I've had multiple PC laptops that were unusable after a year or two because of failing batteries, broken keys and switches, and dysfunctional wifi cards.
That 6 year old macbook still holds plenty of charge for light use at the coffee shop. It served as my wife's primary work machine for a couple of years. We started a photography business using it for image processing. Then I lugged it around through 4 years of university, including triple booting Linux, OSX, and Windows, while I learned Python and C++ on it and then used it as a development machine for robotics competitions in the desert. After that I took it back and forth with me for a year of teaching high school, and now it still happily sits at home for Netflix and casual browsing without an issue. It has a couple of dings and dents, but the time I have spent troubleshooting issues, fiddling with antivirus, or reinstalling the operating system? Zero.
In the same amount of time, my in-laws have been through a half dozen windows laptops, which always seem to have hardware failures or software bloat of one kind or another, that eventually cause them to go shopping for a new machine.
Yes of course, anecdote is not the singular form of data, but the truth is, to get the level of design and component quality that exists in a Mac, you are going to have to spend as much in the PC world as you do in the Mac world. Some things don't show up on a spec sheet yet add tangible value to a product... design, materials, and component quality being among them.
I have yet to use a Mac product that had significant ill-conceived interface issues, software or hardware. I've yet to use a PC that didn't. My work laptop, for instance, has inconsistent behavior between the hardware volume controls and the software ones. Sometimes the hardware controls work, sometimes they don't. The screen blinks on and off 4-5 times every time I boot it up, for no apparent purpose. It fails to connect to the monitor dock reliably and either requires me to wait for several minutes or needs a reboot to get the machine to recognize the docked KB and mouse. It has incredibly onerous antivirus software that will monopolize the machine for up to an hour (4 cores pegged, 100% cpu usage, user not allowed to shut down process) any time I want to install an executable. And, this is in a business-class computer that certainly wasn't bargain-bin priced at Bestbuy.
Thinking that the outer shell doesn't matter is just as irrational as thinking it is the only thing that matters. Quality in design is something that a lot of people value very highly for very good reason. It saves time and prevents the constant irritation of a poorly executed interface.
Honestly, the internet provides potentially more subtle opportunities for targeted bullying to occur, but there's one big positive to internet bullying: there's an indisputable record of exactly how horrid these kids are being, and the right parties can be held responsible.
Childhood is terrifying - you don't have the control, choice, autonomy, or credibility to remove yourself from really awful situations like this. I don't think that the internet changes things substantially. I'm sure that a huge portion of teen suicides from way before the internet could still be attributed on some level to bullying. The difference is, now we can prove it and hold the assholes accountable.
Yes, if we were in a simulation, we'd likely never know.
But given that we have no evidence to suggest we are, any assumptions around the notion that we are (or may be) are pretty much useless to us unless we can figure out the gaps in the simulation.
The discrete nature of quantum mechanics certainly has some interesting implications and a lot of experiments have revealed that the universe behaves in a manner that seems almost like it has been optimized to run efficiently. The Stern-Gerlach apparatus, for instance, which measures spin of an electron, will only ever reveal it to be up, or down. Never in between. It should have an infinite variety of states, much like any physical object could be be right-side-up, upside-down, or anywhere in between. This is weird, and all quantum mechanical systems (and therefore reality) display this discrete behavior on some level.
Also, the double-slit experiment shows us particles that obey wave interference rules (kind of weird) even when there is no other wave/particle to interfere with (super weird).
Last, Bell's theorem (and the EPR paper) call into question whether or not things "exist" when they are not being measured. They apparently don't remember their properties in between measurements, and you would probably agree that it is reasonable to question the existence of something without defined properties. We actually have statistical analysis that proves that those persistent properties (called hidden variables) don't exist. That is what Schrodinger's cat is actually about - attach a cat-killing apparatus to one of these indeterminate particles and you end up with an indeterminate cat. The absurdity of that was the whole point of Schrodinger's thought experiment. It certainly would be a wise move to make sure that your universe didn't waste computational resources on parts of reality that weren't interacting.
Anyhow, all of these things show that reality is screwed up, and it doesn't take that much imagination to see quantum mechanics as one huge "gap in the simulation". Not nearly enough evidence to "prove" that we are in a simulation, but probably enough evidence to make a bit of philosophizing forgivable.
Consider - for all the incredible science done by all the rovers over the many, many years they've been there, NASA acknowledges that the same could've been done in a few weeks by a human. Not to mention the fact that spaceflight isn't and hasn't ever been primarily about science. It has been about exploration, inspiration, and pushing human (and technological) capabilities. You also neglect the fact that robotics are already expanding pretty darn fast, and that the conservative nature of space engineering (use the best hardware available that is really, really well proven) means that the kind of supercomputing and sensing that is driving robotics forward now may take decades to become portable and reliable enough to fit space
Better robots would be great, but the truth is they take forever to get the job done, and the best robots in the world don't change the fact that eventually the human race will go extinct unless it can become spacefaring. And, robots don't create stories people can connect with - if we want more space exploration funded, we need humans to be the ones going.