Yeah, no. I'm a carnivore but there should be a line somewhere in terms of intelligence.
Careful with that. You don't want to end up with Sarah Palin on your plate just because of some arbitrarily low line.
There's an intelligence line and then there's a "that would taste awful" line. Palin-meat crosses the latter and thus will safely remain off our plates.
"A lot of the privacy people, perhaps, don't understand that we still occupy the role of the Great Satan. New bombs are being devised. New terrorists are emerging, new groups, actually, a new level of viciousness," Feinstein said. "We need to be prepared. I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights."
Feinstein's falling victim to what I like to call "The Information Fallacy." Let's say that we knew that terrorists were going to blow something up at some time. It would be hard to thwart this based on this information, right? But if we obtained more information and learned their names, their target, and the exact date they planned to attack, thwarting them gets a lot easier. So far so good, but it can lead people to figure that getting even more information would lead to finding even more terrorist plots (perhaps even ones we don't know about yet).
In an ideal world, albeit one where privacy isn't a concern, this might be true. In the real world, though, gathering tons of information from everyone just leads to a signal-to-noise problem. For every one "Let's blow this up" terrorist phone record there will be millions (if not more) of "How's dad doing?", "When should we meet for dinner?", and other mundane phone records. There might even be some that tick off the right keyword boxes but for the wrong reasons. "That backpack is da bomb" might refer to explosives in a carry-on or it might be the use of slang to indicate that the person's backpack is really nice.
Sadly, too many politicians are worried that reducing the information we gather is just going to let terrorist messages slip by. It might, but we should be doing more focused information gathering (with proper checks and balances to prevent abuse) to improve signal-to-noise, not general information gathering hoping that some signal pokes out from all of the surrounding noise.
the science doesn't even matter to them, it's all about preserving life as they know it.
I've known some creationists personally. I was living with my parents at the time & was a member of their temple. (Only because I didn't have to pay membership dues.) The rabbi would give speeches about how science knew nothing and the Torah revealed all. I kept quiet knowing that a) interrupting his speech while in his temple would be rude and b) I had zero chance of convincing him or any of his congregants anything. Instead, I used it as a time to get to know how the other side thinks.
His main argument seemed to be that science was always changing its answer while religion kept the same answer. He saw religion's constancy to be a positive and science's changing to be a negative. It didn't matter what new data came in. The only thing that mattered was that the answer remained the same. Any change at all was viewed as frightening, different, and to be avoided at all costs. Everything had to be done as it had been done for centuries. (Don't point out that beliefs and practices change over time, though... Everything in religion has always been as it is right now!)
So, yes, creationist opposition to Evolution is about "preserving life as they know it" because any change is scary. God himself could come down and say "Hey guys, the Earth really IS that old and Evolution really happened" and they would find a way to stick to their "Evolution is wrong" Creationist mantra.
There's a lot that should get this squashed. Unfortunately, the person whose job it is to do the squashing (Sen. Dan Patrick, chair of the Texas Senate Education Committee) has said that he believes in Creationism and is a fan of the program.
You forgot that we need to grant Homeland Security the ability to declare matches and all forms of fire to be weapons of terror. Sure, a few innocent people might be arrested as they try to keep warm in the freezing cold, but that's a small price to pay for freedom from the terrorists. Remember: Anyone who opposes the bad on the terrorist tool known as fire is probably a terrorist and hates America!
Cue the NSA insisting that they need to examine every photo and video that passes over the Internet because terrorists might be using this.
Also cue some enterprising NSA employee convincing his superiors that terrorists might hide stuff on porn sites and he needs to examine those photos/videos very carefully and repeatedly.
This is essentially what spammers have said for years. "We have a First Amendment right to send anyone any message we want. Anyone who blocks our messages is infringing on our rights." Of course, it breaks down because spammers might have a right to send their messages, but they don't have a right to have people accept/read their messages.
No matter what you do patent abuse will always happen. If the rules are set up and enforced properly, though, this will be kept to a minimum. (This is "patent abuse under control.") The situation we have now all but encourages patent trolls to operate and leaves it to the courts to occasionally push them back. (At an expense to the people being targeted by patent trolls.)
This probably won't help the OP, but my solution was to convert my MKV files to MP4 format. The reason for this was that I was putting them on an external hard drive to connect to my Roku box. Roku says it supports MKV but in practice I've found it doesn't really. MP4, on the other hand, works nicely.
I'm in the same boat as you, only with Time Warner Cable instead of Comcast. Time Warner Cable can do whatever they want and my only real options are stay with them or have no Internet at all. (Which, considering that I do freelance web development, isn't an option.)
This also assumes that there are choices. In my area, my choice for wired Internet (e.g. not cell provider) is Time Warner Cable. I could also get Verizon DSL, but Verizon has repeatedly shown that they want to ditch DSL as soon as possible so I don't see why I should go to a slower, older technology that the company wants to get rid of. Were Time Warner Cable to start anti-Net Neutrality actions (for example, slowing NetFlix to a crawl unless they paid TWC), I would have no options to switch.
Perhaps this was another problem with my wife's grandmother's setup (as I'm not too familiar with Windows 8, having successfully avoided it before then), but there was no desktop icon that quickly led to the traditional desktop with Start Menu. The only icons on the screen were for commonly used applications.
My wife's grandmother was having computer trouble so I agreed to look over her PC. Unfortunately, it was running Windows 8 in Metro mode. Though I pride myself on my knowledge of computers, I couldn't figure out how to locate anything. It seemed like every step of the way, the computer was actively preventing me from finding tools that would have diagnosed the problem. It was like the OS was designed to be "so easy grandma can use it" to the point that they didn't even think that someone knowledgeable in computers would need to use it. Finally, I managed to escape from Metro-ville and fixed her problems. It turned a five minute job into about a two hour job, though.
Recently, during a meeting about how Common Core is hurting the educational system, a speaker mentioned something that I agree with. The #1 problem with education today isn't teachers or administrators or curriculum. It's poverty. If you were to chart performance of students across how much money they have, you'd find that the richer students do much better than the poorer ones. Worrying about when your next meal will show up or if you will lose your house or any of the hundred other problems that poor kids have that rich kids don't have takes focus away from education. This, in turn, lowers test scores. If we devoted all of this effort spent on "measuring teachers" and creating standardized tests to get metrics for politicians and businesses to turn into buzz words and instead directed it towards helping poor students, we'd see a much greater increase in their performance.
Are all of them good? Of course not; the ones that are bad wind up becoming known as bad, and attendance goes down
Where I live, we had a glut of charter schools that would never meet their appointed figures. The state finally threatened to shut one of them down and all of the charter school advocates protested to stop it. The school hadn't gotten near it's figures for four straight years but they claimed this was the year it would do so. It was spared (and some other public schools were axed to balance the budget). The next year, it failed it's figures again and was closed down - to uproars of how it should remain open because THIS was the year it would hit its figures.
At one point, my oldest son was in a local Montessori school. He had a horrible time there (to the point that - for years after - he'd refuse to talk as we drove by the building) and we were essentially kicked out. (They made our time there as difficult as possible until we left.) He had OT and PT services and we learned from other parents that many other kids with OT/PT were being kicked out of that school. We'd have raised a fuss, but we needed allies in the school system and feared that raising a commotion would result in some well connected folks making our son's educational life a living hell. Since then, we've learned that Charter Schools in our area pick and choose which students to accept based on who does or doesn't have special services. (i.e. If you have special services, you're out.)
We typically e-mail with our sons' teachers. If we need to do some real-time communicate on a matter, we set up a face-to-face meeting. This lets the school have someone cover for the teacher during that time.
In an ideal world, teachers would get paid more than I do because, as important as my job is to me, teachers have a ton more responsibility.
(Disclaimer: This "ideal world" would probably benefit me directly because my wife is a teacher by trade - although she's not currently in a classroom. Mostly because the low salary made staying at home to raise our kids cheaper than having the teacher salary and paying for daycare.)
I oppose the current standardized testing because they don't result in accountability. First of all, tying teacher performance to the tests is only resulting in pressure for the teachers to teach ONLY what is on the test. Any time spent on other topics, no matter how much they might spark the students' interest and love of learning, is time wasted and might result in the teacher being let go in favor of one who will teach to the test. This is already happening in classrooms. My kids school, for example, uses EngageNY which literally is a script of what the teacher should say, at what point, in what manner, how the kids should respond, and how long each lesson should last. Lessons aren't about finding how to spark each child's love of learning, but about giving each child the same scripted performance so they will all spit out the same answer on the test.
Secondly, these tests are designed and run by big companies like Pearson. Pearson is being paid millions of dollars here in NY to design tests. Nobody is allowed to view the tests. Not parents. Not teachers. Not principals or administrators. Tests are to be taken by students and sent back for grading. They are graded and then destroyed. There can be no challenging the scores because no third party is allowed to see what the test constituted. One group of four teachers in my kids' school peaked at a test booklet. (Something that could get them in considerable trouble.) They answered a question in it and each teacher got a different answer. If four teachers with masters degrees in education can't get the right answer, what hope do elementary school kids have?
Third, these companies have a financial incentive for students to fail. If a student does poorly on a test, Pearson can sell the school test prep materials, teacher training courses, administration training courses, etc. If a student does well, they get no additional profit. So why wouldn't they try to maximize failure on the tests?
Finally, these tests don't help teachers assess their students performance. The tests are given at the end of the school year and the results are made available next school year when the kids are with another teacher. When a teacher gives a test, he/she can use it to gauge whether little Johnny needs help in one area and where little Sally is excelling. These tests tell teachers nothing of the sort and are only used as weapons to bludgeon teachers with.
I won't argue that teacher's unions are sinless saints, but the standardized testing regime as it is currently set up has one purpose only: To put all of the "poor student performance" blame on teachers so that companies like Pearson can get bigger profits.
It's not that I don't understand "mainly", but I disagree that most of what modern medicine fixes is due to problems caused by modern life. People have been suffering and dying of illnesses for thousands of years. For most of that time, treating the issues was a little better than a stab in the dark. You could quarantine the diseased but this broke down if the person transmits the disease before showing symptoms.
Modern medicine allowed us to finally understand why people got sick and how to prevent or (in some cases) cure illnesses. It was modern medicine that said that disease was spread by microorganisms that would be destroyed by sanitation techniques. Before the germ theory, people thought that illness just appeared due to environmental conditions which could be identified by a bad smell. It wasn't thought that disease could pass from person to person. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory ) Under this theory, a surgeon operating on a patient had no need to wash his hands because he wasn't going to make his patient sick from the operation. Once it became accepted that germs (bacteria/viruses) were the cause of most illness, washing hands was accepted, sanitation improved, and disease rates dropped.
Many diseases today aren't so much caused by modern life as they are problems of people not dying of other causes. People are going to die eventually no matter what medical care they have. If you were to fully cure the top 10 causes of death today, people would begin dying in larger numbers of causes that are much rarer right now. In addition, modern diagnosis lets us pinpoint the cause of the disease more accurately. In the past, people might not have been said to have died of cancer because they either died of something else before cancer claimed them or because the cancer wasn't diagnosed and the cause of death was misattributed to something else.
Are there problems that modern life has caused? Definitely. Our lifestyle of eating horrible foods and sitting around all day causes many issues. However, going on medical care alone, I'd much rather live in the present day than in any other point in history.
Here in New York, at least, they are horrible for the public school system.
They:
1) Take money from the public school funds, leaving public schools with less money to work with. 2) Aren't required to take ALL students. This means that they'll often reject any student with special needs, pushing them back to the now even more underfunded public schools. This is partly a business decision. Special needs kids require more money to help which would lower the Charter Schools' profits. It's also partly a testing decision (see #4 below). 3) Aren't required to take the horrible Common Core tests that public schools are subjected to and upon whose results teachers' jobs rely. (Common Core is a whole different mess, but it's partly related to the push to "privatize" education - translation: big companies want to make a profit off of our kids.) 4) Where Charter Schools do take tests, they get to decide which results count towards the reported score.
So, by sheer selection bias on the part of Charter Schools, they come out looking great (since nobody who might bring their scores down is allowed in) while public schools wind up looking horrible (since all of those special needs kids who might bring down test scores are pushed back to the underfunded public schools). Meanwhile, the Charter schools keep making money by funneling public school funds to the companies that run them.
Do you seriously think that "modern life" created polio, whooping cough, smallpox, etc? Yes, sanitation is a good first step in preventing disease, but it isn't absolute. It doesn't prevent against all diseases all the time. Vaccination - or where vaccination isn't an option, proper medical treatment - is an important second step.
This is definitely the biggest problem with vaccines. Their very success is their biggest weakness. As people don't personally remember diseases like measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc, they mentally minimize the severity of it. Whooping cough? Sounds like you just have a bad cough for a week or two and then you're fine, right? Then they hear FUD about vaccines that leads to them mentally overestimating the risk of the vaccines. Before you know it you have a person who is thinking of injecting their child with this horrible mix of highly dangerous chemicals just to prevent their child from maybe coughing for a few days. They make the perfectly rational (in their mind, given their flawed assumptions) decision to forego vaccinations.
Sadly, the people who suffer are children like Dana Elizabeth McCaffery who die because they were too young to get the vaccine or people who have valid medical reasons for not getting the vaccine (immune system issues, allergies, etc). These people rely on the rest of us keeping herd immunity up. As the anti-vax movement grows, herd immunity breaks down and more people will die. The good news is that, as more people die, the anti-vax movement should be self-limiting. Who's going to seriously listen to Jenny McCarthy railing about vaccines if a hundred thousand people come down with measles? The bad news is that many, many people will get sick and either die or suffer permanent injury from vaccine-preventable diseases before this happens.
Jenny McCarthy says vaccines put dangerous toxins in your body. Obviously, you don't want "dangerous toxins" even if it would protect you from horrible diseases. Now, if you'll excuse her, she needs to go get an injection of botox to prevent some wrinkles.
Slashdot Mirror
There's an intelligence line and then there's a "that would taste awful" line. Palin-meat crosses the latter and thus will safely remain off our plates.
Feinstein's falling victim to what I like to call "The Information Fallacy." Let's say that we knew that terrorists were going to blow something up at some time. It would be hard to thwart this based on this information, right? But if we obtained more information and learned their names, their target, and the exact date they planned to attack, thwarting them gets a lot easier. So far so good, but it can lead people to figure that getting even more information would lead to finding even more terrorist plots (perhaps even ones we don't know about yet).
In an ideal world, albeit one where privacy isn't a concern, this might be true. In the real world, though, gathering tons of information from everyone just leads to a signal-to-noise problem. For every one "Let's blow this up" terrorist phone record there will be millions (if not more) of "How's dad doing?", "When should we meet for dinner?", and other mundane phone records. There might even be some that tick off the right keyword boxes but for the wrong reasons. "That backpack is da bomb" might refer to explosives in a carry-on or it might be the use of slang to indicate that the person's backpack is really nice.
Sadly, too many politicians are worried that reducing the information we gather is just going to let terrorist messages slip by. It might, but we should be doing more focused information gathering (with proper checks and balances to prevent abuse) to improve signal-to-noise, not general information gathering hoping that some signal pokes out from all of the surrounding noise.
I've known some creationists personally. I was living with my parents at the time & was a member of their temple. (Only because I didn't have to pay membership dues.) The rabbi would give speeches about how science knew nothing and the Torah revealed all. I kept quiet knowing that a) interrupting his speech while in his temple would be rude and b) I had zero chance of convincing him or any of his congregants anything. Instead, I used it as a time to get to know how the other side thinks.
His main argument seemed to be that science was always changing its answer while religion kept the same answer. He saw religion's constancy to be a positive and science's changing to be a negative. It didn't matter what new data came in. The only thing that mattered was that the answer remained the same. Any change at all was viewed as frightening, different, and to be avoided at all costs. Everything had to be done as it had been done for centuries. (Don't point out that beliefs and practices change over time, though... Everything in religion has always been as it is right now!)
So, yes, creationist opposition to Evolution is about "preserving life as they know it" because any change is scary. God himself could come down and say "Hey guys, the Earth really IS that old and Evolution really happened" and they would find a way to stick to their "Evolution is wrong" Creationist mantra.
There's a lot that should get this squashed. Unfortunately, the person whose job it is to do the squashing (Sen. Dan Patrick, chair of the Texas Senate Education Committee) has said that he believes in Creationism and is a fan of the program.
You forgot that we need to grant Homeland Security the ability to declare matches and all forms of fire to be weapons of terror. Sure, a few innocent people might be arrested as they try to keep warm in the freezing cold, but that's a small price to pay for freedom from the terrorists. Remember: Anyone who opposes the bad on the terrorist tool known as fire is probably a terrorist and hates America!
I can't speak to the iOS installations, but Google Play reports that the Starbucks app has between 1 million and 5 million installs: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.starbucks.mobilecard
If iOS has a similar installation base, we're talking somewhere between 1 million and 10 million affected users.
Cue the NSA insisting that they need to examine every photo and video that passes over the Internet because terrorists might be using this.
Also cue some enterprising NSA employee convincing his superiors that terrorists might hide stuff on porn sites and he needs to examine those photos/videos very carefully and repeatedly.
This is essentially what spammers have said for years. "We have a First Amendment right to send anyone any message we want. Anyone who blocks our messages is infringing on our rights." Of course, it breaks down because spammers might have a right to send their messages, but they don't have a right to have people accept/read their messages.
No matter what you do patent abuse will always happen. If the rules are set up and enforced properly, though, this will be kept to a minimum. (This is "patent abuse under control.") The situation we have now all but encourages patent trolls to operate and leaves it to the courts to occasionally push them back. (At an expense to the people being targeted by patent trolls.)
This probably won't help the OP, but my solution was to convert my MKV files to MP4 format. The reason for this was that I was putting them on an external hard drive to connect to my Roku box. Roku says it supports MKV but in practice I've found it doesn't really. MP4, on the other hand, works nicely.
I'm in the same boat as you, only with Time Warner Cable instead of Comcast. Time Warner Cable can do whatever they want and my only real options are stay with them or have no Internet at all. (Which, considering that I do freelance web development, isn't an option.)
This also assumes that there are choices. In my area, my choice for wired Internet (e.g. not cell provider) is Time Warner Cable. I could also get Verizon DSL, but Verizon has repeatedly shown that they want to ditch DSL as soon as possible so I don't see why I should go to a slower, older technology that the company wants to get rid of. Were Time Warner Cable to start anti-Net Neutrality actions (for example, slowing NetFlix to a crawl unless they paid TWC), I would have no options to switch.
Perhaps this was another problem with my wife's grandmother's setup (as I'm not too familiar with Windows 8, having successfully avoided it before then), but there was no desktop icon that quickly led to the traditional desktop with Start Menu. The only icons on the screen were for commonly used applications.
My wife's grandmother was having computer trouble so I agreed to look over her PC. Unfortunately, it was running Windows 8 in Metro mode. Though I pride myself on my knowledge of computers, I couldn't figure out how to locate anything. It seemed like every step of the way, the computer was actively preventing me from finding tools that would have diagnosed the problem. It was like the OS was designed to be "so easy grandma can use it" to the point that they didn't even think that someone knowledgeable in computers would need to use it. Finally, I managed to escape from Metro-ville and fixed her problems. It turned a five minute job into about a two hour job, though.
Recently, during a meeting about how Common Core is hurting the educational system, a speaker mentioned something that I agree with. The #1 problem with education today isn't teachers or administrators or curriculum. It's poverty. If you were to chart performance of students across how much money they have, you'd find that the richer students do much better than the poorer ones. Worrying about when your next meal will show up or if you will lose your house or any of the hundred other problems that poor kids have that rich kids don't have takes focus away from education. This, in turn, lowers test scores. If we devoted all of this effort spent on "measuring teachers" and creating standardized tests to get metrics for politicians and businesses to turn into buzz words and instead directed it towards helping poor students, we'd see a much greater increase in their performance.
Where I live, we had a glut of charter schools that would never meet their appointed figures. The state finally threatened to shut one of them down and all of the charter school advocates protested to stop it. The school hadn't gotten near it's figures for four straight years but they claimed this was the year it would do so. It was spared (and some other public schools were axed to balance the budget). The next year, it failed it's figures again and was closed down - to uproars of how it should remain open because THIS was the year it would hit its figures.
At one point, my oldest son was in a local Montessori school. He had a horrible time there (to the point that - for years after - he'd refuse to talk as we drove by the building) and we were essentially kicked out. (They made our time there as difficult as possible until we left.) He had OT and PT services and we learned from other parents that many other kids with OT/PT were being kicked out of that school. We'd have raised a fuss, but we needed allies in the school system and feared that raising a commotion would result in some well connected folks making our son's educational life a living hell. Since then, we've learned that Charter Schools in our area pick and choose which students to accept based on who does or doesn't have special services. (i.e. If you have special services, you're out.)
We typically e-mail with our sons' teachers. If we need to do some real-time communicate on a matter, we set up a face-to-face meeting. This lets the school have someone cover for the teacher during that time.
In an ideal world, teachers would get paid more than I do because, as important as my job is to me, teachers have a ton more responsibility.
(Disclaimer: This "ideal world" would probably benefit me directly because my wife is a teacher by trade - although she's not currently in a classroom. Mostly because the low salary made staying at home to raise our kids cheaper than having the teacher salary and paying for daycare.)
I oppose the current standardized testing because they don't result in accountability. First of all, tying teacher performance to the tests is only resulting in pressure for the teachers to teach ONLY what is on the test. Any time spent on other topics, no matter how much they might spark the students' interest and love of learning, is time wasted and might result in the teacher being let go in favor of one who will teach to the test. This is already happening in classrooms. My kids school, for example, uses EngageNY which literally is a script of what the teacher should say, at what point, in what manner, how the kids should respond, and how long each lesson should last. Lessons aren't about finding how to spark each child's love of learning, but about giving each child the same scripted performance so they will all spit out the same answer on the test.
Secondly, these tests are designed and run by big companies like Pearson. Pearson is being paid millions of dollars here in NY to design tests. Nobody is allowed to view the tests. Not parents. Not teachers. Not principals or administrators. Tests are to be taken by students and sent back for grading. They are graded and then destroyed. There can be no challenging the scores because no third party is allowed to see what the test constituted. One group of four teachers in my kids' school peaked at a test booklet. (Something that could get them in considerable trouble.) They answered a question in it and each teacher got a different answer. If four teachers with masters degrees in education can't get the right answer, what hope do elementary school kids have?
Third, these companies have a financial incentive for students to fail. If a student does poorly on a test, Pearson can sell the school test prep materials, teacher training courses, administration training courses, etc. If a student does well, they get no additional profit. So why wouldn't they try to maximize failure on the tests?
Finally, these tests don't help teachers assess their students performance. The tests are given at the end of the school year and the results are made available next school year when the kids are with another teacher. When a teacher gives a test, he/she can use it to gauge whether little Johnny needs help in one area and where little Sally is excelling. These tests tell teachers nothing of the sort and are only used as weapons to bludgeon teachers with.
I won't argue that teacher's unions are sinless saints, but the standardized testing regime as it is currently set up has one purpose only: To put all of the "poor student performance" blame on teachers so that companies like Pearson can get bigger profits.
It's not that I don't understand "mainly", but I disagree that most of what modern medicine fixes is due to problems caused by modern life. People have been suffering and dying of illnesses for thousands of years. For most of that time, treating the issues was a little better than a stab in the dark. You could quarantine the diseased but this broke down if the person transmits the disease before showing symptoms.
Modern medicine allowed us to finally understand why people got sick and how to prevent or (in some cases) cure illnesses. It was modern medicine that said that disease was spread by microorganisms that would be destroyed by sanitation techniques. Before the germ theory, people thought that illness just appeared due to environmental conditions which could be identified by a bad smell. It wasn't thought that disease could pass from person to person. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory ) Under this theory, a surgeon operating on a patient had no need to wash his hands because he wasn't going to make his patient sick from the operation. Once it became accepted that germs (bacteria/viruses) were the cause of most illness, washing hands was accepted, sanitation improved, and disease rates dropped.
Many diseases today aren't so much caused by modern life as they are problems of people not dying of other causes. People are going to die eventually no matter what medical care they have. If you were to fully cure the top 10 causes of death today, people would begin dying in larger numbers of causes that are much rarer right now. In addition, modern diagnosis lets us pinpoint the cause of the disease more accurately. In the past, people might not have been said to have died of cancer because they either died of something else before cancer claimed them or because the cancer wasn't diagnosed and the cause of death was misattributed to something else.
Are there problems that modern life has caused? Definitely. Our lifestyle of eating horrible foods and sitting around all day causes many issues. However, going on medical care alone, I'd much rather live in the present day than in any other point in history.
Here in New York, at least, they are horrible for the public school system.
They:
1) Take money from the public school funds, leaving public schools with less money to work with.
2) Aren't required to take ALL students. This means that they'll often reject any student with special needs, pushing them back to the now even more underfunded public schools. This is partly a business decision. Special needs kids require more money to help which would lower the Charter Schools' profits. It's also partly a testing decision (see #4 below).
3) Aren't required to take the horrible Common Core tests that public schools are subjected to and upon whose results teachers' jobs rely. (Common Core is a whole different mess, but it's partly related to the push to "privatize" education - translation: big companies want to make a profit off of our kids.)
4) Where Charter Schools do take tests, they get to decide which results count towards the reported score.
So, by sheer selection bias on the part of Charter Schools, they come out looking great (since nobody who might bring their scores down is allowed in) while public schools wind up looking horrible (since all of those special needs kids who might bring down test scores are pushed back to the underfunded public schools). Meanwhile, the Charter schools keep making money by funneling public school funds to the companies that run them.
Do you seriously think that "modern life" created polio, whooping cough, smallpox, etc? Yes, sanitation is a good first step in preventing disease, but it isn't absolute. It doesn't prevent against all diseases all the time. Vaccination - or where vaccination isn't an option, proper medical treatment - is an important second step.
This is definitely the biggest problem with vaccines. Their very success is their biggest weakness. As people don't personally remember diseases like measles, mumps, whooping cough, etc, they mentally minimize the severity of it. Whooping cough? Sounds like you just have a bad cough for a week or two and then you're fine, right? Then they hear FUD about vaccines that leads to them mentally overestimating the risk of the vaccines. Before you know it you have a person who is thinking of injecting their child with this horrible mix of highly dangerous chemicals just to prevent their child from maybe coughing for a few days. They make the perfectly rational (in their mind, given their flawed assumptions) decision to forego vaccinations.
Sadly, the people who suffer are children like Dana Elizabeth McCaffery who die because they were too young to get the vaccine or people who have valid medical reasons for not getting the vaccine (immune system issues, allergies, etc). These people rely on the rest of us keeping herd immunity up. As the anti-vax movement grows, herd immunity breaks down and more people will die. The good news is that, as more people die, the anti-vax movement should be self-limiting. Who's going to seriously listen to Jenny McCarthy railing about vaccines if a hundred thousand people come down with measles? The bad news is that many, many people will get sick and either die or suffer permanent injury from vaccine-preventable diseases before this happens.
Jenny McCarthy says vaccines put dangerous toxins in your body. Obviously, you don't want "dangerous toxins" even if it would protect you from horrible diseases. Now, if you'll excuse her, she needs to go get an injection of botox to prevent some wrinkles.