I'd humbly suggest that removing the phone from the house of an elderly, helpless, senile person is probably not a complete solution.
Oh, there are so many ways that I could answer that.
Let's try the cruel evil answer first. Sure let's make 78 (or what ever the current average life expectancy age) be the cut off date for all government services. The short answer is that according to the numbers you ought to be dead by now. It's on cost effective for us to pay much to keep you alive. Withholding government service, just encourages you to pass on sooner so your resources can be used by others.
You can change 78 to anything or use whatever metric you want to select out a minority or elite that you want reduced services for over here and increased services over there for. Actually, I think that the real dividing line is the friends/family test. If you are 78 and don't have any connects with others, then no one will care if you die. If you are 78 and have a huge family and tons of friends/large church/political group/or former teacher, then lots of people will care if you die off so resources will become available to extend your life.
Except it wasn't a prank. The lady actually believed she could call the cops to get a dead mouse off her porch. A friend of mine was the dispatcher who took the call, and he kept the recording.
Don't you have an animal services department? Any thing that involves animals they get dispatched out on. They aren't cops per se, more like glorified dog catchers, but our city has put them under our police department and our local 911 is used to dispatch animal service calls. I'm more amazed that this isn't more common. Our 911 call center takes calls for life net, fire, police, and animal services stuff, I'm amazed at how lazy some of other 911 call centers sound from this discussion. I thought that was a normal thing. And these sorts of calls are just part of the normal load. They don't encourage it, but they are trained to deal with it.
Our police department just recently got an internal tool where the detectives could listen to the 911 records from their desk through a web interface. I've wondered how long it'd take for some one to want to make that a public app. We are in the process of converting over to digital video in the cars and storing it all on a 3 TB server. With the right interface, you could make all that video public if you really wanted to. It'd come out if needed in a criminal trial, but the initial plans are to delete everything older than 30 days that isn't flagged to be kept. (O.k. really it just fills up the server and once the server space is maxed out it starts to delete oldest first, but you get the idea.) Do you really want that sort of thing to be plugged up to youtube? Really, think about.
There is a part of me that says sure all the really interesting/funny local videos will be viewed by the entire department so why shouldn't they be made public? The simple answer is would you be willing to work in an environment where 90% of your work is recorded and reviewable by anyone for 30 days afterward?
A non-emergency number (101) was launched a couple of years ago in some areas to try and reduce the number of calls to 999, it's meant to be used for: reporting vandalism and graffiti; noise nuisance; threatening and abusive behaviour; abandoned vehicles; dumping and fly tipping; drunk and rowdy groups; drug related anti-social behaviour; and broken street lighting.
Um, that stuff actually sounds like valid reasons to dial 911 around here. When you really look at most police stuff is this nonemergency stuff. It should all be going to the same dispatch center anyway. The only thing that a different number does is automatically down grade your response time. On our police monthly reports we have 6 dispatch levels of calls for service. Would you want to put out six emergency numbers so that the caller could self sort a bit how important their call is? That's what the damn call center is for! They should be trained and have flow charts on how to handle all of these sorts of calls.
The American taxpayer is footing the bill for their well-being. And pensions. I say, put them on Social Security like the rest of us, and allow their salaries to be commensurate to their approval rating. We'll get some useful things happening then.
I want exit polls and if a politician gets higher levels of disapproval they'd get anywhere from all assets stripped from them, exile, automatic extended jail sentence (at the min. the length that they were in office) or the death penalty. We wouldn't need term limits then and the voting public would have the option of getting rid of those politicians that they hate. Though I'm sure we'd set that death penalty option at like a 90-95% disapproval rating instead of 60-70% disapproval rating.
What he is charged with is so petty compared to the greater good he has done that will be a crying shame. So, you're saying... as long as he keeps the money flowing to you, you are willing to overlook lies and deception? Do you think he's clean as a whistle in all his other dealings, too?
Hypothetically... if I had my own private genie, devil, lobbyist, or politician, I wouldn't care squat what they did on their own time as long as they conned everyone else into giving me more resources for less effort.
For sure. If you think making shift manager at Burger King is a career goal instead of just a waystation on a longer path..... that you achieved at 20 putting yourself through college. And I really wish we could stop the people who think a junior high education makes them ready to vote from getting near a voting booth.
I get giggles reading this. I really think we should make every one of our citizens and their offspring vote in each and every election. Those that want to limit voting for any reason esp. hey that voting group isn't "educated" the way that I want it to be. Set off red flags. It doesn't take a middle school education to evaluate people and political groups and to determine, which option is in your personal best interest.
Actually, I find it funny that you think all these lower end jobs will be magically eliminated and that you'll need a super phd to program any of the robots. Odds are that min. wage labor will always be cheaper than robots for a given segment of labor. I'm more about throwing out crap that just means you have to spend another 8 years in an "educational" environment just for the being what "they" consider educated and subsiding the careers of all those educators. If educators had their way we wouldn't get out of school until we were 30-35.
Heck, I'd be interested in a system like this at work. We have CCTV on our computer labs. However we don't have anyone monitoring it. It's more for liability reasons, and so that if someone steals or damages a computer, we can hopefully help the police catch them. However prevention is better than clean up. So it'd be cool if when the system thought something was wrong, it'd notify staff and we could look. If everything was fine, we carry on as normal. If something is indeed happening, we call the police.
The killer app for this is those home 4 camera DVRs. If you could just run this magic app, and every "interesting" party or criminal activity was just listed and displayed you'd actually have a shot at catching things. This would really come in handy when we start sticking 1.5+ TB HD in those things, which isn't that far off.
1:Smaller class sizes! 2:Less memorization, more critical thinking and analysis. 3:Less passive listening and watching, more discussion and experiment (think Socarates).
I wonder. There are days that I think in order to "fix" education we need to increase class sizes to a standard 25-30 students in each class. Pay teachers less. They should make more than double min. wage, but no more than triple min. wage. You should have everything standardized across the country so it would be trivial to rate how your kid's class is doing compared to any other class in the country.
It seemed that the only time teachers got really frightened was when we had to take standardized tests. Though every teacher loves to hate everything about standardized tests. (Well the easy way to fix that is to have a big massive db where anyone can enter problem sets and solutions and for all of it to be reviewed and approved for use for next years students. You take as much subject judgment away from the teachers as possible and use that to compare the students progress and the teachers' abilities. If you want to home school or test out of classes, you'd have to take the same standardized tests as everyone else and either you do well or not. The object is to rate and rank everyone and their teachers.
The problem seems to be, that the various educational systems seem to be dedicated to hiring trained "teachers" who don't have much, if any specialty, instead of people who are good at their professions who want to spend a few years teaching.
Well you run into two problems. #1 is genius at doing X can't teach their way out of a paper bag most of their students don't learn a fraction of what genius knows. The second is that for most "education" classes you don't need a professional to teach. Your basic general ed shouldn't require a professional to come in and explain anything though you'd want a "trained" teacher to do it.
The problem with teaching is those that want to dominate or be in charge of 20-30 others are offered all they want although they can make up any rule by themselves and expect to be obeyed. Talk about training your kids to obey a dictator few questions asked. I remember as a student never being involved or taught where the rules come from only that the teachers/staff made them and we had to follow them. If you didn't like something, you had to pray that a parent would complain about it and some positive action was taken. Talk about teaching apathy in your future citizens.
Actually, most of those type of articles point to the fact that Finish kids are not treated like babies as to why they can do so well. Most have to get to school themselves, and have a decent amount of responsibility. It seems actually teaching your kids how to take care of themselves makes them more likely to succeed. Shocking, I know...
So you mean if kids in the US actually had to go to school like in those manga where everyone except that single rich kid walks to school and they have assigned duties to clean the room and such that our educational system would be better?
I've always wondered if a school run based off of a manga would work... Who knows it might. I always wondered how every student got to school or home daily without being kidnapped or beat up by such and such gangs... Oh that's right that's in a lot of manga too about kids being abused/bullied on the way home/to school.
Plenty of parents saw no value in education in their own lives, and discourage their kids from wasting their time. That's going to take generations to fix.
Um, I'd say most of us with critical thinking abilities encourage our kids to have that attitude for several reasons. #1 is that education isn't generally worth stressing over. Do you have any idea how long it takes to unlearn that education is important? About 1 year, after finding out that two adults with BS degrees are worth min. wage jobs or being told that they don't have any experience being just out of college. Talk about finding out the real value of a math minor and a computer science BS.
People like to say math is important and it's good for you like vitamins, but really I've hardly used any math since college. None outside of tutoring the occasional junior high person and I had to relearn most of that. (Though generally that only takes 5-10 minutes, except you learn that the reason said person is having problems is that problem isn't following the formula that was taught, and it isn't obvious at all how they want you to solve it.) Fix education by throwing out the 90% of it that the average citizen doesn't need.
Opps we find out that we can really get by with less than a junior high education. That's not PC so has to be wrong.
For kids, school should be akin to their 9-5 job. In order to excel they need to put the time in at home, and the only people that can help instill that discipline are the parents.
I like the job analogy, but then think that all forms of homework are evil and any teacher/professor that assigns any should be shot. You wouldn't put up with having to do 3-4 hours of unpaid work nightly after doing your 9-5 job would you? Then why expect it out of kids just for "education" just so they can be called "educated" or being kept busy? I could do most of my HS homework in 5-10 min. unless it was designed to consume time.
Would you like your boss to assign take home projects that you couldn't do at work and wouldn't be paid for, but were expected to be completed by the end of the week and working?
I teach my kids, that after work, I don't think about it. After 5 and before 8 are my time not their paid time though the occasional 15 minutes here or there is o.k.
Compare that to the games that older generations were brought up on (Nethack, Mist, older rpgs) and it is pretty obvious to see why this newer generation doesn't endorse puzzles like some of the older peeps here do.
Um, I'm sorry, but I'd have to say from my RPG experience things boil down to two things if you can't do it at first. Number one is that you need more levels to make it easier. That's the easy solution to many RPG problems. The other is that boss or random critter is immune to everything except either this type of magic or this given weapon nothing else works although the critter only has 10 hp.
The third thing that I hate more than anything is. Dude don't waste any items or use any magic on that miniboss because it's an impossible story element that you are going to loose no matter what. (Even if you've over leveled by 20 levels and seem to be able to kill said boss, he touches you and you are down for the count. Grr.)
The thing that I've learned about puzzles in RPGs is that puzzles are almost all evil and if its not mandatory or some really cool item for doing it, then I'm avoiding it. Wait 5-10 minutes to find out that annoying puzzle is mandatory if you want to go farther.
There are days that I think that most RPG puzzles are overrated. If they really wanted to give us a few puzzles, they make us solve a chemistry formula and gather ingredients, or do trig. (Both would be random and couldn't be just looked up in a walk through, you'd have to learn the subject in order to pass the said puzzle.
You don't see players making detailed hand-drawn maps of every level of Portal, complete with precise notes, just so they can solve the puzzles. Gamers today just don't have the patience for it. Even online RPGs, the last stronghold of the fanatical mappers and note-takers, have all given up and provided automatic mapping tools which even a brain-dead cat sleeping on the keyboard could use.
Um, if you really want to picky blame it on Doom and the map that popped up when you hit tab. I'm sure there were early examples of this out there, but Doom was the game that really brought it home to me. I utterly hate games without a decent built in auto map now. I'm thinking of RPGs more than anything though. They vary greatly in how much is shown on that map, if the map is scalable, and if treasure boxes/enemies appear on the map. The reason you won't see me or others make maps is because we'd rather not waste our time map making. We've bought a game to have fun. We'd like it to give us a nice visual map. (There is bonus marks for other options added to the maps, and it's even o.k. if you have to get a story item before map elements show up.)
Spent nuclear fuel also emits significant heat, it would seem more logical to recycle the fuel rods as water heating devices than dump them somewhere and ignore them, although preventing contamination would be extremely hard. Hard is not impossible, however, and it seems better to try and solve a hard problem (and risk succeeding) than to do nothing and face impossible energy demand problems year-after-year.
Direct nuclear water heaters? I love it.;) If only we'd be a bit saner and use roof top solar water heating and some more residential geothermal, we wouldn't need that much additional heat though.;)
If the amount of resources that were poured into nuclear development in the 50's were poured into solar development today, solar development would probably be double that of microprocessors. Sure, solar development is advancing today faster than ever before, but even today, the effort is miniscule compared to what was dumped into nukes.
If you want the honest truth, solar is thousands of years old. Nukes as you've put it are really less than 100. We only stopped designing everything around solar energy once "cheap" electricity and A/C came around. I'm mixed. I've never really felt the passion about solar. I do feel strongly that we never really developed nuclear tech as we should have. Instead we've labeled "bad"/"ugly" and have gone back to our old solar/wind thing. Solar/wind is old/ancient tech. We are just refining it and applying it to electricity as we should have done in the beginning. Now we've really not even touched nuclear tech. We are most likely going to drop oil fueled ships to go back to sailing ships instead of designing and running nuclear shipping for awhile.
What I do know about pushing people into public works projects on renewable resources is that it would create jobs, and result in more renewable energy. However, if the cost of the energy is greater, than everyone is paying in higher overall costs (or taxes). It must also be noted that in a slumping economy, the costs of implementing large public works projects is cheaper, as there are often large numbers of unemployed people (who in the US are often earning money from the government already from the welfare system). This means the net cost of implementing these projects is cheaper due to being able to pay lower wages, and even cheaper still because you don't have to pay these people welfare benefits.
Basically you are saying the government needs to tie the welfare system to "digging useful ditches" sort of tasks. If the government is going to pay you to live, then it wants you to labor at something, other citizens will benefit from other than just you not being a criminal to live. That sounds like a decent idea.
A recent poll (I think it was from last Thursday) said that over 90% of Americans are FOR the rapid mobilization of wind and solar power. It seems everyone's on board for this.
Except BOTH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES. Which is quite mind-blowing since the populous as a whole is ALL FOR IT and if either did support such a plan, it would net them a HUGE amount of voters from both political parties
I don't think that this is something either of them really want to bring up. Why? It's not something that will be seen as a presidential win. This will be something that congress and business do because its cheaper long term. If 90% of everyone wants something, it's going to happen soon anyway. It doesn't need a president to back it.
The one thing that irks me about Bush's policy is that he got pushed into the entire foreign military thing rather than fighting them long term through this sort of route. If we had gone nuts over the last several years installing renewable energy in this county, the middle east would have a lot more to fear. I got mad too, but I wanted to do something that would cause their resources to be worth a lot less over the long term rather than fighting over their resources.
Everyone got a good laugh out of their own ignorance of how the Congress works and it cost him the election and got us eight years of Bush. Was a joke made at his expense really worth eight years of Bush? It was really a misunderstanding of terminology not a wild claim made by Gore so is it still funny?
Damn, I didn't think anyone actually used that to change their vote. I was 50/50 until I listened to the vp running mates. Gore's at the time was all for video game censorship. That was the killer that made me lean towards Bush. As far as I was concerned, Bush and Gore were both middle of the road folks and wouldn't be able to do anything unless the rest of the country wanted to do it.
On your point of laughing at Gore. If the man couldn't have decent PR supporters/campaign machine telling him how he should get his point across, then he didn't deserve to be president. One of the big things that I actually respect about Bush, is that he surrounds himself with capable advisers and seems to listen to them. To turn that around, would Gore have been elected president if he had a better adviser team? I don't know. Heck, I tend to hold up Bush and Reagan as examples of how far your average person could make it with the right backing. Now if Bush and Reagan can get elected president, how come Gore couldn't?
It's much more than this one joke that his opponents use. At his level of politics, he should have known better than give anyone that kind of opening. I figure if Gore couldn't win an election coming out right after Clinton's term, then he will never be able to win.
So I am just dumbstruck that these people have not found a way around these providers that are clearly "butt raping the tourists". I can see them getting together in a private room at a restaurant getting drunk of the local alcohol (which can be REAL strong) and laughing hysterically.... I think I remember that it was around 100-150$ USD per month, which is pretty competitive and even close to prices here in the US.
Don't tell 'em. They are all reporters and well should know better. If I was going to go to any country, I'd check out their cellular internet. In the US, it generally costs around $70-80 a month in my area. I'd think every developed country would have that by now. I consider India and China to be developed. The only really practical way of getting the entire human population on the internet is through cell phones as it is. Wait 20-30 years, and we'll get there.
I'm waiting until China or India can send out a press release that 70-80% of their population have internet enabled cell phones.
It does have an oil industry and the people who live here are justified in using it to improve their living environment, are they not? Or perhaps you feel that they shouldn't. This is shifting, by the way.
I kinda of see it just like NY or LA. Were those cities built by slave labor? Well, they bitch and moan because that wealth is there being spent rather than here being spent. You are right a major city such as that doesn't exist because of one freaking resource. A small company town could start like that, but a major city just has too many people in it to depend entirely on one of any resource.
I could bitch and moan all day that NY, LA, Houston, or Dallas are using unfair trade practices/labor practices that keep that wealth out of my small town. Would it be true? Not at all. Is my small town using unfair trade practices/labor practices to keep wealth out of the tiny surrounding communities? Not at all. Its just jealousy of the wealth of larger population centers.
I wouldn't trust the Chinese government to report on the color of the sky, but I suppose there are ways to validate their claims.
I'm very mixed on that comment. I don't know if I'd "trust" any national government to put out accurate stats about itself. I'd have to trust them all to lie somewhat equally though. If a government lies or stretches the truth too much it'll be found it. It's much easier long term to just put out stats that you have reasonable faith in.
(That still doesn't mean that the stats right, just that those that are compiling them think that they are.)
Heck, I know that the police stats in the US are all slanted as much as they can in the direction that the given police departments want. (Be it up or down depending on where the grant money lays this year.) You have to just adjust to the fact that all human organizations lie as much as they can get away with. When you take it as a given life is just so much easier to adjust to.
Well to use an analogy, if Apache and IIS were car companies, one is manufacturing cars that get 200 MPG, with keyless entry security systems that are highly customizable and can be purchased for $10. The other company makes a car that runs on baby kittens, can be hijacked everytime you go under 30 MPH (and whose top speed is 35 MPH) and can be purchased for $100,000.
Who do you think deserves the market in this case?
The guy that sold a few thousand copies for $100k each. Considering that the other product would have to sell 100K to match the profit in 1 single sale of the other.
O.k. The guy would make far more money if it could sell that $10 one for $100K to a few thousand, but that's always an option to charge them to upgrade to the new improved version.
Frankly, I've never bought that old CW about girls being worse at math than boys... especially since I met and married my math-major wife in college, who has always been much better at math than I am. It may be true that boys are more _interested_ in math than girls, and thus pursue it and are successful at it more often, but that's a completely different thing from saying that girls are somehow innately "worse" at math.
Um, I'd be mixed on that. I remember about the same level of ability in my math and cs classes between sexes. Now ratios though you'd have 1-2 females out of a class of 15-18 in either CS or Math. Now, this also somewhat proves the point. If girls had equal ability through out the population in math than the college math classes should have been about half of either sex. In my high school, math classes were divided by equal portions of sex.
We don't know that females are avoiding something that they aren't good at or or they avoiding a subject that they don't like or are they avoiding math because they aren't good at it? Female math majors are the exceptions not the rule.
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I'd humbly suggest that removing the phone from the house of an elderly, helpless, senile person is probably not a complete solution.
Oh, there are so many ways that I could answer that.
Let's try the cruel evil answer first. Sure let's make 78 (or what ever the current average life expectancy age) be the cut off date for all government services. The short answer is that according to the numbers you ought to be dead by now. It's on cost effective for us to pay much to keep you alive. Withholding government service, just encourages you to pass on sooner so your resources can be used by others.
You can change 78 to anything or use whatever metric you want to select out a minority or elite that you want reduced services for over here and increased services over there for. Actually, I think that the real dividing line is the friends/family test. If you are 78 and don't have any connects with others, then no one will care if you die. If you are 78 and have a huge family and tons of friends/large church/political group/or former teacher, then lots of people will care if you die off so resources will become available to extend your life.
Except it wasn't a prank. The lady actually believed she could call the cops to get a dead mouse off her porch.
A friend of mine was the dispatcher who took the call, and he kept the recording.
Don't you have an animal services department? Any thing that involves animals they get dispatched out on. They aren't cops per se, more like glorified dog catchers, but our city has put them under our police department and our local 911 is used to dispatch animal service calls. I'm more amazed that this isn't more common. Our 911 call center takes calls for life net, fire, police, and animal services stuff, I'm amazed at how lazy some of other 911 call centers sound from this discussion. I thought that was a normal thing. And these sorts of calls are just part of the normal load. They don't encourage it, but they are trained to deal with it.
Our police department just recently got an internal tool where the detectives could listen to the 911 records from their desk through a web interface. I've wondered how long it'd take for some one to want to make that a public app. We are in the process of converting over to digital video in the cars and storing it all on a 3 TB server. With the right interface, you could make all that video public if you really wanted to. It'd come out if needed in a criminal trial, but the initial plans are to delete everything older than 30 days that isn't flagged to be kept. (O.k. really it just fills up the server and once the server space is maxed out it starts to delete oldest first, but you get the idea.) Do you really want that sort of thing to be plugged up to youtube? Really, think about.
There is a part of me that says sure all the really interesting/funny local videos will be viewed by the entire department so why shouldn't they be made public? The simple answer is would you be willing to work in an environment where 90% of your work is recorded and reviewable by anyone for 30 days afterward?
A non-emergency number (101) was launched a couple of years ago in some areas to try and reduce the number of calls to 999, it's meant to be used for: reporting vandalism and graffiti; noise nuisance; threatening and abusive behaviour; abandoned vehicles; dumping and fly tipping; drunk and rowdy groups; drug related anti-social behaviour; and broken street lighting.
Um, that stuff actually sounds like valid reasons to dial 911 around here. When you really look at most police stuff is this nonemergency stuff. It should all be going to the same dispatch center anyway. The only thing that a different number does is automatically down grade your response time. On our police monthly reports we have 6 dispatch levels of calls for service. Would you want to put out six emergency numbers so that the caller could self sort a bit how important their call is? That's what the damn call center is for! They should be trained and have flow charts on how to handle all of these sorts of calls.
The American taxpayer is footing the bill for their well-being. And pensions. I say, put them on Social Security like the rest of us, and allow their salaries to be commensurate to their approval rating. We'll get some useful things happening then.
I want exit polls and if a politician gets higher levels of disapproval they'd get anywhere from all assets stripped from them, exile, automatic extended jail sentence (at the min. the length that they were in office) or the death penalty. We wouldn't need term limits then and the voting public would have the option of getting rid of those politicians that they hate. Though I'm sure we'd set that death penalty option at like a 90-95% disapproval rating instead of 60-70% disapproval rating.
What he is charged with is so petty compared to the greater good he has done that will be a crying shame.
So, you're saying... as long as he keeps the money flowing to you, you are willing to overlook lies and deception? Do you think he's clean as a whistle in all his other dealings, too?
Hypothetically... if I had my own private genie, devil, lobbyist, or politician, I wouldn't care squat what they did on their own time as long as they conned everyone else into giving me more resources for less effort.
For sure. If you think making shift manager at Burger King is a career goal instead of just a waystation on a longer path..... that you achieved at 20 putting yourself through college. And I really wish we could stop the people who think a junior high education makes them ready to vote from getting near a voting booth.
I get giggles reading this. I really think we should make every one of our citizens and their offspring vote in each and every election. Those that want to limit voting for any reason esp. hey that voting group isn't "educated" the way that I want it to be. Set off red flags. It doesn't take a middle school education to evaluate people and political groups and to determine, which option is in your personal best interest.
Actually, I find it funny that you think all these lower end jobs will be magically eliminated and that you'll need a super phd to program any of the robots. Odds are that min. wage labor will always be cheaper than robots for a given segment of labor. I'm more about throwing out crap that just means you have to spend another 8 years in an "educational" environment just for the being what "they" consider educated and subsiding the careers of all those educators. If educators had their way we wouldn't get out of school until we were 30-35.
Heck, I'd be interested in a system like this at work. We have CCTV on our computer labs. However we don't have anyone monitoring it. It's more for liability reasons, and so that if someone steals or damages a computer, we can hopefully help the police catch them. However prevention is better than clean up. So it'd be cool if when the system thought something was wrong, it'd notify staff and we could look. If everything was fine, we carry on as normal. If something is indeed happening, we call the police.
The killer app for this is those home 4 camera DVRs. If you could just run this magic app, and every "interesting" party or criminal activity was just listed and displayed you'd actually have a shot at catching things. This would really come in handy when we start sticking 1.5+ TB HD in those things, which isn't that far off.
1:Smaller class sizes!
2:Less memorization, more critical thinking and analysis.
3:Less passive listening and watching, more discussion and experiment (think Socarates).
I wonder. There are days that I think in order to "fix" education we need to increase class sizes to a standard 25-30 students in each class. Pay teachers less. They should make more than double min. wage, but no more than triple min. wage. You should have everything standardized across the country so it would be trivial to rate how your kid's class is doing compared to any other class in the country.
It seemed that the only time teachers got really frightened was when we had to take standardized tests. Though every teacher loves to hate everything about standardized tests. (Well the easy way to fix that is to have a big massive db where anyone can enter problem sets and solutions and for all of it to be reviewed and approved for use for next years students. You take as much subject judgment away from the teachers as possible and use that to compare the students progress and the teachers' abilities. If you want to home school or test out of classes, you'd have to take the same standardized tests as everyone else and either you do well or not. The object is to rate and rank everyone and their teachers.
The problem seems to be, that the various educational systems seem to be dedicated to hiring trained "teachers" who don't have much, if any specialty, instead of people who are good at their professions who want to spend a few years teaching.
Well you run into two problems. #1 is genius at doing X can't teach their way out of a paper bag most of their students don't learn a fraction of what genius knows. The second is that for most "education" classes you don't need a professional to teach. Your basic general ed shouldn't require a professional to come in and explain anything though you'd want a "trained" teacher to do it.
The problem with teaching is those that want to dominate or be in charge of 20-30 others are offered all they want although they can make up any rule by themselves and expect to be obeyed. Talk about training your kids to obey a dictator few questions asked. I remember as a student never being involved or taught where the rules come from only that the teachers/staff made them and we had to follow them. If you didn't like something, you had to pray that a parent would complain about it and some positive action was taken. Talk about teaching apathy in your future citizens.
Actually, most of those type of articles point to the fact that Finish kids are not treated like babies as to why they can do so well. Most have to get to school themselves, and have a decent amount of responsibility. It seems actually teaching your kids how to take care of themselves makes them more likely to succeed. Shocking, I know...
So you mean if kids in the US actually had to go to school like in those manga where everyone except that single rich kid walks to school and they have assigned duties to clean the room and such that our educational system would be better?
I've always wondered if a school run based off of a manga would work... Who knows it might. I always wondered how every student got to school or home daily without being kidnapped or beat up by such and such gangs... Oh that's right that's in a lot of manga too about kids being abused/bullied on the way home/to school.
Plenty of parents saw no value in education in their own lives, and discourage their kids from wasting their time. That's going to take generations to fix.
Um, I'd say most of us with critical thinking abilities encourage our kids to have that attitude for several reasons. #1 is that education isn't generally worth stressing over. Do you have any idea how long it takes to unlearn that education is important? About 1 year, after finding out that two adults with BS degrees are worth min. wage jobs or being told that they don't have any experience being just out of college. Talk about finding out the real value of a math minor and a computer science BS.
People like to say math is important and it's good for you like vitamins, but really I've hardly used any math since college. None outside of tutoring the occasional junior high person and I had to relearn most of that. (Though generally that only takes 5-10 minutes, except you learn that the reason said person is having problems is that problem isn't following the formula that was taught, and it isn't obvious at all how they want you to solve it.) Fix education by throwing out the 90% of it that the average citizen doesn't need.
Opps we find out that we can really get by with less than a junior high education. That's not PC so has to be wrong.
For kids, school should be akin to their 9-5 job. In order to excel they need to put the time in at home, and the only people that can help instill that discipline are the parents.
I like the job analogy, but then think that all forms of homework are evil and any teacher/professor that assigns any should be shot. You wouldn't put up with having to do 3-4 hours of unpaid work nightly after doing your 9-5 job would you? Then why expect it out of kids just for "education" just so they can be called "educated" or being kept busy? I could do most of my HS homework in 5-10 min. unless it was designed to consume time.
Would you like your boss to assign take home projects that you couldn't do at work and wouldn't be paid for, but were expected to be completed by the end of the week and working?
I teach my kids, that after work, I don't think about it. After 5 and before 8 are my time not their paid time though the occasional 15 minutes here or there is o.k.
Compare that to the games that older generations were brought up on (Nethack, Mist, older rpgs) and it is pretty obvious to see why this newer generation doesn't endorse puzzles like some of the older peeps here do.
Um, I'm sorry, but I'd have to say from my RPG experience things boil down to two things if you can't do it at first. Number one is that you need more levels to make it easier. That's the easy solution to many RPG problems. The other is that boss or random critter is immune to everything except either this type of magic or this given weapon nothing else works although the critter only has 10 hp.
The third thing that I hate more than anything is. Dude don't waste any items or use any magic on that miniboss because it's an impossible story element that you are going to loose no matter what. (Even if you've over leveled by 20 levels and seem to be able to kill said boss, he touches you and you are down for the count. Grr.)
The thing that I've learned about puzzles in RPGs is that puzzles are almost all evil and if its not mandatory or some really cool item for doing it, then I'm avoiding it. Wait 5-10 minutes to find out that annoying puzzle is mandatory if you want to go farther.
There are days that I think that most RPG puzzles are overrated. If they really wanted to give us a few puzzles, they make us solve a chemistry formula and gather ingredients, or do trig. (Both would be random and couldn't be just looked up in a walk through, you'd have to learn the subject in order to pass the said puzzle.
You don't see players making detailed hand-drawn maps of every level of Portal, complete with precise notes, just so they can solve the puzzles. Gamers today just don't have the patience for it. Even online RPGs, the last stronghold of the fanatical mappers and note-takers, have all given up and provided automatic mapping tools which even a brain-dead cat sleeping on the keyboard could use.
Um, if you really want to picky blame it on Doom and the map that popped up when you hit tab. I'm sure there were early examples of this out there, but Doom was the game that really brought it home to me. I utterly hate games without a decent built in auto map now. I'm thinking of RPGs more than anything though. They vary greatly in how much is shown on that map, if the map is scalable, and if treasure boxes/enemies appear on the map. The reason you won't see me or others make maps is because we'd rather not waste our time map making. We've bought a game to have fun. We'd like it to give us a nice visual map. (There is bonus marks for other options added to the maps, and it's even o.k. if you have to get a story item before map elements show up.)
Way waste time map making if you don't have to?
Spent nuclear fuel also emits significant heat, it would seem more logical to recycle the fuel rods as water heating devices than dump them somewhere and ignore them, although preventing contamination would be extremely hard. Hard is not impossible, however, and it seems better to try and solve a hard problem (and risk succeeding) than to do nothing and face impossible energy demand problems year-after-year.
Direct nuclear water heaters? I love it. ;) If only we'd be a bit saner and use roof top solar water heating and some more residential geothermal, we wouldn't need that much additional heat though. ;)
If the amount of resources that were poured into nuclear development in the 50's were poured into solar development today, solar development would probably be double that of microprocessors. Sure, solar development is advancing today faster than ever before, but even today, the effort is miniscule compared to what was dumped into nukes.
If you want the honest truth, solar is thousands of years old. Nukes as you've put it are really less than 100. We only stopped designing everything around solar energy once "cheap" electricity and A/C came around. I'm mixed. I've never really felt the passion about solar. I do feel strongly that we never really developed nuclear tech as we should have. Instead we've labeled "bad"/"ugly" and have gone back to our old solar/wind thing. Solar/wind is old/ancient tech. We are just refining it and applying it to electricity as we should have done in the beginning. Now we've really not even touched nuclear tech. We are most likely going to drop oil fueled ships to go back to sailing ships instead of designing and running nuclear shipping for awhile.
What I do know about pushing people into public works projects on renewable resources is that it would create jobs, and result in more renewable energy. However, if the cost of the energy is greater, than everyone is paying in higher overall costs (or taxes). It must also be noted that in a slumping economy, the costs of implementing large public works projects is cheaper, as there are often large numbers of unemployed people (who in the US are often earning money from the government already from the welfare system). This means the net cost of implementing these projects is cheaper due to being able to pay lower wages, and even cheaper still because you don't have to pay these people welfare benefits.
Basically you are saying the government needs to tie the welfare system to "digging useful ditches" sort of tasks. If the government is going to pay you to live, then it wants you to labor at something, other citizens will benefit from other than just you not being a criminal to live. That sounds like a decent idea.
A recent poll (I think it was from last Thursday) said that over 90% of Americans are FOR the rapid mobilization of wind and solar power. It seems everyone's on board for this.
Except BOTH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES. Which is quite mind-blowing since the populous as a whole is ALL FOR IT and if either did support such a plan, it would net them a HUGE amount of voters from both political parties
I don't think that this is something either of them really want to bring up. Why? It's not something that will be seen as a presidential win. This will be something that congress and business do because its cheaper long term. If 90% of everyone wants something, it's going to happen soon anyway. It doesn't need a president to back it.
The one thing that irks me about Bush's policy is that he got pushed into the entire foreign military thing rather than fighting them long term through this sort of route. If we had gone nuts over the last several years installing renewable energy in this county, the middle east would have a lot more to fear. I got mad too, but I wanted to do something that would cause their resources to be worth a lot less over the long term rather than fighting over their resources.
Everyone got a good laugh out of their own ignorance of how the Congress works and it cost him the election and got us eight years of Bush. Was a joke made at his expense really worth eight years of Bush? It was really a misunderstanding of terminology not a wild claim made by Gore so is it still funny?
Damn, I didn't think anyone actually used that to change their vote. I was 50/50 until I listened to the vp running mates. Gore's at the time was all for video game censorship. That was the killer that made me lean towards Bush. As far as I was concerned, Bush and Gore were both middle of the road folks and wouldn't be able to do anything unless the rest of the country wanted to do it.
On your point of laughing at Gore. If the man couldn't have decent PR supporters/campaign machine telling him how he should get his point across, then he didn't deserve to be president. One of the big things that I actually respect about Bush, is that he surrounds himself with capable advisers and seems to listen to them. To turn that around, would Gore have been elected president if he had a better adviser team? I don't know. Heck, I tend to hold up Bush and Reagan as examples of how far your average person could make it with the right backing. Now if Bush and Reagan can get elected president, how come Gore couldn't?
It's much more than this one joke that his opponents use. At his level of politics, he should have known better than give anyone that kind of opening. I figure if Gore couldn't win an election coming out right after Clinton's term, then he will never be able to win.
So I am just dumbstruck that these people have not found a way around these providers that are clearly "butt raping the tourists". I can see them getting together in a private room at a restaurant getting drunk of the local alcohol (which can be REAL strong) and laughing hysterically. ...
I think I remember that it was around 100-150$ USD per month, which is pretty competitive and even close to prices here in the US.
Don't tell 'em. They are all reporters and well should know better. If I was going to go to any country, I'd check out their cellular internet. In the US, it generally costs around $70-80 a month in my area. I'd think every developed country would have that by now. I consider India and China to be developed. The only really practical way of getting the entire human population on the internet is through cell phones as it is. Wait 20-30 years, and we'll get there.
I'm waiting until China or India can send out a press release that 70-80% of their population have internet enabled cell phones.
It does have an oil industry and the people who live here are justified in using it to improve their living environment, are they not? Or perhaps you feel that they shouldn't. This is shifting, by the way.
I kinda of see it just like NY or LA. Were those cities built by slave labor? Well, they bitch and moan because that wealth is there being spent rather than here being spent. You are right a major city such as that doesn't exist because of one freaking resource. A small company town could start like that, but a major city just has too many people in it to depend entirely on one of any resource.
I could bitch and moan all day that NY, LA, Houston, or Dallas are using unfair trade practices/labor practices that keep that wealth out of my small town. Would it be true? Not at all. Is my small town using unfair trade practices/labor practices to keep wealth out of the tiny surrounding communities? Not at all. Its just jealousy of the wealth of larger population centers.
I wouldn't trust the Chinese government to report on the color of the sky, but I suppose there are ways to validate their claims.
I'm very mixed on that comment. I don't know if I'd "trust" any national government to put out accurate stats about itself. I'd have to trust them all to lie somewhat equally though. If a government lies or stretches the truth too much it'll be found it. It's much easier long term to just put out stats that you have reasonable faith in.
(That still doesn't mean that the stats right, just that those that are compiling them think that they are.)
Heck, I know that the police stats in the US are all slanted as much as they can in the direction that the given police departments want. (Be it up or down depending on where the grant money lays this year.) You have to just adjust to the fact that all human organizations lie as much as they can get away with. When you take it as a given life is just so much easier to adjust to.
(Hell, most geeks already know this. Which is a more effective way to stop someone reading your e-mail? Threatening them or encrypting it?)
Um, I thought it was either boring them or annoying them with the content of said e-mail.
Well to use an analogy, if Apache and IIS were car companies, one is manufacturing cars that get 200 MPG, with keyless entry security systems that are highly customizable and can be purchased for $10. The other company makes a car that runs on baby kittens, can be hijacked everytime you go under 30 MPH (and whose top speed is 35 MPH) and can be purchased for $100,000.
Who do you think deserves the market in this case?
The guy that sold a few thousand copies for $100k each. Considering that the other product would have to sell 100K to match the profit in 1 single sale of the other.
O.k. The guy would make far more money if it could sell that $10 one for $100K to a few thousand, but that's always an option to charge them to upgrade to the new improved version.
Frankly, I've never bought that old CW about girls being worse at math than boys... especially since I met and married my math-major wife in college, who has always been much better at math than I am. It may be true that boys are more _interested_ in math than girls, and thus pursue it and are successful at it more often, but that's a completely different thing from saying that girls are somehow innately "worse" at math.
Um, I'd be mixed on that. I remember about the same level of ability in my math and cs classes between sexes. Now ratios though you'd have 1-2 females out of a class of 15-18 in either CS or Math. Now, this also somewhat proves the point. If girls had equal ability through out the population in math than the college math classes should have been about half of either sex. In my high school, math classes were divided by equal portions of sex.
We don't know that females are avoiding something that they aren't good at or or they avoiding a subject that they don't like or are they avoiding math because they aren't good at it? Female math majors are the exceptions not the rule.