I concede the original point--it was an overeager, off-the-cuff generalization on my part, and it's not defensible. However, if it's possible to prove conclusively that healthcare in (as I understand it, quite literally) every other OECD country isn't substantially cheaper than that in the US, I'd expect the news to be fairly widespread as there's been no shortage of money behind fighting universal care in the US; I haven't seen it, and I've looked, but if there are data sets or analyses that indicate that's the case I'd be interested to see them.
To get back to the topic of the costs of education, everything a quick Google search turns up indicates that US education spending is on the order of double the OECD average, at every level; some higher-than-average spending may be justified but that seems extreme, and it does make it look like government involvement in other states is not driving their costs up the way that our system is, which looks to me to rule out the broad category of government spending/involvement as the culprit behind our out-of-control costs, though some subset of it (which might possibly not be a problem with some other combination of regulations or factors) may well be to blame. I simply don't see evidence to support the notion that government spending must drive up prices this way, nor even that it typically does.
Taxation aside, it's hard to believe that others spend more on education when they... don't. There are plenty of other differences to explain the tax disparity (and in the case of Denmark in particular, being at one extreme of the effective taxation spectrum, it appears you are correct that the disparity is substantial).
A fair point on transit--though, seriously, my state's transportation infrastructure is shit, that's not just Europeans-can-do-no-wrong grousing. We're bad even compared to other states in our region, which is made obvious any time we cross the border with one of our neighbors and the roads suddenly get smoother.
I'd certainly take the health care system of just about any other OECD nation, at their cost (I've never seen anything indicating this isn't a massive, massive net savings, despite higher taxes, to say nothing of the other benefits of not having to worry about losing coverage for one reason or another), and I'd certainly take the 12% lower salary in exchange for 4 weeks plus 10 holidays of guaranteed vacation every year, that I could actually take without jeopardizing career advancement or having to change careers entirely (and, to take the specific example of Denmark, they might even have more vacation time than that, as IIRC four weeks is the low end in the EU).
Of course it can be fair. If restraining one person for the benefit of another were absolutely and in all cases unfair, then any law whatsoever is unfair. It's a matter of degrees, and yeah, people don't seem to agree where the line is, but it doesn't mean people who don't agree with you are freedom-haters or whatever.
All civilization is compromise; wise use of government is recognizing when said compromise yields sufficient benefits (cost savings, strategic advantage, freedoms) to outweigh the costs (sometimes money, sometimes personal advantage, sometimes other freedoms). The argument of the Rugged Individualist is poetic and tempting--it's easy to see its appeal--but as best I can tell doesn't yield the best life for most people. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple.
I try to weigh each policy decision by its merits, rather than attempting to smash it in to the mold of some iron-clad dogma. What will I actually gain? What will others gain? What will I/we lose? Are the gains worth the costs? If the policy closes some doors for us, does it open others?
In the end, real-world examples are my guiding star. If "socialism" is so bad, how can so many countries that practice it be so well-off? It may not be the sole answer to every problem, but if your goal is to raise the overall standard of living then government-driven solutions seem to be worth a look, at least.
You've got a point, but that's a gross exaggeration. What did the 20th century give us? Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bertrand Russell, Richard Feynman, Vonnegut... between them, dozens of books worth preserving, and that's just a tiny selection of major 20th century authors. It might be argued that the number will diminish over time (Feynman's physics lectures might not always be so great in light of newer work, after all, and god knows not all of Vonnegut's work is worth a damn) but it'll take a very long time for it to reach two.
Hell, there are centuries BCE that I think most scholars would say have more than two books worth preserving.
They tax the bejeezus out of their people [wikipedia.org]. Danish sales tax is a whopping 25% (second only to Hungary) and their MEAN income tax rate is over 40%. Don't kid yourself (or mislead others) -- a Danish student pays more dearly for his "free" education over the course of his life than even the most debt-saddled American student ever will.
My income tax rate's not far under that, all things considered, and I do all right but I'm far from rich (FICA is a bitch--a regressive-ass bitch). For it, I get poor transportation infrastructure (my state's roads are exceptionally bad, to say nothing of public transit, or rather, the lack of it), no help toward health care (so, like most, my health and my family's is dependent on my employment; there's a nice extra risk to discourage entrepreneurship), and some minimal aid toward education should I want to use it (didn't before, don't expect that I will).
I'd happily pay another 10% or so to gain what people in many (most?) other OECD nations have--I'd be a fool not to, since it's a bargain.
Yeah. That's why all those other countries where the government is more heavily involved than ours in higher education has the same problems we do, or worse.
It's the same as the goddamn health care "arguments" from the US right.
"We have too much government involvement! Of course it's expensive! If we get the damn government out the market will fix everything!" Yeah, maybe, I guess. Or we could do the opposite of what you're saying and get guaranteed results, as proven in reality, not some ideological model.
If this pattern continues, next the poor dumb bastards will start arguing that government-subsidized education infringes on the average american's right to start and run a student loan corporation, or to choose which loan corporation fucks them in the ass.
Some countries pay--not loan--100% of the tuition for a fairly large percentage of their student population and don't seem to have the runaway cost problems that we do.
As with most situations like this, there's clearly a solution other than "the government needs to get out of the business of X". Maybe it should, but it doesn't need to; it may just need to do it better. What do places like Denmark do differently? Can we try that, rather than just giving up?
Keeping all three alive either leads to stagnating development (look at the specs on the iPad 1, especially the RAM, then look at how much memory is available to apps after the latest iOS update... yeah) or complaining customers who are upset that their "brand new" iPad 1 can't run anything in the store.
Even without other planned-obsolescence-related motives, retiring it was the right thing to do to keep the app ecosystem healthy. One of the reasons Apple mobile devices are so much nicer to develop for than Android is that it's a fairly consistent platform, and keeping older devices "alive" harms that advantage. Retina vs. Non-Retina is bad enough, and those iPad 1s are feeling increasingly cramped in the memory department--we don't even do game dev, so I can't imagine how bad it is for those guys. We're hoping the next major iOS release kills support for the iPad 1 so we can stop supporting it, and I guarantee we're not alone--though I would guess it'll be the one after that that drops the ax.
There's so much good music coming out now that it's almost impossible to keep up with it unless you turn searching for it in to a major (10+ hrs/week) hobby or a profession. It's been that way for years, at least, and I suspect decades.
You won't hear it on the average radio station, but find a couple of the better current bands and plug them in to Pandora and a few hours later you'll have a list of dozens of great acts, most of them with releases in the last few years. This is true for just about every conceivable genre of music. Or find a big blog/magazine about your genre of choice and start checking out their recommendations. You won't like them all, but unless you don't actually like music that much you'll certainly find several you enjoy.
You can even find good acts in genres that haven't been huge in years, like surf or 80s-pop (though usually the ones with 80s pop influences are way better than just about all actual 80s pop)
Doing it right at the state level while not violating other laws can be tricky. An entity without the ability to strictly control immigration and cross-border commerce (like US states, amongst themselves), for instance, is very vulnerable to the Free Rider Problem and Tragedy of the Commons-esqe situations. The economies of scale and ability to spread costs over a long period of time open to more-sovereign entities are often not an option for quasi-sovereign ones like the states
If you can live in a state with the current US standard of wild-west health care, paying only for very shitty health insurance, then hop the border to another with relatively inexpensive single-payer when you get cancer, said single-payer system cannot possibly remain relatively inexpensive and will collapse. Quality or cost will suffer, and it will have to be abandoned.
Half-measures like Romneycare are the best we can hope for at the state level. If we want the full benefits of a "socialized" system (including, especially, the huge cost savings it represents) it's got to be Federal.
Besides, what the "any of the universal coverage systems used in all the other OECD nations would reduce our freedom!" arguments all seem to ignore is that most people aren't especially free to pick their health insurance or much of anything else about their health care experience. Most get nothing, awful catastrophic-only insurance (and you better believe they'll fight tooth and nail not to pay for anything at all if something bad does happen, leaving you to duke it out with both them and the hospitals, who don't give a shit and will gladly go after you if the insurance companies drag their feet, all while you're sick), or, in the best case, whatever insurance that their job supplies.
There really aren't enough people getting meaningful choices out of our system for it to be a sensible argument against single-payer or, say, a Swiss-style system, especially considering that most who do have choices under the US system would still have choices under most others--even in the UK with its more-nationalized-than-most health care system you can pay for private care and insurance, on top of the basic care that everyone gets.
A slim minority of edge cases might get left out, but almost everyone would see no effective decrease in "freedom" under most UHC systems. It's a 100% bullshit argument but, in my experience, is the one that's gotten the most traction, alongside general (and also bullshit) fear mongering about waiting lists and such. I really don't understand what's going on in people's heads when they throw this out, and they're on their employer's insurance--in those cases they don't seem to me to have a dog in the "freedom" fight, except in some hypothetical abstract way that will never have any practical meaning to them.
Most people don't have any more say in their health care now than they would under a universal system, and we pay more, and we leave lots of people without coverage, and our system is a huge burden on small businesses, entrepreneurs, and independent contractors. What the goddamn hell is worth defending about it?
It sucks that it's hard to buy smaller portions out, too. Where's the option for two chicken strips and half the fries, rather than the insane four strips and a giant pile of fries? Assuming you can get a half order or share a single order, you'll likely pay extra, which sucks.
Relatedly: pushing people toward the largest size with prices, on items with very large margins. Example: movie theater soda. Small? $5.00. Large, with twice the volume and unlimited refills? $5.25. It's bullshit.
The part that I really don't get is that the "freedoms" defenders of our (the US') system are trying to protect aren't relevant for the vast majority of the population.
Freedom of choice in health care? Bullshit. Only a reality if you can personally pay for every procedure, or personally pay for very, very high end insurance.
Most people in the US already experience the most dreaded parts of "socialized" medicine at best. At worst--and distressingly often this is the case--they're far worse off than they would be under a single-payer universal system or similar. Most of the tiny minority that do have real freedom under our system still would under most socialized systems anyway, since private insurance often still exists to add perks on top of the basic, public system.
Defending imaginary freedoms at great cost is fucking retarded--if one can trade effectively irrelevant freedoms for any practical gain whatsoever, one should do so.
If there's one single sound-bite sized piece of information I wish my fellow voters would internalize, it's that.
My wife teaches 6th grade in a pretty damn poor area.
All the kids have smart phones.
She used to teach 3rd grade in the same school.
All the kids had smart phones.
Whether they should or not, no-one seems to mind paying for even very young kids to have expensive data/voice/text plans. I don't get it either, but that's the state of things.
Incidentally, the 3rd grade boys all played Modern Warfare on the X-Box, not Mario on the Wii like one might expect. So weird.
In short, cell phone? Practically guaranteed. DS/PSP? Maybe.
I'm sure some new teaching methods are legit, but from what I've seen a bad combination of snake oil salesmen and principals/school boards who don't understand how important it is to duplicate conditions to reproduce results--on the off chance they do spend their money on training programs and materials that aren't bullshit--keeps the tiny percentage of useful discoveries from reaching most kids.
In fact, I'd say the damage done by frequent switching of curricula and teaching methods (what do you mean we haven't seen results in a year from a program that requires a kindergarten-up foundation in a totally new method of learning math, which we decided to roll out to all 13 grades simultaneously because we're fucking idiots??? QUICK, SWITCH TO SOMETHING ELSE!) and application of misguided bullshit is far worse than if they just stuck to stuff that was battle-tested years ago, and ignored the new crap entirely.
It's also expensive. Spend the money on teacher's salaries and reduced class sizes instead--I guaran-fucking-tee the average school will see more results from that than from monkeying with shit year after year incompetently chasing fad pedagogy.
IMO this is a tragically overlooked factor in what's screwed up about US public education.
1. Place a US penny on some pavement (gotta be a somewhat new one, mind you--don't try this with a steel wheat penny or something, obviously)
2. Heat it with a butane lighter--the kind with the little blue flame that shoots straight out, 'cuz you gotta be able to point it down. 2a. Maybe wear a glove on the lighter-holding hand; optional, and I've never seen it matter, but I've only seen it done a couple times so...
3. Watch as the lower-melting-point zinc busts through the still-solid copper in liquid form!
Hasn't been explosive when I've seen it--it just tears the copper and flows out a bit--but if there's an air bubble or something, who knows; be careful!
It's actually perfectly in keeping with the justification for private property used by some of the big thinkers in political science shortly before and a bit after the founding of the US, notably John Locke.
Granted his book was mostly fantasy, but a lot of people continue to use it in everyday lay discussion of politics and economics, so why not that part too?
I would guess that the concept of squatter's rights either influenced Locke & co.'s thinking, or vice-versa (too lazy to look it up), for a real-world parallel to the present difficulty.
Of course, this has the added layer that the person who actually created the art in question wants it to be performed, and it's pretty damn old. Hard to argue that this is a good example of copyright working as designed, for the benefit of all involved, even if you don't accept that fallow works should be forfeit to the public domain (or, FFS, at least revert to the creator's ownership).
It's called push polling. They didn't give a shit what you thought, they just wanted you to hear their framing of the question and believe it was true.
I'm convinced that pretty much the same reasoning was how we ended up in Iraq. Go with the flow and you're no more culpable than anyone else if there's nothing there, and you're on the right side if there is; complain, and you score some points if you turn out to be right but you're out on your ass guaranteed if you're wrong.
No moderately informed person could have thought it was a good idea (at least not for the public reasons), let alone Congressmen, whose pretty much only job aside from "get elected" is "be informed". I blame cowardly political maneuvering--betting for the war on the (very) off chance that even a quarter of the bullshit was true.
I thought the novella version of Ender's Game was pretty good juvenile fiction. Wouldn't stand up to good adult fiction, but it was OK for what it was. The prose was serviceable, but nothing special--good enough for juvie fic.
I haven't read any of the rest of his work, but I'd guess a full-sized novel telling the same story would be far less tight and focused and would, consequently, kind of suck.
Slashdot Mirror
I concede the original point--it was an overeager, off-the-cuff generalization on my part, and it's not defensible. However, if it's possible to prove conclusively that healthcare in (as I understand it, quite literally) every other OECD country isn't substantially cheaper than that in the US, I'd expect the news to be fairly widespread as there's been no shortage of money behind fighting universal care in the US; I haven't seen it, and I've looked, but if there are data sets or analyses that indicate that's the case I'd be interested to see them.
To get back to the topic of the costs of education, everything a quick Google search turns up indicates that US education spending is on the order of double the OECD average, at every level; some higher-than-average spending may be justified but that seems extreme, and it does make it look like government involvement in other states is not driving their costs up the way that our system is, which looks to me to rule out the broad category of government spending/involvement as the culprit behind our out-of-control costs, though some subset of it (which might possibly not be a problem with some other combination of regulations or factors) may well be to blame. I simply don't see evidence to support the notion that government spending must drive up prices this way, nor even that it typically does.
Taxation aside, it's hard to believe that others spend more on education when they... don't. There are plenty of other differences to explain the tax disparity (and in the case of Denmark in particular, being at one extreme of the effective taxation spectrum, it appears you are correct that the disparity is substantial).
A fair point on transit--though, seriously, my state's transportation infrastructure is shit, that's not just Europeans-can-do-no-wrong grousing. We're bad even compared to other states in our region, which is made obvious any time we cross the border with one of our neighbors and the roads suddenly get smoother.
I'd certainly take the health care system of just about any other OECD nation, at their cost (I've never seen anything indicating this isn't a massive, massive net savings, despite higher taxes, to say nothing of the other benefits of not having to worry about losing coverage for one reason or another), and I'd certainly take the 12% lower salary in exchange for 4 weeks plus 10 holidays of guaranteed vacation every year, that I could actually take without jeopardizing career advancement or having to change careers entirely (and, to take the specific example of Denmark, they might even have more vacation time than that, as IIRC four weeks is the low end in the EU).
Of course it can be fair. If restraining one person for the benefit of another were absolutely and in all cases unfair, then any law whatsoever is unfair. It's a matter of degrees, and yeah, people don't seem to agree where the line is, but it doesn't mean people who don't agree with you are freedom-haters or whatever.
All civilization is compromise; wise use of government is recognizing when said compromise yields sufficient benefits (cost savings, strategic advantage, freedoms) to outweigh the costs (sometimes money, sometimes personal advantage, sometimes other freedoms). The argument of the Rugged Individualist is poetic and tempting--it's easy to see its appeal--but as best I can tell doesn't yield the best life for most people. Unfortunately, things aren't that simple.
I try to weigh each policy decision by its merits, rather than attempting to smash it in to the mold of some iron-clad dogma. What will I actually gain? What will others gain? What will I/we lose? Are the gains worth the costs? If the policy closes some doors for us, does it open others?
In the end, real-world examples are my guiding star. If "socialism" is so bad, how can so many countries that practice it be so well-off? It may not be the sole answer to every problem, but if your goal is to raise the overall standard of living then government-driven solutions seem to be worth a look, at least.
You've got a point, but that's a gross exaggeration. What did the 20th century give us? Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Bertrand Russell, Richard Feynman, Vonnegut... between them, dozens of books worth preserving, and that's just a tiny selection of major 20th century authors. It might be argued that the number will diminish over time (Feynman's physics lectures might not always be so great in light of newer work, after all, and god knows not all of Vonnegut's work is worth a damn) but it'll take a very long time for it to reach two.
Hell, there are centuries BCE that I think most scholars would say have more than two books worth preserving.
My income tax rate's not far under that, all things considered, and I do all right but I'm far from rich (FICA is a bitch--a regressive-ass bitch). For it, I get poor transportation infrastructure (my state's roads are exceptionally bad, to say nothing of public transit, or rather, the lack of it), no help toward health care (so, like most, my health and my family's is dependent on my employment; there's a nice extra risk to discourage entrepreneurship), and some minimal aid toward education should I want to use it (didn't before, don't expect that I will).
I'd happily pay another 10% or so to gain what people in many (most?) other OECD nations have--I'd be a fool not to, since it's a bargain.
Yeah. That's why all those other countries where the government is more heavily involved than ours in higher education has the same problems we do, or worse.
It's the same as the goddamn health care "arguments" from the US right.
"We have too much government involvement! Of course it's expensive! If we get the damn government out the market will fix everything!"
Yeah, maybe, I guess. Or we could do the opposite of what you're saying and get guaranteed results, as proven in reality, not some ideological model.
If this pattern continues, next the poor dumb bastards will start arguing that government-subsidized education infringes on the average american's right to start and run a student loan corporation, or to choose which loan corporation fucks them in the ass.
Some countries pay--not loan--100% of the tuition for a fairly large percentage of their student population and don't seem to have the runaway cost problems that we do.
As with most situations like this, there's clearly a solution other than "the government needs to get out of the business of X". Maybe it should, but it doesn't need to; it may just need to do it better. What do places like Denmark do differently? Can we try that, rather than just giving up?
Keeping all three alive either leads to stagnating development (look at the specs on the iPad 1, especially the RAM, then look at how much memory is available to apps after the latest iOS update... yeah) or complaining customers who are upset that their "brand new" iPad 1 can't run anything in the store.
Even without other planned-obsolescence-related motives, retiring it was the right thing to do to keep the app ecosystem healthy. One of the reasons Apple mobile devices are so much nicer to develop for than Android is that it's a fairly consistent platform, and keeping older devices "alive" harms that advantage. Retina vs. Non-Retina is bad enough, and those iPad 1s are feeling increasingly cramped in the memory department--we don't even do game dev, so I can't imagine how bad it is for those guys. We're hoping the next major iOS release kills support for the iPad 1 so we can stop supporting it, and I guarantee we're not alone--though I would guess it'll be the one after that that drops the ax.
That's what I came in here to post. Buddy of mine didn't need any pirated DVDs sent--he bought plenty over there, and brought them back.
There's so much good music coming out now that it's almost impossible to keep up with it unless you turn searching for it in to a major (10+ hrs/week) hobby or a profession. It's been that way for years, at least, and I suspect decades.
You won't hear it on the average radio station, but find a couple of the better current bands and plug them in to Pandora and a few hours later you'll have a list of dozens of great acts, most of them with releases in the last few years. This is true for just about every conceivable genre of music. Or find a big blog/magazine about your genre of choice and start checking out their recommendations. You won't like them all, but unless you don't actually like music that much you'll certainly find several you enjoy.
You can even find good acts in genres that haven't been huge in years, like surf or 80s-pop (though usually the ones with 80s pop influences are way better than just about all actual 80s pop)
Doing it right at the state level while not violating other laws can be tricky. An entity without the ability to strictly control immigration and cross-border commerce (like US states, amongst themselves), for instance, is very vulnerable to the Free Rider Problem and Tragedy of the Commons-esqe situations. The economies of scale and ability to spread costs over a long period of time open to more-sovereign entities are often not an option for quasi-sovereign ones like the states
If you can live in a state with the current US standard of wild-west health care, paying only for very shitty health insurance, then hop the border to another with relatively inexpensive single-payer when you get cancer, said single-payer system cannot possibly remain relatively inexpensive and will collapse. Quality or cost will suffer, and it will have to be abandoned.
Half-measures like Romneycare are the best we can hope for at the state level. If we want the full benefits of a "socialized" system (including, especially, the huge cost savings it represents) it's got to be Federal.
Besides, what the "any of the universal coverage systems used in all the other OECD nations would reduce our freedom!" arguments all seem to ignore is that most people aren't especially free to pick their health insurance or much of anything else about their health care experience. Most get nothing, awful catastrophic-only insurance (and you better believe they'll fight tooth and nail not to pay for anything at all if something bad does happen, leaving you to duke it out with both them and the hospitals, who don't give a shit and will gladly go after you if the insurance companies drag their feet, all while you're sick), or, in the best case, whatever insurance that their job supplies.
There really aren't enough people getting meaningful choices out of our system for it to be a sensible argument against single-payer or, say, a Swiss-style system, especially considering that most who do have choices under the US system would still have choices under most others--even in the UK with its more-nationalized-than-most health care system you can pay for private care and insurance, on top of the basic care that everyone gets.
A slim minority of edge cases might get left out, but almost everyone would see no effective decrease in "freedom" under most UHC systems. It's a 100% bullshit argument but, in my experience, is the one that's gotten the most traction, alongside general (and also bullshit) fear mongering about waiting lists and such. I really don't understand what's going on in people's heads when they throw this out, and they're on their employer's insurance--in those cases they don't seem to me to have a dog in the "freedom" fight, except in some hypothetical abstract way that will never have any practical meaning to them.
Most people don't have any more say in their health care now than they would under a universal system, and we pay more, and we leave lots of people without coverage, and our system is a huge burden on small businesses, entrepreneurs, and independent contractors. What the goddamn hell is worth defending about it?
It sucks that it's hard to buy smaller portions out, too. Where's the option for two chicken strips and half the fries, rather than the insane four strips and a giant pile of fries? Assuming you can get a half order or share a single order, you'll likely pay extra, which sucks.
Relatedly: pushing people toward the largest size with prices, on items with very large margins. Example: movie theater soda. Small? $5.00. Large, with twice the volume and unlimited refills? $5.25. It's bullshit.
A good interpreter and filter of information is worth 1000 raw sources.
The part that I really don't get is that the "freedoms" defenders of our (the US') system are trying to protect aren't relevant for the vast majority of the population.
Freedom of choice in health care? Bullshit. Only a reality if you can personally pay for every procedure, or personally pay for very, very high end insurance.
Most people in the US already experience the most dreaded parts of "socialized" medicine at best. At worst--and distressingly often this is the case--they're far worse off than they would be under a single-payer universal system or similar. Most of the tiny minority that do have real freedom under our system still would under most socialized systems anyway, since private insurance often still exists to add perks on top of the basic, public system.
Defending imaginary freedoms at great cost is fucking retarded--if one can trade effectively irrelevant freedoms for any practical gain whatsoever, one should do so.
If there's one single sound-bite sized piece of information I wish my fellow voters would internalize, it's that.
My wife teaches 6th grade in a pretty damn poor area.
All the kids have smart phones.
She used to teach 3rd grade in the same school.
All the kids had smart phones.
Whether they should or not, no-one seems to mind paying for even very young kids to have expensive data/voice/text plans. I don't get it either, but that's the state of things.
Incidentally, the 3rd grade boys all played Modern Warfare on the X-Box, not Mario on the Wii like one might expect. So weird.
In short, cell phone? Practically guaranteed. DS/PSP? Maybe.
More like the "proven" methods change.
I'm sure some new teaching methods are legit, but from what I've seen a bad combination of snake oil salesmen and principals/school boards who don't understand how important it is to duplicate conditions to reproduce results--on the off chance they do spend their money on training programs and materials that aren't bullshit--keeps the tiny percentage of useful discoveries from reaching most kids.
In fact, I'd say the damage done by frequent switching of curricula and teaching methods (what do you mean we haven't seen results in a year from a program that requires a kindergarten-up foundation in a totally new method of learning math, which we decided to roll out to all 13 grades simultaneously because we're fucking idiots??? QUICK, SWITCH TO SOMETHING ELSE!) and application of misguided bullshit is far worse than if they just stuck to stuff that was battle-tested years ago, and ignored the new crap entirely.
It's also expensive. Spend the money on teacher's salaries and reduced class sizes instead--I guaran-fucking-tee the average school will see more results from that than from monkeying with shit year after year incompetently chasing fad pedagogy.
IMO this is a tragically overlooked factor in what's screwed up about US public education.
Fun trick:
1. Place a US penny on some pavement (gotta be a somewhat new one, mind you--don't try this with a steel wheat penny or something, obviously)
2. Heat it with a butane lighter--the kind with the little blue flame that shoots straight out, 'cuz you gotta be able to point it down.
2a. Maybe wear a glove on the lighter-holding hand; optional, and I've never seen it matter, but I've only seen it done a couple times so...
3. Watch as the lower-melting-point zinc busts through the still-solid copper in liquid form!
Hasn't been explosive when I've seen it--it just tears the copper and flows out a bit--but if there's an air bubble or something, who knows; be careful!
It's actually perfectly in keeping with the justification for private property used by some of the big thinkers in political science shortly before and a bit after the founding of the US, notably John Locke.
Granted his book was mostly fantasy, but a lot of people continue to use it in everyday lay discussion of politics and economics, so why not that part too?
I would guess that the concept of squatter's rights either influenced Locke & co.'s thinking, or vice-versa (too lazy to look it up), for a real-world parallel to the present difficulty.
Of course, this has the added layer that the person who actually created the art in question wants it to be performed, and it's pretty damn old. Hard to argue that this is a good example of copyright working as designed, for the benefit of all involved, even if you don't accept that fallow works should be forfeit to the public domain (or, FFS, at least revert to the creator's ownership).
It's called push polling. They didn't give a shit what you thought, they just wanted you to hear their framing of the question and believe it was true.
Push poll
They're running NodeJS.
NodeJS: letting everyone write their own servers in Javascript like that's a good idea since whenever the hell it came out.
I'm convinced that pretty much the same reasoning was how we ended up in Iraq. Go with the flow and you're no more culpable than anyone else if there's nothing there, and you're on the right side if there is; complain, and you score some points if you turn out to be right but you're out on your ass guaranteed if you're wrong.
No moderately informed person could have thought it was a good idea (at least not for the public reasons), let alone Congressmen, whose pretty much only job aside from "get elected" is "be informed". I blame cowardly political maneuvering--betting for the war on the (very) off chance that even a quarter of the bullshit was true.
Ah, makes sense. My first guess was "the ever-dangerous auto-increment ID column strikes again!"
But of course I didn't RTFA.
I thought the novella version of Ender's Game was pretty good juvenile fiction. Wouldn't stand up to good adult fiction, but it was OK for what it was. The prose was serviceable, but nothing special--good enough for juvie fic.
I haven't read any of the rest of his work, but I'd guess a full-sized novel telling the same story would be far less tight and focused and would, consequently, kind of suck.