Not all private schools. Catholic schools, for example. Part of tuition from those who can afford to pay goes to those who want a private school education but cannot afford it. The reason they work is that in a private school, all the students are there because the parents are willing to sacrifice to put their students there.
All private schools are less appealing in districts with quality public schools. So in theory, when public schools outcompete the private options, vouchers are not a threat. But the larger point against vouchers is that many public districts want to do better but can't, and making it easier for motivated parents to move their kids will leave public schools even worse off. (And the response then becomes, "so only the richest can have private school?"... and around in circles we go...)
Internet (ok, electronic) banking has different, independent stakeholders verifying the validity of transactions with armies of accountants armed with IS systems that have been around for decades.
Discussion of the law *must* include those whom it affects. When people file lawsuits, one of the concepts is that the person filing must have standing. Wikipedia: "In the United States, the current doctrine is that a person cannot bring a suit challenging the constitutionality of a law unless the plaintiff can demonstrate that the plaintiff is (or will imminently be) harmed by the law."
Cigarette companies testify about nicotine regulation, car companies testify about gasoline efficiency standards, and wall street bankers testify about the impact of bailouts. Members of Congress are supposed to be a proxy for the taxpayers they represent, and then bring in viewpoints from different sides. Typically, the party in control of a hearing stacks the group with speakers who favor their own pre-determined stance. So it was in both the Republican and Democratic hearings on this topic.
Such companies are not really off the hook, but a level of indirection can often diffuse blame. Humans have a judgment bias that sees indirect harm as less bad than direct harm. Legally there's no difference (murder-for-hire vs. hire), but ethically people have to work harder before they see the two harms as equivalent.
For example, in 2006 Merck sold the marketing rights to a cancer drug to a small company named Ovation, who then charged exorbitant rates to recoup the costs. Merck kept the sales proceeds, and continued to produce the drug, but Ovation was the company charging patients ten times more. Ovation's business model is to act as a buffer for large pharmaceutical firms that want to get a large payday out of a niche drug without getting their hands dirty.
The process of science is one of a long-running debate between theories that have more or less support from evidence.
I think the members of academia by and large have enough integrity to acknowledge in articles that they write that different viewpoints exist. A writer for a conference or journal needs to demonstrate basic command of the breadth of debate (lit review), or else a reviewer would likely reject the article. Many journals have occasional articles that are nothing but long literature reviews that survey the field to give a sense of current research streams.
I think what we're seeing here is a new product with different characteristics from both wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias. Who says wikipedia best serves the preferences of the entire internet population? This is a young idea, we should encourage experimentation. (invitation only, or reputation/moderation, or all-volunteer, or paid maintainers of specific pages, or all kinds of other governance and incentive schemes that I'm not thinking of) If people have different preferences, (and they do), then there is no perfect system.
There are times to worry about having more choice than is socially optimal, (too many mutual funds, too many drug benefit plans) but I welcome new entries into this particular space. The only real risks are if there are so many wikipedia clones that people can no longer efficiently search them (I think google can handle that), or if the volunteer economies of scale are heavily damaged by dividing up volunteers into smaller less effective groups (it doesn't seem like this new entrant really wants to have the same kinds of volunteers who are currently working on wikipedia)
Let me know where you're purchasing your state and local law enforcement. Or public goods in general. (Unless you're a proponent of anarcho-capitalism, in which case you can just refute these criticisms)
Re:What would be cool...
on
Talking iPods
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· Score: 1
It's not whistling, but tapping is probably easier to implement on an iPod... just replace 'space bar' with 'clickwheel'...
This site lets you search for a song, by tapping the rhythm of its words (lyrics).
Let's say you have a song stuck in your head, and you don't know the name of it. Never fear! Load up our search screen, and try tapping the rhythm of the song on your space bar while humming the tune. Tap the space bar for each syllable that you sing. It's that simple!
Any thoughts from users of Tinderbox or DEVONThink? I'm actually trying to set up a system to organize my rather scattered writing/research efforts, and as I'm looking over the options, this announcement occurs.
My hope is that Notebook is the result of a bunch of PhDs at Google using these other products and thinking, "Hey, we should offer something like that!" Then we might expect some sort of interoperability, or at least import/export -- it would be nice to do stuff in a campus lab and then dump the results to my laptop for later work (unless Notebook is so great I never need advanced functionality from other products). Google Calendar can work with Apple's iCal because they both use the same standard, but there's no such standard AFAIK for the things Notebook would do. (other than plain old text files)
It's kinda funny that you linked to Mark Newman, since he just wrote an article on modularity and community structure (which he did indeed proceed to use on the karate club in a recent talk). However, his work does include graph partitioning and cluster analysis, which he tries to improve upon using a new algorithm.
I agree there is certainly a lot of integrative work to be done, but that's because there has been a ton of network stuff done in physics and computer science, but not all of it is mappable to human-to-human networks, which have tricky psychological and sociological forces at work. I've found Brokerage and Closure by Ron Burt to be a really good read on social networks from a sociological and business perspective. Super-quick summary: closure measures the cohesiveness of a group, while brokers span the gaps between the groups. It can be difficult and costly to be a broker, but in general these costs are outweighed by the benefits of greater access to information and opportunities.
I think there's plenty of mediocre research in many fields, but the trick is finding, using, and promoting the good stuff. (Kinda like Slashdot comments?)
I cited the cell phone statistic because your original post said this:
the locals have been told (by twits) that the engineered crops that use less water and resist pests are the work of Satan, etc.
This isn't true in the Philippines, at least not in the places I've been to (outside Manilla). Many GM crops are okay for use. The people crave economic growth and opportunity. Education is highly valued... one of the biggest exports from the Philippines has been nurses and engineers and skilled oil workers who can get paid better by other countries. (and Filipino immigrants don't just come from Manila.)
There just hasn't been enough economic growth to make a big difference in the lives of the most rural people. Economic growth is the best solution for inefficient land use and overpopulation, so how do you build growth in very poor rural areas? I'm trying to understand your alternate solution since small solutions only treat the symptoms, but all the things you said will lead to greater prosperity are present in the Philippines, and yet it hasn't come together yet. Are you advocating massive aid so that the poor can afford proper technology? Whatever the extent logging had to do with the disaster, your post made it sound like it's the Filipinos' own fault for dying.
Democracy, a flexible market, and rule of law, once established and maintained, attract investment, equipment, and positive change faster than any 1-kilowatt cowdung generator will ever do.
The Philippines has a democracy, flexible markets, and the rule of law. There was a time when more text messages were being exchanged in the Philippines than anywhere else in the world. The issues of poverty and emerging markets cannot be waved away with general economic equilibrium theory and the magical Walrasian auctioneer.
Much bigger, much more heavy duty infrastructure is the only thing that will turn around places like that village of 1500 that just got buried in the mud they just created by chopping down all of their trees.
I'm sorry, but this strikes me as a horribly insensitive comment. While there may be lots of people in the world, and economic growth may be the best engine for improving overall welfare, this borderline victim-blaming crosses the line. If only we could have fewer of those poor, inefficient people, the world would be a happier place?
Those are two good points. First off, I assume that China and Russia are already developing space weapon capabilities, since that might be a good way to offset US superiority in conventional weapons. Rumsfeld's vision of the future US military is one that is light, mobile, and better informed than the enemy. Surveillance and communications are crucial to such a strategy and makes space an interesting weak point, which is why Rumsfeld and the air force guys are so keen on making sure that space is a safe platform for global military operations.
China itself is going to be just a huge issue this century. I'm not thrilled to see a Chinese military with access to a rapidly maturing manufacturing sector under one-party rule. (Insert joke about one-party rule in the US here.) Wishing for an arms race not to happen won't make it so... arms races end when all parties involved understand that it is in no one's interest to continue the race.
As for being the good guy, I do believe the US is the most qualified country to be the world's "good guy", even though the record has some pretty ugly spots, and has a moral duty to lead by example. For example, I still don't understand why we need to have lawyerly discussions about torture and prisoners of war -- we shouldn't worry about where the exact line is... because we have no business being anywhere near it!! Since we're the closest thing to "the good guy", we should act like it. (Hmm, if we don't act like the good guys, maybe we're not in fact the good guys? Inconceivable!)
I stand corrected. Underneath my claim were a few assumptions:
The disruption caused by a possibly sudden reduction in oil supplies is so high that the only real choice is to try to phase in artificial high prices. I might offer you the choice of a 100-degree sauna for 30 minutes or a 200-degree sauna for 15 minutes.
However, there is certainly disagreement on this assumption. I'm in fact substituting my own political calculation for the status quo, but who's to say my analysis is necessarily correct? That's why we currently rely on the median voter to decide what we do.
Also, I think that the price of any product should reflect externalities, such as the cost in pollution, the future cost of disruption, and the current cost of military intervention in the mideast. However, again there is plenty of disagreement as to how much to charge for these externalities (since by definition externalities exist outside a market transaction).
Thanks for the reminder -- any solution that involves government has to account for the possibility/probability that the government will perform poorly.
Am I totally opposed to space weapons? Well, not really. Krepon's arguments include: 1) North Korea and Iran don't have space programs. Space weapons would be useful against only Russia and China. 2) The US is the world's most important rule maker or rule breaker. We should set an example and develop a code of conduct.
My response to (1) is that militarily, it sucks to get leapfrogged. You don't want to get passed because of complacency. As for (2), bad actors tend not to follow rules anyway, so will the conduct of the US really shape the behavior of the rest of the world? (I would guess that many outside the US would hope not.)
That said, the opportunity cost for space weapons is *huge*. It feeds into the whole asymmetrical warfare concept -- the US can disable satellites but can't stop an insurgency that everybody saw coming except the secretary of defense.
Furthermore, even within military spending there are better places to spend the money than space weapon deployment. More unmanned systems, better infantry-level support, or faster mobilization (so that the US doesn't build up a force and then claim it's so expensive to keep them there that we have to start the war *right now* -- there were people who said we couldn't wait through a summer... about $200 billion ago.)
But the best place to spend money, in my opinion, is accelerated research that supports reduced reliance on oil. (Yes, I'm a Thomas Friedman fan.) I wouldn't mind a grant or two to a brilliant poli sci researcher who could figure out how to sell the public on a large gas tax. (and mitigate the effects on the poor?) I think most economists would say a gas tax (or more generally, a carbon tax) is the most efficient way to spur adoption of renewable energy sources. Otherwise, you're hoping the government can pick technological winners and losers. (While reps are getting nice contributions from the farm lobby.)
Re:You obviously weren't alive in the 1970s
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New Way to Make Hydrogen
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is it difficult to set up better public transportation in the US?
Yes. US consumers have had cheap gas so long, the effects (sprawling metro areas, big box stores) make it much harder to construct a transit system that people will use. (They'll want other people to use it so that the roads become clearer for *them*.)
Also, most other countries are smaller than the US. Amtrak has been a disaster in part because the notion of a nationwide passenger rail company does not fit well when much of the population is concentrated on near coasts thousands of miles apart.
I think it's possible to set up better public transportation -- but it requires a lot of zoning changes, support for biking and walking paths, and some innovative pricing of road use (somehow make them more expensive) and transit use (make sure it's cheap or free). And don't even *think* about passenger rail -- a fixed infrastructure (track) in a flexible world isn't the best idea.
As the price of oil rises, people will adapt. It's just unfortunate that because of the lack of foresight, many people will end up in trouble because the economy will suffer for a while, and a recession plus higher gas prices would hit the working poor the hardest.
Address organization and its processes, not IT
on
Technology Paradise Lost
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· Score: 4, Informative
It could be argued that such general terminology must necessarily be used when discussing information technology among business managers.
I spent much of my business career at the intersection of business processes and computer systems. I know how business units complain about information systems departments without understanding how large-scale systems evolve. Conversely, I have seen information systems departments try to run the business ("driving from the back seat," as one former colleague calls it). Overall, I have arrived at this conclusion: Information systems reflect their organizational setting.
If organizational roles and boundaries are not well defined, then computer systems will have gaps and overlaps, also. If a business process is overly complex, then the computer systems will share that complexity. If a management structure has too many layers, then the computer system will be bloated by effort to meet competing demands.
In my experience, problems that are blamed on computer systems almost invariably can be traced back to organizational characteristics. Any attempt to fix the information system without doing anything about the organizational issues is likely to fail. Information system weaknesses are more often a symptom than a cause of an organizational problem.
We need people who can address technical and business audiences with equal skill. I'm not saying it's easy -- I'm leaving my current company because I just didn't have it -- but it's going to be more critical because the biggest benefits will come from taking a new technical innovation and using it to solve a business problem.
LordNimon's right. There are plenty of good reasons to not like the agreement, but if you sign up anyway, then your legal position is a whole lot weaker.
It's not a matter of "owning" contractor/employees. It's potentially being held liable for their actions, and not doing anything about it (never mind the ethics of using the services of someone who is knowingly doing something that violates an agreement). Google for "vicarious liability." OSDL would benefit from the creation of an open source clone of BitMover. In fact, BitMover could have done much worse than just revoke the free beer version.
Of course, BitMover is still making a bad judgment call. It's perfectly reasonable to think that OSDL and BitMover are both bad actors.
I had a difficult time reconciling the fact that the following two statements are in the same review:
Say you're listening to All Things Considered and Nina Totenberg is about to make an especially poignant point about the day's oral arguments at the Supreme Court...
If you're listening to your favorite top 40 radio station and the newest Ashlee Simpson tune comes on and you want to save it...
Yikes! Still, I think the pause feature may be a nice Tivo-ish thing, but the Season Pass concept will probably be better covered by podcasting. (Actually, there was a feature on podcasting on NPR's Day to Day: you can listen to it here, but alas, not as a podcast.)
If the school is funded by tax dollars, then the principal is indeed an agent of the government, and is thus subject to the first amendment. Private schools are another matter.
A principal does have a competing duty to maintain discipline. The guideline in Hazelwood is that censorship may occur only to prevent "material and substantial disruption".
Instead of sponsored speech, you may be thinking of commercial speech, which is its own legal world. High school newspapers are, AFAIK, supposed to encourage journalism, not public relations.
In case there are any high schoolers (or parents of high schoolers) reading Slashdot, here's the FAQ from SPLC (Student Press Law Center). I worked on a newspaper in high school and despite the extreme (grade-affecting) hard work found it really rewarding. http://splc.org/legalresearch.asp?id=3
Q: Do high school students have First Amendment rights? A: Yes. As the United States Supreme Court said in 1969, "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." But the First Amendment only prohibits government officials from suppressing speech; it does not prevent school censorship at private schools. A state constitution, statute or school policy could provide private school students with free speech protections.
Q: What about the Hazelwood decision? A: Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision, gave public high school officials greater authority to censor some school-sponsored student publications if they chose to do so. But the ruling doesn't apply to publications that have been opened as "public forums for student expression." It also requires school officials to demonstrate some reasonable educational justification before they can censor anything. In addition, some states (currently Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas and Massachusetts) have passed laws that give students much stronger free expression protection than Hazelwood. Other states are considering such laws.
Q: What is a "public forum for student expression?" A: A student publication is a public forum for student expression when school officials have given student editors the authority to make their own content decisions. A school can do that either through an official policy or by allowing a publication to operate with editorial independence.
Q: So if policy or practice indicates the content of my publication is determined by students, the Hazelwood decision doesn't apply to me? A: That's right. If a student publication is a public forum for student expression, then students are entitled to stronger First Amendment protection. School officials are only allowed to censor forum publications when they can show the publication will cause a "material and substantial disruption" of school activities.
Q: What about underground or independent student publications? Are they protected from censorship? A: Absolutely. Although public schools can establish reasonable restrictions as to the time, place and manner of distribution of underground publications, they cannot absolutely forbid their distribution on school grounds. Like school-sponsored publications that are forums, a school must show substantial disruption before they can censor an independent publication.
Q: Can a student publication be sued for libel, invasion of privacy or copyright infringement? A: Yes, and occasionally they are. In such cases the individual reporter and the editor could be held legally responsible. Court decisions indicate that a school which does not control the content of a student publication may be protected from liability. Students need to be aware that with press freedom does come legal responsibility.
Q: Can student reporters protect confidential news sources or information? A: Some states have "shield laws" and others have court-created privileges that protect journalists from having to reveal this kind of information. However, most states have never explicitly applied these laws to student journalists. You should check your state law before making a promise of confidentiality because once you make such a promise, the law requires you to keep it.
Q: Can I use freedom of information laws? A: Yes. Freedom of information, or "sunshine" laws, require government agencies such as public schools to open many of their official records and
I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm not sold on the concept of belonging to a social network site. There was a time when people registered their web sites on directories like Yahoo, until Google figured out a way to spider the web and present relevant stuff to you without requiring pre-registration. I'm not sure requiring membership with a site is going to work, without some sort of protocol to let different sites work with each other.
Eventually, everyone will have their own blogs, and will embed some identity info into them. We're seeing the semantic web emerging from what people want to do on the web instead of from people trying to classify everything.
Now an interesting issue is balancing anonymity with community. What would be neat to see would be ways of embedding different types of content in your blog and giving each type different accessibility levels. You'd have your deep thoughts available to the public, but still be able to share stories about your kids with your inner circle.
RSS, Friend-of-a-friend, cryptography, semantics... roll 'em all up and let's see what happens.
My wife and I talk about this a lot, because we were both smart and geeky in high school (she was also an athlete, though, so she had a much easier time of it).
Our primary advice to our kids will be: "It gets better."
High school will not be, and shouldn't be, "the best years of your life." People will be petty, people won't understand you. You've got to take it, and still treat other people with respect. (Even if you're smarter, you're not necessarily better -- if you're excluded, don't retreat to elitism.)
All that said, I'm not sure if "wasting time" is so bad. Young children should be encouraged to play freely, not subjected 100% to a rigorous schedule of pre-planned activities. Not sure how much that can or should carry over into teenage years.
Graham is advocating exploration of that which interests you -- in my mind, I should've been spending more time practicing social skills... since in high school I was most interested in my female classmates.
Slashdot Mirror
Not all private schools. Catholic schools, for example. Part of tuition from those who can afford to pay goes to those who want a private school education but cannot afford it. The reason they work is that in a private school, all the students are there because the parents are willing to sacrifice to put their students there.
All private schools are less appealing in districts with quality public schools. So in theory, when public schools outcompete the private options, vouchers are not a threat. But the larger point against vouchers is that many public districts want to do better but can't, and making it easier for motivated parents to move their kids will leave public schools even worse off. (And the response then becomes, "so only the richest can have private school?" ... and around in circles we go ...)
Internet (ok, electronic) banking has different, independent stakeholders verifying the validity of transactions with armies of accountants armed with IS systems that have been around for decades.
Electronic democracy does not.
Discussion of the law *must* include those whom it affects. When people file lawsuits, one of the concepts is that the person filing must have standing. Wikipedia: "In the United States, the current doctrine is that a person cannot bring a suit challenging the constitutionality of a law unless the plaintiff can demonstrate that the plaintiff is (or will imminently be) harmed by the law."
Cigarette companies testify about nicotine regulation, car companies testify about gasoline efficiency standards, and wall street bankers testify about the impact of bailouts. Members of Congress are supposed to be a proxy for the taxpayers they represent, and then bring in viewpoints from different sides. Typically, the party in control of a hearing stacks the group with speakers who favor their own pre-determined stance. So it was in both the Republican and Democratic hearings on this topic.
"I need something to make me think. Let's see... Hardy Boys... too easy. Nancy Drew... too hard. Ah, perfect. Bonfire of the Vanities."
Such companies are not really off the hook, but a level of indirection can often diffuse blame. Humans have a judgment bias that sees indirect harm as less bad than direct harm. Legally there's no difference (murder-for-hire vs. hire), but ethically people have to work harder before they see the two harms as equivalent.
For example, in 2006 Merck sold the marketing rights to a cancer drug to a small company named Ovation, who then charged exorbitant rates to recoup the costs. Merck kept the sales proceeds, and continued to produce the drug, but Ovation was the company charging patients ten times more. Ovation's business model is to act as a buffer for large pharmaceutical firms that want to get a large payday out of a niche drug without getting their hands dirty.
For more information, check See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior (Gino, Moore and Bazerman 2008) and The Preference for Indirect Harm (Royzman and Baron 2002, Social Justice Research).
The process of science is one of a long-running debate between theories that have more or less support from evidence.
I think the members of academia by and large have enough integrity to acknowledge in articles that they write that different viewpoints exist. A writer for a conference or journal needs to demonstrate basic command of the breadth of debate (lit review), or else a reviewer would likely reject the article. Many journals have occasional articles that are nothing but long literature reviews that survey the field to give a sense of current research streams.
I think what we're seeing here is a new product with different characteristics from both wikipedia and traditional encyclopedias. Who says wikipedia best serves the preferences of the entire internet population? This is a young idea, we should encourage experimentation. (invitation only, or reputation/moderation, or all-volunteer, or paid maintainers of specific pages, or all kinds of other governance and incentive schemes that I'm not thinking of) If people have different preferences, (and they do), then there is no perfect system.
There are times to worry about having more choice than is socially optimal, (too many mutual funds, too many drug benefit plans) but I welcome new entries into this particular space. The only real risks are if there are so many wikipedia clones that people can no longer efficiently search them (I think google can handle that), or if the volunteer economies of scale are heavily damaged by dividing up volunteers into smaller less effective groups (it doesn't seem like this new entrant really wants to have the same kinds of volunteers who are currently working on wikipedia)
Let me know where you're purchasing your state and local law enforcement. Or public goods in general. (Unless you're a proponent of anarcho-capitalism, in which case you can just refute these criticisms)
http://www.songtapper.com/s/tappingmain.bin
Any thoughts from users of Tinderbox or DEVONThink? I'm actually trying to set up a system to organize my rather scattered writing/research efforts, and as I'm looking over the options, this announcement occurs.
My hope is that Notebook is the result of a bunch of PhDs at Google using these other products and thinking, "Hey, we should offer something like that!" Then we might expect some sort of interoperability, or at least import/export -- it would be nice to do stuff in a campus lab and then dump the results to my laptop for later work (unless Notebook is so great I never need advanced functionality from other products). Google Calendar can work with Apple's iCal because they both use the same standard, but there's no such standard AFAIK for the things Notebook would do. (other than plain old text files)
PointCast had a hot idea in the '90s and failed to leap at a $450 million offer. Look what that got them.
*Maybe* Facebook is different. I don't know it too well since I'm not on it.
It's kinda funny that you linked to Mark Newman, since he just wrote an article on modularity and community structure (which he did indeed proceed to use on the karate club in a recent talk). However, his work does include graph partitioning and cluster analysis, which he tries to improve upon using a new algorithm.
I agree there is certainly a lot of integrative work to be done, but that's because there has been a ton of network stuff done in physics and computer science, but not all of it is mappable to human-to-human networks, which have tricky psychological and sociological forces at work. I've found Brokerage and Closure by Ron Burt to be a really good read on social networks from a sociological and business perspective. Super-quick summary: closure measures the cohesiveness of a group, while brokers span the gaps between the groups. It can be difficult and costly to be a broker, but in general these costs are outweighed by the benefits of greater access to information and opportunities.
I think there's plenty of mediocre research in many fields, but the trick is finding, using, and promoting the good stuff. (Kinda like Slashdot comments?)
I cited the cell phone statistic because your original post said this:
... one of the biggest exports from the Philippines has been nurses and engineers and skilled oil workers who can get paid better by other countries. (and Filipino immigrants don't just come from Manila.)
the locals have been told (by twits) that the engineered crops that use less water and resist pests are the work of Satan, etc.
This isn't true in the Philippines, at least not in the places I've been to (outside Manilla). Many GM crops are okay for use. The people crave economic growth and opportunity. Education is highly valued
There just hasn't been enough economic growth to make a big difference in the lives of the most rural people. Economic growth is the best solution for inefficient land use and overpopulation, so how do you build growth in very poor rural areas? I'm trying to understand your alternate solution since small solutions only treat the symptoms, but all the things you said will lead to greater prosperity are present in the Philippines, and yet it hasn't come together yet. Are you advocating massive aid so that the poor can afford proper technology? Whatever the extent logging had to do with the disaster, your post made it sound like it's the Filipinos' own fault for dying.
Democracy, a flexible market, and rule of law, once established and maintained, attract investment, equipment, and positive change faster than any 1-kilowatt cowdung generator will ever do.
The Philippines has a democracy, flexible markets, and the rule of law. There was a time when more text messages were being exchanged in the Philippines than anywhere else in the world. The issues of poverty and emerging markets cannot be waved away with general economic equilibrium theory and the magical Walrasian auctioneer.
Much bigger, much more heavy duty infrastructure is the only thing that will turn around places like that village of 1500 that just got buried in the mud they just created by chopping down all of their trees.
I'm sorry, but this strikes me as a horribly insensitive comment. While there may be lots of people in the world, and economic growth may be the best engine for improving overall welfare, this borderline victim-blaming crosses the line. If only we could have fewer of those poor, inefficient people, the world would be a happier place?
Those are two good points. First off, I assume that China and Russia are already developing space weapon capabilities, since that might be a good way to offset US superiority in conventional weapons. Rumsfeld's vision of the future US military is one that is light, mobile, and better informed than the enemy. Surveillance and communications are crucial to such a strategy and makes space an interesting weak point, which is why Rumsfeld and the air force guys are so keen on making sure that space is a safe platform for global military operations.
... arms races end when all parties involved understand that it is in no one's interest to continue the race.
... because we have no business being anywhere near it!! Since we're the closest thing to "the good guy", we should act like it. (Hmm, if we don't act like the good guys, maybe we're not in fact the good guys? Inconceivable!)
China itself is going to be just a huge issue this century. I'm not thrilled to see a Chinese military with access to a rapidly maturing manufacturing sector under one-party rule. (Insert joke about one-party rule in the US here.) Wishing for an arms race not to happen won't make it so
As for being the good guy, I do believe the US is the most qualified country to be the world's "good guy", even though the record has some pretty ugly spots, and has a moral duty to lead by example. For example, I still don't understand why we need to have lawyerly discussions about torture and prisoners of war -- we shouldn't worry about where the exact line is
Yes, this means I'm hopelessly, hopelessly naive.
I stand corrected. Underneath my claim were a few assumptions:
The disruption caused by a possibly sudden reduction in oil supplies is so high that the only real choice is to try to phase in artificial high prices. I might offer you the choice of a 100-degree sauna for 30 minutes or a 200-degree sauna for 15 minutes.
However, there is certainly disagreement on this assumption. I'm in fact substituting my own political calculation for the status quo, but who's to say my analysis is necessarily correct? That's why we currently rely on the median voter to decide what we do.
Also, I think that the price of any product should reflect externalities, such as the cost in pollution, the future cost of disruption, and the current cost of military intervention in the mideast. However, again there is plenty of disagreement as to how much to charge for these externalities (since by definition externalities exist outside a market transaction).
Thanks for the reminder -- any solution that involves government has to account for the possibility/probability that the government will perform poorly.
Am I totally opposed to space weapons? Well, not really. Krepon's arguments include:
... about $200 billion ago.)
1) North Korea and Iran don't have space programs. Space weapons would be useful against only Russia and China.
2) The US is the world's most important rule maker or rule breaker. We should set an example and develop a code of conduct.
My response to (1) is that militarily, it sucks to get leapfrogged. You don't want to get passed because of complacency. As for (2), bad actors tend not to follow rules anyway, so will the conduct of the US really shape the behavior of the rest of the world? (I would guess that many outside the US would hope not.)
That said, the opportunity cost for space weapons is *huge*. It feeds into the whole asymmetrical warfare concept -- the US can disable satellites but can't stop an insurgency that everybody saw coming except the secretary of defense.
Furthermore, even within military spending there are better places to spend the money than space weapon deployment. More unmanned systems, better infantry-level support, or faster mobilization (so that the US doesn't build up a force and then claim it's so expensive to keep them there that we have to start the war *right now* -- there were people who said we couldn't wait through a summer
But the best place to spend money, in my opinion, is accelerated research that supports reduced reliance on oil. (Yes, I'm a Thomas Friedman fan.) I wouldn't mind a grant or two to a brilliant poli sci researcher who could figure out how to sell the public on a large gas tax. (and mitigate the effects on the poor?) I think most economists would say a gas tax (or more generally, a carbon tax) is the most efficient way to spur adoption of renewable energy sources. Otherwise, you're hoping the government can pick technological winners and losers. (While reps are getting nice contributions from the farm lobby.)
Is it difficult to set up better public transportation in the US?
Yes. US consumers have had cheap gas so long, the effects (sprawling metro areas, big box stores) make it much harder to construct a transit system that people will use. (They'll want other people to use it so that the roads become clearer for *them*.)
Also, most other countries are smaller than the US. Amtrak has been a disaster in part because the notion of a nationwide passenger rail company does not fit well when much of the population is concentrated on near coasts thousands of miles apart.
I think it's possible to set up better public transportation -- but it requires a lot of zoning changes, support for biking and walking paths, and some innovative pricing of road use (somehow make them more expensive) and transit use (make sure it's cheap or free). And don't even *think* about passenger rail -- a fixed infrastructure (track) in a flexible world isn't the best idea.
As the price of oil rises, people will adapt. It's just unfortunate that because of the lack of foresight, many people will end up in trouble because the economy will suffer for a while, and a recession plus higher gas prices would hit the working poor the hardest.
I've looked at this from both sides, but I'll borrow from a recent economics column http://www.techcentralstation.com/051905B.html:
We need people who can address technical and business audiences with equal skill. I'm not saying it's easy -- I'm leaving my current company because I just didn't have it -- but it's going to be more critical because the biggest benefits will come from taking a new technical innovation and using it to solve a business problem.
LordNimon's right. There are plenty of good reasons to not like the agreement, but if you sign up anyway, then your legal position is a whole lot weaker.
It's not a matter of "owning" contractor/employees. It's potentially being held liable for their actions, and not doing anything about it (never mind the ethics of using the services of someone who is knowingly doing something that violates an agreement). Google for "vicarious liability." OSDL would benefit from the creation of an open source clone of BitMover. In fact, BitMover could have done much worse than just revoke the free beer version.
Of course, BitMover is still making a bad judgment call. It's perfectly reasonable to think that OSDL and BitMover are both bad actors.
Old joke:
The people who run the world read The Wall Street Journal.
The people who think they run the world read The Washington Post.
The people who wish they ran the world read The New York Times.
(P.S. Both the Post and Journal have better reporting than the NYTimes now, which is sad. NY Times used to be the gold standard of journalism.)
I had a difficult time reconciling the fact that the following two statements are in the same review:
...
...
Say you're listening to All Things Considered and Nina Totenberg is about to make an especially poignant point about the day's oral arguments at the Supreme Court
If you're listening to your favorite top 40 radio station and the newest Ashlee Simpson tune comes on and you want to save it
Yikes! Still, I think the pause feature may be a nice Tivo-ish thing, but the Season Pass concept will probably be better covered by podcasting. (Actually, there was a feature on podcasting on NPR's Day to Day: you can listen to it here, but alas, not as a podcast.)
If the school is funded by tax dollars, then the principal is indeed an agent of the government, and is thus subject to the first amendment. Private schools are another matter.
A principal does have a competing duty to maintain discipline. The guideline in Hazelwood is that censorship may occur only to prevent "material and substantial disruption".
Instead of sponsored speech, you may be thinking of commercial speech, which is its own legal world. High school newspapers are, AFAIK, supposed to encourage journalism, not public relations.
In case there are any high schoolers (or parents of high schoolers) reading Slashdot, here's the FAQ from SPLC (Student Press Law Center). I worked on a newspaper in high school and despite the extreme (grade-affecting) hard work found it really rewarding.
http://splc.org/legalresearch.asp?id=3
Q: Do high school students have First Amendment rights?
A: Yes. As the United States Supreme Court said in 1969, "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional right to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." But the First Amendment only prohibits government officials from suppressing speech; it does not prevent school censorship at private schools. A state constitution, statute or school policy could provide private school students with free speech protections.
Q: What about the Hazelwood decision?
A: Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision, gave public high school officials greater authority to censor some school-sponsored student publications if they chose to do so. But the ruling doesn't apply to publications that have been opened as "public forums for student expression." It also requires school officials to demonstrate some reasonable educational justification before they can censor anything. In addition, some states (currently Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas and Massachusetts) have passed laws that give students much stronger free expression protection than Hazelwood. Other states are considering such laws.
Q: What is a "public forum for student expression?"
A: A student publication is a public forum for student expression when school officials have given student editors the authority to make their own content decisions. A school can do that either through an official policy or by allowing a publication to operate with editorial independence.
Q: So if policy or practice indicates the content of my publication is determined by students, the Hazelwood decision doesn't apply to me?
A: That's right. If a student publication is a public forum for student expression, then students are entitled to stronger First Amendment protection. School officials are only allowed to censor forum publications when they can show the publication will cause a "material and substantial disruption" of school activities.
Q: What about underground or independent student publications? Are they protected from censorship?
A: Absolutely. Although public schools can establish reasonable restrictions as to the time, place and manner of distribution of underground publications, they cannot absolutely forbid their distribution on school grounds. Like school-sponsored publications that are forums, a school must show substantial disruption before they can censor an independent publication.
Q: Can a student publication be sued for libel, invasion of privacy or copyright infringement?
A: Yes, and occasionally they are. In such cases the individual reporter and the editor could be held legally responsible. Court decisions indicate that a school which does not control the content of a student publication may be protected from liability. Students need to be aware that with press freedom does come legal responsibility.
Q: Can student reporters protect confidential news sources or information?
A: Some states have "shield laws" and others have court-created privileges that protect journalists from having to reveal this kind of information. However, most states have never explicitly applied these laws to student journalists. You should check your state law before making a promise of confidentiality because once you make such a promise, the law requires you to keep it.
Q: Can I use freedom of information laws?
A: Yes. Freedom of information, or "sunshine" laws, require government agencies such as public schools to open many of their official records and
Found this entry:
... roll 'em all up and let's see what happens.
The Semantic Social Network
I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm not sold on the concept of belonging to a social network site. There was a time when people registered their web sites on directories like Yahoo, until Google figured out a way to spider the web and present relevant stuff to you without requiring pre-registration. I'm not sure requiring membership with a site is going to work, without some sort of protocol to let different sites work with each other.
Eventually, everyone will have their own blogs, and will embed some identity info into them. We're seeing the semantic web emerging from what people want to do on the web instead of from people trying to classify everything.
Now an interesting issue is balancing anonymity with community. What would be neat to see would be ways of embedding different types of content in your blog and giving each type different accessibility levels. You'd have your deep thoughts available to the public, but still be able to share stories about your kids with your inner circle.
RSS, Friend-of-a-friend, cryptography, semantics
My wife and I talk about this a lot, because we were both smart and geeky in high school (she was also an athlete, though, so she had a much easier time of it).
... since in high school I was most interested in my female classmates.
Our primary advice to our kids will be: "It gets better."
High school will not be, and shouldn't be, "the best years of your life." People will be petty, people won't understand you. You've got to take it, and still treat other people with respect. (Even if you're smarter, you're not necessarily better -- if you're excluded, don't retreat to elitism.)
All that said, I'm not sure if "wasting time" is so bad. Young children should be encouraged to play freely, not subjected 100% to a rigorous schedule of pre-planned activities. Not sure how much that can or should carry over into teenage years.
Graham is advocating exploration of that which interests you -- in my mind, I should've been spending more time practicing social skills