fair distinction to make. co-operative competition (whole class attempting to get the best combined score, for example) serves to motivate. Positive-sum is a concept I hadn't heard before, I like it, thanks.
Hunter/gatherer tribes learned long, long ago it's better to work together to get food than it is to get it separately. sure, a bigger dude might get a little more meat, but ultimately, co-operation is the adaptive trait that has caused us to thrive, not 'vicious competition'.
I like competition as much as the next guy... more than most, actually... but I dont pretend it's the most effective way to TEACH. that's a pretty big leap.
Did you really need to compete to learn to tie your shoes? Do addition? Pick up calculus? I joined a math team because I liked math enough to want to do it as sport, but I"m not dumb enough to require a "vicious competition" just to LEARN. And the girls on the team beat most of the boys, I might add. But then, the girls at my elementary school could beat the boys at basketball too. Must have been all that birth control in the spring water my rural maine town suffered from.
why are you assuming that competitive based learning is better, or "boy friendly"? Perhaps friendly to a boy that is constantly told to compete with everyone he sees, but that doesn't mean it's an inherent trait of boys. Boys like to collaborate too, if it's not a zero-sum game that is presented to them.
Furthermore, why would you assume that if we are abandoning a practice in one field, that means we would want to take it up in another to balance it out?
If we decided rote memorization was not effective, and stopped using it in math, would we then need to pick it up in history class?
the idea that learning should be "competitive" is, frankly, ridiculous. If you learn something, you win. If I learn it too, we both win. Why would we have to pick a "winner" if the goal is simply to learn?
a house does not feel stuffy, nor does it have mold/mildew problems, if it has proper ventilation.
superinsulated houses from the seventies had those problems precisely because they did not understand the need for ventilation and did not ventilate properly.
With proper ventilation, the air is fresh and feels fresh.
Your thermal expansion/contraction arguement is interesting, but untrue if the sealing mechanism swells and expands at the same rate as the rest of the house members, or in the case of construction methods such as ICF or SIP homes, there is little to no bridging to cause infiltration in the first place.
Proper planning of available window area (that is, gasp, ARCHITECTURE actually trying to do something useful for once) allows for a "big window" feel with small window areas.
right now, you only have to buy off a portion of the few hundred people in congress.
with direct representation, you would potentially have to buy off thousands of representatives. and, if anyone thought their chosen elector was selling his/her votes, they could reallocate it, for the fastest response to corruption ever seen.
how is this more risky than it is now, with much larger amounts of power concentrated in fewer and easier to target hands. if I wanted to buy votes, now is close to a dream situation, direct representation would be much more of a nightmare.
my apologies; I piled misunderstanding on top of assumption in my prior response. your stance is very thoughtful and thorough, and thanks for posting it.
A cop telling you to shoot a 3 year old in the face is most assuredly not legal unless other factors would lead you to believe that it were necessary to protect yourself or others from the threat of the 3-year old. You don't get to say " a cop told me to do it" and walk.
THe law you reference seems to indicate that law enforcement can ask for wiretapping quickly in an emergency, but only if they provide justification for it within 48 hours of the tap. That is a far cry from "vacuum tapping" mass amounts of telecom customers, possibly with no justification ever given as far as we know now.
there is no reason why a congressional investigation should not proceed, and that requires no special favors done ahead of such an investigation.
No one is plumbing potable systems in copper anymore except in Mass and a couple of other states that have been extremely slow to adopt it. The rest of us have had PEX in the codes for more than a decade.
The industry had a problem with PolyButylene years ago, and the problems were primarily related to the fittings, not the pipe itself. Polybutylene itself is still around.
Also, freeze protection is a reason to use pex. it expands, and reforms to its original shape when heated (assuming the use of PEX-A). making it 'freeze resistant'; no water damage unless it's a really severe freeze and bursts anyway. Copper doesn't expand too well and burst pipes are a major source of water problems. But the long and the short of it is, your pipes should NEVER be in an outside wall, EVER, that's just poor practice, and if you're building houses in which the pipes freeze, your plumbing is substandard.
Finally, PEX has been around for decades and in heating systems for more than 30 years here in the US now. We are pretty clear that it's here to last.
they WON overwhelmingly, in that election cycle. they did not win an overwhelming majority. That's two different things. Seats considered "safe" by republicans fell in droves in '06.
Perhaps, because we had cheap energy to count on when we were building most of the houses and communities that currently exist.
if you live in a 200 year old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, well, they would go to town a few times a YEAR when they built the place. If you don't want to live like that, great! Live somewhere more populated.
If you BUILT a house in the middle of nowhere to "get away from it all", then don't get mad that "it's away".
In short, our population distribution would be a lot denser if we didn't assume gas would be $1 or $2/gallon forever when we built stuff. A lot more like.. oh I don't know, let's say Europe.
it does not suggest that you reason with people who attacked you. it suggests you reason with people who have NOT attacked you, and that you behave in ways that does not provoke people into attacking you without damn good reason.
it DOES SUGGEST that you do NOT then, after you've presumably gone after the people who attacked you, start attacking or threatening to attack anyone else you think might ever possible THINK about attacking you; that's clouded judgement at work. a backlash.
it's understandable too, but we elect leaders to be better than knee jerk responders; they are supposed to be LEADERS. Being knee jerk wuss bags is what makes our credibility worldwide disintegrate, which has ramifications if we are expecting people to side with us and not Russia or China in the coming years, and it has in large part left us weak, vulnerable, and horribly overspent.
it may be a great way to jump out from in front of a speeding bus, but it's a ridiculous way to run a country. But then, if you bothered to think for two seconds about the company you're quoting to support your view of intellectuals, you could probably have figured that out all by yourself. but your fight response must have been a little strong.
I was just out collecting signatures yesterday to fight RealID and the concessions we're making towards it in maine.
let me tell you; people in rural maine are still afraid of terrorists. I got my sigs because many rural mainers are also damn near libertarians and luckily this time around realID is an unfunded mandate and mainers hate taxes, but I lost plenty to people who want the government to be covering us all like some big, faceless security blanket.
individual co-ops don't have to grow to international size to affect the world. a Union of a lot of them could achieve the same thing. I would argue that would probably be more effective to boot.
I don't know much about financing though because I run a small, cash company that only needed $10k to start, so I can't comment there. I have no idea how financing beyond loans is handled.
you're right, there are tweaks needed I'm sure, but you could say that about anything; that's not unique to the co-op model. beyond your startup financing issue I don't see much in co-op modelling that would have to change, it just needs more people to be aware of the options. but, i do need to do more research into how the model works.
and, as a co-owner of a small company, it would require me to hand over the business my partner and i have largely built to the employees... which, right now, won't happen (we worked a hell of a lot harder than anyone to make this happen). so it's not like I'm some ideal activist here or anything, just so it's clear and I'm not misrepresenting myself. I don't think everything necessarily has to be a co-op, i just don't think the co-op has to be everything either;)
the smaller companies I just referred to which are basically pump and dump schemes with cash instead of stock (providing lots of income in a short period of time, rather than ongoing income which is HARD, which you would know if you owned a business). Rest assured the guys running them didn't give two shits for the employees (who were generally stiffed pay at the end) or their vendors (also stiffed) or their customers (sold junk at 300% markups). All totally legal. company went bankrupt, don't you know?
as for the evil being a function of size, it's because "evil" is not always some guy with machinations at heart (though sociopaths, real ones, do well in business it's true). It's often 100 middle managers, each with a tiny slice of the overall pie and no real connection to what's happening as a result of their actions, each making small, individually insignificant decisions that add up to Bad Stuff. Not my job syndrome. It's a form of apathy. and it's nearly unavoidable in a large company... at least, it certainly seems that way so far.
Large corps act to maximize profit. that's it. that's what they do. there is no morality and no ethics to it beyond legal regulation and the actions of some who actually care, which is nice, but not enough when you wield the power of a huge company. you can argue whether that is good or bad in the end, but a person that acts with NO regard for its fellow human beings and that is completely narcissistic is a sociopath, and if you're going to make a corporation a person (legally speaking, of course), that's the kind of person it is.
size is a big deal. size is a big part of what detaches personal responsibility from corporate action. I know the modern free marketeers bury their heads on this one, but as I just posted to another fellow, bigger is not necessarily better in all things. It may be more efficient in many ways, and efficiency certainly has a lot of benefit, but it's not the be all end all of existence a construct that pretends that it is, is dysfunctional for human beings to be associated with long term.
a co-op of co-ops would reap economies of scale just as well as anything monolithic.
But beyond that, bigger is not always better. There is nothing at all wrong with successfully providing a good service to a chosen market for a fair price.
Furthermore, directly democratic methods work best in small groups, and as things get bigger, they get more abstract, and people who are interested in co-ops are by and large interested in the direct, human connections they are making at work.
that is, that work is about more than just the paycheck, and business doesn't have to be dedicated to absolute efficiency. Humanity has value as well. You can benefit society, for example, all you like, but if you do it at the price of people's ability to relate to each other, what have you won?
All that said.. if you see a working model there, you can work with them to replicate it, or you can use it yourself, but don't whine that you bring up an option and they don't choose to fund you with their money;) (just needling in good fun there).
well, more to the point if I don't do it, you're right, I can be sued into oblivion, AND as I noted in my other post I am operating in a society where that is the norm, because everyone expects that I will have this sort of protection AND insurance. Therefor if you slip on my stoop and sue me, you aren't suing ME.
cue the unnecessary lawsuits. because the person aims to plunder an insurance company, not me.
so i don't think it's right, but it would be suicide for me to drop my protections alone in this environment, so I have to do it. But someday, if I wanted to be a jerk, I could make some changes to the way things are done in the company, siphon out all the cash, and let people attempt to the sue the husk for whatever I leave in there. That's not right either... and I know people who have done exactly that, repeatedly. Those infomercials for products that don't work? Yeah, that's what they are really doing.
the idea that a corporate person should shield me from my actions ALLOWS for the rise of megacorps that act like sociopaths. Luckily I am a six person company and someday I might be as big as twenty, but my company will never be hundred or thousands of people large, my niche market just isn't big enough. so my risk of becoming that "fascist" corp is pretty low. but it is only my conscience and sincere desire to do good work that keeps my company flying straight... the constructs that it exists in insulate me should I ever decide otherwise. and that, as I say, isn't "right".
well, beyond that, we are in a society that has been formed partially by the existance of these structures.
If that were not true, I would be less worried about being sued because someone stubbed their toe on my threshold. but everyone is so used to these monolithic entities and insurance companies that they can do things they would never do to another person directly.
so I can't shed my protection alone, it needs to be part of a bigger movement, IMHO.
You mean kind of like we did with Cuba (minus the EMP bit)? I mean, that works really well, right? Or Iraq? Embargo the heck out of them, and sooner or later those pissed off commoners will throw off their shackels!!
right?
So, how do you seriously get to the point where a couple of blackouts and some economic competition justifies bombing around 1 billion people because you're paying too much for gas? Do you kick puppies for training, or are you just born that much of an asshole naturally?
I own an S-corp LLC as well, that doesn't mean I think it's *right*. but you play by the rules of the game you're playing.
corporation personhood is an abomination. I'd be happy to see it go. having a taxable entity is great, but having a nearly impervious shield to liability most assuredly is NOT.
wow. well hey, good for you. no one in the regular world though gets a month of vacation a year, especially not entry level. Average in america is 13 days per year. with a bachelor's degree, you still don't have to look hard to see two weeks plus holidays portrayed as 'generous' for entry level.
beyond discretionary leave, any teacher gets more vacation time DURING THE SCHOOL YEAR, even after you account for time taken out of that for "home work", then most comparable jobs give all year. And they still get sick time, which you conveniently ignore, on top of that, plus summer. Sure, vacations may not be "discretionary", but then, it isn't for anyone who has kids in school either. big whup. especially when you get multiple weeks throughout the school year, plus a 2 to 3 month chunk in the summer, if you can't hit one of those times for your trip, well, what I am supposed to do, cry for you?
and do you think teachers only take sick days when they are sick?
I'm not paying $15 to read the article, got another source? Because all I can find are several working examples in other countries that have caused NONE of the doom and gloom scenarios to happen, and the edmonton model which seems to be pretty universally respected except.. and I might be wrong, but this is all I'm seeing out there.. by people who think that bad schools closing is a bad thing. Personally, I think it's a great thing when good schools thrive and bad ones close.
I agree with your statement about the unions in principle. But if you've ever worked with union people, you might admit that the statement is a tad idealistic. I don't think we should break unions or anything, but I'm thinking we have advocates for government and advocates for teachers built into this system... perhaps we need an advocate for CHILDREN in the mix as well. A representative children's union, if you will.
that's a half baked idea, btw, and I welcome critique or further commentary on it.
I thought athens' voting citizens were only land owning men?
that's not exactly pure democracy.
generally speaking the less informed self select by not bothering to vote.
I think you can achieve pure democracy in a representative structure. You just have to allow people to change their personal representative, or override him/her, at any time. That does require fast communication though, you're right. but not everyone has to vote on everything personally to avoid "elitist" or anti-democratic structures.
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fair distinction to make. co-operative competition (whole class attempting to get the best combined score, for example) serves to motivate. Positive-sum is a concept I hadn't heard before, I like it, thanks.
go idea and cite your sources.
Hunter/gatherer tribes learned long, long ago it's better to work together to get food than it is to get it separately. sure, a bigger dude might get a little more meat, but ultimately, co-operation is the adaptive trait that has caused us to thrive, not 'vicious competition'.
I like competition as much as the next guy... more than most, actually... but I dont pretend it's the most effective way to TEACH. that's a pretty big leap.
Did you really need to compete to learn to tie your shoes? Do addition? Pick up calculus? I joined a math team because I liked math enough to want to do it as sport, but I"m not dumb enough to require a "vicious competition" just to LEARN. And the girls on the team beat most of the boys, I might add. But then, the girls at my elementary school could beat the boys at basketball too. Must have been all that birth control in the spring water my rural maine town suffered from.
why are you assuming that competitive based learning is better, or "boy friendly"? Perhaps friendly to a boy that is constantly told to compete with everyone he sees, but that doesn't mean it's an inherent trait of boys. Boys like to collaborate too, if it's not a zero-sum game that is presented to them.
Furthermore, why would you assume that if we are abandoning a practice in one field, that means we would want to take it up in another to balance it out?
If we decided rote memorization was not effective, and stopped using it in math, would we then need to pick it up in history class?
the idea that learning should be "competitive" is, frankly, ridiculous. If you learn something, you win. If I learn it too, we both win. Why would we have to pick a "winner" if the goal is simply to learn?
a house does not feel stuffy, nor does it have mold/mildew problems, if it has proper ventilation.
superinsulated houses from the seventies had those problems precisely because they did not understand the need for ventilation and did not ventilate properly.
With proper ventilation, the air is fresh and feels fresh.
Your thermal expansion/contraction arguement is interesting, but untrue if the sealing mechanism swells and expands at the same rate as the rest of the house members, or in the case of construction methods such as ICF or SIP homes, there is little to no bridging to cause infiltration in the first place.
Proper planning of available window area (that is, gasp, ARCHITECTURE actually trying to do something useful for once) allows for a "big window" feel with small window areas.
right now, you only have to buy off a portion of the few hundred people in congress.
with direct representation, you would potentially have to buy off thousands of representatives. and, if anyone thought their chosen elector was selling his/her votes, they could reallocate it, for the fastest response to corruption ever seen.
how is this more risky than it is now, with much larger amounts of power concentrated in fewer and easier to target hands. if I wanted to buy votes, now is close to a dream situation, direct representation would be much more of a nightmare.
my apologies; I piled misunderstanding on top of assumption in my prior response. your stance is very thoughtful and thorough, and thanks for posting it.
A cop telling you to shoot a 3 year old in the face is most assuredly not legal unless other factors would lead you to believe that it were necessary to protect yourself or others from the threat of the 3-year old. You don't get to say " a cop told me to do it" and walk.
THe law you reference seems to indicate that law enforcement can ask for wiretapping quickly in an emergency, but only if they provide justification for it within 48 hours of the tap. That is a far cry from "vacuum tapping" mass amounts of telecom customers, possibly with no justification ever given as far as we know now.
there is no reason why a congressional investigation should not proceed, and that requires no special favors done ahead of such an investigation.
Nice try though, apologist guy.
No one is plumbing potable systems in copper anymore except in Mass and a couple of other states that have been extremely slow to adopt it. The rest of us have had PEX in the codes for more than a decade.
The industry had a problem with PolyButylene years ago, and the problems were primarily related to the fittings, not the pipe itself. Polybutylene itself is still around.
Also, freeze protection is a reason to use pex. it expands, and reforms to its original shape when heated (assuming the use of PEX-A). making it 'freeze resistant'; no water damage unless it's a really severe freeze and bursts anyway. Copper doesn't expand too well and burst pipes are a major source of water problems. But the long and the short of it is, your pipes should NEVER be in an outside wall, EVER, that's just poor practice, and if you're building houses in which the pipes freeze, your plumbing is substandard.
Finally, PEX has been around for decades and in heating systems for more than 30 years here in the US now. We are pretty clear that it's here to last.
they WON overwhelmingly, in that election cycle. they did not win an overwhelming majority. That's two different things. Seats considered "safe" by republicans fell in droves in '06.
how about "race to the bottom", when we drill everything we've got to buy 15 more years of cheap gas with no exit strategy?
Why do you think it is like that?
Perhaps, because we had cheap energy to count on when we were building most of the houses and communities that currently exist.
if you live in a 200 year old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, well, they would go to town a few times a YEAR when they built the place. If you don't want to live like that, great! Live somewhere more populated.
If you BUILT a house in the middle of nowhere to "get away from it all", then don't get mad that "it's away".
In short, our population distribution would be a lot denser if we didn't assume gas would be $1 or $2/gallon forever when we built stuff. A lot more like.. oh I don't know, let's say Europe.
it does not suggest that you reason with people who attacked you. it suggests you reason with people who have NOT attacked you, and that you behave in ways that does not provoke people into attacking you without damn good reason.
it DOES SUGGEST that you do NOT then, after you've presumably gone after the people who attacked you, start attacking or threatening to attack anyone else you think might ever possible THINK about attacking you; that's clouded judgement at work. a backlash.
it's understandable too, but we elect leaders to be better than knee jerk responders; they are supposed to be LEADERS. Being knee jerk wuss bags is what makes our credibility worldwide disintegrate, which has ramifications if we are expecting people to side with us and not Russia or China in the coming years, and it has in large part left us weak, vulnerable, and horribly overspent.
it may be a great way to jump out from in front of a speeding bus, but it's a ridiculous way to run a country. But then, if you bothered to think for two seconds about the company you're quoting to support your view of intellectuals, you could probably have figured that out all by yourself. but your fight response must have been a little strong.
I was just out collecting signatures yesterday to fight RealID and the concessions we're making towards it in maine.
let me tell you; people in rural maine are still afraid of terrorists. I got my sigs because many rural mainers are also damn near libertarians and luckily this time around realID is an unfunded mandate and mainers hate taxes, but I lost plenty to people who want the government to be covering us all like some big, faceless security blanket.
Yeah, accountability is sooooo lame.
individual co-ops don't have to grow to international size to affect the world. a Union of a lot of them could achieve the same thing. I would argue that would probably be more effective to boot.
;)
I don't know much about financing though because I run a small, cash company that only needed $10k to start, so I can't comment there. I have no idea how financing beyond loans is handled.
you're right, there are tweaks needed I'm sure, but you could say that about anything; that's not unique to the co-op model. beyond your startup financing issue I don't see much in co-op modelling that would have to change, it just needs more people to be aware of the options. but, i do need to do more research into how the model works.
and, as a co-owner of a small company, it would require me to hand over the business my partner and i have largely built to the employees... which, right now, won't happen (we worked a hell of a lot harder than anyone to make this happen). so it's not like I'm some ideal activist here or anything, just so it's clear and I'm not misrepresenting myself. I don't think everything necessarily has to be a co-op, i just don't think the co-op has to be everything either
the smaller companies I just referred to which are basically pump and dump schemes with cash instead of stock (providing lots of income in a short period of time, rather than ongoing income which is HARD, which you would know if you owned a business). Rest assured the guys running them didn't give two shits for the employees (who were generally stiffed pay at the end) or their vendors (also stiffed) or their customers (sold junk at 300% markups). All totally legal. company went bankrupt, don't you know?
as for the evil being a function of size, it's because "evil" is not always some guy with machinations at heart (though sociopaths, real ones, do well in business it's true). It's often 100 middle managers, each with a tiny slice of the overall pie and no real connection to what's happening as a result of their actions, each making small, individually insignificant decisions that add up to Bad Stuff. Not my job syndrome. It's a form of apathy. and it's nearly unavoidable in a large company... at least, it certainly seems that way so far.
Large corps act to maximize profit. that's it. that's what they do. there is no morality and no ethics to it beyond legal regulation and the actions of some who actually care, which is nice, but not enough when you wield the power of a huge company. you can argue whether that is good or bad in the end, but a person that acts with NO regard for its fellow human beings and that is completely narcissistic is a sociopath, and if you're going to make a corporation a person (legally speaking, of course), that's the kind of person it is.
size is a big deal. size is a big part of what detaches personal responsibility from corporate action. I know the modern free marketeers bury their heads on this one, but as I just posted to another fellow, bigger is not necessarily better in all things. It may be more efficient in many ways, and efficiency certainly has a lot of benefit, but it's not the be all end all of existence a construct that pretends that it is, is dysfunctional for human beings to be associated with long term.
a co-op of co-ops would reap economies of scale just as well as anything monolithic.
;) (just needling in good fun there).
But beyond that, bigger is not always better. There is nothing at all wrong with successfully providing a good service to a chosen market for a fair price.
Furthermore, directly democratic methods work best in small groups, and as things get bigger, they get more abstract, and people who are interested in co-ops are by and large interested in the direct, human connections they are making at work.
that is, that work is about more than just the paycheck, and business doesn't have to be dedicated to absolute efficiency. Humanity has value as well. You can benefit society, for example, all you like, but if you do it at the price of people's ability to relate to each other, what have you won?
All that said.. if you see a working model there, you can work with them to replicate it, or you can use it yourself, but don't whine that you bring up an option and they don't choose to fund you with their money
well, more to the point if I don't do it, you're right, I can be sued into oblivion, AND as I noted in my other post I am operating in a society where that is the norm, because everyone expects that I will have this sort of protection AND insurance. Therefor if you slip on my stoop and sue me, you aren't suing ME.
cue the unnecessary lawsuits. because the person aims to plunder an insurance company, not me.
so i don't think it's right, but it would be suicide for me to drop my protections alone in this environment, so I have to do it. But someday, if I wanted to be a jerk, I could make some changes to the way things are done in the company, siphon out all the cash, and let people attempt to the sue the husk for whatever I leave in there. That's not right either... and I know people who have done exactly that, repeatedly. Those infomercials for products that don't work? Yeah, that's what they are really doing.
the idea that a corporate person should shield me from my actions ALLOWS for the rise of megacorps that act like sociopaths. Luckily I am a six person company and someday I might be as big as twenty, but my company will never be hundred or thousands of people large, my niche market just isn't big enough. so my risk of becoming that "fascist" corp is pretty low. but it is only my conscience and sincere desire to do good work that keeps my company flying straight... the constructs that it exists in insulate me should I ever decide otherwise. and that, as I say, isn't "right".
well, beyond that, we are in a society that has been formed partially by the existance of these structures.
If that were not true, I would be less worried about being sued because someone stubbed their toe on my threshold. but everyone is so used to these monolithic entities and insurance companies that they can do things they would never do to another person directly.
so I can't shed my protection alone, it needs to be part of a bigger movement, IMHO.
You mean kind of like we did with Cuba (minus the EMP bit)? I mean, that works really well, right? Or Iraq? Embargo the heck out of them, and sooner or later those pissed off commoners will throw off their shackels!!
right?
So, how do you seriously get to the point where a couple of blackouts and some economic competition justifies bombing around 1 billion people because you're paying too much for gas? Do you kick puppies for training, or are you just born that much of an asshole naturally?
So do most people who work at corporations, though the majority never reach those dreams.
Doesn't this say that the corporation is not an effective route to the goals you were espousing?
I own an S-corp LLC as well, that doesn't mean I think it's *right*. but you play by the rules of the game you're playing.
corporation personhood is an abomination. I'd be happy to see it go. having a taxable entity is great, but having a nearly impervious shield to liability most assuredly is NOT.
wow. well hey, good for you. no one in the regular world though gets a month of vacation a year, especially not entry level. Average in america is 13 days per year. with a bachelor's degree, you still don't have to look hard to see two weeks plus holidays portrayed as 'generous' for entry level.
beyond discretionary leave, any teacher gets more vacation time DURING THE SCHOOL YEAR, even after you account for time taken out of that for "home work", then most comparable jobs give all year. And they still get sick time, which you conveniently ignore, on top of that, plus summer. Sure, vacations may not be "discretionary", but then, it isn't for anyone who has kids in school either. big whup. especially when you get multiple weeks throughout the school year, plus a 2 to 3 month chunk in the summer, if you can't hit one of those times for your trip, well, what I am supposed to do, cry for you?
and do you think teachers only take sick days when they are sick?
really?
I'm not paying $15 to read the article, got another source? Because all I can find are several working examples in other countries that have caused NONE of the doom and gloom scenarios to happen, and the edmonton model which seems to be pretty universally respected except.. and I might be wrong, but this is all I'm seeing out there.. by people who think that bad schools closing is a bad thing. Personally, I think it's a great thing when good schools thrive and bad ones close.
I agree with your statement about the unions in principle. But if you've ever worked with union people, you might admit that the statement is a tad idealistic. I don't think we should break unions or anything, but I'm thinking we have advocates for government and advocates for teachers built into this system... perhaps we need an advocate for CHILDREN in the mix as well. A representative children's union, if you will.
that's a half baked idea, btw, and I welcome critique or further commentary on it.
I thought athens' voting citizens were only land owning men?
that's not exactly pure democracy.
generally speaking the less informed self select by not bothering to vote.
I think you can achieve pure democracy in a representative structure. You just have to allow people to change their personal representative, or override him/her, at any time. That does require fast communication though, you're right. but not everyone has to vote on everything personally to avoid "elitist" or anti-democratic structures.