The fact is that our education system in the US is outdated and terrible (as Sir Ken Robinson has brilliantly and repeatedly explained - example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U). It needs improvement in many, many ways.
HOWEVER, just throwing more, and more, and even more money at the system (as endorsed by teachers' unions and government bureaucrats everywhere) hasn't solved anything. The city of Minneapolis spends nearly $21,000 per student per year (http://www.better-ed.org/20911-minneapolis-public-schools-avg-spending-student). With an average class size of 26 (actually pretty good), that's $546,000/year/classroom*....which is rather obscene, particularly when you consider their abysmal graduation rates.
So yes, I might agree that charter schools are not individually the solution, but we have to try SOMETHING different, and accomplishing change in small charter school 'hothouses' (where the parents are essentially volunteering their kids for an experience that is HOPEFULLY better than the norm) is far more possible than in the shitty public school system that is overwhelmed and ossified with bureaucracy, teachers' unions, and a cultural aversion to substantive change. The hope is that these changes, if they're successful, might actually percolate back into the stultified public schools.
And no, I don't think schools should be held to the same standards as a commercial business - they are intrinsically and substantively different. But there is an analogy to a refining company: schools are processing raw materials (our children) in an effort to make them finished products (fundamentally-educated adults). The difference is that schools can't simply throw out the dross, but are compelled to reprocess and reprocess until there's something useful there, fighting the 80/20 rule all the way to the bottom of Zeno's dichotomy paradox.
*let's dissect that, shall we? Let's pay the teacher ~$120,000 year - so their total cost is ~$146,000/year - that rounds out our numbers, and I don't think any teacher would argue with that salary. So $400k/year left. Lease rates for commercial, furnished offices in Minneapolis: let's use high-end, as we want our schools to be nicer than most office places: $304/psqft/year. We'll use a generous 40x40 room for the 'classroom' to account for other, shared spaces like gymnasium, cafeteria, etc., and ignore that - as the building builders and owners, the actual triple-net cost should be far less than half that (note, they don't pay property taxes, either...) - $50,000/year; $350k per year left. Let's spend $100k PER YEAR PER CLASSROOM on 'stuff' - materials, dvd rentals, books, shared costs of projectors, smartboards. $250k per year left. So in waste/bureaucracy, you could hand each student nearly $10,000 PER YEAR.
Not to mention, of course, the most implausible tissue of rationales for it to appear HERE on a tech-news site.
"Let's see, we can cover it because we could suppose that the governor, if he actually had anything to do with it, could use the same tactics to defend himself that the NSA is using to defend themselves for doing the things the president ordered them to do!"
It's like supposing the motivations of a strawman of a strawman of a strawman who happens to use computers. Sheesh.
This story has led the news in national TV, radio, and newspapers, as well as most major-market regional/local papers.
Really?
A traffic jam?
Let's compare how much media time this gets, compared American state dept official being left out to be lynched by a planned assault on our consulate when help was available? Does it really matter if it was planned or spontaneous?
STFU or you're giving the manufacturers a "legitimate" reason to become involved in resale transactions, since (according to the MPAA/RIAA logic) every resale means they've lost revenue.
Remember, there's a HUGE difference between successful and "good".
"Successful" means appealing to the dozen or so big publishers' editors, such that they are willing to pimp your book and market it. They can - and have, obviously - taken utter crapola to the top of the "bestseller" lists.
I entirely understand that the algorithm favors deep internal monologues, because those editors clearly love them.
I don't know about you, but for me this is absolutely thrilling. We're no longer inferring the existence of other planets, we're actually LOOKING at them.
The word "breathtaking" doesn't cover it.
And from a ground-based camera...I knew imaging tech is leaping ahead, but this makes me absolutely excited to see what the GPI (and eventually, hopefully, the JWST) will see over the next years.
Damn Slashdot and their uneditable posts. The Wiki entry is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty but obviously I decided to use the earliest version of the quote, which was THREE boxes of liberty. (More modern vernacular adds "soap-box" to the front of the list.)
"There are three and only three ways to reform our Congressional legislation, familiarly called, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box". -Stephen Decatur Miller, 1830
As much as it might make government officials uncomfortable, that last one is non-negotiable.
"...That is why you are seeing people with college degrees working at McDonalds..." Bullshit.
In 1980, barely 50% of high school graduates went to college. Now it's around 70%.
There is no reason that nearly 50% more of our population NEED a college degree, aside from (depending on who you blame) an elitist focus on intellectualism uber alles OR a giant subsidy to the most reliably left-voting demographic (teachers) camouflaged as 'increased government assistance to help kids go to college'.
Further, the reason the non-collegiate kids have shit jobs is because of the loss of industrial jobs - most of those people would have gone to work in factories that are now in China or Mexico. Again, depending on where you sit you can blame the limitless greed of corporations seeking lower-cost labor regardless of the impact to their own community, OR unions that made factory-line labor here prohibitively expensive.
In neither case did the internet have anything to do with it.
This smells distinctly like someone had an idea ("The internet is destroying the middle class!") and then busily started beavering away trying to jam every square peg into that round-hole of conclusion.
Kodak was absolutely NOT destroyed by the internet, not by any way. It was annihilated by digital CAMERAS. It's only with a staggering misunderstanding of recent history and a stunning lack of historical memory that someone could assert that something released in 2010 destroyed a company that was shedding jobs a half-decade before. (15000 jobs cut in 2004 alone).
To suggest that "the internet" led to the financial crisis is simply ignorant; the (most recent) financial crisis had its roots in the subprime-mortgage industry, which (depending on whom you believe, and probably your politics) was a failure of collusive non-regulation, unbridled mercenary greed, the Democrats, the Republicans, or the Illuminati. Only by a complete misunderstanding of the circumstances could one believe that electronic trading (I guess?) might have had something to do with it, but EVEN THEN fund traders don't use the interwebs, they have dedicated lines because even a 0.5 second delay would mean a massive competitive disadvantage.
NETWORKS are allowing companies of any size to compete successfully around firms like Wal-Mart and Target (who themselves destroyed small-town businesses). Networks mean everyone's competing in a flatter environment, informationally - that's a good thing, pretty much per economics 101. (Well, it's not good for the non-competitive; are they a 'protected class' now?)
Joe Nocera, by the way, is a "business" columnist/commentator who has a penchant for taking a reasonable position to silly extremes, so I guess this isn't such a surprise.
Guy with NO EXPERIENCE in a field decides to run a company in that field.
Said field has been on the commercial denouement (at the very least) for 20+ years, with only a slight bump in the otherwise-downward curve for the last few years as small publishers are able to get into the market (I'm looking at Paizo, fr'instance).
I can see this ending in nothing but tears.
Why didn't he just start up a buggy whip company while he's at it?
Except: 1) you apparently entirely missed my point about subsidies to industries and banks, no? Or were you just too busy getting all offended? 2) I've seen your "Red states are the biggest recipients of government largesse"... a) it's only true if you're talking about FEDERAL funding (most social funding is funneled through the states) b) it's not anywhere near true on an INDIVIDUAL level; last time I checked, states didn't vote for candidates, individuals do. So the fact that Wyoming gets a buttload of federal money for Yellowstone doesn't mean Yellowstone is getting to vote.
When you look at the statistics carefully, and look at where actual, individual subsidies and assistance programs are going, it then is the non-surprising poor underclass that largely vote Democrat.
Until the endpoint service drones start demanding absurd wages like $15/hour and benefits for skill-less menial jobs...in which case I suspect the value proposition for the capital investment of machines at the point of sale becomes much more attractive. I suspect we will see such machines in widespread use in flagship chains within 10 years.
"...to spend more money than you should..." This is a convenient way to rationalize poor choices, that's all.
How much "should" I be spending on anything?
If I buy something for $5 and am happy with it, but could have gotten it for $4, am I cheated somehow? To suggest so denies the context that until very recently, my only way to find out competitive prices was to physically go to the store and look. Merchants could be as daring as they wanted to be to charge as much as they could get away with...THAT'S THEIR BUSINESS.
Ultimately, I've never been compelled to spend a single dollar by a merchant...the only one that compels me to spend my money is the government.
I believe the phrase 'caveat emptor' is at least 2000 years old.
TFA says it perfectly: "...Johnson-Freese put it more bluntly: âoeIn terms of technology, are the Chinese at a peer level or more advanced than us? No, absolutely not. What they have that we donâ(TM)t is political will.â"
Simply, Western governments have decided that space is no longer important. Certainly, not more important than handing out subsidies to industries, banks, and the underclass of easily-bought voters.
I mean, not that China's all capitalist or anything, but they should have their costs covered by someone responsible for this pack of morons.
(I'm one of those crazy people that believe that people who put themselves into extreme situations like mountain climbers (or their inheritors), etc should indeed pay for the extraordinary costs of their rescues or rescue-attempts.)
I guess I can breathe now? It was really hard to find: practically HIDDEN in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito "Alito's majority opinion in the 2008 worker protection case Gomez-Perez v. Potter cleared the way for federal workers who experience retaliation after filing age discrimination complaints to sue for damages. He sided with the liberal bloc of the court, inferring protection against retaliation in the federal-sector provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act despite the lack of an explicit provision concerning retaliation."
I'm delighted Sotomayor ruled this way, and hope fervently that every justice - conservative or liberal - makes rulings on such bases. I expect that they do, actually, no matter what side of the political fence they're on. There is PLENTY of room in our Constitution for interpretive difference, based on personal ideology, but there are some cases where ideology should be nearly irrelevant.
Next time you make such a blanket statement however, you might want to do some research - and while you're at it, look up the meaning of "tendentious internet wanker".
When someone asks me to take a survey, I generally say no...usually I have more important things to do with my time than that (like, well, pretty much anything).
So the people who are agreeing to be surveyed are already a self selected group of either a) people who have nothing better to do, and b) people who desperately want someone else to know their feelings on a subject.
I'd argue strongly that amongst the right, evangelicals are FAR more likely to be in group b. (And according to the parties I go to, leftists are almost always more likely to want to advertise their politics generally anyway.)
So unless a survey includes clear data on how many people refused to be surveyed or gave no answer (who are likely disproportionately republicans), I tend to ignore its conclusions, or shift them at least 10 to 15 points to interpret them at all.
Do you really need me to list the 50+ games that SUCKED for each gem you've listed (and I'd agree with your list, except you missed System Shock)?
What the OP is really on about is the fact that we're swimming in games today and most of them suck....exactly like yesteryear. Now he has the advantage of hindsight to say "oh, that one was really a classic".
Slashdot Mirror
Stupid uneditable Slashdot - property rate isn't $304/sqft, it's $30.
The fact is that our education system in the US is outdated and terrible (as Sir Ken Robinson has brilliantly and repeatedly explained - example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U). It needs improvement in many, many ways.
HOWEVER, just throwing more, and more, and even more money at the system (as endorsed by teachers' unions and government bureaucrats everywhere) hasn't solved anything. The city of Minneapolis spends nearly $21,000 per student per year (http://www.better-ed.org/20911-minneapolis-public-schools-avg-spending-student). With an average class size of 26 (actually pretty good), that's $546,000/year/classroom*....which is rather obscene, particularly when you consider their abysmal graduation rates.
So yes, I might agree that charter schools are not individually the solution, but we have to try SOMETHING different, and accomplishing change in small charter school 'hothouses' (where the parents are essentially volunteering their kids for an experience that is HOPEFULLY better than the norm) is far more possible than in the shitty public school system that is overwhelmed and ossified with bureaucracy, teachers' unions, and a cultural aversion to substantive change. The hope is that these changes, if they're successful, might actually percolate back into the stultified public schools.
And no, I don't think schools should be held to the same standards as a commercial business - they are intrinsically and substantively different. But there is an analogy to a refining company: schools are processing raw materials (our children) in an effort to make them finished products (fundamentally-educated adults). The difference is that schools can't simply throw out the dross, but are compelled to reprocess and reprocess until there's something useful there, fighting the 80/20 rule all the way to the bottom of Zeno's dichotomy paradox.
*let's dissect that, shall we?
Let's pay the teacher ~$120,000 year - so their total cost is ~$146,000/year - that rounds out our numbers, and I don't think any teacher would argue with that salary. So $400k/year left.
Lease rates for commercial, furnished offices in Minneapolis: let's use high-end, as we want our schools to be nicer than most office places: $304/psqft/year. We'll use a generous 40x40 room for the 'classroom' to account for other, shared spaces like gymnasium, cafeteria, etc., and ignore that - as the building builders and owners, the actual triple-net cost should be far less than half that (note, they don't pay property taxes, either...) - $50,000/year; $350k per year left.
Let's spend $100k PER YEAR PER CLASSROOM on 'stuff' - materials, dvd rentals, books, shared costs of projectors, smartboards. $250k per year left.
So in waste/bureaucracy, you could hand each student nearly $10,000 PER YEAR.
Just a reminder: society != government.
" If you look worldwide, the gender balance (to pick the one imbalance your post mentions) is a lot closer to 50:50 in some countries"
Really? I'd genuinely like to see a link that supports that statement in tech fields or even in the sciences.
So it's fair to analyze someone by looking at their friends?
Frank Davis
Bill Ayers
Tony Rezko
Ring any bells?
Not to mention, of course, the most implausible tissue of rationales for it to appear HERE on a tech-news site.
"Let's see, we can cover it because we could suppose that the governor, if he actually had anything to do with it, could use the same tactics to defend himself that the NSA is using to defend themselves for doing the things the president ordered them to do!"
It's like supposing the motivations of a strawman of a strawman of a strawman who happens to use computers. Sheesh.
This story has led the news in national TV, radio, and newspapers, as well as most major-market regional/local papers.
Really?
A traffic jam?
Let's compare how much media time this gets, compared American state dept official being left out to be lynched by a planned assault on our consulate when help was available? Does it really matter if it was planned or spontaneous?
STFU or you're giving the manufacturers a "legitimate" reason to become involved in resale transactions, since (according to the MPAA/RIAA logic) every resale means they've lost revenue.
Remember, there's a HUGE difference between successful and "good".
"Successful" means appealing to the dozen or so big publishers' editors, such that they are willing to pimp your book and market it. They can - and have, obviously - taken utter crapola to the top of the "bestseller" lists.
I entirely understand that the algorithm favors deep internal monologues, because those editors clearly love them.
Well done, GPI team.
I don't know about you, but for me this is absolutely thrilling. We're no longer inferring the existence of other planets, we're actually LOOKING at them.
The word "breathtaking" doesn't cover it.
And from a ground-based camera...I knew imaging tech is leaping ahead, but this makes me absolutely excited to see what the GPI (and eventually, hopefully, the JWST) will see over the next years.
Damn Slashdot and their uneditable posts.
The Wiki entry is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
but obviously I decided to use the earliest version of the quote, which was THREE boxes of liberty. (More modern vernacular adds "soap-box" to the front of the list.)
"There are three and only three ways to reform our Congressional legislation, familiarly called, the ballot box, the jury box and the cartridge box".
-Stephen Decatur Miller, 1830
As much as it might make government officials uncomfortable, that last one is non-negotiable.
"...That is why you are seeing people with college degrees working at McDonalds..."
Bullshit.
In 1980, barely 50% of high school graduates went to college.
Now it's around 70%.
There is no reason that nearly 50% more of our population NEED a college degree, aside from (depending on who you blame) an elitist focus on intellectualism uber alles OR a giant subsidy to the most reliably left-voting demographic (teachers) camouflaged as 'increased government assistance to help kids go to college'.
Further, the reason the non-collegiate kids have shit jobs is because of the loss of industrial jobs - most of those people would have gone to work in factories that are now in China or Mexico. Again, depending on where you sit you can blame the limitless greed of corporations seeking lower-cost labor regardless of the impact to their own community, OR unions that made factory-line labor here prohibitively expensive.
In neither case did the internet have anything to do with it.
This smells distinctly like someone had an idea ("The internet is destroying the middle class!") and then busily started beavering away trying to jam every square peg into that round-hole of conclusion.
Kodak was absolutely NOT destroyed by the internet, not by any way. It was annihilated by digital CAMERAS. It's only with a staggering misunderstanding of recent history and a stunning lack of historical memory that someone could assert that something released in 2010 destroyed a company that was shedding jobs a half-decade before. (15000 jobs cut in 2004 alone).
To suggest that "the internet" led to the financial crisis is simply ignorant; the (most recent) financial crisis had its roots in the subprime-mortgage industry, which (depending on whom you believe, and probably your politics) was a failure of collusive non-regulation, unbridled mercenary greed, the Democrats, the Republicans, or the Illuminati. Only by a complete misunderstanding of the circumstances could one believe that electronic trading (I guess?) might have had something to do with it, but EVEN THEN fund traders don't use the interwebs, they have dedicated lines because even a 0.5 second delay would mean a massive competitive disadvantage.
NETWORKS are allowing companies of any size to compete successfully around firms like Wal-Mart and Target (who themselves destroyed small-town businesses). Networks mean everyone's competing in a flatter environment, informationally - that's a good thing, pretty much per economics 101. (Well, it's not good for the non-competitive; are they a 'protected class' now?)
Joe Nocera, by the way, is a "business" columnist/commentator who has a penchant for taking a reasonable position to silly extremes, so I guess this isn't such a surprise.
Guy with NO EXPERIENCE in a field decides to run a company in that field.
Said field has been on the commercial denouement (at the very least) for 20+ years, with only a slight bump in the otherwise-downward curve for the last few years as small publishers are able to get into the market (I'm looking at Paizo, fr'instance).
I can see this ending in nothing but tears.
Why didn't he just start up a buggy whip company while he's at it?
Except:
1) you apparently entirely missed my point about subsidies to industries and banks, no? Or were you just too busy getting all offended?
2) I've seen your "Red states are the biggest recipients of government largesse"...
a) it's only true if you're talking about FEDERAL funding (most social funding is funneled through the states)
b) it's not anywhere near true on an INDIVIDUAL level; last time I checked, states didn't vote for candidates, individuals do. So the fact that Wyoming gets a buttload of federal money for Yellowstone doesn't mean Yellowstone is getting to vote.
When you look at the statistics carefully, and look at where actual, individual subsidies and assistance programs are going, it then is the non-surprising poor underclass that largely vote Democrat.
Until the endpoint service drones start demanding absurd wages like $15/hour and benefits for skill-less menial jobs...in which case I suspect the value proposition for the capital investment of machines at the point of sale becomes much more attractive. I suspect we will see such machines in widespread use in flagship chains within 10 years.
I thought the ultimate sign of affluence was that the primary medical concern if your poor is obesity and obesity-related conditions?
(Ok yes I meant this as amusing, but I actually agree with your cogent comment.)
Then you don't really understand the process of ratification necessary for the US to become party to a treaty.
A treaty cannot supercede national laws, no matter how many chicken littles scream that it will. Not in the US at least.
"...to spend more money than you should..."
This is a convenient way to rationalize poor choices, that's all.
How much "should" I be spending on anything?
If I buy something for $5 and am happy with it, but could have gotten it for $4, am I cheated somehow? To suggest so denies the context that until very recently, my only way to find out competitive prices was to physically go to the store and look. Merchants could be as daring as they wanted to be to charge as much as they could get away with...THAT'S THEIR BUSINESS.
Ultimately, I've never been compelled to spend a single dollar by a merchant...the only one that compels me to spend my money is the government.
I believe the phrase 'caveat emptor' is at least 2000 years old.
TFA says it perfectly: "...Johnson-Freese put it more bluntly: âoeIn terms of technology, are the Chinese at a peer level or more advanced than us? No, absolutely not. What they have that we donâ(TM)t is political will.â"
Simply, Western governments have decided that space is no longer important. Certainly, not more important than handing out subsidies to industries, banks, and the underclass of easily-bought voters.
Who's paying for the rescue?
I mean, not that China's all capitalist or anything, but they should have their costs covered by someone responsible for this pack of morons.
(I'm one of those crazy people that believe that people who put themselves into extreme situations like mountain climbers (or their inheritors), etc should indeed pay for the extraordinary costs of their rescues or rescue-attempts.)
I guess I can breathe now?
It was really hard to find: practically HIDDEN in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito
"Alito's majority opinion in the 2008 worker protection case Gomez-Perez v. Potter cleared the way for federal workers who experience retaliation after filing age discrimination complaints to sue for damages. He sided with the liberal bloc of the court, inferring protection against retaliation in the federal-sector provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act despite the lack of an explicit provision concerning retaliation."
I'm delighted Sotomayor ruled this way, and hope fervently that every justice - conservative or liberal - makes rulings on such bases. I expect that they do, actually, no matter what side of the political fence they're on. There is PLENTY of room in our Constitution for interpretive difference, based on personal ideology, but there are some cases where ideology should be nearly irrelevant.
Next time you make such a blanket statement however, you might want to do some research - and while you're at it, look up the meaning of "tendentious internet wanker".
I think it's simpler than that: survey bias.
When someone asks me to take a survey, I generally say no...usually I have more important things to do with my time than that (like, well, pretty much anything).
So the people who are agreeing to be surveyed are already a self selected group of either a) people who have nothing better to do, and b) people who desperately want someone else to know their feelings on a subject.
I'd argue strongly that amongst the right, evangelicals are FAR more likely to be in group b. (And according to the parties I go to, leftists are almost always more likely to want to advertise their politics generally anyway.)
So unless a survey includes clear data on how many people refused to be surveyed or gave no answer (who are likely disproportionately republicans), I tend to ignore its conclusions, or shift them at least 10 to 15 points to interpret them at all.
Do you really need me to list the 50+ games that SUCKED for each gem you've listed (and I'd agree with your list, except you missed System Shock)?
What the OP is really on about is the fact that we're swimming in games today and most of them suck....exactly like yesteryear. Now he has the advantage of hindsight to say "oh, that one was really a classic".
Oh and re BG you might want to check: http://www.baldursgate.com/
or http://www.baldursgateii.com/