Economics is about the application of LIMITED resources most effectively.
For example, if someone hypothesized that the globe's temperatures *might* (they're pretty sure) go up a half a degree over the next century, and that we *might* (they're pretty sure) be able to mitigate some portion of this possible increase if we would only commit vast $trillions$ of wealth, this would have to be weighed against the actual, measurable good that wealth might otherwise provide.
One of the most basic problems facing modern medicine is economic, in a similar way: just because we CAN prolong someone's life, should we? If we can spend $10,000,000 to help that 88 year old man live another 6 months, is that better than spending that money in orphanages where $100 will provide basic preventative care for 120 kids for a year?
Most decisions come down to economics, because resources are finite, and need is infinite.
From my point of view, it's what's so damnably frustrating about the left; they love to paint anyone who disagrees with them as some sort of heartless ogre, while they get to skip around talking about bunnies and rainbows. The fact is, I'd LOVE to have everyone have medical care, I'd love to have everyone have a nice clean environment, I'd love to have everyone have food, shelter, a job, hell, even a beach house. But the fact is that we simply cannot afford all the things we want. And while there are plenty of things wrong with capitalism as a system, at least in this system I have some ability to control what happens to me and my family. I don't accept that what my children get should be decided by a faceless bureaucrat who thinks she knows best what everyone else should have.
As a Republican, I think Obama's been a terrific president.
- Kept Guantanamo open, with no sign it's closing. - Has made nice noises about getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we're really not completely leaving any time soon. - Has set the stage nicely for war with Iran if we want it. - Has bailed out banks and big businesses, saving them from insolvency and the consequences of their own bad decisions and cheerfully used TAXPAYER dollars to do it. - Has pretty much laid the legal basis for the detention of any US citizen without warrant, trial, or lawyer. - Far from being transparent, he's conducted repeated secret strategy meetings and closed off giant chunks of the government to public scrutiny - He's packed Washington with more lobbyists than ever, and in fact I believe he actually might have a representative from Goldman Sachs actually sleeping in bed with him and Michelle. - He's made all sorts of platitudes toward the eco-nuts, but has prevented anything actually happening in terms of Green policies, including failing to hold anyone responsible for the massive BP disaster.
That's pretty much all the important stuff for us Republicans. I'm not sure why you Democrats think he's working for you, hell, he's great for us.
The article title is "alternatives are worth trying" and in fact the article summary is that whatever niche thing the alternatives do is usually easily do-able with the basic chromium and some addons. So really the author is saying they AREN'T worth the effort unless you have an obsessive need to address some trivial issue and downloading a whole new browser is easier for you than to modify the defaults yourself. (shrug)
" Is it better to let the market destroy those people not smart enough to see the price spikes coming or is it better to cushion that blow and encourage the development of alternate systems to reduce the life changing impacts of those changes?"
I'd argue that when the 'cushioning' costs resources, and relies on essentially wagering by the government about which industries to non-competitively subsidize - then no, the cushion is not worth the cost in terms of what it does to the economy.
We survived the transition to electricity, we survived the transition from horse to cars, and we've survived other greatly dislocating transitions; human economies are extraordinarily resilient and successful when they are LEFT ALONE. Yes, it can be savage to individuals, but the overall best-result-greatest-number is generally to leave the market alone (not that our politicians can or have done so in the last 40 years, so I admit my point is so nearly utopian as to be valueless).
Let me state it plainly: there is and will be no such thing as "running out of oil".
It will not happen. I'm dead serious. We will NEVER in human history run OUT of oil.
As oil grows more scarce, and the price per bbl rises, more and more fossil fuel reserves will become accessible because it will then be profitable to retrieve them. There are ample reserves at $100/bbl, and when those tap out, there will be more available at $200/bbl. Oil will never run out, it will just become prohibitively expensive.
Just so we're clear what we're talking about.
What will happen as fossil fuels rise in prices? We will be forced to develop more and more efficient technologies, and ultimately it will become more economical to drive electric cars, or not drive at all. But the fact is a bunch of do-gooders shaking their fingers at everyone else will simply as a practical, human matter, never change anyone's behavior.
Economics will force the change in peoples' conduct when the economics do so. But it's absurd to claim we're running out of fossil fuels when the same raw material (basically) is used to make the plastic bags we bring our groceries home in. If it's THAT cheap - it's not running out*.
*and yes, the oil companies get huge subsidies. Not sure why anymore. Sure, at one point it was necessary as a strategic factor for a state. But I daresay that we'd be far better off letting these firms carry their ACTUAL costs, and sell gas for the real cost of production/distribution.
You're unfairly broadening the argument to say that anyone who believes anthropogenic global warming is balderdash is somehow ipso facto anti-environment. That's patently not true, although it is a useful bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand for the AGW true believers to lump all deniers as such.
I believe it's stupid to shit where you sleep. However, I don't necessarily subscribe to Al Gore's religion of doom, nor (in particular) to the modern version of indulgences his Carbon Trading company offers. I believe climate is cyclical, and that while humans perhaps impact it, our impact is trivial, somewhere below the level of noise in the system. I believe certainly that over the last 750,000 years, we've had several cycles of warming and cooling, including radical CO2 spikes, which the earth has coped with. There is nothing to suggest persuasively to me that our situation is anywhere outside the norm.
Therefore spending resources toward warming mitigation are resources WASTED that could be better spent to do actual, known-good environmental things like give 3rd world women educations and birth control, build nuclear plants, and remove/mitigate ACTUAL pollution. For the government to spend its time on global warming is a MASSIVE waste of time and resources. For example, claiming CO2 is a pollutant and should be regulated as such - even the EPA has said itself in court filings that regulation and enforcement is "absurd and likely impossible", requiring $21 billion PER YEAR and 230,000 more employees by 2016 when these requirements go into effect. That's simply stupid, and it's a knee jerk reaction to the greatest secular religion ever invented.
The only thing really new is the expectation that our soldiers are something other than human. Something, I guess, angelic.
I don't believe anyone who understands the military or has ever been a soldier would seriously such beliefs, it's only the most naive of civilians (who seem often to be journalists and politicians) that would make such assertions.
Let's remember that the enemy they're fighting is deliberately (due to the asymmetry of power involved) NOT fighting a 'stand up' fight. They are using weapons of random terror, intimidation, and brutality. The intent is to sow fear, insecurity, and doubt. We've chosen not to ignore them, so what's left to our soldiers? Expressing their very human rage and fear in ways that taunt the enemy, show them that 'it's not working'.
Of course these soldiers should be punished. We need to always strive to maintain order, even when we can understand why they did what they did. But there are several acts of assholery involved in this: - the soldiers committing the act - the idiot that took a picture - the idiot (could be the photographer) that shared it, knowing exactly what the result would be.
"920 PRINT "IT'S YOUR MOVE: "; 930 INPUT P,Q,R 940 IF P>W+1 THEN 1030 950 IF P=W+1 THEN 1000 960 IF Q>X+1 THEN 1030 970 IF Q=(X+1) THEN 1010 980 IF R >(Y+1) THEN 1030 990 GOTO 1050"
"You don't worry about how many bowls of cereal you can get out of a carton of milk, or how many sandwiches you can make from a jar of marmalade, or how many sheets of paper you can print with a toner cartridge"
Well, actually, you DO. That's EXACTLY what you do calculate to determine 'value', it's just that the average consumer knows roughly what those values are intutively, or guesses so from the packaging and experience. For printer cartridges, "pages printed" is actually in fact the primary metric of value.
If suddenly someone said that they wanted to charge the same price for a 'carton' of milk, but the carton was 1c / 200ml, you'd say that's bullshit because you know how big a 'carton' is in your local commercial context.
The point is that so far in the discussion, the quantity of stock in the cartridge (until your post) wasn't mentioned, still leaving people up in the air estimating something for which they had no common reference. The website's down, and I'm still not clear from your post if you're really stating that their feedstock cartridge is $40 and 1kg, or just that 'abs filament' is $40/kg....because clearly if they're printing color, their 'cartridges' are going to have to include more than just raw plastic.
As logical as mining is, there are essentially two ways to do it.
1) dig. Digging is problematic because digging requires extraordinarily tough and durable tools. Usually this means unbelievably heavy. In a lower-gravity environment, they might even have to be heavier (I am not a planetary scientist, I don't know if Mars' gravity being only 38% earth's would mean it's proportionally easier to dig into). Weight is the primary barrier to anything going into space, at least until we have orbital factories fed asteroids for raw materials. Look at all the designs for spacecraft and structures - their characteristic is that they're intrinsically fragile, mainly because they are so lightweight. (And FWIW, mining without machinery - in case anyone even considered that - is laughably, crazy-hard work. Like, back-breaking hard.)
2) boom The other way to dig is to drop something from really high and/or let it explode. You end up with a nice crater (hole) and a lot of nicely loosened soil, so building a habitation semi-below-ground is easier, and then roofing it over with the debris is easier too. Yet I don't believe we're desperate enough yet to start bombing Mars (although I'd certainly consider it a reasonable alternative for the Moon, particularly with the damn spider rocks).
3) the unknown The problem with digging in, for both #1 and #2 above, is that we know almost NOTHING about the geology beneath say, the top couple of inches of a teensy bit of Martian terrain. Take a random square kilometer of land area on Earth....what are the odds that you could a) successfully dig more than 3m vertically AND 2) end up with a supportable space underground that wouldn't collapse? I'd guess it's something below 1/10. And this is for ground that we know several orders of magnitude better than the Martian soil. It's too much of a crapshoot, because if you drop a 'Mars base builder kit' and your ground sucks, well, you're done, you lose. (Certainly it would be a much higher proportion of terrain you COULD dig into and with the right structuring you could create a habitation even under loose sand - but now you run into the weight question again, because now your base parts aren't just strong enough to support themselves and repel hazards, they also have to carry several TONS of dirt all the time.)
You don't think that perhaps the 'land 5 rocketloads of bulk supplies' mightn't provide a wonderful testbed for this?
Granted, this IS rocket science, and it's really really hard. But considering the failure-tolerance for the habitation part, compared to the failure tolerances for the bulk-shipping piece, I'm unsurprised that they start with the hardest part.
You DO understand, of course, that is pretty much how the New World was found and developed, right?
Certainly, they were governments backing many (but not all of) these explorers, but by and large their motives were entirely commercial.
Now, governments pretty much just impede whatever progress they can when they're not too preoccupied providing bread and circuses for the ignorant masses.
Agreed, but the point is HOW you raise gas prices - do you simply tack another tax on the top of the current pricing, or do you remove the host of price supports subsidizing the oil companies, so they are forced to charge a price per gallon that actually represents their real costs?
In both cases, the price to the consumer goes up. The alternative proposed by the OP means that taxes are taken from the public to lower prices (by paying subsidies to the oil companies) and AGAIN taken from the public to then force prices higher. That's just silly (unless you run an oil company).
Gas prices are too low...so let's raise taxes? That's our knee-jerk response?
How about instead of raising taxes which will fall disproportionately on the middle class (the lower classes tend to use public transit), instead let's STOP subsidizing gas and oil exploration, remove massive subsidies, rebates, and all the frosting for our oil-lobby friends?
Raising taxes on the masses while simultaneously handing $billion$ to oil means that the primary beneficiaries are the oil companies, nobody else.
Absolutely - I'm perfectly fine with finding alternatives because the current system doesn't seem to recognize the variability teachers are faced with.
However, the Teachers' Unions' responses tend to be "it's way too complicated to evaluate teachers fairly! So let's just give up and hand them tenure!" - which everyone knows is simply self-interested bullshit that's unrealistic.
One might even say that the shitty benchmarking systems teachers are faced with now ARE THE DIRECT RESULT of Unions' intransigence and unwillingness to come up with credible, reasonably objective metrics themselves.
THAT'S THE POINT OF THE INTERNET - COST OF ENTRY IS NEARLY ZERO.
You can argue all day that the 'middlemen' provide a service, winnowing the 99.9% crap artists so the rest of us don't have to. To some degree you'd be right, but then again these middlemen brought us Dane Cook (not funny), Creed (not talented), and Roseanne Barr (neither funny nor talented) - so what 'service' are they providing again to justify their MASSIVE financial parasitism in the middle of the producer/consumer chain?
Thanks, I'll cheerfully crowdsource my preferences among friends that agree and enjoy the trickle of talent we find for a minimal investment of $.
Agreed. I heard the same sort of thing in a speech by the CEO of Dairy Queen that they were constantly evaluating everyone's performance for excellence.
However, DQ *also* gets to choose it's inputs, both in terms of raw materials and people. They don't hire the stupid ones (they hope), and they don't buy substandard products.
Public school is more like a business that gets a random assortment of input raw material and a random cross-section of people showing up to work. And then assert that they can't fire anyone or refuse to use anything but the most defective raw mats. THEN how would their product/service excel?
Teachers need to be evaluated, in the same sense that every working person needs to be evaluated. To suggest that somehow teachers are immune to the natural tendency to slough-off when they can get away with it is silly.
But the shallow comparisons to business are neither accurate nor useful.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it's an economic question.
Economics is about the application of LIMITED resources most effectively.
For example, if someone hypothesized that the globe's temperatures *might* (they're pretty sure) go up a half a degree over the next century, and that we *might* (they're pretty sure) be able to mitigate some portion of this possible increase if we would only commit vast $trillions$ of wealth, this would have to be weighed against the actual, measurable good that wealth might otherwise provide.
One of the most basic problems facing modern medicine is economic, in a similar way: just because we CAN prolong someone's life, should we? If we can spend $10,000,000 to help that 88 year old man live another 6 months, is that better than spending that money in orphanages where $100 will provide basic preventative care for 120 kids for a year?
Most decisions come down to economics, because resources are finite, and need is infinite.
From my point of view, it's what's so damnably frustrating about the left; they love to paint anyone who disagrees with them as some sort of heartless ogre, while they get to skip around talking about bunnies and rainbows. The fact is, I'd LOVE to have everyone have medical care, I'd love to have everyone have a nice clean environment, I'd love to have everyone have food, shelter, a job, hell, even a beach house. But the fact is that we simply cannot afford all the things we want. And while there are plenty of things wrong with capitalism as a system, at least in this system I have some ability to control what happens to me and my family. I don't accept that what my children get should be decided by a faceless bureaucrat who thinks she knows best what everyone else should have.
Whatever the level is that will kill you, that's probably "high".
Considering 10% is 'you're dead' and 5% is pretty much 'you're unconscious', yeah, 4% is high.
As a Republican, I think Obama's been a terrific president.
- Kept Guantanamo open, with no sign it's closing.
- Has made nice noises about getting us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but we're really not completely leaving any time soon.
- Has set the stage nicely for war with Iran if we want it.
- Has bailed out banks and big businesses, saving them from insolvency and the consequences of their own bad decisions and cheerfully used TAXPAYER dollars to do it.
- Has pretty much laid the legal basis for the detention of any US citizen without warrant, trial, or lawyer.
- Far from being transparent, he's conducted repeated secret strategy meetings and closed off giant chunks of the government to public scrutiny
- He's packed Washington with more lobbyists than ever, and in fact I believe he actually might have a representative from Goldman Sachs actually sleeping in bed with him and Michelle.
- He's made all sorts of platitudes toward the eco-nuts, but has prevented anything actually happening in terms of Green policies, including failing to hold anyone responsible for the massive BP disaster.
That's pretty much all the important stuff for us Republicans. I'm not sure why you Democrats think he's working for you, hell, he's great for us.
While I think it's a crappy excuse for a space station, ISS did fly in 1998, that's not terribly bad, only 4 years late.
I'm guessing you also thought Bush was Beelzebub and Cheney was Satan.
Only on /. and DailyKos does this get rated funny.
Obligatory geek-cred correction:
"Star Wars is BSG. (Seriously, tell me Rebel technology is not based off the Viper.) "
Er, considering Star Wars came out in 1977, and Battlestar Galactica 1978, that's probably not possible.
The article title is "alternatives are worth trying" and in fact the article summary is that whatever niche thing the alternatives do is usually easily do-able with the basic chromium and some addons. So really the author is saying they AREN'T worth the effort unless you have an obsessive need to address some trivial issue and downloading a whole new browser is easier for you than to modify the defaults yourself. (shrug)
Valid points.
" Is it better to let the market destroy those people not smart enough to see the price spikes coming or is it better to cushion that blow and encourage the development of alternate systems to reduce the life changing impacts of those changes?"
I'd argue that when the 'cushioning' costs resources, and relies on essentially wagering by the government about which industries to non-competitively subsidize - then no, the cushion is not worth the cost in terms of what it does to the economy.
We survived the transition to electricity, we survived the transition from horse to cars, and we've survived other greatly dislocating transitions; human economies are extraordinarily resilient and successful when they are LEFT ALONE. Yes, it can be savage to individuals, but the overall best-result-greatest-number is generally to leave the market alone (not that our politicians can or have done so in the last 40 years, so I admit my point is so nearly utopian as to be valueless).
Also responsible for the oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?
Just sayin'.
Are you suggesting that state-run monopolies might not be competitive or customer-oriented?
That's unpossible.
Let me state it plainly: there is and will be no such thing as "running out of oil".
It will not happen. I'm dead serious. We will NEVER in human history run OUT of oil.
As oil grows more scarce, and the price per bbl rises, more and more fossil fuel reserves will become accessible because it will then be profitable to retrieve them. There are ample reserves at $100/bbl, and when those tap out, there will be more available at $200/bbl. Oil will never run out, it will just become prohibitively expensive.
Just so we're clear what we're talking about.
What will happen as fossil fuels rise in prices? We will be forced to develop more and more efficient technologies, and ultimately it will become more economical to drive electric cars, or not drive at all. But the fact is a bunch of do-gooders shaking their fingers at everyone else will simply as a practical, human matter, never change anyone's behavior.
Economics will force the change in peoples' conduct when the economics do so. But it's absurd to claim we're running out of fossil fuels when the same raw material (basically) is used to make the plastic bags we bring our groceries home in. If it's THAT cheap - it's not running out*.
*and yes, the oil companies get huge subsidies. Not sure why anymore. Sure, at one point it was necessary as a strategic factor for a state. But I daresay that we'd be far better off letting these firms carry their ACTUAL costs, and sell gas for the real cost of production/distribution.
Yes, it sincerely DOES matter.
You're unfairly broadening the argument to say that anyone who believes anthropogenic global warming is balderdash is somehow ipso facto anti-environment. That's patently not true, although it is a useful bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand for the AGW true believers to lump all deniers as such.
I believe it's stupid to shit where you sleep. However, I don't necessarily subscribe to Al Gore's religion of doom, nor (in particular) to the modern version of indulgences his Carbon Trading company offers. I believe climate is cyclical, and that while humans perhaps impact it, our impact is trivial, somewhere below the level of noise in the system. I believe certainly that over the last 750,000 years, we've had several cycles of warming and cooling, including radical CO2 spikes, which the earth has coped with. There is nothing to suggest persuasively to me that our situation is anywhere outside the norm.
Therefore spending resources toward warming mitigation are resources WASTED that could be better spent to do actual, known-good environmental things like give 3rd world women educations and birth control, build nuclear plants, and remove/mitigate ACTUAL pollution. For the government to spend its time on global warming is a MASSIVE waste of time and resources. For example, claiming CO2 is a pollutant and should be regulated as such - even the EPA has said itself in court filings that regulation and enforcement is "absurd and likely impossible", requiring $21 billion PER YEAR and 230,000 more employees by 2016 when these requirements go into effect. That's simply stupid, and it's a knee jerk reaction to the greatest secular religion ever invented.
The only thing really new is the expectation that our soldiers are something other than human. Something, I guess, angelic.
I don't believe anyone who understands the military or has ever been a soldier would seriously such beliefs, it's only the most naive of civilians (who seem often to be journalists and politicians) that would make such assertions.
Let's remember that the enemy they're fighting is deliberately (due to the asymmetry of power involved) NOT fighting a 'stand up' fight. They are using weapons of random terror, intimidation, and brutality. The intent is to sow fear, insecurity, and doubt. We've chosen not to ignore them, so what's left to our soldiers? Expressing their very human rage and fear in ways that taunt the enemy, show them that 'it's not working'.
Of course these soldiers should be punished. We need to always strive to maintain order, even when we can understand why they did what they did. But there are several acts of assholery involved in this:
- the soldiers committing the act
- the idiot that took a picture
- the idiot (could be the photographer) that shared it, knowing exactly what the result would be.
"920 PRINT "IT'S YOUR MOVE: ";
930 INPUT P,Q,R
940 IF P>W+1 THEN 1030
950 IF P=W+1 THEN 1000
960 IF Q>X+1 THEN 1030
970 IF Q=(X+1) THEN 1010
980 IF R >(Y+1) THEN 1030
990 GOTO 1050"
"You don't worry about how many bowls of cereal you can get out of a carton of milk, or how many sandwiches you can make from a jar of marmalade, or how many sheets of paper you can print with a toner cartridge"
Well, actually, you DO. That's EXACTLY what you do calculate to determine 'value', it's just that the average consumer knows roughly what those values are intutively, or guesses so from the packaging and experience. For printer cartridges, "pages printed" is actually in fact the primary metric of value.
If suddenly someone said that they wanted to charge the same price for a 'carton' of milk, but the carton was 1c / 200ml, you'd say that's bullshit because you know how big a 'carton' is in your local commercial context.
The point is that so far in the discussion, the quantity of stock in the cartridge (until your post) wasn't mentioned, still leaving people up in the air estimating something for which they had no common reference. The website's down, and I'm still not clear from your post if you're really stating that their feedstock cartridge is $40 and 1kg, or just that 'abs filament' is $40/kg....because clearly if they're printing color, their 'cartridges' are going to have to include more than just raw plastic.
As logical as mining is, there are essentially two ways to do it.
1) dig.
Digging is problematic because digging requires extraordinarily tough and durable tools. Usually this means unbelievably heavy. In a lower-gravity environment, they might even have to be heavier (I am not a planetary scientist, I don't know if Mars' gravity being only 38% earth's would mean it's proportionally easier to dig into). Weight is the primary barrier to anything going into space, at least until we have orbital factories fed asteroids for raw materials. Look at all the designs for spacecraft and structures - their characteristic is that they're intrinsically fragile, mainly because they are so lightweight.
(And FWIW, mining without machinery - in case anyone even considered that - is laughably, crazy-hard work. Like, back-breaking hard.)
2) boom
The other way to dig is to drop something from really high and/or let it explode. You end up with a nice crater (hole) and a lot of nicely loosened soil, so building a habitation semi-below-ground is easier, and then roofing it over with the debris is easier too. Yet I don't believe we're desperate enough yet to start bombing Mars (although I'd certainly consider it a reasonable alternative for the Moon, particularly with the damn spider rocks).
3) the unknown
The problem with digging in, for both #1 and #2 above, is that we know almost NOTHING about the geology beneath say, the top couple of inches of a teensy bit of Martian terrain. Take a random square kilometer of land area on Earth....what are the odds that you could a) successfully dig more than 3m vertically AND 2) end up with a supportable space underground that wouldn't collapse? I'd guess it's something below 1/10. And this is for ground that we know several orders of magnitude better than the Martian soil. It's too much of a crapshoot, because if you drop a 'Mars base builder kit' and your ground sucks, well, you're done, you lose. (Certainly it would be a much higher proportion of terrain you COULD dig into and with the right structuring you could create a habitation even under loose sand - but now you run into the weight question again, because now your base parts aren't just strong enough to support themselves and repel hazards, they also have to carry several TONS of dirt all the time.)
You don't think that perhaps the 'land 5 rocketloads of bulk supplies' mightn't provide a wonderful testbed for this?
Granted, this IS rocket science, and it's really really hard. But considering the failure-tolerance for the habitation part, compared to the failure tolerances for the bulk-shipping piece, I'm unsurprised that they start with the hardest part.
You DO understand, of course, that is pretty much how the New World was found and developed, right?
Certainly, they were governments backing many (but not all of) these explorers, but by and large their motives were entirely commercial.
Now, governments pretty much just impede whatever progress they can when they're not too preoccupied providing bread and circuses for the ignorant masses.
Agreed, but the point is HOW you raise gas prices - do you simply tack another tax on the top of the current pricing, or do you remove the host of price supports subsidizing the oil companies, so they are forced to charge a price per gallon that actually represents their real costs?
In both cases, the price to the consumer goes up.
The alternative proposed by the OP means that taxes are taken from the public to lower prices (by paying subsidies to the oil companies) and AGAIN taken from the public to then force prices higher. That's just silly (unless you run an oil company).
Gas prices are too low...so let's raise taxes? That's our knee-jerk response?
How about instead of raising taxes which will fall disproportionately on the middle class (the lower classes tend to use public transit), instead let's STOP subsidizing gas and oil exploration, remove massive subsidies, rebates, and all the frosting for our oil-lobby friends?
Raising taxes on the masses while simultaneously handing $billion$ to oil means that the primary beneficiaries are the oil companies, nobody else.
And he's DEAD now, isn't he?
I'm just sayin'.
Absolutely - I'm perfectly fine with finding alternatives because the current system doesn't seem to recognize the variability teachers are faced with.
However, the Teachers' Unions' responses tend to be "it's way too complicated to evaluate teachers fairly! So let's just give up and hand them tenure!" - which everyone knows is simply self-interested bullshit that's unrealistic.
One might even say that the shitty benchmarking systems teachers are faced with now ARE THE DIRECT RESULT of Unions' intransigence and unwillingness to come up with credible, reasonably objective metrics themselves.
It might be impossible at $5 for an unknown, sure.
Then again, maybe at $1.29 it wouldn't be: http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/bed-intruder-song-feat.-kelly/id386478006
(the 'bed intruder mashup' has sold over 100k copies, making the unknown original artist and the mashup artists a combined $100,000)
THAT'S THE POINT OF THE INTERNET - COST OF ENTRY IS NEARLY ZERO.
You can argue all day that the 'middlemen' provide a service, winnowing the 99.9% crap artists so the rest of us don't have to. To some degree you'd be right, but then again these middlemen brought us Dane Cook (not funny), Creed (not talented), and Roseanne Barr (neither funny nor talented) - so what 'service' are they providing again to justify their MASSIVE financial parasitism in the middle of the producer/consumer chain?
Thanks, I'll cheerfully crowdsource my preferences among friends that agree and enjoy the trickle of talent we find for a minimal investment of $.
You're right - that's a great idea.... ...well, except for the lack of frigid temperatures, lack of dry air, and lack of endless nights.
Aside from that, though: brilliant!
Agreed. I heard the same sort of thing in a speech by the CEO of Dairy Queen that they were constantly evaluating everyone's performance for excellence.
However, DQ *also* gets to choose it's inputs, both in terms of raw materials and people. They don't hire the stupid ones (they hope), and they don't buy substandard products.
Public school is more like a business that gets a random assortment of input raw material and a random cross-section of people showing up to work. And then assert that they can't fire anyone or refuse to use anything but the most defective raw mats. THEN how would their product/service excel?
Teachers need to be evaluated, in the same sense that every working person needs to be evaluated. To suggest that somehow teachers are immune to the natural tendency to slough-off when they can get away with it is silly.
But the shallow comparisons to business are neither accurate nor useful.