Priorities. A Bachelors' these days is what a high school diploma used to be; without it, your odds of getting a job that doesn't involve a paper hat are slim.
Once we get that fixed, then a high school diploma will be the new high school diploma.
And if you're not talking about giving up on students, why are you expelling students as a method of improvement:
Flush those people out of the school system, and let them either fend for themselves, or subsist on the dole.
I would think keeping them off Welfare is the goal. Bouncing them from a high school because they're "difficult" does not achieve that. All it does is make them unemployable.
Teaching is hard, especially under the circumstances we see in the USA. But throwing students out on the street is probably not the solution we're looking for.
You can't make a person whose market value is $8/hr suddenly have a market value of $15/hr just by raising the minimum wage - you just make them unemployable.
McDonalds will still need someone to flip those burgers. I will happily pay another 20 cents on a Big Mac so that the people making my food get a reasonable wage.
You're just redefining what constitutes a livable wage. If you really want to live like someone in the 1950's, you can still do it quite easily on the median salary.
OK, let's do the math (these numbers are from the state with the cheapest COL, Mississippi; where necessary to be specific I've chosen the Jackson area):
1000 sq ft house (mortgage, $58,000) = $337.32/month, or $4047.84 a year. On a trailer. If you can get the loan. I'm calculating that with a 4% interest rate, which is very optimistic, considering most lenders won't give you a loan for a trailer. (I'm calculating a purchase because the rentals are more expensive.)
Modern car payment = roughly $300/mo, or $3600 a year.
Electricity = Assuming decent rates, let's call this $75 a month, or $900 a year.
Food for a family of four = Let's say $250 a month, stretching as much as you can, so $3000.
So, we're already at $11,547.84, and we haven't even considered things like insurance (health/auto/homeowners), gas, heating (if you need it down there), and any unplanned maintenance on car/trailer. The numbers above are conservative.
North Korea is authoritarian. The USA is merely dysfunctional. One day you wingnuts are going to realize that fearmongering and lies will only get you so far; after a while you get diminishing returns.
Likewise the risks associated with the job you listed could probably be greatly reduced if someone wanted to put the time and money into it and accept the resulting loss of productivity.
You sound like someone who's never swung a shovel, or climbed up onto the roof of some McMansion filled with over-privileged white kids, or turned a wrench on ANYTHING. It is important to have safety training and rules, and follow them, but falling off a roof will kill you no matter how educated you are.
it seems ironic to find that the schools themselves are victim to the same pressures that spur some households and businesses to relocate outside the city.
Which lowers tax revenues, which defunds the schools, which makes it that much harder for low-income students to escape the cycle of poverty. Eventually the neighborhood will be ripe for gentrification, and the school will be turned into a bunch of luxury condos. So the 1% gets cheap land, and the rest of us get shitty schools. Par for the course with these guys; their idea of "urban renewal" is when a block of housing projects burns down.
And I think you've got 1 and 3 right. There are schools where nearly every student gets free breakfast and lunch because the area is so poor. Lower incomes are correlated with increased crime, so I think you're right there.
It's time to stop paying for schools out of property taxes. It makes Lily White Charter School that much more well-funded, but PS 142 in the 'hood will never be able to get its head above water. The schools should be funded out of the state coffers (I know the states help the localities, but it's not enough). If the schools are equally funded and equipped, then every student gets the same opportunity.
I know, I hear you screaming about dumbing down and failing gifted students. What happens when that gifted student is Latino? Or black? They're being failed right now. Time to level the field. Let the rich kids learn what it's like to have limited resources, and let the low-income kids learn that they are valued and given the resources they need.
At my last job, I was talking about the input validation that I'd created on a web application. My PHB asked why I had done that, since the client hadn't asked for it.
If I could include pictures with a Slashdot post, it would be the Jackie Chan "My Brain Is Full Of Fuck" meme.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 sets a cap on benefits of no more than 2 consecutive years at a stretch and 5 years total over someone's lifetime. "Generational" welfare would involve longer time-frames. Please get your facts right if you're going to criticize.
In Virginia at least, if you have a child more than 10 months after you begin receiving benefits, that child is not eligible for additional benefits. Having a kid does not increase how much you get under TANF. Please stop spreading bullshit about welfare recipients. We can't solve the problems involved if people ignore the reality of the situation by demonizing recipients as goldbricking baby factories.
What exactly constitutes "passive welfare"? Since welfare was reformed under that reactionary libertarian President Clinton, everyone that receives cash assistance is required to either work or attend job training 30 hours a week, or lose their benefits. Which is awesome on paper if you want to fix the "problem" of welfare queens (which have not been proven to exist in significant numbers), but in reality it creates more problems, one of which is what to do with your kids while you're working or going to job training. Not everyone has a spouse or family that can watch the kids while you're off at your dead-end McJob making minimum wage.
Everyone who is able-bodied should work, in an ideal situation. In the real world, you can't always get a job when you need one, and if you have to pay for day care, sometimes having a job means you have LESS money to work with than if you were sitting at home on the couch like everyone on the right thinks welfare recipients do. Lots of people think the poor should be punished for being so, so the situation continues. There's a school of thought that providing cash benefits perpetuates a cycle of poverty, that it encourages dependence instead of personal responsibility. The truth is that most people on cash assistance are trying desperately to get a job so they can stop collecting benefits, and forcing an arbitrary work requirement on them does nothing more than 1) make the situation worse for the recipients and their children, and 2) provide Big Biz with a captive audience of low-wage workers who can't quit when you treat them like dogshit. When you factor in the low wages, lack of access to health insurance (as even under the ACA a lot of people have to make a sizable payment each month for even the lowest level of coverage), and cultural stigma (which, ironically, makes it HARDER to get a job due to the perception of welfare recipients being goldbricking leeches), welfare DOES make people dependent by perpetuating the vicious cycle of trapping low-wage workers in their jobs, not because they're lazy. The solution is not to end welfare, but to increase wages enough to shift the burden from public assistance to private wages. This is one reason why people want the minimum wage increased; a living wage gets people off welfare. But, since that eats into the profits (which are still at record highs), Big Biz just instructs their wholly owned "elected" representatives to perpetuate the myth of the lazy welfare recipient who leeches off taxpayers' hard work. After all, it's much better for the CEO to buy his third summer home with his six-figure bonus for keeping salaries low than for the workers at his business who do actual work to have enough money to live on.
I can also recall a manager I had who, within the first month of him being brought in had 20% of his developers quit, referencing him as WHY they were quitting.
This is a win for management. The other 80% of developers that DIDN'T quit will have to do the work of the 20% who have left. That manager just saved the company approximately 20% on programmers' salary (assuming that those developers got paid roughly the same.) Since reducing costs is good for the profits, this manager will not be fired.
But he was a superstar, and last I checked he is now the CEO of the company, with 95% of the staff gone (and down to 1 or 2 developers), and he is credited with keeping the company afloat.
Sure, he saved 95% off salaries. It's easy to keep a company afloat when you don't worry about working people to death.
That you know about. It's entirely possible that things went on in retaliation for Piss Christ that were not reported by the media. If the editor of the newspaper that would have run the story was a crazy fundie, he/she could decide that running the article would make it harder for them to retaliate the next time, so under the radar it goes.
Zealotry is zealotry, whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Athiest, Capitalist, Libertarian...
The major American AV vendors announced a joint task force today to respond to these results.
When asked how they would ensure that corporate members of the task force would be held accountable for this sort of cheating, their spokesperson responded with the following:
"Accountable for cheating? No, no, no, the point of the task force is to keep from getting caught like this."
Because it's a browser from Microsoft. They don't have a great track record. I can't wait to see all the "standards" they make up so that everyone has to do their site design twice.
Rand Paul should focus on freedom of communication, which sidesteps this debate once and for all.
It's not about freedom, it's about letting corporations do whatever the fuck they want. It's only freedom if you don't have to give a shit about anyone else.
It's not a "crappy" car. I quite like it. It gets better mileage than any SUV, it's fun to drive, and it has all the toys that I want.
Using less gas helps others. Driving a car that doesn't weigh 3 tons helps others. Driving a car that doesn't block others' view helps others. Not driving a car that overcompensates for any physical shortcomings helps others.
But you're convinced it doesn't matter what car you drive so long as you like it. Our choices affect others. I wish you could see that.
If the policy in place is dumb, make it obviously so. This way it can be solved, if you don't do it, you are part of the problem.
In my experience, the dumbness of the policy is directly proportional to the difficulty in making anyone understand how dumb it is. It's also directly proportional to the likelihood that someone whose job title starts with "Chief" wrote the policy and will not change it, no matter what.
It's also dumb to allow the CEO to have a non-expiring password that is the name of the company. But good luck telling the CEO he can't have it. I'll see you at the unemployment office.
And sometimes not even then. I was at a company when they had a breach involving financial info. It cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase credit protection for thousands of our customers. However, they just kept on operating the same way, storing credit card information in the clear because that's the way they've always done it, and upgrading the back-office accounting system to allow tokenization of transactions would have cost money. Nobody in upper management had the balls to go to the CFO and say "You will fix this, and you will fix it now. I don't want any excuses. Get it done."
So, as far as I know, they're still doing it. At least they're not storing CVV numbers anymore...
Slashdot Mirror
Priorities. A Bachelors' these days is what a high school diploma used to be; without it, your odds of getting a job that doesn't involve a paper hat are slim.
Once we get that fixed, then a high school diploma will be the new high school diploma.
And if you're not talking about giving up on students, why are you expelling students as a method of improvement:
I would think keeping them off Welfare is the goal. Bouncing them from a high school because they're "difficult" does not achieve that. All it does is make them unemployable.
Teaching is hard, especially under the circumstances we see in the USA. But throwing students out on the street is probably not the solution we're looking for.
McDonalds will still need someone to flip those burgers. I will happily pay another 20 cents on a Big Mac so that the people making my food get a reasonable wage.
OK, let's do the math (these numbers are from the state with the cheapest COL, Mississippi; where necessary to be specific I've chosen the Jackson area):
1000 sq ft house (mortgage, $58,000) = $337.32/month, or $4047.84 a year. On a trailer. If you can get the loan. I'm calculating that with a 4% interest rate, which is very optimistic, considering most lenders won't give you a loan for a trailer. (I'm calculating a purchase because the rentals are more expensive.)
Modern car payment = roughly $300/mo, or $3600 a year.
Electricity = Assuming decent rates, let's call this $75 a month, or $900 a year.
Food for a family of four = Let's say $250 a month, stretching as much as you can, so $3000.
So, we're already at $11,547.84, and we haven't even considered things like insurance (health/auto/homeowners), gas, heating (if you need it down there), and any unplanned maintenance on car/trailer. The numbers above are conservative.
I call bullshit.
North Korea is authoritarian. The USA is merely dysfunctional. One day you wingnuts are going to realize that fearmongering and lies will only get you so far; after a while you get diminishing returns.
You sound like someone who's never swung a shovel, or climbed up onto the roof of some McMansion filled with over-privileged white kids, or turned a wrench on ANYTHING. It is important to have safety training and rules, and follow them, but falling off a roof will kill you no matter how educated you are.
TL;DR: We can fix the educational system by giving up on students.
How about we make a Bachelors' Degree mean something first, before the high school diploma?
Which lowers tax revenues, which defunds the schools, which makes it that much harder for low-income students to escape the cycle of poverty. Eventually the neighborhood will be ripe for gentrification, and the school will be turned into a bunch of luxury condos. So the 1% gets cheap land, and the rest of us get shitty schools. Par for the course with these guys; their idea of "urban renewal" is when a block of housing projects burns down.
And I think you've got 1 and 3 right. There are schools where nearly every student gets free breakfast and lunch because the area is so poor. Lower incomes are correlated with increased crime, so I think you're right there.
It's time to stop paying for schools out of property taxes. It makes Lily White Charter School that much more well-funded, but PS 142 in the 'hood will never be able to get its head above water. The schools should be funded out of the state coffers (I know the states help the localities, but it's not enough). If the schools are equally funded and equipped, then every student gets the same opportunity.
I know, I hear you screaming about dumbing down and failing gifted students. What happens when that gifted student is Latino? Or black? They're being failed right now. Time to level the field. Let the rich kids learn what it's like to have limited resources, and let the low-income kids learn that they are valued and given the resources they need.
Truth.
At my last job, I was talking about the input validation that I'd created on a web application. My PHB asked why I had done that, since the client hadn't asked for it.
If I could include pictures with a Slashdot post, it would be the Jackie Chan "My Brain Is Full Of Fuck" meme.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 sets a cap on benefits of no more than 2 consecutive years at a stretch and 5 years total over someone's lifetime. "Generational" welfare would involve longer time-frames. Please get your facts right if you're going to criticize.
In Virginia at least, if you have a child more than 10 months after you begin receiving benefits, that child is not eligible for additional benefits. Having a kid does not increase how much you get under TANF. Please stop spreading bullshit about welfare recipients. We can't solve the problems involved if people ignore the reality of the situation by demonizing recipients as goldbricking baby factories.
What exactly constitutes "passive welfare"? Since welfare was reformed under that reactionary libertarian President Clinton, everyone that receives cash assistance is required to either work or attend job training 30 hours a week, or lose their benefits. Which is awesome on paper if you want to fix the "problem" of welfare queens (which have not been proven to exist in significant numbers), but in reality it creates more problems, one of which is what to do with your kids while you're working or going to job training. Not everyone has a spouse or family that can watch the kids while you're off at your dead-end McJob making minimum wage.
Everyone who is able-bodied should work, in an ideal situation. In the real world, you can't always get a job when you need one, and if you have to pay for day care, sometimes having a job means you have LESS money to work with than if you were sitting at home on the couch like everyone on the right thinks welfare recipients do. Lots of people think the poor should be punished for being so, so the situation continues. There's a school of thought that providing cash benefits perpetuates a cycle of poverty, that it encourages dependence instead of personal responsibility. The truth is that most people on cash assistance are trying desperately to get a job so they can stop collecting benefits, and forcing an arbitrary work requirement on them does nothing more than 1) make the situation worse for the recipients and their children, and 2) provide Big Biz with a captive audience of low-wage workers who can't quit when you treat them like dogshit. When you factor in the low wages, lack of access to health insurance (as even under the ACA a lot of people have to make a sizable payment each month for even the lowest level of coverage), and cultural stigma (which, ironically, makes it HARDER to get a job due to the perception of welfare recipients being goldbricking leeches), welfare DOES make people dependent by perpetuating the vicious cycle of trapping low-wage workers in their jobs, not because they're lazy. The solution is not to end welfare, but to increase wages enough to shift the burden from public assistance to private wages. This is one reason why people want the minimum wage increased; a living wage gets people off welfare. But, since that eats into the profits (which are still at record highs), Big Biz just instructs their wholly owned "elected" representatives to perpetuate the myth of the lazy welfare recipient who leeches off taxpayers' hard work. After all, it's much better for the CEO to buy his third summer home with his six-figure bonus for keeping salaries low than for the workers at his business who do actual work to have enough money to live on.
This is a win for management. The other 80% of developers that DIDN'T quit will have to do the work of the 20% who have left. That manager just saved the company approximately 20% on programmers' salary (assuming that those developers got paid roughly the same.) Since reducing costs is good for the profits, this manager will not be fired.
Sure, he saved 95% off salaries. It's easy to keep a company afloat when you don't worry about working people to death.
Two words: Fox News.
Perhaps, but my point about zealotry, not ideology or religion, being the issue stands.
That you know about. It's entirely possible that things went on in retaliation for Piss Christ that were not reported by the media. If the editor of the newspaper that would have run the story was a crazy fundie, he/she could decide that running the article would make it harder for them to retaliate the next time, so under the radar it goes.
Zealotry is zealotry, whether it be Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Athiest, Capitalist, Libertarian...
The major American AV vendors announced a joint task force today to respond to these results.
When asked how they would ensure that corporate members of the task force would be held accountable for this sort of cheating, their spokesperson responded with the following:
"Accountable for cheating? No, no, no, the point of the task force is to keep from getting caught like this."
There's no rule of law in the USA either, if you have enough money and your skin is the right color.
Because it's a browser from Microsoft. They don't have a great track record. I can't wait to see all the "standards" they make up so that everyone has to do their site design twice.
It's not about freedom, it's about letting corporations do whatever the fuck they want. It's only freedom if you don't have to give a shit about anyone else.
It's not a "crappy" car. I quite like it. It gets better mileage than any SUV, it's fun to drive, and it has all the toys that I want.
Using less gas helps others. Driving a car that doesn't weigh 3 tons helps others. Driving a car that doesn't block others' view helps others. Not driving a car that overcompensates for any physical shortcomings helps others.
But you're convinced it doesn't matter what car you drive so long as you like it. Our choices affect others. I wish you could see that.
"*overpaid empty suit* is leaving to spend more time with his family."
"Change it or you're fired."
He got his non-compliant password.
Executives are immune from inconvenient policy.
Don't know about that, and don't care. I left that shithole a year and a half ago.
It's certainly your problem when they fire you for not doing it.
In my experience, the dumbness of the policy is directly proportional to the difficulty in making anyone understand how dumb it is. It's also directly proportional to the likelihood that someone whose job title starts with "Chief" wrote the policy and will not change it, no matter what.
It's also dumb to allow the CEO to have a non-expiring password that is the name of the company. But good luck telling the CEO he can't have it. I'll see you at the unemployment office.
And sometimes not even then. I was at a company when they had a breach involving financial info. It cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase credit protection for thousands of our customers. However, they just kept on operating the same way, storing credit card information in the clear because that's the way they've always done it, and upgrading the back-office accounting system to allow tokenization of transactions would have cost money. Nobody in upper management had the balls to go to the CFO and say "You will fix this, and you will fix it now. I don't want any excuses. Get it done."
So, as far as I know, they're still doing it. At least they're not storing CVV numbers anymore...