It's ironic that conservatives complain about poor, elderly, and disabled people and all their "entitlements," all while acting completely oblivious to how ridiculously entitled they act themselves
It is ridiculous how people like you think that there are only two possible political positions.
What we have now is an unstable crypto-plutocracy with the trappings of fairness and equality slathered on and maintained through the inertia of habit
A "crypto-plutocracy" is what we have always had, since the founding of the nation, and it has served us well.
You're right that the "trappings of fairness and equality" were "slathered on". Let's get rid of the trappings and stop pretending. It isn't the job of government to ensure "fairness" or "equality", it is the job of government to protect individual liberty and ensure the rule of law. That results in equal opportunities, and that's all that can be realistically achieved.
The biggest risk we face is that it turns into a European style democracy; European democracies indeed are committed to "fairness and equality" (as defined by whatever political theorists are in power), and they burn democracy and a few million people along with it at regular intervals to achieve it.
I was using Twitter pretty actively for a few years. It never was a great service, but it was simple, widely used, and had a lot of useful add-ons. But function after function has disappeared, making Twitter pretty much useless for me. So I quit.
Once a city goes bankrupt, basically the residents have lost pretty much everything. So, yes, once there just is nobody to take any money from anymore, even public sector unions can't squeeze any more money out of people. And now try to think about what will happen if you apply the same mechanism at the state or federal level. My point remains: public sector unions are fundamentally different from private sector unions and operate in a fundamentally different environment.
For many years a high priced RISC chip would easily beat any x86 chip on the market...
But what matters is bang for the buck, not bang. And, as you may notice, the difference was primarily in FP performance, which mainly depends on the FPU and where Intel probably just made a conscious choice to sacrifice some performance in order to keep cost down.
All the chips with higher benchmark results than the alpha are considerably newer...
The alpha was a chip designed to do well on benchmarks. But it did so only really with proprietary compilers for a long time, which meant you had to use shitty proprietary operating systems, and even with all that, all you got was slightly higher performance at a much higher price.
Mechanical typewriters are actually pretty expensive to buy and maintain compared to something electronic.
If you want to go low-tech and used, a whole bunch of old serial terminals (VT100 etc.) hooked up to a PC via USB-to-serial ports would be another option. Linux supports that kind of usage fully and there is tons of software available for it.
Of course, as I was saying, I think a low-end Android tablet and a USB keyboard are really the way to go.
You can plug a USB keyboard into any recent Android phone or tablet. Obviously, you can charge them when you have power and use them for many hours. If you look around, you should be able to get a Coby or other Chinese Android tablet and a cheap full-size USB keyboard close to your price range (you also need a USB-to-Go cable, but they are less than $1). I've used them and they are perfectly fine tablets. Students can also use them for reading books.
There are also some typing tutors, although more geared towards on-screen typing. There are also tons of text editors you can use for practice.
Shouldn't that be more than enough justification for having it?
Yes, but my point is that it's the only justification (unlike, say, funding for SCOTUS or DOD). Bill doubted that the majority of Americans cared about NASA, and if that's true, then NASA indeed should not get funded anymore.
We have BILLIONS of people trying to get a slice of the ecnomic pie and the pie isn't growing fast enough for us all to have increasing standards of living. Hence, the haves are getting more and the have nots are being left in the dust.
Everybody, from poorest to richest, is doing a lot better now than a few decades ago, largely thanks to liberal and secular government, free trade, and free markets. This idea of the "have nots being left in the dust" is a political fabrication from people who simply can't deal with the fact that their ideologies and politics have failed.
Of course people of Abrahamic faiths need to be encouraged to see their similarities and love one another.
Yeah, right. Catholicism claims that even protestants will go to hell. Luther called the Pope the anti-Christ. And to Christians, Mohammed is the "sower of discord" condemned to the deepest levels of hell. Dore even helpfully gives you a picture of naked Mohammed with his chest torn open by God in punishment, found in most copies of Dante's inferno.
The idea that the Abrahamic religions are one big happy loving whole is a fable created by modern religious leaders circling the wagons to defend against secularism and reason. And if these people ever manage to defeat secularism and reason, they'd go right back to murdering each other, as they have done for more than a millennium.
Just because the Catholic church is a mess (and it's gotten much better), doesn't mean Christianity is bad.
What does "Christianity is good/bad" even mean? According to traditional Catholic doctrine, if you aren't a Catholic, you aren't really a Christian and you'll go to hell. Luther, on the other hand, thought that the Pope was the anti-Christ.
Many Christians have committed heinous crimes, in the name of Christianity, with the blessing of recognized Christian churches and authorities. Catholicism in particular claims doctrinal, spiritual, moral, and economic continuity with its entire past and claims to derive its authority from that. So, if you call yourself a Catholic, that means that you take responsibility for, and approve of, the historical actions of the Catholic church: its support of totalitarian leaders, its corruption, its torture, its oppression of minorities, its destruction of entire cultures and peoples. And others are justified in judging you by your choice.
And it's the same when you call yourself a Muslim: either you accept and take responsibility of what mainstream Islam has done in the world since the time of Mohammed, what its preachers and holy books say and teach, or you shouldn't call yourself a Muslim.
You propose increasingly complicated evaluation systems and propose to evaluate principals and to give principals more power to hire and fire. Now look back at the original article and the strike: the CTU refuses evaluation based on testing (because they rightfully point out many problems with testing), they want more money, and they certainly wouldn't agree to teachers being let go at the whim of a principal.
The problem isn't with your ideas themselves (vague as they may be), the problem is with your notion that you can implement them as part of a public and publicly financed education system.
The only known mechanism by which schools, principals, and teachers can reliably be held responsible for the consequences of their choices is by having them be autonomous, separate, private institutions. As soon as you make them public and state-run, it is politicians, unions, and experts that make the decisions, and no matter how well intentioned these people may be, they are ultimately not up to the task: salaries will edge up a little faster than they should, low performers will be kept on out of fear, curricula will be compromises to make all constituents happy, and they will make a significant number of errors in judgment. Furthermore, because these choices and errors are replicated across the entire system and people are forced to pay for them, the system fails to self-correct.
In aggregate, all these political compromises result in the education system we have: a system that is one of the most expensive in the world, but yields at best mediocre results. And I haven't heard you or anybody else come up with a way of fixing that.
Right, but what does that have to do with ARM vs x86? An x86-based mobile phone running Android will be no worse in that regard than an ARM-based mobile phone running Android. And both Windows and Linux run on both ARM and x86.
Itanium was designed by top hardware and software designers and companies sunk a lot of money into it. What this tells you is that even if you put together smart and experienced engineers and give them large amounts of resources, they still get it wrong. And Itanium is hardly the first such failure. Hence, I don't put much stake in anybody's opinion about what a good or bad processor architecture is for a particular application.
There's generally not much disagreement over what it means to be able to read. To communicate in written form using grammatically correct, coherent English. To add, subtract, do fractions, understand weights and measures, what a "percentage" means, compound interest, etc.
There is plenty of disagreement on this in the days of computers, spell checkers, smart phones, and voice recognition. And you're just thinking about the "typical" student, but most students are atypical: dyslexics, immigrants, gifted students, football players, etc. Some of them will never be able to meet those goals, others will be bored to tears by them.
I'd say improvement in test scores. Focus on the median score, and, at the higher grades, treat dropouts as the equivalent to the minimum possible test score.
So your approach then is to mix everybody up, screw the people at the bottom, screw the people at the top, and then teach to the middle. I think that's a horrible prescription for an education system, but it is actually pretty close to what we are doing in primary and secondary education.
When we are, collectively, via the state, funding primary and secondary education, we/it has a stake in how that money's spent.
I disagree. Assistance to people in need is not a justification to start running their lives for them. If I lend you money because your business is experiencing a shortfall, you would object strenuously if I then started to tell you what schools to send your kids to (or what to eat or whatever).
It highlights one of the big justifications often given for vouchers: there are kids who are "stuck" in low-performing schools. I pointed out earlier that my district's policies allow most such kids to transfer to the "good" schools in the name of racial diversity. Very few do so. So why would vouchers make a difference?
That's why I said "ghettoization has little to do with school or school vouchers". The goal of school vouchers is to give everybody an opportunity to improve their lot. The majority will waste that opportunity, but that is their right in a free society. You apparently want to decide for them what is good for them and then to force them into it. I think that is wrong, and it is not how I want my tax dollars spent. I also think it is ineffective, because the only way you can even get close to designing a school system that will work is to teach to the middle, as you yourself expressed above.
I don't see what choice Intel has. A large chunk of the server and desktop market cares less and less about instruction sets, so they are in competition with ARM whether they want it or not. If they manage to bring power efficient and cheap x86 chips to market quickly, they have a slight competitive advantage while people still care a little about instruction sets. If they don't, then they may continue to make a bit more money on x86 for a while but lose to ARM (and other processors) in the long run. Either way, it seems like a pretty straightforward business problem, not some deep rooted technical issue.
So you're saying it's more or less impossible to gauge in any meaningful way whether one set of students improved "more" (or "less") than another set over some period of time in a trait like "math proficiency" or "language proficiency".
No, I'm saying that there isn't even agreement on what "math proficiency" or "language profiency" means, or whether they are desirable or relevant. Schools and educators have little idea of what the job market demands or what people need in order to be successful.
The question I was attempting to answer is, "How might we evaluate teachers and/or schools in such a way as to accurately differentiate the effective ones from the ineffective ones."
But the whole discussion is largely about what "effective" even means: improvements in test scores? dropout rates? improvements in the worst students? in the best students? jobless rates after graduation? college acceptance rates? Depending on which criteria you choose, you get completely different curricula.
I'm sympathetic to this argument. At the same time I'm also highly skeptical of education consumers' ability to make optimal choices and of voucher schemes' effectiveness at counteracting the ghettoization of poor and/or low-performing students.
People make suboptimal choices in every aspect of their lives, every day, rich and poor, smart and dumb. There isn't even a clear meaning of the term "optimal" for anything. Is an iPhone 5 the "optimal phone" or an overpriced toy? If we were to accept the principle you seem to imply, namely that it is the purpose of government to protect people from suboptimal choices, then we are pretty much giving up on liberty altogether.
Furthermore, "ghettoization" I think has little to do with schools or school vouchers, and more to do with where people choose to live. If you could wave a magic wand and redistribute the US population randomly across the country, ghettos would disappear overnight. In part, it is trying to alleviate the problems with ghettos that keeps people stuck in them.
I don't get it. If you look at Surface, third party operating systems are allowed on x86 but not on ARM. And for Android, CyanogenMod isn't "allowed" by most manufacturers either: no device is designed to facilitate installation of other operating systems, most take active steps to make it hard, and pretty much all of them void your warranty and can be bricked that way. There is a big problem there, but I don't see it as being related to x86 vs ARM.
What the hell are you talking about? The whole point of the automatic budget cuts (aka sequestration) is that it's 50/50 split between military and non-Social Security and non-Medicaid domestic spending.
Sounds like "the brunt of the cuts to me".
If nothing is done and the sequestration takes effect, the USA's debt rating is going to get cut again.
Good! The lower the debt rating, the less we can borrow.
I'm not sure I get that. Why would x86 based mobile devices be less open than ARM-based ones? Seems to me that as far as Microsoft's products are concerned, it's the x86-based ones that are less restrictive. And much as I like CyanogenMod, I doubt it has much influence on the market place: it is such a pain and so risky to install on many devices. We need to address the issue of the disappearance of programmable general purpose computers, but that issue won't be addressed by ARM-vs-Intel. Ultimately, I think it needs to be addressed legally via anti-trust law.
Speaking of burden of proof, ARM is considerably more power efficient than any x86. Rhetoric doesn't change that.
Current ARM chips are more power efficient than current x86 chips. The question is whether that's an intrinsic property of the instruction set and whether it holds true at the whole system level (rather than instruction by instruction). I think you haven't made your case.
Not arbitrary at all, unless you're of the opinion it's impossible to objectively measure students' grasp of subject matter.
Just choosing what the subject matter ought to be is itself a difficult decision, and it's unclear that our current mechanism for determining curricula are doing a good job.
First of all, nothing in what I wrote even addressed school choice. So I'm not sure why you assume I'm against it
Because you implicitly keep returning to arguing within the framework of a school system in which most students attend public schools that are run by principals evaluated by government officials. You seem to vacillate between free market principles (letting principals make their own decisions and holding them responsible) and a centrally planned education system (fixed curricula and evaluation criteria etc.).
I'm saying that that what you seem to have in mind is not internally consistent. If you want schools to be evaluated based on their performance, and you want teachers, principals, and schools to succeed and fail based on the quality of education they deliver, then the way to do it is to open up the education market and privatize it, with some regulatory protections in place.
Well, x86 has pretty much destroyed the RISC market on the desktop, for workstations, and for supercomputers. The last big attempt at RISC, IA64, was a failure. If you want to argue that x86 has some enormous overhead due to its instruction set, I think the burden of proof is on you.
I think instruction sets matter little, and the fact that we have x86 on the desktop and ARM on mobile devices is an accident of history. Either architecture could evolve to fill the other's niche. Intel seems to think so too. If you disagree, where is your proof?
I think that's a simplistic view of looking at it. Architectures, production facilities, pricing, and applications are deeply intertwined and interdependent. Although putting ARM chips on cutting edge processes would give you better ARM chips, it would probably not be economically efficient overall. In the end, I really don't care. Either Intel will figure out how to make efficient, cost-competitive x86-based chips or they won't; I think it makes little difference to users.
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It is ridiculous how people like you think that there are only two possible political positions.
A "crypto-plutocracy" is what we have always had, since the founding of the nation, and it has served us well.
You're right that the "trappings of fairness and equality" were "slathered on". Let's get rid of the trappings and stop pretending. It isn't the job of government to ensure "fairness" or "equality", it is the job of government to protect individual liberty and ensure the rule of law. That results in equal opportunities, and that's all that can be realistically achieved.
The biggest risk we face is that it turns into a European style democracy; European democracies indeed are committed to "fairness and equality" (as defined by whatever political theorists are in power), and they burn democracy and a few million people along with it at regular intervals to achieve it.
I was using Twitter pretty actively for a few years. It never was a great service, but it was simple, widely used, and had a lot of useful add-ons. But function after function has disappeared, making Twitter pretty much useless for me. So I quit.
Once a city goes bankrupt, basically the residents have lost pretty much everything. So, yes, once there just is nobody to take any money from anymore, even public sector unions can't squeeze any more money out of people. And now try to think about what will happen if you apply the same mechanism at the state or federal level. My point remains: public sector unions are fundamentally different from private sector unions and operate in a fundamentally different environment.
But what matters is bang for the buck, not bang. And, as you may notice, the difference was primarily in FP performance, which mainly depends on the FPU and where Intel probably just made a conscious choice to sacrifice some performance in order to keep cost down.
The alpha was a chip designed to do well on benchmarks. But it did so only really with proprietary compilers for a long time, which meant you had to use shitty proprietary operating systems, and even with all that, all you got was slightly higher performance at a much higher price.
Mechanical typewriters are actually pretty expensive to buy and maintain compared to something electronic.
If you want to go low-tech and used, a whole bunch of old serial terminals (VT100 etc.) hooked up to a PC via USB-to-serial ports would be another option. Linux supports that kind of usage fully and there is tons of software available for it.
Of course, as I was saying, I think a low-end Android tablet and a USB keyboard are really the way to go.
You can plug a USB keyboard into any recent Android phone or tablet. Obviously, you can charge them when you have power and use them for many hours. If you look around, you should be able to get a Coby or other Chinese Android tablet and a cheap full-size USB keyboard close to your price range (you also need a USB-to-Go cable, but they are less than $1). I've used them and they are perfectly fine tablets. Students can also use them for reading books.
There are also some typing tutors, although more geared towards on-screen typing. There are also tons of text editors you can use for practice.
Yes, but my point is that it's the only justification (unlike, say, funding for SCOTUS or DOD). Bill doubted that the majority of Americans cared about NASA, and if that's true, then NASA indeed should not get funded anymore.
An ironic signature, given your fanatical and knee-jerk reaction to political views.
Everybody, from poorest to richest, is doing a lot better now than a few decades ago, largely thanks to liberal and secular government, free trade, and free markets. This idea of the "have nots being left in the dust" is a political fabrication from people who simply can't deal with the fact that their ideologies and politics have failed.
Yeah, right. Catholicism claims that even protestants will go to hell. Luther called the Pope the anti-Christ. And to Christians, Mohammed is the "sower of discord" condemned to the deepest levels of hell. Dore even helpfully gives you a picture of naked Mohammed with his chest torn open by God in punishment, found in most copies of Dante's inferno.
The idea that the Abrahamic religions are one big happy loving whole is a fable created by modern religious leaders circling the wagons to defend against secularism and reason. And if these people ever manage to defeat secularism and reason, they'd go right back to murdering each other, as they have done for more than a millennium.
What does "Christianity is good/bad" even mean? According to traditional Catholic doctrine, if you aren't a Catholic, you aren't really a Christian and you'll go to hell. Luther, on the other hand, thought that the Pope was the anti-Christ.
Many Christians have committed heinous crimes, in the name of Christianity, with the blessing of recognized Christian churches and authorities. Catholicism in particular claims doctrinal, spiritual, moral, and economic continuity with its entire past and claims to derive its authority from that. So, if you call yourself a Catholic, that means that you take responsibility for, and approve of, the historical actions of the Catholic church: its support of totalitarian leaders, its corruption, its torture, its oppression of minorities, its destruction of entire cultures and peoples. And others are justified in judging you by your choice.
And it's the same when you call yourself a Muslim: either you accept and take responsibility of what mainstream Islam has done in the world since the time of Mohammed, what its preachers and holy books say and teach, or you shouldn't call yourself a Muslim.
You propose increasingly complicated evaluation systems and propose to evaluate principals and to give principals more power to hire and fire. Now look back at the original article and the strike: the CTU refuses evaluation based on testing (because they rightfully point out many problems with testing), they want more money, and they certainly wouldn't agree to teachers being let go at the whim of a principal.
The problem isn't with your ideas themselves (vague as they may be), the problem is with your notion that you can implement them as part of a public and publicly financed education system.
The only known mechanism by which schools, principals, and teachers can reliably be held responsible for the consequences of their choices is by having them be autonomous, separate, private institutions. As soon as you make them public and state-run, it is politicians, unions, and experts that make the decisions, and no matter how well intentioned these people may be, they are ultimately not up to the task: salaries will edge up a little faster than they should, low performers will be kept on out of fear, curricula will be compromises to make all constituents happy, and they will make a significant number of errors in judgment. Furthermore, because these choices and errors are replicated across the entire system and people are forced to pay for them, the system fails to self-correct.
In aggregate, all these political compromises result in the education system we have: a system that is one of the most expensive in the world, but yields at best mediocre results. And I haven't heard you or anybody else come up with a way of fixing that.
Right, but what does that have to do with ARM vs x86? An x86-based mobile phone running Android will be no worse in that regard than an ARM-based mobile phone running Android. And both Windows and Linux run on both ARM and x86.
Itanium was designed by top hardware and software designers and companies sunk a lot of money into it. What this tells you is that even if you put together smart and experienced engineers and give them large amounts of resources, they still get it wrong. And Itanium is hardly the first such failure. Hence, I don't put much stake in anybody's opinion about what a good or bad processor architecture is for a particular application.
There is plenty of disagreement on this in the days of computers, spell checkers, smart phones, and voice recognition. And you're just thinking about the "typical" student, but most students are atypical: dyslexics, immigrants, gifted students, football players, etc. Some of them will never be able to meet those goals, others will be bored to tears by them.
So your approach then is to mix everybody up, screw the people at the bottom, screw the people at the top, and then teach to the middle. I think that's a horrible prescription for an education system, but it is actually pretty close to what we are doing in primary and secondary education.
I disagree. Assistance to people in need is not a justification to start running their lives for them. If I lend you money because your business is experiencing a shortfall, you would object strenuously if I then started to tell you what schools to send your kids to (or what to eat or whatever).
That's why I said "ghettoization has little to do with school or school vouchers". The goal of school vouchers is to give everybody an opportunity to improve their lot. The majority will waste that opportunity, but that is their right in a free society. You apparently want to decide for them what is good for them and then to force them into it. I think that is wrong, and it is not how I want my tax dollars spent. I also think it is ineffective, because the only way you can even get close to designing a school system that will work is to teach to the middle, as you yourself expressed above.
I don't see what choice Intel has. A large chunk of the server and desktop market cares less and less about instruction sets, so they are in competition with ARM whether they want it or not. If they manage to bring power efficient and cheap x86 chips to market quickly, they have a slight competitive advantage while people still care a little about instruction sets. If they don't, then they may continue to make a bit more money on x86 for a while but lose to ARM (and other processors) in the long run. Either way, it seems like a pretty straightforward business problem, not some deep rooted technical issue.
No, I'm saying that there isn't even agreement on what "math proficiency" or "language profiency" means, or whether they are desirable or relevant. Schools and educators have little idea of what the job market demands or what people need in order to be successful.
But the whole discussion is largely about what "effective" even means: improvements in test scores? dropout rates? improvements in the worst students? in the best students? jobless rates after graduation? college acceptance rates? Depending on which criteria you choose, you get completely different curricula.
People make suboptimal choices in every aspect of their lives, every day, rich and poor, smart and dumb. There isn't even a clear meaning of the term "optimal" for anything. Is an iPhone 5 the "optimal phone" or an overpriced toy? If we were to accept the principle you seem to imply, namely that it is the purpose of government to protect people from suboptimal choices, then we are pretty much giving up on liberty altogether.
Furthermore, "ghettoization" I think has little to do with schools or school vouchers, and more to do with where people choose to live. If you could wave a magic wand and redistribute the US population randomly across the country, ghettos would disappear overnight. In part, it is trying to alleviate the problems with ghettos that keeps people stuck in them.
I don't get it. If you look at Surface, third party operating systems are allowed on x86 but not on ARM. And for Android, CyanogenMod isn't "allowed" by most manufacturers either: no device is designed to facilitate installation of other operating systems, most take active steps to make it hard, and pretty much all of them void your warranty and can be bricked that way. There is a big problem there, but I don't see it as being related to x86 vs ARM.
Sounds like "the brunt of the cuts to me".
Good! The lower the debt rating, the less we can borrow.
I'm not sure I get that. Why would x86 based mobile devices be less open than ARM-based ones? Seems to me that as far as Microsoft's products are concerned, it's the x86-based ones that are less restrictive. And much as I like CyanogenMod, I doubt it has much influence on the market place: it is such a pain and so risky to install on many devices. We need to address the issue of the disappearance of programmable general purpose computers, but that issue won't be addressed by ARM-vs-Intel. Ultimately, I think it needs to be addressed legally via anti-trust law.
Current ARM chips are more power efficient than current x86 chips. The question is whether that's an intrinsic property of the instruction set and whether it holds true at the whole system level (rather than instruction by instruction). I think you haven't made your case.
Just choosing what the subject matter ought to be is itself a difficult decision, and it's unclear that our current mechanism for determining curricula are doing a good job.
Because you implicitly keep returning to arguing within the framework of a school system in which most students attend public schools that are run by principals evaluated by government officials. You seem to vacillate between free market principles (letting principals make their own decisions and holding them responsible) and a centrally planned education system (fixed curricula and evaluation criteria etc.).
I'm saying that that what you seem to have in mind is not internally consistent. If you want schools to be evaluated based on their performance, and you want teachers, principals, and schools to succeed and fail based on the quality of education they deliver, then the way to do it is to open up the education market and privatize it, with some regulatory protections in place.
Well, x86 has pretty much destroyed the RISC market on the desktop, for workstations, and for supercomputers. The last big attempt at RISC, IA64, was a failure. If you want to argue that x86 has some enormous overhead due to its instruction set, I think the burden of proof is on you.
I think instruction sets matter little, and the fact that we have x86 on the desktop and ARM on mobile devices is an accident of history. Either architecture could evolve to fill the other's niche. Intel seems to think so too. If you disagree, where is your proof?
I think that's a simplistic view of looking at it. Architectures, production facilities, pricing, and applications are deeply intertwined and interdependent. Although putting ARM chips on cutting edge processes would give you better ARM chips, it would probably not be economically efficient overall. In the end, I really don't care. Either Intel will figure out how to make efficient, cost-competitive x86-based chips or they won't; I think it makes little difference to users.