NYC is where it is mostly because of shipping, harbors, and the merchants that got rich on that. Those made it a favorable place to live despite the costs of coastal living. These days, that location makes little sense. There is still shipping, of course, but not much reason why our financial center should be there.
So, leave it up to New Yorkers: as long as they want to pay and are able to pay for defending the city against the elements, let them. Once it doesn't make economic sense anymore, people will stop building there and people will move elsewhere. This has happened time and again to cities in human history, it's a natural process.
How is a company defending a legitimate copyright imply anything about the quality of their machines.
It doesn't tell you anything directly about the quality of heir machines, but it does tell you about their attitudes towards their customers, namely "screw you".
The fact that they have the right to screw their customers doesn't mean people don't have a right to criticize them for it.
With the climate greatly warming over the past 20000 years, all those nice wine growing regions around the Mediterranean became so hot and dry that grapes just wouldn't grow there anymore! And now? Hardly anybody produces wine anymore! It's a disaster! (Rolls eyes.)
You're a geek. I'm a geek. We can muddle through the messy complexities of switching between a bunch of different interfaces. Most users are completely stymied by it. Windows throws them into the old desktop and they don't know how to get back. Or they are used to the old desktop and they don't understand what happens with all those new tiles.
And Metro, in particular, gets many things wrong, starting with the fact that it almost consistently fails to indicate where you can interact with it. After using it for a while, I still haven't even figured out how the task switcher is supposed to work: when you jam your mouse at the left edge, you get some window thumbnail, but if you keep jamming it, you get more. WTF? And all the auto-hide have annoying delays that are far slower than I work.
Informed and educated opinions leading to decisions do not work with without rational politicians. A democracy cannot function without rational politicians and citizens.
Voting is intrinsically an irrational act, because the costs greatly outweigh the benefits, so if people behaved rationally, voter participation would be much lower than it is, and people wouldn't follow politics as much as they do. And no matter what you do, the vast majority of citizens is never going to understand science; they have neither the time nor the motivation for it.
Underlying your statements is the assumption that it is the job of government to do a lot of stuff for the people: to tell them what to think, to teach them, to keep them healthy, to make them wealthy, to promote equality, etc. Those all require decisions based on complex scientific and economic analyses. The problem with that is that nobody is capable of them. Once you drop that delusion and restrict government to its core functions, protecting liberty, justice, and common defense, rationality becomes much less important. A young earth creationist can fight in the military or adjudicate a murder just as well as some physics professor, probably better.
Windows 8 is a pretty mixed bag. Parts of it are good, parts of it are mediocre, and parts of it are lousy. The problem with this is that it doesn't average out; it's the parts that users get stuck on again and again that determine the overall experience. Consistently mediocre would be better than this.
Part of what makes it such a mixed bag is the way in which old software constantly rears its ugly (and I mean ugly!) head, when you least expect it. That's really confusing.
Microsoft's bad karma, meticulously built over decades, also comes back to haunt them: developers just expect getting screwed again. Maybe Microsoft will copy their wildly successful product, Maybe Microsoft will just drop some important API or technology leaving their product stranded. Maybe Microsoft will just decide next year to give up on Surface altogether and clone Google Glass instead. No matter what, developers pretty much know they are going to get screwed.
Not to mention that it is not clear what you mean by secondary school.
I'm sorry that it's not clear to you, but It's a standard term: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=secondary+school If you don't understand a word other people are using, you look it up.
I don't know about you, but the schools I went to had solid attendance in their maths specializations.
You finished a Gymnasium, as (currently) about 40% of Germans do. Only some percentage of those people specialize in mathematics. Hence, the majority of German students don't ever see linear algebra.
but that is a distinct minority reserved for people with IQ less than 80 (approximately, but they are legally retarded)
An IQ of 80 is in the normal range; mental retardation means an IQ below 70.
Granted, that's my own personal experience, but what do I know. I'm only from there.
Quite true: you know very little about your own country. You also display a great deal of arrogance towards the majority of Germans who didn't attend the Gymnasium. And you insist others feed you data instead of showing intellectual curiosity and initiative. All of that reflects on the quality of your schooling.
[Citation Needed]
You know, let me tell you about these wonderful data sources: Nationmaster, CIA Factbook, and Wikipedia. If it's there, I don't provide "citations" because I assume you are capable of typing a word into Google and clicking on the link. Here's how you do that:
I trust you can do the rest yourself. Most of the data is pretty uncontroversial.
Most of these are elementary economic data; if you don't believe them, that's more a testament to your lack of education.
One that I know is incorrect is happiness, because I saw the study
Of course you'll find some contradictory "studies" for some of these measures. Are you really so naive and uneducated to think that every economic or psychological measure has a consistent single definition and measure? If you have a contradictory study, cite it so that one can talk about it. For example, the Happy Planet Index (http://www.happyplanetindex.org/) claims to measure happiness, but actually measures happiness divided by ecological footprint, and it even does that incorrectly.
You make a claim, you provide the data.
You still haven't provided any data supporting the notion that Germany's educational system produces superior outcomes. You make the claim, you provide the data.
I don't have anything to prove to you and this is not a pissing contest. The data I referred to is mostly uncontroversial and completely clear. If you are intellectually curious, you can easily look it up and maybe it will make you think. If not, the discussion is really pointless.
Yeah, sadly you're right. In fact, there was an NPR story about how Obama had been much more adept at "targeting" and "adapting" his message to specific audiences, while Romney delivered pretty much the same message to every audience and market.
In total numbers, there are going more and more people to university every year. And we are up now to 2 mio. students coming from 1 mio. students in 1970.
Yes, but still a much smaller percentage of the population than in the US.
Our, you can study when you can apply for university policy at least does not hinder anyone willing to study STEM from doing so.
Everybody who wants to study a STEM field in the US and has reasonable grades can do so, just like Germany. So I don't see what you're getting at.
I'm not talking about a single KPI. The German educational system produces worse outcomes than the US system on pretty much every indicator: productivity, labor participation rate, level of adult knowledge of science, percent of university graduates, average length of schooling, scientific productivity, number of patents granted per capita, number of publications per capita, number of books read or published per capita, median family income, happiness, etc. (statistics are online, you can easily check them yourself). (That's also consistent with my observations "on the ground", having lived in both places, and some more.)
Do you disagree? Do you think the German system does produce better outcomes? By what objective measure?
Your problem is two-fold: you equate a degree with knowing stuff and being educated, and you think that only a university can make someone a productive member of society
Where did I "equate" anything? I simply said that the GP had failed to make his case that the German educational system was superior.
Keep in mind that Germans who graduate high school not only are between 1 and 3 years older than their American counterparts. The average German high schooler has been exposed to Linear Algebra.
Germany has a three-tiered system. The majority of Germans attends secondary schools that are 10 years or less. Average length of schooling in Germany (10.2 years) is lower than in the US (12 years); since they start primary school at around the same time, that means that the average secondary school graduate is younger and less educated in Germany than the average secondary school graduate in the US. Vectors are covered only in grades 11 and 12 in Germany, and in many cases only if you choose mathematics as one of your specialties (most people don't), so the great majority of Germans never get to see any linear algebra.
Note that I'm not saying that one system or the other is better. But your statements are totally wrong and you don't know what you're talking about.
Use your datamining to actually get government right. Figure out what everybody wants, and find a solution
You know what everybody wants: lots of free loot and they want their neighbors to stop living in ways that they don't approve of (a pony is optional but appreciated by the kids). And they want all of that without paying for it themselves and without any restrictions on their own liberties.
And the solution is also simple: as a politician, you pass laws giving people free loot, pay for it by borrowing money (preferably from other countries), and then leave your successor to worry about the mess you made. And if you're really good at it, you manage to deceive both the voters and yourself with talk of "trickle down economics" or "Keynesian stimulus", because that sounds so much better than "corruption" and "buying votes". For particular speaking engagements, you throw in a little ideology like "Christianity" or "progressivism" (all these ideologies are pretty much interchangeable) and get the supporters all riled up with a little demonization of the other guys. Romney and Obama were both equally good at this kind of deception and self-deception, and thus they split the vote pretty evenly.
So, yes it was better 20 years ago, but it is still better than the present US system.
So, fewer Germans go to university, and STEM fields have big trouble finding students in Germany. That means that everybody is forced to pay so that some people can get degrees in art history, literature, and theology, degrees that are are utterly useless in the job market. How is that "better"?
So, let's say you're right and some evil American company hires Pavan from India to work for $50000 in the US instead of hiring Jim to work for $70000. You want to stop that. So Jim gets his $70000 job. What do you think happens to Pavan? He jumps off a bridge? No, of course not. He works in India or Ireland and gets paid $40000/year or less. His company competes with Jim's company, and because it has lower costs, drives Jim's company out of business. You can't preserve US jobs by keeping capable and willing workers out of the US.
I hardly think that a citizen of the Netherlands has any business lecturing anybody on proper moral conduct in international relations or the use of military power: your nation failed miserably on both counts. When you still had the military power, your nation ran a brutal colonial empire. And after that faltered, you were unable to defend yourself and got screwed left and right by your neighbors.
A solution is multiple-winner proportional representation.
And what problem is that supposed to solve? Right now, the winner take all system means that fringe candidates just don't make it. With proportional representation, any significant group of political nuts gets a voice in Congress. Do you really want a Congress in which you have a Christian Fundamentalist Party, a Black Panther Party, an Earth First Party, and a Neo-Marxist Party? Those are the kinds of groups that the current system filters out. I think that's a good thing.
In addition, in a proportional representation system, by necessity, you end up having people appointed to Congress by parties; do you really want the Democratic and Republican party machinery to be able to appoint their nutcases to Congress without any voter input?
Proportional representation is a horrible idea, and we should be glad that we don't have it in the US.
But there are problems with the system as it currently exists:
These problems exist because anti-immigration hysteria and political correctness shut down the visa type that actually was intended for skilled workers: immigrant visas.
We don't need more H1B restrictions, we need numerical limits and restrictions on green cards lifted for skilled immigrants.
In addition, the German system doesn't actually produce better outcomes and it costs a lot more, so it's not clear why you even would want to import it.
Slashdot Mirror
NYC is where it is mostly because of shipping, harbors, and the merchants that got rich on that. Those made it a favorable place to live despite the costs of coastal living. These days, that location makes little sense. There is still shipping, of course, but not much reason why our financial center should be there.
So, leave it up to New Yorkers: as long as they want to pay and are able to pay for defending the city against the elements, let them. Once it doesn't make economic sense anymore, people will stop building there and people will move elsewhere. This has happened time and again to cities in human history, it's a natural process.
People do that all the time, and I don't mind at all.
It doesn't tell you anything directly about the quality of heir machines, but it does tell you about their attitudes towards their customers, namely "screw you".
The fact that they have the right to screw their customers doesn't mean people don't have a right to criticize them for it.
With the climate greatly warming over the past 20000 years, all those nice wine growing regions around the Mediterranean became so hot and dry that grapes just wouldn't grow there anymore! And now? Hardly anybody produces wine anymore! It's a disaster! (Rolls eyes.)
You're a geek. I'm a geek. We can muddle through the messy complexities of switching between a bunch of different interfaces. Most users are completely stymied by it. Windows throws them into the old desktop and they don't know how to get back. Or they are used to the old desktop and they don't understand what happens with all those new tiles.
And Metro, in particular, gets many things wrong, starting with the fact that it almost consistently fails to indicate where you can interact with it. After using it for a while, I still haven't even figured out how the task switcher is supposed to work: when you jam your mouse at the left edge, you get some window thumbnail, but if you keep jamming it, you get more. WTF? And all the auto-hide have annoying delays that are far slower than I work.
Voting is intrinsically an irrational act, because the costs greatly outweigh the benefits, so if people behaved rationally, voter participation would be much lower than it is, and people wouldn't follow politics as much as they do. And no matter what you do, the vast majority of citizens is never going to understand science; they have neither the time nor the motivation for it.
Underlying your statements is the assumption that it is the job of government to do a lot of stuff for the people: to tell them what to think, to teach them, to keep them healthy, to make them wealthy, to promote equality, etc. Those all require decisions based on complex scientific and economic analyses. The problem with that is that nobody is capable of them. Once you drop that delusion and restrict government to its core functions, protecting liberty, justice, and common defense, rationality becomes much less important. A young earth creationist can fight in the military or adjudicate a murder just as well as some physics professor, probably better.
Well, and next you're going to tell us that high real estate prices mean that homes are a great value. I think we saw how well that worked out.
Windows 8 is a pretty mixed bag. Parts of it are good, parts of it are mediocre, and parts of it are lousy. The problem with this is that it doesn't average out; it's the parts that users get stuck on again and again that determine the overall experience. Consistently mediocre would be better than this.
Part of what makes it such a mixed bag is the way in which old software constantly rears its ugly (and I mean ugly!) head, when you least expect it. That's really confusing.
Microsoft's bad karma, meticulously built over decades, also comes back to haunt them: developers just expect getting screwed again. Maybe Microsoft will copy their wildly successful product, Maybe Microsoft will just drop some important API or technology leaving their product stranded. Maybe Microsoft will just decide next year to give up on Surface altogether and clone Google Glass instead. No matter what, developers pretty much know they are going to get screwed.
50% great tech just isn't enough.
By the way, let's return this to the original issue, your style:
Citation needed.
That's a common misconception among German intellectuals. You can look at the official data to see that it isn't true: http://www.datenportal.bmbf.de/portal/K23.gus?rid=T2.3.1#T2.3.1
I'm sorry that it's not clear to you, but It's a standard term: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=secondary+school If you don't understand a word other people are using, you look it up.
You finished a Gymnasium, as (currently) about 40% of Germans do. Only some percentage of those people specialize in mathematics. Hence, the majority of German students don't ever see linear algebra.
An IQ of 80 is in the normal range; mental retardation means an IQ below 70.
Quite true: you know very little about your own country. You also display a great deal of arrogance towards the majority of Germans who didn't attend the Gymnasium. And you insist others feed you data instead of showing intellectual curiosity and initiative. All of that reflects on the quality of your schooling.
You know, let me tell you about these wonderful data sources: Nationmaster, CIA Factbook, and Wikipedia. If it's there, I don't provide "citations" because I assume you are capable of typing a word into Google and clicking on the link. Here's how you do that:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=average+length+of+schooling+by+country#
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/edu_ave_yea_of_sch_of_adu-education-average-years-schooling-adults
Articles on those sites provide plenty of sources.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=productivity+by+country
I trust you can do the rest yourself. Most of the data is pretty uncontroversial.
Most of these are elementary economic data; if you don't believe them, that's more a testament to your lack of education.
Of course you'll find some contradictory "studies" for some of these measures. Are you really so naive and uneducated to think that every economic or psychological measure has a consistent single definition and measure? If you have a contradictory study, cite it so that one can talk about it. For example, the Happy Planet Index (http://www.happyplanetindex.org/) claims to measure happiness, but actually measures happiness divided by ecological footprint, and it even does that incorrectly.
You still haven't provided any data supporting the notion that Germany's educational system produces superior outcomes. You make the claim, you provide the data.
I don't have anything to prove to you and this is not a pissing contest. The data I referred to is mostly uncontroversial and completely clear. If you are intellectually curious, you can easily look it up and maybe it will make you think. If not, the discussion is really pointless.
If he had been a good CIA ops, perhaps he'd still be working for the CIA.
Yeah, sadly you're right. In fact, there was an NPR story about how Obama had been much more adept at "targeting" and "adapting" his message to specific audiences, while Romney delivered pretty much the same message to every audience and market.
Yes, but still a much smaller percentage of the population than in the US.
Everybody who wants to study a STEM field in the US and has reasonable grades can do so, just like Germany. So I don't see what you're getting at.
I'm not talking about a single KPI. The German educational system produces worse outcomes than the US system on pretty much every indicator: productivity, labor participation rate, level of adult knowledge of science, percent of university graduates, average length of schooling, scientific productivity, number of patents granted per capita, number of publications per capita, number of books read or published per capita, median family income, happiness, etc. (statistics are online, you can easily check them yourself). (That's also consistent with my observations "on the ground", having lived in both places, and some more.)
Do you disagree? Do you think the German system does produce better outcomes? By what objective measure?
Where did I "equate" anything? I simply said that the GP had failed to make his case that the German educational system was superior.
Germany has a three-tiered system. The majority of Germans attends secondary schools that are 10 years or less. Average length of schooling in Germany (10.2 years) is lower than in the US (12 years); since they start primary school at around the same time, that means that the average secondary school graduate is younger and less educated in Germany than the average secondary school graduate in the US. Vectors are covered only in grades 11 and 12 in Germany, and in many cases only if you choose mathematics as one of your specialties (most people don't), so the great majority of Germans never get to see any linear algebra.
Note that I'm not saying that one system or the other is better. But your statements are totally wrong and you don't know what you're talking about.
You know what everybody wants: lots of free loot and they want their neighbors to stop living in ways that they don't approve of (a pony is optional but appreciated by the kids). And they want all of that without paying for it themselves and without any restrictions on their own liberties.
And the solution is also simple: as a politician, you pass laws giving people free loot, pay for it by borrowing money (preferably from other countries), and then leave your successor to worry about the mess you made. And if you're really good at it, you manage to deceive both the voters and yourself with talk of "trickle down economics" or "Keynesian stimulus", because that sounds so much better than "corruption" and "buying votes". For particular speaking engagements, you throw in a little ideology like "Christianity" or "progressivism" (all these ideologies are pretty much interchangeable) and get the supporters all riled up with a little demonization of the other guys. Romney and Obama were both equally good at this kind of deception and self-deception, and thus they split the vote pretty evenly.
You don't need high tech to figure this out.
Well, I didn't say that it was a good thing. I was challenging the statement that "Tuition should be zero. It works in Germany."
I want to know by what criteria people think that the German system works better than the US system and why we should adopt it.
So, fewer Germans go to university, and STEM fields have big trouble finding students in Germany. That means that everybody is forced to pay so that some people can get degrees in art history, literature, and theology, degrees that are are utterly useless in the job market. How is that "better"?
So, let's say you're right and some evil American company hires Pavan from India to work for $50000 in the US instead of hiring Jim to work for $70000. You want to stop that. So Jim gets his $70000 job. What do you think happens to Pavan? He jumps off a bridge? No, of course not. He works in India or Ireland and gets paid $40000/year or less. His company competes with Jim's company, and because it has lower costs, drives Jim's company out of business. You can't preserve US jobs by keeping capable and willing workers out of the US.
I hardly think that a citizen of the Netherlands has any business lecturing anybody on proper moral conduct in international relations or the use of military power: your nation failed miserably on both counts. When you still had the military power, your nation ran a brutal colonial empire. And after that faltered, you were unable to defend yourself and got screwed left and right by your neighbors.
Obama should have used that as a campaign slogan: "I'm Barack Obama. Vote for me because I'm no worse than Bush or Reagan!"
And what problem is that supposed to solve? Right now, the winner take all system means that fringe candidates just don't make it. With proportional representation, any significant group of political nuts gets a voice in Congress. Do you really want a Congress in which you have a Christian Fundamentalist Party, a Black Panther Party, an Earth First Party, and a Neo-Marxist Party? Those are the kinds of groups that the current system filters out. I think that's a good thing.
In addition, in a proportional representation system, by necessity, you end up having people appointed to Congress by parties; do you really want the Democratic and Republican party machinery to be able to appoint their nutcases to Congress without any voter input?
Proportional representation is a horrible idea, and we should be glad that we don't have it in the US.
These problems exist because anti-immigration hysteria and political correctness shut down the visa type that actually was intended for skilled workers: immigrant visas.
We don't need more H1B restrictions, we need numerical limits and restrictions on green cards lifted for skilled immigrants.
In addition, the German system doesn't actually produce better outcomes and it costs a lot more, so it's not clear why you even would want to import it.