Is there any evidence of widespread brain damage? No. In fact, kids have been getting smarter and healthier for decades. This is another one of those "think of the children" scares by which people are trying to make a name for themselves and others latch onto them because it aligns with their political ideologies.
A lot of countries have tax / government funded education schemes. What is proposed here is similar to something Australia has had since the 1960s.
So?
We go to uni with no up-front fees. Our entry into the uni is solely judged by our abilities (according to high-school overall position marks which is a problem for another thread). We pick the courses / university we want to study at in order of preference, i.e. Engineering at UQ, Engineering at QUT, Engineering at USQ etc working our way down the preferences (typically the first preference will likely be the most popular because of the aforementioned prestige).
In different words, you have a highly centralized, centrally controlled system in which the government determines merit and picks winners and losers. How nice for you. Do not want.
Going to uni then incurs a HECS-HELP debt. When you start working and you hit the HECS threshold of $51000 gross income, you get hit with a 4% tax to start repaying your HECS-HELP debt. If you're so inclined you can pay it off early and every contribution above $200 gives you a 10% discount on your debt, and if you can afford to pay for uni upfront you also get the same 10% discount off the fees.
You say that as if it were a good thing.
Other countries the scheme is even easier. Austria has a fully socialised university system. You apply, if you meet the academic criteria then you get in, that's it. The admission fees are fully socialised through taxes.
Yes, and it suffers the consequences too.
I'd hate to live in a country where studying depended on a) money, b) anything other than academic merit, c) acceptance by some board who is interested in what kind of a citizen I am, or if I volunteer for the homeless, of if I'm a great football player, or if my dad can add an extra building to the university.
Well, your education, such as it was, seems to have inculcated you with bigotry, prejudice, and ignorance.
People have actually looked at overall scientific literacy in the US, and it compares favorably to the EU (and the rest of the world):
Jon Miller of Michigan State University reported the numbers at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, this afternoon, during a session on civic science literacy assessments around the world. The new U.S. rate, based on questionnaires administered in 2008, is seven percentage points behind Sweden, the only European nation to exceed the Americans. The U.S. figure is slightly higher than that for Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Netherlands. And it’s double the 2005 rate in the United Kingdom (and the collective rate for the European Union).
I don't see how that is true with respect to education. Student loans mean that you decide whether investing in your education is likely to yield a good return, you decide how hard you work for it, and you have to live with the consequences. Nobody else pays for that. That seems reasonable to me.
"Free" education or intergenerational transfers mean you can pick an unsuitable subject, slack off, and end up with a low-paying job, and others end up having to foot the bill for your poor choices. That's not right.
<sarcasm>That's a totally brilliant idea! That way, successful people are penalized for going to college, while slackers get a college education for free and then have to pay almost nothing back. What could possibly go wrong?</sarcasm>
I sort of like it, however: it would drive anybody with half a brain to avoid college and universities like the plague and instead go for unaccredited schools and vocational training. That is, it would motivate people to avoid the stamp of a college degree (since that costs a huge amount of money) and instead focus on actually learning something.
You don't need to correct for experiments done on other datasets.
Really? So you're saying that if I have a hypothesis that I'm desperate to prove, I can just keep trying one data set after another until I find one for which I get a statistically significant result and that p-value doesn't need to be corrected? Think that through. In fact, I can even test completely different hypotheses each time, only one hypothesis applied to only one data set ever, and things still fail in the same way.
There is no correction that you can apply that makes p-values any more meaningful than they would be without correction. A p-value really simply is a convenient scale on which to report resarch results; a single high significance result by itself means little more than no result at all. You need many independent replications of an experiment, each with high significance p-value outcomes, in order to actually demonstrate a scientific hypothesis to be true.
We know how the physics of fusion works. What they are really trying to do now is design a cost-efficient device. That's an engineering task, not a task for physicists, and they don't seem to be very good at it.
If you look at this result, billions spent to achieve a neutron flux that theoretically contains slightly more energy than a theoretical number grabbed out of a hat, it's useless and a gigantic waste of money. They are as far away from energy production as ever.
Properly calculated p-values do not have this problem because they are corrected for multiple comparisons.
You can't correct for multiple comparisons because you don't know about all the experiments other people have been doing; you'd have to to know that in order to do that correction properly. It's very hard even to count the number of comparisons you have been doing yourself, because it's not just the number of times you've run the test.
Lecturers are measured on how many papers they publish, most peer reviewers don't know the subtle differences between these tests
Nobody really "knows the subtle difference between the tests" because nobody really knows what the actual distribution of the data is. In addition, the same way people shop for statistical tests, they shop for experimental procedures, samples, and all other aspects of an experiment, until they get the result they want.
It's not a problem with being "fooled by statistics". If they applied the statistics wrong or made some other error, six sigma is no better than two sigma if there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions. (Not saying that there is anything wrong with the Higgs experiment.)
The only real protection against this sort of thing is to have many different research groups repeat an experiment independently and analyze it many different ways.
So you're saying that our government should continue to waste tax dollars on a public education system that is a "complete and utter joke" because, what, you lived frugally? What kind of moronic justification is that?
(Besides, I don't believe you; you have already shown yourself in other postings to be a complete idiot when it comes to money management.)
Education in the United states is a complete and utter joke.
Actually, it's fairly average among Western nations; but don't let facts get in the way of a good rant. Even US public schools are fairly average in comparison to other nations.
As an adult that went through that system and had to have my father scream at teachers and administrators to do their frigging job, and myself had to do the same thing until I simply pulled my child from the worthless public school system and sent her to private school at great personal expense, I know how worthless it is.
So, what you consider "worthless" isn't actually "education" in the US, it's public education. And the logical approach is therefore to let more people choose private education, say via voucher programs. That's particularly important for those who, unlike you, can't afford to send their kids to private schools.
The proposal calls for more transparent, accountable and inclusive governance.
Yeah, as "transparent" as the EU and its swarms of diplomats and lobbyists. As "inclusive" as the UN, which is primarily composed of representatives of totalitarian regimes.
Kroes said: “Some are calling for the International Telecommunications Union to take control of key Internet functions. I agree that governments have a crucial role to play, but top-down approaches are not the right answer.
That's a smokescreen. Of course, European governments want to get their grubby hands on Internet functions and governance.
In the wake of large-scale Internet surveillance and reduced trust in the internet, the European Commission today proposes a key reform to the way the Internet is managed and run.... We must strengthen the multi-stakeholder model to preserve the Internet as a fast engine for innovation.”
How is one related to the other? No matter what you think of NSA surveillance (and European nations seemed to like it as long as it was hush-hush), you can hardly accuse the US of not having maintained the Internet as a "fast engine for innovation".
No, that's not how it works. When a construction company's employees screw up, they get paid while fixing the screw-up. Often, even the construction company gets paid by the customer, unless they really screwed up badly and have to eat the cost.
Really, this is not about obligations, moral or legal, but about risk and insurance. Bugs and errors will happen, on any project. Someone needs to pay for them. Either the builder can pay for them out of their pocket, effectively providing insurance for y, but they are going to charge you more for the contract overall. Or, you can pay for them as they occur. Either way, if you want the project to go ahead, you pay for the bugs.
The only way you end up not paying for them is if the bugs or mistakes are due to gross negligence or if the builder misrepresented their qualifications; in that case, you may have to go to court to recover your money. But that doesn't apply in an employer/employee relationship, since presumably you know your employees pretty well.
Well, given that Russia copied much of its ideology and culture (such as it is) from Germany, German and Russian attitudes are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Both nations have a long history of totalitarianism, intolerance, and anti-Americanism. Both nations have middle classes born and bred to serve the state, while viewing business and trade with disdain. You sound like a typical representative.
Why should you care about "every little piece of shit"? Because if you leave that stuff to your elites, they will wreck your economies and eventually go on oppressing and killing their neighbors and their minorities, just like they have done time and time again.
maybe winning some local elections, but increasingly irrelevant on the national scene.
Sure, that's why Democrats have both houses and Obama won by a landslide, right? Get real. The administration and Democrats have been screweing so badly that they even make idiot Bush look good. As an Independent, I think both parties are becoming increasingly irrelevant. In the future, I'll probably vote for whoever I think can produce the most gridlock in Washington, because the less either Republicans or Democrats do, the better.
Funny to hear about that "abandon", esp after in USA, you got shafted of your *own* *pensions*.
What do pensions have to do with consumer protection?
And, FWIW, Germany's mandatory annuity-based system screws people in a major way.
10+ years in Germany - and I see no abundance of the alleged behavior.
You mean customers getting screwed by companies? Excessively high prices (including for insurance), high penalties for switching or terminating contracts, price fixing, barriers to entry, etc. Of course you don't see it: it would be politically unpopular to make it obvious, but it's there.
Yes, I do not have to think about it. Welcome to the social state!
Yes, you put your finger on it: free markets require people to think and make informed decisions; informed buyers in a free market is what keeps companies honest. People like you find that uncomfortable and don't like think, you don't like to do your part to keep society going, you just rather leave that to the experts.
There's nothing wrong with people like you choosing to live like zoo animals in well-tended cages. I think it's great that people like you have places like Germany and Massachusetts to move to. Just don't try to impose your preferences on the entire US (which is what Democrats have been trying to do).
There certainly is some point where scientific debate ends, but not when Authority Says It Does.
You're absolutely right. And scientific debate continues by scientists reproducing experiments and contributing more and more scientific results. That's what proved Galileo right, and what failed to happen in Hayes' case. Instead, Hayes hung up his scientific hat and became an activist, and that is not part of "scientific debate".
I'm sorry you don't understand the difference, "friend".
The goal of the laws is to make sure that companies can't shaft the customers.
But the effect is that one group of customers shafts another, and often that companies can shaft their customers even more, both of which happens with abandon in Europe.
In Germany, if you paid money for it - you bought it. Unlike USA, in Germany, EULA can't override the (consumer protection) law.
It's not clear that this is "consumer protection". If the resales actually lower a company's profits, they are going to raise prices to make up for it. In essence, the EU is forcing some group of users to subsidize another group of users. The same is true for a lot of these other "consumer protection laws".
You can't see a more appropriate response than a campaign of dirty tricks and character assassination? Well, lets start with what they shouldn't do if they want to avoid looking manipulative and guilty: they should't harass people and invade their privacy.
No, actually I can't see a more appropriate response. After the EPA and other agencies looked at his data and rejected it, the scientific debate was over. If Hayes wanted to make more contributions as a scientist, the only way to do it would have been to produce more scientific results.
Instead of producing more scientificdata to convince others, Hayes apparently went on a personal crusade and PR campaign. At that point, Hayes ceased to be a scientist and started being an activist without sufficient scientific data to back up his claims. At that point, his character and motivations became valid issues; he might well have had a financial motive for hurting the company, or a personality problem.
It's not a pretty situation, and the company could probably have handled it better. But it doesn't fit the narrative of innocent scientist being hounded by big, bad company. This is not a "corporate war against a scientist".
How do scientists fight a PR war against corporations with unlimited pockets? How far should they go?
Perhaps the first question to ask is whether his "PR war" is justified. The EPA (under Clinton) and APVMA (Australia's equivalent) decided there was no evidence atrazine was harmful, and several studies failed to reproduce his results.
So, the flipside of that question is: what should companies do against persistent but scientifically baseless attacks? Almost anything they can do can be twisted around to make them look even more manipulative and guilty.
Of course, you are 'free' to act otherwise, but then if that was practiced by the majority, capitalism would collapse. Because it is an economic system which capitalizes on the vices you mentioned.
Sorry, but that's complete bullshit. Capitalism (by which I mean free market economies with free movement of capital) is value neutral, it just efficiently supplies what people want, whether it's diet products, bloody movies, hookers, space travel, or a clean environment. Capitalism won't "collapse" if people all of a sudden reduce their consumption or start investing in socially more valuable pursuits. Capitalism is holding up a mirror to society, and you apparently don't like what you see.
Personally I think, not only are you wrongly blaming the engine for where the driver is taking the car, you also underestimate how vicious, intolerant, selfish, and greedy people used to be; our society has become much better over the last century. And the more free market a society has been, the more progress it has made on social and environmental issues.
At the very least, obsessing with your health makes you buy a shitload of diet complements and fantasize that all the problems caused to your body by stress will be relieved, leaving you free to enjoy life. I'm not the one to be held accountable for the inherent capitalism contradictions.
There is no "contradiction". Liberty means you have the freedom to make poor choices, and the wealth created by capitalism means you can indulge in those poor choices. But the poor choices you make are yours, nobody else's. Capitalism and advertising don't force you to make poor choices.
In fact, if you really "obsess with your health", you don't buy any of that crap, you buy the cheap and healthy foods that cost less than ever before, and you save tons of money too.
but it would be missing the elephant in the room if you denied that also capitalism forces you to be productive
Capitalism doesn't force you to do anything. You can work half time on some low-end job and still live better than most of the rest of the world, or the way most people did a century ago. The reason you feel "forced" is because of greed, gluttony, and envy.
where in the other case you are pointed to the cheese in the mousetrap, which is the wealth that one person out of 1000 achieves through capitalism
That's not being "forced", that is simply you giving in to your greed. Greed, envy, gluttony, and all those other vices were recognized human failings long before capitalism even existed. Again, if you give in to your vices and bad impulses, capitalism will carry you all the way to hell in a comfortable Lexus. Under less capable economic systems, you'd simply not have the option of indulging your vices, but that's hardly preferable.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any evidence of widespread brain damage? No. In fact, kids have been getting smarter and healthier for decades. This is another one of those "think of the children" scares by which people are trying to make a name for themselves and others latch onto them because it aligns with their political ideologies.
So? This scheme is being proposed for the US.
So?
In different words, you have a highly centralized, centrally controlled system in which the government determines merit and picks winners and losers. How nice for you. Do not want.
You say that as if it were a good thing.
Yes, and it suffers the consequences too.
Well, your education, such as it was, seems to have inculcated you with bigotry, prejudice, and ignorance.
People have actually looked at overall scientific literacy in the US, and it compares favorably to the EU (and the rest of the world):
https://www.sciencenews.org/bl...
Of course, it would be nice if scientific literacy were higher everywhere, including the US.
I don't see how that is true with respect to education. Student loans mean that you decide whether investing in your education is likely to yield a good return, you decide how hard you work for it, and you have to live with the consequences. Nobody else pays for that. That seems reasonable to me.
"Free" education or intergenerational transfers mean you can pick an unsuitable subject, slack off, and end up with a low-paying job, and others end up having to foot the bill for your poor choices. That's not right.
It's paying a lifetime tax of 3% that makes it unattractive.
Ah, well, you put your finger on it: education really has become all about prestige, instead of learning stuff.
And where is that currently the case? On Mars? In a distant galaxy? Because that sure as hell isn't the case in the US.
<sarcasm>That's a totally brilliant idea! That way, successful people are penalized for going to college, while slackers get a college education for free and then have to pay almost nothing back. What could possibly go wrong?</sarcasm>
I sort of like it, however: it would drive anybody with half a brain to avoid college and universities like the plague and instead go for unaccredited schools and vocational training. That is, it would motivate people to avoid the stamp of a college degree (since that costs a huge amount of money) and instead focus on actually learning something.
Really? So you're saying that if I have a hypothesis that I'm desperate to prove, I can just keep trying one data set after another until I find one for which I get a statistically significant result and that p-value doesn't need to be corrected? Think that through. In fact, I can even test completely different hypotheses each time, only one hypothesis applied to only one data set ever, and things still fail in the same way.
There is no correction that you can apply that makes p-values any more meaningful than they would be without correction. A p-value really simply is a convenient scale on which to report resarch results; a single high significance result by itself means little more than no result at all. You need many independent replications of an experiment, each with high significance p-value outcomes, in order to actually demonstrate a scientific hypothesis to be true.
We know how the physics of fusion works. What they are really trying to do now is design a cost-efficient device. That's an engineering task, not a task for physicists, and they don't seem to be very good at it.
If you look at this result, billions spent to achieve a neutron flux that theoretically contains slightly more energy than a theoretical number grabbed out of a hat, it's useless and a gigantic waste of money. They are as far away from energy production as ever.
You can't correct for multiple comparisons because you don't know about all the experiments other people have been doing; you'd have to to know that in order to do that correction properly. It's very hard even to count the number of comparisons you have been doing yourself, because it's not just the number of times you've run the test.
Nobody really "knows the subtle difference between the tests" because nobody really knows what the actual distribution of the data is. In addition, the same way people shop for statistical tests, they shop for experimental procedures, samples, and all other aspects of an experiment, until they get the result they want.
It's not a problem with being "fooled by statistics". If they applied the statistics wrong or made some other error, six sigma is no better than two sigma if there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions. (Not saying that there is anything wrong with the Higgs experiment.)
The only real protection against this sort of thing is to have many different research groups repeat an experiment independently and analyze it many different ways.
So you're saying that our government should continue to waste tax dollars on a public education system that is a "complete and utter joke" because, what, you lived frugally? What kind of moronic justification is that?
(Besides, I don't believe you; you have already shown yourself in other postings to be a complete idiot when it comes to money management.)
Actually, it's fairly average among Western nations; but don't let facts get in the way of a good rant. Even US public schools are fairly average in comparison to other nations.
So, what you consider "worthless" isn't actually "education" in the US, it's public education. And the logical approach is therefore to let more people choose private education, say via voucher programs. That's particularly important for those who, unlike you, can't afford to send their kids to private schools.
Yeah, as "transparent" as the EU and its swarms of diplomats and lobbyists. As "inclusive" as the UN, which is primarily composed of representatives of totalitarian regimes.
That's a smokescreen. Of course, European governments want to get their grubby hands on Internet functions and governance.
How is one related to the other? No matter what you think of NSA surveillance (and European nations seemed to like it as long as it was hush-hush), you can hardly accuse the US of not having maintained the Internet as a "fast engine for innovation".
No, that's not how it works. When a construction company's employees screw up, they get paid while fixing the screw-up. Often, even the construction company gets paid by the customer, unless they really screwed up badly and have to eat the cost.
Really, this is not about obligations, moral or legal, but about risk and insurance. Bugs and errors will happen, on any project. Someone needs to pay for them. Either the builder can pay for them out of their pocket, effectively providing insurance for y, but they are going to charge you more for the contract overall. Or, you can pay for them as they occur. Either way, if you want the project to go ahead, you pay for the bugs.
The only way you end up not paying for them is if the bugs or mistakes are due to gross negligence or if the builder misrepresented their qualifications; in that case, you may have to go to court to recover your money. But that doesn't apply in an employer/employee relationship, since presumably you know your employees pretty well.
Well, given that Russia copied much of its ideology and culture (such as it is) from Germany, German and Russian attitudes are sometimes difficult to distinguish. Both nations have a long history of totalitarianism, intolerance, and anti-Americanism. Both nations have middle classes born and bred to serve the state, while viewing business and trade with disdain. You sound like a typical representative.
Why should you care about "every little piece of shit"? Because if you leave that stuff to your elites, they will wreck your economies and eventually go on oppressing and killing their neighbors and their minorities, just like they have done time and time again.
Sure, that's why Democrats have both houses and Obama won by a landslide, right? Get real. The administration and Democrats have been screweing so badly that they even make idiot Bush look good. As an Independent, I think both parties are becoming increasingly irrelevant. In the future, I'll probably vote for whoever I think can produce the most gridlock in Washington, because the less either Republicans or Democrats do, the better.
What do pensions have to do with consumer protection?
And, FWIW, Germany's mandatory annuity-based system screws people in a major way.
You mean customers getting screwed by companies? Excessively high prices (including for insurance), high penalties for switching or terminating contracts, price fixing, barriers to entry, etc. Of course you don't see it: it would be politically unpopular to make it obvious, but it's there.
Yes, you put your finger on it: free markets require people to think and make informed decisions; informed buyers in a free market is what keeps companies honest. People like you find that uncomfortable and don't like think, you don't like to do your part to keep society going, you just rather leave that to the experts.
There's nothing wrong with people like you choosing to live like zoo animals in well-tended cages. I think it's great that people like you have places like Germany and Massachusetts to move to. Just don't try to impose your preferences on the entire US (which is what Democrats have been trying to do).
You're absolutely right. And scientific debate continues by scientists reproducing experiments and contributing more and more scientific results. That's what proved Galileo right, and what failed to happen in Hayes' case. Instead, Hayes hung up his scientific hat and became an activist, and that is not part of "scientific debate".
I'm sorry you don't understand the difference, "friend".
But the effect is that one group of customers shafts another, and often that companies can shaft their customers even more, both of which happens with abandon in Europe.
It's not clear that this is "consumer protection". If the resales actually lower a company's profits, they are going to raise prices to make up for it. In essence, the EU is forcing some group of users to subsidize another group of users. The same is true for a lot of these other "consumer protection laws".
No, actually I can't see a more appropriate response. After the EPA and other agencies looked at his data and rejected it, the scientific debate was over. If Hayes wanted to make more contributions as a scientist, the only way to do it would have been to produce more scientific results.
Instead of producing more scientificdata to convince others, Hayes apparently went on a personal crusade and PR campaign. At that point, Hayes ceased to be a scientist and started being an activist without sufficient scientific data to back up his claims. At that point, his character and motivations became valid issues; he might well have had a financial motive for hurting the company, or a personality problem.
It's not a pretty situation, and the company could probably have handled it better. But it doesn't fit the narrative of innocent scientist being hounded by big, bad company. This is not a "corporate war against a scientist".
Perhaps the first question to ask is whether his "PR war" is justified. The EPA (under Clinton) and APVMA (Australia's equivalent) decided there was no evidence atrazine was harmful, and several studies failed to reproduce his results.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
So, the flipside of that question is: what should companies do against persistent but scientifically baseless attacks? Almost anything they can do can be twisted around to make them look even more manipulative and guilty.
Sorry, but that's complete bullshit. Capitalism (by which I mean free market economies with free movement of capital) is value neutral, it just efficiently supplies what people want, whether it's diet products, bloody movies, hookers, space travel, or a clean environment. Capitalism won't "collapse" if people all of a sudden reduce their consumption or start investing in socially more valuable pursuits. Capitalism is holding up a mirror to society, and you apparently don't like what you see.
Personally I think, not only are you wrongly blaming the engine for where the driver is taking the car, you also underestimate how vicious, intolerant, selfish, and greedy people used to be; our society has become much better over the last century. And the more free market a society has been, the more progress it has made on social and environmental issues.
There is no "contradiction". Liberty means you have the freedom to make poor choices, and the wealth created by capitalism means you can indulge in those poor choices. But the poor choices you make are yours, nobody else's. Capitalism and advertising don't force you to make poor choices.
In fact, if you really "obsess with your health", you don't buy any of that crap, you buy the cheap and healthy foods that cost less than ever before, and you save tons of money too.
Capitalism doesn't force you to do anything. You can work half time on some low-end job and still live better than most of the rest of the world, or the way most people did a century ago. The reason you feel "forced" is because of greed, gluttony, and envy.
That's not being "forced", that is simply you giving in to your greed. Greed, envy, gluttony, and all those other vices were recognized human failings long before capitalism even existed. Again, if you give in to your vices and bad impulses, capitalism will carry you all the way to hell in a comfortable Lexus. Under less capable economic systems, you'd simply not have the option of indulging your vices, but that's hardly preferable.