There is no better return on investment than money spend educating children. None. You're talking about the future of this country, literally. If there is a problem then you fix the problem, you don't ignore it.
You of course assume that money is actually spent on educating children. Here's a news flash for you, it's not! Just like almost all other gov. spending that money goes to people who scratched someone else's back. Look at some of the school money that got cut from this bill. It was for a shrinking school district in MI, that has schools sitting empty already. Why build more schools in this area? Oh, to funnel money to some builder who probably gave you money in your election campaign.
Can that private school kick out the non-performing kids or the ones with poor discipline? I know a lot of teachers and after talking to them I've concluded that the single biggest problem in public education today is discipline (more like the lack of), and their options to deal with it.
My aunt works as a teacher in a private school making less money than a public school but she loves it. Every parent comes to parent-teacher meetings. She has next to zero classroom discipline issues because if the kid continues to be a problem he'll get booted out. The parents know this so they make sure it's not a problem.
The problem in public school is what do you do with the kids who just don't care and have parents who don't care. You can't really kick them out of school, but you don't want them in the classroom slowing down the other students. What do you do?
This is why I have all of my electronics go through a wall switch. TVs, amps, cable boxes, game systems, etc... all continue to draw power even when off. Flip the wall switch on your way out and you have a low-tech way to fight this problem.
The only downside is that the digital cable box takes a few minutes to start. Actually, come to think of it, it's more of an upside since I get tired of waiting and go do something more productive instead of watching TV.
I agree with you. The point I was making (perhaps poorly) is that repeated exposure to violence can have an affect not just on kids, but also on adults. It does affect everyone differently. The problem I have is the immediate response is that video game (or any other realistic fake) violence has no has no affect on anyone. In my mind to believe that is just as bad as thinking that games cause all of the violence out there.
To think that people are not affected by their environment at all is just as bad as thinking every violent act leads back to a video game.
To use your logic kids with abusive parents should never have any problems later in life if what they experience every day has no long lasting affect on them.
You're right, but have video games led to move violence? I think a bigger area to look at would be how do things like the huge popularity in MMA affect today's youth. Are people more likely to fight because they are watching so much realistic violence all the time? Or, are things like violent video games, MMA, etc... simply reflecting our current society where violence appears to be more prevalent than in the past?
Well it's easy to not have to fight when you have someone whose interests are mostly aligned with yours to do the fighting for you. Since we're talking about Canada we can use the hockey analogy of the enforcer (the US) to the rest of the team (Canada and much of the world).
Sheesh, kids these days. No one remembers the Cold War.
Bingo! Nearly every military issue prior to the USSR falling apart was the US fighting them either directly or through intermediaries. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but at the time we were fighting communism at all costs. It turns out that we won for the most part, but now without a large power on the other side of the world laying down the regular smack down all the little dictators now have more relative power.
For example our bases in Japan are there for defensive purposes and were used for reconstruction of Japan after the war, same with Germany.
Also, at the time our bases were put in Japan it was in order to keep China happy. At the time everyone in the region was terrified of a Japan with a large military. In order to have Japan not rebuild a significant military we had to promise to defend them. This in turn kept China mostly happy.
The other option was to make Japan a state. Something the US rarely has done after defeating someone in a war. In fact the US generally goes out of it's way to give the country back to the people.
This is older, but it often is what people refer to when saying money isn't the issue. DC schools spend more out of any other school district on a per student basis and they are known as one of the worst districts in the nation.
And my personal opinion on how to fix schools? Bring discipline back plain and simple.
So you think the DOW is going to 4k? I'm fairly pessimistic, but now you're talking about it going all the way back to '94/'95 levels. Why not just say it's going to zero? It's similar to the media going nuts about unemployment. I agree it's bad, but instead of pointing to 10%-15% of people who aren't working think about the much larger % who are working. We are almost in the exact opposite of the real estate bubble right now. I hear the same amount of fear now than of greed I heard then. You can have a bubble down just as easily as you can have a bubble up.
The reality is that the world is printing money like it's going out of style. When the economic environment turns (and it will) inflation is likely to hit very hard. Commodities will run up the most, but equities will go up with the inflation also.
I think you're mostly right on. A recovery will happen eventually and those that are buying stock right now will see returns. What I wouldn't do is dump my life savings into stocks since the market may go down father before finally recovering, but you're idea of simply upping your 401k deduction is a good one.
With free market rates and without FRB the housing bubble would never have come to pass
You're point still stands, but you can't leave out FNM and FRE out of the causes of this problem. When the gov. started implicitly backing all home mortgages they set up the situation where loans would be written to people who had no chance to ever pay them. This led to artificially low rates and people discounting risk (the gov. will save us!).
According to experts 30 years ago, the was simply no way we could produce enough food for 5 billion people. Now we're doing it for 7.
Not to nitpick, but there still are some starving people in the world. Although it could be argued that we have plenty of food to feed everyone and it's more of a logistical (err...random dictator) problem.
There is no reason to RTFA. It's easy to tell from the headline that it's a stupid law. If someone wants to take a picture without being noticed having a cell phone camera make a noise isn't going to change anything. This is a complete waste of government time and energy.
Why in the hell is so damned many PC users not bothering to patch their stupid machines?
For the home user you're correct. In the corporate world it's not that simple. If you're managing say 20k machines with a mix of XP Pro -> Vista workstations and win2k->2003 server, then you have a mix of mission critical applications (some custom, some off the shelf), and add in that new security patches are being released all the time it's not that simple to stay up to date. You're bound to have some lag between a hole getting patched and it getting rolled out to every machine you have on your network.
I do agree that corporate networks should have policies in place to do emergency patch rollouts when a threat like this exposes itself.
Having managed quite a few servers I have found that turning on automatic updates doesn't always work. Either it misses updates or just never does the automatic install no matter how many times you pick a time and tell it to.
I guess every company is different because the first thing mine did was cut all contractors mainly because it's an easy thing to do and save some money. The next thing they did was cut some of the cruft that had built up over the boom and multiple acquisitions. We're running pretty lean now and may hire a couple people for certain teams.
In fact it does. Sony is a bit different in that they don't just rely upon unique ideas to drive their business. They are happy making the $50 DVD player (an old idea at this point) and making small margins on it.
MS is also very much an idea company, but their ideas are (generally) expected to be more boring or mundane than Apples. They also have a crap load of products and services at this point so that even if one of their prime movers was to leave the company it would hopefully not destroy other parts.
So Apple just manufactures iPods? Actually it's quite the opposite, they don't do any of their own hardware manufacturing and instead come up with the ideas for hardware and farm out their creations to 3rd parties often in China.
I fail to see how information regarding a person's health can in any way be construed as belonging in the public domain. Health care and issues relating to such are about as private as personal information can be. Saying that the stock holder's have a right to know about Steve Jobs' most personal/private happenings is absurd to say the least.
Apple is an idea company. Its worth is directly tied to the people who work there. Imagine if you were thinking about investing in a football team. Wouldn't you want to know if the star QB was about to leave because of a known illness? I agree that the particular illness doesn't need to be shared, but the fact that he is ill and may have to leave the company is crucial in your decision to invest or not. This is why SJs health, or lack thereof, is important to investors.
If he holds to that he can't possibly continue the war on drugs. But I'm not too optimistic, there's still way to many people who can't differentiate opposition to the war on drugs from support for drugs.
LOL, the war on drugs is effective at employing hundreds of thousands of people and spending millions of dollars. It's very effective at its true goals.
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You of course assume that money is actually spent on educating children. Here's a news flash for you, it's not! Just like almost all other gov. spending that money goes to people who scratched someone else's back. Look at some of the school money that got cut from this bill. It was for a shrinking school district in MI, that has schools sitting empty already. Why build more schools in this area? Oh, to funnel money to some builder who probably gave you money in your election campaign.
Can that private school kick out the non-performing kids or the ones with poor discipline? I know a lot of teachers and after talking to them I've concluded that the single biggest problem in public education today is discipline (more like the lack of), and their options to deal with it.
My aunt works as a teacher in a private school making less money than a public school but she loves it. Every parent comes to parent-teacher meetings. She has next to zero classroom discipline issues because if the kid continues to be a problem he'll get booted out. The parents know this so they make sure it's not a problem.
The problem in public school is what do you do with the kids who just don't care and have parents who don't care. You can't really kick them out of school, but you don't want them in the classroom slowing down the other students. What do you do?
This is why I have all of my electronics go through a wall switch. TVs, amps, cable boxes, game systems, etc... all continue to draw power even when off. Flip the wall switch on your way out and you have a low-tech way to fight this problem.
The only downside is that the digital cable box takes a few minutes to start. Actually, come to think of it, it's more of an upside since I get tired of waiting and go do something more productive instead of watching TV.
I agree with you. The point I was making (perhaps poorly) is that repeated exposure to violence can have an affect not just on kids, but also on adults. It does affect everyone differently. The problem I have is the immediate response is that video game (or any other realistic fake) violence has no has no affect on anyone. In my mind to believe that is just as bad as thinking that games cause all of the violence out there.
No, but to think that people (not just kids) aren't affected by the stuff they experience in their daily environment is just as short-sighted.
It's probably had a hand in teenage obesity.
To think that people are not affected by their environment at all is just as bad as thinking every violent act leads back to a video game.
To use your logic kids with abusive parents should never have any problems later in life if what they experience every day has no long lasting affect on them.
You're right, but have video games led to move violence? I think a bigger area to look at would be how do things like the huge popularity in MMA affect today's youth. Are people more likely to fight because they are watching so much realistic violence all the time? Or, are things like violent video games, MMA, etc... simply reflecting our current society where violence appears to be more prevalent than in the past?
Well it's easy to not have to fight when you have someone whose interests are mostly aligned with yours to do the fighting for you. Since we're talking about Canada we can use the hockey analogy of the enforcer (the US) to the rest of the team (Canada and much of the world).
Bingo! Nearly every military issue prior to the USSR falling apart was the US fighting them either directly or through intermediaries. Of course hindsight is 20/20, but at the time we were fighting communism at all costs. It turns out that we won for the most part, but now without a large power on the other side of the world laying down the regular smack down all the little dictators now have more relative power.
Also, at the time our bases were put in Japan it was in order to keep China happy. At the time everyone in the region was terrified of a Japan with a large military. In order to have Japan not rebuild a significant military we had to promise to defend them. This in turn kept China mostly happy.
The other option was to make Japan a state. Something the US rarely has done after defeating someone in a war. In fact the US generally goes out of it's way to give the country back to the people.
This is older, but it often is what people refer to when saying money isn't the issue. DC schools spend more out of any other school district on a per student basis and they are known as one of the worst districts in the nation.
And my personal opinion on how to fix schools? Bring discipline back plain and simple.
My local coffee shop closed down you insensitive clod!
So you think the DOW is going to 4k? I'm fairly pessimistic, but now you're talking about it going all the way back to '94/'95 levels. Why not just say it's going to zero? It's similar to the media going nuts about unemployment. I agree it's bad, but instead of pointing to 10%-15% of people who aren't working think about the much larger % who are working. We are almost in the exact opposite of the real estate bubble right now. I hear the same amount of fear now than of greed I heard then. You can have a bubble down just as easily as you can have a bubble up.
The reality is that the world is printing money like it's going out of style. When the economic environment turns (and it will) inflation is likely to hit very hard. Commodities will run up the most, but equities will go up with the inflation also.
I think you're mostly right on. A recovery will happen eventually and those that are buying stock right now will see returns. What I wouldn't do is dump my life savings into stocks since the market may go down father before finally recovering, but you're idea of simply upping your 401k deduction is a good one.
You're point still stands, but you can't leave out FNM and FRE out of the causes of this problem. When the gov. started implicitly backing all home mortgages they set up the situation where loans would be written to people who had no chance to ever pay them. This led to artificially low rates and people discounting risk (the gov. will save us!).
Not to nitpick, but there still are some starving people in the world. Although it could be argued that we have plenty of food to feed everyone and it's more of a logistical (err...random dictator) problem.
There is no reason to RTFA. It's easy to tell from the headline that it's a stupid law. If someone wants to take a picture without being noticed having a cell phone camera make a noise isn't going to change anything. This is a complete waste of government time and energy.
For the home user you're correct. In the corporate world it's not that simple. If you're managing say 20k machines with a mix of XP Pro -> Vista workstations and win2k->2003 server, then you have a mix of mission critical applications (some custom, some off the shelf), and add in that new security patches are being released all the time it's not that simple to stay up to date. You're bound to have some lag between a hole getting patched and it getting rolled out to every machine you have on your network.
I do agree that corporate networks should have policies in place to do emergency patch rollouts when a threat like this exposes itself.
Having managed quite a few servers I have found that turning on automatic updates doesn't always work. Either it misses updates or just never does the automatic install no matter how many times you pick a time and tell it to.
I guess every company is different because the first thing mine did was cut all contractors mainly because it's an easy thing to do and save some money. The next thing they did was cut some of the cruft that had built up over the boom and multiple acquisitions. We're running pretty lean now and may hire a couple people for certain teams.
In fact it does. Sony is a bit different in that they don't just rely upon unique ideas to drive their business. They are happy making the $50 DVD player (an old idea at this point) and making small margins on it.
MS is also very much an idea company, but their ideas are (generally) expected to be more boring or mundane than Apples. They also have a crap load of products and services at this point so that even if one of their prime movers was to leave the company it would hopefully not destroy other parts.
So Apple just manufactures iPods? Actually it's quite the opposite, they don't do any of their own hardware manufacturing and instead come up with the ideas for hardware and farm out their creations to 3rd parties often in China.
Software is simply the expression of an idea.
Apple is very much an idea company.
Apple is an idea company. Its worth is directly tied to the people who work there. Imagine if you were thinking about investing in a football team. Wouldn't you want to know if the star QB was about to leave because of a known illness? I agree that the particular illness doesn't need to be shared, but the fact that he is ill and may have to leave the company is crucial in your decision to invest or not. This is why SJs health, or lack thereof, is important to investors.
LOL, the war on drugs is effective at employing hundreds of thousands of people and spending millions of dollars. It's very effective at its true goals.
Many he'll put a ex-embezzler in charge of the TARP the same way he wants to put a tax evader in charge of the treasury (and thus the IRS).