OK. In 1980, when I was a kid, costs were $5,700/kid. Are the services and "% of population served" dramatically different now than when I grew up? Other than that I regularly had art, music, and PE classes and no one wanted to cut them?
Costs of educating exceed inflation
That was my entire point. Why are inflation-adjusted costs four times higher than they were at the start of that report?
You also might want to include how much the property values have gone up, as well as the local property tax rates. All that is the BARE MINIMUM you need to start doing an honest comparison.
My property tax rates have gone up more than 50% in the last decade. As my valuation has increased, my tax bill has risen dramatically.
I don't know where you live, but in many place the property tax has not risen much, and in a lot of places it's lower now.
I know there was a drop due to the housing bubble, but I can't believe that the actually rates are lower than they were a decade ago.
A classroom is much smaller than my house. I pay on the order of $3,000 per year in utilities (and my house doesn't sit empty in the summer when cooling is most expensive). A $10/hr janitor could easily clean a classroom in less than an hour per day, or less than $2,000 per year. My total Internet connection (which is better than my kid's school's) is under $1,000 per year. And as my house is stand-alone, it doesn't get to share costs with neighboring building.
I guess my final argument is that my older kids go to a private school where the total expenditure (not tuition; expenditure) per student is $5,010. That school's test scores are excellent (and even the special needs kids seem to thrive), they have great after-school activities (my kids are in sports and band), a brand-new building in mint condition, and a computer lab stuffed with Macs. I'm not sure why that private school can afford first-place amenities at less than half the national average cost, but they do and we're glad for it.
Thank the Republicans and the TEA Party. Taxes are the lowest they have been since the 50s on the upper classes, but these people have been fighting tooth and nail to cut budgets even further.
Of course, you know that schools are almost entirely paid for by state and local taxes. According to the wiki:
The federal government supplies around 8.5% of the public school system funds, according to a 2005 report by the National Center for Education Statistics.
As a homeowner, I guaran-fucking-tee that the property taxes which provide the majority of school funding are not the lowest they've been since, well, ever, either in terms of rates or revenue. Meanwhile, the Department of Education says that per-pupil expenditures have increased from $2,808 in 1961 to $10,441 in 2007, adjusted for inflation. If the Republicans' nefarious goal is to cut budgets, they've done a shitty job of it.
Not only that, but how much extra will it cost parents who need to pay for care for younger children who would otherwise be in school. We know some parents like to treat schools as babysitters, but in any case, now they will really need one. Guess they maybe shouldn't have complained about a slight tax increase to pay for their kids education.
Dude, you so nailed it. My school district decided that teachers needed more time during the week for training, so they changed the school schedule. Now class lets out at 3:15, except for Tuesdays when it lets out at 2:00. I can't tell you how happy I am to have to leave work early in the middle of the week.
I know teachers aren't babysitters, but in a very tangible way the school systems themselves are. The law says parents have to take their kids there at set times every weekday, and that leads to things like employers scheduling shifts around school hours. I know lots of couples who arrange their work schedules so that one parent drops their kid off on the way to work, then the other parent picks the kid up on their way home. So now that everyone's calendar is designed around this government-imposed schedule, they change it on a whim and then get pissy when parents complain about the new inconvenience?
Want to really cut costs? Fire half the administrators. The Dept. of Education says average per-pupil spending is over $10,000, and average class size is 20 pupils. If you can't run a school for $200,000 per classroom - while giving teachers the good salaries they've earned - then you're incompetent and shouldn't be running it.
In fairness, you did say "no evangelicals are really young-Earth types" and that's the generalization I was replying to. I was blissfully ignorant of the idea that anyone really believed that science supports a young Earth.
But I think it's you who doesn't understand. There's no contradiction between their beliefs and behavior, because there's always a loophole in their beliefs - "God made it that way" - that lets them shrug and go back to reaping the practical benefits of scientific discovery.
OK, you and I both know that's silly and a pretty vacuous position to take. It doesn't offer any meaningful insight into why things are the way the are; it just hand-waves away any unexpected observations as irrelevant. But it does allow them to retain beliefs in absurd ideas without making them hypocrites. Woefully misinformed, sure, but not internally inconsistent.
Darned if I know. And please not that I'm not defending the Young Earth position, which I utterly disagree with. It's just that the OP stated that young earthers couldn't possibly believe their own story because of the demonstrable scientific problems with it, and my point is that those same people would wave away those inconsistencies by saying "God made it that way". It wouldn't shatter their faith so much as demonstrate (to them only) that God sometimes has inscrutable reasons for doing things the way he does.
I have no idea how to talk them out of their beliefs. Not a clue. But I do know that showing them scientific evidence against their positions won't work at all because their faith framework allows God to do whatever random thing he wants. As I said: it's unfalsifiable.
For Christianity specifically, Jesus references a literal Noah
No, he didn't. Or at least, your reference doesn't prove that he did. The quoted verse says:
For [a]the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark,
While he namechecks Noah he could have just as easily been referring to pop culture of the time. Suppose he'd said:
For [a]the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Jack Sparrow. For as in those days before the battle, there were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day the Black Pearl returned,
Had he said the latter, he'd be making a reference to a popular story that the majority of the audience would be likely to understand. That doesn't mean that he's endorsing the literal existence of the characters. It just means he's a good teacher.
"God works in mysterious ways. We don't know why He put the oil deposits where He did, but He must have had a reason so we'll go along with it."
Your logic is inadequate for debunking their beliefs because you're attempting to falsify something that's unfalsifiable. No young-earther is going to say, "know what, he's right! That demonstrates that oil came to be through a natural process!" because they believe that it's entirely within God's abilities and prerogatives to make it look however he wants to.
Basically, you're trying to use science to disprove an unscientific opinion. That's not an appropriate tool in this particular argument.
It is parents like yourself who do not raise their kids to have respect, that are a problem.
Respect what, exactly? I get along great with my kids' teachers. On the few occasions when my kids have done something boneheaded, their teachers have emailed me and I addressed the problem at home. It's a two-way street, though: I respect those teachers because they deserve it (which is the default setting for teachers until proven otherwise).
In contrast, my oldest had a terrible teacher when she graduated from one school and started in another. I'll skip the details, but the essence was that my daughter was expected to sit quietly in class when she finished one subject until it was time to start the next. If she did her math assignment in 5 minutes, she was required to sit still at her desk for the rest of the allotted hour. She wasn't allowed to read a book ("it's not reading time!"). She wasn't allowed to work ahead ("we're on page 23, not 37. Stay on page 23!"). She was held in at recess once for "looking bored in class" (swear to God - those were the teacher's words to me). I didn't respect that teacher or expect my daughter to, and I told everyone involved why. That loserish babysitter didn't deserve respect beyond the minimal "I have authority in this room so you have to obey me while you're in it" level.
I respect people who deserve it. I don't respect people who don't. And I'm not going to tell my kids to give respect to authorities simply because they're authorities.
PS: Save the inevitable Slashdot "we only have your side of the story!" speech for someone who cares. The story happened as I told it, and if you don't believe me, don't waste your breath telling me why. We transferred her to another school after one quarter in the crappy one, and she's been on the honor roll for seven quarters straight and was given an award for being the best reader in the school for all of last year. She's a good kid who had a martinet of a disaffected teacher and we fixed the problem.
as if being friends in real life was an impossibility, forget facebook the human race survived for millions of years before the internet came along so you can survive and communicate with your friends without facebook too
Yes, you are being uber lame. Why edit stuff on Github when I just drive to the author's house, take a look at what he's working on, and suggest changes in person?
In the real world, my wife texted me to ask me to pick something up at the store on my way home. In what way is that morally inferior to a phone call?
And finally, why are you posting to a bulletin on the Internet instead of finding a topical corkboard in your local college student union and conducting a lively debate on it there?
You were the kind of person we used to hate when I was in the hardware business; you'd 'rent' our hardware from the store, then return it and we'd then have to QA it again and sell it as a refurbished product.
Were the subject any other retailer, I'd say it was despicable. But Best Buy? I figure they deserve pretty much whatever happens to them. Maybe I'd feel different if members of my immediate family hadn't bought expensive new-in-box electronics from them, then got them home to find that they were quite used and banged up.
As soon as Best Buy loses its reputation for shady practices, borderline-retarded and flat out lying salespeople, and treating paid customers like shoplifters by attempting [*] to search sacks of purchased goods as people leave, maybe I'll be bothered to care what scams people [**] pull off against them. Until then, meh.
[*] Boy, they get pissy when you decline their "offer" to search your stuff.
[**] No, not me. I've happily avoided them altogether for over a decade. I wouldn't do those things because it's against my principals. I don't mind if you do, though, for much the same reason I wouldn't care if a pimp beat up a pickpocket.
That was Bill Gates saying that piracy is good for Microsoft, submitted as supporting evidence to iONiUM's argument that piracy is good for Microsoft. That seems pretty topical to me.
How would you do that? Sit down with a pile of applications and rate them on a scale from 1 to 100?
Out of curiosity... why not? Why couldn't you strip all identifying information from the applications and have a panel review them for the sole purpose of evaluating them, then compare the result?
I can see the need for grant committees to know who submitted applications - if one of Hawking's postdocs wanted money to work on some cosmology stuff, they might put it to better use than a kid from the local junior college - but surely you could do a blind assessment for research-only purposes.
Evolution, and breeding. We don't all have the same ancestry. For everyone who wants to cry "racism!" so quickly, is it not at least a little bit possible that Neanderthals were better at some things than Homo sapiens sapiens (and worse at others) and that a tiny bit of that carried forward to their descendants? Why is it OK to not be surprised that a Kenyan wins a marathon if all racial heritages are supposed to be identically capable in every respect?
I do take exception to your characterization of spear-throwing Native Americans, though. Firearms didn't make it from China to the Middle East and Europe until the 1300s or so. Columbus landed just over 100 years later. You can't really characterize the Native Americans as technologically backward for not having an invention that Europe had only acquired a century earlier. And as someone who visited Little Big Horn last week, I can assure you that they made up for lost time.
If AT&T's texting wasn't so butt-rapingly expensive, iPhones wouldn't have about 100 free texting applications. I used TextFree for a while (and still have it on the kids' iPods). Twitter replaced texting for a lot of my friends. Most recently I've started using Google Plus "huddles" for several people.
I'm on Verizon but benefit from AT&T's shortsightedness. Thanks, Ma Bell, for getting developers to come up with a bunch of solutions that work better (for free!) than your crappy service. I know that a lot of people don't have smartphones yet, but that problem will fix itself over time.
IIRC, forms will not collect, so incompetent programmers that put properties on their forms can come later and get those properties from the form after it is closed, other things like that
If an object is still in scope and referenced such that you can still access its properties, then there's no way it can be collected anyway.
Ah, I see the problem: you're a Windows programmer. You must be. No other platform cares nearly so much about whether a file is closed before allowing another process to open it. Yes, it's good practice to close files when you're done with them. No, there's no practical difference on most systems if you don't. In general, the worst that can happen is that you'll create an enormous, partition-filling file that the filesystem can't unlink because you still have an open handle to it.
That's assuming you're not still actively writing to a file, but if you're at the point in your program where the file could be closed anyway, that's not likely to be an issue.
Finally, Python lets you write code like this:
with open('foo.txt') as inputfile: process(inputfile)
which explicitly garbage-collects inputfile as soon as it falls out of scope. If you use that pattern you'll never need to close the file (and it would in fact be a pretty dumb thing to do).
When it comes to my elections what I care about is accuracy, reliability, verifiability. The paper method works because everything is done by hand, so there a no/few glitches. It reliable because, well paper is ancient. And finally it is verifiable because there exists a paper trail, which allows recount if there is a dispute.
So combine the two. Well, the electronic portion anyway - the on-line part seems positively insane. Use a computer interface at the poll booth that prints a perfectly-marked, easily-scannable paper ballot as the last step and ask votes to verify that the ballot has their intended candidates marked. At the same time, save the electronic results to a database for quick tabulation to satisfy voters' desire to have an idea of the winner 30 seconds after the polls close. Keep the paper ballots as the official results and hand-count them through whatever traditional way you prefer.
Advantages: you still get quick, likely-accurate results but retain auditing abilities, and the auditable ballots are clear and distinct (no interpreting which circle a voted meant to fill in. No erasure marks. No stray pencil marks. No "hanging chads".
Slashdot Mirror
OK. In 1980, when I was a kid, costs were $5,700/kid. Are the services and "% of population served" dramatically different now than when I grew up? Other than that I regularly had art, music, and PE classes and no one wanted to cut them?
Costs of educating exceed inflation
That was my entire point. Why are inflation-adjusted costs four times higher than they were at the start of that report?
You also might want to include how much the property values have gone up, as well as the local property tax rates. All that is the BARE MINIMUM you need to start doing an honest comparison.
My property tax rates have gone up more than 50% in the last decade. As my valuation has increased, my tax bill has risen dramatically.
I don't know where you live, but in many place the property tax has not risen much, and in a lot of places it's lower now.
I know there was a drop due to the housing bubble, but I can't believe that the actually rates are lower than they were a decade ago.
A classroom is much smaller than my house. I pay on the order of $3,000 per year in utilities (and my house doesn't sit empty in the summer when cooling is most expensive). A $10/hr janitor could easily clean a classroom in less than an hour per day, or less than $2,000 per year. My total Internet connection (which is better than my kid's school's) is under $1,000 per year. And as my house is stand-alone, it doesn't get to share costs with neighboring building.
I guess my final argument is that my older kids go to a private school where the total expenditure (not tuition; expenditure) per student is $5,010. That school's test scores are excellent (and even the special needs kids seem to thrive), they have great after-school activities (my kids are in sports and band), a brand-new building in mint condition, and a computer lab stuffed with Macs. I'm not sure why that private school can afford first-place amenities at less than half the national average cost, but they do and we're glad for it.
Thank the Republicans and the TEA Party. Taxes are the lowest they have been since the 50s on the upper classes, but these people have been fighting tooth and nail to cut budgets even further.
Of course, you know that schools are almost entirely paid for by state and local taxes. According to the wiki:
As a homeowner, I guaran-fucking-tee that the property taxes which provide the majority of school funding are not the lowest they've been since, well, ever, either in terms of rates or revenue. Meanwhile, the Department of Education says that per-pupil expenditures have increased from $2,808 in 1961 to $10,441 in 2007, adjusted for inflation. If the Republicans' nefarious goal is to cut budgets, they've done a shitty job of it.
Not only that, but how much extra will it cost parents who need to pay for care for younger children who would otherwise be in school. We know some parents like to treat schools as babysitters, but in any case, now they will really need one. Guess they maybe shouldn't have complained about a slight tax increase to pay for their kids education.
Dude, you so nailed it. My school district decided that teachers needed more time during the week for training, so they changed the school schedule. Now class lets out at 3:15, except for Tuesdays when it lets out at 2:00. I can't tell you how happy I am to have to leave work early in the middle of the week.
I know teachers aren't babysitters, but in a very tangible way the school systems themselves are. The law says parents have to take their kids there at set times every weekday, and that leads to things like employers scheduling shifts around school hours. I know lots of couples who arrange their work schedules so that one parent drops their kid off on the way to work, then the other parent picks the kid up on their way home. So now that everyone's calendar is designed around this government-imposed schedule, they change it on a whim and then get pissy when parents complain about the new inconvenience?
Want to really cut costs? Fire half the administrators. The Dept. of Education says average per-pupil spending is over $10,000, and average class size is 20 pupils. If you can't run a school for $200,000 per classroom - while giving teachers the good salaries they've earned - then you're incompetent and shouldn't be running it.
Dear God.
In fairness, you did say "no evangelicals are really young-Earth types" and that's the generalization I was replying to. I was blissfully ignorant of the idea that anyone really believed that science supports a young Earth.
But I think it's you who doesn't understand. There's no contradiction between their beliefs and behavior, because there's always a loophole in their beliefs - "God made it that way" - that lets them shrug and go back to reaping the practical benefits of scientific discovery.
OK, you and I both know that's silly and a pretty vacuous position to take. It doesn't offer any meaningful insight into why things are the way the are; it just hand-waves away any unexpected observations as irrelevant. But it does allow them to retain beliefs in absurd ideas without making them hypocrites. Woefully misinformed, sure, but not internally inconsistent.
Darned if I know. And please not that I'm not defending the Young Earth position, which I utterly disagree with. It's just that the OP stated that young earthers couldn't possibly believe their own story because of the demonstrable scientific problems with it, and my point is that those same people would wave away those inconsistencies by saying "God made it that way". It wouldn't shatter their faith so much as demonstrate (to them only) that God sometimes has inscrutable reasons for doing things the way he does.
I have no idea how to talk them out of their beliefs. Not a clue. But I do know that showing them scientific evidence against their positions won't work at all because their faith framework allows God to do whatever random thing he wants. As I said: it's unfalsifiable.
For Christianity specifically, Jesus references a literal Noah
No, he didn't. Or at least, your reference doesn't prove that he did. The quoted verse says:
While he namechecks Noah he could have just as easily been referring to pop culture of the time. Suppose he'd said:
Had he said the latter, he'd be making a reference to a popular story that the majority of the audience would be likely to understand. That doesn't mean that he's endorsing the literal existence of the characters. It just means he's a good teacher.
"God works in mysterious ways. We don't know why He put the oil deposits where He did, but He must have had a reason so we'll go along with it."
Your logic is inadequate for debunking their beliefs because you're attempting to falsify something that's unfalsifiable. No young-earther is going to say, "know what, he's right! That demonstrates that oil came to be through a natural process!" because they believe that it's entirely within God's abilities and prerogatives to make it look however he wants to.
Basically, you're trying to use science to disprove an unscientific opinion. That's not an appropriate tool in this particular argument.
Oh, I just knew someone was going to jump on the "unique snowflake" bandwagon demonstrated elsewhere in these comments. :-D
Everyone should be using mysql_real_crypt by now.
It is parents like yourself who do not raise their kids to have respect, that are a problem.
Respect what, exactly? I get along great with my kids' teachers. On the few occasions when my kids have done something boneheaded, their teachers have emailed me and I addressed the problem at home. It's a two-way street, though: I respect those teachers because they deserve it (which is the default setting for teachers until proven otherwise).
In contrast, my oldest had a terrible teacher when she graduated from one school and started in another. I'll skip the details, but the essence was that my daughter was expected to sit quietly in class when she finished one subject until it was time to start the next. If she did her math assignment in 5 minutes, she was required to sit still at her desk for the rest of the allotted hour. She wasn't allowed to read a book ("it's not reading time!"). She wasn't allowed to work ahead ("we're on page 23, not 37. Stay on page 23!"). She was held in at recess once for "looking bored in class" (swear to God - those were the teacher's words to me). I didn't respect that teacher or expect my daughter to, and I told everyone involved why. That loserish babysitter didn't deserve respect beyond the minimal "I have authority in this room so you have to obey me while you're in it" level.
I respect people who deserve it. I don't respect people who don't. And I'm not going to tell my kids to give respect to authorities simply because they're authorities.
PS: Save the inevitable Slashdot "we only have your side of the story!" speech for someone who cares. The story happened as I told it, and if you don't believe me, don't waste your breath telling me why. We transferred her to another school after one quarter in the crappy one, and she's been on the honor roll for seven quarters straight and was given an award for being the best reader in the school for all of last year. She's a good kid who had a martinet of a disaffected teacher and we fixed the problem.
That was careless. You'd think people would pay more attention to their fossils.
as if being friends in real life was an impossibility, forget facebook the human race survived for millions of years before the internet came along so you can survive and communicate with your friends without facebook too
Yes, you are being uber lame. Why edit stuff on Github when I just drive to the author's house, take a look at what he's working on, and suggest changes in person?
In the real world, my wife texted me to ask me to pick something up at the store on my way home. In what way is that morally inferior to a phone call?
And finally, why are you posting to a bulletin on the Internet instead of finding a topical corkboard in your local college student union and conducting a lively debate on it there?
You were the kind of person we used to hate when I was in the hardware business; you'd 'rent' our hardware from the store, then return it and we'd then have to QA it again and sell it as a refurbished product.
Were the subject any other retailer, I'd say it was despicable. But Best Buy? I figure they deserve pretty much whatever happens to them. Maybe I'd feel different if members of my immediate family hadn't bought expensive new-in-box electronics from them, then got them home to find that they were quite used and banged up.
As soon as Best Buy loses its reputation for shady practices, borderline-retarded and flat out lying salespeople, and treating paid customers like shoplifters by attempting [*] to search sacks of purchased goods as people leave, maybe I'll be bothered to care what scams people [**] pull off against them. Until then, meh.
[*] Boy, they get pissy when you decline their "offer" to search your stuff.
[**] No, not me. I've happily avoided them altogether for over a decade. I wouldn't do those things because it's against my principals. I don't mind if you do, though, for much the same reason I wouldn't care if a pimp beat up a pickpocket.
That was Bill Gates saying that piracy is good for Microsoft, submitted as supporting evidence to iONiUM's argument that piracy is good for Microsoft. That seems pretty topical to me.
How would you do that? Sit down with a pile of applications and rate them on a scale from 1 to 100?
Out of curiosity... why not? Why couldn't you strip all identifying information from the applications and have a panel review them for the sole purpose of evaluating them, then compare the result?
I can see the need for grant committees to know who submitted applications - if one of Hawking's postdocs wanted money to work on some cosmology stuff, they might put it to better use than a kid from the local junior college - but surely you could do a blind assessment for research-only purposes.
Look at race car drivers- almost no female drivers- yet there is no reason why women should not be as good as men
Except for the well-documented differences in depth perception, which is critical for things like judging when to brake before an upcoming turn.
Evolution, and breeding. We don't all have the same ancestry. For everyone who wants to cry "racism!" so quickly, is it not at least a little bit possible that Neanderthals were better at some things than Homo sapiens sapiens (and worse at others) and that a tiny bit of that carried forward to their descendants? Why is it OK to not be surprised that a Kenyan wins a marathon if all racial heritages are supposed to be identically capable in every respect?
I do take exception to your characterization of spear-throwing Native Americans, though. Firearms didn't make it from China to the Middle East and Europe until the 1300s or so. Columbus landed just over 100 years later. You can't really characterize the Native Americans as technologically backward for not having an invention that Europe had only acquired a century earlier. And as someone who visited Little Big Horn last week, I can assure you that they made up for lost time.
If AT&T's texting wasn't so butt-rapingly expensive, iPhones wouldn't have about 100 free texting applications. I used TextFree for a while (and still have it on the kids' iPods). Twitter replaced texting for a lot of my friends. Most recently I've started using Google Plus "huddles" for several people.
I'm on Verizon but benefit from AT&T's shortsightedness. Thanks, Ma Bell, for getting developers to come up with a bunch of solutions that work better (for free!) than your crappy service. I know that a lot of people don't have smartphones yet, but that problem will fix itself over time.
IIRC, forms will not collect, so incompetent programmers that put properties on their forms can come later and get those properties from the form after it is closed, other things like that
If an object is still in scope and referenced such that you can still access its properties, then there's no way it can be collected anyway.
"Gone With The Wind-er: The Revenge", Summer 2012.
Ah, I see the problem: you're a Windows programmer. You must be. No other platform cares nearly so much about whether a file is closed before allowing another process to open it. Yes, it's good practice to close files when you're done with them. No, there's no practical difference on most systems if you don't. In general, the worst that can happen is that you'll create an enormous, partition-filling file that the filesystem can't unlink because you still have an open handle to it.
That's assuming you're not still actively writing to a file, but if you're at the point in your program where the file could be closed anyway, that's not likely to be an issue.
Finally, Python lets you write code like this:
which explicitly garbage-collects inputfile as soon as it falls out of scope. If you use that pattern you'll never need to close the file (and it would in fact be a pretty dumb thing to do).
When it comes to my elections what I care about is accuracy, reliability, verifiability. The paper method works because everything is done by hand, so there a no/few glitches. It reliable because, well paper is ancient. And finally it is verifiable because there exists a paper trail, which allows recount if there is a dispute.
So combine the two. Well, the electronic portion anyway - the on-line part seems positively insane. Use a computer interface at the poll booth that prints a perfectly-marked, easily-scannable paper ballot as the last step and ask votes to verify that the ballot has their intended candidates marked. At the same time, save the electronic results to a database for quick tabulation to satisfy voters' desire to have an idea of the winner 30 seconds after the polls close. Keep the paper ballots as the official results and hand-count them through whatever traditional way you prefer.
Advantages: you still get quick, likely-accurate results but retain auditing abilities, and the auditable ballots are clear and distinct (no interpreting which circle a voted meant to fill in. No erasure marks. No stray pencil marks. No "hanging chads".