The article associates recent statements made by Republicans about carpet bombing cities with our past plans of dropping nuclear weapons on populated cities. It is all very chilling, but mostly because we no longer live in a world where modern societies are willing to wage this form of warfare. Less than 100 years ago we were, and we did carpet bomb cities and nuke cities into the ground.
Our new-found humanity prevents us from committing some horrible atrocities, but it also means complete victory like we had in World War 2 will rarely happen again. If we fought against Al Qaeda and ISIS like we fought against Germany and Japan, those organizations would not exist and new similar organizations would not take there place. But it would likely take the slaughter of tens of millions of innocents, which we are no longer able to accept.
My wife is a pharmacist. I think you underestimate what a pharmacist contributes to the equation. A pharmacy tach does not usually have the same problem solving ability as a tech. The education requirement for a PharmD vs a tech isn't remotely comparable.
I've worked with a lot of pharmacy techs and pharmacists, and agree completely that their level of education and problem solving capabilities are not remotely comparable. That is absolutely not in question here. The question is merely are pharmacy technicians good enough?
Walgreens for instance started a push back in 2013 to elevate the responsibilities of pharmacy technicians. This has given their pharmacists more face to face time with their patients, but it has also pushed the limits of what pharmacy technicians can be expected to do. For the time being their focus is on improving customer service, but they are also positioning themselves for a time where health care costs are dramatically cut. If pharmacists are mostly just providing better customer service instead of performing more necessary tasks, they can be more easily displaced. Those new Walgreens desks where the pharmacists talk with patients could soon become kiosks where you talk to pharmacists in a calling center.
When I went to pharmacy technology seminars and trade shows, the primary selling point of the software and hardware was reduced payroll costs. Reduced drug waste was minor because hospitals generally already do a good job with that by employing more pharmacists and pharmacy techs. And the vast majority of those payroll cuts went towards pharmacists, not pharmacy technicians. Usually the staff reduction was done through attrition instead of job cuts so there is less resistance from existing pharmacists on staff.
Can the pharmacy tech talk to a worried mom about any one of an uncountable number of different medication or healthcare questions?
Anything that can be done from behind a counter can be done from a computer terminal. Very little of a pharmacist's time is spend doing this, so I doubt it would even take 1 pharmacists per 10 pharmacies to cover this type of interaction. Asking pharmacy techs and self-serve QA portals can cover most questions. Almost all questions I hear from people while waiting in line are insurance related, not medication related.
Sure you lose a bit of human touch this way, but what else is new? How easy is it to get human operators when calling customer service these days? If the technology is capable of handling 90% of interactions, companies won't care about human touch when they can cut out a majority of their payroll costs.
I don't work at CVS, but they hire every pharmacy graduate they can get. I work as a clinical PharmD in a hospital.
It doesn't really matter if you work for drug stores or not, your employment is still affected by the same market forces as the PharmDs who do work at CVS. This is because if their industry is disrupted, more of those workers will move to hospitals and drive down wages there.
Government regulations are the only thing that can save pharmacist jobs over the next decade or two. Filling the correct pills into bottles and checking for drug interactions are two tasks modern AI systems already excel at, and continue to improve at. Government regulations will continue requiring pharmacists to work at pharmacies for a while, but as health care costs continue to spiral up costs will start to be cut. An $18 pharmacy tech can do almost everything a pharmacist can do with computer support. Give technology another 10 years and that will change to literally everything a pharmacist can do.
After doing software development for a large pharmaceutical distributor and manufacturer of pill dispensing machinery, I came to realize pharmacists are the #1 job in health care that computer automation will get rid of. Software developers have an order of magnitude more secure job than a PharmD.
I think people won't pay the asking price if the value isn't there to do so. The only other option is to pirate or use an ad blocker in the case of web ads.
This is the statement you made earlier which clearly shows you have a desire to watch the film. You didn't list "watch something else" or "wait until the film is available on cable or a streaming service", so there is a strong desire to watch the film. If it was actually crappy, you wouldn't waste your time. There are plenty of other things you could do with your wife.
When we watch a movie or consume web content we are spending some of our time yes, but we are not necessarily in agreement that an additional monetary fee on top of our time spent is justified.
The question is why isn't it justified? Is it not justified because there are better things to do? Then do those other things. When you don't do those other things you are implicitly giving a great deal of value to the activity you are choosing to do.
The price you are willing to pay for the movie is almost unrelated to its actual value to you. Its value to you is nearly priceless, since out of thousands of other choices you are choosing one particular activity. The price has more to do with market forces. The choice on what to pay has more to do with your budget than it does with the movie's intrinsic value to you.
My main point is no one can ever justify piracy because the content is not worth $5. It is worth far more than that if you spend your time watching it. You may not be able to afford it, or don't want to budget that much money to entertainment, but luckily there are other legally free options.
Zero is a very realistic price for a lot of content.
Zero is a very realistic price for a lot of content. The majority of content you never watch was worth $0 to you. It was simply not worth your time to watch it.
Once you decide to watch content, however, you have given it value. Unless you only value your free time at a couple dollars per hour, then the price of content is trivial compared to the value of the time you spend to consume it.
Very few people have ever pirated media because they don't think the content is worth enough. This may be what they tell themselves, but it isn't true. They are just coming up with rationalizations.
Its the same concept though.. Can also apply to music, software, anything that can be pirated really. I think people won't pay the asking price if the value isn't there to do so
My point is if you take some of the precious time you have on this planet to watch a movie, you do give value to that movie. Taking the time to watch a two hour movie means you feel the movie is worth twice what you think an hour of your life is worth. Saying you wont even spend a $5 rental price for the movie means one of two things:
1) You value your time an order of magnitude less than $2.50 an hour. That is pretty sad. 2) You are full of shit and just don't want to pay for things if you can find a way around it that you don't think you will be punished for.
The fallacy of many web-sponsored startups is to believe that their "content" is good or even worth anything, just because people look at it for free. Mostly it's not.
Even something that is free is worth something to you if you spend your free time looking at it. You only have so many hours of free time left in this lifetime, why would you ever waste it on something with no value? Do you have such low self respect that you think your life and your time has no value? Call a hotline.
Essentially but refusing to pay, we are saying it is worth $0.
You may utter those words, but that is not what your actions are saying.
If you refuse to pay for a movie and never watch it, you are saying it is worth $0 to you. If you refuse to pay for a movie and still watch it, you are saying it is worth whatever you consider your free time to be worth to you. You only have a limited number of hours of leisure time in your lifetime, and that has value. You just refuse to pay someone for content you obviously think has value. You can argue semantics on whether that is piracy, theft, etc. but it is certainly being an ass. If you pay for a movie and watch it, you are saying it is worth the purchased price plus your free time.
I do understand what you are saying. I want to assure you that it is not a class in Boolean. It is a simple intro, literally 3 minutes, that is included in the introduction to the IF statement in Excel. There is sone debate on if we can include the IF in 2nd semester classes at all. The High School teacher wants it there; however, the curriculum consultant sees it as unnecessary complication.
As far as your proposal, pseudo-coding a simple game, I assure you that would have no chance of making it onto the new curriculum.
I need to stop reading your posts. They remind me of how horrifically useless "computer science" classes were in the 90's when I was in school. My last shred of respect for formal education was destroyed when my high school computer programming class was a "how to use a computer" class in disguise.
People tend to exaggerate their salaries in this business because nobody wants to admit that they aren't "successful" and making the "Google wage" of 150 thousand per year.
And other people tend to exaggerate how hard it is to succeed in the IT industry because they have failed themselves.
I live in the Midwest (30 miles from the nearest major city), and it was quite easy to break into a six digit salary. When it happened I wasn't even asking for it. After about 8 years in the industry my boss at the time just gave me my yearly review and added a promotion to senior developer along with a $25k salary bump. I thought I might have been being overpaid (I was consultant at the time), but a year later I was recruited by a company along with another $20k salary bump. I don't expect that kind of rapid growth to get me all the way to $200k, but the $100k barrier was hardly a barrier at all.
Not every developer will hit $100k easily, but EVERY developer worthy of a "senior" or "lead" title will hit six figures without much fuss. And this includes people living in areas where you can get a 3000 sq ft house for under $300k.
On paper, these kids had all been in the came class. They all came to the High School with one year of 'computer' at the middle school.
I am not sure our schools can ever be fixed until they stop using age as a proxy for level of knowledge. I would much rather have schools provide 10-20 levels of math / english / computer science / whatever and place each child into the appropriate level each year. No one is held back, and no one is put into a hopeless situation where they are too far back to improve.
And just checking if a student has a prerequisite class is not even close to good enough to measure competency. A combination of pretests, previous grades, and teacher recommendations would be the minimal amounts of inputs in determining a student's level of knowledge.
That would immediately put me at 97% mastery. Yes, I have run the numbers; I just consider them to be dishonest.
Then find an honest way to do it. You're a good teacher, you can do it.
From what I read of Hasaf's post, the way the school is doing it is just as dishonest. Limiting the curriculum to very basic material that is easy to teach, but doesn't expand the minds of the children, allows other teachers to easily hit the 90% mastery. As such, there is no honest way to hit the benchmark. Either make the class meaningless, or game the system. Or try to show management that the system itself is broken, but good luck with that.
I hope Hasaf chooses gaming the system over teaching a less educational class every time.
I guess the philosophical difference is whether you want roads safer or you want rules followed more carefully. They are not the same thing. I certainly agree that draconian law enforcement will keep citizens in line. I guess the difference between us is I think punishment should be the last resort in changing public behavior. For instance, I would rather put more money towards funding inner city after school programs than simply hiring more police officers to reduce crime.
For the same reasons, finding ways to reduce vehicular injuries and property damage without relying on punishment should be the top priority. I admit this is an opinion of mine based on the type of society I wish to live in. I want a police force that is there to protect and not only to punish. And ignoring traffic engineering solutions to reduce traffic fatalities in favor of harsher enforcement of poorly designed laws is not a good idea, again in my opinion that is.
Now to the silenced engineers and researchers. Federal law (Title 23) says fact–based sound engineering practices are to take precedence over conjecture. The problem, no one is willing to enforce it – including the FHWA.
Perhaps I am being hypocritical but here is a law I wish we did have better enforcement for. Instead of treating traffic safety as something we need to create more and harsher laws to engineer, how about we use more effective social engineering such as setting more reasonable speed limits or even (gasp) removing them from many roads all together.
The issue here is that people tend to drive as fast or as slow as the road allows,
That is incorrect. People tend to drive as fast or as slow as enforcement of the speed limit allows.
Don't try passing off your misinformed opinions as fact. There is plenty of research on the affects of lowering or raising speed limits, and universally it finds most people drive at speeds they are comfortable at regardless of speed limits. One particularly broad study done in Virginia in 1992 provides some very detailed findings, along with the statistical relevance of those findings. It is quite clear that speed limits are far too low in this country and our roads would be much safer if they were raised on average 5-10 mph. Some important findings are listed below.
Posted speed limits were set, on the average, at the 45th percentile speed or below the average speed of traffic, even though raising speed limits in the region of the 85th percentile speed has an extremely beneficial effect on drivers complying with the posted speed limits.
Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent.
Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate in 59 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 21 percent to an increase of 10 percent.
At sites where speed limits were raised [by 5, 10, 15, or 20 mi/h], there was an increase of less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 km/h) for drivers traveling at and below the 75th percentile speed. When the posted limits were raised by 10 and 15 mi/h (16 and 24 km/h), there was a small decrease in the 99th percentile speed.
Lowering speed limits by 5, 10, 15, or 20 mi/h (8, 16, 24, or 26 km/h) at the study sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. Posting lower speed limits does not decrease motorist's speeds.
Raising speed limits by 5, 10, or 15 mi/h (8, 16, or 25 km/h) at the rural and urban sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. In other words, an increase in the posted speed limit did not create a corresponding increase in vehicle speeds.
I don't doubt that the other players involved do make money, but you have failed to take into account what their expenses are. The $386 that goes into seed, etc. isn't pure profit. When you have an open and competitive market with many players and a low enough barrier to entry you tend not to see profit in the double digit percentages.
Well it appears agricultural chemicals and pharmaceuticals have among the highest profit margins in the chemicals industry, which would put them both at around 13%-14% profit margins. This is a very capital intensive industry, since R&D spending is very high in these sectors, so it is not a very open market. It is very clearly an oligopoly. The top 6 pesticide and GMO corporations make up 68% of the market, and are all companies with market caps above $50 billion.
As for seeds, three companies control almost 50% of the world's seed supply, and the top 10 companies control 75% (source. Monsanto makes almost $12 billion per year and has around a 50% gross profit margin (net profit margin fluctuates greatly but has averaged 12% over the past two years). Yet again these companies have huge R&D budgets which restricts competitors entering the market.
I never even claimed the costs of growing food was too high. I'm glad there is so much R&D being done in the industry. I would rather the price per bushel to go up than for our food industries to stagnate. But characterizing these companies as small with a low barrier to entry is not accurate.
If this was true, the whining farmer would sell off the incredibly expensive land, go get a cushy job at the local mart.
Most do just that. The rise of corporate farms has a lot to do with the newer generations realizing farming isn't worth it. They sell the land they inherit for millions of dollars and live the good life. I know six farmers who owned their land and passed it on to their children (including my great grandfather). Only one of those farms is still owned by descendants. The rest were sold to either corporate farms or to build housing complexes / shopping malls. In my grandparents case they went from a life of near poverty to an early retirement. They traveled the world and for about a decade didn't even own/rent a personal home.
Farmers are some of US richest people. They make millions of dollars...
Farming is not lucrative. Inheriting farmland is lucrative. There are different classes of farmers. The ones who inherited large amounts of land are often very well off, just like everyone else who inherits millions of dollars from their parents. The farmers who rent farmland are almost never wealthy. Rich farmers could be more accurately labelled as rich real estate owners.
So for a change, family farms are actually more economically viable than large new upstart businesses operating as factory farms?
Depends on what you mean as "more economically viable." If a farmer is making $150,000 per year farming, but could be making $130,000 per year if he retired and rented his land out to a factory farming operation, is it really economically viable for him to remain a farmer? If he loves the job (like my father did) then more power to him. But in that case the farming is more of a hobby, while being a landlord (to himself) is his primary profession.
Factory farms make up for the low margins with scale. They don't make more money per acre than a family farmer other than through better practices their extra scale allows them to do. Like larger combine heads, computer driven tractors, better research into increasing crop yields, etc.
"Zeus wants me to chop heads off." it's an opinion, not a fact.
So is "My god wants me to kill my sister to bring honor to our family" and "My god wants me to mutilate my daughter's genitals".
Chopping people's heads off is the physical manifestation (which does happen BTW), just like performing an honor killing or mutilating your children is a physical manifestation of religious and/or cultural beliefs.
Farmers don't make real money for anyone but the owner and few select ag services business individuals.
You nothing about agriculture if that's what you think. Most farmers are very well off. Especially after the commodity prices of the last 8 or 10 years.
I come from a farming community in the Midwest (mostly corn, soybeans, and livestock). The only farmers who are well off in my home town are those who inherited land. Farmland is incredibly expensive. According to Iowa State University the cost of growing corn is $887 per acre in 2015. This comes to $4.79 per bushel @ 185 bushels per acre.
Of that cost, $37 goes to farmers (4%) and $312 goes towards cash rent or equivalent (35%). Seed, fertilizers, and other additives make up another $386 (44%).
It is painfully obvious the only people making money off farming are the land owners and seed/fertilizer/herbicide/etc providers. Just like the GP said.
Sounds more like they predictably let go of their grand standing proposals made to appease their rightmost and leftmost leaning constituents, and ultimately passed a very status quo bill in the end. Business as usual. They throw a few billion around since it sounds like a lot of money to regular people, when on the national level it will have little to no impact on any of our biggest problems.
Slashdot Mirror
The article associates recent statements made by Republicans about carpet bombing cities with our past plans of dropping nuclear weapons on populated cities. It is all very chilling, but mostly because we no longer live in a world where modern societies are willing to wage this form of warfare. Less than 100 years ago we were, and we did carpet bomb cities and nuke cities into the ground.
Our new-found humanity prevents us from committing some horrible atrocities, but it also means complete victory like we had in World War 2 will rarely happen again. If we fought against Al Qaeda and ISIS like we fought against Germany and Japan, those organizations would not exist and new similar organizations would not take there place. But it would likely take the slaughter of tens of millions of innocents, which we are no longer able to accept.
My wife is a pharmacist. I think you underestimate what a pharmacist contributes to the equation. A pharmacy tach does not usually have the same problem solving ability as a tech. The education requirement for a PharmD vs a tech isn't remotely comparable.
I've worked with a lot of pharmacy techs and pharmacists, and agree completely that their level of education and problem solving capabilities are not remotely comparable. That is absolutely not in question here. The question is merely are pharmacy technicians good enough?
Walgreens for instance started a push back in 2013 to elevate the responsibilities of pharmacy technicians. This has given their pharmacists more face to face time with their patients, but it has also pushed the limits of what pharmacy technicians can be expected to do. For the time being their focus is on improving customer service, but they are also positioning themselves for a time where health care costs are dramatically cut. If pharmacists are mostly just providing better customer service instead of performing more necessary tasks, they can be more easily displaced. Those new Walgreens desks where the pharmacists talk with patients could soon become kiosks where you talk to pharmacists in a calling center.
When I went to pharmacy technology seminars and trade shows, the primary selling point of the software and hardware was reduced payroll costs. Reduced drug waste was minor because hospitals generally already do a good job with that by employing more pharmacists and pharmacy techs. And the vast majority of those payroll cuts went towards pharmacists, not pharmacy technicians. Usually the staff reduction was done through attrition instead of job cuts so there is less resistance from existing pharmacists on staff.
Can the pharmacy tech talk to a worried mom about any one of an uncountable number of different medication or healthcare questions?
Anything that can be done from behind a counter can be done from a computer terminal. Very little of a pharmacist's time is spend doing this, so I doubt it would even take 1 pharmacists per 10 pharmacies to cover this type of interaction. Asking pharmacy techs and self-serve QA portals can cover most questions. Almost all questions I hear from people while waiting in line are insurance related, not medication related.
Sure you lose a bit of human touch this way, but what else is new? How easy is it to get human operators when calling customer service these days? If the technology is capable of handling 90% of interactions, companies won't care about human touch when they can cut out a majority of their payroll costs.
I don't work at CVS, but they hire every pharmacy graduate they can get. I work as a clinical PharmD in a hospital.
It doesn't really matter if you work for drug stores or not, your employment is still affected by the same market forces as the PharmDs who do work at CVS. This is because if their industry is disrupted, more of those workers will move to hospitals and drive down wages there.
Government regulations are the only thing that can save pharmacist jobs over the next decade or two. Filling the correct pills into bottles and checking for drug interactions are two tasks modern AI systems already excel at, and continue to improve at. Government regulations will continue requiring pharmacists to work at pharmacies for a while, but as health care costs continue to spiral up costs will start to be cut. An $18 pharmacy tech can do almost everything a pharmacist can do with computer support. Give technology another 10 years and that will change to literally everything a pharmacist can do.
After doing software development for a large pharmaceutical distributor and manufacturer of pill dispensing machinery, I came to realize pharmacists are the #1 job in health care that computer automation will get rid of. Software developers have an order of magnitude more secure job than a PharmD.
I think people won't pay the asking price if the value isn't there to do so. The only other option is to pirate or use an ad blocker in the case of web ads.
This is the statement you made earlier which clearly shows you have a desire to watch the film. You didn't list "watch something else" or "wait until the film is available on cable or a streaming service", so there is a strong desire to watch the film. If it was actually crappy, you wouldn't waste your time. There are plenty of other things you could do with your wife.
When we watch a movie or consume web content we are spending some of our time yes, but we are not necessarily in agreement that an additional monetary fee on top of our time spent is justified.
The question is why isn't it justified? Is it not justified because there are better things to do? Then do those other things. When you don't do those other things you are implicitly giving a great deal of value to the activity you are choosing to do.
The price you are willing to pay for the movie is almost unrelated to its actual value to you. Its value to you is nearly priceless, since out of thousands of other choices you are choosing one particular activity. The price has more to do with market forces. The choice on what to pay has more to do with your budget than it does with the movie's intrinsic value to you.
My main point is no one can ever justify piracy because the content is not worth $5. It is worth far more than that if you spend your time watching it. You may not be able to afford it, or don't want to budget that much money to entertainment, but luckily there are other legally free options.
But even $5 for a shitty formulaic rom-com? Not worth the money but worth the time with the wife.
It is depressing you think an hour and a half of time with your wife is worth so much less than $5.
Zero is a very realistic price for a lot of content.
Zero is a very realistic price for a lot of content. The majority of content you never watch was worth $0 to you. It was simply not worth your time to watch it.
Once you decide to watch content, however, you have given it value. Unless you only value your free time at a couple dollars per hour, then the price of content is trivial compared to the value of the time you spend to consume it.
Very few people have ever pirated media because they don't think the content is worth enough. This may be what they tell themselves, but it isn't true. They are just coming up with rationalizations.
Its the same concept though.. Can also apply to music, software, anything that can be pirated really. I think people won't pay the asking price if the value isn't there to do so
My point is if you take some of the precious time you have on this planet to watch a movie, you do give value to that movie. Taking the time to watch a two hour movie means you feel the movie is worth twice what you think an hour of your life is worth. Saying you wont even spend a $5 rental price for the movie means one of two things:
1) You value your time an order of magnitude less than $2.50 an hour. That is pretty sad.
2) You are full of shit and just don't want to pay for things if you can find a way around it that you don't think you will be punished for.
Having a lower willingness to pay doesn't equate to piracy.
Agreed, but the post I was responding to explicitly brought up the movie industry. I concede not everything in my post was applicable to ad-blocker.
The fallacy of many web-sponsored startups is to believe that their "content" is good or even worth anything, just because people look at it for free. Mostly it's not.
Even something that is free is worth something to you if you spend your free time looking at it. You only have so many hours of free time left in this lifetime, why would you ever waste it on something with no value? Do you have such low self respect that you think your life and your time has no value? Call a hotline.
Essentially but refusing to pay, we are saying it is worth $0.
You may utter those words, but that is not what your actions are saying.
If you refuse to pay for a movie and never watch it, you are saying it is worth $0 to you.
If you refuse to pay for a movie and still watch it, you are saying it is worth whatever you consider your free time to be worth to you. You only have a limited number of hours of leisure time in your lifetime, and that has value. You just refuse to pay someone for content you obviously think has value. You can argue semantics on whether that is piracy, theft, etc. but it is certainly being an ass.
If you pay for a movie and watch it, you are saying it is worth the purchased price plus your free time.
I do understand what you are saying. I want to assure you that it is not a class in Boolean. It is a simple intro, literally 3 minutes, that is included in the introduction to the IF statement in Excel. There is sone debate on if we can include the IF in 2nd semester classes at all. The High School teacher wants it there; however, the curriculum consultant sees it as unnecessary complication.
As far as your proposal, pseudo-coding a simple game, I assure you that would have no chance of making it onto the new curriculum.
I need to stop reading your posts. They remind me of how horrifically useless "computer science" classes were in the 90's when I was in school. My last shred of respect for formal education was destroyed when my high school computer programming class was a "how to use a computer" class in disguise.
So depressing to see things have not improved.
People tend to exaggerate their salaries in this business because nobody wants to admit that they aren't "successful" and making the "Google wage" of 150 thousand per year.
And other people tend to exaggerate how hard it is to succeed in the IT industry because they have failed themselves.
I live in the Midwest (30 miles from the nearest major city), and it was quite easy to break into a six digit salary. When it happened I wasn't even asking for it. After about 8 years in the industry my boss at the time just gave me my yearly review and added a promotion to senior developer along with a $25k salary bump. I thought I might have been being overpaid (I was consultant at the time), but a year later I was recruited by a company along with another $20k salary bump. I don't expect that kind of rapid growth to get me all the way to $200k, but the $100k barrier was hardly a barrier at all.
Not every developer will hit $100k easily, but EVERY developer worthy of a "senior" or "lead" title will hit six figures without much fuss. And this includes people living in areas where you can get a 3000 sq ft house for under $300k.
On paper, these kids had all been in the came class. They all came to the High School with one year of 'computer' at the middle school.
I am not sure our schools can ever be fixed until they stop using age as a proxy for level of knowledge. I would much rather have schools provide 10-20 levels of math / english / computer science / whatever and place each child into the appropriate level each year. No one is held back, and no one is put into a hopeless situation where they are too far back to improve.
And just checking if a student has a prerequisite class is not even close to good enough to measure competency. A combination of pretests, previous grades, and teacher recommendations would be the minimal amounts of inputs in determining a student's level of knowledge.
That would immediately put me at 97% mastery. Yes, I have run the numbers; I just consider them to be dishonest.
Then find an honest way to do it. You're a good teacher, you can do it.
From what I read of Hasaf's post, the way the school is doing it is just as dishonest. Limiting the curriculum to very basic material that is easy to teach, but doesn't expand the minds of the children, allows other teachers to easily hit the 90% mastery. As such, there is no honest way to hit the benchmark. Either make the class meaningless, or game the system. Or try to show management that the system itself is broken, but good luck with that.
I hope Hasaf chooses gaming the system over teaching a less educational class every time.
I guess the philosophical difference is whether you want roads safer or you want rules followed more carefully. They are not the same thing. I certainly agree that draconian law enforcement will keep citizens in line. I guess the difference between us is I think punishment should be the last resort in changing public behavior. For instance, I would rather put more money towards funding inner city after school programs than simply hiring more police officers to reduce crime.
For the same reasons, finding ways to reduce vehicular injuries and property damage without relying on punishment should be the top priority. I admit this is an opinion of mine based on the type of society I wish to live in. I want a police force that is there to protect and not only to punish. And ignoring traffic engineering solutions to reduce traffic fatalities in favor of harsher enforcement of poorly designed laws is not a good idea, again in my opinion that is.
Less traffic laws make our roads safer. I find one paragraph quite insightful in this article:
Now to the silenced engineers and researchers. Federal law (Title 23) says fact–based sound engineering practices are to take precedence over conjecture. The problem, no one is willing to enforce it – including the FHWA.
Perhaps I am being hypocritical but here is a law I wish we did have better enforcement for. Instead of treating traffic safety as something we need to create more and harsher laws to engineer, how about we use more effective social engineering such as setting more reasonable speed limits or even (gasp) removing them from many roads all together.
The issue here is that people tend to drive as fast or as slow as the road allows,
That is incorrect. People tend to drive as fast or as slow as enforcement of the speed limit allows.
Don't try passing off your misinformed opinions as fact. There is plenty of research on the affects of lowering or raising speed limits, and universally it finds most people drive at speeds they are comfortable at regardless of speed limits. One particularly broad study done in Virginia in 1992 provides some very detailed findings, along with the statistical relevance of those findings. It is quite clear that speed limits are far too low in this country and our roads would be much safer if they were raised on average 5-10 mph. Some important findings are listed below.
Posted speed limits were set, on the average, at the 45th percentile speed or below the average speed of traffic, even though raising speed limits in the region of the 85th percentile speed has an extremely beneficial effect on drivers complying with the posted speed limits.
Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate is 44 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 11 percent to an increase of 26 percent.
Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent. The level of confidence of this estimate in 59 percent. The 95 percent confidence limits for this estimate ranges from a reduction in accidents of 21 percent to an increase of 10 percent.
At sites where speed limits were raised [by 5, 10, 15, or 20 mi/h], there was an increase of less than 1.5 mi/h (2.4 km/h) for drivers traveling at and below the 75th percentile speed. When the posted limits were raised by 10 and 15 mi/h (16 and 24 km/h), there was a small decrease in the 99th percentile speed.
Lowering speed limits by 5, 10, 15, or 20 mi/h (8, 16, 24, or 26 km/h) at the study sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. Posting lower speed limits does not decrease motorist's speeds.
Raising speed limits by 5, 10, or 15 mi/h (8, 16, or 25 km/h) at the rural and urban sites had a minor effect on vehicle speeds. In other words, an increase in the posted speed limit did not create a corresponding increase in vehicle speeds.
I don't doubt that the other players involved do make money, but you have failed to take into account what their expenses are. The $386 that goes into seed, etc. isn't pure profit. When you have an open and competitive market with many players and a low enough barrier to entry you tend not to see profit in the double digit percentages.
Well it appears agricultural chemicals and pharmaceuticals have among the highest profit margins in the chemicals industry, which would put them both at around 13%-14% profit margins. This is a very capital intensive industry, since R&D spending is very high in these sectors, so it is not a very open market. It is very clearly an oligopoly. The top 6 pesticide and GMO corporations make up 68% of the market, and are all companies with market caps above $50 billion.
As for seeds, three companies control almost 50% of the world's seed supply, and the top 10 companies control 75% (source. Monsanto makes almost $12 billion per year and has around a 50% gross profit margin (net profit margin fluctuates greatly but has averaged 12% over the past two years). Yet again these companies have huge R&D budgets which restricts competitors entering the market.
I never even claimed the costs of growing food was too high. I'm glad there is so much R&D being done in the industry. I would rather the price per bushel to go up than for our food industries to stagnate. But characterizing these companies as small with a low barrier to entry is not accurate.
If this was true, the whining farmer would sell off the incredibly expensive land, go get a cushy job at the local mart.
Most do just that. The rise of corporate farms has a lot to do with the newer generations realizing farming isn't worth it. They sell the land they inherit for millions of dollars and live the good life. I know six farmers who owned their land and passed it on to their children (including my great grandfather). Only one of those farms is still owned by descendants. The rest were sold to either corporate farms or to build housing complexes / shopping malls. In my grandparents case they went from a life of near poverty to an early retirement. They traveled the world and for about a decade didn't even own/rent a personal home.
Farmers are some of US richest people. They make millions of dollars ...
Farming is not lucrative. Inheriting farmland is lucrative. There are different classes of farmers. The ones who inherited large amounts of land are often very well off, just like everyone else who inherits millions of dollars from their parents. The farmers who rent farmland are almost never wealthy. Rich farmers could be more accurately labelled as rich real estate owners.
So for a change, family farms are actually more economically viable than large new upstart businesses operating as factory farms?
Depends on what you mean as "more economically viable." If a farmer is making $150,000 per year farming, but could be making $130,000 per year if he retired and rented his land out to a factory farming operation, is it really economically viable for him to remain a farmer? If he loves the job (like my father did) then more power to him. But in that case the farming is more of a hobby, while being a landlord (to himself) is his primary profession.
Factory farms make up for the low margins with scale. They don't make more money per acre than a family farmer other than through better practices their extra scale allows them to do. Like larger combine heads, computer driven tractors, better research into increasing crop yields, etc.
"Zeus wants me to chop heads off." it's an opinion, not a fact.
So is "My god wants me to kill my sister to bring honor to our family" and "My god wants me to mutilate my daughter's genitals".
Chopping people's heads off is the physical manifestation (which does happen BTW), just like performing an honor killing or mutilating your children is a physical manifestation of religious and/or cultural beliefs.
Farmers don't make real money for anyone but the owner and few select ag services business individuals.
You nothing about agriculture if that's what you think. Most farmers are very well off. Especially after the commodity prices of the last 8 or 10 years.
I come from a farming community in the Midwest (mostly corn, soybeans, and livestock). The only farmers who are well off in my home town are those who inherited land. Farmland is incredibly expensive. According to Iowa State University the cost of growing corn is $887 per acre in 2015. This comes to $4.79 per bushel @ 185 bushels per acre.
Of that cost, $37 goes to farmers (4%) and $312 goes towards cash rent or equivalent (35%). Seed, fertilizers, and other additives make up another $386 (44%).
It is painfully obvious the only people making money off farming are the land owners and seed/fertilizer/herbicide/etc providers. Just like the GP said.
Bob: "Zeus wants me to chop heads off."
What about criticizing empirically observed manifestations of some religions like fe/male genital mutilation, honor killing and so on?
Are you saying that chopping peoples' heads off doesn't qualify as an empirically observed act?
Sounds more like they predictably let go of their grand standing proposals made to appease their rightmost and leftmost leaning constituents, and ultimately passed a very status quo bill in the end. Business as usual. They throw a few billion around since it sounds like a lot of money to regular people, when on the national level it will have little to no impact on any of our biggest problems.