The distribution of skill and intelligence in men and women is different. Although, on average, men and women are about the same, men have a higher variance. That means that if you look at the extremes of the skill/intelligence scale, you find a lot more men than women there. That's why men are overrepresented in mental institutions and prisons, as well as in professions requiring unusual skill. No amount of affirmative action or social policy is going to change basic human biology.
Maybe I should have started with the fact that I live in Illinois, and national government is less corrupt as a general rule.
I agree that there are plenty of local and state governments that don't work. But lots do work better than what you have, and the costs and regulations you impose on the nation to try to fix your problems end up making this worse for other people. And it has a second insidious effect: by driving all the states towards some uniform, federally mandated mediocrity, it removes the ability and incentive for individual states to figure out how to run their affairs better.
All I know is that it's best if nationally connected telecommunications companies weren't allowed to do whatever they want. Government regulation is the only practical option I can think of to accomplish this.
Nationally connected telecoms can "do whatever they want" precisely because they are highly regulated: regulation and lobbying is the vehicle by which they get what they want.
There really are no easy fixes for this. Complete deregulation of the telecoms industry is simply not logically possible at this point, because large parts of what they do overlaps other highly regulated areas of life (e.g., roads). But adding more bad regulation on top of lots of already bad regulation is going to make things worse.
So you're saying that because you can find a law that violates the commerce clause even more, we should now acquiesce to all violations of the commerce clause? I think a more logical and preferable course of actions is to repeal any law that violates the Constitution, including Obamacare.
Wow! Which state is it that has no 'products or services' from other states moving over its wires?
If that were the relevant criterion, there would effectively be no limits no the power of the federal government at all and we didn't need a Constitution or any enumerated powers. Obviously, that is not what the commerce clause means.
Regulation of 'local lines' owned by companies that use them for interstate commerce has uncontroversial when the Interstate Commerce Commission was created in 1882 - it did exactly what you claim is illogical.
You'd be amazed at how many illogical, unconstitutional, and morally reprehensible things the federal government has done since the late 19th century. You'd be amazed if your ideological blinders didn't prevent you from even looking.
Based on the above, I would say 'logic' is not your strong suit here.
I would say someone with as addled a mind as yours is not in a position to judge the validity of other people's arguments.
1. SOMEBODY has to own the "last mile". It's simply not practical for a Free Market, every vendor digs separate trenches and lays their own cable neighborhood.
You got it backwards, because that's the way public planning often works: for every new provider, the road gets dug up, cities, utilities, or companies put in a new wire, and then they close it. Often, they come back a few weeks later and do it again. Last place I lived, they even had the gall to send special assessments to home owners to fix up the street afterwards. The problem there is precisely that government owns the roads, they make the rules, and they generally have no interest in coming up with a less idiotic scheme of deploying wires and infrastructure efficiently; why should they give a f*ck about how much tax payer money they are wasting with such inefficient methods? They aren't rewarded for saving money with better ideas; coming up with something better is just going to be a lot of work and probably is going to be killed anyway.
What are better arrangements? There are plenty, and some places are using them: you can have tunnels, pipes, and utility poles, and you lease out space on them. You can also start connecting a neighborhood via laser or microwave, and then only as the density increases go to wired.
The problem with our infrastructure isn't that government isn't running more of it, the problem is that it is almost entirely under government control and the people responsible for it in government lack the financial incentives to do a better and more efficient job than they are doing.
If surveillance is your worry, recall that the Feds already demonstrably own enough of private-vendor network hardware and can easily tap into the rest. Or have you forgotten the infamous AT&T room in San Francisco?
No, surveillance isn't the worry. The worry is that once the government owns the infrastructure, it doesn't just engage in clandestine surveillance, it can actually write the terms of service and impose them on service providers. As an equivalent of FCC rules for broadcasting, if the wires are owned by the government, they might impose the rule that any Internet service provider using their lines needs to terminate the account of anyone posting foul language publicly.
The internet, like TV, radio, telephones, telegraphs, etc., is prima facie a medium for interstate commerce,
No, it's not. The wires crossing state lines are "prima facie" a medium for interstate commerce. The wires within a state have nothing to do with interstate commerce because no products or services move across state lines over them. The fact that things that have moved across state lines eventually move over local lines as well doesn't make them "interstate".
Of course, logic has been thrown out the window since Wickard v. Filburn. After that, picking your nose in your basement might be considered "interstate commerce".
This initiative may well make faster Internet speeds available at seemingly moderate increases in monthly payments. But you are likely going to see low end Internet plans cut, forcing people to upgrade to high speed plans they don't want or need, and you are going to see massive direct and indirect subsidies to telecom companies.
I'm on a 50 Mbps plan, and to my provider's credit, that's what they deliver. What they aren't giving me is a 5 Mbps plan at a fraction of the price, which is really all I want.
All right. Let's do that. I say "I want a Ferrari. I'm willing to pay the entire cost of the Ferrari, and I'm willing to pay the costs for you to stick a Ferrari on a truck and bring it to me.
Paying the cost wouldn't be sufficient, you need to pay cost plus a reasonable profit. But you aren't even willing to pay the cost, you are willing to pay what you imagine the cost to be based on neighborhoods where the company can amortize fixed costs over many more users, and based on looking at foreign countries where people pay a shitload in hidden fees and taxes to arrive at nominally slightly lower monthly Internet fees.
Besides, a car is not an educational tool in any meaningful sense. The poor are not harmed in their ability to stop being poor by being able to buy an overpriced automobile.
The poor are also not being harmed by merely having 40 Mbps Internet service in Sunnyvale.
and you're using those an assumptions to attack me personally as a means to attack the position
I don't need to attack your position, any more than I need to attack the position that the earth is flat: your position is ludicrously wrong. I'm just expressing my disapproval that supposedly educated people in the 21st century can still be so greedy and ignorant.
If you want to know why your position is wrong, open up any reasonable economic textbook, starting with Adam Smith.
(Oh, and I don't need to assume anything, I'm a classically trained musician and used to play in church.)
What the h*** are you talking about? I'm asking to pay for a service, shouting "Take my money!" and they're not doing it. Wanting others to give me money? Quite the opposite.
Let's substitute "Ferrari" for "Fiber" and try that on for size: "I want a Ferrari. Take my money! Here is my $5000! Why aren't greedy corporations giving me my Ferrari for $5000? We need a law to force greedy corporations to give everybody a Ferrari for $5000! Then the poor will finally get the same transportation as the rich! It's a question of fairness!"
I fight for the poor because I believe everyone deserves the chances that I had.
So you are saying that "the poor" need superior human beings like you to fight for them? Are you saying they are too stupid to fight for themselves? Can you seriously delude yourself into believing that among all the things that "the poor" need, mandating that Sunnyvale, CA, be covered in fiber even makes the list?
I guarantee that the things I propose will not cause poor people to be unfairly burdened. How can I say that? Because we ALREADY DID IT TWICEâ"ONCE WITH PHONE LINES, AND AGAIN WITH DSL. The poor were not unfairly burdened by having access to either of those technologies, both of which had the properties that I described.
Why do you believe they were "not unfairly burdened"? Of course, the poor were unfairly burdened by the regulation of POTS and DSL markets, because they amounted to regressive taxation.
Enriching myself? How is expecting the quality of Internet service in my community to keep pace with the rest of the world "enriching myself"?
Keep pace with??? Sunnyvale has average download speeds of 40 Mbps, far above G8, EU and world-wide averages.
your argument seems to be ad hominem attacks
Is your Latin a little rusty? An "argumentum ad hominem" would be to say "your argument is wrong because you are a greedy and ignorant human being". That is not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you are a greedy and ignorant human being because of the arguments you make.
This discussion is seriously making me mad at this point.
Well, good! A bit of anger can be the start of insight and change.
Before you go attacking me and claiming that I'm somehow greedy and trying to steal from the poor, you might want to get your facts straight.
I'm not saying you are "trying" to steal from the poor; that implies insight and volition that you obviously lack. You simply find it comforting to maintain the fiction that your greed is actually for the benefit of others; philosophers and economists have recognized this common fault at least since the 18th century.
(I did learn, however, that you have a lousy taste in music.)
Your post is self-contradictory. First you blame the American educational system for underachieving compared to the rest of the world. Then you claim that public educational system is broken, despite the fact that many of those "rest of the world" countries that outpace you have exactly that.
The public educational systems of Western nations, including the US, all produce similar results. The differences between nations are minor and largely related to factors other than how the educational system works. Calling that "outpacing" is stupid and your reasoning doesn't work: there are no policies we can adopt from Sweden or Germany or Finland that would improve our educational system because their systems don't actually work any better than ours (in fact, despite PISA numbers, in reality, they arguably are worse).
Where educational systems differ is in how much they spend per student. The US spends a lot more per student than, say, Sweden, yet achieves pretty much the same educational outcomes. What that tells you is that spending more money on the public educational system isn't going to improve student performance.
All public educational systems across the world are increasingly failing their students.
Maybe, but you haven't proven that. You quoted cost per student. I quoted cost per tax payer, of which there are vastly more of.
You compared cost per tax payer for public schools to cost per student for private schools. That's not valid.
Says the cost per student is closer to $10k
The article on the OECD study explains that:
The United States spent more than $11,000 per elementary student in 2010 and more than $12,000 per high school student. When researchers factored in the cost for programs after high school education such as college or vocational training, the United States spent $15,171 on each young person in the system â" more than any other nation covered in the report.
Either way, US public education is hugely expensive, both compared to other school systems around the world, many of which yield better results, and compared to existing private schools in the US.
And the cost for private schools in the US would fall further if they were freed from the ridiculous constraints and costs that public school-related special interests impose on them in an attempt to keep them from competing too much.
In light of hard facts and numbers, it is difficult to see what kind of rational argument anybody can make for keeping the public school system as the primary educational system in the US.
I advocate this policy because I don't feel it's right to be limited to low-quality service simply because of where I can afford to live.
Exactly, it's about you wanting others to give you money. All the rest is a smokescreen. It's no different when Blackwater, the cable companies, or the prison union go to Congress with their hands open. They also say "but it's for everybody's good!".
If that's your definition of a loss
You are missing the point by trying to argue the definition of "loss". Why do you think greedy corporations don't prioritize your area for deployment of fiber? Because they are prejudiced against white techies?
No, it's because right now, they'd make less money on it than elsewhere and because they have limited capacity to put in fiber and backbone. Rushing out service to your area is going to cost them dearly, both in opportunity cost and inefficiency. They are not going to accept lower profits, they are going to raise prices; the simplest way for them to raise prices is to charge a premium for the new fiber service and to eliminate all low-cost, slower services. And so your "poor kids" now have to pay $70/month for fiber, instead of $12.95/month for basic DSL.
Actually, if you do it right, you have the government run the fiber. Then, people with higher incomes pay most of the cost of that fiber so that the poor can pay next to nothing.
Again, you're showing your true colors: this is about redistribution. But in practice, this doesn't even end up being redistribution from the rich to the poor. There aren't enough people with higher incomes than you to redistribute money from.
What policies like this really end up doing is redistributing money from the politically weak (mostly poor folks) to an educated intellectual elite like you. And you add insult to injury by pretending that enriching yourself that way is for everybody else's good.
Many other nations that get better results than we do while spending much less (in PPP$). That alone tells you that our system is highly inefficient.
How many private schools have yearly tuition for less than that? Community colleges? Colleges? pre-schools???
Catholic schools cost, on average, half as much per student as public schools, and that's with the onerous and costly government educational regulations in place. Other private schools are also much cheaper on average than public schools. And without regulations, K-12 private education would be even cheaper.
Sometimes one of these inspires me to (internet) research the topic enough for a properly cited rebuttal and in the process I learn something. Hopefully you do too.
You need to do a lot more research because your numbers are way off.
How much more basic can you get than a statistic than students are carrying more debt than before?
What would you rather be someone who has $600000 debt on a $1000000 home, or someone who has $100000 debt on a $200000 home? Carrying more debt isn't intrinsically bad.
That was my entire point. Only selective facts were given.
The articles I cited make pretty good arguments that there isn't a problem with student loans. You have provided no counter arguments.
Here is a page with only the numbers and no commentary.
Yes, that data is consistent with what was cited and in the original articles. You haven't come up with any alternative interpretations.
More importantly, it illustrates even more clearly that government funding of education is mainly government funding for the upper middle class. The very first statistic says "Share of College Graduates from High Income Families who Borrow has Doubled". Mostly what those statistics say is that already well-off people choose to spend more on education. Worrying about that makes about as much sense about worrying about well-off people taking out bigger loans to buy BMWs instead of Hondas.
In that particular case, you'd be wrong. I live in Sunnyvale, can pay for it, and want to pay for it. They won't put it in Sunnyvale because half the neighborhood are retirees who aren't demanding better performance, living on a fixed income, who are willing to accept the status quo.
I.e. I'm right: many of the people living there don't want it, so it's not cost-effective for companies to put it in. Furthermore, the reason you advocate this policy is because after buying into Sunnyvale because it's cheap, you now want it to become just like the rest of Silicon Valley. It's textbook special interests (like yourself) pretending to look out for the poor when actually they just want to enrich themselves.
They would make less profit because they'd be paying off the loan more slowly because they would have way less than 100% penetration. That's not the same thing as taking a loss.
Yes, that is exactly the same as taking a loss: they need to make a huge capital investment now and take out a loan for that. Furthermore, the loss is magnified because it isn't just how much they are losing relative to break-even, it's how much they are losing compared to what they would get if they invested that money better. And, of course, the company or its shareholders aren't going to pay for it, it's other customers.
In fact, it's mostly those retirees and poor school children who are going to pay higher rates for fiber they don't want so that you get the fiber you think you deserve.
Adjusted for inflation, average tuition costs have gone up %230 since 1981
Sure, and that's in large part because of public subsidies and a government-maintained monopoly.
I should say that it's also because people are financially better off and simply choose to spend more on education, just like people choose to spend more on fine dining. The average cost of a restaurant meal has also gone up substantially, but that hardly means that people are starving in the streets, it means that people are actually better off. And if you subsidized dining with public funds, the average cost of a restaurant meal would go up even faster.
Adjusted for inflation, average tuition costs have gone up %230 since 1981
Sure, and that's in large part because of public subsidies and a government-maintained monopoly. If you want tuition costs to fall, you have to stop subsidizing education and start creating a competitive market. But even with the broken system we have, there still is no tuition crisis or student loan crisis.
That's what's so bad about Obama's initiative: it will cause tuition to rise further, with no actual improvement in educational outcomes.
Why not compare have debt burden of new graduates from previous dates to debt burdens on current graduates.
Why is that a relevant statistic? For example, if more people go to medical school, the debt burden after graduation will be higher, but there won't be a problem because doctors can generally pay back their debt pretty easily.
These articles use very selective statistics in order to make a point that goes along with the author's political leanings.
Well, obviously it goes with his political leanings because you can hardly expect people in bed with the educational establishment to speak up against this manufactured panic. Don't argue ad hominem, look at the facts.
And you're missing the bigger picture in the Brookings study: when you look at the statistics, there simply is no indication that there is a problem with student loan debt. The vast majority of households don't have any significant student debt, and those that do can mostly pay them back easily. Here is another article that explains it:
In rural areas, from what I've read, the average cost of fiber to the curb is somewhere in the neighborhood of $2,500 per customer. Assume that the ISP charges about the U.S. average feeâ"$35 per customer. Part of that goes to the upstream ISP for providing the bandwidth, and part of it goes to the cost of interest on that fiber cost, so let's say that maybe $25 of that actually goes towards paying down the principal. You're now talking about 8.3 years just to break even.
If you move to a rural area and the infrastructure you want isn't there, you often have to pay for putting it in. That means tens of thousands of dollars for local roads, electricity, water, and sewage each (or going off grid). Why shouldn't you have to pay $2500 or $10000 up-front if you really want fiber? (Most people in those areas will probably go with a microwave link.)
Nowhere did I even suggest that urban areas should subsidize rural areas.
You didn't "suggest" it, but that's one of the many deleterious effects the policies you advocate have.
So without mandatory universal service requirements, you'll have fiber in Cupertino, but not parts of Sunnyvale.
Indeed. That means you'll have fiber where customers actually demand it, where it makes sense, and where they are willing and able to pay for it. And conversely, people to whom fiber is more important than other factors will move to areas where it is available.
If they don't put it into Sunnyvale unless you make it mandatory it's for the simple reason that the people who live there aren't willing to pay for it and companies would be making a loss. So, if you mandate companies put fiber there, they are still making the loss, and they need to make up for that loss by raising prices elsewhere.
A secondary effect is that if you mandate that poor neighborhoods are brought up to the infrastructure standards of rich neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will become more desirable and housing prices will rise. So, by imposing your preferences on poor neighborhoods, you are really preparing them for gentrification.
It must be all or nothing within a geographical region (e.g. a county). This is, of course, unrelated to the issue of competition; it's simply the right thing to do.
No, it is exactly the wrong thing to do: it causes companies to spend vast amounts of money on creating infrastructure in the wrong places. I don't need fiber, I don't want to pay for it, and I'd be glad to move into a neighborhood that's cheap because rich, spoiled techies don't get the infrastructure they want. Having a diversity in infrastructure and housing is a good thing.
Of course, whether you consciously realize it or not, all of these effects and consequences are exactly why people like you want it: it doesn't serve the interests of the poor, it serves your own economic interests, at the expense of everybody else.
Heh, you favor neo-liberalism, the Reagan/Thatcher variety. Phony as a three dollar bill. I prefer conservatives to charlatans.
No, I favor classical liberalism.
Yes! Of course! Heaven forbid that anyone besides yourself should benefit at all from from your labor.
Lots of people benefit from my labor, namely the people who buy the stuff I make and the people whose companies I invest in. The policies you advocate reduce the benefit others receive from my labor.
Whatever... you're just playing the part of the stooge here, the crap is so tiresome after hearing for so many years... don't know if you're like this in meatspace. I sure do wish though, that you people could come up with something a bit more original after all this time.
Hate to break it to you, but in the long run, you're on the losing end of this discussion because the policies you advocate simply don't work.
Why, yes, "reactionary" in that I favor a return to liberalism, and that I'm opposed to both conservatism and progressivism.
Wealthiest for some, lousy internet for most, comparatively speaking of course,
People with money generally pick cheap Internet plans because people with money tend to be frugal. Personally, I have always picked the cheapest Internet plan I could find.
I don't see why I should pay higher taxes so that you can get an Internet plan that I would never buy for myself.
Not many people making $30k/year could afford to pay $10k/year per kid to educate their 2 children
It would be a lot cheaper if it weren't effectively a government monopoly; public education is hugely overpriced.
Furthermore, your "$30k/year" is hypothetical; few married couples with kids make that little money, and if they do, they get plenty of government support.
Thank you for illustrating why we have what we have today:-)
You mean one of the wealthiest countries in the world? Yes.
Unfortunately, people like you seem hell-bent on dragging us into the same cesspit that Europe is in. Hopefully, we can prevent that and reverse some of the damage you have done.
Slashdot Mirror
The distribution of skill and intelligence in men and women is different. Although, on average, men and women are about the same, men have a higher variance. That means that if you look at the extremes of the skill/intelligence scale, you find a lot more men than women there. That's why men are overrepresented in mental institutions and prisons, as well as in professions requiring unusual skill. No amount of affirmative action or social policy is going to change basic human biology.
I guess the summary is "nobody can afford oil anymore, it's getting too cheap and there is too much of it around"!
I agree that there are plenty of local and state governments that don't work. But lots do work better than what you have, and the costs and regulations you impose on the nation to try to fix your problems end up making this worse for other people. And it has a second insidious effect: by driving all the states towards some uniform, federally mandated mediocrity, it removes the ability and incentive for individual states to figure out how to run their affairs better.
Nationally connected telecoms can "do whatever they want" precisely because they are highly regulated: regulation and lobbying is the vehicle by which they get what they want.
There really are no easy fixes for this. Complete deregulation of the telecoms industry is simply not logically possible at this point, because large parts of what they do overlaps other highly regulated areas of life (e.g., roads). But adding more bad regulation on top of lots of already bad regulation is going to make things worse.
So you're saying that because you can find a law that violates the commerce clause even more, we should now acquiesce to all violations of the commerce clause? I think a more logical and preferable course of actions is to repeal any law that violates the Constitution, including Obamacare.
If that were the relevant criterion, there would effectively be no limits no the power of the federal government at all and we didn't need a Constitution or any enumerated powers. Obviously, that is not what the commerce clause means.
You'd be amazed at how many illogical, unconstitutional, and morally reprehensible things the federal government has done since the late 19th century. You'd be amazed if your ideological blinders didn't prevent you from even looking.
I would say someone with as addled a mind as yours is not in a position to judge the validity of other people's arguments.
You got it backwards, because that's the way public planning often works: for every new provider, the road gets dug up, cities, utilities, or companies put in a new wire, and then they close it. Often, they come back a few weeks later and do it again. Last place I lived, they even had the gall to send special assessments to home owners to fix up the street afterwards. The problem there is precisely that government owns the roads, they make the rules, and they generally have no interest in coming up with a less idiotic scheme of deploying wires and infrastructure efficiently; why should they give a f*ck about how much tax payer money they are wasting with such inefficient methods? They aren't rewarded for saving money with better ideas; coming up with something better is just going to be a lot of work and probably is going to be killed anyway.
What are better arrangements? There are plenty, and some places are using them: you can have tunnels, pipes, and utility poles, and you lease out space on them. You can also start connecting a neighborhood via laser or microwave, and then only as the density increases go to wired.
The problem with our infrastructure isn't that government isn't running more of it, the problem is that it is almost entirely under government control and the people responsible for it in government lack the financial incentives to do a better and more efficient job than they are doing.
No, surveillance isn't the worry. The worry is that once the government owns the infrastructure, it doesn't just engage in clandestine surveillance, it can actually write the terms of service and impose them on service providers. As an equivalent of FCC rules for broadcasting, if the wires are owned by the government, they might impose the rule that any Internet service provider using their lines needs to terminate the account of anyone posting foul language publicly.
No, it's not. The wires crossing state lines are "prima facie" a medium for interstate commerce. The wires within a state have nothing to do with interstate commerce because no products or services move across state lines over them. The fact that things that have moved across state lines eventually move over local lines as well doesn't make them "interstate".
Of course, logic has been thrown out the window since Wickard v. Filburn. After that, picking your nose in your basement might be considered "interstate commerce".
This initiative may well make faster Internet speeds available at seemingly moderate increases in monthly payments. But you are likely going to see low end Internet plans cut, forcing people to upgrade to high speed plans they don't want or need, and you are going to see massive direct and indirect subsidies to telecom companies.
I'm on a 50 Mbps plan, and to my provider's credit, that's what they deliver. What they aren't giving me is a 5 Mbps plan at a fraction of the price, which is really all I want.
Paying the cost wouldn't be sufficient, you need to pay cost plus a reasonable profit. But you aren't even willing to pay the cost, you are willing to pay what you imagine the cost to be based on neighborhoods where the company can amortize fixed costs over many more users, and based on looking at foreign countries where people pay a shitload in hidden fees and taxes to arrive at nominally slightly lower monthly Internet fees.
The poor are also not being harmed by merely having 40 Mbps Internet service in Sunnyvale.
I don't need to attack your position, any more than I need to attack the position that the earth is flat: your position is ludicrously wrong. I'm just expressing my disapproval that supposedly educated people in the 21st century can still be so greedy and ignorant.
If you want to know why your position is wrong, open up any reasonable economic textbook, starting with Adam Smith.
(Oh, and I don't need to assume anything, I'm a classically trained musician and used to play in church.)
Let's substitute "Ferrari" for "Fiber" and try that on for size: "I want a Ferrari. Take my money! Here is my $5000! Why aren't greedy corporations giving me my Ferrari for $5000? We need a law to force greedy corporations to give everybody a Ferrari for $5000! Then the poor will finally get the same transportation as the rich! It's a question of fairness!"
So you are saying that "the poor" need superior human beings like you to fight for them? Are you saying they are too stupid to fight for themselves? Can you seriously delude yourself into believing that among all the things that "the poor" need, mandating that Sunnyvale, CA, be covered in fiber even makes the list?
Why do you believe they were "not unfairly burdened"? Of course, the poor were unfairly burdened by the regulation of POTS and DSL markets, because they amounted to regressive taxation.
Keep pace with??? Sunnyvale has average download speeds of 40 Mbps, far above G8, EU and world-wide averages.
Is your Latin a little rusty? An "argumentum ad hominem" would be to say "your argument is wrong because you are a greedy and ignorant human being". That is not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you are a greedy and ignorant human being because of the arguments you make.
Well, good! A bit of anger can be the start of insight and change.
I'm not saying you are "trying" to steal from the poor; that implies insight and volition that you obviously lack. You simply find it comforting to maintain the fiction that your greed is actually for the benefit of others; philosophers and economists have recognized this common fault at least since the 18th century.
(I did learn, however, that you have a lousy taste in music.)
The public educational systems of Western nations, including the US, all produce similar results. The differences between nations are minor and largely related to factors other than how the educational system works. Calling that "outpacing" is stupid and your reasoning doesn't work: there are no policies we can adopt from Sweden or Germany or Finland that would improve our educational system because their systems don't actually work any better than ours (in fact, despite PISA numbers, in reality, they arguably are worse).
Where educational systems differ is in how much they spend per student. The US spends a lot more per student than, say, Sweden, yet achieves pretty much the same educational outcomes. What that tells you is that spending more money on the public educational system isn't going to improve student performance.
All public educational systems across the world are increasingly failing their students.
You compared cost per tax payer for public schools to cost per student for private schools. That's not valid.
The article on the OECD study explains that:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us...
Either way, US public education is hugely expensive, both compared to other school systems around the world, many of which yield better results, and compared to existing private schools in the US.
And the cost for private schools in the US would fall further if they were freed from the ridiculous constraints and costs that public school-related special interests impose on them in an attempt to keep them from competing too much.
In light of hard facts and numbers, it is difficult to see what kind of rational argument anybody can make for keeping the public school system as the primary educational system in the US.
Exactly, it's about you wanting others to give you money. All the rest is a smokescreen. It's no different when Blackwater, the cable companies, or the prison union go to Congress with their hands open. They also say "but it's for everybody's good!".
You are missing the point by trying to argue the definition of "loss". Why do you think greedy corporations don't prioritize your area for deployment of fiber? Because they are prejudiced against white techies?
No, it's because right now, they'd make less money on it than elsewhere and because they have limited capacity to put in fiber and backbone. Rushing out service to your area is going to cost them dearly, both in opportunity cost and inefficiency. They are not going to accept lower profits, they are going to raise prices; the simplest way for them to raise prices is to charge a premium for the new fiber service and to eliminate all low-cost, slower services. And so your "poor kids" now have to pay $70/month for fiber, instead of $12.95/month for basic DSL.
Again, you're showing your true colors: this is about redistribution. But in practice, this doesn't even end up being redistribution from the rich to the poor. There aren't enough people with higher incomes than you to redistribute money from.
What policies like this really end up doing is redistributing money from the politically weak (mostly poor folks) to an educated intellectual elite like you. And you add insult to injury by pretending that enriching yourself that way is for everybody else's good.
Your numbers are bogus. Public K-12 schools spend an average of around $15000/student/year, the largest amount in the world:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us...
Many other nations that get better results than we do while spending much less (in PPP$). That alone tells you that our system is highly inefficient.
Catholic schools cost, on average, half as much per student as public schools, and that's with the onerous and costly government educational regulations in place. Other private schools are also much cheaper on average than public schools. And without regulations, K-12 private education would be even cheaper.
You need to do a lot more research because your numbers are way off.
What would you rather be someone who has $600000 debt on a $1000000 home, or someone who has $100000 debt on a $200000 home? Carrying more debt isn't intrinsically bad.
The articles I cited make pretty good arguments that there isn't a problem with student loans. You have provided no counter arguments.
Yes, that data is consistent with what was cited and in the original articles. You haven't come up with any alternative interpretations.
More importantly, it illustrates even more clearly that government funding of education is mainly government funding for the upper middle class. The very first statistic says "Share of College Graduates from High Income Families who Borrow has Doubled". Mostly what those statistics say is that already well-off people choose to spend more on education. Worrying about that makes about as much sense about worrying about well-off people taking out bigger loans to buy BMWs instead of Hondas.
I.e. I'm right: many of the people living there don't want it, so it's not cost-effective for companies to put it in. Furthermore, the reason you advocate this policy is because after buying into Sunnyvale because it's cheap, you now want it to become just like the rest of Silicon Valley. It's textbook special interests (like yourself) pretending to look out for the poor when actually they just want to enrich themselves.
Yes, that is exactly the same as taking a loss: they need to make a huge capital investment now and take out a loan for that. Furthermore, the loss is magnified because it isn't just how much they are losing relative to break-even, it's how much they are losing compared to what they would get if they invested that money better. And, of course, the company or its shareholders aren't going to pay for it, it's other customers.
In fact, it's mostly those retirees and poor school children who are going to pay higher rates for fiber they don't want so that you get the fiber you think you deserve.
I should say that it's also because people are financially better off and simply choose to spend more on education, just like people choose to spend more on fine dining. The average cost of a restaurant meal has also gone up substantially, but that hardly means that people are starving in the streets, it means that people are actually better off. And if you subsidized dining with public funds, the average cost of a restaurant meal would go up even faster.
Sure, and that's in large part because of public subsidies and a government-maintained monopoly. If you want tuition costs to fall, you have to stop subsidizing education and start creating a competitive market. But even with the broken system we have, there still is no tuition crisis or student loan crisis.
That's what's so bad about Obama's initiative: it will cause tuition to rise further, with no actual improvement in educational outcomes.
Why is that a relevant statistic? For example, if more people go to medical school, the debt burden after graduation will be higher, but there won't be a problem because doctors can generally pay back their debt pretty easily.
Well, obviously it goes with his political leanings because you can hardly expect people in bed with the educational establishment to speak up against this manufactured panic. Don't argue ad hominem, look at the facts.
And you're missing the bigger picture in the Brookings study: when you look at the statistics, there simply is no indication that there is a problem with student loan debt. The vast majority of households don't have any significant student debt, and those that do can mostly pay them back easily. Here is another article that explains it:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/je...
If you move to a rural area and the infrastructure you want isn't there, you often have to pay for putting it in. That means tens of thousands of dollars for local roads, electricity, water, and sewage each (or going off grid). Why shouldn't you have to pay $2500 or $10000 up-front if you really want fiber? (Most people in those areas will probably go with a microwave link.)
You didn't "suggest" it, but that's one of the many deleterious effects the policies you advocate have.
Indeed. That means you'll have fiber where customers actually demand it, where it makes sense, and where they are willing and able to pay for it. And conversely, people to whom fiber is more important than other factors will move to areas where it is available.
If they don't put it into Sunnyvale unless you make it mandatory it's for the simple reason that the people who live there aren't willing to pay for it and companies would be making a loss. So, if you mandate companies put fiber there, they are still making the loss, and they need to make up for that loss by raising prices elsewhere.
A secondary effect is that if you mandate that poor neighborhoods are brought up to the infrastructure standards of rich neighborhoods, those neighborhoods will become more desirable and housing prices will rise. So, by imposing your preferences on poor neighborhoods, you are really preparing them for gentrification.
No, it is exactly the wrong thing to do: it causes companies to spend vast amounts of money on creating infrastructure in the wrong places. I don't need fiber, I don't want to pay for it, and I'd be glad to move into a neighborhood that's cheap because rich, spoiled techies don't get the infrastructure they want. Having a diversity in infrastructure and housing is a good thing.
Of course, whether you consciously realize it or not, all of these effects and consequences are exactly why people like you want it: it doesn't serve the interests of the poor, it serves your own economic interests, at the expense of everybody else.
No, I favor classical liberalism.
Lots of people benefit from my labor, namely the people who buy the stuff I make and the people whose companies I invest in. The policies you advocate reduce the benefit others receive from my labor.
Hate to break it to you, but in the long run, you're on the losing end of this discussion because the policies you advocate simply don't work.
Public education in the US works as well as it will ever work; the problems and limitations it has are intrinsic to any public education system.
That kind of amounts to partial privatization.
Why, yes, "reactionary" in that I favor a return to liberalism, and that I'm opposed to both conservatism and progressivism.
People with money generally pick cheap Internet plans because people with money tend to be frugal. Personally, I have always picked the cheapest Internet plan I could find.
I don't see why I should pay higher taxes so that you can get an Internet plan that I would never buy for myself.
It would be a lot cheaper if it weren't effectively a government monopoly; public education is hugely overpriced.
Furthermore, your "$30k/year" is hypothetical; few married couples with kids make that little money, and if they do, they get plenty of government support.
You mean one of the wealthiest countries in the world? Yes.
Unfortunately, people like you seem hell-bent on dragging us into the same cesspit that Europe is in. Hopefully, we can prevent that and reverse some of the damage you have done.
Oh, that's easy to answer: a better use of tax dollars than public education would be actual education.