See how the public schools are failing since they have less funds? That means that you need to open more charters and send more money away from the public schools.
In the US, public school performance does not improve with increased funding, and US public schools spend several times what public schools in other countries spend for comparable or better educational results ($PPP). So the idea that public schools are failing because they aren't getting enough money is total b.s.
The charter schools also get to pick and choose which students they get. Does your child have special needs? Sorry, don't bother applying. Kids with special needs cost more and thus aren't as profitable
First of all, many charter schools are non-profits. In addition, charter schools have a higher percentage of special needs kids than public schools. In different words, your reasoning is based on fabrications.
My oldest son is one of those special needs students. His grades are exceptional, but he requires supports which cost more than the average student. In the charter school model, he'd be tossed aside as costing too much instead of being educated and developing a love of learning (as he currently is doing in his public school).
In different words, you live in a nice neighborhood with nice schools. You don't care how inefficiently your school operates because it's mostly other people's tax dollars that pay for it. And you don't care how many students are f*cked over by the public school system, as long as you get your stuff for free. It's selfishness like yours that causes America's school system to deteriorate further and further.
I agree on most of what you say, except that private schools are often not much better.
Of course, most private businesses suck, just like government services. The difference is that with private businesses, you have a choice not to give your money to businesses that you have found to suck, whereas with government services, you keep having to pay for bad services no matter what.
It's basically the same idea as evolution. It's kind of funny that progressives pay lip service to evolutionary ideas in biology but believe in intelligent design in economics.
Short-term test-based evaluation is not an useful metric.
Yet, that is exactly what the US government is advocating. Furthermore, even if it were a useful metric, it would get gamed. That's, again, why it's important to leave the choice of metric up to individual parents, just like the choice of school. If you have a diversity of metrics and a diversity of choices from parents, not only do you avoid nationwide educational disaster, but also models that are particularly successful will thrive, while those that aren't will disappear.
You need to find a private school where they actually are not seeing them as a commercial enterprise.
Many different people have many different beliefs about what constitutes a good school. Again, that's why a free market in education is so important; free markets, of course, also have nonprofits operating in them.
I take it you can't read: In the long run, companies can't fake how much money they have made: the money is either there or it isn't.
There are actually two schools of deception in play in the private sector
There are many schools of deception in play in the private sector. But those kinds of deceptions don't work in the long run because you can't hide arbitrary amounts of losses forever; sooner or later the accounting is going to catch up with you.
(What you can do, of course, is keep asking for a "government stimulus" or "government bailout", but then you aren't really private sector anymore.)
Gaming the system goes on in the private sector too
I didn't say that there was no "gaming" in the private sector; there is plenty of it. I said companies can't fake how much money they are making in the long run.
Just weeks after an L.A. Times op-ed called on public schools to emulate high-tech companies by paying high salaries to driven, talented employees whose productivity more than compensates for their high pay
High tech companies are ultimately able and driven to pay productive employees more because they make them more money. In the long run, companies can't fake how much money they have made: the money is either there or it isn't.
But in the educational system, outcomes can be faked, because they aren't self-enforcing. Whatever test results, performance measures, or statistics you use for determining performance, they are subject to lobbying and manipulation and they can be gamed. Putting public teachers on a performance standard is probably even worse than simply letting them do whatever they want.
If you want teachers who are actually evaluated and paid based on performance, the only option you have is to send your kids to private schools. It would be nice if more parents can do that (via vouchers or similar mechanisms), but that's not going to happen as long as public teachers unions remain as powerful as they are.
Both stupid things to do I agree and it's more practical/effective using the liquid alcohol, but when has pre-adult portion of our society ever been smart when it comes to drugs?
The pre-adult portion of our society has legal guardians that ought to be responsible for them. The idea that we should structure adult society such that it is safe for pre-adults without parental supervision is simply not workable, and it's not a society I would want to live in. If parents want such environments for their kids, they should move to gated communities that cater to their tastes.
The problem, Lumpy, is that stupid people often kill *other* people with their acts of stupidity.
It's called life; deal with it. Living in a way that takes into account the stupidity and threats posed by your fellow human beings is a normal and necessary part of life; pretending that you can legislate those risks away is itself a sign of profound stupidity on your part.
If we give up our liberties one by one because some people abuse those liberties, we won't have any liberties left, and our safety won't improve significantly either.
They also hate calling something a "terrorist attack" if there isn't a pre-announced political message for the reasons behind the attack.
It's not a question of "hating"; without a political message, it simply is not a terrorist attack. The point of a terrorist attack is to create terror connected to a political agenda.
Within the US, "whites" are not the top performers on IQ tests. And generally, IQ tests correlate very well with later performance in life, and the correlation with culture is a simple result that culture, too, correlates with later performance in life. That is, it isn't that IQ tests are unfairly biased to give some groups higher scores; it's that some groups actually perform better than others and the IQ test reflects that.
(Note that the differences in performance are not racial; that is, the same "race" or "culture" may do very well in one country and poorly in another country.)
Note the "without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion". Does that sound like the Bechdel test?
No. The UN charter and human rights are about equal opportunities, the Bechdel test is about equal outcomes.
It's a common error to assume that equal opportunities should achieve equal outcomes, but they almost never do. That is, even in the complete absence of discrimination, you still get highly unequal outcomes based on race, sex, language, and religion.
In order to actually achieve equality of outcome, you have to deprive some people of rights and manipulate others into doing this they aren't interested in doing.
Any industry which does not appeal to ~half of its prospective workers might want to spend a bit of time trying to figure out why,
You mean like receptionists, secretaries, nurses, day care attendants, elementary school teachers, and cosmetologists?
instead of getting all defensive and blaming everyone and everything else for the issue.
"Defensiveness" and "blame" imply that there is anything wrong. I don't believe there is anything wrong.
Here's a question: Would you enter such a discussion open to the idea that you are wrong?
Wrong about what?
What if someone showed you concrete evidence of, say, widespread institutionalised misogyny - would you accept it?
If there were "institutionalised misogyny" at my company, it would be something for our management to think about, and it would be up to them whether to do anything about it or not. If they want to run an all-lesbian development team, I'm happy to leave and find another job.
both startups and larger companies could find the modified Bechdel Test a useful tool for opening up a discussion about gender balance within engineering and development teams.
And what exactly is it you want to "discuss"? Are you entering this "discussion" being open to the idea that your ideas about "gender balance" are wrong? Or are you just trying to hit other people over the head with your particular views?
You think historians are scientists? Really? Theologians? Seriously?
I don't think they are scientists, I am pointing out to you that they pretend that they are scientists ("social sciences", "Geisteswissenschaftler", etc.), have the same trappings as such (doctorates, journals, peer review, conferences), and are treated by governments like scientific experts speaking objective truth (the exact field of a doctorate is usually not even mentioned when "experts" give input on legislation).
That's why I said You're a bloody fool if you think that someone who happens to have the title of "scientist" automatically has training or a career in "quantifying objective phenomena".
The "experts" who decide who you can fuck or marry, whether you can have an abortion, what medical conditions will be covered by your government-mandated insurance, what historical truths you can speak, whether your political speech is hateful or conforming, what religions are proper and improper, and which ethnicities owe money to which other ethnicities are these kinds of pseudo-scientists, and it is the ignorance of people like you who gives them power.
I did have a fairly detailed reply in mind.
Don't bother, you have nothing of value to say because you don't have the slightest idea of how the world around you works. You live in a semi-autistic fantasy world in which rational Ubermenschen guide your life and run society with their benevolent superior intellects.
I suppose we could start to have a "my-country-has-a-better-system-of-government-than-your-country" argument.
You felt like pointing out that it didn't work that way in your country. I explained why. I fail to see how that is a "my country is better than your country" argument. It's simply a fact that government-by-elites is deeply ingrained in European democracies and European thinking. You yourself evidently can't conceive of any other possibility.
Of course. Someone with no scientific background and whose main priorities are getting re-elected and protecting the corporate issues of his campaign contributors is going to be much better placed to make objective assessments than someone whose training and career has been about quantifying objective phenomena. Yup. Totally buying that one.
You're a bloody fool if you think that someone who happens to have the title of "scientist" automatically has training or a career in "quantifying objective phenomena". Most scientist that influence politics are social scientists, political scientists, medicine, theologians, philosophers, economists, and historians. There is little that's objective about their fields, and they merely bestow the title "scientist" on the next generation. Add to that the large fraction of charlatans in the hard sciences and you end up with a dismal collection of decision makers.
I mean doctors are pretty much scientists. We should probably ignore them when formulating medical policy. Likewise we should probably not give any special consideration to teachers when it comes to Education. And we'll probably have to stop all those lawyers from exerting undue influence over lawmaking. And stop the bankers and financiers from influencing fiscal policy.
Quite right: there should be no "medical policy", "educational policy", or "fiscal policy", and lawmaking should be clear and transparent enough so that you don't need lawyers to interpret the laws. Why is that even a question?
Or the implication that "only the political left has abused science in support of genocide, racism or political extremism"?
I don't see what your big problem is with that "implication"; the political right generally uses religion for the same purpose. Whether religion or science, they both have a self-perpetuating class of high priests that won't be questioned, whose decisions aren't rooted in fact and reason, and aren't accountable to anybody.
There may be facts in there somewhere, but I really don't think they come close to supporting the conclusion you appear to have drawn. Sorry, but it remains just your opinion.
I don't need to "support the conclusion"; anybody who is historically literate should know the facts. If you don't, well, get yourself an education.
She can either get a Linux-supported laptop, or she can run VirtualBox on Windows or Mac. All of those options work fine.
If you do get a Mac, realize that its much vaunted "UNIX environment" isn't really that useful for software development for anything other than Mac; there are simply too many annoying differences in the command line tools, libraries, and compilers; in addition, the native Mac environment lacks a good package manager. But VirtualBox on Mac works fine if you decide to go that route.
Doesn't work that way in my constitutional democracy:)
There are a lot "constitutional democracies", in particular in Europe, that try to limit power to an intellectual elite.
I don't actually disagree with you about that. Of course, by the same token politics shouldn't say anything about science either, which doesn't seem to be the case at the moment.
Of course, politics should say something about science: it should pick which scientific theories to believe and decide what policies to derive from them.
I'm not sure that's consistent with your earlier declaration that "The only way science should ever influence policy in a democracy is by convincing a majority of voters". I mean if scientists aren't allowed to lobby for laws based on their findings and if apparently they're now not allowed to tell anyone about those findings, then what are they allowed do?
Where did I say that they weren't "allowed to tell anybody"? There is a difference between telling people "an asteroid is going to hit earth" and "I want a law doing X".
Also, it does seem as though you're forbidding people from participating in the political process based on their profession. I'd have thought that you'd have had problems with that, yourself.
Why is it always about "forbidding" with you people? Scientists can do whatever they want, but as a society we should recognize that people who lobby for laws cease being responsible scientists and treat them accordingly.
And the political right is correct on these points. That's not just an opinion or a preference, it's a lesson that history has taught us painfully in the form of racism, socialism, and genocide: all of them justified by science and scientists, and often motivated by a crisis that scientists claimed to have recognized.
Actually, I really do think that's just an opinion.
So basically, you support the use of referenda to determine policy on important scientific matters? That seems to be what you're saying. So who decides what's important enough for a plebiscite and what isn't?
Plebiscites are usually held once people collect enough signatures indicating that they want one to be held. But a plebiscite is only one of many mechanisms by which politics can turn scientific results into action. My point is that science by itself has nothing relevant to say about politics at all.
These days, of course, it would be easy to give the people the power to vote on pretty much every law. What objection would you have to that?
For instance, aren't you basically saying that if a scientist has data that he feels demands a change in policy, the scientist has to stop doing science and become a politician?
Quite the opposite: scientists should not become politicians and they should not favor or advocate particular policies; it corrupts the science. Formulating policies is the job of politicians, and choosing among them is ultimately the job of the people. Since both scientists and politicians frequently are biased and corrupt in their choices, plebiscites seem like a reasonable choice.
And more to the point, isn't this the very activity that the political right have used to brand scientists as hypocrites and liars in the past. You know, the idea that they're playing at politics when they should be doing science?
And the political right is correct on these points. That's not just an opinion or a preference, it's a lesson that history has taught us painfully in the form of racism, socialism, and genocide: all of them justified by science and scientists, and often motivated by a crisis that scientists claimed to have recognized.
but ethnicity and culture have nothing to do with this problem
Ethnic and cultural homogeneity have everything to do with this problem, since crime and recidivism rates are highly linked to culture, and culture itself is highly linked to having a minority status.
(Since you appear to be too stupid to understand this, let me spell it out: it's not membership in any specific "race" or ethnicity that is related to crime and recidivism, it is the status of being a minority inside a majority culture.)
Slashdot Mirror
Creative accounting can be used to manipulate stock prices in the short run; it doesn't work in the long run.
In the US, public school performance does not improve with increased funding, and US public schools spend several times what public schools in other countries spend for comparable or better educational results ($PPP). So the idea that public schools are failing because they aren't getting enough money is total b.s.
First of all, many charter schools are non-profits. In addition, charter schools have a higher percentage of special needs kids than public schools. In different words, your reasoning is based on fabrications.
In different words, you live in a nice neighborhood with nice schools. You don't care how inefficiently your school operates because it's mostly other people's tax dollars that pay for it. And you don't care how many students are f*cked over by the public school system, as long as you get your stuff for free. It's selfishness like yours that causes America's school system to deteriorate further and further.
Of course, most private businesses suck, just like government services. The difference is that with private businesses, you have a choice not to give your money to businesses that you have found to suck, whereas with government services, you keep having to pay for bad services no matter what.
It's basically the same idea as evolution. It's kind of funny that progressives pay lip service to evolutionary ideas in biology but believe in intelligent design in economics.
Yet, that is exactly what the US government is advocating. Furthermore, even if it were a useful metric, it would get gamed. That's, again, why it's important to leave the choice of metric up to individual parents, just like the choice of school. If you have a diversity of metrics and a diversity of choices from parents, not only do you avoid nationwide educational disaster, but also models that are particularly successful will thrive, while those that aren't will disappear.
Many different people have many different beliefs about what constitutes a good school. Again, that's why a free market in education is so important; free markets, of course, also have nonprofits operating in them.
I take it you can't read: In the long run, companies can't fake how much money they have made: the money is either there or it isn't.
There are many schools of deception in play in the private sector. But those kinds of deceptions don't work in the long run because you can't hide arbitrary amounts of losses forever; sooner or later the accounting is going to catch up with you.
(What you can do, of course, is keep asking for a "government stimulus" or "government bailout", but then you aren't really private sector anymore.)
I didn't say that there was no "gaming" in the private sector; there is plenty of it. I said companies can't fake how much money they are making in the long run.
Don't worry, the teachers' unions are "too big to fail", and they already get pretty much whatever they want.
High tech companies are ultimately able and driven to pay productive employees more because they make them more money. In the long run, companies can't fake how much money they have made: the money is either there or it isn't.
But in the educational system, outcomes can be faked, because they aren't self-enforcing. Whatever test results, performance measures, or statistics you use for determining performance, they are subject to lobbying and manipulation and they can be gamed. Putting public teachers on a performance standard is probably even worse than simply letting them do whatever they want.
If you want teachers who are actually evaluated and paid based on performance, the only option you have is to send your kids to private schools. It would be nice if more parents can do that (via vouchers or similar mechanisms), but that's not going to happen as long as public teachers unions remain as powerful as they are.
Liquids are a lot more messy to hike with than powders.
The pre-adult portion of our society has legal guardians that ought to be responsible for them. The idea that we should structure adult society such that it is safe for pre-adults without parental supervision is simply not workable, and it's not a society I would want to live in. If parents want such environments for their kids, they should move to gated communities that cater to their tastes.
It's called life; deal with it. Living in a way that takes into account the stupidity and threats posed by your fellow human beings is a normal and necessary part of life; pretending that you can legislate those risks away is itself a sign of profound stupidity on your part.
If we give up our liberties one by one because some people abuse those liberties, we won't have any liberties left, and our safety won't improve significantly either.
I suspect pilot suicides are at least as common as terrorist attacks.
It's not a question of "hating"; without a political message, it simply is not a terrorist attack. The point of a terrorist attack is to create terror connected to a political agenda.
No, it's due to your assumptions being wrong.
Within the US, "whites" are not the top performers on IQ tests. And generally, IQ tests correlate very well with later performance in life, and the correlation with culture is a simple result that culture, too, correlates with later performance in life. That is, it isn't that IQ tests are unfairly biased to give some groups higher scores; it's that some groups actually perform better than others and the IQ test reflects that.
(Note that the differences in performance are not racial; that is, the same "race" or "culture" may do very well in one country and poorly in another country.)
No. The UN charter and human rights are about equal opportunities, the Bechdel test is about equal outcomes.
It's a common error to assume that equal opportunities should achieve equal outcomes, but they almost never do. That is, even in the complete absence of discrimination, you still get highly unequal outcomes based on race, sex, language, and religion.
In order to actually achieve equality of outcome, you have to deprive some people of rights and manipulate others into doing this they aren't interested in doing.
I thought misogyny was rather funny.
You mean like receptionists, secretaries, nurses, day care attendants, elementary school teachers, and cosmetologists?
"Defensiveness" and "blame" imply that there is anything wrong. I don't believe there is anything wrong.
Wrong about what?
If there were "institutionalised misogyny" at my company, it would be something for our management to think about, and it would be up to them whether to do anything about it or not. If they want to run an all-lesbian development team, I'm happy to leave and find another job.
And what exactly is it you want to "discuss"? Are you entering this "discussion" being open to the idea that your ideas about "gender balance" are wrong? Or are you just trying to hit other people over the head with your particular views?
I don't think they are scientists, I am pointing out to you that they pretend that they are scientists ("social sciences", "Geisteswissenschaftler", etc.), have the same trappings as such (doctorates, journals, peer review, conferences), and are treated by governments like scientific experts speaking objective truth (the exact field of a doctorate is usually not even mentioned when "experts" give input on legislation).
That's why I said You're a bloody fool if you think that someone who happens to have the title of "scientist" automatically has training or a career in "quantifying objective phenomena".
The "experts" who decide who you can fuck or marry, whether you can have an abortion, what medical conditions will be covered by your government-mandated insurance, what historical truths you can speak, whether your political speech is hateful or conforming, what religions are proper and improper, and which ethnicities owe money to which other ethnicities are these kinds of pseudo-scientists, and it is the ignorance of people like you who gives them power.
Don't bother, you have nothing of value to say because you don't have the slightest idea of how the world around you works. You live in a semi-autistic fantasy world in which rational Ubermenschen guide your life and run society with their benevolent superior intellects.
You felt like pointing out that it didn't work that way in your country. I explained why. I fail to see how that is a "my country is better than your country" argument. It's simply a fact that government-by-elites is deeply ingrained in European democracies and European thinking. You yourself evidently can't conceive of any other possibility.
You're a bloody fool if you think that someone who happens to have the title of "scientist" automatically has training or a career in "quantifying objective phenomena". Most scientist that influence politics are social scientists, political scientists, medicine, theologians, philosophers, economists, and historians. There is little that's objective about their fields, and they merely bestow the title "scientist" on the next generation. Add to that the large fraction of charlatans in the hard sciences and you end up with a dismal collection of decision makers.
Quite right: there should be no "medical policy", "educational policy", or "fiscal policy", and lawmaking should be clear and transparent enough so that you don't need lawyers to interpret the laws. Why is that even a question?
I don't see what your big problem is with that "implication"; the political right generally uses religion for the same purpose. Whether religion or science, they both have a self-perpetuating class of high priests that won't be questioned, whose decisions aren't rooted in fact and reason, and aren't accountable to anybody.
I don't need to "support the conclusion"; anybody who is historically literate should know the facts. If you don't, well, get yourself an education.
She can either get a Linux-supported laptop, or she can run VirtualBox on Windows or Mac. All of those options work fine.
If you do get a Mac, realize that its much vaunted "UNIX environment" isn't really that useful for software development for anything other than Mac; there are simply too many annoying differences in the command line tools, libraries, and compilers; in addition, the native Mac environment lacks a good package manager. But VirtualBox on Mac works fine if you decide to go that route.
There are a lot "constitutional democracies", in particular in Europe, that try to limit power to an intellectual elite.
Of course, politics should say something about science: it should pick which scientific theories to believe and decide what policies to derive from them.
Where did I say that they weren't "allowed to tell anybody"? There is a difference between telling people "an asteroid is going to hit earth" and "I want a law doing X".
Why is it always about "forbidding" with you people? Scientists can do whatever they want, but as a society we should recognize that people who lobby for laws cease being responsible scientists and treat them accordingly.
No, sadly, it's historical fact.
Plebiscites are usually held once people collect enough signatures indicating that they want one to be held. But a plebiscite is only one of many mechanisms by which politics can turn scientific results into action. My point is that science by itself has nothing relevant to say about politics at all.
These days, of course, it would be easy to give the people the power to vote on pretty much every law. What objection would you have to that?
Quite the opposite: scientists should not become politicians and they should not favor or advocate particular policies; it corrupts the science. Formulating policies is the job of politicians, and choosing among them is ultimately the job of the people. Since both scientists and politicians frequently are biased and corrupt in their choices, plebiscites seem like a reasonable choice.
And the political right is correct on these points. That's not just an opinion or a preference, it's a lesson that history has taught us painfully in the form of racism, socialism, and genocide: all of them justified by science and scientists, and often motivated by a crisis that scientists claimed to have recognized.
Yes it does. I am from Europe, and I don't want the US to turn into Europe.
So you are saying Americans are nationalists because Europeans are saying that Europeans are superior?
Ethnic and cultural homogeneity have everything to do with this problem, since crime and recidivism rates are highly linked to culture, and culture itself is highly linked to having a minority status.
(Since you appear to be too stupid to understand this, let me spell it out: it's not membership in any specific "race" or ethnicity that is related to crime and recidivism, it is the status of being a minority inside a majority culture.)