Taxation has always been an instrument of social engineering how a society operates. By any other name, it's a behavior modifier. The fact many of you don't already know this is quite frankly, scary as hell!
Except that this wasn't a tax until John Roberts retconned it into one.
The DREAM Act is precisely what I'm talking about in rewarding illegal immigration. It's a kind of Amnesty. It's a message that "Hey, if you can keep your kid here long enough without getting caught, he gets to stay whether you played by the rules or not". This law has nothing... zero... to do with the regular visa system, and, once again, the overwhelming support for it on all sides. It's a total dodge of the question of support for legal immigration.
You seem to be unaware that the populations of both the EU and the USA are increasing solely because of immigration. Birthrates in the USA and EU are already below replacement rates.
That's not true for the US. The EU, yeah (and Japan too...boy do they have a population implosion coming). Mark Steyn has sold millions of books on how the Italian family tree is now upside down. But in the US? We're breeding slightly above replacement rates.
I have never once seen an ounce of hostility toward legal immigrants in my life.
I have, many times. And i would be surprised if you actually haven't. A lot of it takes the form of racism. I've heard people told "go back to ________". There are numerous immigrant small business owners who suffer abuse solely because they are (or are perceived to be) not native americans. The stereotype is Korean store owners in non Korean communities, who are purportedly prime targets, especially when things start to go bad.
Koreans are hated in other minority communities... South Central L.A., for instance... where they're seen in a tinge of jealousy because of their success. In middle class areas, they're liked just fine. There's a Korean car factory near me, and people here think they're great people, smart, and hard-working. You're always going to find someone bitching about immigrants... that will never change... but legal immigrants are largely welcomed and admired in most of the US. I'd say the sole exception right now is Arab immigrants, and that's a direct result of 9/11. That will work itself out with time, especially after the current Middle East wars have been over for awhile.
Are you really that naive? If people only cared about the legal status of immigrants, then we could pass a bill to legalize every immigrant and please everyone. The fact that conservatives refuse every opportunity to make legal immigration easier proves that it's not the legality at all that's the issue.
This is a flat out, demonstrably false lie. Conservatives support legal immigration at about the same rates as self identified liberals and moderates. Further, we already have very generous legal immigration. We issue over one million visas per year, in a lottery system. This is in a nation of just over 300 million. That's a lot of visas. Further, in some years there are almost as many naturalizations... around a million... as visas granted. We're very open and generous already. Illegal immigration is about just that: illegal immigration. Which, by the way, the American public is against overwhelmingly.
The issue of "legalization" is whether or not giving an amnesty to illegal aliens would only encourage more border jumping. I think history is pretty clear that it would... when you reward illegal behavior, you get more of it. The Reagan Administration was promised that if they signed on to an amnesty deal, it would pretty much settle the illegal alien problem permanently, and advocates promised that border security would take a priority. The Reagan amnesty was sold as a one shot solution that would permanently fix the problem. Obviously, the opposite happened. Opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens is NOT the same thing as being "anti-immigrant". Any assertion to the contrary is political BS.
And this is an example of why the executive branch cannot and should not decide WHAT laws to to enforce a la cart. Imagine if Eisenhower decided he didn't like Brown v Board of Education (and he didn't) and wouldn't enforce it.
Or that if a President decided unilaterally that he'd deport illegal aliens when he was good and ready, duly enacted law be damned. Oh wait....
Not all slaves were African. Slavery has existed for all people of all colors since the beginning of history. My great, great, grandparents were white, German, and slaves, for instance--in Auschwitz.
Further, slavery was on every continent, for every race, and never really went away. There's an active slave trade between Africa and Arabia, and what are prisons but periods of slavery? The state owns you, and puts you to work "paying off your debt to society". Sounds a lot like indentured servitude.
The Supreme Court TRIED to stop that practice by issuing decisions that the Indians did not need to move, but the slave-owning Democrats who were in charge (like Andrew Jackson) decided the Supreme Court can shutup, and moves the Indians anyway.
That SCOTUS decision... Worcester vs. Georgia... produced the infamous Andy Jackson quote: "John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it".
In many cases, Tiffany wouldn't hire them. I've never seen anyone with two-inch gauges and tattoos from wrist to shoulder working at Tiffany.
I've never seen anyone like that at an Apple store either. For all of the "think different" stuff, Apple seems to prefer their employees... even retail clerks... to be stylish and "clean cut", so to speak. Remember, Apple is all about image.
Much of the debate about American unemployment has focused on why companies have moved factories overseas, but only 8 percent of the American work force is in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yea, that's the problem...Duh. People need jobs, so they work retail.
That manufacturing stat cuts two ways, though. A smaller percentage of the population works in manufacturing, but our population growth has been huge over time. Even with the outsourcing trend, in total output, America is manufacturing more than ever before, including the "glory days" of the mid 20th century during and after WWII. The need... and value of... service sector work has grown even more though, and that's why they're where the jobs are. For all of the bitching about how we don't make things anymore, or don't have as many farmers, etc, the fact is that we're in something of a golden age right now. We're building more things and growing more food than we ever have before. Technology has simply changed those fields to where fewer people are required to do them. Modern business supply chain methods have also reduced the need for personnel. We've wrung an awful lot of efficiency out of the process. Manufacturing is faster and less worker intensive and more efficient than even two decades ago. So even if we adopted a Japanese MITI-style industrial policy (which, most economists now think, has failed them in the long run), massive numbers of manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. We'll continue to make more and more, but unless you artificially limit or ban productivity technologies and supply chain methods... which would put us at a huge competitive disadvantage... you're simply never going to see more than 10 percent of a modern western country working in factories. And there's really nothing bad about that. Skilled workers will always make a nice living, but your kid would probably be even better off as a banker or manager.
Contemplate the meaning of that for a moment. It's not just that we have high unemployment, it's that those WITH employment aren't getting anything close to a living wage. And you know what happens when you don't get a living wage? You have to go on welfare programs.
Funny how that works out, isn't it?
Most Apple Store employees are young students or young workers living at home or sharing an apartment with others and splitting expenses. I really doubt that there's a lot of single parents supporting a whole family on Apple Store pay. So there goes your welfare jab. Getting outraged over this is like getting outraged at making just over minimum wage flipping burgers. If you want to make more money, learn a skill and become a higher valued worker.
The main issue is that this video is not an accurate depiction of lab work. It's an idiotic thing that would have been a great 80s music video.
The idiotic thing is the continuing quest to get more women in science and engineering, etc. Why no drive to get more male elementary school teachers, nurses, and secretaries? It would be just as stupid. Just because a field becomes more open to women doesn't mean that women necessarily want to be part of that field. There are always exceptions, but generally, different genders are attracted to different work. And this is why these campaigns are both silly and useless, noting more than an attempt to re-engineer human nature, which isn't really malleable.
And if you see a vulnerability in scum like Kim Barking Mad Teapots North Korea or Ahmadinejad's Iran then we should be doing our best to take them out now whilst we still can.
Which is exactly the mind set that got us into this position. Neither Iran nor North Korea would be such a big problem for us now if we hadn't sponsored a coup in one, and used the other as a proxy during the Cold War.
The way we deal with them today will set the stage for the next 50-100 years. We can keep fucking with them, or we can work on decreasing tensions.
This is absolutely astonishing. We "used" North Korea as a proxy? Really? Crawl out of your political cocoon for a minute, and look at the facts: North Korea is a pariah because it attempted an invasion of South Korea in 1950, supplied and backed by the Soviet Union and Maoist China. The Norks were a proxy, all right, but a proxy used as a weapon against the West and emerging Asian democracies by Stalin and Mao.You DO know this, right? Or are we going to get a conspiracy theory about it? And ever since, they've periodically attacked the South or US forces stationed there. The regime is infamous for kidnapping South Korean citizens for reasons as varied as the need for political prisoners to Kim Jong Il having the hots for a actress he saw in the South. The Norks are as institutionally brutal, corrupt, and totalitarian as any regime in history, and they got that way all on their own. Every time we try to "decrease tensions" with the North... giving them aid, etc... they abuse it, renege on their agreements, and inevitably attack the South in some manner. Did you forget that they sank a ship of the SK Navy a few years ago, literally because they could get away with it? That they just woke up one day and decided to shell South Korea last year?
You can debate the Iranian situation (though I think an Islamist government was inevitable no matter what policy we followed), but to somehow blame us for North Korea is the very height of what Jeanne Kirkpatrick used to call the "Blame America First" syndrome.
I think there's almost certainly going to be a backlash against college in general... and that's good and long overdue. The "all kids should go to college" idea has resulted in too many students in too many colleges with too many dollars being shoveled into a bubble that might equal the housing bubble. And as STEM is hard, few kids choose it, opting for easier majors, relying on the old myth that simply waving their diploma will get them a good job. Thousands of social sciences, ethnic/gender studies, and humanities majors are discovering that fallacy the hard way now. And because of the sheer glut of graduates in a bad economy... most of reduced quality and from reduced academic rigor... even STEM and business graduates are finding it harder than usual. There's a reason why so many non-STEM and non-business grads try law school... they want high earnings, have no future with a bachelors, and go "Hey! I know! Lawyers make lots of money!". This is an annoyance to serious students that actually wanted to practice law from the get-go.
When the Higher Ed bubble bursts, it's gonna be something to see. If it's anything like the housing or tech bubbles in scale, expect a lot of schools to shut their doors... and many of them will be longstanding colleges you'd think immune.
No, I expect humanity will choke itself on it's own wastes, like yeast in a jar of sugar water that eventually produces toxic concentrations of ethanol. That doesn't mean we should encourage it, even yeast isn't that stupid.
I expect that humanity, on the whole, will do just fine, and that all of the disasters that have been predicted and yet haven't happened... island chains and coastal states under water, vast famines in first world countries because theyv'e turned to desert, etc... still aren't going to happen. Oh, famines have happened in the third world and they will continue to, from time to time, but they'll happen in all the normal places for all the normal reasons. What I will predict is that everytime a famine or hurricane or disease outbreak occurs, the Global Warming Chorus will sing out as one that it was all caused by....ding!... climate change!". Nevermind that these things happen from time to time, and always have... NOW it'll solely be because I refuse to ditch my truck and ride a wind-powered tram to work. That's my prediction.
Canada has 15% corporate tax rate (http://www.canadabusinesstax.com/corporate-income-tax-rates/), 52 week combined maternity/parental leave, free health care, and federal pension plan.
There is no reason the US cannot provide the same level of benefits except for political bickering and the close to 2 billion *per day* the US spends on its military.
Canada can afford to do all this with a piss-poor military. With a population of just over 30 million, Canada's military is so small that it's barely adequate to protect one quarter of their territory. The truth is, part of that 2 billion a day you lament the US military is spending goes in part towards providing military security to countries like Canada that don't spend enough on their own defense.
My third grader informed me one day that "science is boring". You could have hit my in the nuts with a hammer and it would have hurt me less. I inquired more and found out that he is reading a lot of stuff and he just doesn't find it exciting
I collect old books, including some old textbooks, and one thing I see is a definite shift from the use of the practical to explain science in texts to an almost complete reliance on theory. The former is interesting and the later bores the hell out of most kids.
One of my favorite books that I've collected is a junior high school general science text from 1932. If you're used to modern school science texts, the thing that immediately jumps out at you about this book is that for most subjects, practical, real world examples are used to introduce the concept to the students... usually using machines that do our various jobs... and then followed with some light theory behind. For instance, flight is taught not with a dry paragraph of theory, but with a picture of a WWI fighter in action, with notes on how the various parts work. That grabs their interest with the cool factor. Then a paragraph on the opposite page has a brief description of Bernoulli's principle to explain how it gets off the ground. There's a chapter on energy that starts out with a diagram of an old Dynamo, with an incredibly cool description of how everything works, what the various parts do, and thenyou get some info on electrical theory. It's fantastic, and I read it cover to cover. I never had a science text like that, and I was in my mid-30's when I bought it, had a bachelor's degree, and I still learned things from it. It was fun. When's the last time you saw a middle school science text that could be described as fun?
Go to Google Books, and poke around in some of the old science texts from that period. You'll see what I'm talking about. I absolutely love the idea of teaching by means of examining how a machine works, especially when you do it by building one on a small scale yourself. So I completely get the "have 'em build rockets" notion. There's a lot to that.
When's the last time you've seen a school science text
If they had come to my school in the 70s they would have seen us kids hunkered down the same way for SRA tests. Remember the SRA test? They were just an evaluation, AFAIK. I don't know what they did with them, other than call you in for a parent-teacher-child conference to let you know how you did and what you could do to fix problems.
Standardized testing came about in the first place because of declining quality of graduates. When reasons for that decline were examined, one of the things we found was that the previous methods for ensuring quality... reliance on teachers and local schools to police themselves and give tough tests... was failing because new ideas about education stressed that such demands were detrimental at times to the child. One of the first practical applications of this thinking was that things like class discipline, rote learning, and traditional English instruction had to go. The sixties and seventies then brought us such fads as "new math", whole language instruction, and "open classrooms", where some schools actually brought in workmen to knock down walls joining several classrooms into one large, cubical-farm like space. The 80's and 90's brought us the "self-esteem" craze. Meanwhile, real knowledge and understanding of curriculum declined, but for various reasons, many kids were passed and promoted to the next grade anyway. In other words, standardized testing came about to ensure that kids really did have the basics, because we could no longer trust the classroom process to produce those results.
It says everything that there was truly a time where an A could be trusted to really be an A... a mark of excellence in classroom work... and now it can't be.
They're doing exactly what they've been told to do by the system that politics has created. To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.
While I agree with your sentiments, educators are not only missing the punchline, they're one of the primary drivers behind the current system. Have a look at the curriculum of various education degree programs at colleges and universities... especially on the graduate side. You'll find a devotion to rigid institutional orthodoxy, and an almost cultish drive to keep non-education majors out of the the teaching ranks. Teaching has become something of a guild.
The real challenge will be keeping the work output of all of these "normal" people worth anything in a meaningful sense. They are quickly being replaced by technology. This is one of the problems - in order for there to be a large middle class - the work output of the large middle class has to be worth something. Probably won't happen if they are all "out-of-work english majors"
This is a valid concern, with scary examples here and there, but on the whole, increasing technology has tended to expand economies, not contract them. Yes, buggy makers are out of business, but automobile makers are hiring. And much of this presupposes that new technologies completely eliminate old ones. Yet we've had the jackhammer for years, and shovels are still being used. We've got computers and calculators, and yet there are probably more pencils and paper being produced now than in anytime in history. So I won't claim that new technologies don't bring disruptions, but on the whole, the fears on this are overblown. Things tend to work themselves out in economies when new tech comes along.
One more thing; I have to take issue with the whole concept of "meaningful" work. Who defines what that is? A garbageman isn't skilled or revered, but if no one picks up the trash, things tend to go to hell pretty quick. All work isn't glamorous, but any work that needs to be done is by definition meaningful work. The world really does need ditch-diggers too. We'd all be before off if we understood and accepted this.
the undue amount of focus now on standardized tests. Teaching to the test, as it where.
remember, test makers make test designed to test things kids don't know, not what kids have learned. When the teaching focus becomes teaching the test, we have difficult.
Grades should be based on participation, and how 'far' a student move forward in the subject.
A kids trying hes damndest and getting a B is better then a kid getting an easy A.
The problem with removing standardized testing is that you'd revert to a situation where we really had no idea if they were learning anything at all before. At least if they pass the standardized tests, we know they have at least a basic grasp of that material. Testing was implemented precisely because of your "participation" idea... you had kids getting decent to good to even great grades just for "class participation"... when they really weren't learning the material.
And frankly, some of the crying about the standardized tests are just silly. It's not like these test have esoteric things on them that the students don't need to know. They're standardized so that there's an assurance of a uniform field of common knowledge that's been gained. Some of it is through rote instruction, but so what? Rote instruction can be very useful. Tweak and reform testing, but don't chuck it aside completely.
It's unlikely we'll ever do 1, and impossible that we'll ever do 2. But of 2, I will say this... I've come to agree with you that compulsory education is not seen by many students as a right, or even an opportunity, but as a burden. I've come to see as I've gotten older that you tend to want and value things more if they're not automatic and compulsory, and you want them even moreso if they have to be earned. Witness the wave of kids in India desperately trying to get into the best high schools, the way our best HS graduates desperately try to get into Ivy League schools.
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Taxation has always been an instrument of social engineering how a society operates. By any other name, it's a behavior modifier. The fact many of you don't already know this is quite frankly, scary as hell!
Except that this wasn't a tax until John Roberts retconned it into one.
Then explain this
The DREAM Act is precisely what I'm talking about in rewarding illegal immigration. It's a kind of Amnesty. It's a message that "Hey, if you can keep your kid here long enough without getting caught, he gets to stay whether you played by the rules or not". This law has nothing... zero... to do with the regular visa system, and, once again, the overwhelming support for it on all sides. It's a total dodge of the question of support for legal immigration.
Any time I parse something like "(Partnership).*(American|(Econom(y|ic)))", I immediately lump it into the right wing propoganda bin.
Assuming they are a right wing org, does that mean that if they say "immigrants are good for us", that makes it bad?
You seem to be unaware that the populations of both the EU and the USA are increasing solely because of immigration. Birthrates in the USA and EU are already below replacement rates.
That's not true for the US. The EU, yeah (and Japan too...boy do they have a population implosion coming). Mark Steyn has sold millions of books on how the Italian family tree is now upside down. But in the US? We're breeding slightly above replacement rates.
I have never once seen an ounce of hostility toward legal immigrants in my life.
I have, many times. And i would be surprised if you actually haven't. A lot of it takes the form of racism. I've heard people told "go back to ________". There are numerous immigrant small business owners who suffer abuse solely because they are (or are perceived to be) not native americans. The stereotype is Korean store owners in non Korean communities, who are purportedly prime targets, especially when things start to go bad.
Koreans are hated in other minority communities... South Central L.A., for instance... where they're seen in a tinge of jealousy because of their success. In middle class areas, they're liked just fine. There's a Korean car factory near me, and people here think they're great people, smart, and hard-working. You're always going to find someone bitching about immigrants... that will never change... but legal immigrants are largely welcomed and admired in most of the US. I'd say the sole exception right now is Arab immigrants, and that's a direct result of 9/11. That will work itself out with time, especially after the current Middle East wars have been over for awhile.
Are you really that naive? If people only cared about the legal status of immigrants, then we could pass a bill to legalize every immigrant and please everyone. The fact that conservatives refuse every opportunity to make legal immigration easier proves that it's not the legality at all that's the issue.
This is a flat out, demonstrably false lie. Conservatives support legal immigration at about the same rates as self identified liberals and moderates. Further, we already have very generous legal immigration. We issue over one million visas per year, in a lottery system. This is in a nation of just over 300 million. That's a lot of visas. Further, in some years there are almost as many naturalizations... around a million... as visas granted. We're very open and generous already. Illegal immigration is about just that: illegal immigration. Which, by the way, the American public is against overwhelmingly.
The issue of "legalization" is whether or not giving an amnesty to illegal aliens would only encourage more border jumping. I think history is pretty clear that it would... when you reward illegal behavior, you get more of it. The Reagan Administration was promised that if they signed on to an amnesty deal, it would pretty much settle the illegal alien problem permanently, and advocates promised that border security would take a priority. The Reagan amnesty was sold as a one shot solution that would permanently fix the problem. Obviously, the opposite happened. Opposition to amnesty for illegal aliens is NOT the same thing as being "anti-immigrant". Any assertion to the contrary is political BS.
And this is an example of why the executive branch cannot and should not decide WHAT laws to to enforce a la cart. Imagine if Eisenhower decided he didn't like Brown v Board of Education (and he didn't) and wouldn't enforce it.
Or that if a President decided unilaterally that he'd deport illegal aliens when he was good and ready, duly enacted law be damned. Oh wait....
Not all slaves were African. Slavery has existed for all people of all colors since the beginning of history. My great, great, grandparents were white, German, and slaves, for instance--in Auschwitz.
Further, slavery was on every continent, for every race, and never really went away. There's an active slave trade between Africa and Arabia, and what are prisons but periods of slavery? The state owns you, and puts you to work "paying off your debt to society". Sounds a lot like indentured servitude.
The Supreme Court TRIED to stop that practice by issuing decisions that the Indians did not need to move, but the slave-owning Democrats who were in charge (like Andrew Jackson) decided the Supreme Court can shutup, and moves the Indians anyway.
That SCOTUS decision... Worcester vs. Georgia... produced the infamous Andy Jackson quote: "John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him enforce it".
At best, you'll get treating with disrespect, dismisive attitude, rudeness, made to wait entire days in line, etc..
So... getting a visa is pretty much like dealing with any other federal agency, then.
In many cases, Tiffany wouldn't hire them. I've never seen anyone with two-inch gauges and tattoos from wrist to shoulder working at Tiffany.
I've never seen anyone like that at an Apple store either. For all of the "think different" stuff, Apple seems to prefer their employees... even retail clerks... to be stylish and "clean cut", so to speak. Remember, Apple is all about image.
Much of the debate about American unemployment has focused on why companies have moved factories overseas, but only 8 percent of the American work force is in manufacturing, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Yea, that's the problem...Duh. People need jobs, so they work retail.
That manufacturing stat cuts two ways, though. A smaller percentage of the population works in manufacturing, but our population growth has been huge over time. Even with the outsourcing trend, in total output, America is manufacturing more than ever before, including the "glory days" of the mid 20th century during and after WWII. The need... and value of... service sector work has grown even more though, and that's why they're where the jobs are. For all of the bitching about how we don't make things anymore, or don't have as many farmers, etc, the fact is that we're in something of a golden age right now. We're building more things and growing more food than we ever have before. Technology has simply changed those fields to where fewer people are required to do them. Modern business supply chain methods have also reduced the need for personnel. We've wrung an awful lot of efficiency out of the process. Manufacturing is faster and less worker intensive and more efficient than even two decades ago. So even if we adopted a Japanese MITI-style industrial policy (which, most economists now think, has failed them in the long run), massive numbers of manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. We'll continue to make more and more, but unless you artificially limit or ban productivity technologies and supply chain methods... which would put us at a huge competitive disadvantage... you're simply never going to see more than 10 percent of a modern western country working in factories. And there's really nothing bad about that. Skilled workers will always make a nice living, but your kid would probably be even better off as a banker or manager.
Yes, making $11/hr means you've got it hard.
Contemplate the meaning of that for a moment. It's not just that we have high unemployment, it's that those WITH employment aren't getting anything close to a living wage. And you know what happens when you don't get a living wage? You have to go on welfare programs.
Funny how that works out, isn't it?
Most Apple Store employees are young students or young workers living at home or sharing an apartment with others and splitting expenses. I really doubt that there's a lot of single parents supporting a whole family on Apple Store pay. So there goes your welfare jab. Getting outraged over this is like getting outraged at making just over minimum wage flipping burgers. If you want to make more money, learn a skill and become a higher valued worker.
The main issue is that this video is not an accurate depiction of lab work. It's an idiotic thing that would have been a great 80s music video.
The idiotic thing is the continuing quest to get more women in science and engineering, etc. Why no drive to get more male elementary school teachers, nurses, and secretaries? It would be just as stupid. Just because a field becomes more open to women doesn't mean that women necessarily want to be part of that field. There are always exceptions, but generally, different genders are attracted to different work. And this is why these campaigns are both silly and useless, noting more than an attempt to re-engineer human nature, which isn't really malleable.
And if you see a vulnerability in scum like Kim Barking Mad Teapots North Korea or Ahmadinejad's Iran then we should be doing our best to take them out now whilst we still can.
Which is exactly the mind set that got us into this position. Neither Iran nor North Korea would be such a big problem for us now if we hadn't sponsored a coup in one, and used the other as a proxy during the Cold War.
The way we deal with them today will set the stage for the next 50-100 years. We can keep fucking with them, or we can work on decreasing tensions.
This is absolutely astonishing. We "used" North Korea as a proxy? Really? Crawl out of your political cocoon for a minute, and look at the facts: North Korea is a pariah because it attempted an invasion of South Korea in 1950, supplied and backed by the Soviet Union and Maoist China. The Norks were a proxy, all right, but a proxy used as a weapon against the West and emerging Asian democracies by Stalin and Mao.You DO know this, right? Or are we going to get a conspiracy theory about it? And ever since, they've periodically attacked the South or US forces stationed there. The regime is infamous for kidnapping South Korean citizens for reasons as varied as the need for political prisoners to Kim Jong Il having the hots for a actress he saw in the South. The Norks are as institutionally brutal, corrupt, and totalitarian as any regime in history, and they got that way all on their own. Every time we try to "decrease tensions" with the North... giving them aid, etc... they abuse it, renege on their agreements, and inevitably attack the South in some manner. Did you forget that they sank a ship of the SK Navy a few years ago, literally because they could get away with it? That they just woke up one day and decided to shell South Korea last year?
You can debate the Iranian situation (though I think an Islamist government was inevitable no matter what policy we followed), but to somehow blame us for North Korea is the very height of what Jeanne Kirkpatrick used to call the "Blame America First" syndrome.
... a backlash against education.
I think there's almost certainly going to be a backlash against college in general... and that's good and long overdue. The "all kids should go to college" idea has resulted in too many students in too many colleges with too many dollars being shoveled into a bubble that might equal the housing bubble. And as STEM is hard, few kids choose it, opting for easier majors, relying on the old myth that simply waving their diploma will get them a good job. Thousands of social sciences, ethnic/gender studies, and humanities majors are discovering that fallacy the hard way now. And because of the sheer glut of graduates in a bad economy... most of reduced quality and from reduced academic rigor... even STEM and business graduates are finding it harder than usual. There's a reason why so many non-STEM and non-business grads try law school... they want high earnings, have no future with a bachelors, and go "Hey! I know! Lawyers make lots of money!". This is an annoyance to serious students that actually wanted to practice law from the get-go.
When the Higher Ed bubble bursts, it's gonna be something to see. If it's anything like the housing or tech bubbles in scale, expect a lot of schools to shut their doors... and many of them will be longstanding colleges you'd think immune.
No, I expect humanity will choke itself on it's own wastes, like yeast in a jar of sugar water that eventually produces toxic concentrations of ethanol. That doesn't mean we should encourage it, even yeast isn't that stupid.
I expect that humanity, on the whole, will do just fine, and that all of the disasters that have been predicted and yet haven't happened... island chains and coastal states under water, vast famines in first world countries because theyv'e turned to desert, etc... still aren't going to happen. Oh, famines have happened in the third world and they will continue to, from time to time, but they'll happen in all the normal places for all the normal reasons. What I will predict is that everytime a famine or hurricane or disease outbreak occurs, the Global Warming Chorus will sing out as one that it was all caused by....ding!... climate change!". Nevermind that these things happen from time to time, and always have... NOW it'll solely be because I refuse to ditch my truck and ride a wind-powered tram to work. That's my prediction.
Canada has 15% corporate tax rate (http://www.canadabusinesstax.com/corporate-income-tax-rates/), 52 week combined maternity/parental leave, free health care, and federal pension plan.
There is no reason the US cannot provide the same level of benefits except for political bickering and the close to 2 billion *per day* the US spends on its military.
Canada can afford to do all this with a piss-poor military. With a population of just over 30 million, Canada's military is so small that it's barely adequate to protect one quarter of their territory. The truth is, part of that 2 billion a day you lament the US military is spending goes in part towards providing military security to countries like Canada that don't spend enough on their own defense.
the chinese will pirate anything.
They've been cloning electronics, toys, and even whole vehicles for years now. So why not clone whole cities and towns?
My third grader informed me one day that "science is boring". You could have hit my in the nuts with a hammer and it would have hurt me less. I inquired more and found out that he is reading a lot of stuff and he just doesn't find it exciting
I collect old books, including some old textbooks, and one thing I see is a definite shift from the use of the practical to explain science in texts to an almost complete reliance on theory. The former is interesting and the later bores the hell out of most kids.
One of my favorite books that I've collected is a junior high school general science text from 1932. If you're used to modern school science texts, the thing that immediately jumps out at you about this book is that for most subjects, practical, real world examples are used to introduce the concept to the students... usually using machines that do our various jobs... and then followed with some light theory behind. For instance, flight is taught not with a dry paragraph of theory, but with a picture of a WWI fighter in action, with notes on how the various parts work. That grabs their interest with the cool factor. Then a paragraph on the opposite page has a brief description of Bernoulli's principle to explain how it gets off the ground. There's a chapter on energy that starts out with a diagram of an old Dynamo, with an incredibly cool description of how everything works, what the various parts do, and thenyou get some info on electrical theory. It's fantastic, and I read it cover to cover. I never had a science text like that, and I was in my mid-30's when I bought it, had a bachelor's degree, and I still learned things from it. It was fun. When's the last time you saw a middle school science text that could be described as fun?
Go to Google Books, and poke around in some of the old science texts from that period. You'll see what I'm talking about. I absolutely love the idea of teaching by means of examining how a machine works, especially when you do it by building one on a small scale yourself. So I completely get the "have 'em build rockets" notion. There's a lot to that.
When's the last time you've seen a school science text
If they had come to my school in the 70s they would have seen us kids hunkered down the same way for SRA tests. Remember the SRA test? They were just an evaluation, AFAIK. I don't know what they did with them, other than call you in for a parent-teacher-child conference to let you know how you did and what you could do to fix problems.
Standardized testing came about in the first place because of declining quality of graduates. When reasons for that decline were examined, one of the things we found was that the previous methods for ensuring quality... reliance on teachers and local schools to police themselves and give tough tests... was failing because new ideas about education stressed that such demands were detrimental at times to the child. One of the first practical applications of this thinking was that things like class discipline, rote learning, and traditional English instruction had to go. The sixties and seventies then brought us such fads as "new math", whole language instruction, and "open classrooms", where some schools actually brought in workmen to knock down walls joining several classrooms into one large, cubical-farm like space. The 80's and 90's brought us the "self-esteem" craze. Meanwhile, real knowledge and understanding of curriculum declined, but for various reasons, many kids were passed and promoted to the next grade anyway. In other words, standardized testing came about to ensure that kids really did have the basics, because we could no longer trust the classroom process to produce those results.
It says everything that there was truly a time where an A could be trusted to really be an A... a mark of excellence in classroom work... and now it can't be.
They're doing exactly what they've been told to do by the system that politics has created. To fix our schools, you need to keep congress's nose out of the process, return responsibility to the individual states and local boards of education.
While I agree with your sentiments, educators are not only missing the punchline, they're one of the primary drivers behind the current system. Have a look at the curriculum of various education degree programs at colleges and universities... especially on the graduate side. You'll find a devotion to rigid institutional orthodoxy, and an almost cultish drive to keep non-education majors out of the the teaching ranks. Teaching has become something of a guild.
The real challenge will be keeping the work output of all of these "normal" people worth anything in a meaningful sense. They are quickly being replaced by technology. This is one of the problems - in order for there to be a large middle class - the work output of the large middle class has to be worth something. Probably won't happen if they are all "out-of-work english majors"
This is a valid concern, with scary examples here and there, but on the whole, increasing technology has tended to expand economies, not contract them. Yes, buggy makers are out of business, but automobile makers are hiring. And much of this presupposes that new technologies completely eliminate old ones. Yet we've had the jackhammer for years, and shovels are still being used. We've got computers and calculators, and yet there are probably more pencils and paper being produced now than in anytime in history. So I won't claim that new technologies don't bring disruptions, but on the whole, the fears on this are overblown. Things tend to work themselves out in economies when new tech comes along.
One more thing; I have to take issue with the whole concept of "meaningful" work. Who defines what that is? A garbageman isn't skilled or revered, but if no one picks up the trash, things tend to go to hell pretty quick. All work isn't glamorous, but any work that needs to be done is by definition meaningful work. The world really does need ditch-diggers too. We'd all be before off if we understood and accepted this.
the undue amount of focus now on standardized tests. Teaching to the test, as it where.
remember, test makers make test designed to test things kids don't know, not what kids have learned. When the teaching focus becomes teaching the test, we have difficult.
Grades should be based on participation, and how 'far' a student move forward in the subject.
A kids trying hes damndest and getting a B is better then a kid getting an easy A.
The problem with removing standardized testing is that you'd revert to a situation where we really had no idea if they were learning anything at all before. At least if they pass the standardized tests, we know they have at least a basic grasp of that material. Testing was implemented precisely because of your "participation" idea... you had kids getting decent to good to even great grades just for "class participation"... when they really weren't learning the material.
And frankly, some of the crying about the standardized tests are just silly. It's not like these test have esoteric things on them that the students don't need to know. They're standardized so that there's an assurance of a uniform field of common knowledge that's been gained. Some of it is through rote instruction, but so what? Rote instruction can be very useful. Tweak and reform testing, but don't chuck it aside completely.
1) Close the DoE
2) Make going to school non-compulsory
It's unlikely we'll ever do 1, and impossible that we'll ever do 2. But of 2, I will say this... I've come to agree with you that compulsory education is not seen by many students as a right, or even an opportunity, but as a burden. I've come to see as I've gotten older that you tend to want and value things more if they're not automatic and compulsory, and you want them even moreso if they have to be earned. Witness the wave of kids in India desperately trying to get into the best high schools, the way our best HS graduates desperately try to get into Ivy League schools.