I was just curious because it sounded like another public school story... (I went to public school myself). My sister went to private girls school, and there's no way they would let persist that level of incompetence you just described. Unfortunately, almost all public schools just lack accountability or good feedback mechanisms that will correct problems.
I got to meet him a few times at Stanford when he was in his 90s... He was the nicest man and even at that age was one of the sharpest minds I have ever seen
For those reading this post and don't know about Milton Friedman... he was a Nobel Prize winner in economics that absolutely revolutionized monetary policy and made many other major intellectual contributions. Later in his career he became a fierce advocate for school vouchers and school choice. (Google Milton Friedman and read about his views on schoool choice, it is well worth your time.)
I'm going to guess public (though I might be wrong!) I think a big problem with public schools is that there is almost no accountability. Teachers can't be fired and don't neccesarily care what administrators or parents think... Administrators aren't responsive to parents because they don't have to be (and can't do anything even if they wanted to).... and then there's the old Mark Twain qoute, "God made the idiot for practice, then He made the school board." Absolutely no one is in charge, and if something terrible happens, there are no consequences.
Research has shown that Catholic schools have a SUBSTANTIALLY LOWER dropout rate than public schools. (For example, read a paper in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Policy Review here. ) Though it isn't terribly surprising you enjoyed your high school and it was good (it was private), your post does help illustrate the large gap between private schools and public schools,on a number of levels: college prep, dropout rate, individual achievement, and individual attention. Don't get me wrong, there are some good public schools, but it is much more rare and often occurs in more affluent neighborhoods where the school has to compete against private ones.
I think as problems with public schools persist and the clear emprical advantages of competition become increasingly clear, there will have to be more support for school choice... but it never ceases to me amaze me how tolerant people are of the government run public school monopoly that year after year achieves such lackluster results.
And unsurprisingly, government run monopolies deliver a poor product at a high price.
Could you imagine if we had ONE government run auto company? Imagine everyone paid taxes and was provided with a "free" car from this government car company. The rich would say to hell with it and go off and buy a Lexus or a Mercedes, but the poor and most of the middle class would take the crap government car because they already paid for it. This is exactly what has happened to our education system and I'm always amazed more people aren't outraged. The poor go to crappy public schools because its the only choice, the middle class go to crap and mediocre public schools because they already paid for it, and the rich and some middle class send their kids to quality private schools.
The solution is to expose schools to competition... support school vouchers and school choice so that you break up the government run monopoly. The ROOT problem is the government run monopoly, and it must be addressed.
Several other major countries such as Australia let people into the country for job reasons while approximately 2/3 of immigrants come to the US under family reunification. In an era of cheap long distance, the Internet, and discount airfares, giving such a high priority to family reunification probably doesn't make sense (definition of "family" includes adult brothers and sisters of US citizens etc...).
I'm all for more H1B workers, but at some point we have to confront the dramatic failings of large sections of the K-12 education system. We need more high quality K-12 schools that the broad population can attend. High stakes testing won't deliver that, and government/teachers union controlled schools haven't and won't deliver that either. (I'm not anti-teacher, but anyone with actual school experience will tell you that the state and national teachers unions are part of the problem, not the solution.)
I think the broad model should be the US university system. It doesn't have to be all private or all public, but you have real competition between schools and people can direct some of their government subsidies for education towards private schools instead of public schools.
Competition works, Government run monopolies don't. Until we realize that, large numbers of our schools are going to continue to pump out drug dealers instead of electrical engineers and web designers.
DISASTER. Not like it's hard to see this one coming.
In health care, you don't have to computerize 10 documents or even a hundred, its in the thousands and thousands... Docters are set in their ways and can be slow to change... Health care is governed by a complex interlocking set of rules, regulations, etc...
Add to this complexity all the efficienct and results oriented forward planning of a government bureaucracy and you can be almost guaranteed that you will be building a boondoggle.
IMHO this is totally expected. If the system worked, that would be reason for a big headline.
Extreme #(1) On one far side of the IP continuum, you treat intellectual property almost EXACTLY like physical property. Lifetime ownership, lifetime copyright etc... This situation probably grants excessive monopoly power to the IP creator and creates inefficiencies.
Extreme #(2)> On the other side, you have absolutely no rules whatsoever. Everyone is free to use/steal/whatever anything.... This situation creates a variation on the classic tragedy of the commons. Everyone has an incentive to use the common IP resources; no one has an incentive to create them. (And no, communism does not work and the broad population will not create free stuff for the benefit of mankind without compensation.)
(3) The Fuzzy Middle Then there is some position in the middle that grants a time limited monopoly (copyright) with certain exceptions for "fair use." Where "fair use" has a strict definition. A brief quotation is "fair use," while a larger excerpt is not. the Anti IP group (2) people want to redefine "fair use" as "all use." (Switch US system from (3) to Extreme #2 by stealth.) Not that I'm an RIAA fan, but the opinion piece here has a point.
Ken Mehlman is NOT stepping down because he is gay.
Looking at the the history of RNC chairmen, the RNC gets a new chairman every one or two election cycles.
Ken Mehlman says he was stepping down at the end of the election cycle, regardless of the outcome.
If you want to speculate, the "thumpin" the Republicans took increased the likelihood the RNC would switch leadership.
Not that it is particularly important, Ken Mehlman has denied being gay. Just because Bill Maher says something, doesn't make it is true. (Bill Maher says a lot of wacko things on a lot of topics. That's how he gets ratings.)
News organizations have a great deal of editorial discretion in what they include an interview, what they don't include etc... Interviews are edited all the time for all kinds of reasons! Obviously some editors at CNN didn't think it was informative to include Bill Maher's weirdo comments that he thinks the head of the RNC is gay. Maybe they wanted to keep the interview focussed on Maher's other topics.
It's not like CNN is run by some right wing conspiracy. I think you have to be pretty far out on the political fringe to get all excited about CNN's minor editorial decision.
This doesn't explain everything, but it does explain a lot. The list is available here
Looking at the list, you notice two trends. (1) Cold northern countries are in the top 15... Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Canada etc... (2) Smaller countries with highly dense population centers are in the top 15... Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Iceland (Iceland which is both cold and small is at the very top)
That said, we probably could do better with increased compensation because we're so goddamn rich, and compared to other countries on the list, we have such a low penetration of DSL.
Seriously though, I'm all for alternative energy, but to really make a difference, the technology has to be cost effective and scalable. That is the ONLY way it will ever get adopted. Wind is moving in that direction and I think nuclear is becoming more viable again.... but many other stuff: solar, wave power, etc... has a LONG way to go.
The point, I hope, that does not get dimissed, is that our votes have absolutely no place being counted by private interests. None.
What the heck does that actually mean?
Elections are currently run and votes counted by government agencies (Secretary of State, country registrar of voters etc...)
Private companies supply these agencies with technology, as they ALWAYS have. Voting machines have been supplied by private companies since voting machines were invented. Voting machines have to be certified as meeting proper standards for accuracy etc... by the State. Before voting machines, private companies supplied the government with pens and paper.
Are you advocating that some government agency has a monopoly on voting machine design? manufacture? Do all the employees have to be full time government employees? This sounds like a colossal mess to me, especially considerring all the touchscreen problems I've heard about aren't purposeful fraud problems, but problems with screen calibration, user error, poorly trained poll workers etc... (problems that are more likely to be fixed with competition between voting machine companies than by some centralized dumb government voting machine company).
Are volunteer poll workers "private interests" because they don't receive a government salary? Are you advocating that poll workers can't be volunteers?
What's wrong with the time tested system of "trust, but verify" Let private companies do what they do best and make the machines, and have government run the actual election and verify that everything is legit.
How much of the criticism of Diebold is legitimate and how much is over the top political grandstanding?
I don't know quite how it happens, but through some process, it becomes in vogue to completely hate and irrationally bash a company. For a while it was cool to hate Nike, but then people got over it. Same with the GAP. (Maybe its the millions they spend on ads.) Now the latest is for all the politicians to bash Walmart. Hillary Clinton returned Walmart's contribution to her campaign "because of serious differences with company practices." She USED to sit on the Walmart board, and it's not like they made some dramatic change in strategy. Academic studies show that Walmart provides the same kind of wages and benefits as other companies in the retail sector, but that doesn't seem to affect the Walmart criticism.
Techy people love to hate Microsoft, sometimes for good reason, but much of the stuff you read on Slashdot is beyond way out there. My impression is that the anti-Microsoft crowd is getting smaller. Nobody seriously talks about breaking Microsoft up into separate companies anymore, even though Microsoft is roughly about as dominant in the OS and office suite market as it has ever been.
PR is expensive, and I guess giving up the vote machine business may be Diebold's only way to get out of the political target sight.
Wrong. Public accomodations are only required to make "reasonable" efforts. Courts have held that costs to make the changes are part of testing if changes are "reasonable."
That's not real cost benefit analysis. I can't argue that I shouldn't have to put in a small wheelchair ramp because 0 people with wheelchairs ever visit my store, and if they did, I (and staff) could simply lift the wheelchair up the 2 stairs. A real cost benefit analysis would allow me to make arguments like that.
You have the correct answer; let market forces work. When giving greater access to the disabled is cheap, companies will do it (ramps to get up curbs etc...) and when it is unreasonably expensive, they won't (installing mini elevator units wherever there is a 3 stair staircase).
I'm not exactly sure why so many people don't go for this solution. My guess is that disabled groups want greater access than the market would give and they want someone else to pay for it. The public at large feels bad for the disabled and doesn't realize how much the changes will cost. Also, I think many voters think that businesses are some kidn of magical bank and that sticking some new business with a HUGE ADA bill somehow doesn't hurt them.
Imagine that the federal government had to pay 30% of any businesses costs associated with the ADA. If a business had to install 15 mini -elevators, it bills 30 percent to the government. If a business had to redesign its website, it bills the government for 30%. I'm sure lawmakers and tax payers would go nuts and change the law once they had to directly pay the real cost of what they were doing.
If this applies to Target, won't this apply to almost all US companies with a real physical storefront? I can just feel the litigation coming...
The real problem with the ADA is that there is no real cost benefit analysis. For many ADA required fixes, the cost is huge and a small benefit goes to a very small group of people. How much will it cost a small mom and pop store to completely redesign the website of their home business? Thousands and thousands of dollars? And how many blind web-surfers will come by to buy a $20 flower vase because of the redesign, 1? 2? 0? The same goes for Target, how much will it cost them to completely redesign? How many blind customers are there going to be? Would it just be simpler and cheaper to have them come into the store and have a real clerk help them out? (or do something over the phone?)
This is just the latest in a long line of crazy cases coming out of the ADA. I'm not against the blind, but it's just dumb to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver a service to a blind person that that blind person values at maybe $20 or less
My Observations:
(1) Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of high quality, accurate information.
(2) Wikipedia has a large amount of bogus info, misleading statements, and other problems.
My Opinion:
(3) Wikipedia could be made more accurate/better if articles were systematically reviewed by experts.
(4) The only practical way for (3) to be accomplished is it were organized and run by an extremely well financed non-profit or a private company that could somehow recoup its investment by selling access, advertisements or some kind of product.
Essentially, the private company would start with the current wikipedia and pay real experts in the various fields to go through and prune the bogus crap and misleading statements. I don't know if this is compatible with wikipedia licensing in its current form... but I think an encyclopedia with all of wikipedias content, but peer reviewed and without the crap, would be fantastic. You might be able to actually cite it! (Argue all you want, but there's no way you can cite Wikipedia right now in a real academic article.)
I wish I had MOD points.... I think you are 100% correct
I sometimes use Wikipedia as a place to get some information that I will have to carefully verify using other sources. I would never trust anything on Wikipedia to be right and would never cite it as a source in a paper. You just never know on Wikipedia when you're going to run into some BS (for the reason you described).
A number of Wikpedia articles are great, but I've noticed too many misleading articles, or articles with just tons of crap in them. For example, some of the articles on bogus medical treatments and pseudoscience are just filled with unscientific gobbledygook that make it sound that theres an actual scientific disagreement over whether the bogus medical treatment is actually bogus. Any 10 idiots with a few dynamic IPs can make quite a big mess on wikipedia and we live in a big world with lots of idiots. Any 10 reasonably smart people who actually don't know exactly what they're talking about can be equally as harmful.
Slashdot Mirror
I was just curious because it sounded like another public school story... (I went to public school myself). My sister went to private girls school, and there's no way they would let persist that level of incompetence you just described. Unfortunately, almost all public schools just lack accountability or good feedback mechanisms that will correct problems.
For those reading this post and don't know about Milton Friedman... he was a Nobel Prize winner in economics that absolutely revolutionized monetary policy and made many other major intellectual contributions. Later in his career he became a fierce advocate for school vouchers and school choice. (Google Milton Friedman and read about his views on schoool choice, it is well worth your time.)
I'm going to guess public (though I might be wrong!) I think a big problem with public schools is that there is almost no accountability. Teachers can't be fired and don't neccesarily care what administrators or parents think... Administrators aren't responsive to parents because they don't have to be (and can't do anything even if they wanted to).... and then there's the old Mark Twain qoute, "God made the idiot for practice, then He made the school board." Absolutely no one is in charge, and if something terrible happens, there are no consequences.
I'm just curious...
I think as problems with public schools persist and the clear emprical advantages of competition become increasingly clear, there will have to be more support for school choice... but it never ceases to me amaze me how tolerant people are of the government run public school monopoly that year after year achieves such lackluster results.
Could you imagine if we had ONE government run auto company? Imagine everyone paid taxes and was provided with a "free" car from this government car company. The rich would say to hell with it and go off and buy a Lexus or a Mercedes, but the poor and most of the middle class would take the crap government car because they already paid for it. This is exactly what has happened to our education system and I'm always amazed more people aren't outraged. The poor go to crappy public schools because its the only choice, the middle class go to crap and mediocre public schools because they already paid for it, and the rich and some middle class send their kids to quality private schools.
The solution is to expose schools to competition... support school vouchers and school choice so that you break up the government run monopoly. The ROOT problem is the government run monopoly, and it must be addressed.
Several other major countries such as Australia let people into the country for job reasons while approximately 2/3 of immigrants come to the US under family reunification. In an era of cheap long distance, the Internet, and discount airfares, giving such a high priority to family reunification probably doesn't make sense (definition of "family" includes adult brothers and sisters of US citizens etc...).
I think the broad model should be the US university system. It doesn't have to be all private or all public, but you have real competition between schools and people can direct some of their government subsidies for education towards private schools instead of public schools.
Competition works, Government run monopolies don't. Until we realize that, large numbers of our schools are going to continue to pump out drug dealers instead of electrical engineers and web designers.
The article says that Kaiser is spending about $1.5 billion a year on this plus other IT systems
That comes out to $15,000 per year per physician.
Bad summary or am I missing something?!
(This makes me want to check on those UK health system numbers too...)
In health care, you don't have to computerize 10 documents or even a hundred, its in the thousands and thousands... Docters are set in their ways and can be slow to change... Health care is governed by a complex interlocking set of rules, regulations, etc...
Add to this complexity all the efficienct and results oriented forward planning of a government bureaucracy and you can be almost guaranteed that you will be building a boondoggle.
IMHO this is totally expected. If the system worked, that would be reason for a big headline.
On one far side of the IP continuum, you treat intellectual property almost EXACTLY like physical property. Lifetime ownership, lifetime copyright etc... This situation probably grants excessive monopoly power to the IP creator and creates inefficiencies.
Extreme #(2)> ... This situation creates a variation on the classic tragedy of the commons. Everyone has an incentive to use the common IP resources; no one has an incentive to create them. (And no, communism does not work and the broad population will not create free stuff for the benefit of mankind without compensation.)
On the other side, you have absolutely no rules whatsoever. Everyone is free to use/steal/whatever anything.
(3) The Fuzzy Middle
Then there is some position in the middle that grants a time limited monopoly (copyright) with certain exceptions for "fair use." Where "fair use" has a strict definition. A brief quotation is "fair use," while a larger excerpt is not. the Anti IP group (2) people want to redefine "fair use" as "all use." (Switch US system from (3) to Extreme #2 by stealth.) Not that I'm an RIAA fan, but the opinion piece here has a point.
Ferris Bueller, you're my hero!
Looking at the the history of RNC chairmen, the RNC gets a new chairman every one or two election cycles.
Ken Mehlman says he was stepping down at the end of the election cycle, regardless of the outcome.
If you want to speculate, the "thumpin" the Republicans took increased the likelihood the RNC would switch leadership.
Not that it is particularly important, Ken Mehlman has denied being gay. Just because Bill Maher says something, doesn't make it is true. (Bill Maher says a lot of wacko things on a lot of topics. That's how he gets ratings.)
It's not like CNN is run by some right wing conspiracy. I think you have to be pretty far out on the political fringe to get all excited about CNN's minor editorial decision.
Looking at the list, you notice two trends. (1) Cold northern countries are in the top 15... Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Canada etc... (2) Smaller countries with highly dense population centers are in the top 15... Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Iceland (Iceland which is both cold and small is at the very top)
That said, we probably could do better with increased compensation because we're so goddamn rich, and compared to other countries on the list, we have such a low penetration of DSL.
Seriously though, I'm all for alternative energy, but to really make a difference, the technology has to be cost effective and scalable. That is the ONLY way it will ever get adopted. Wind is moving in that direction and I think nuclear is becoming more viable again.... but many other stuff: solar, wave power, etc... has a LONG way to go.
What the heck does that actually mean?
Elections are currently run and votes counted by government agencies (Secretary of State, country registrar of voters etc...)
Private companies supply these agencies with technology, as they ALWAYS have. Voting machines have been supplied by private companies since voting machines were invented. Voting machines have to be certified as meeting proper standards for accuracy etc... by the State. Before voting machines, private companies supplied the government with pens and paper.
Are you advocating that some government agency has a monopoly on voting machine design? manufacture? Do all the employees have to be full time government employees? This sounds like a colossal mess to me, especially considerring all the touchscreen problems I've heard about aren't purposeful fraud problems, but problems with screen calibration, user error, poorly trained poll workers etc... (problems that are more likely to be fixed with competition between voting machine companies than by some centralized dumb government voting machine company).
Are volunteer poll workers "private interests" because they don't receive a government salary? Are you advocating that poll workers can't be volunteers?
What's wrong with the time tested system of "trust, but verify" Let private companies do what they do best and make the machines, and have government run the actual election and verify that everything is legit.
I don't know quite how it happens, but through some process, it becomes in vogue to completely hate and irrationally bash a company. For a while it was cool to hate Nike, but then people got over it. Same with the GAP. (Maybe its the millions they spend on ads.) Now the latest is for all the politicians to bash Walmart. Hillary Clinton returned Walmart's contribution to her campaign "because of serious differences with company practices." She USED to sit on the Walmart board, and it's not like they made some dramatic change in strategy. Academic studies show that Walmart provides the same kind of wages and benefits as other companies in the retail sector, but that doesn't seem to affect the Walmart criticism.
Techy people love to hate Microsoft, sometimes for good reason, but much of the stuff you read on Slashdot is beyond way out there. My impression is that the anti-Microsoft crowd is getting smaller. Nobody seriously talks about breaking Microsoft up into separate companies anymore, even though Microsoft is roughly about as dominant in the OS and office suite market as it has ever been.
PR is expensive, and I guess giving up the vote machine business may be Diebold's only way to get out of the political target sight.
I guess the solution is to repeal the first amendment so we can systematically censor any research that might be controversial.
if(!at_home && distance(get_current_location(), get_house_location()) lessthan FIFTYYARDS) ) {
FILE* mail = openMailStream(girlfriend@house.com, "Hi honey!");
fprintf(mail, "I'm home!\n");
closeMailStream(mail);
at_home = true;
}
That's not real cost benefit analysis. I can't argue that I shouldn't have to put in a small wheelchair ramp because 0 people with wheelchairs ever visit my store, and if they did, I (and staff) could simply lift the wheelchair up the 2 stairs. A real cost benefit analysis would allow me to make arguments like that.
I'm not exactly sure why so many people don't go for this solution. My guess is that disabled groups want greater access than the market would give and they want someone else to pay for it. The public at large feels bad for the disabled and doesn't realize how much the changes will cost. Also, I think many voters think that businesses are some kidn of magical bank and that sticking some new business with a HUGE ADA bill somehow doesn't hurt them.
Imagine that the federal government had to pay 30% of any businesses costs associated with the ADA. If a business had to install 15 mini -elevators, it bills 30 percent to the government. If a business had to redesign its website, it bills the government for 30%. I'm sure lawmakers and tax payers would go nuts and change the law once they had to directly pay the real cost of what they were doing.
The real problem with the ADA is that there is no real cost benefit analysis. For many ADA required fixes, the cost is huge and a small benefit goes to a very small group of people. How much will it cost a small mom and pop store to completely redesign the website of their home business? Thousands and thousands of dollars? And how many blind web-surfers will come by to buy a $20 flower vase because of the redesign, 1? 2? 0? The same goes for Target, how much will it cost them to completely redesign? How many blind customers are there going to be? Would it just be simpler and cheaper to have them come into the store and have a real clerk help them out? (or do something over the phone?)
This is just the latest in a long line of crazy cases coming out of the ADA. I'm not against the blind, but it's just dumb to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to deliver a service to a blind person that that blind person values at maybe $20 or less
(1) Wikipedia has a tremendous amount of high quality, accurate information.
(2) Wikipedia has a large amount of bogus info, misleading statements, and other problems.
My Opinion:
(3) Wikipedia could be made more accurate/better if articles were systematically reviewed by experts.
(4) The only practical way for (3) to be accomplished is it were organized and run by an extremely well financed non-profit or a private company that could somehow recoup its investment by selling access, advertisements or some kind of product.
Essentially, the private company would start with the current wikipedia and pay real experts in the various fields to go through and prune the bogus crap and misleading statements. I don't know if this is compatible with wikipedia licensing in its current form... but I think an encyclopedia with all of wikipedias content, but peer reviewed and without the crap, would be fantastic. You might be able to actually cite it! (Argue all you want, but there's no way you can cite Wikipedia right now in a real academic article.)
I sometimes use Wikipedia as a place to get some information that I will have to carefully verify using other sources. I would never trust anything on Wikipedia to be right and would never cite it as a source in a paper. You just never know on Wikipedia when you're going to run into some BS (for the reason you described).
A number of Wikpedia articles are great, but I've noticed too many misleading articles, or articles with just tons of crap in them. For example, some of the articles on bogus medical treatments and pseudoscience are just filled with unscientific gobbledygook that make it sound that theres an actual scientific disagreement over whether the bogus medical treatment is actually bogus. Any 10 idiots with a few dynamic IPs can make quite a big mess on wikipedia and we live in a big world with lots of idiots. Any 10 reasonably smart people who actually don't know exactly what they're talking about can be equally as harmful.