Absolutely. I tell my kids that if they want a secure well paying job, become a tool and die maker, or a plumber.
The original post maintained that he entered the trades because he couldn't get into university, which he blamed on homeschooling. I wasn't trying to denigrate the trades, just disagree with his point.
So then your post is really "I didn't use a curriculum 20 years ago, but I was part of a radical movement that is totally not mainstream." rather than "Most homeschoolers don't use a curriculum."
See, I wasn't saying you didn't have those things. I was saying that your brutally broad generalization of your personal experience to include "most homeschoolers" was absurd, and in fact, incorrect.
So you've got a very strong opinion on this matter, enough to post it publicly, and you've never heard of Christian curriculum?
Never heard of Apologia Science ("Apologia provides fun and challenging K-12 creation-based science curriculum...")?
Never heard of incredibly popular "Student of the Word" bible-based curriculum that bases all subjects (math, geography, history, science) on scripture?
Never actually typed "bible-based curriculum" into google and seen the quarter million hits?
And yet you still feel confident enough in your knowledge of the topic to publicly say "homeschoolers rarely follow a curriculum"? Wow.
Do they follow the normal government approved curriculum? No, some don't. Do they follow a curriculum? Definitely.
(There's a tiny (less than 10) percentage of people who identify as "un-schoolers" who don't actually use curriculum as a matter of philosophy, but the true unschooler philosophy is to guide your children to learn on their own, and most are quite serious about it.)
Of course I see a problem with people who do what you said to their kids. But that's not most homeschoolers. That's not even a barely significant percentage of homeschoolers.
There are people who abuse their kids who go to school too. Be mad at child abusers, not homeschoolers.
Sounds like you have a personal axe to grind with your parents and you're transferring it on to the homeschool movement as a whole.
You are sadly under-informed and your opinions are based on your personal experience and not the real statistics or experience of the actual national homeschool community.
Okay, that's enough. No, really. Stop it, you're killing me here.
Do you realize how HUGE the homeschool curriculum market is? Many folks order a big box from some place like Abeka or Saxon Textbooks or some other "school in a box" company and hand out the books. Just like "real school". The trade shows and conferences for curriculum are massive. Look on homeschool forums, and 90% of what you find is "Which curriculum should I get for [x subject]?" Online schooling, and satellite school are increasing every year.
It's a running joke that the first thing homeschoolers say when they meet is "What curriculum do you use?"
Seriously, read something about your subject before you post again.
In such an environment, a homeschooling ban may not be ideal, but it makes some sense and opens up opportunities to children who would get only very limited education otherwise.
So why not solve the problem you have rather than using a massive blanket that sort-of addresses the problem but affects others too? If children aren't being given the opportunity for an education, then deal with that.
If a homeschooler isn't providing a basic education, then deal with that.
Banning homeschooling to deal with a few people who don't educate their kids is absurd, especially when those people will resist educating their children if government school is mandatory too.
It doesn't solve the problem. Has very little to do with the problem, actually.
Tinny little crappy schools like Harvard, Yale, USC, West Point, Annapolis, Rennselaer, Princeton...
If you ended up in trades it's not the University's fault, nor is it the fault of homeschooling in general. You either didn't bother to look for an answer or you didn't think ahead to create the proper portfolio when you were in your last few tears of schooling. Either way, it's a personal issue, not the concept of homeschooling, that's at fault.
Ditto your socially useless brother. For every homeschooler you point to with social issues, I'll point to 100 kids in normal school who are socially inept. Can you really look at society today and say that geeks that can't talk to girls is the fault of homeschooling? Not likely. Homeschoolers are higher in civic participation, volunteerism, community involvement and other indicators. Are some of them awkward? Sure. Are some of them great socially? Sure. Just like the rest of the world.
As an indicator of what they've become...
I was in "The Source" (the Canadian re-branding of Radio Shack) a few days ago looking for a headphone adapter, and when I entered the store, the clerk and the sole other customer were having a conversation about the merits of a motorized barbeque brush.
It's one of those "Look, it's a cheap crappy gift already packaged in a box for you to give someone!" things that RadShack carries, but this guy was looking at it for himself. It's a rotating treadmill thing with a handle and steel wool on the treadmill so when you press the trigger it scrubs the barbeque for you. It takes 6 (six!) D cells.
The guy asked if it was any good, and the clerk replied "Yeah, it has lots of power, it worked really well.". A motorized barbeque brush.
Ooooohkay then.
Oh, Radioshack, what have you become?
Because that's all it would do: add an extra step to remove the watermark. Which would slow piracy by an extra two or three minutes.
You are already recognizing that it can easily be defeated before it's even implemented. THAT is why oh why this was not done long ago.
Think about the government's track record dealing with citizen's data.
Now think about continually submitting your whereabouts and details of your environment to the government to the level of detail that you describe.
There's no way I'd trust anyone not to change the terms of use for the data without informing anyone. Suddenly they decide to use it to track people on the "persons of interest" list. Then on the "no-fly" list. Then people suspected of being candidates for that list. Then the FBI petitions to use it to track felons. Then suspects. Then suspects' known contacts.
Now they use it to track "harmful chemicals" but soon it's used to alert the authorities whenever it smells drugs. Or when it smells large amounts of cash. Or when it smells shwarma.
It'll never end. Stop it before it goes over the edge of the slippery slope.
Well, it strikes me that if you have a (likely close to or more than) hundred thousand dollar asset then you aren't really "bankrupt", are you?
If you are going to screw your creditors, why shouldn't you have to liquidate your large assets? Why should someone getting away from their liabilities be able to keep their assets?
If you are so sure that you are bankrupt, perhaps going to live in a small apartment is an appropriate consequence. You are bankrupt!
P.S. -- Why should the fact that he's a veteran or 86-years old affect purely financial dealings? And why should his choice to get a reverse mortgage not affect him the way it would affect anyone else?
I've got a terabyte and a half of storage under my desk, on 2 old Pc's that would otherwise be useless to me.
Whenever anyone I know upgrades their machines, I get the old ones. Take a Celeron 400 and an pold P3, throw in $120 500-gig hard drives and boot with NASLite. (NASLITE overrides the BIOS of old motherboards, so even dinosaur boxes can boot huge hard drives. I've run it on 486 boxes).
So I have about 600 gig of storage on one NAS box that I use for music, movies, photographs and anything else that I want to have accessible to all the machines on the network. The other NAS box is just 2 500 gig disks that are used for backups of the first NAS box.
I'm using SyncBACK freeware to schedule backups from one box to the other.
Works like a charm, and all for the measly cost of NASLITE+ and the hard drives.
Thanks for a belly laugh.
I read "(not the funk group)" and went off into my own little world of reverie, picturing a world where George Clinton made laws as he wanted...
If I pay a bit extra for CD's and iPods and I get to freely download music, that's a fair trade for me. The money I pay in levies will be no where NEAR the cost of the music I'd get, hypothetically.
I don't have kids in school, but I pay school taxes. My city taxes go to building hockey rinks I don't use. Other people's levies can go to paying for my music even if they don't "infringe".
This is also a major hurdle to people. How is Joe User going to know which of the 30 browsers he should use, or 20 file management utilities, or 20 calculators? Distributions come with standard software, generally, but even Ubuntu still requires you to connect to dubious quasi-legal repositories in order to get mp3 working. What Joe User is going to scour the internet for an obscure how-to on getting that to work?
Yes, this is a big problem. Here's a great talk from TED about how more choices are actually stressing consumers rather than giving "freedom" as so many people like to say.
I've been there, very recently. It *is* stressful to have to many choices. Even in something as basic as KDE versus Gnome the choice is intimidating to a newb, and the massive amount of purely subjective conflicting opinions on the web adds to that.
The pages aren't glued together, there is a thread of paper glued between them to indicate whether the pages have been read or not. The act of opening the motion would break the tiny paper thread.
I wondered about that too, having seen other lists of search terms where actual URLs are near the top.
However, many/most people are head-down hunt and peck typists. When you open a browser to google (and I assume AOL is that same) the cursor defaults to the search box not the URL bar.
Someone opens the browser, types in the url they want and hits enter without even realizing they are typing in the wrong box, because they are watching their fingers not the screen.
I mentioned this a bit further down, but took too long, GP made my point for me.
Since when is taxation that specific? "Sorry, I didn't use the hospital this year, I'm not paying that part of my taxes." "I don't own a car, don't use any of my taxes for roads, please." "Hey!!! I don't like hockey, don't build that arena with my money!" "I don't have kids, I'm not paying school taxes!"
Blank media sales seem as good a transaction as any to attach the levy to, and those levies purchase the right to copy music for everyone.
Don't you see? It's not paying for illegal activity, it's making the activity legal for everyone. You can get off your self-righteous "I'm not a pirate" horse because the world "pirate" doesn't mean anything in a place where we buy the right to copy any music we want.
I don't quite understand the "the blank media levy is terrible!" stuff that I keep seeing.
I, as a Canadian, get to download all the music I want. The price for that is not prohibitive. The organization gets the money (them not paying it out fairly is a problem with the mechanics of the system, not the reasoning behind the system).
Not all media is used for copying music? So? I pay gasoline taxes that go to road infrastructure even when I use the gasoline in my lawnmower or snowmobile or to soak engine parts. I pay school taxes even though I homeschool my kids.
Instead of looking at it as "they consider me a thief, I am subsidizing people who are stealing music", I consider it "Hmm, I have a license to get any music I want, legally". The extra money on my iPod buys me the right to get any music I want, not just those that I have on CD. You don't want to do that, fine, but the right is there.
I think I must be missing something, because I can't reconcile the "but in Canada they can download!" and the "but the levy is bad!" statements. You often see the former in discussing the American system, and the latter when discussing the Canadian system.
An open licence to copy is a convenient good thing, in my book. The levy seems about as reasonable a way to collect a fee for that as any. It seems very Canadian to tax something to provide a service to all.:)
...that suddenly the Wheat Board is under massive pressure and under-the-table attack?
Make you wonder if there was a very quiet reason that the softwood lumber deal got closed so easily and quickly after all these years of getting nowhere, dunnit?
"You give us softwood, we'll stomp the Wheat Board. Deal?"
I think the next dumbass thing the MPAA will try is to charge bands to cover songs at any live performance.
Um, they already do. Any bar you see that has a band pays money to allow music to be performed. Any festival or outdoor venue does too.
From WSU's page (which says the same as other pages, just in an understandable format):
The right to perform or play a song in public is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder. You will need to get permission or a license if you play music in public unless the music is in the Public Domain or the use of the music qualifies as fair use. But the line between what is private and what is public is complicated. Prior to the Music Licensing Act in 19982, some court cases have drawn the line and declared public uses of music to be copyright infringement unless licensed, as follows:
Radio stations, bars, night clubs, and juke box operators;
Hotels that play the radio for guests through speakers or headphones;
Restaurants;
Stores;
Telephone intercom systems that play music while callers are on hold.
I completely acquiesce to the copyright issue. I realize that selling an edited version without consent is against copyright. No arguments there.
But the blatant hypocrisy in the comments here is my real point. Most posts complain that "parents should parent" and control what their kids watch, and then spout crap like "get over your fear of cuss words" when I decide to parent. I'm only allowed to parent YOUR way? Wonderful.
The posters advocating "parents should parent" are really saying "be a draconian restrictive jerk who doesn't let his kids see anything or be libertarian hippy 'they aren't any different than any other words' and let my kids see anything".
"Parents should parent". I don't think that word means what you think it means.
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Absolutely. I tell my kids that if they want a secure well paying job, become a tool and die maker, or a plumber.
The original post maintained that he entered the trades because he couldn't get into university, which he blamed on homeschooling. I wasn't trying to denigrate the trades, just disagree with his point.
So then your post is really "I didn't use a curriculum 20 years ago, but I was part of a radical movement that is totally not mainstream." rather than "Most homeschoolers don't use a curriculum."
See, I wasn't saying you didn't have those things. I was saying that your brutally broad generalization of your personal experience to include "most homeschoolers" was absurd, and in fact, incorrect.
So you've got a very strong opinion on this matter, enough to post it publicly, and you've never heard of Christian curriculum?
Never heard of Apologia Science ("Apologia provides fun and challenging K-12 creation-based science curriculum...")?
Never heard of incredibly popular "Student of the Word" bible-based curriculum that bases all subjects (math, geography, history, science) on scripture?
Never actually typed "bible-based curriculum" into google and seen the quarter million hits?
And yet you still feel confident enough in your knowledge of the topic to publicly say "homeschoolers rarely follow a curriculum"? Wow.
Do they follow the normal government approved curriculum? No, some don't. Do they follow a curriculum? Definitely.
(There's a tiny (less than 10) percentage of people who identify as "un-schoolers" who don't actually use curriculum as a matter of philosophy, but the true unschooler philosophy is to guide your children to learn on their own, and most are quite serious about it.)
Of course I see a problem with people who do what you said to their kids. But that's not most homeschoolers. That's not even a barely significant percentage of homeschoolers.
There are people who abuse their kids who go to school too. Be mad at child abusers, not homeschoolers.
Sounds like you have a personal axe to grind with your parents and you're transferring it on to the homeschool movement as a whole.
You are sadly under-informed and your opinions are based on your personal experience and not the real statistics or experience of the actual national homeschool community.
Home schoolers rarely follow a curriculum
BWAHAHAHAHAHA.
Okay, that's enough. No, really. Stop it, you're killing me here.
Do you realize how HUGE the homeschool curriculum market is? Many folks order a big box from some place like Abeka or Saxon Textbooks or some other "school in a box" company and hand out the books. Just like "real school". The trade shows and conferences for curriculum are massive. Look on homeschool forums, and 90% of what you find is "Which curriculum should I get for [x subject]?" Online schooling, and satellite school are increasing every year.
It's a running joke that the first thing homeschoolers say when they meet is "What curriculum do you use?"
Seriously, read something about your subject before you post again.
In such an environment, a homeschooling ban may not be ideal, but it makes some sense and opens up opportunities to children who would get only very limited education otherwise.
So why not solve the problem you have rather than using a massive blanket that sort-of addresses the problem but affects others too? If children aren't being given the opportunity for an education, then deal with that.
If a homeschooler isn't providing a basic education, then deal with that.
Banning homeschooling to deal with a few people who don't educate their kids is absurd, especially when those people will resist educating their children if government school is mandatory too.
It doesn't solve the problem. Has very little to do with the problem, actually.
Yeah, just look at this tiny list of colleges that accept homeschoolers:
http://learninfreedom.org/colleges_4_hmsc.html
Tinny little crappy schools like Harvard, Yale, USC, West Point, Annapolis, Rennselaer, Princeton...
If you ended up in trades it's not the University's fault, nor is it the fault of homeschooling in general. You either didn't bother to look for an answer or you didn't think ahead to create the proper portfolio when you were in your last few tears of schooling. Either way, it's a personal issue, not the concept of homeschooling, that's at fault.
Ditto your socially useless brother. For every homeschooler you point to with social issues, I'll point to 100 kids in normal school who are socially inept. Can you really look at society today and say that geeks that can't talk to girls is the fault of homeschooling? Not likely. Homeschoolers are higher in civic participation, volunteerism, community involvement and other indicators. Are some of them awkward? Sure. Are some of them great socially? Sure. Just like the rest of the world.
As an indicator of what they've become... I was in "The Source" (the Canadian re-branding of Radio Shack) a few days ago looking for a headphone adapter, and when I entered the store, the clerk and the sole other customer were having a conversation about the merits of a motorized barbeque brush. It's one of those "Look, it's a cheap crappy gift already packaged in a box for you to give someone!" things that RadShack carries, but this guy was looking at it for himself. It's a rotating treadmill thing with a handle and steel wool on the treadmill so when you press the trigger it scrubs the barbeque for you. It takes 6 (six!) D cells. The guy asked if it was any good, and the clerk replied "Yeah, it has lots of power, it worked really well.". A motorized barbeque brush. Ooooohkay then. Oh, Radioshack, what have you become?
Because that's all it would do: add an extra step to remove the watermark. Which would slow piracy by an extra two or three minutes. You are already recognizing that it can easily be defeated before it's even implemented. THAT is why oh why this was not done long ago.
Actually, I don't carry one... But your point is taken: golden handcuffs.
Think about the government's track record dealing with citizen's data.
Now think about continually submitting your whereabouts and details of your environment to the government to the level of detail that you describe.
There's no way I'd trust anyone not to change the terms of use for the data without informing anyone. Suddenly they decide to use it to track people on the "persons of interest" list. Then on the "no-fly" list. Then people suspected of being candidates for that list. Then the FBI petitions to use it to track felons. Then suspects. Then suspects' known contacts.
Now they use it to track "harmful chemicals" but soon it's used to alert the authorities whenever it smells drugs. Or when it smells large amounts of cash. Or when it smells shwarma.
It'll never end. Stop it before it goes over the edge of the slippery slope.
Wow. Good points. Thanks.
Well, it strikes me that if you have a (likely close to or more than) hundred thousand dollar asset then you aren't really "bankrupt", are you?
If you are going to screw your creditors, why shouldn't you have to liquidate your large assets? Why should someone getting away from their liabilities be able to keep their assets?
If you are so sure that you are bankrupt, perhaps going to live in a small apartment is an appropriate consequence. You are bankrupt!
P.S. -- Why should the fact that he's a veteran or 86-years old affect purely financial dealings? And why should his choice to get a reverse mortgage not affect him the way it would affect anyone else?
I've got a terabyte and a half of storage under my desk, on 2 old Pc's that would otherwise be useless to me.
Whenever anyone I know upgrades their machines, I get the old ones. Take a Celeron 400 and an pold P3, throw in $120 500-gig hard drives and boot with NASLite. (NASLITE overrides the BIOS of old motherboards, so even dinosaur boxes can boot huge hard drives. I've run it on 486 boxes).
So I have about 600 gig of storage on one NAS box that I use for music, movies, photographs and anything else that I want to have accessible to all the machines on the network. The other NAS box is just 2 500 gig disks that are used for backups of the first NAS box.
I'm using SyncBACK freeware to schedule backups from one box to the other.
Works like a charm, and all for the measly cost of NASLITE+ and the hard drives.
Thanks for a belly laugh. I read "(not the funk group)" and went off into my own little world of reverie, picturing a world where George Clinton made laws as he wanted...
They're taking money from people to give it to rich people just in case the original people might steal music.
It's a matter of perspective.
I see it as "they're taking money from people to give it to rich people so that the original people can download all the music they want".
That's okay by me.
I don't have kids in school. I refuse to pay school taxes.
I don't own a car. I refuse to pay the portion of my taxes that go to road maintenance.
Etc. Etc.
If I pay a bit extra for CD's and iPods and I get to freely download music, that's a fair trade for me. The money I pay in levies will be no where NEAR the cost of the music I'd get, hypothetically.
I don't have kids in school, but I pay school taxes. My city taxes go to building hockey rinks I don't use. Other people's levies can go to paying for my music even if they don't "infringe".
I've been there, very recently. It *is* stressful to have to many choices. Even in something as basic as KDE versus Gnome the choice is intimidating to a newb, and the massive amount of purely subjective conflicting opinions on the web adds to that.
The pages aren't glued together, there is a thread of paper glued between them to indicate whether the pages have been read or not. The act of opening the motion would break the tiny paper thread.
I wondered about that too, having seen other lists of search terms where actual URLs are near the top.
However, many/most people are head-down hunt and peck typists. When you open a browser to google (and I assume AOL is that same) the cursor defaults to the search box not the URL bar.
Someone opens the browser, types in the url they want and hits enter without even realizing they are typing in the wrong box, because they are watching their fingers not the screen.
That's what I always figured, anyway.
I mentioned this a bit further down, but took too long, GP made my point for me.
Since when is taxation that specific? "Sorry, I didn't use the hospital this year, I'm not paying that part of my taxes." "I don't own a car, don't use any of my taxes for roads, please." "Hey!!! I don't like hockey, don't build that arena with my money!" "I don't have kids, I'm not paying school taxes!"
Blank media sales seem as good a transaction as any to attach the levy to, and those levies purchase the right to copy music for everyone.
Don't you see? It's not paying for illegal activity, it's making the activity legal for everyone. You can get off your self-righteous "I'm not a pirate" horse because the world "pirate" doesn't mean anything in a place where we buy the right to copy any music we want.
I don't quite understand the "the blank media levy is terrible!" stuff that I keep seeing.
:)
I, as a Canadian, get to download all the music I want. The price for that is not prohibitive. The organization gets the money (them not paying it out fairly is a problem with the mechanics of the system, not the reasoning behind the system).
Not all media is used for copying music? So? I pay gasoline taxes that go to road infrastructure even when I use the gasoline in my lawnmower or snowmobile or to soak engine parts. I pay school taxes even though I homeschool my kids.
Instead of looking at it as "they consider me a thief, I am subsidizing people who are stealing music", I consider it "Hmm, I have a license to get any music I want, legally". The extra money on my iPod buys me the right to get any music I want, not just those that I have on CD. You don't want to do that, fine, but the right is there.
I think I must be missing something, because I can't reconcile the "but in Canada they can download!" and the "but the levy is bad!" statements. You often see the former in discussing the American system, and the latter when discussing the Canadian system.
An open licence to copy is a convenient good thing, in my book. The levy seems about as reasonable a way to collect a fee for that as any. It seems very Canadian to tax something to provide a service to all.
...that suddenly the Wheat Board is under massive pressure and under-the-table attack? Make you wonder if there was a very quiet reason that the softwood lumber deal got closed so easily and quickly after all these years of getting nowhere, dunnit? "You give us softwood, we'll stomp the Wheat Board. Deal?"
Um, they already do. Any bar you see that has a band pays money to allow music to be performed. Any festival or outdoor venue does too.
From WSU's page (which says the same as other pages, just in an understandable format):
I completely acquiesce to the copyright issue. I realize that selling an edited version without consent is against copyright. No arguments there.
But the blatant hypocrisy in the comments here is my real point. Most posts complain that "parents should parent" and control what their kids watch, and then spout crap like "get over your fear of cuss words" when I decide to parent. I'm only allowed to parent YOUR way? Wonderful.
The posters advocating "parents should parent" are really saying "be a draconian restrictive jerk who doesn't let his kids see anything or be libertarian hippy 'they aren't any different than any other words' and let my kids see anything".
"Parents should parent". I don't think that word means what you think it means.