NCLB was invented by screwballs who hadn't taught themselves and didn't understand education (or statistics). Most of them were economists who thought you could do anything by providing economic incentives.
You'd think they'd realize that while economic incentives do work, they rarely work exactly how you want them to. And I'm sure the idea that any metric used for incentives can and will be gamed has been mentioned in economic literature.
So you provide a "bug bounty", and your programmers start writing in deliberate bugs to find later. You base budgets on student success at certain tests, and teachers start teaching to the test (or outright cheating). You pay extra for a class with a certain percentage of females, and males are excluded if they'd cause the percentage to drop below that level. All quite obvious, apparently unless you're a certain sort of economist.
It's highly unlikely that every successful school is going to produce mostly engineers at the expense of every other profession. The reality is that they're going to have whatever spread the individual students desire, only the total output is low.
That total output is low does not follow. I'm claiming we have a bimodal distribution in educational output (this has historically been true, though I've seen a paper which indicates that lately it's become trimodal) -- our engineers and other professionals are roughly on par in terms of general education with the rest of the industrialized world, but our retail clerks and unskilled and semi-skilled laborers are not.
Don't knock it. We've hired a buncha folks lately, and frankly, the quality of the "average developer" these days is horrible. About a decade or so ago, you might have to go through a dozen or so interviews before finding someone who is at least a good code monkey, but these days, you have to go through at least 30 or so applicants to find someone who is even remotely competent (like ability to open an editor and write a hello world program competent).
There is definitely a skills shortage. I doubt it can be solved by importing folks from other places, or whatnot. Education really needs to step up.... way too many folks get the degrees (or pretend degrees) without knowing the basics.
There's not a skills shortage, there's an idiot surplus. The good ones are still there, but thanks to overall economic conditions there's a lot more idiots applying so you have to sift through more idiots to find people you want. (HR policies which select for idiots and (especially) liars don't help).
The boys see girls getting preferential treatment and start looking down on them: "I made it here because I earned it with odds stacked against me. She made it here because she got breaks and extra awards. I'm better than her. She sucks." This is the source of the problem not the solution.
Ah, but if you believe the whole "white male privilege" thing, or as John Scalzi puts it, white male being "the easiest difficulty level in the RPG called Real Life", then it's already the other way around -- a white woman, in order to get where she is, has had to work far harder and overcome far more obstacles than a white man in the same position. So anything you do to stack the odds against him is merely leveling the playing field.
(Scalzi's analogy reminds me of the In Living Color sketch where a black man, having turned himself white, finds out that white people get everything for free when black people aren't around. I don't know, John, maybe I'm not white enough, but it's never been like that for me)
I do not believe that there is anyone in Tokyo or Washington that is so much invested in these islands to risk *everything* for them.
I rather doubt there are many (but there's always a few) in Tokyo or Washington who thinks China is going to risk *everything* for them, if by *everything* you mean full-scale war. On the other hand, I guarantee you there's a lot of people in both places who figure letting this go unchallenged will simply result in more of the same.
China already demonstrated that they will be very aggressive with violators. Remember that SIGINT airplane that they forced to land during the reign of W?
They were posturing and one of their pilots ended up colliding with the plane they were supposed to be posturing to. It ended up with the US writing a letter saying either "we're sorry we violated your airspace" or "we're sorry you assholes didn't respond to our distress calls" depending on how you looked at it, and the flights they objected to continued.
You really can't have it both ways on this one slashdot. Either:
We're doing pretty damn shitty at producing competent engineers and we need to import talent via H-1B.
Or:
Our education system is just fantastic and therefore H-1B visas are unnecessary.
False dilemma. Our education system can suck on average and still produce plenty of competent engineers. The US has a very stratified education system; there's the school systems in poor areas which produce illiterates, and the school systems in wealthy areas which have pretty decent results.
Do you honestly think this rant putting down "aspies" and "near-aspies" is any better than someone using "females?"
That's the typical line from the PC "misogynistic male programmers are driving women out" school of thought, though they usually don't use those terms. The general idea is that there's something wrong with the men that's driving the women out, therefore the men need to be corrected (in much the same way a dog is). Of course they don't use the term "aspies" because that might put the men in a protected class also, which would make those PC brains explode.
"Near-aspies" is a good one for the less bleeding-heart of the PC set, though; it implies the men are socially inept while not giving them the excuse of a medical condition.
I think China made the winning move in this game. Possession is 90% of the law.
What, precisely, does China possess? They didn't occupy the islands. They said "This airspace is ours, and you will follow our procedures when entering it". The obvious next move for the Japanese (or the US) is to flagrantly violate that claimed airspace, pointedly ignoring the procedures the Chinese demand. At that point the Chinese have to either start a shooting war, back off, or continue to bluster (the last being the most likely).
The politically-correct bullshit has to stop - do people REALLY believe there's a concerted effort to keep women out of coding? It must be so, because that's the only situation in which this sort of thing would matter.
As far as I can tell, they do. Not in the sense of a conspiracy, but in the sense that they think male programmers are by and large misogynistic bastards who drive women out through our poor hygiene, sartorial failure, creepy stares, inappropriate jokes, and the like. This idea fails on any number of levels, chief of which IMO is that in professions where the men are far, far, worse (such as sales and advertising), there are more women.
Anyway, given that idea, the obvious "solution" is to simultaneously encourage more women (and fewer men) to enter the profession, while coming down hard on any sort of expression or action by men which might tend to alienate women. This, of course, fails on every possible level.
...but theres nothing the US can do to stop them. Maybe prior to 2000, maybe prior to 1990, but after years of appeasements, transfers of critical technology, and currency manipulations, the Chinese have the US by the short and curlies. Nobody wants to say it, but that doesn't mean it isn't so.
And if the US were to start patrolling the region, pointedly ignoring Chinese demands, what precisely do you think the Chinese would do about it? "Accidentally" shoot down a US plane?
I have a bot which goes into the various nasty parts of the web and grabs whatever's available, but erases it before it has a chance to make it into persistent storage. The NSA may think I'm a perv, but they'll never figure out which kind of perv.
Your first reason is why it should flatten out -- $100 on $5000 can be argued to be much more of a burden than $10,000 on $500,000, but I don't see how $100,000 on $5,000,000 is so much more of a burden than $1,000,000 on $50,000,000.
Your second reason, I think, is simply invalid. One can accept that taxes are necessary without assuming that the government is the best spender of money in general.
Your third reason is simply the assumption that CEOs are overpaid and should have their "excess" compensation drained.
Honestly, from what I recall about the Laffer curve, if revenue was the chief concern then one should target a maximum of 50%
I'm pretty sure no one knows what the shape of the Laffer curve is.
So if you can survive fine without it why do you care that they restrict releases, own the copyrights and want to prevent people from pirating it?
Because those fuckers want to put a gun to the heads of everyone in the electronics and software industries in order to enforce their copyrights. They've got the DMCA passed, they had various copy-protection mandates since then, they're responsible for the whole HDMI clusterfuck, and they've proposed such shit as requiring every analog to digital converter (presumably other than those authorized by them) be able to recognize and refuse to convert anything they claim dominion over.
And, of course, they claim dominion over a lot more things than the law (that they wrote) actually gives them the rights to.
Why should tax rates continue to go up as income goes up? If someone making $1,000,000 pays $300,000 in taxes, why shouldn't someone making $10,000,000 pay $3,000,000 in taxes? The usual excuses for progressive rates don't hold at those levels.
My house is over 50 years old. Guess how well sealed and insulated it is? I'll give you a hint: before I replaced the windows, when there was a stiff breeze outside you'd feel it inside. And replacing the windows, while it reduced drafts, didn't change the utility bill much.
So you're not only a totalitarian shit who would want me beaten for what might happen, but a dumb one too. Required insurance that I'd have been paying that $4100/year for was $35,000. So if I caused someone $100+k in medical bills, that insurance would reduce it to $65+k, at which point I'd still have to declare bankruptcy and they'd still have had their life fucked up.
And you're a totalitarian shit, and I long for the day when you find yourself under the lash yourself; it will be amusing to find if you're the type who will maintain your love of Big Brother even as you are ground under his heel, or the type who will be utterly flabbergasted that they would treat a loyal citizen like yourself the way you want everyone else treated.
The dangerous criminals are part of the system to keep the regular people in line, preventing them from engaging in any sort of activism. If Rosa Park would have been facing years of torture at the hands of her cellmates instead of just some cooling-off time in jail, we'd probably still have Jim Crow.
Aaron Swartz understood this. He rolled the dice anyway, and lost.
What happens when your insurance goes up to $1200 a year because you won't use the device?
I'll do what I did when my insurance was $4100/year. Drive uninsured. Yeah, it's illegal... so what, am I supposed to care about laws bought and paid for by insurance companies? A line has to be drawn somewhere, and mine is well before allowing an insurance company to track me.
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You'd think they'd realize that while economic incentives do work, they rarely work exactly how you want them to. And I'm sure the idea that any metric used for incentives can and will be gamed has been mentioned in economic literature.
So you provide a "bug bounty", and your programmers start writing in deliberate bugs to find later. You base budgets on student success at certain tests, and teachers start teaching to the test (or outright cheating). You pay extra for a class with a certain percentage of females, and males are excluded if they'd cause the percentage to drop below that level. All quite obvious, apparently unless you're a certain sort of economist.
That total output is low does not follow. I'm claiming we have a bimodal distribution in educational output (this has historically been true, though I've seen a paper which indicates that lately it's become trimodal) -- our engineers and other professionals are roughly on par in terms of general education with the rest of the industrialized world, but our retail clerks and unskilled and semi-skilled laborers are not.
There's not a skills shortage, there's an idiot surplus. The good ones are still there, but thanks to overall economic conditions there's a lot more idiots applying so you have to sift through more idiots to find people you want. (HR policies which select for idiots and (especially) liars don't help).
Ah, but if you believe the whole "white male privilege" thing, or as John Scalzi puts it, white male being "the easiest difficulty level in the RPG called Real Life", then it's already the other way around -- a white woman, in order to get where she is, has had to work far harder and overcome far more obstacles than a white man in the same position. So anything you do to stack the odds against him is merely leveling the playing field.
(Scalzi's analogy reminds me of the In Living Color sketch where a black man, having turned himself white, finds out that white people get everything for free when black people aren't around. I don't know, John, maybe I'm not white enough, but it's never been like that for me)
So far, they don't even have that.
I rather doubt there are many (but there's always a few) in Tokyo or Washington who thinks China is going to risk *everything* for them, if by *everything* you mean full-scale war. On the other hand, I guarantee you there's a lot of people in both places who figure letting this go unchallenged will simply result in more of the same.
They were posturing and one of their pilots ended up colliding with the plane they were supposed to be posturing to. It ended up with the US writing a letter saying either "we're sorry we violated your airspace" or "we're sorry you assholes didn't respond to our distress calls" depending on how you looked at it, and the flights they objected to continued.
False dilemma. Our education system can suck on average and still produce plenty of competent engineers. The US has a very stratified education system; there's the school systems in poor areas which produce illiterates, and the school systems in wealthy areas which have pretty decent results.
That's the typical line from the PC "misogynistic male programmers are driving women out" school of thought, though they usually don't use those terms. The general idea is that there's something wrong with the men that's driving the women out, therefore the men need to be corrected (in much the same way a dog is). Of course they don't use the term "aspies" because that might put the men in a protected class also, which would make those PC brains explode.
"Near-aspies" is a good one for the less bleeding-heart of the PC set, though; it implies the men are socially inept while not giving them the excuse of a medical condition.
What, precisely, does China possess? They didn't occupy the islands. They said "This airspace is ours, and you will follow our procedures when entering it". The obvious next move for the Japanese (or the US) is to flagrantly violate that claimed airspace, pointedly ignoring the procedures the Chinese demand. At that point the Chinese have to either start a shooting war, back off, or continue to bluster (the last being the most likely).
As far as I can tell, they do. Not in the sense of a conspiracy, but in the sense that they think male programmers are by and large misogynistic bastards who drive women out through our poor hygiene, sartorial failure, creepy stares, inappropriate jokes, and the like. This idea fails on any number of levels, chief of which IMO is that in professions where the men are far, far, worse (such as sales and advertising), there are more women.
Anyway, given that idea, the obvious "solution" is to simultaneously encourage more women (and fewer men) to enter the profession, while coming down hard on any sort of expression or action by men which might tend to alienate women. This, of course, fails on every possible level.
And if the US were to start patrolling the region, pointedly ignoring Chinese demands, what precisely do you think the Chinese would do about it? "Accidentally" shoot down a US plane?
I have a bot which goes into the various nasty parts of the web and grabs whatever's available, but erases it before it has a chance to make it into persistent storage. The NSA may think I'm a perv, but they'll never figure out which kind of perv.
If he were a psychopath, he'd not be disturbed by it. Of course, maybe he's only faking being disturbed by it to promote his career.
Your first reason is why it should flatten out -- $100 on $5000 can be argued to be much more of a burden than $10,000 on $500,000, but I don't see how $100,000 on $5,000,000 is so much more of a burden than $1,000,000 on $50,000,000.
Your second reason, I think, is simply invalid. One can accept that taxes are necessary without assuming that the government is the best spender of money in general.
Your third reason is simply the assumption that CEOs are overpaid and should have their "excess" compensation drained.
I'm pretty sure no one knows what the shape of the Laffer curve is.
Because those fuckers want to put a gun to the heads of everyone in the electronics and software industries in order to enforce their copyrights. They've got the DMCA passed, they had various copy-protection mandates since then, they're responsible for the whole HDMI clusterfuck, and they've proposed such shit as requiring every analog to digital converter (presumably other than those authorized by them) be able to recognize and refuse to convert anything they claim dominion over.
And, of course, they claim dominion over a lot more things than the law (that they wrote) actually gives them the rights to.
Why should tax rates continue to go up as income goes up? If someone making $1,000,000 pays $300,000 in taxes, why shouldn't someone making $10,000,000 pay $3,000,000 in taxes? The usual excuses for progressive rates don't hold at those levels.
As with so many things in this world, when you look like Natalie Portman you can get them for free.
Rape by deception? Is that what Cinderella did to Prince Charming?
Got some bad news for you.
Wait for it.
Wait for it.
There is no free world.
My house is over 50 years old. Guess how well sealed and insulated it is? I'll give you a hint: before I replaced the windows, when there was a stiff breeze outside you'd feel it inside. And replacing the windows, while it reduced drafts, didn't change the utility bill much.
No, Mr. Bond, they expect you to die. Preferably in a carbon-neutral way, so try to turn into limestone or something.
So you're not only a totalitarian shit who would want me beaten for what might happen, but a dumb one too. Required insurance that I'd have been paying that $4100/year for was $35,000. So if I caused someone $100+k in medical bills, that insurance would reduce it to $65+k, at which point I'd still have to declare bankruptcy and they'd still have had their life fucked up.
And you're a totalitarian shit, and I long for the day when you find yourself under the lash yourself; it will be amusing to find if you're the type who will maintain your love of Big Brother even as you are ground under his heel, or the type who will be utterly flabbergasted that they would treat a loyal citizen like yourself the way you want everyone else treated.
The dangerous criminals are part of the system to keep the regular people in line, preventing them from engaging in any sort of activism. If Rosa Park would have been facing years of torture at the hands of her cellmates instead of just some cooling-off time in jail, we'd probably still have Jim Crow.
Aaron Swartz understood this. He rolled the dice anyway, and lost.
If you're at all familiar with the road and traffic is heavy it's easy. There's going to be consistent spots where one lane is faster than the other.
I'll do what I did when my insurance was $4100/year. Drive uninsured. Yeah, it's illegal... so what, am I supposed to care about laws bought and paid for by insurance companies? A line has to be drawn somewhere, and mine is well before allowing an insurance company to track me.