Do you have any idea of the scale of the United States? Mass transit simply isn't an option for a vast majority of this country. Most Americans (particularly those in rural areas) have to commute to work, to buy groceries, etc, etc.,
Right: and now we'll a) stop driving pickup trucks and start driving Priuses and b) coalesce into denser population centers that require less driving, provided we're smart enough to have land use controls that do so. Granted, big coastal cities aren't that smart, but maybe inner America will do better.
Given our record with rail, which exacerbates the size problem you noted, this seems unlikely. But if gas prices rise enough, what seemed unlikely becomes much more palatable, despite people who want to support their lifestyle instead of recognizing the trade-offs inherent in social and political decisions.
Now think : if everybody made 10x the wage of donald trump, had a planet to him/herself and an army of robot servants to comply with his/her every whim, would obviously still be 10% "poor" people.
If you compare the right time horizons, this has already in effect happened. Relative to how most people lived in the year 1,000, virtually everyone in the United States has better lives (or at least the potential for better lives if they choose to access the social support infrastructure). Back then, early death was a likely outcome and making it past 30 unusual, and even if you did, the health problems made whatever life you had a painful one. Today's paupers live better in material terms than kings did then.
This is an extreme example of the "cake" metaphor I discussed in another comment. It seems this discussion keeps rolling back around to the trade-offs involved in this idea.
The second round of elimination is at the college level - day courses at public universities are free of charge (!), and those "free" courses are generally the best, so there is fierce competition - at the University of Warsaw, around 25 students apply per place for the most popular courses. It may be cruel, but since for the best students the entire education path is free of charge, it's not uncommon for smart people from the countryside to become top professionals in their field, and advance into the middle class in one generation.
This might not be optimal because it assumes a very strong correlation between grades, test scores, and genuine intelligence, whatever that is. It also doesn't allow for much jumping between tracks. I'll use myself as an example: I did horrendously in my first two years of high school and then graduated with a 3.4 GPA by acing the last two, and eventually I ended up in an excellent but not especially well-known school named Clark University. Now I'm about to start graduate school, and aside from posting to/., I think I'm doing reasonably well, but in a system that's more strongly tracked I might not've been able to make the jumps I did.
Perhaps Clark is analogous to the private colleges you mention. Nonetheless, I've read that one of the United States' strengths is in its ability to have education at a variety of levels at virtually any time in one's life, especially in terms of community colleges. That isn't to say that high schools don't have many, many problems, as the parent article observes, but before we get too interested in merit systems, we should at least evaluate the trade-offs inherent in such systems.
And when you use analogize world phenomenon to sociological phenomenon, something gets lost in the metaphor. Normally a pie is used, but I'll go with cake -- namely, the question is also whether you want to increase the size of the cake or change the way its allocated. Over the short term, you can't increase (or decrease) the size all that much, but over the long term, the size becomes much more elastic. The question is one of trade-offs.
Over the long term, I'd rather see a bigger cake, which will eventually offer slices that are larger, in absolute terms, than those with smaller slices are getting now. This is often labeled a more "conservative" opinion in the United States, although to my mind it corresponds more closely to classical liberalism. One reason NCLB generates such vitriol is that it takes a position usually labeled "liberal" in the United States regarding the size/distribution of cake slices and then takes it under a Republican administration. But whatever nominally "conservative" values the administration once served via lips have been discarded in the creation of actual policy.
In the past, plenty of highly intelligent people have contributed to warfare and advanced weaponry.
This is a wise observation: for a particularly detailed account of one such person, read Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. It prominently features Edward Teller, who was the driving force behind the hydrogen bomb even when many of the other Manhattan project scientists, and most notably Oppenheimer, had lost their zeal for weaponry and their certainty that we are the good guys, as the GP argues.
Although it's about a unit of state rather than federal government, you could look at the story directly below this one concerning a Massachusetts man who was fired for (not) downloading porn on his computer. Given how well government tends to work -- more examples of it working (or not, once again) are available here, at GWC -- I'm not surprised that many free-thinking and brilliant people wouldn't be inclined to work for it.
Art.com has loads and loads of famous painting reprints -- I got a copy of Botecelli's "Venus and Mars" from them -- but they don't have the Dali. Searching for it, however, yielded a scarf at the Philadelphia Art Museum Store. But that's probably not what you're looking for.
This is one of the more insightful comments I've read, especially because, as I stated here, computers haven't really been shown to improve learning in and of themselves. On the other hand, however, the growing interest in inexpensive laptops might make them more available in third-world countries more generally, and thus power those countries' economies, which will hopefully lead to more investment in education.
Even if OLPC folds tomorrow, it's already been a success in at least one field.
The big problem, as Slate.com argues, is that giving kids computers doesn't appear to improve their academic performance. And that's on top of the management and other issues mentioned by BusinessWeek.
I also write grants for nonprofit and public agencies, and the third item in this blog post involves some of the research into computers as educational devices. It isn't positive. That doesn't mean someone won't find a way to make computers useful in a statistically significant way, or that the next great hacker with a world changing idea won't get their first computing experience via OLPC or Intel's version or whatever, but it's harder to justify computers en masse without more solid evidence behind it.
I posted a link in the main thread anticipating an Aeron love fest, though I didn't realize it would metastasize with such speed. Regardless, if anyone makes it this far down, it might be worth reading the Joel on Software and other quotes in this thread.
It is the best in a way that's hard to describe without sitting in one for eight hours a day, as I've done for the last two years. But you don't have to take it just from me and the numerous other commenters who are sure to appear -- Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software loves them too, and uses them as a recruiting advantage:
Let me, for a moment, talk about the famous Aeron chair, made by Herman Miller. They cost about $900. This is about $800 more than a cheap office chair from OfficeDepot or Staples.
They are much more comfortable than cheap chairs. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable. The back and seat are made out of a kind of mesh that lets air flow so you don't get sweaty. The ergonomics, especially of the newer models with lumbar support, are excellent.
They last longer than cheap chairs. We've been in business for six years and every Aeron is literally in mint condition: I challenge anyone to see the difference between the chairs we bought in 2000 and the chairs we bought three months ago. They easily last for ten years. The cheap chairs literally start falling apart after a matter of months. You'll need at least four $100 chairs to last as long as an Aeron.
So the bottom line is that an Aeron only really costs $500 more over ten years, or $50 a year. One dollar per week per programmer.
A nice roll of toilet paper runs about a buck. Your programmers are probably using about one roll a week, each.
So upgrading them to an Aeron chair literally costs the same amount as you're spending on their toilet paper, and I assure you that if you tried to bring up toilet paper in the budget committee you would be sternly told not to mess around, there were important things to discuss.
The Aeron chair has, sadly, been tarnished with a reputation of being extravagant, especially for startups. It somehow came to stand for the symbol of all the VC money that was wasted in the dotcom boom, which is a shame, because it's not very expensive when you consider how long it lasts; indeed when you think of the eight hours a day you spend sitting in it, even the top of the line model, with the lumbar support and the friggin' tailfins is so dang cheap you practically make money by buying them.
Notice his comment: The Aeron chair has, sadly, been tarnished with a reputation of being extravagant, especially for startups. The Aeron isn't extravagant -- it's wonderful, and people who sit in chairs for most of their lives ought to have a good one. I don't get the people who spend $30K on a car and $100 on a chair and $200 on a bed, when allocating a very small amount of capital from the first to the second two could lead to a dramatically improved quality of life, given how much time one spends wrapped in each. I use similar reasoning when I justify an amazing $70 Customizer over a typical $20 mushy keyboard.
Joel's not the only one with Aeron love, by the way. Check this review from game nerds:
With that said, there is no doubt in our mind that when you sit in an Aeron, you will honestly feel like you are sitting in a thousand-dollar chair. It exudes quality and comfort. While it may not be to everyone's taste, there's no denying that it's of the absolute highest quality-and given its price, that's something you would expect.
I'm about to start grad school in English lit and write a blog on literature and books. Most of the material on it, however, is closer to reviews and magazine criticism than to academic articles; the one article I'm shopping around is under "papers," although the most recent version isn't online at the moment because it's... wait for it... being peer reviewed.
In English, where the quality of your reading and your persuasiveness is of more importance than, say, experiment design, I think peer review will become less important but still not unimportant. In the sciences, however, I think peer review is going to remain exceedingly important, and some method will remain for conducting it. Peer review at the moment is bound up (haha, I know) with paper journals, but over time one can only hope the two will be decoupled. That's when paper journals will be obsolete. The journal publishers, however, don't want this to happen, and they have enormous power over academics: you have to publish to get a job and get tenure. This fundamental power imbalance is part of the reason expensive paper journals persist. Think of this as a toll keeper problem.
As other posters have noted the problem is not journals themselves, but the cost of journals and the restrictions to access. To the extent that things like blogs make paper journals obsolete in that respect faster than would otherwise occur, a very good thing has happened and knowledge has been democratized.
So just because there's no magic bullet everyone should just let them do it unimpeded?
No, it means that you should carefully consider what kinds of items and things you're going to ban and focus the maximal amount of attention on that. The best rule I can come up with is: is this product going to directly hurt other people?
In the case of many drugs, like pot, the answer seems to be "no," and I'd argue the same for prostitution. The ivory issue is essentially this: will allowing the sale of ivory on eBay lead to more elephants killed for it, or will people who have "grandfathered" ivory simply be able to trade.
I think that's what the GP was implying, and that's what you parody.
If you'd simply looked at the pckeyboard.com site linked to in the summary, you'd have found the original 101 key design without a Windows logo. I'm the original submitter, however, and as my review states, I need three keys for Macs, as the command key is the gateway to almost all shortcuts.
P.s. English isn't my first language !
Your English is no doubt better than my what-ever-you-speak-originally. Depending on your original language, Unicomp also has the Customizer 102/3 keyboard with German, Italian, and Spanish layouts, as well as UK English.
Alas, it's not quite that heavy, but given the choice of a modern Dell or Apple keyboard, I'll take the Customizer. But if you happen to be, say, helping someone move instead of "consoling" them, you might like the somewhat lighter modern version.
Incidentally, I'm 24, and I only learned about buckling spring keyboards from the curmudgeons wise mentors on/. and elsewhere. But when I actually began using these keyboards, I realized why they're revered in nerd circles. A more elegant weapon for a more civilized age, indeed.
I don't think it's necessarily complaining about price to note that the price is somewhat higher than normal keyboards, and for someone on the margin of deciding whether to buy the keyboard the additional $50 might turn them off. You can see that my review says, "the price, at $69, is somewhat high, but I think the productivity improvement worth the extra cost [...]". Furthermore, although another poster observed that both the real and non-inflation-adjusted price of Model Ms and Customizers have dropped, it's also true that computers themselves have become less expensive. A $69 keyboard is a much larger percentage of a $1,000 keyboard than a $100 keyboard is of a $4,000 computer.
It's just how we compare prices: relatively rather than absolutely, even if an absolute metric would be more fair. Dan Ariely discusses this in his book, Predictably Irrational, which I think worth reading.
I don't think one necessarily has to mod down someone just because the person disagrees with you (and he clearly disagrees with me, since I'm the original submitter!), and it's at least somewhat useful to have a second opinion, even one not backed up by much evidence. But since keyboards seem a fairly subjective issue anyway -- the only thing approaching research I've seen about them comes from here -- it's worth noting that not everyone will necessarily love the Customizer, although I'm obviously a fan.
As a peer post says, "Interesting comment, however I completely and utterly disagree. " I'm not sure what typing on an "old beast" will do, but I'm the original submitter and obviously like the new Model Ms quite a bit. From my experience, I type faster and more accurately (he says as he scans this post for the typos someone is going to find and get an easy +5 Funny). Granted, this might be in part a placebo effect (oooo, I must type faster with a badass expensive keyboard!) or from familiarity, but in reality mine seems quite nice.
The only real attempt I've seen to quantify keyboard design and speed is here, and although the study is somewhat old, it seems to support the Model M fanbois.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that you Hans?
Not unless the case is about to get even more weird than it already is.
Right: and I wrote a review of it (that /. picked up) here, for those of you who want to know more.
Caveat: this only works optimally if the images in question depict nude women.
Right: and now we'll a) stop driving pickup trucks and start driving Priuses and b) coalesce into denser population centers that require less driving, provided we're smart enough to have land use controls that do so. Granted, big coastal cities aren't that smart, but maybe inner America will do better.
Given our record with rail, which exacerbates the size problem you noted, this seems unlikely. But if gas prices rise enough, what seemed unlikely becomes much more palatable, despite people who want to support their lifestyle instead of recognizing the trade-offs inherent in social and political decisions.
If you compare the right time horizons, this has already in effect happened. Relative to how most people lived in the year 1,000, virtually everyone in the United States has better lives (or at least the potential for better lives if they choose to access the social support infrastructure). Back then, early death was a likely outcome and making it past 30 unusual, and even if you did, the health problems made whatever life you had a painful one. Today's paupers live better in material terms than kings did then.
This is an extreme example of the "cake" metaphor I discussed in another comment. It seems this discussion keeps rolling back around to the trade-offs involved in this idea.
This might not be optimal because it assumes a very strong correlation between grades, test scores, and genuine intelligence, whatever that is. It also doesn't allow for much jumping between tracks. I'll use myself as an example: I did horrendously in my first two years of high school and then graduated with a 3.4 GPA by acing the last two, and eventually I ended up in an excellent but not especially well-known school named Clark University. Now I'm about to start graduate school, and aside from posting to /., I think I'm doing reasonably well, but in a system that's more strongly tracked I might not've been able to make the jumps I did.
Perhaps Clark is analogous to the private colleges you mention. Nonetheless, I've read that one of the United States' strengths is in its ability to have education at a variety of levels at virtually any time in one's life, especially in terms of community colleges. That isn't to say that high schools don't have many, many problems, as the parent article observes, but before we get too interested in merit systems, we should at least evaluate the trade-offs inherent in such systems.
Over the long term, I'd rather see a bigger cake, which will eventually offer slices that are larger, in absolute terms, than those with smaller slices are getting now. This is often labeled a more "conservative" opinion in the United States, although to my mind it corresponds more closely to classical liberalism. One reason NCLB generates such vitriol is that it takes a position usually labeled "liberal" in the United States regarding the size/distribution of cake slices and then takes it under a Republican administration. But whatever nominally "conservative" values the administration once served via lips have been discarded in the creation of actual policy.
This is a wise observation: for a particularly detailed account of one such person, read Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb . It prominently features Edward Teller, who was the driving force behind the hydrogen bomb even when many of the other Manhattan project scientists, and most notably Oppenheimer, had lost their zeal for weaponry and their certainty that we are the good guys, as the GP argues.
Note too that I pitched a theory as to why this is a problem in another comment.
If you want to know more about the subject, check out my earlier post and some of the links in it.
Although it's about a unit of state rather than federal government, you could look at the story directly below this one concerning a Massachusetts man who was fired for (not) downloading porn on his computer. Given how well government tends to work -- more examples of it working (or not, once again) are available here, at GWC -- I'm not surprised that many free-thinking and brilliant people wouldn't be inclined to work for it.
Call it a hunch, but as other posters have noted, it seems unlikely that this is genuinely about monopolies.
Art.com has loads and loads of famous painting reprints -- I got a copy of Botecelli's "Venus and Mars" from them -- but they don't have the Dali. Searching for it, however, yielded a scarf at the Philadelphia Art Museum Store. But that's probably not what you're looking for.
Even if OLPC folds tomorrow, it's already been a success in at least one field.
I also write grants for nonprofit and public agencies, and the third item in this blog post involves some of the research into computers as educational devices. It isn't positive. That doesn't mean someone won't find a way to make computers useful in a statistically significant way, or that the next great hacker with a world changing idea won't get their first computing experience via OLPC or Intel's version or whatever, but it's harder to justify computers en masse without more solid evidence behind it.
I posted a link in the main thread anticipating an Aeron love fest, though I didn't realize it would metastasize with such speed. Regardless, if anyone makes it this far down, it might be worth reading the Joel on Software and other quotes in this thread.
Notice his comment: The Aeron chair has, sadly, been tarnished with a reputation of being extravagant, especially for startups. The Aeron isn't extravagant -- it's wonderful, and people who sit in chairs for most of their lives ought to have a good one. I don't get the people who spend $30K on a car and $100 on a chair and $200 on a bed, when allocating a very small amount of capital from the first to the second two could lead to a dramatically improved quality of life, given how much time one spends wrapped in each. I use similar reasoning when I justify an amazing $70 Customizer over a typical $20 mushy keyboard.
Joel's not the only one with Aeron love, by the way. Check this review from game nerds:
In English, where the quality of your reading and your persuasiveness is of more importance than, say, experiment design, I think peer review will become less important but still not unimportant. In the sciences, however, I think peer review is going to remain exceedingly important, and some method will remain for conducting it. Peer review at the moment is bound up (haha, I know) with paper journals, but over time one can only hope the two will be decoupled. That's when paper journals will be obsolete. The journal publishers, however, don't want this to happen, and they have enormous power over academics: you have to publish to get a job and get tenure. This fundamental power imbalance is part of the reason expensive paper journals persist. Think of this as a toll keeper problem.
As other posters have noted the problem is not journals themselves, but the cost of journals and the restrictions to access. To the extent that things like blogs make paper journals obsolete in that respect faster than would otherwise occur, a very good thing has happened and knowledge has been democratized.
No, it means that you should carefully consider what kinds of items and things you're going to ban and focus the maximal amount of attention on that. The best rule I can come up with is: is this product going to directly hurt other people?
In the case of many drugs, like pot, the answer seems to be "no," and I'd argue the same for prostitution. The ivory issue is essentially this: will allowing the sale of ivory on eBay lead to more elephants killed for it, or will people who have "grandfathered" ivory simply be able to trade.
I think that's what the GP was implying, and that's what you parody.
P.s. English isn't my first language !
Your English is no doubt better than my what-ever-you-speak-originally. Depending on your original language, Unicomp also has the Customizer 102/3 keyboard with German, Italian, and Spanish layouts, as well as UK English.
For more on the issue of what science exists WRT keyboard design, check out this post.
Alas, it's not quite that heavy, but given the choice of a modern Dell or Apple keyboard, I'll take the Customizer. But if you happen to be, say, helping someone move instead of "consoling" them, you might like the somewhat lighter modern version.
Incidentally, I'm 24, and I only learned about buckling spring keyboards from the curmudgeons wise mentors on /. and elsewhere. But when I actually began using these keyboards, I realized why they're revered in nerd circles. A more elegant weapon for a more civilized age, indeed.
It's just how we compare prices: relatively rather than absolutely, even if an absolute metric would be more fair. Dan Ariely discusses this in his book, Predictably Irrational, which I think worth reading.
I don't think one necessarily has to mod down someone just because the person disagrees with you (and he clearly disagrees with me, since I'm the original submitter!), and it's at least somewhat useful to have a second opinion, even one not backed up by much evidence. But since keyboards seem a fairly subjective issue anyway -- the only thing approaching research I've seen about them comes from here -- it's worth noting that not everyone will necessarily love the Customizer, although I'm obviously a fan.
The only real attempt I've seen to quantify keyboard design and speed is here, and although the study is somewhat old, it seems to support the Model M fanbois.