If you didn't notice, my last point was a big part of explaining the parent problem: If your educational attainment makes no difference in your financial success, than not spending valuable time or money on education is a rational decision. The parent's message to their kids becomes not "work hard, stay in school, study carefully" but "don't get your hopes up". And after somewhere around 75 years of that, it would be hardly surprising that this idea was embedded in the culture.
So yes, it needs to be solved, but the solution is to make it worth people's while to do well in school.
The problems in education in the US are not about the supplies the kids have, and the iPads, while great for publicity, won't have much effect on student achievement.
The big problems have a lot more to do with: - A lack of pre-K education for a lot of kids means that many start about 2-3 years behind. For example, I was one of two students who walked into first grade able to read at all, count, and add. Head Start and similar programs could help with that, but they've never come close to having the funding they'd really need to solve that problem, and parents are often completely unaware that that sort of thing even exists.
- Teachers are poorly paid compared to other professions requiring similar levels of education, so we don't have our smartest people opting to become teachers. For example, someone who's good at math or science, and good at explaining it to other people, could choose to get an engineering degree and make about $85K a year, or go into teaching and make about $50K a year. Which would you expect them to choose?
- The school districts that desperately need the best teachers are not the same districts as can afford the best teachers. Teachers, like most people, opt to work for places that pay them well if possible, and that means wealthy suburban districts can get better staff than poor urban or rural districts. But generally speaking, the poor kids are the ones who could most use a really good teacher to give them a chance to not be poor.
- For students in minority cultures, education is not always seen as a path to financial success, because (certainly historically, and seems to be still at least partially true) educated people in that minority do not necessarily get the jobs they are qualified for. If education isn't a path to success, then many students will be motivated to just muddle through until either they graduate or drop out, because either way they're going to be flipping burgers for a living if they are lucky enough to get a job.
None of that will be solved with iPads, just like none of that was solved by Apple giving out Apple II's to a lot of schools back in the 1980's.
Unions in the USA all crawled into bed with the Democrats decades ago
Specifically, unions started really supporting Democrats in the 1930's, for a very good reason: The Democrats had just passed the National Labor Relations Act, which among other things gave unions the legal right to exist. For the 50 years or so before that, union leaders were operating under the constant threat of being beaten to a pulp or shot by company goons, and the unions tended to put their political support not behind either Democrats or Republicans but instead behind Socialists.
The Democratic Party continued to support organized labor up until the late 1980's or so, when they decided that the unions were basically a lost cause, and Bill Clinton abandoned unions in favor of corporate funding of the Democratic Party. Unions have never recovered either the political clout or the membership and funding they once had. And totally coincidentally, a worker today makes less (adjusted for inflation) than they did in 1987, despite the fact that the current American worker is more productive than any other worker that has ever existed on the planet.
If he is officially diagnosed, what would you say then?
I'd say that there's a significant difference between autism and sociopathy. An autistic person frequently doesn't understand how to interact with someone else, but they have enough empathy to know some basics of how *not* to interact.
That's who CNN should be afraid of since they are both playing the same game.
Well, not really: Al Jazeera has been making a big point about providing informative coverage and in-depth analysis with a variety of commentators in their area of expertise, while CNN has been making a big point about silly graphics and talking heads yelling at each other.
A big part of that was the government response to a terrorist attack. In the UK, what the government always told its citizens to do was "Keep Calm and Carry On". In the US, what citizens were told to do was "Panic! Buy lots of safety equipment! Support invading a country that had nothing to do with it!"
I've always thought that response from the US government was a big reason why the 9/11 "truthers" gained as much traction as they did.
If that happens, terrorist attacks will become a form of theater in which terrorists not only get to write the play but also act as the primary producers of the coverage of the event.
CNN and other news outlets are simply demanding to be in charge of the coverage themselves - the terrorists showing and explaining their own actions is a challenge to their oligopoly! Also, it makes it impossible for the US State Dept to go to the major media outlets and politely ask them to adjust the coverage to something more to the current administration's (whoever the current administration happens to be, this isn't Obama-specific) liking.
Major media outlets don't really hate massive disasters and horrific violence, because both of those drive up ratings. In fact, if there's nothing major going on, they'll do their best to take a relatively minor affair and describe it as a massive disaster, for precisely that purpose.
If you're ever in a jury where the NSA is presenting data against someone, find that person innocent?
Err, what makes you think that will ever happen? The data from the NSA isn't going to be used for those silly trials (where a jury might find somebody not guilty). Instead, we'll use the data to put people on secret lists that will ensure that it is extremely unpleasant for them to: - Get on a commercial plane. - Cross an international border. - Deposit money into a bank account. - Get or keep a job. - Vote. - Rent a car. - Take out a bank loan. - Enter a court of law, regardless of the reason. - Own a smartphone, laptop, or other portable electronic device. Oh, and if you're in a foreign country that nobody important cares about, like Yemen, then they may just decide to kill you and your family with a drone and be done with it.
Most of these kinds of steps have already been taken against people who the national security state has decided are troublemakers.
He wants all information about everybody he can get his hands on. That's basically his job.
That's why it's the President's job is to say "That's illegal. Don't do it. If you do it, I will have you fired, arrested for wiretapping, and charged for your crimes. I will do that to the next NSA Director who breaks the law. And the next. For as many as it takes, until I get an NSA Director who understands that the law supercedes what they want.", and follow through on what he said.
President Obama has failed to do this. So did President Bush. That's because they don't want to do their job, they'd rather (for whatever reason) have an NSA breaking the law.
Out of curiosity, what's stopping you from doing that? Sure, you'd be vegetarian almost all the time, but that is doable for most people. Also, it can be significantly cheaper (e.g. black beans are about 1/3 the price of ground beef).
What we need to do is breed a steer that wants to be eaten, a la Restaurant at the End of the Universe!
And this mostly-vegetarian thinks that the biggest ethical problem with eating meat is that the way animals are currently raised for meat basically has them eating things they aren't really supposed to (e.g. corn to grass-eaters, and cannibalism), which is both bad for the animals and bad for us. The cramped conditions and abuse and such don't help.
I don't care about IPhone versus Android versus Blackberry versus any other smartphone, but I have nothing but contempt for people who trust their disembodied GPS voice more than what they see when they look outside their car.
Why, we could completely block organizing efforts for those political parties that are advocate independence for parts of the UK: How do you like that, Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru, and Scottish Nationalists? And then maybe get rid of those pesky Green parties, and then the Liberal Democrats too, just to be on the safe side.
My use of "left-wing" was not meant as a positive or negative, but as a descriptive. Presidents Correa, Rousseff, Maduro, and Morales would all quite proudly describe their politics as liberal. Raul Castro would be offended if you described his politics as centrist or right-wing.
3 (non-religious secular government) likewise, eventually turns into 1 (genocide of Jews).
There's a fairly good argument that a secular state does not necessarily create a genocide of Jews: The United States. While there has been and still is anti-Semetic violence in the US, the fact remains that Jews have been safer and more prosperous in the US than anywhere else (including, assuming they existed, the ancient Jewish kingdoms and modern-day Israel). One reason Jews came to the US was precisely because of its religious freedom established very early on in its history.
Also, what kind of moron actually drives through an airport just because their eyePhone tells them to? Perhaps instead of setting up barricades, they should have prevented that kind of move with caltrops and/or land mines to remove a dangerously stupid person from the gene pool.
In many cases, a good cause requires a strong charismatic leader and cannot continue without one in face of great adversity.
The thing is, Rousseff's party has other strong charismatic leaders, most notably Lula da Silva, who is only out of an elected position because of term limits.
The NSA doesn't do political assassinations - that's the CIA's job.
However, they probably know that killing Rousseff wouldn't actually change much: She's ridiculously popular in Brazil (above 75% approval), but her party is only slightly less popular (about 63% approval), so chances are if she were killed Vice President Temer would just take over and continue Rousseff's policies. That means they won't try that, but will instead try to destabilize the country, curry favor with the military, and try to organize a coup like they did in Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, and a bunch of other countries in the area.
The history of the Pledge of Allegience is quite interesting, really: - For starters, instead of a hand over your heart, originally you were supposed to raise your arm up, like this. They starting changing that in 1941 for some reason. - In one of the few bits of codified sexism still on the books, men are supposed to remove their hats, unless they are uniformed military personnel, in which case they are supposed to stand at attention and salute. - The original version just said "I pledge allegiance to my Flag" - they changed that in 1923 to prevent those immigrants from thinking they were supposed to be loyal to their former countries. - In the 1940's, there was a brief period in which the courts allowed schools to require children to say it, regardless of their religious beliefs. Jehovah's Witnesses in particular had a big problem with that, because they considered it idolatry. - In 1954, they added "under God", specifically for religious reasons, with its supporters cheering the fact that schoolchildren across America would be proclaiming their monotheism. In 2010, this was upheld because the majority claimed it was of a "ceremonial and patriotic nature".
the end of the Arab Israeli conflict can only be solved in three ways, - decide that palestine is all arab (and muslim) - decide that israel is all isrealy (and jewish) - decide that this vaguely federal country to be named is a democratic country with people of various ethnic and religious back ground who need to live together and the only way this can happen is to totally extirpate any reference to any specific religion, ethnic origin or "nation".
Choice one and two would mean lots of dead people, choice three would be seen as a "bad example" for the neighbours and protectors...
The thing is, that a lot of Americans would like to see choice 2, that Israel, including the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, be Israeli Jewish territory. This has a lot to do with conservative Christians who believe that the restoration of the Jews to Israel is a precursor to the Second Coming of Jesus, and also believe that Muslims are the Satanic forces they'll be battling at Armageddon. Some also have a goal of matching the borders of modern Israel with the borders described in the Book of Joshua and other texts that would eventually have Israel taking over the Sinai from Egypt, all of Lebanon, about 2/3 of Syria (up to the Euphrates), and a good portion of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, in all cases kicking out or exterminating the Muslims living there and replacing them with Jews.
That kind of religious thinking is a major motivator of US-Israel relations, more than AIPAC (because there are other Jewish-American lobbying groups advocating different policies), more than the potential campaign donations from Jewish-Americans (again, there's significant divides among Jewish-Americans over the best policy for Israel), and more than what the government of Israel wants (the US has not been supportive of Israeli government efforts to remove settlers from the West Bank or Gaza, for example). Sure, their preferred policy would result in a lot of dead people, but from that crowd's point of view those dead people were irredeemably evil and thus should be killed at first opportunity.
represented the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden
Really, "the most serious diplomatic fallout" was a (justifiably) angry speech?
How about when Vladimir "Polonium 209" Putin suddenly became the world's defender of human rights? Or how about when the US and EU countries grounded Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, so they could search his plane for Snowden (a rough equivalent here would be the Chinese stopping and searching Air Force One)?
Rousseff is almost definitely speaking for more than just Brazil: Her government is the strongest of a group of left-wing South American countries that have resisted the US for about a decade. Others in that group include Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and of course Cuba.
Slashdot Mirror
If you didn't notice, my last point was a big part of explaining the parent problem: If your educational attainment makes no difference in your financial success, than not spending valuable time or money on education is a rational decision. The parent's message to their kids becomes not "work hard, stay in school, study carefully" but "don't get your hopes up". And after somewhere around 75 years of that, it would be hardly surprising that this idea was embedded in the culture.
So yes, it needs to be solved, but the solution is to make it worth people's while to do well in school.
The problems in education in the US are not about the supplies the kids have, and the iPads, while great for publicity, won't have much effect on student achievement.
The big problems have a lot more to do with:
- A lack of pre-K education for a lot of kids means that many start about 2-3 years behind. For example, I was one of two students who walked into first grade able to read at all, count, and add. Head Start and similar programs could help with that, but they've never come close to having the funding they'd really need to solve that problem, and parents are often completely unaware that that sort of thing even exists.
- Teachers are poorly paid compared to other professions requiring similar levels of education, so we don't have our smartest people opting to become teachers. For example, someone who's good at math or science, and good at explaining it to other people, could choose to get an engineering degree and make about $85K a year, or go into teaching and make about $50K a year. Which would you expect them to choose?
- The school districts that desperately need the best teachers are not the same districts as can afford the best teachers. Teachers, like most people, opt to work for places that pay them well if possible, and that means wealthy suburban districts can get better staff than poor urban or rural districts. But generally speaking, the poor kids are the ones who could most use a really good teacher to give them a chance to not be poor.
- For students in minority cultures, education is not always seen as a path to financial success, because (certainly historically, and seems to be still at least partially true) educated people in that minority do not necessarily get the jobs they are qualified for. If education isn't a path to success, then many students will be motivated to just muddle through until either they graduate or drop out, because either way they're going to be flipping burgers for a living if they are lucky enough to get a job.
None of that will be solved with iPads, just like none of that was solved by Apple giving out Apple II's to a lot of schools back in the 1980's.
Actually, you don't even need one of those, when you can pick up, at your local grocery store, a bananaphone.
Rimmer, Lister
Unions in the USA all crawled into bed with the Democrats decades ago
Specifically, unions started really supporting Democrats in the 1930's, for a very good reason: The Democrats had just passed the National Labor Relations Act, which among other things gave unions the legal right to exist. For the 50 years or so before that, union leaders were operating under the constant threat of being beaten to a pulp or shot by company goons, and the unions tended to put their political support not behind either Democrats or Republicans but instead behind Socialists.
The Democratic Party continued to support organized labor up until the late 1980's or so, when they decided that the unions were basically a lost cause, and Bill Clinton abandoned unions in favor of corporate funding of the Democratic Party. Unions have never recovered either the political clout or the membership and funding they once had. And totally coincidentally, a worker today makes less (adjusted for inflation) than they did in 1987, despite the fact that the current American worker is more productive than any other worker that has ever existed on the planet.
If he is officially diagnosed, what would you say then?
I'd say that there's a significant difference between autism and sociopathy. An autistic person frequently doesn't understand how to interact with someone else, but they have enough empathy to know some basics of how *not* to interact.
I was actually planning on installing Debian tonight on a spare box, completely unaware of this anniversary. Now I pretty much have to do it.
That's who CNN should be afraid of since they are both playing the same game.
Well, not really: Al Jazeera has been making a big point about providing informative coverage and in-depth analysis with a variety of commentators in their area of expertise, while CNN has been making a big point about silly graphics and talking heads yelling at each other.
A big part of that was the government response to a terrorist attack. In the UK, what the government always told its citizens to do was "Keep Calm and Carry On". In the US, what citizens were told to do was "Panic! Buy lots of safety equipment! Support invading a country that had nothing to do with it!"
I've always thought that response from the US government was a big reason why the 9/11 "truthers" gained as much traction as they did.
If that happens, terrorist attacks will become a form of theater in which terrorists not only get to write the play but also act as the primary producers of the coverage of the event.
CNN and other news outlets are simply demanding to be in charge of the coverage themselves - the terrorists showing and explaining their own actions is a challenge to their oligopoly! Also, it makes it impossible for the US State Dept to go to the major media outlets and politely ask them to adjust the coverage to something more to the current administration's (whoever the current administration happens to be, this isn't Obama-specific) liking.
Major media outlets don't really hate massive disasters and horrific violence, because both of those drive up ratings. In fact, if there's nothing major going on, they'll do their best to take a relatively minor affair and describe it as a massive disaster, for precisely that purpose.
If you're ever in a jury where the NSA is presenting data against someone, find that person innocent?
Err, what makes you think that will ever happen? The data from the NSA isn't going to be used for those silly trials (where a jury might find somebody not guilty). Instead, we'll use the data to put people on secret lists that will ensure that it is extremely unpleasant for them to:
- Get on a commercial plane.
- Cross an international border.
- Deposit money into a bank account.
- Get or keep a job.
- Vote.
- Rent a car.
- Take out a bank loan.
- Enter a court of law, regardless of the reason.
- Own a smartphone, laptop, or other portable electronic device.
Oh, and if you're in a foreign country that nobody important cares about, like Yemen, then they may just decide to kill you and your family with a drone and be done with it.
Most of these kinds of steps have already been taken against people who the national security state has decided are troublemakers.
He wants all information about everybody he can get his hands on. That's basically his job.
That's why it's the President's job is to say "That's illegal. Don't do it. If you do it, I will have you fired, arrested for wiretapping, and charged for your crimes. I will do that to the next NSA Director who breaks the law. And the next. For as many as it takes, until I get an NSA Director who understands that the law supercedes what they want.", and follow through on what he said.
President Obama has failed to do this. So did President Bush. That's because they don't want to do their job, they'd rather (for whatever reason) have an NSA breaking the law.
Out of curiosity, what's stopping you from doing that? Sure, you'd be vegetarian almost all the time, but that is doable for most people. Also, it can be significantly cheaper (e.g. black beans are about 1/3 the price of ground beef).
I'm pretty sure the discovery of martian yeast would be big news on its own.
Well, if Men are from Venus, and Women from Mars ... (ducks)
What we need to do is breed a steer that wants to be eaten, a la Restaurant at the End of the Universe!
And this mostly-vegetarian thinks that the biggest ethical problem with eating meat is that the way animals are currently raised for meat basically has them eating things they aren't really supposed to (e.g. corn to grass-eaters, and cannibalism), which is both bad for the animals and bad for us. The cramped conditions and abuse and such don't help.
I don't care about IPhone versus Android versus Blackberry versus any other smartphone, but I have nothing but contempt for people who trust their disembodied GPS voice more than what they see when they look outside their car.
Why, we could completely block organizing efforts for those political parties that are advocate independence for parts of the UK: How do you like that, Sinn Fein, Plaid Cymru, and Scottish Nationalists? And then maybe get rid of those pesky Green parties, and then the Liberal Democrats too, just to be on the safe side.
My use of "left-wing" was not meant as a positive or negative, but as a descriptive. Presidents Correa, Rousseff, Maduro, and Morales would all quite proudly describe their politics as liberal. Raul Castro would be offended if you described his politics as centrist or right-wing.
3 (non-religious secular government) likewise, eventually turns into 1 (genocide of Jews).
There's a fairly good argument that a secular state does not necessarily create a genocide of Jews: The United States. While there has been and still is anti-Semetic violence in the US, the fact remains that Jews have been safer and more prosperous in the US than anywhere else (including, assuming they existed, the ancient Jewish kingdoms and modern-day Israel). One reason Jews came to the US was precisely because of its religious freedom established very early on in its history.
Also, what kind of moron actually drives through an airport just because their eyePhone tells them to? Perhaps instead of setting up barricades, they should have prevented that kind of move with caltrops and/or land mines to remove a dangerously stupid person from the gene pool.
In many cases, a good cause requires a strong charismatic leader and cannot continue without one in face of great adversity.
The thing is, Rousseff's party has other strong charismatic leaders, most notably Lula da Silva, who is only out of an elected position because of term limits.
The NSA doesn't do political assassinations - that's the CIA's job.
However, they probably know that killing Rousseff wouldn't actually change much: She's ridiculously popular in Brazil (above 75% approval), but her party is only slightly less popular (about 63% approval), so chances are if she were killed Vice President Temer would just take over and continue Rousseff's policies. That means they won't try that, but will instead try to destabilize the country, curry favor with the military, and try to organize a coup like they did in Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, and a bunch of other countries in the area.
The history of the Pledge of Allegience is quite interesting, really:
- For starters, instead of a hand over your heart, originally you were supposed to raise your arm up, like this. They starting changing that in 1941 for some reason.
- In one of the few bits of codified sexism still on the books, men are supposed to remove their hats, unless they are uniformed military personnel, in which case they are supposed to stand at attention and salute.
- The original version just said "I pledge allegiance to my Flag" - they changed that in 1923 to prevent those immigrants from thinking they were supposed to be loyal to their former countries.
- In the 1940's, there was a brief period in which the courts allowed schools to require children to say it, regardless of their religious beliefs. Jehovah's Witnesses in particular had a big problem with that, because they considered it idolatry.
- In 1954, they added "under God", specifically for religious reasons, with its supporters cheering the fact that schoolchildren across America would be proclaiming their monotheism. In 2010, this was upheld because the majority claimed it was of a "ceremonial and patriotic nature".
the end of the Arab Israeli conflict can only be solved in three ways,
- decide that palestine is all arab (and muslim)
- decide that israel is all isrealy (and jewish)
- decide that this vaguely federal country to be named is a democratic country with people of various ethnic and religious back ground who need to live together and the only way this can happen is to totally extirpate any reference to any specific religion, ethnic origin or "nation".
Choice one and two would mean lots of dead people, choice three would be seen as a "bad example" for the neighbours and protectors...
The thing is, that a lot of Americans would like to see choice 2, that Israel, including the entirety of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, be Israeli Jewish territory. This has a lot to do with conservative Christians who believe that the restoration of the Jews to Israel is a precursor to the Second Coming of Jesus, and also believe that Muslims are the Satanic forces they'll be battling at Armageddon. Some also have a goal of matching the borders of modern Israel with the borders described in the Book of Joshua and other texts that would eventually have Israel taking over the Sinai from Egypt, all of Lebanon, about 2/3 of Syria (up to the Euphrates), and a good portion of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq, in all cases kicking out or exterminating the Muslims living there and replacing them with Jews.
That kind of religious thinking is a major motivator of US-Israel relations, more than AIPAC (because there are other Jewish-American lobbying groups advocating different policies), more than the potential campaign donations from Jewish-Americans (again, there's significant divides among Jewish-Americans over the best policy for Israel), and more than what the government of Israel wants (the US has not been supportive of Israeli government efforts to remove settlers from the West Bank or Gaza, for example). Sure, their preferred policy would result in a lot of dead people, but from that crowd's point of view those dead people were irredeemably evil and thus should be killed at first opportunity.
represented the most serious diplomatic fallout to date from the revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden
Really, "the most serious diplomatic fallout" was a (justifiably) angry speech?
How about when Vladimir "Polonium 209" Putin suddenly became the world's defender of human rights? Or how about when the US and EU countries grounded Evo Morales, President of Bolivia, so they could search his plane for Snowden (a rough equivalent here would be the Chinese stopping and searching Air Force One)?
Rousseff is almost definitely speaking for more than just Brazil: Her government is the strongest of a group of left-wing South American countries that have resisted the US for about a decade. Others in that group include Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and of course Cuba.