"Jew" is used to designate both adherents of Judaism, and a member of the Jewish ethnic group. You're argument is a straw man; nobody's arguing he was genetically testing for religion; you deliberately picked the meaning of the term that, by context, was obviously not the one intended.
We have bandwidth caps and ISPs offering off-quota services in Australia, and we don't have the problem you describe.
I think the key difference is that for some reason, "free market" America is saddled with a whole bunch of monopolistic ISPs. Here, we had one telecommunications company that was initially publicly owned, but later floated and sold on the market. As far as I can see, this isn't hugely different from America's private ISPs, which used government funding to roll out their infrastructure.
When we sold Telstra (the telecommunications company in question), they were required to give other companies wholesale access to the infrastructure government funding had paid for. I think the reason we don't have the problem you describe is that, if Telstra were to make such an offer with their in-house movie system, people who didn't want it could just switch to iiNet. Or Dodo. Or Optus. Or any of a dozen other ADSL providers using Telstra's infrastructure.
I don't think net neutrality is going to solve your problems, just because it's not the root cause. The root cause is the geographic monopolies your ISPs control.
GET session IDs, rewritten URLs and HTTP referrers don't help track users.
In case you're unaware, the way this tracking works is by the tracking party embedding an image on a third party page (for Google, this is usually adwords, for Facebook, it's the like buttons). When a user hits that image, they send a request to the tracking party's server to fetch the image. Along with that request, it sends the cookies for that domain. The tracking party can then determine that the user with that cookie, visited third-party page X.
GET variables, mangled URLs, HTTP referrers - these can be used to track someone within a site (and are very useful for maintaining session), but none of them can be used to track you across third party site, because to do so would mean the third party site would have to serve up unique content for each user.
The one valid issue you raised was the user agent string, and while it's not guaranteed unique, research shows it's often good enough to do a reasonable job, although I don't know if any companies do use it that way, since simple cookies are nigh-ubiquitous. I agree it's an issue, but it should be a simple, technological fix. There's no good reason for browsers to share so much information via their agent strings. For those who are concerned about tracking, installing a agent-string switching addon is simple enough. I agree they shouldn't need to, and maybe the focus on tracking will get the major browser vendors to change their default behaviour, but it's not like "opting out" of the tracking is at all difficult.
Does anyone remember, back in the day, when browsers shipped configured so that all cookies set had to be explicitly authorized to be set? Remember how the first thing everyone did was change their configuration to auto-accept? Remember how browsers eventually changed to just have that setting by default?
A site cannot track you across third-party sites. Not unless you let them. It's just that users have deferred that responsibility to their browser's configuration, and are now complaining that they've been granting authorization to let these sites track them. The result is articles like this, and heavy-handed legislation like the EUs recent cookie-ban. All because users are too lazy and ignorant to take the responsibility on themselves. Hell, with modern browsers and addon/extension models, you don't even need to use the coarse-grained approach that old-school browsers used. Just a plugin that let's you whitelist cookies.
But it sounds like even that's too much effort for the average user. Just complain, and rely on the courts.
I worked with a fellow who got two flu shots, and both times he became ill right afterward with the flu...I once worked with a man who's doctor put him on cholesterol reducing drugs for mildly elevated cholesterol. It nuked his sex drive.
I wasn't trying to outline a regimen of behaviour to absolve fault. I was just illustrating that, yes, our actions impact our health, and frequently, our health is the result of our own decisions, not factors of a chaotic universe beyond our control. In the cases you outlined above, yes, to all of them. Yes, his actions in taking the flu-shot resulted in him getting the flu. Yes, when he got the flu without it, his lack of vaccination was a factor. Yes, the guy's lack of sex drive were due to his actions in taking the medication. Yes, if he had a heart attack without taking the medication, that would have been due to his own decisions too.
I'm not trying to make judgements about what decisions people make, but when you make them, you live with the consequences, and you acknowledge that the consequences are the results of your own decisions. In the case of the cholesterol guy, presumably he weighed the pros and cons of low sex drive versus increased chance of heart attack. I'm not going to say which decision was wrong or right, but whichever he chose, the consequences were of his doing.
In my family, we tend toward big, and we tend to live to around 85 to 90 years old. That's pretty much independent of what we do, from days before heart, cholesterol or high blood pressure meds - fat or thin - to the present day.
Which is why I explicitly called that sort of thing out in my post:
Most of them are "lifestyle" diseases that (for most people - there are always some exceptions) are due mostly to the choices they've made.
That's pretty much the ultimate ""your own fault" approach. There is a fairly widespread subset of th epopulation that thinks that any ailment is the sick person's fault.
The thing is, for large swathes of ailments, it is true. Think lung cancer, skin cancer, heart disease, diabetes, AIDs, hepatitis, etc. Most of them are "lifestyle" diseases that (for most people - there are always some exceptions) are due mostly to the choices they've made. And there's plenty of other cases. My work offered free flu vaccines this winter. Some people took them, some people didn't - and got the flu when it went around. I know people who avoid doctors like the plague, and so when they do get sick, they don't seek professional help in time to head it off at the outset, and end up much worse off. I know people who put their faith in healing crystals or homeopathy, and suffer for it.
It's not general enough to say every illness you get is your fault, but there is a significant enough chunk that it's a reasonable stance to take for a large proportion of ailments.
Yes, any real fight that happens to occur while you're carrying a sword around. Most likely it'll be against law enforcement who are trying to deal with the freak with the sword, and will just tase your ass from a distance.
Android is simply too lasses faire and requires too much learning for your non-geek and simply doesn't "work" yet.
Citation needed. My wife seems to be able to operate her Android without any trouble. Why is being laissez-faire a problem? And what particulary "doesn't work"? Market share is a hard thing to measure, but by at least some metrics, Android is outcompeting iOS fairly substatially.
In my business we call that a sales opportunity. When your job is to fix things, the more broke they are, the more money you can make.
If you were a contractor called in to fix it, I'd agree. If you're an in-house developer whose real job isn't to fix things, but to create new things, getting pulled off whatever job you were doing in the first place to fix someone else's mess is a PITA - and you don't make any more money.
Finally all those "real" programmers that gnash their teeth at even the mention of the word VB? GET OVER IT, you wouldn't expect them to call a 'real"engineer when all they need is something that can be banged together out of an Erector set would you? of course not and it just so happens there is a hell of a lot of business jobs that don't need some full blown SQL DB just to get the job done.
I'd be fine with that. Except that those little projects that just need to be banged together out of an erector set have a habit of growing, and becoming "business critical". They soon exceed the skills of those who banged them together, and they need to call a "real engineer" in to make it work again. Frequently, the existing software doesn't do exactly what it's meant to, or what the documentation (if there is any) says it does, and nobody wants to give any design criteria are "do what the old one does, but better".
In short, the reason "real programmers" hate it, is because sooner or later, it ends up being their problem.
So you are saying everyone is entitled to cheap entertainment, cheap being whatever you dictate.
It's got nothing to do with entitlement. It's just what's going to happen. Restrict a market, a black market develops. You can bitch and moan about it all you like, but if you want to solve it, you need to address the root cause of why that market developed. Trying to legislate it away is futile, as it just further restricts the market, and enhances the value of the black market further.
I don't think there is a good excuse for unlicensed viewing of recorded entertainment other than "because we can."
And I don't think there is a good excuse for 100+ years of copyrighting entertainment otgo unheard.her than "because we can". Unfortunately, since I don't "donate" millions to politicians, my thoughts don't appear to count.
California has universal healthcare. Sick people cost more money than healthy people which means your taxes go up paying for smokers and soda drinkers.
You know who also cost more money than healthy people? Old people. Maybe you should increase taxes on them too.
Shared risk pools are my answer. I have no problem with insurance, as long as it's not mandated by government, at which point it just becomes taxation by another name.
The problem with the US system is the cost, which is entirely out of line with other countries. I think it's due to the fact that, for some reason, insurance got tied to your employer. From what I understand (I'm not American) it's almost impossible to get insurance as an individual, and even if you do, you're going to be taken to the cleaners. Not only does that mean that only the employed have health insurance, it means that the only people who care about the cost of procedures are third parties (the hospital, and the insurance companies).
Because the patient don't care about the price (after all, the insurance covers that), the hospital is free to jack up the price. The insurance company doesn't care, because it can just hike up the premiums. They're paid by your employer, who also doesn't care, they just factor it into your wage. At this point, your wage is so distant from the cost of your medical care, you don't actually feel like you're paying for it. All the sleight-of-hand behind the scenes insulates you from actually realising (and complaining) about the price, while everyone else involved takes their slice of the pie.
If you want to get the government involved, get them into investigating and fixing the issue of why American healthcare is so overpriced, rather than forcing everyone to pay those ludicrous prices.
As for "the poor suffering and dying", that's what charities are for. Give to them; volunteer for them. Hell, if you get health insurance prices down to a reasonable level, it'd probably be possible for a charity to take out health insurance for the people they're helping.
It's perfectly rational to tax people who choose to make bad choices which will lead to higher health care costs for everyone else.
Now, I know this is a radical thought, but how about you pay for your healthcare, I'll pay for mine, and you can keep your damn nose out of whatever the hell I want to do.
This is why political conservatives oppose state-funded health care; not because they hate poor people, but because it's the camel's nose in the tent. And pretty soon, the damn camel's telling you what you're allowed to do, not do, eat drink and breathe.
Also, I'd like actual stats on those health care costs of yours. Dying is expensive, no matter what it's from. Most of my elderly relatives don't suffer from diabetes or heart disease, and yet they're in and out of hospitals regularly. When my grandfather died, it was after being in hospital for months, and he was basically just dying of old age. The cheapest way to go would actually be one big coronary or stroke in middle age.
Oh no! A small minority of people in populations with close-to, or below replacement level are having many children! Catastrophe! Somebody call Malthus!
And unless you work for a small private company, odds are there are productivity metrics. Try firing someone without em and watch how fast they lawyer up these days.
Yes. But they're not the sole criteria. You don't just fire the people who come up bottom of the metrics. The metrics are a warning signal that something might be wrong - you need human intervention to interpret them.
But we judge the STUDENTS by the very clearly defined metrics you abhore applying to teachers,
No we don't. We judge the students by their work. You're wanting to judge the teacher's by the student's work.
It is the job of the schools and teachers to teach, if the students aren't learning who else do we hold accountable?
Um, the students? The old adage about leading a horse to water springs to mind. It's impossible to forcibly teach someone. You can present the knowledge all you like, but you can't force it into their skulls for them.
In reality, if the student's bright, they're going to be learning despite the teacher. If they're not interested in learning at all, they're not going to, no matter how good the teacher. If they're average, then they'll learn well under a good teacher, and poorly under a poor one.
You reply that my analogy is flawed, and I should assume some of the parts coming in are in defective batches and because some shifts just happen to get those cheap Chinese parts it isn't their fault.
If the parts were sentient beings in their own right, who had entire lives and their own issues going on in the context of being assembled, then your analogy may have some point. As it is, it's simply a poor analogy, no matter how many caveats and addendums you add. A teaching environment needs to be symbiotic, with the student willing to learn, and the teacher able to teach. Factoring out the student as a widget, and putting the entire focus on the teacher is simply not a good model.
Also if some workers could work around bad parts by noticing them and culling them or otherwise fixing the defects on the fly I'd keep those and lose the stupid ones and not lose much sleep about the fairness or unfairness of it, even if the stupid ones were doing everything 'by the book.
So the teachers you'd keep are the ones that could play the political game well enough to shuffle the undesirables off onto other teachers. Those that try and educate their students to the best of their ability (do things by the book) are the ones that get the shaft. Great system.
The current system also has pretty simple rules and is easy to game. Sit through an Edu Degree, get a job and expend some effort for a couple of years until tenure. And that is the bottom line. The current system does not work. Defending it only makes you part of the problem.
Did you even read my post, or just start ranting as soon as the reply pane had loaded? In my country, teachers don't get tenure. I agree that tenure for K-12 is a stupid idea, and part of the problem. But just because a stupid idea is the cause of the problem doesn't mean another stupid idea's going to fix it.
Not outside the art houses. In most of the book trade it is sales, a very quantifiable metric.
And again, your love of metrics leaves you measuring the wrong thing. Sales measures the commercial success of a book, not its quality. I don't know of one single person who chooses what book to read by perusing the publisher's P&L statements. They choose what to read by reading reviews and following the recommendations of people they trust.
Every time the notion of judging the performance of teachers by their output, exactly like EVERYONE else with a job is judged, promoted and fired
Which industry do you work in? Because other than factory line workers and sales people, nobody I know is judged, promoted and fired like that. People I know are usually promoted/fired based on the opinion of their superiors on the quality of their work.
Or is it your position that there is no reliably measurable difference between a 'good' and a 'bad' teacher?
Pretty much. My position is that there is a difference between a good and bad teacher, but that it's not possible (or at least, simple) to reduce that difference to numbers in a way is both balanced across the different nature of classes, and impossible to game. It's a problem I find with most metrics other than the most simple of jobs.
In the same way, I believe that there are good books and bad books, but judging the quality of the book by using, say, average number of syllables in a word, is a really poor way of doing it. When we want to judge the quality of a book, we rely on human opinions (reviewers). In the case of people, we should rely on the opinions of supervisors, who have a greater grasp on context than does an algorithmic metric.
Which means it is useless. Mine is chosen almost entirely on the basis of being actually measurable and thus IS useful.
Just being measurable doesn't make it useful. Lines of Code is a perfectly measurable metric, but still sucks when it comes to determining the productivity of a software developer.
Come on over to the reality based community
The reality is, you need to base decisions on personal observation, not on some clunky algorithm that doesn't produce the correct result.
Really. How many other professions are there where the people in charge will openly assert that it is impossible to measure their output, immoral to even try.
How many other professions are there where your output is entirely determined by a third party, over whom you have no authority? The ability of teachers to effectively control their students has been diminishing year by year. Many of the students know it too, and know that there'll be nobody in a school willing to call them out on their actions, for fear of legal liability.
and oh, by the way we insist on being granted tenure even though the notion is utterly inapplicable to K-12 education
I'm in a different country. We have the same current trend towards metrics, but none of our K-12 teachers have tenure, although, as government employees, teachers are just as difficult to fire as any other bureaucrat. I agree with you that the solution to the problem is getting rid of the under-performing teachers; I disagree that a simple mathematical formula is able to determine that accurately.
The way to solve security issues for novices is by someone building a more secure store, which of course will have to be the default store and replace the App Market for the novice users to find it.
No, not really. If someone can install an app, they can install another app store (which is really nothing more than an app). Assuming novices can install apps (which is fairly reasonable or the whole argument is moot anyway) it's not a question of whether it's too difficult for novices, it's a question of whether they can be bothered. That's what I mean about demand - it's unlikely a large number of people will be motivated to change to a pre-vetted app store. It's the same sort of inertia that was seen with Windows/IE.
Apple caters for the lowest common denominator. They restrict those who might want to install third party apps for the good of those who can't be bothered to engage their brain when installing an app. Android is more of a free for all - there's no restrictions, but the only safety net is one that you choose to install yourself. It's not that it's difficult, it's that requires action and thought to do it.
You say that like it is a bad thing. If the kids didn't improve from when they came in at the start of the year that means the teacher sucks. Or give me a definition of 'good teacher' that includes 'kids don't improve'.
How about this: a teacher is "good" if the results 50% of teachers would have gotten in the same situation, would not have been significantly better.
Weighing teachers against each other based on their student's results is inaccurate, because you have no control. All classes are not equal; a "bad" teacher with a self-starting, highly-motivated class with involved parents will do far better (on your metrics) than a good teacher with a bad-attitude, frequently-delinquent class with an education retarded by their last three lousy teachers. Swap those teachers around, and the ones with the best class will come out on top, not the one with the greater ability.
The problem with my metric is that it's impossible to measure. It just has some relationship to reality, which is an advantage over the currently-used metrics.
Sorry.. but this statement is just B.S. Apple IIs and TRaSh-80s were the gateway for hundreds of future computer users and programmers. Students learned TONS on them, though maybe not was initially intended.
Sort of. I was a student, and I learned tons on an early computer. It wasn't the computer in my school that we were allowed to access for one hour a week to play games on though. It was my computer at home. The limited access to computers at school, the limited amount of things you were allowed to do with them, and the limited knowledge of anyone in the school about them meant they taught me absolutely nothing.
Your law may differ, but AFAIK, the law in my country doesn't discriminate based on cuteness on animal. It's illegal to kill certain species because they are endangered. It's illegal to kill animals that belong to another person. It's illegal to kill any animal in painful or inhumane way, or to deliberately injure any animal without good reason.
There might be more public outrage or political posturing when it's a cute penguin that gets kicked to death, but the law doesn't distinguish between animals on that basis.
I hate lobbing brickbats at Google since I like the Android ecosystem and Android phones. Android even has a stronger security model than iOS. However, Apple does one thing which precludes the need for that much security in iOS, and that is to be an active and stern gatekeeper.
The thing is, with Android being open, this can be done without Google doing it. Unlike iOS, Android isn't locked to a particular store. If there's demand for a pre-vetted store, and Google doesn't do it, anyone else can set it up. Personally, I don't think there will be enough demand, because the vast majority of users don't take security seriously. Google solution to the problem is free market; Apple's is much closer to central planning, where Apple does what they think is best for you (they may even be right), and your desires aren't taken into consideration.
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"Jew" is used to designate both adherents of Judaism, and a member of the Jewish ethnic group. You're argument is a straw man; nobody's arguing he was genetically testing for religion; you deliberately picked the meaning of the term that, by context, was obviously not the one intended.
since we try to avoid dupes!
You must be new here.
We have bandwidth caps and ISPs offering off-quota services in Australia, and we don't have the problem you describe.
I think the key difference is that for some reason, "free market" America is saddled with a whole bunch of monopolistic ISPs. Here, we had one telecommunications company that was initially publicly owned, but later floated and sold on the market. As far as I can see, this isn't hugely different from America's private ISPs, which used government funding to roll out their infrastructure.
When we sold Telstra (the telecommunications company in question), they were required to give other companies wholesale access to the infrastructure government funding had paid for. I think the reason we don't have the problem you describe is that, if Telstra were to make such an offer with their in-house movie system, people who didn't want it could just switch to iiNet. Or Dodo. Or Optus. Or any of a dozen other ADSL providers using Telstra's infrastructure.
I don't think net neutrality is going to solve your problems, just because it's not the root cause. The root cause is the geographic monopolies your ISPs control.
GET session IDs, rewritten URLs and HTTP referrers don't help track users.
In case you're unaware, the way this tracking works is by the tracking party embedding an image on a third party page (for Google, this is usually adwords, for Facebook, it's the like buttons). When a user hits that image, they send a request to the tracking party's server to fetch the image. Along with that request, it sends the cookies for that domain. The tracking party can then determine that the user with that cookie, visited third-party page X.
GET variables, mangled URLs, HTTP referrers - these can be used to track someone within a site (and are very useful for maintaining session), but none of them can be used to track you across third party site, because to do so would mean the third party site would have to serve up unique content for each user.
The one valid issue you raised was the user agent string, and while it's not guaranteed unique, research shows it's often good enough to do a reasonable job, although I don't know if any companies do use it that way, since simple cookies are nigh-ubiquitous. I agree it's an issue, but it should be a simple, technological fix. There's no good reason for browsers to share so much information via their agent strings. For those who are concerned about tracking, installing a agent-string switching addon is simple enough. I agree they shouldn't need to, and maybe the focus on tracking will get the major browser vendors to change their default behaviour, but it's not like "opting out" of the tracking is at all difficult.
Does anyone remember, back in the day, when browsers shipped configured so that all cookies set had to be explicitly authorized to be set? Remember how the first thing everyone did was change their configuration to auto-accept? Remember how browsers eventually changed to just have that setting by default?
A site cannot track you across third-party sites. Not unless you let them. It's just that users have deferred that responsibility to their browser's configuration, and are now complaining that they've been granting authorization to let these sites track them. The result is articles like this, and heavy-handed legislation like the EUs recent cookie-ban. All because users are too lazy and ignorant to take the responsibility on themselves. Hell, with modern browsers and addon/extension models, you don't even need to use the coarse-grained approach that old-school browsers used. Just a plugin that let's you whitelist cookies.
But it sounds like even that's too much effort for the average user. Just complain, and rely on the courts.
I worked with a fellow who got two flu shots, and both times he became ill right afterward with the flu...I once worked with a man who's doctor put him on cholesterol reducing drugs for mildly elevated cholesterol. It nuked his sex drive.
I wasn't trying to outline a regimen of behaviour to absolve fault. I was just illustrating that, yes, our actions impact our health, and frequently, our health is the result of our own decisions, not factors of a chaotic universe beyond our control. In the cases you outlined above, yes, to all of them. Yes, his actions in taking the flu-shot resulted in him getting the flu. Yes, when he got the flu without it, his lack of vaccination was a factor. Yes, the guy's lack of sex drive were due to his actions in taking the medication. Yes, if he had a heart attack without taking the medication, that would have been due to his own decisions too.
I'm not trying to make judgements about what decisions people make, but when you make them, you live with the consequences, and you acknowledge that the consequences are the results of your own decisions. In the case of the cholesterol guy, presumably he weighed the pros and cons of low sex drive versus increased chance of heart attack. I'm not going to say which decision was wrong or right, but whichever he chose, the consequences were of his doing.
In my family, we tend toward big, and we tend to live to around 85 to 90 years old. That's pretty much independent of what we do, from days before heart, cholesterol or high blood pressure meds - fat or thin - to the present day.
Which is why I explicitly called that sort of thing out in my post:
Most of them are "lifestyle" diseases that (for most people - there are always some exceptions) are due mostly to the choices they've made.
That's pretty much the ultimate ""your own fault" approach. There is a fairly widespread subset of th epopulation that thinks that any ailment is the sick person's fault.
The thing is, for large swathes of ailments, it is true. Think lung cancer, skin cancer, heart disease, diabetes, AIDs, hepatitis, etc. Most of them are "lifestyle" diseases that (for most people - there are always some exceptions) are due mostly to the choices they've made. And there's plenty of other cases. My work offered free flu vaccines this winter. Some people took them, some people didn't - and got the flu when it went around. I know people who avoid doctors like the plague, and so when they do get sick, they don't seek professional help in time to head it off at the outset, and end up much worse off. I know people who put their faith in healing crystals or homeopathy, and suffer for it.
It's not general enough to say every illness you get is your fault, but there is a significant enough chunk that it's a reasonable stance to take for a large proportion of ailments.
Yes, any real fight that happens to occur while you're carrying a sword around. Most likely it'll be against law enforcement who are trying to deal with the freak with the sword, and will just tase your ass from a distance.
Android is simply too lasses faire and requires too much learning for your non-geek and simply doesn't "work" yet.
Citation needed. My wife seems to be able to operate her Android without any trouble. Why is being laissez-faire a problem? And what particulary "doesn't work"? Market share is a hard thing to measure, but by at least some metrics, Android is outcompeting iOS fairly substatially.
In my business we call that a sales opportunity. When your job is to fix things, the more broke they are, the more money you can make.
If you were a contractor called in to fix it, I'd agree. If you're an in-house developer whose real job isn't to fix things, but to create new things, getting pulled off whatever job you were doing in the first place to fix someone else's mess is a PITA - and you don't make any more money.
Finally all those "real" programmers that gnash their teeth at even the mention of the word VB? GET OVER IT, you wouldn't expect them to call a 'real"engineer when all they need is something that can be banged together out of an Erector set would you? of course not and it just so happens there is a hell of a lot of business jobs that don't need some full blown SQL DB just to get the job done.
I'd be fine with that. Except that those little projects that just need to be banged together out of an erector set have a habit of growing, and becoming "business critical". They soon exceed the skills of those who banged them together, and they need to call a "real engineer" in to make it work again. Frequently, the existing software doesn't do exactly what it's meant to, or what the documentation (if there is any) says it does, and nobody wants to give any design criteria are "do what the old one does, but better".
In short, the reason "real programmers" hate it, is because sooner or later, it ends up being their problem.
So you are saying everyone is entitled to cheap entertainment, cheap being whatever you dictate.
It's got nothing to do with entitlement. It's just what's going to happen. Restrict a market, a black market develops. You can bitch and moan about it all you like, but if you want to solve it, you need to address the root cause of why that market developed. Trying to legislate it away is futile, as it just further restricts the market, and enhances the value of the black market further.
I don't think there is a good excuse for unlicensed viewing of recorded entertainment other than "because we can."
And I don't think there is a good excuse for 100+ years of copyrighting entertainment otgo unheard.her than "because we can". Unfortunately, since I don't "donate" millions to politicians, my thoughts don't appear to count.
I see this alluded to all the time, but has the actually ever happened anywhere? As the Wikipedians would say, "[citation needed]".
Um, have you read the article, summary or title of the page you;re reading?
California has universal healthcare. Sick people cost more money than healthy people which means your taxes go up paying for smokers and soda drinkers.
You know who also cost more money than healthy people? Old people. Maybe you should increase taxes on them too.
Shared risk pools are my answer. I have no problem with insurance, as long as it's not mandated by government, at which point it just becomes taxation by another name.
The problem with the US system is the cost, which is entirely out of line with other countries. I think it's due to the fact that, for some reason, insurance got tied to your employer. From what I understand (I'm not American) it's almost impossible to get insurance as an individual, and even if you do, you're going to be taken to the cleaners. Not only does that mean that only the employed have health insurance, it means that the only people who care about the cost of procedures are third parties (the hospital, and the insurance companies).
Because the patient don't care about the price (after all, the insurance covers that), the hospital is free to jack up the price. The insurance company doesn't care, because it can just hike up the premiums. They're paid by your employer, who also doesn't care, they just factor it into your wage. At this point, your wage is so distant from the cost of your medical care, you don't actually feel like you're paying for it. All the sleight-of-hand behind the scenes insulates you from actually realising (and complaining) about the price, while everyone else involved takes their slice of the pie.
If you want to get the government involved, get them into investigating and fixing the issue of why American healthcare is so overpriced, rather than forcing everyone to pay those ludicrous prices.
As for "the poor suffering and dying", that's what charities are for. Give to them; volunteer for them. Hell, if you get health insurance prices down to a reasonable level, it'd probably be possible for a charity to take out health insurance for the people they're helping.
It's perfectly rational to tax people who choose to make bad choices which will lead to higher health care costs for everyone else.
Now, I know this is a radical thought, but how about you pay for your healthcare, I'll pay for mine, and you can keep your damn nose out of whatever the hell I want to do.
This is why political conservatives oppose state-funded health care; not because they hate poor people, but because it's the camel's nose in the tent. And pretty soon, the damn camel's telling you what you're allowed to do, not do, eat drink and breathe.
Also, I'd like actual stats on those health care costs of yours. Dying is expensive, no matter what it's from. Most of my elderly relatives don't suffer from diabetes or heart disease, and yet they're in and out of hospitals regularly. When my grandfather died, it was after being in hospital for months, and he was basically just dying of old age. The cheapest way to go would actually be one big coronary or stroke in middle age.
Oh no! A small minority of people in populations with close-to, or below replacement level are having many children! Catastrophe! Somebody call Malthus!
I've heard that's also why human's are relatively hairless compared to other animals. Too much hair and we overheated when running for long periods.
And unless you work for a small private company, odds are there are productivity metrics. Try firing someone without em and watch how fast they lawyer up these days.
Yes. But they're not the sole criteria. You don't just fire the people who come up bottom of the metrics. The metrics are a warning signal that something might be wrong - you need human intervention to interpret them.
But we judge the STUDENTS by the very clearly defined metrics you abhore applying to teachers,
No we don't. We judge the students by their work. You're wanting to judge the teacher's by the student's work.
It is the job of the schools and teachers to teach, if the students aren't learning who else do we hold accountable?
Um, the students? The old adage about leading a horse to water springs to mind. It's impossible to forcibly teach someone. You can present the knowledge all you like, but you can't force it into their skulls for them.
In reality, if the student's bright, they're going to be learning despite the teacher. If they're not interested in learning at all, they're not going to, no matter how good the teacher. If they're average, then they'll learn well under a good teacher, and poorly under a poor one.
You reply that my analogy is flawed, and I should assume some of the parts coming in are in defective batches and because some shifts just happen to get those cheap Chinese parts it isn't their fault.
If the parts were sentient beings in their own right, who had entire lives and their own issues going on in the context of being assembled, then your analogy may have some point. As it is, it's simply a poor analogy, no matter how many caveats and addendums you add. A teaching environment needs to be symbiotic, with the student willing to learn, and the teacher able to teach. Factoring out the student as a widget, and putting the entire focus on the teacher is simply not a good model.
Also if some workers could work around bad parts by noticing them and culling them or otherwise fixing the defects on the fly I'd keep those and lose the stupid ones and not lose much sleep about the fairness or unfairness of it, even if the stupid ones were doing everything 'by the book.
So the teachers you'd keep are the ones that could play the political game well enough to shuffle the undesirables off onto other teachers. Those that try and educate their students to the best of their ability (do things by the book) are the ones that get the shaft. Great system.
The current system also has pretty simple rules and is easy to game. Sit through an Edu Degree, get a job and expend some effort for a couple of years until tenure. And that is the bottom line. The current system does not work. Defending it only makes you part of the problem.
Did you even read my post, or just start ranting as soon as the reply pane had loaded? In my country, teachers don't get tenure. I agree that tenure for K-12 is a stupid idea, and part of the problem. But just because a stupid idea is the cause of the problem doesn't mean another stupid idea's going to fix it.
Not outside the art houses. In most of the book trade it is sales, a very quantifiable metric.
And again, your love of metrics leaves you measuring the wrong thing. Sales measures the commercial success of a book, not its quality. I don't know of one single person who chooses what book to read by perusing the publisher's P&L statements. They choose what to read by reading reviews and following the recommendations of people they trust.
Every time the notion of judging the performance of teachers by their output, exactly like EVERYONE else with a job is judged, promoted and fired
Which industry do you work in? Because other than factory line workers and sales people, nobody I know is judged, promoted and fired like that. People I know are usually promoted/fired based on the opinion of their superiors on the quality of their work.
Or is it your position that there is no reliably measurable difference between a 'good' and a 'bad' teacher?
Pretty much. My position is that there is a difference between a good and bad teacher, but that it's not possible (or at least, simple) to reduce that difference to numbers in a way is both balanced across the different nature of classes, and impossible to game. It's a problem I find with most metrics other than the most simple of jobs.
In the same way, I believe that there are good books and bad books, but judging the quality of the book by using, say, average number of syllables in a word, is a really poor way of doing it. When we want to judge the quality of a book, we rely on human opinions (reviewers). In the case of people, we should rely on the opinions of supervisors, who have a greater grasp on context than does an algorithmic metric.
Which means it is useless. Mine is chosen almost entirely on the basis of being actually measurable and thus IS useful.
Just being measurable doesn't make it useful. Lines of Code is a perfectly measurable metric, but still sucks when it comes to determining the productivity of a software developer.
Come on over to the reality based community
The reality is, you need to base decisions on personal observation, not on some clunky algorithm that doesn't produce the correct result.
Really. How many other professions are there where the people in charge will openly assert that it is impossible to measure their output, immoral to even try.
How many other professions are there where your output is entirely determined by a third party, over whom you have no authority? The ability of teachers to effectively control their students has been diminishing year by year. Many of the students know it too, and know that there'll be nobody in a school willing to call them out on their actions, for fear of legal liability.
and oh, by the way we insist on being granted tenure even though the notion is utterly inapplicable to K-12 education
I'm in a different country. We have the same current trend towards metrics, but none of our K-12 teachers have tenure, although, as government employees, teachers are just as difficult to fire as any other bureaucrat. I agree with you that the solution to the problem is getting rid of the under-performing teachers; I disagree that a simple mathematical formula is able to determine that accurately.
The way to solve security issues for novices is by someone building a more secure store, which of course will have to be the default store and replace the App Market for the novice users to find it.
No, not really. If someone can install an app, they can install another app store (which is really nothing more than an app). Assuming novices can install apps (which is fairly reasonable or the whole argument is moot anyway) it's not a question of whether it's too difficult for novices, it's a question of whether they can be bothered. That's what I mean about demand - it's unlikely a large number of people will be motivated to change to a pre-vetted app store. It's the same sort of inertia that was seen with Windows/IE.
Apple caters for the lowest common denominator. They restrict those who might want to install third party apps for the good of those who can't be bothered to engage their brain when installing an app. Android is more of a free for all - there's no restrictions, but the only safety net is one that you choose to install yourself. It's not that it's difficult, it's that requires action and thought to do it.
You say that like it is a bad thing. If the kids didn't improve from when they came in at the start of the year that means the teacher sucks. Or give me a definition of 'good teacher' that includes 'kids don't improve'.
How about this: a teacher is "good" if the results 50% of teachers would have gotten in the same situation, would not have been significantly better.
Weighing teachers against each other based on their student's results is inaccurate, because you have no control. All classes are not equal; a "bad" teacher with a self-starting, highly-motivated class with involved parents will do far better (on your metrics) than a good teacher with a bad-attitude, frequently-delinquent class with an education retarded by their last three lousy teachers. Swap those teachers around, and the ones with the best class will come out on top, not the one with the greater ability.
The problem with my metric is that it's impossible to measure. It just has some relationship to reality, which is an advantage over the currently-used metrics.
Sorry.. but this statement is just B.S. Apple IIs and TRaSh-80s were the gateway for hundreds of future computer users and programmers. Students learned TONS on them, though maybe not was initially intended.
Sort of. I was a student, and I learned tons on an early computer. It wasn't the computer in my school that we were allowed to access for one hour a week to play games on though. It was my computer at home. The limited access to computers at school, the limited amount of things you were allowed to do with them, and the limited knowledge of anyone in the school about them meant they taught me absolutely nothing.
YMMV.
Your law may differ, but AFAIK, the law in my country doesn't discriminate based on cuteness on animal. It's illegal to kill certain species because they are endangered. It's illegal to kill animals that belong to another person. It's illegal to kill any animal in painful or inhumane way, or to deliberately injure any animal without good reason.
There might be more public outrage or political posturing when it's a cute penguin that gets kicked to death, but the law doesn't distinguish between animals on that basis.
I hate lobbing brickbats at Google since I like the Android ecosystem and Android phones. Android even has a stronger security model than iOS. However, Apple does one thing which precludes the need for that much security in iOS, and that is to be an active and stern gatekeeper.
The thing is, with Android being open, this can be done without Google doing it. Unlike iOS, Android isn't locked to a particular store. If there's demand for a pre-vetted store, and Google doesn't do it, anyone else can set it up. Personally, I don't think there will be enough demand, because the vast majority of users don't take security seriously. Google solution to the problem is free market; Apple's is much closer to central planning, where Apple does what they think is best for you (they may even be right), and your desires aren't taken into consideration.
I prefer Google's solution rather than Apple's.