...Ensuring a clean shutdown from a known-good state, rather than expecting they'll need to spend more time troubleshooting everything when they get back.
You've never run a webcam site, have you? I have. If it fails, it fails. There is no "clean shutdown" necessary. You still fix the same thing when it breaks.
Layoffs seem to have the effect of pushing people away from government dependence.
This isn't a layoff, it's a furlough. Every one of those employees who isn't working today expects to go back to the same job with the same rate of pay and the same amount of accrued vacation and sick leave that they had when they left. In fact, they can't have less leave because they are prohibited from using leave time to cover the shutdown. Leave is an expense. Sicktime is an expense. They may be hoping for retroactive pay, but that's not a given.
And CoverOregon.com, the Oregon marketplace website is open, they just haven't created the part that allows you to actually sign up for a plan. Yet, the banner proudly proclaims that they've made it easy to find and sign up for plans.
Not ready for prime time. A year's delay would have been appropriate, just like the year's delay for large corporations that Obama granted them was appropriate.
But were there multiple competitors for the money given to Pratt and Whitney? Did they have to read, deliberate, and have experts from various organizations debate the merits? Or did some guys get together and say - 'we have a really tough job to do; we need to distribute several billions in a few days/hours'?
The summary is a wonderful rant on the government bypassing shutdown, but a few facts might clear things up. The government wasn't yet shutdown when the contract was awarded to Pratt and Whitney. There goes the "military can spend while the government is shut down! " rant.
And then, by simply following the Reuters article linked to in the summary itself, you will find that the contract is:
Sole source. Sole-sourcing a contract means you've got a justification for not bidding it out. That justification might be:
For spare parts. That means, we've got a lot of Pratt and Whitney engines that need spare parts. Jet engines in high performance aircraft like fighters aren't like car engines that only need oil changes every 5000 miles. They have regular maintenance after relatively short usages, and that takes parts. Parts that are best supplied by the same company that makes the engines. That way there is some guarantee they'll work in the engine you put them in.
Is being paid for out of FY 2014 money. They're not spending $2.5 billion of this year's money in a fire-sale spending binge, they're spending next year's money.
Runs until Sept. 2018. Five years. $500 million a year.
But for higher, more powerful positions, you need to prove atleast a rudimentary understanding of the issues before being allowed vote.
This statement disqualifies you from being able to vote under your own rules. This is nothing more than a literacy test with a more politically correct name. Since you don't have a working knowledge of history behind voting, you should not have the right to vote.
Now, myself, I prefer a bit different, election specific solution. I figure, if you're voting on a proposal for a tax, you aren't allowed to vote for that tax unless you voluntarily pay an amount equal to what it would cost someone who is subject to that tax would pay in the first year. Call it "escrow". It will cover your first year's payment of that tax if it passes. If it doesn't, well, I'm all for the money going to the general fund.
This would stop the kind of nonsense where people who don't smoke vote in ever-higher cigarette taxes on other people. Or non-drinkers add to the alcohol taxes. It's always easy to vote yes when it will cost you exactly nothing. If it so important that the taxes be increased, then you should think it important enough to pay that tax yourself, voluntarily. And this goes doubly true for tax levies to provide services. You want the library to be open on Monday so much that you'd reach into other people's pockets to pay for it, well, you show you value that service by voluntarily paying for it first.
The government, after the shutdown, spent money to rent barricades to close off national monuments that are normally open 24x7 with no means of closing access.
Of course. You can't leave public parks and monuments open to the public when you can shut them down create more upset and use it to political advantage.
They also spent money and time to turn off things like the "Panda Cam" that they could have just kept on until it failed.
The NASA website is closed, too. Nothing there that was available prior to the shutdown is now available. I guess the NASA website requires constant attention from a staff of IT web professionals just to keep it up. Otherwise, let the existing content be available and just don't add new things.
Any actual layoffs or closures are wholly there to annoy you and make you think you need government more than you do.
And to make political hay while the sun shines. As Saul Alinsky said, never let a crisis go to waste.
This. The last statement in the summary is just ridiculous.
"even when the federal government is shutdown and the military has temporarily lost half its civilian workforce, the Pentagon can spend money like almost no one else."
The government hadn't yet been shut down. They military hadn't yet lost "half its civilian workforce".
This is normal end-of-fiscal-year activity. There is a lot of money that is allocated on contingency. Agencies don't always spend everything they were given. They don't know until late in September how much they haven't spent out of the allocated amounts, so they can't spend the rest until late September.
Now, if you got rid of congress saying "you didn't spend all we gave you last year so we're going to give you less this year", you'd go a long way towards ending the end of year spending spree. You wouldn't completely end it because, of course, they have to give the leftover money back. If you got rid of that, too, the spree would be much smaller, if it happens at all.
As it does, your notion of people paying for the healthcare of others who have never "helped them out" is abject nonsense - everyone is affected by everyone else, to a certain degree, in an economy. It benefits everyone when everyone has healthcare at affordable prices.
So you admit that those who choose not to have health insurance (not "healthcare", health insurance) until they have a "pre-existing condition", and then belly up to the medical bar to get their treatments subsidized by other people aren't benefiting others, because they are outside the "benefits everyone" statement you just made.
No, sorry, you choosing to not have health insurance until you will directly benefit from it does not benefit me in any way. It only costs me money because my insurance rates are higher to cover your pre-existing condition when you need it paid for. You paid nothing in up front, you'll drop insurance like a hot potato should your condition be cured, and you pay less in that you get back in services while you are enrolled. And that will cost us all less?
If insurance companies are removed from the equation,
Are you even aware of what's going on? Obama didn't get rid of insurance companies, he just handed them a potful of money by FORCING people to buy their product. They aren't removed from the equation, they become the equal sign in that equation. Obama plus ACA equals money for insurance companies.
But no, I'm sure you'll find something wrong with the idea of people not having to worry about getting sick,
Health insurance doesn't mean people don't have to worry about getting sick. That's just one failure in your "hand out not a hand up" philosophy.
and everyone paying less for the privilege.
Another failure. Everyone won't be paying less. Just one glaring obvious example is all it takes to disprove your unicorns and glitter worldview. Those people whose employers decide not to cover them will be spending their own money to buy insurance instead of getting it as part of their employment. They can't even say "I guess I just won't have insurance" because the law says they must or be fined. But you don't care about them because they upset the magic accounting that shows this new system will be so great.
I read all I needed to from you when you said you were ok with forcing other people to pay for your healthcare. I didn't start being personally insulting, though.
you do not get to redefine the word theft to your liking.
But you get to redefine "insurance" to yours. Go figure.
If I was a worse person I'd sit here and hope your family gets cancer
You've now demonstrated beyond question that civil discourse is beyond your comprehension. Bye.
So... Let's see...People are now going to go to their Primary Care Physician (which they can now afford to visit regularly because they have insurance that covers the visit), and that Primary Care Provider says to them "Bob... You really should lose 20 pounds. Here are some programs that you can take advantage of at no extra cost thanks to your new insurance providing it for you." I bet that a significant percentage of those people are going to actually take advantage of those programs.
First, you don't need insurance to walk five miles a day. You just have to have the willpower. If you don't have the willpower, just having insurance won't help. And history has shown over and over, people don't value things they get for free as much as what they have to pay for. Free gym membership through your insurance? Well, ok, I might go. This is costing me $100/month out of my own pocket? I better go and get my money's worth.
But that's not what I responded to. The implication I responded to was that insurance would have some means of making people lose weight because they would have a vested interest in saving the money from future medical issues due to weight. They have nothing.
But, in general, people don't want to be fat.
The national statistics on obesity contradict that claim. They may not "want to be fat" in some nebulous sense that they say "I wish I weren't...". That doesn't seem to translate into action, however, and the saying "the words don't match the deeds" comes to mind.
Yes, there is a huge industry taking money from people who have money to throw at the problem. Wouldn't it be nice if the insurance companies threw money at it, too? But the results speak for themselves.
Of course, it's up to the individual to actually do it,
That's what I said. And if people really wanted to do it, they'd do any of the free things they could do instead of looking for the magic bullet promise of "get skinny easy". You might notice that right next to the gym industry sucking money out of people's wallets, there is a huge herbal supplement industry doing the same thing. "Take this pill and be skinny".
... a large percentage of them will participate and that brings the overall costs down for everyone, which leads to lower rates.
When you isolate costs to specific things, sure, you can claim "costs go down". But when you ignore the overall costs you set yourself up for failure, and the next generation facing what we face with social security today. "How did this get to be so costly?"
Hawaii learned this years ago. They put in a plan to insure dependents below 17 (I think it was) who didn't have health insurance. State funded. They counted the number of youths without health insurance, multiplied by the cost for one policy, and came up with a number. Very cost effective. Save money. Get youth their preventative maintenance and save on long term costs.
Until parents realized they could drop their kids from their own policies and save money. Put them on the state policy. The state ran out of money, the program was shut down.
And now the federal government wants to go down that same path. We've already seen what medicare costs have done, but we'll magically control this new program so it doesn't bankrupt us faster. Sure.
Then your comment was, at best, completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand or completely misleading at worst.
Someone says "there is even a tax on employees" with or without health insurance, and he's called a liar. I point out that FICA is indeed a tax on having employees (and on employees themselves), and I'm irrelevant or misleading?
FICA is the medicare tax that has absolutely nothing to do with the ACA.
And the statement was that there is a tax even when you don't consider ACA. So, yes, FICA, as a tax that exists whether ACA does or not, has nothing to do with ACA. I'm glad you figured that out.
Considering your comment "there is a tax" was sandwiched between two other sentences that directly mention Obamacare,
The original comment, which I did not make, is quite simple. I'll paraphrase it for you. "Obamacare is just one issue for employers. There is a tax on having employees that exists with or without Obamacare..." The second sentence contained its own context that shows it was not referring to a "new" tax (never said it was new) that had anything to do with ACA (whether or not they have health insurance).
the strong implication in your statement is that Obamacare introduced a tax for every single employee.
My "statement" said nothing at all about Obamacare. "There is even a tax on employees" (someone else's statement, BTW) is factually correct; the person who responded that this was a "new lie" he'd never heard before was himself lying, since he's now admitted that he knows exactly which tax was being referred to. My first statement on the matter was pointing out the existence of this tax on employees that was allegedly a "new lie". I said nothing about Obamacare, nor did I imply anything about it.
Now, we're still waiting for the person who called "liar" to apologize for his insult and ignorance. Should we include you in the list?
That can still be done with self-learning. A student can still be given a curriculum that includes topics they aren't interested in.
Who supervises these students to 1) give them the curriculum and 2) make sure they follow it?
But how do you determine which questions are working and which ones aren't?
What you are advocating is turning our children into guinea pigs. Let's throw hundreds of thousands of math problems at them and see which ones work and which ones don't. Let's throw hundreds of different lectures at them and see which ones work and which ones don't. If your child is the unlucky one to get the problems and lectures that didn't work, well, sorry, maybe your next child in line will get the education your first one missed out on.
I look forward to a day where teachers are more like personal tutors than the lecture providers that they are today.
Wouldn't it be nice if there were enough money in the pool so that teachers could be personal tutors instead of being in charge of a whole class. As for "lecture providers", that's already gone. You've got half of what you want, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, ok?
Of course you are. You save money. Where the money comes from to cover what you don't pay, you don't care.
It will distribute them evenly so people aren't bankrupted by illness.
There is a meaning for the word "evenly" that implies "fairness". Getting other people to pay for your medical costs when you've never helped them out, and doing it under force of law, is not charity and it's not fair, it's theft.
It will also reduce costs by allowing people to use less expensive forms of care and more preventative care.
They can already use less expensive forms of care. And having everyone show up at the doctor's office for regular check ups will vastly increase the number of health care professionals required, increasing the costs. And hinder those who are actually sick, since they'll have to try to fit an appointment in when they can instead of when they need it.
If my medication starts exhibiting a side-effect, do you think I would be better served and cost less to the system if I could get an appointment with my primary care physician to discuss it, or should I go to the ER because I can't get an appointment for two months? And just in case you are ignorant about this, there are some side effects that become permanent if you don't deal with them quickly. Do you care?
As for businesses playing with hours- blame the Republicans for that.
Bullshit. When ACA says that you don't have to pay for health insurance for your employees if you have fewer than some number of full time employees, that's part of ACA, not the fault of the Republicans. In case you missed it, it's the Republicans who are trying to get rid of the ACA (and the mandates that are costing jobs) altogether, but for right now they're only trying to delay it a year. Funny how Obama can unilaterally delay parts of it for a year because it's not ready, but if the Republicans point out that it isn't ready and try to delay it, they are the ones who are forcing employers to cut hours.
We were forced to this path by them refusing better solutions like a public option.
Yeah, it's all their fault because they wouldn't hand out free health care to everyone who walks in the door asking for it. It's not that doing that would bankrupt the treasury, it's them just being obnoxious. And they don't like you personally. That's it.
Employers shouldn't be involved with healthcare at all.
Why not? Why shouldn't my employer be allowed to offer to pay for health insurance (not "healtcare" like you keep calling it) as a perk for me if it wants to? Why shouldn't they be able to offer that as an incentive for good people to come work for them? You think your pronouncement that they shouldn't be involved is all it should take to make it so?
Very few employers will reduce hours to 30 because that requires more people.
You've been reading the koolaid blogs that I referenced and buying it. If I need 40 hours of work done and having one person doing it will cost me a lot of money in health insurance payments, while two people working 20 hours will do it for the same rate of pay, why wouldn't I use two? Oh, because I might have to MANAGE them and keep track of how many hours they work. I'm already doing that. I have to do that so I can pay them. Yeah, it will cost a bit more in training, but spend a little to save alot is a good business practice.
It might make things better if they did, it would reduce unemployment.
The claim is that the ACA is not hurting people. You having a job while my hours get cut still hurts me. Right, you don't care. You can live with that.
Or to fix the law to prevent it- perhaps requiring them to provide healthcare for anyone above 10 hours,
Your experience is like someone who goes into the store and buys a lottery ticket on a whim and wins a million bucks. Based on your experience we should do away with jobs and payrolls and just buy lottery tickets. In your experience, one ticket is all it takes to be rich for a long time. Other people's experiences are vastly different. Should your experience be the guide for everyone, or should we admit that planning on the exceptional is not a good plan?
I, and others I know, are examples that the kind of direct supervision that teachers provide is not necessary to learn.
You hang around with other people who are not average. That's nice. And you still don't know that the job of a primary school is not "learn", it is an education. Anyone can learn just what they want to learn without supervision. Getting an education means sometimes being forced to learn things that you don't think are fun or exciting. When the majority thinks that history and social studies and even math are boring and unexciting, then you can't just abandon them and say "they could learn it by themselves if they wanted to", you need to provide supervision so they do. And supervision so that at least some idea of what is considered a good education appears in front of a student -- every student.
You did need supervision ("a project") to learn parts of computing you didn't like. Your experience is not what most people go through, and even you prove you aren't totally supervision free.
just that teachers aren't the only source of instruction.
Nobody said they were.
Databases of hundreds of thousands of math questions can be created, and textbooks could have access to all of them.
You don't need hundreds of thousands of math problems to teach math. In fact, if you need to have that many you are doing something wrong. The principles can be taught with far fewer.
There are a large number of students who would sit reading comic books all day if they were left to their own devices. Before the demise of the pinball parlor, that's where a lot of them would spend their time. (And I used to work at one, so I've seen it first hand. The only reason that some of them weren't there all day is because we were instructed to throw them out if they showed up before 3PM.) Do we say "people can learn without supervision so let's just do it that way", or do we actually try to provide a good education to people who would otherwise become wards of the state, unable to make change for a dollar if their life depended on it?
Now that he will have insurance, it is in the insurance companies benefit to get his weight down because it will cost less in the long run.
Unfortunately, the insurance company has very little say in the process of getting this person's weight down. I say that as someone whose doctor is pushing me to get my weight down, and my insurance company would pay for various programs. Ultimately, it is my own decision what I do, and the only hammer the insurance company has is raising rates. Take that away by mandating equal coverage and price and they have no force to apply at all.
Now, that's a brand new lie I've never heard before.
So FICA is a lie propagated by the right wing? Or are you just so ignorant that you've never heard of it before? Here, go read up on it. Then come back and apologize.
In that case you weren't getting the main advantage of insurance- spreading the risk. Instead you had to pay 3-10 times the amount if you had a pre-existing condition. Why?
Getting insurance to cover a pre-existing condition isn't "spreading the risk", it's pushing the cost for a known condition off on other people. When you've already got it, it is no longer a risk, it's a given. At that point you're buying "discount health care", not "insurance". The costs to treat you are the same, you're just hoping other people will help foot the bill.
It requires insurance companies to accept people with pre-existing conditions (which can include mere weight), which is a major problem for anyone trying to buy individual coverage.
And accepting pre-existing conditions means that insurance is no longer insurance, it's a discount healthcare plan subsidized by those who are stupid enough to think it is insurance.
It also provides rebates for people who make under a certain threshold, reducing costs.
No, it just moves the costs off to other people. The costs will increase because we'll need more providers and those we currently have will be stretched thinner. People with pre-existing conditions will appear on the "insurance" rolls needing expensive treatments from day one, never paying more than their care costs. You think those costs will magically disappear? This is how you make costs lower?
It's not perfect by a long shot, but it's better than what we had.
Not so good for those who have lost their coverage because their hours were cut and now have to pay for their own. Trader Joe's for one, who now feels that they don't need to pay for so many part timer's health care, so they won't.
There's a lot of companies who are cutting hours. They're not admitting that it is because of ACA, so of course the polls that try to prove that ACA isn't hurting people don't count them. It's like the unemployment numbers aren't sky high because they don't count people who have given up looking. (And even so, the magic number we were never going to go above didn't turn out to be so magic after all.) Nobody is crowing "Hey, thanks Mr. Obama for letting me toss my employees out into the street as far as health care is concerned. Saves me a bundle of money." So those jobs aren't counted against ACA. They are just short term adjustments to the employment levels due to, umm, unicorns buying less pixie dust. (The unicorn and pixie dust market should be holding steady based on advertising running in Oregon for 'Cover Oregon' which for the last few months has been nothing but pushing unicorns and pixie dust on the public, spending taxpayer dollars to do it.)
The blogs that tout the ACA are putting all kinds of spin on the issue so that ACA doesn't look so bad. They even claim that Trader Joe's is proof that ACA is working, not that it is hurting people. Trader Joe's is not paying for as many people's health care, and that is a Good Thing, they say. "Here's $500, go find your own insurance." This guy is claiming that of course small companies won't cut hours because that would mean they have to manage how many hours a week the employees work, and nobody does that now. Huh? Here's the quote, it's magical and naive at best:
In that case there would be a new roll for supervisors, too, who would likely need to manage their workers' hours more closely to ensure they don't go over the 30-hour threshold. That's not a function that supervisors in restaurants and retail typically provide right now, Ryan adds.
So we're supposed to believe that supervisors aren't already responsible for scheduling their employees? I was a supervisor for a summer while going to college, and you bet I was responsible for schedules, and responsible to make sure nobody went over 40 hours without a good reason. It's a big deal to change that limit to 30 instead of 40? Sure. Right.
First, you cant enforce a contract that relinquishes your rights.
I bought a house in a gated neighborhood. The deed contains conditions. You telling me that the neighborhood association won't act to keep me from breaking the deed restrictions? That's a contract that limits my property rights.
Can the school ensure that my child is not at a disadvantage because of these differences?
If you as a parent are putting arbitrary limits on what the school can do with your child, it's the schools fault when your child is at a disadvantage? What happened to your responsibility in this process? I suspect you would have your child at the front of the line for free breakfasts and lunches (even during the summer) because we all know that a well fed child is a better student and it is the school's responsibility to educate your child, not yours.
How long do you think it would take for a parent of a failing student who didnt have an iPad/laptop to sue the school for unfair treatment. How does the school defend against that?
"We offered him one and you didn't want us to give it to him."
While I'm not saying teachers are unimportant, but are you actually saying that children are unable to learn without supervision?
I will say that children, on average, are not able to obtain a general education without supervision.
I remember writing my own computer games half a decade before my first programming class in college.
Perhaps you are not average? And perhaps this is not really "learning" in a fully rounded sense?
You learned what you were interested in. You probably didn't learn history or English or a second language. If you didn't need it right away, you probably didn't spend a lot of time learning about it. You may have watched one of the Robin Hood movies, but then never bothered to learn the basis for that character or the real events that were taking place around that time (like the Magna Carta, generally considered the beginning of the English common law system, which carried on into the US).
I'd have to raise my hand as guilty, too. I did most of my chemistry up to college by myself. It was grad school before I realized the vast gaps in my chemistry education. Those things that just weren't interesting but were important to a real working chemist were missing. I whizzed through high school English class by writing things with the correct political view. When I got to college and needed a foreign language, I was having to learn the language AND parts of speech and cases (genetive? dative? Huh?) at the same time, which put me at a huge disadvantage.
For the majority of students, your experience is irrelevant. Were we to base our educational system on it today, we'd have a large number of people who are unqualified to be cashiers at a burger joint, and a few who manage to take advantage of them because they know how.
No, actually, what I was thinking of was subsumption architecture and the name Rodney Brooks. It's the recognition that some interesting behaviours develop from groupings of lower function autonomous systems. I'm sorry if you feel insulted because I didn't say it the way you wanted. And thanks for trying to tell me what I was thinking.
What does this have to do with autonomous vehicles?
Autonomous vehicles are independent autonomous systems that interact indirectly, just like the insects that demonstrate your "swarm behaviour". Nobody sits at the top level saying "all you ants, line up single file and head east". The line of ants comes from emergent behaviour based on simple rules.
Stock market havok can result from a swarm of autonomous trading programs, all acting independently but interacting indirectly. One program is nudged to sell sell sell. Other programs see the trades and decide to sell or buy. Other programs see that and do something. On normal days that works out ok. On some days, not so well. Do you think the designers of those programs anticipated the negative results? Do you think that being able to react to stimuli in microseconds compared to seconds actually improves the chances for positive outcomes?
Now apply that to a freeway full of autonomous vehicles. Throw in a human driver for good measure. How will the entire freeway of independent vehicles react to various issues? Are you seriously trying to claim that a system of hundreds of cars made by tens of manufacturers that haven't actually been produced yet is a well understood system? That models of nonexistent objects can tell us everything there is to know about those objects, especially when those objects aren't even fully designed yet? That arrogance is the insulting part, I think.
Here's one that turned up after about 5 seconds of googling,
I spent a considerable amount of time googling for the person I was thinking of with no luck. I'm glad you found something you were interested in in just 5 seconds. Yes, I found lots of papers by lots of other people, all pretty much following Rodney's work, but unfortunately not what I was looking for until I got the name right. Assuming that I must not have spent even five seconds because I didn't find the papers you thought I should be thinking about is, well, arrogant.
Of course, these days the typist has gone the way of the buggy whip so everyone now has to learn to type
Not really. You gave the reason why learning to type in the past was valuable. It's the cost of making a mistake.
Once the 'backspace' key appeared with the computer keyboard, the cost of a mistake went to almost zero compared to "move the carriage back, slip in a bit of correction paper, retype the wrong thing, back the carriage up again and retype the right thing." For example, I just started writing a sentence that I didn't know how to end. On a typewriter it would be a new sheet of paper and redo everything that was on it. On the computer it's just delete the mistake and move ahead.
What people learn today is not "to type", it's "how to use the word processor". Given the absent cost in time of a mistake, even hunt and peck typists can be productive.
We the people have been throwing more and more money at schoolteachers,
No, we haven't. Teachers have been the last people to get the money. We're throwing money at administrators and crap like iPads for all. Free lunches and breakfasts. Class sizes go up. Where are those teachers we're throwing money at? Right -- not hired because an administrator makes a bundle more and someone has to supervise all the teachers.
This article is a perfect example of how the teachers get shafted. It's an article about administrators squandering money by giving free toys to kids, and still the teachers get blamed.
'They were bound to fail,' says Renee Hobbs, who's been a skeptic of the iPad program from the start. 'There is a huge history in American education of being attracted to the new, shiny, hugely promising bauble and then watching the idea fizzle because teachers weren't properly trained to use it and it just ended up in the closet.'
No, honey, this isn't a case where the teachers weren't trained. This failure is purely the fault of ignorant administrators who decided that the latest bauble and $1 billion wasted on them would solve the problem.
What we need are voucher programs, more home schooling, teachers and schools that have to compete,
I happen to agree with that, but not because I think teachers are paid too much. I agree because it eviscerates a lot of administration. Those home and charter schools perform not because you're saving money on teachers, it's for two reasons. Fewer (or no) administrators putting ridiculous demands on the teachers that are there, and/or parents being intimately involved in their child's education. Children learn better when they see that learning is in important part of their parent's lives. Can't get much more important than Mom or Dad sitting with Junior every day doing the teaching.
and pay/bonuses based on classroom performance instead of seniority.
Absolutely not. The only result of this will be to teach to the tests and not teach to educate. It's already been tried. It's happening here in Oregon. Schools get ranked by class performance. Guess what topics get stressed? The ones that answer questions on the tests. Real world relevance? Well, I guess the standardized tests are "real world".
Opening up the teaching profession to anyone with a bachelor's degree and a demonstrated knowledge of a subject (english, math, science) would be even better.
You must be joking. You want better teachers and you'd make the qualifications wide open? You'd want people with just a bachelor's degree in English teaching high school students? That's a sure fire way to dumb down the classroom, which would, I guess, even out the results. You wouldn't be motivating the underachievers to perform better, you'd stifle the gifted, and that would achieve equality of results.
Let those who want to teach and who are good at it take the field,
And you'd know how good the entry level applicant is exactly how? "They call me Doctor Science because I have a bachelor's degree... in Science!"
and get rid of parasitic space takers for whom a teaching job is a state-paid sinecure.
Absolutely. But dropping the standards for teachers won't make them better, it will simply open the door to more people who don't know what they are doing.
The same is true to an extent of autopilots in planes but with a plane you usually have much more time to respond to problems than in a car.
Yes. It took 3 minutes and 30 seconds for Air France 447 to crash into the ocean after the autopilot disengaged. It disengaged because the airspeed indicators were giving erroneous and differing answers. The aircraft said, basically, "here, humans, you deal with this problem, I don't understand what's going on. I'm not going to help you by keeping your wings level or your pitch attitude within normal limits, even though none of those sensors has failed. I'm confused about how fast we are going through the air and I give up."
Note that AF447 did not have a stream of other aircraft coming the opposite direction less than ten feet away in the opposite lane, nor were they 3 airplane lengths behind an aircraft in front of them. There were three trained pilots and several minutes to deal with it, and they still couldn't.
Still at least one plane has crashed because the pilots accidentally disabled the autopilot and failed to notice.
Many have crashed because the autopilot disengaged without the pilot taking over. Many have crashed because the autonomous system (autopilot) flew them into something it shouldn't have, and some of those were with the pilots fully aware of what was going on and trying to stop it. This is why there is almost always half a dozen or more ways of overriding or disengaging the autopilot designed into the system, and even then autopilot created crashes still happen.
We have been able to design perfectly functioning autopilots for airplanes that can deal perfectly with the world around them. It is time to bring the technology to our automobiles because we are too lazy to want to deal with driving for ourselves, just as pilots are too lazy to fly the airplanes they master for themselves.
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Yeah, so those parks don't get covered in trash, graffiti, and meth labs while nobody is available to patrol them.
Good to know that federal law enforcement is considered a non-essential service that is not exempted from the furloughs.
...Ensuring a clean shutdown from a known-good state, rather than expecting they'll need to spend more time troubleshooting everything when they get back.
You've never run a webcam site, have you? I have. If it fails, it fails. There is no "clean shutdown" necessary. You still fix the same thing when it breaks.
Layoffs seem to have the effect of pushing people away from government dependence.
This isn't a layoff, it's a furlough. Every one of those employees who isn't working today expects to go back to the same job with the same rate of pay and the same amount of accrued vacation and sick leave that they had when they left. In fact, they can't have less leave because they are prohibited from using leave time to cover the shutdown. Leave is an expense. Sicktime is an expense. They may be hoping for retroactive pay, but that's not a given.
Not ready for prime time. A year's delay would have been appropriate, just like the year's delay for large corporations that Obama granted them was appropriate.
But were there multiple competitors for the money given to Pratt and Whitney? Did they have to read, deliberate, and have experts from various organizations debate the merits? Or did some guys get together and say - 'we have a really tough job to do; we need to distribute several billions in a few days/hours'?
The summary is a wonderful rant on the government bypassing shutdown, but a few facts might clear things up. The government wasn't yet shutdown when the contract was awarded to Pratt and Whitney. There goes the "military can spend while the government is shut down! " rant.
And then, by simply following the Reuters article linked to in the summary itself, you will find that the contract is:
But for higher, more powerful positions, you need to prove atleast a rudimentary understanding of the issues before being allowed vote.
This statement disqualifies you from being able to vote under your own rules. This is nothing more than a literacy test with a more politically correct name. Since you don't have a working knowledge of history behind voting, you should not have the right to vote.
Now, myself, I prefer a bit different, election specific solution. I figure, if you're voting on a proposal for a tax, you aren't allowed to vote for that tax unless you voluntarily pay an amount equal to what it would cost someone who is subject to that tax would pay in the first year. Call it "escrow". It will cover your first year's payment of that tax if it passes. If it doesn't, well, I'm all for the money going to the general fund.
This would stop the kind of nonsense where people who don't smoke vote in ever-higher cigarette taxes on other people. Or non-drinkers add to the alcohol taxes. It's always easy to vote yes when it will cost you exactly nothing. If it so important that the taxes be increased, then you should think it important enough to pay that tax yourself, voluntarily. And this goes doubly true for tax levies to provide services. You want the library to be open on Monday so much that you'd reach into other people's pockets to pay for it, well, you show you value that service by voluntarily paying for it first.
It will never happen, but it's a nice dream.
The government, after the shutdown, spent money to rent barricades to close off national monuments that are normally open 24x7 with no means of closing access.
Of course. You can't leave public parks and monuments open to the public when you can shut them down create more upset and use it to political advantage.
They also spent money and time to turn off things like the "Panda Cam" that they could have just kept on until it failed.
The NASA website is closed, too. Nothing there that was available prior to the shutdown is now available. I guess the NASA website requires constant attention from a staff of IT web professionals just to keep it up. Otherwise, let the existing content be available and just don't add new things.
Any actual layoffs or closures are wholly there to annoy you and make you think you need government more than you do.
And to make political hay while the sun shines. As Saul Alinsky said, never let a crisis go to waste.
"even when the federal government is shutdown and the military has temporarily lost half its civilian workforce, the Pentagon can spend money like almost no one else."
The government hadn't yet been shut down. They military hadn't yet lost "half its civilian workforce".
This is normal end-of-fiscal-year activity. There is a lot of money that is allocated on contingency. Agencies don't always spend everything they were given. They don't know until late in September how much they haven't spent out of the allocated amounts, so they can't spend the rest until late September.
Now, if you got rid of congress saying "you didn't spend all we gave you last year so we're going to give you less this year", you'd go a long way towards ending the end of year spending spree. You wouldn't completely end it because, of course, they have to give the leftover money back. If you got rid of that, too, the spree would be much smaller, if it happens at all.
But why ARE we paying for France to buy drones?
As it does, your notion of people paying for the healthcare of others who have never "helped them out" is abject nonsense - everyone is affected by everyone else, to a certain degree, in an economy. It benefits everyone when everyone has healthcare at affordable prices.
So you admit that those who choose not to have health insurance (not "healthcare", health insurance) until they have a "pre-existing condition", and then belly up to the medical bar to get their treatments subsidized by other people aren't benefiting others, because they are outside the "benefits everyone" statement you just made.
No, sorry, you choosing to not have health insurance until you will directly benefit from it does not benefit me in any way. It only costs me money because my insurance rates are higher to cover your pre-existing condition when you need it paid for. You paid nothing in up front, you'll drop insurance like a hot potato should your condition be cured, and you pay less in that you get back in services while you are enrolled. And that will cost us all less?
If insurance companies are removed from the equation,
Are you even aware of what's going on? Obama didn't get rid of insurance companies, he just handed them a potful of money by FORCING people to buy their product. They aren't removed from the equation, they become the equal sign in that equation. Obama plus ACA equals money for insurance companies.
But no, I'm sure you'll find something wrong with the idea of people not having to worry about getting sick,
Health insurance doesn't mean people don't have to worry about getting sick. That's just one failure in your "hand out not a hand up" philosophy.
and everyone paying less for the privilege.
Another failure. Everyone won't be paying less. Just one glaring obvious example is all it takes to disprove your unicorns and glitter worldview. Those people whose employers decide not to cover them will be spending their own money to buy insurance instead of getting it as part of their employment. They can't even say "I guess I just won't have insurance" because the law says they must or be fined. But you don't care about them because they upset the magic accounting that shows this new system will be so great.
All I need to read. Sorry Libertardians,
I read all I needed to from you when you said you were ok with forcing other people to pay for your healthcare. I didn't start being personally insulting, though.
you do not get to redefine the word theft to your liking.
But you get to redefine "insurance" to yours. Go figure.
If I was a worse person I'd sit here and hope your family gets cancer
You've now demonstrated beyond question that civil discourse is beyond your comprehension. Bye.
So... Let's see...People are now going to go to their Primary Care Physician (which they can now afford to visit regularly because they have insurance that covers the visit), and that Primary Care Provider says to them "Bob... You really should lose 20 pounds. Here are some programs that you can take advantage of at no extra cost thanks to your new insurance providing it for you." I bet that a significant percentage of those people are going to actually take advantage of those programs.
First, you don't need insurance to walk five miles a day. You just have to have the willpower. If you don't have the willpower, just having insurance won't help. And history has shown over and over, people don't value things they get for free as much as what they have to pay for. Free gym membership through your insurance? Well, ok, I might go. This is costing me $100/month out of my own pocket? I better go and get my money's worth.
But that's not what I responded to. The implication I responded to was that insurance would have some means of making people lose weight because they would have a vested interest in saving the money from future medical issues due to weight. They have nothing.
But, in general, people don't want to be fat.
The national statistics on obesity contradict that claim. They may not "want to be fat" in some nebulous sense that they say "I wish I weren't...". That doesn't seem to translate into action, however, and the saying "the words don't match the deeds" comes to mind.
Yes, there is a huge industry taking money from people who have money to throw at the problem. Wouldn't it be nice if the insurance companies threw money at it, too? But the results speak for themselves.
Of course, it's up to the individual to actually do it,
That's what I said. And if people really wanted to do it, they'd do any of the free things they could do instead of looking for the magic bullet promise of "get skinny easy". You might notice that right next to the gym industry sucking money out of people's wallets, there is a huge herbal supplement industry doing the same thing. "Take this pill and be skinny".
... a large percentage of them will participate and that brings the overall costs down for everyone, which leads to lower rates.
When you isolate costs to specific things, sure, you can claim "costs go down". But when you ignore the overall costs you set yourself up for failure, and the next generation facing what we face with social security today. "How did this get to be so costly?"
Hawaii learned this years ago. They put in a plan to insure dependents below 17 (I think it was) who didn't have health insurance. State funded. They counted the number of youths without health insurance, multiplied by the cost for one policy, and came up with a number. Very cost effective. Save money. Get youth their preventative maintenance and save on long term costs.
Until parents realized they could drop their kids from their own policies and save money. Put them on the state policy. The state ran out of money, the program was shut down.
And now the federal government wants to go down that same path. We've already seen what medicare costs have done, but we'll magically control this new program so it doesn't bankrupt us faster. Sure.
Then your comment was, at best, completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand or completely misleading at worst.
Someone says "there is even a tax on employees" with or without health insurance, and he's called a liar. I point out that FICA is indeed a tax on having employees (and on employees themselves), and I'm irrelevant or misleading?
FICA is the medicare tax that has absolutely nothing to do with the ACA.
And the statement was that there is a tax even when you don't consider ACA. So, yes, FICA, as a tax that exists whether ACA does or not, has nothing to do with ACA. I'm glad you figured that out.
Considering your comment "there is a tax" was sandwiched between two other sentences that directly mention Obamacare,
The original comment, which I did not make, is quite simple. I'll paraphrase it for you. "Obamacare is just one issue for employers. There is a tax on having employees that exists with or without Obamacare..." The second sentence contained its own context that shows it was not referring to a "new" tax (never said it was new) that had anything to do with ACA (whether or not they have health insurance).
the strong implication in your statement is that Obamacare introduced a tax for every single employee.
My "statement" said nothing at all about Obamacare. "There is even a tax on employees" (someone else's statement, BTW) is factually correct; the person who responded that this was a "new lie" he'd never heard before was himself lying, since he's now admitted that he knows exactly which tax was being referred to. My first statement on the matter was pointing out the existence of this tax on employees that was allegedly a "new lie". I said nothing about Obamacare, nor did I imply anything about it.
Now, we're still waiting for the person who called "liar" to apologize for his insult and ignorance. Should we include you in the list?
That can still be done with self-learning. A student can still be given a curriculum that includes topics they aren't interested in.
Who supervises these students to 1) give them the curriculum and 2) make sure they follow it?
But how do you determine which questions are working and which ones aren't?
What you are advocating is turning our children into guinea pigs. Let's throw hundreds of thousands of math problems at them and see which ones work and which ones don't. Let's throw hundreds of different lectures at them and see which ones work and which ones don't. If your child is the unlucky one to get the problems and lectures that didn't work, well, sorry, maybe your next child in line will get the education your first one missed out on.
I look forward to a day where teachers are more like personal tutors than the lecture providers that they are today.
Wouldn't it be nice if there were enough money in the pool so that teachers could be personal tutors instead of being in charge of a whole class. As for "lecture providers", that's already gone. You've got half of what you want, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, ok?
I'm ok with that.
Of course you are. You save money. Where the money comes from to cover what you don't pay, you don't care.
It will distribute them evenly so people aren't bankrupted by illness.
There is a meaning for the word "evenly" that implies "fairness". Getting other people to pay for your medical costs when you've never helped them out, and doing it under force of law, is not charity and it's not fair, it's theft.
It will also reduce costs by allowing people to use less expensive forms of care and more preventative care.
They can already use less expensive forms of care. And having everyone show up at the doctor's office for regular check ups will vastly increase the number of health care professionals required, increasing the costs. And hinder those who are actually sick, since they'll have to try to fit an appointment in when they can instead of when they need it.
If my medication starts exhibiting a side-effect, do you think I would be better served and cost less to the system if I could get an appointment with my primary care physician to discuss it, or should I go to the ER because I can't get an appointment for two months? And just in case you are ignorant about this, there are some side effects that become permanent if you don't deal with them quickly. Do you care?
As for businesses playing with hours- blame the Republicans for that.
Bullshit. When ACA says that you don't have to pay for health insurance for your employees if you have fewer than some number of full time employees, that's part of ACA, not the fault of the Republicans. In case you missed it, it's the Republicans who are trying to get rid of the ACA (and the mandates that are costing jobs) altogether, but for right now they're only trying to delay it a year. Funny how Obama can unilaterally delay parts of it for a year because it's not ready, but if the Republicans point out that it isn't ready and try to delay it, they are the ones who are forcing employers to cut hours.
We were forced to this path by them refusing better solutions like a public option.
Yeah, it's all their fault because they wouldn't hand out free health care to everyone who walks in the door asking for it. It's not that doing that would bankrupt the treasury, it's them just being obnoxious. And they don't like you personally. That's it.
Employers shouldn't be involved with healthcare at all.
Why not? Why shouldn't my employer be allowed to offer to pay for health insurance (not "healtcare" like you keep calling it) as a perk for me if it wants to? Why shouldn't they be able to offer that as an incentive for good people to come work for them? You think your pronouncement that they shouldn't be involved is all it should take to make it so?
Very few employers will reduce hours to 30 because that requires more people.
You've been reading the koolaid blogs that I referenced and buying it. If I need 40 hours of work done and having one person doing it will cost me a lot of money in health insurance payments, while two people working 20 hours will do it for the same rate of pay, why wouldn't I use two? Oh, because I might have to MANAGE them and keep track of how many hours they work. I'm already doing that. I have to do that so I can pay them. Yeah, it will cost a bit more in training, but spend a little to save alot is a good business practice.
It might make things better if they did, it would reduce unemployment.
The claim is that the ACA is not hurting people. You having a job while my hours get cut still hurts me. Right, you don't care. You can live with that.
Or to fix the law to prevent it- perhaps requiring them to provide healthcare for anyone above 10 hours,
Ok, this is just getting stupid. First y
I know what FICA is, thanks. I was commenting on the new tax comment.
There was no "new" in what you commented on. "There is a tax ..." is a factually true statement.
I don't see how my experience is irrelevant.
Your experience is like someone who goes into the store and buys a lottery ticket on a whim and wins a million bucks. Based on your experience we should do away with jobs and payrolls and just buy lottery tickets. In your experience, one ticket is all it takes to be rich for a long time. Other people's experiences are vastly different. Should your experience be the guide for everyone, or should we admit that planning on the exceptional is not a good plan?
I, and others I know, are examples that the kind of direct supervision that teachers provide is not necessary to learn.
You hang around with other people who are not average. That's nice. And you still don't know that the job of a primary school is not "learn", it is an education. Anyone can learn just what they want to learn without supervision. Getting an education means sometimes being forced to learn things that you don't think are fun or exciting. When the majority thinks that history and social studies and even math are boring and unexciting, then you can't just abandon them and say "they could learn it by themselves if they wanted to", you need to provide supervision so they do. And supervision so that at least some idea of what is considered a good education appears in front of a student -- every student.
You did need supervision ("a project") to learn parts of computing you didn't like. Your experience is not what most people go through, and even you prove you aren't totally supervision free.
just that teachers aren't the only source of instruction.
Nobody said they were.
Databases of hundreds of thousands of math questions can be created, and textbooks could have access to all of them.
You don't need hundreds of thousands of math problems to teach math. In fact, if you need to have that many you are doing something wrong. The principles can be taught with far fewer.
There are a large number of students who would sit reading comic books all day if they were left to their own devices. Before the demise of the pinball parlor, that's where a lot of them would spend their time. (And I used to work at one, so I've seen it first hand. The only reason that some of them weren't there all day is because we were instructed to throw them out if they showed up before 3PM.) Do we say "people can learn without supervision so let's just do it that way", or do we actually try to provide a good education to people who would otherwise become wards of the state, unable to make change for a dollar if their life depended on it?
Now that he will have insurance, it is in the insurance companies benefit to get his weight down because it will cost less in the long run.
Unfortunately, the insurance company has very little say in the process of getting this person's weight down. I say that as someone whose doctor is pushing me to get my weight down, and my insurance company would pay for various programs. Ultimately, it is my own decision what I do, and the only hammer the insurance company has is raising rates. Take that away by mandating equal coverage and price and they have no force to apply at all.
Now, that's a brand new lie I've never heard before.
So FICA is a lie propagated by the right wing? Or are you just so ignorant that you've never heard of it before? Here, go read up on it. Then come back and apologize.
In that case you weren't getting the main advantage of insurance- spreading the risk. Instead you had to pay 3-10 times the amount if you had a pre-existing condition. Why?
Getting insurance to cover a pre-existing condition isn't "spreading the risk", it's pushing the cost for a known condition off on other people. When you've already got it, it is no longer a risk, it's a given. At that point you're buying "discount health care", not "insurance". The costs to treat you are the same, you're just hoping other people will help foot the bill.
Can't the gov't just give us all free money?
They already do, according to Kevin Trudeau and Matthew Lesko. What, aren't you getting your share yet?
It requires insurance companies to accept people with pre-existing conditions (which can include mere weight), which is a major problem for anyone trying to buy individual coverage.
And accepting pre-existing conditions means that insurance is no longer insurance, it's a discount healthcare plan subsidized by those who are stupid enough to think it is insurance.
It also provides rebates for people who make under a certain threshold, reducing costs.
No, it just moves the costs off to other people. The costs will increase because we'll need more providers and those we currently have will be stretched thinner. People with pre-existing conditions will appear on the "insurance" rolls needing expensive treatments from day one, never paying more than their care costs. You think those costs will magically disappear? This is how you make costs lower?
It's not perfect by a long shot, but it's better than what we had.
Not so good for those who have lost their coverage because their hours were cut and now have to pay for their own. Trader Joe's for one, who now feels that they don't need to pay for so many part timer's health care, so they won't.
There's a lot of companies who are cutting hours. They're not admitting that it is because of ACA, so of course the polls that try to prove that ACA isn't hurting people don't count them. It's like the unemployment numbers aren't sky high because they don't count people who have given up looking. (And even so, the magic number we were never going to go above didn't turn out to be so magic after all.) Nobody is crowing "Hey, thanks Mr. Obama for letting me toss my employees out into the street as far as health care is concerned. Saves me a bundle of money." So those jobs aren't counted against ACA. They are just short term adjustments to the employment levels due to, umm, unicorns buying less pixie dust. (The unicorn and pixie dust market should be holding steady based on advertising running in Oregon for 'Cover Oregon' which for the last few months has been nothing but pushing unicorns and pixie dust on the public, spending taxpayer dollars to do it.)
The blogs that tout the ACA are putting all kinds of spin on the issue so that ACA doesn't look so bad. They even claim that Trader Joe's is proof that ACA is working, not that it is hurting people. Trader Joe's is not paying for as many people's health care, and that is a Good Thing, they say. "Here's $500, go find your own insurance." This guy is claiming that of course small companies won't cut hours because that would mean they have to manage how many hours a week the employees work, and nobody does that now. Huh? Here's the quote, it's magical and naive at best:
So we're supposed to believe that supervisors aren't already responsible for scheduling their employees? I was a supervisor for a summer while going to college, and you bet I was responsible for schedules, and responsible to make sure nobody went over 40 hours without a good reason. It's a big deal to change that limit to 30 instead of 40? Sure. Right.
First, you cant enforce a contract that relinquishes your rights.
I bought a house in a gated neighborhood. The deed contains conditions. You telling me that the neighborhood association won't act to keep me from breaking the deed restrictions? That's a contract that limits my property rights.
Can the school ensure that my child is not at a disadvantage because of these differences?
If you as a parent are putting arbitrary limits on what the school can do with your child, it's the schools fault when your child is at a disadvantage? What happened to your responsibility in this process? I suspect you would have your child at the front of the line for free breakfasts and lunches (even during the summer) because we all know that a well fed child is a better student and it is the school's responsibility to educate your child, not yours.
How long do you think it would take for a parent of a failing student who didnt have an iPad/laptop to sue the school for unfair treatment. How does the school defend against that?
"We offered him one and you didn't want us to give it to him."
While I'm not saying teachers are unimportant, but are you actually saying that children are unable to learn without supervision?
I will say that children, on average, are not able to obtain a general education without supervision.
I remember writing my own computer games half a decade before my first programming class in college.
Perhaps you are not average? And perhaps this is not really "learning" in a fully rounded sense?
You learned what you were interested in. You probably didn't learn history or English or a second language. If you didn't need it right away, you probably didn't spend a lot of time learning about it. You may have watched one of the Robin Hood movies, but then never bothered to learn the basis for that character or the real events that were taking place around that time (like the Magna Carta, generally considered the beginning of the English common law system, which carried on into the US).
I'd have to raise my hand as guilty, too. I did most of my chemistry up to college by myself. It was grad school before I realized the vast gaps in my chemistry education. Those things that just weren't interesting but were important to a real working chemist were missing. I whizzed through high school English class by writing things with the correct political view. When I got to college and needed a foreign language, I was having to learn the language AND parts of speech and cases (genetive? dative? Huh?) at the same time, which put me at a huge disadvantage.
For the majority of students, your experience is irrelevant. Were we to base our educational system on it today, we'd have a large number of people who are unqualified to be cashiers at a burger joint, and a few who manage to take advantage of them because they know how.
What you are thinking of is Swarm Robotics.
No, actually, what I was thinking of was subsumption architecture and the name Rodney Brooks. It's the recognition that some interesting behaviours develop from groupings of lower function autonomous systems. I'm sorry if you feel insulted because I didn't say it the way you wanted. And thanks for trying to tell me what I was thinking.
What does this have to do with autonomous vehicles?
Autonomous vehicles are independent autonomous systems that interact indirectly, just like the insects that demonstrate your "swarm behaviour". Nobody sits at the top level saying "all you ants, line up single file and head east". The line of ants comes from emergent behaviour based on simple rules.
Stock market havok can result from a swarm of autonomous trading programs, all acting independently but interacting indirectly. One program is nudged to sell sell sell. Other programs see the trades and decide to sell or buy. Other programs see that and do something. On normal days that works out ok. On some days, not so well. Do you think the designers of those programs anticipated the negative results? Do you think that being able to react to stimuli in microseconds compared to seconds actually improves the chances for positive outcomes?
Now apply that to a freeway full of autonomous vehicles. Throw in a human driver for good measure. How will the entire freeway of independent vehicles react to various issues? Are you seriously trying to claim that a system of hundreds of cars made by tens of manufacturers that haven't actually been produced yet is a well understood system? That models of nonexistent objects can tell us everything there is to know about those objects, especially when those objects aren't even fully designed yet? That arrogance is the insulting part, I think.
Here's one that turned up after about 5 seconds of googling,
I spent a considerable amount of time googling for the person I was thinking of with no luck. I'm glad you found something you were interested in in just 5 seconds. Yes, I found lots of papers by lots of other people, all pretty much following Rodney's work, but unfortunately not what I was looking for until I got the name right. Assuming that I must not have spent even five seconds because I didn't find the papers you thought I should be thinking about is, well, arrogant.
Of course, these days the typist has gone the way of the buggy whip so everyone now has to learn to type
Not really. You gave the reason why learning to type in the past was valuable. It's the cost of making a mistake.
Once the 'backspace' key appeared with the computer keyboard, the cost of a mistake went to almost zero compared to "move the carriage back, slip in a bit of correction paper, retype the wrong thing, back the carriage up again and retype the right thing." For example, I just started writing a sentence that I didn't know how to end. On a typewriter it would be a new sheet of paper and redo everything that was on it. On the computer it's just delete the mistake and move ahead.
What people learn today is not "to type", it's "how to use the word processor". Given the absent cost in time of a mistake, even hunt and peck typists can be productive.
We the people have been throwing more and more money at schoolteachers,
No, we haven't. Teachers have been the last people to get the money. We're throwing money at administrators and crap like iPads for all. Free lunches and breakfasts. Class sizes go up. Where are those teachers we're throwing money at? Right -- not hired because an administrator makes a bundle more and someone has to supervise all the teachers.
This article is a perfect example of how the teachers get shafted. It's an article about administrators squandering money by giving free toys to kids, and still the teachers get blamed.
No, honey, this isn't a case where the teachers weren't trained. This failure is purely the fault of ignorant administrators who decided that the latest bauble and $1 billion wasted on them would solve the problem.
What we need are voucher programs, more home schooling, teachers and schools that have to compete,
I happen to agree with that, but not because I think teachers are paid too much. I agree because it eviscerates a lot of administration. Those home and charter schools perform not because you're saving money on teachers, it's for two reasons. Fewer (or no) administrators putting ridiculous demands on the teachers that are there, and/or parents being intimately involved in their child's education. Children learn better when they see that learning is in important part of their parent's lives. Can't get much more important than Mom or Dad sitting with Junior every day doing the teaching.
and pay/bonuses based on classroom performance instead of seniority.
Absolutely not. The only result of this will be to teach to the tests and not teach to educate. It's already been tried. It's happening here in Oregon. Schools get ranked by class performance. Guess what topics get stressed? The ones that answer questions on the tests. Real world relevance? Well, I guess the standardized tests are "real world".
Opening up the teaching profession to anyone with a bachelor's degree and a demonstrated knowledge of a subject (english, math, science) would be even better.
You must be joking. You want better teachers and you'd make the qualifications wide open? You'd want people with just a bachelor's degree in English teaching high school students? That's a sure fire way to dumb down the classroom, which would, I guess, even out the results. You wouldn't be motivating the underachievers to perform better, you'd stifle the gifted, and that would achieve equality of results.
Let those who want to teach and who are good at it take the field,
And you'd know how good the entry level applicant is exactly how? "They call me Doctor Science because I have a bachelor's degree ... in Science!"
and get rid of parasitic space takers for whom a teaching job is a state-paid sinecure.
Absolutely. But dropping the standards for teachers won't make them better, it will simply open the door to more people who don't know what they are doing.
The same is true to an extent of autopilots in planes but with a plane you usually have much more time to respond to problems than in a car.
Yes. It took 3 minutes and 30 seconds for Air France 447 to crash into the ocean after the autopilot disengaged. It disengaged because the airspeed indicators were giving erroneous and differing answers. The aircraft said, basically, "here, humans, you deal with this problem, I don't understand what's going on. I'm not going to help you by keeping your wings level or your pitch attitude within normal limits, even though none of those sensors has failed. I'm confused about how fast we are going through the air and I give up."
Note that AF447 did not have a stream of other aircraft coming the opposite direction less than ten feet away in the opposite lane, nor were they 3 airplane lengths behind an aircraft in front of them. There were three trained pilots and several minutes to deal with it, and they still couldn't.
Still at least one plane has crashed because the pilots accidentally disabled the autopilot and failed to notice.
Many have crashed because the autopilot disengaged without the pilot taking over. Many have crashed because the autonomous system (autopilot) flew them into something it shouldn't have, and some of those were with the pilots fully aware of what was going on and trying to stop it. This is why there is almost always half a dozen or more ways of overriding or disengaging the autopilot designed into the system, and even then autopilot created crashes still happen.
We have been able to design perfectly functioning autopilots for airplanes that can deal perfectly with the world around them. It is time to bring the technology to our automobiles because we are too lazy to want to deal with driving for ourselves, just as pilots are too lazy to fly the airplanes they master for themselves.