It might interest you that there used to be way fewer teachers, no administrators, no dept of education... and the quality of education was way higher.
I'm sure I could come up with a lot of others that disprove your hypothesis. There are lots and lots of private companies that we have to do business with. We have no choice in the matter.
Great soundbite. Now expand on it. Tell us how, exactly, you would put your proposal into practice.
Fewer cops? Less regulations? Which ones? Fewer teachers? No DMV (and no vehicle registrations, or safety regulations, or license plates, or insurance?)
Actually, Islam had huge cultural advances. Algorithm comes from the arabic, Al-Khwrizm taught the Europeans how to do basic math. A lot of the European renaissance was fueled by Islamist intellectual input. True, Europe moved on after that and the Islamic cultures fell into their own dark ages.
Hey! We're buying T-Mobile to keep it out of the hands of our rivals. We don't care about the customers or the service, in fact we just want T-Mobile gone. But we'll tell you that the merger will create tens of thousands of jobs! And fewer companies in the marketplace means more competition! Yeah, baby!
I'm glad someone in the FCC has the cojones to stand up to this sort of nonsense.
I agree that losing the game is pretty silly. Water polo is much like soccer; one goal is one point, but it's a higher scoring game than soccer. The sanction is against the coach and not the team. The coach is supposed to put in his/her second (third?) string or practice stuff his team doesn't know if the score gets lopsided.
Our water polo team had a match against a much smaller club. They could only field 7 players (that's what you need for a team) but one could not play because of injury. She "started" - got in the water and got out as soon as the whistle blew so the team could play.
Our coaches called a time out, and pulled one of our players to make the game even. At one point we were losing and our coaches stuck with it; they played fair. That taught all the kids a very valuable lesson; you win fairly. You play fair and on an even field. You don't take advantage of the other team.
There is a rule that if you are ahead by more than 20 points, it's "unsportsmanlike conduct" and you can get sanctioned. I agree with it - as there's no way to ensure an even field. When you have one high school that plays water polo year round, and does not have a swim team, and can field 3 times as many players as you, and another can barely field 7 players and plays 9 weeks out of the year, it's unsportmanlike to run up the score. Otherwise it becomes a $ game; the big and rich schools win and the poor schools lose.
The point of games is to learn; not to crush your enemy and hear the lamentations of their women. That's for Gengis Khan; not middle and high school.
My wife was a good distance runner - placed a lot in her age group and had a couple of top-three finishes in regional marathons. Me, I'm not so good. I have good endurance but no speed. I also don't like to compete (a result of a pushy parent - if you can't win, why bother doing it?) so I tend to pick events that have no prizes. I ride road bikes; 100+ miles, up mountains, etc. Neither of us is a swimmer (which is probably why our kids like it so much.:-) ) We have a really good swim club near our house (within walking distance) so it's a good after school activity. Maybe if we had a fencing club they'd be fencers; who knows.
My 14 year old daughter is more of an endurance type. She is competitive in triathlons with adult women; sprint times of 1:28 or so. My son is a fart in a whirlwind; typical for an 11 year old boy, he'll do anything and try anything. Full-contact american football is the only thing I won't let him do. He's small for his age, and he'd get creamed out there. Injuries at that age are too permanent.
As a former competitive swimmer, I have seen exactly what your son has spoken about and it saddens me. I have also tried to be a hard worker and encourage others (as your daughter does). Athletes tend to be competitive people and by design, we don't like seeing people working harder than us, so its easy for such a personality to drive the team as whole to higher levels of performance.
I have to give a lot of credit to the head coach; he's been at it for 33 years and his goal is to create lifetime athletes. He doesn't care if you do well today; he wants your best every day, and he's willing to work at it. Our team has not won a relay ever (I think) since he puts one new/weak swimmer in every time. One time my son - then 9 - swam with the 15 year olds. They got their butt kicked but they all had a grand time; the high schoolers because they had no pressure to win, and my 9 year old because they all welcomed him and treated him as an equal.
Part of it is also that we're all athletes to some extent; my wife is a distance runner and I'm an endurance cyclist so we know how hard it is to push every day. We know that our kids need encouragement and time off. Sometimes you have a great day, and sometimes you have a crappy day.
No shit. My kid (who's a better than average swimmer) won't go to the State competition anymore as he's seen too many parents yelling at their kids. "How come you didn't win? You really screwed up!" - to a 7 year old.
I'm backing him 100% on that. Yup, he's qualified, he's fast, and he's good but it's just no fun to watch parents be assholes.
So where's the "I really want to do it" gene? My daughter is not as good a swimmer but she's highly coveted by her team because she really wants to be there. She'll never get above middle of the pack, but every coach wants her on their team - because she works harder than anyone else and loves it, and encourages everyone around her.
Where's the gene for that?
This will be used by parents to beat up on their kids; parents who never were more than middle of the pack anything, now are 100 lbs overwieght, but know their kid is the next Michael Phelps. Blech.
Then they aren't camping, are they Sparky? They're in a mobile home. What I said wouldn't apply to them.
OK, if you say so. Last time I checked, a mobile home and an RV are two different things, but I guess not. Hmmmm.
As for the cell phone tethering, that might work for some but not for others. Last I checked, cell phone coverage wasn't universal; it certainly isn't for me. And I pay for a campground so I'm not exactly "depending on random strangers"; I'm paying for a service.
Putting wi-fi in a campground is contrary to its purpose. I don't care if the asker and the editors failed to notice this. I don't care if that rains on someone's little parade. It's a dumb idea. Whatever you're doing there, it isn't camping. It's using the Internet outside. That's my genuine opinion, and not only is it as valid as the asker's, it's more valid because it's more consistent with what a campground is for. Some ball-less soul-less sack of shit will mod me down anyway because he hasn't the guts to argue against me, but that's okay.
Except that a lot of people in RVs full time. That means their RV is their primary, and only, home. As such, they need access to their bank accounts, friends, relatives, news. For most people who full time, a campground with wifi is essential, at least once in a while.
My sister lives aboard a sailboat. Full time, all over the world. Wifi is huge for her. Without wifi, we do't know if she's alive or not. We have an RV; we don't fulltime but after 9 days it's nice to do laundry and catch up on world news.
We also backpack and spend a lot of time in the wilderness, so I'll stack my "camping creds" against yours any day. When was the last time you were in the wilderness, with a 2 day hike-out to the nearest trailhead? Are you spending your thanksgiving next to your computer, or in the high desert 20 miles from the nearest town?
Corporations hold too much power but if enough people get together and vote in primaries like the Tea Party does results will happen.
Fer crying out loud... The Tea Party is an arm of the Koch Brothers business empire. It has nothing to do with "voting in primaries" and "enough people getting together". It has everything to do with a well funded, well coordinated effort on multiple fronts by two of the richest, most corrupt men in America swaying US politics even further to right, to remove the few restrictions and responsibilities the federal and state governments still impose on mega-businesses.
The problem is that every time a teacher teaches sex-ed, or gay-lesbian stuff, or tells his / her class to read something through-provoking, the luddites and idiots on the school boards would fire them. So you would have teachers who are afraid to teach.
Tenure is important to shield teachers from the stupidity of the masses. It also has the unfortunate side effect of shielding bad teachers. If you get rid of it, you'll lose the good teachers.
This is either hyperbole, or wrong. Health insurance is expensive, but the cost is rarely more than a few hundreds bucks a month per person, significantly less than minimum wage.
Maybe your contribution.... Or maybe you're living in the past, or maybe you're 22. The employer pays well over $1K/mo per employee for insurance. I shut my business down in large part because we could no longer afford health insurance, and thus could not compete with the big outfits for talent.
We were paying roughly $14k/year for catastrophic care - no doctor visits, no well-baby care, no prescription coverage, and a deductible of well over $3K/year. When the insurance company told me that would go up 30%, and the nearest "competitive bid" was well over 50% higher, we closed our doors.
The small firms simply cannot compete with the big firms because they don't have the purchasing power. So there went 8 well paid professional jobs.
Not only that, but if you actually sat and listened to it, it had a weird sense of incompleteness. It's like you;re looking for some pattern and not finding it.
Not at all "bad" - it certainly elicited an emotional response from me. I wanted it to be complete, to have a pattern, and so I ended up listening to it to find one.
I've heard worse - music that has a pattern but that's completely devoid of interest and impact. This is music that devoid of pattern and therefore draws your interest.
I could really see this being orchestrated/arranged and be really cool.
Or they would become extensions of our current pay-to-play political system. With no government loans, schools would depend more on private backers. Any bets that the Koch brothers would fund environmental science? Or "liberal" views?
Hey, professor So-and-so is too liberal. I'm pulling my funding unless you get rid of him.
Hey, your environmental science program is interfering with my ability to make money. Close it down or I pull my funding.
Hey, your law school is putting out too many ACLU lawyers. I'm pulling my funding.
Welcome to private enterprise schools, where money buys the curriculum.
So if you're poor, you're screwed. If mommy and daddy are rich, you're fine.
Seems like a great society to me.
When you try to hire someone and you can't find any educated people, post back. In the meantime, please don't be so damn selfish.
Taxes are what we buy civilization with. You don't want to pay taxes? Move to Somalia. I hear that's a place with a very small and ineffective central government.
Crap. I work for a utility. You can't believe what people will do. We have to put 2 ground leads on each transformer as they will steal the ground lads. One, OK. Second, you get about 7KV through you.
We have had 1,600 feet of copper wire stolen off a giant spool. Do you have any idea how much effort that takes? I don't know how much a 6' spool of copper wire weighs, but it takes a honking big forklift to move it around.
We had people hacksaw through gate hinges to get at stuff. We had people steal everything that is not nailed down.
Heck, we had someone burn a porta-potty to the ground - purple fluid, crap and all. To the ground. They must have poured a gallon of gasoline into it....
Hehe... I'm a good bit older than you, and I typically don't use the seat back at all. I sit up and "engage the core muscles" to keep my spine aligned. All those nagging respiratory problems, fatigue, etc. go away when you do that. I can actually bring on a respiratory infection by slouching in my chair enough days.
I can't but second the physical movement part. Walk, move, flap your arms, whatever. Every so often, when you talk to a co-worker go outside and walk around the parking lot while talking.
Yup. It sounds like this kid's parents understand the complexity. My kids are smart - both at least a grade above their peers and at the top of their class, but not so smart as to be outside the norm. And I will not put them into a T&G program that isolates them from their peers.
This kid's parents must have that problem in spades. At least my kids have gotten beat both in physical and academic competition. I was a T&G student; smart enough for Mensa, yadda yadda. And I was totally unprepared for academic failure in college. It was crushing to have kids around me who knew more and were smarter and better prepared. It was a totally new environment, and one that I was completely unprepared for.
I would worry about what happens when this kid finally runs into a situation where he doesn't excel. Where others are better than he is. It's good that he's with kids his age; maybe he'll learn that while he's intellectually better other kids can take him in other contests.... A bit of humility is good for the soul.
Yup. Not happening. At a guess my wife would be prohibited, while my 13 year old daughter would pass.
I work with a woman in her 30s who regularly gets carded and accused of carrying fake ID. She has season tickets to a local college football team, and has been asked to leave because the guards suspect her of underage drinking.
There's just too much variety in human body types and looks to work. Also, how is this thing going to work if the person is on the sofa under a blanket? Are we going to have to stand up and "assume the position" to watch TV now?
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It might interest you that there used to be way fewer teachers, no administrators, no dept of education ... and the quality of education was way higher.
Citation, please. Hard data, not more soundbites.
Experian? Other credit rating companies?
I'm sure I could come up with a lot of others that disprove your hypothesis. There are lots and lots of private companies that we have to do business with. We have no choice in the matter.
Great soundbite. Now expand on it. Tell us how, exactly, you would put your proposal into practice.
Fewer cops? Less regulations? Which ones? Fewer teachers? No DMV (and no vehicle registrations, or safety regulations, or license plates, or insurance?)
I want to know.
Actually, Islam had huge cultural advances. Algorithm comes from the arabic, Al-Khwrizm taught the Europeans how to do basic math. A lot of the European renaissance was fueled by Islamist intellectual input. True, Europe moved on after that and the Islamic cultures fell into their own dark ages.
I don't think he's a native speaker. Criticize only if you can write equally coherently in his/her language.
and get paid for lying through my teeth!
Hey! We're buying T-Mobile to keep it out of the hands of our rivals. We don't care about the customers or the service, in fact we just want T-Mobile gone. But we'll tell you that the merger will create tens of thousands of jobs! And fewer companies in the marketplace means more competition! Yeah, baby!
I'm glad someone in the FCC has the cojones to stand up to this sort of nonsense.
I look at anti-virus as a compression bandage. It staunches the bleeding, but does nothing to prevent the injury....
Maybe a more secure OS from the get-go might help? Although Win 7 seems to be a step in the right direction....
I agree that losing the game is pretty silly. Water polo is much like soccer; one goal is one point, but it's a higher scoring game than soccer. The sanction is against the coach and not the team. The coach is supposed to put in his/her second (third?) string or practice stuff his team doesn't know if the score gets lopsided.
Yeah, well....
Our water polo team had a match against a much smaller club. They could only field 7 players (that's what you need for a team) but one could not play because of injury. She "started" - got in the water and got out as soon as the whistle blew so the team could play.
Our coaches called a time out, and pulled one of our players to make the game even. At one point we were losing and our coaches stuck with it; they played fair. That taught all the kids a very valuable lesson; you win fairly. You play fair and on an even field. You don't take advantage of the other team.
There is a rule that if you are ahead by more than 20 points, it's "unsportsmanlike conduct" and you can get sanctioned. I agree with it - as there's no way to ensure an even field. When you have one high school that plays water polo year round, and does not have a swim team, and can field 3 times as many players as you, and another can barely field 7 players and plays 9 weeks out of the year, it's unsportmanlike to run up the score. Otherwise it becomes a $ game; the big and rich schools win and the poor schools lose.
The point of games is to learn; not to crush your enemy and hear the lamentations of their women. That's for Gengis Khan; not middle and high school.
My wife was a good distance runner - placed a lot in her age group and had a couple of top-three finishes in regional marathons. Me, I'm not so good. I have good endurance but no speed. I also don't like to compete (a result of a pushy parent - if you can't win, why bother doing it?) so I tend to pick events that have no prizes. I ride road bikes; 100+ miles, up mountains, etc. Neither of us is a swimmer (which is probably why our kids like it so much. :-) ) We have a really good swim club near our house (within walking distance) so it's a good after school activity. Maybe if we had a fencing club they'd be fencers; who knows.
My 14 year old daughter is more of an endurance type. She is competitive in triathlons with adult women; sprint times of 1:28 or so. My son is a fart in a whirlwind; typical for an 11 year old boy, he'll do anything and try anything. Full-contact american football is the only thing I won't let him do. He's small for his age, and he'd get creamed out there. Injuries at that age are too permanent.
As a former competitive swimmer, I have seen exactly what your son has spoken about and it saddens me. I have also tried to be a hard worker and encourage others (as your daughter does). Athletes tend to be competitive people and by design, we don't like seeing people working harder than us, so its easy for such a personality to drive the team as whole to higher levels of performance.
I have to give a lot of credit to the head coach; he's been at it for 33 years and his goal is to create lifetime athletes. He doesn't care if you do well today; he wants your best every day, and he's willing to work at it. Our team has not won a relay ever (I think) since he puts one new/weak swimmer in every time. One time my son - then 9 - swam with the 15 year olds. They got their butt kicked but they all had a grand time; the high schoolers because they had no pressure to win, and my 9 year old because they all welcomed him and treated him as an equal.
Part of it is also that we're all athletes to some extent; my wife is a distance runner and I'm an endurance cyclist so we know how hard it is to push every day. We know that our kids need encouragement and time off. Sometimes you have a great day, and sometimes you have a crappy day.
No shit. My kid (who's a better than average swimmer) won't go to the State competition anymore as he's seen too many parents yelling at their kids. "How come you didn't win? You really screwed up!" - to a 7 year old.
I'm backing him 100% on that. Yup, he's qualified, he's fast, and he's good but it's just no fun to watch parents be assholes.
So where's the "I really want to do it" gene? My daughter is not as good a swimmer but she's highly coveted by her team because she really wants to be there. She'll never get above middle of the pack, but every coach wants her on their team - because she works harder than anyone else and loves it, and encourages everyone around her.
Where's the gene for that?
This will be used by parents to beat up on their kids; parents who never were more than middle of the pack anything, now are 100 lbs overwieght, but know their kid is the next Michael Phelps. Blech.
Then they aren't camping, are they Sparky? They're in a mobile home. What I said wouldn't apply to them.
OK, if you say so. Last time I checked, a mobile home and an RV are two different things, but I guess not. Hmmmm.
As for the cell phone tethering, that might work for some but not for others. Last I checked, cell phone coverage wasn't universal; it certainly isn't for me. And I pay for a campground so I'm not exactly "depending on random strangers"; I'm paying for a service.
Putting wi-fi in a campground is contrary to its purpose. I don't care if the asker and the editors failed to notice this. I don't care if that rains on someone's little parade. It's a dumb idea. Whatever you're doing there, it isn't camping. It's using the Internet outside. That's my genuine opinion, and not only is it as valid as the asker's, it's more valid because it's more consistent with what a campground is for. Some ball-less soul-less sack of shit will mod me down anyway because he hasn't the guts to argue against me, but that's okay.
Except that a lot of people in RVs full time. That means their RV is their primary, and only, home. As such, they need access to their bank accounts, friends, relatives, news. For most people who full time, a campground with wifi is essential, at least once in a while.
My sister lives aboard a sailboat. Full time, all over the world. Wifi is huge for her. Without wifi, we do't know if she's alive or not. We have an RV; we don't fulltime but after 9 days it's nice to do laundry and catch up on world news.
We also backpack and spend a lot of time in the wilderness, so I'll stack my "camping creds" against yours any day. When was the last time you were in the wilderness, with a 2 day hike-out to the nearest trailhead? Are you spending your thanksgiving next to your computer, or in the high desert 20 miles from the nearest town?
Corporations hold too much power but if enough people get together and vote in primaries like the Tea Party does results will happen.
Fer crying out loud... The Tea Party is an arm of the Koch Brothers business empire. It has nothing to do with "voting in primaries" and "enough people getting together". It has everything to do with a well funded, well coordinated effort on multiple fronts by two of the richest, most corrupt men in America swaying US politics even further to right, to remove the few restrictions and responsibilities the federal and state governments still impose on mega-businesses.
The problem is that every time a teacher teaches sex-ed, or gay-lesbian stuff, or tells his / her class to read something through-provoking, the luddites and idiots on the school boards would fire them. So you would have teachers who are afraid to teach.
Tenure is important to shield teachers from the stupidity of the masses. It also has the unfortunate side effect of shielding bad teachers. If you get rid of it, you'll lose the good teachers.
This is either hyperbole, or wrong. Health insurance is expensive, but the cost is rarely more than a few hundreds bucks a month per person, significantly less than minimum wage.
Maybe your contribution.... Or maybe you're living in the past, or maybe you're 22. The employer pays well over $1K/mo per employee for insurance. I shut my business down in large part because we could no longer afford health insurance, and thus could not compete with the big outfits for talent.
We were paying roughly $14k/year for catastrophic care - no doctor visits, no well-baby care, no prescription coverage, and a deductible of well over $3K/year. When the insurance company told me that would go up 30%, and the nearest "competitive bid" was well over 50% higher, we closed our doors.
The small firms simply cannot compete with the big firms because they don't have the purchasing power. So there went 8 well paid professional jobs.
Not only that, but if you actually sat and listened to it, it had a weird sense of incompleteness. It's like you;re looking for some pattern and not finding it.
Not at all "bad" - it certainly elicited an emotional response from me. I wanted it to be complete, to have a pattern, and so I ended up listening to it to find one.
I've heard worse - music that has a pattern but that's completely devoid of interest and impact. This is music that devoid of pattern and therefore draws your interest.
I could really see this being orchestrated/arranged and be really cool.
Or they would become extensions of our current pay-to-play political system. With no government loans, schools would depend more on private backers. Any bets that the Koch brothers would fund environmental science? Or "liberal" views?
Hey, professor So-and-so is too liberal. I'm pulling my funding unless you get rid of him.
Hey, your environmental science program is interfering with my ability to make money. Close it down or I pull my funding.
Hey, your law school is putting out too many ACLU lawyers. I'm pulling my funding.
Welcome to private enterprise schools, where money buys the curriculum.
So if you're poor, you're screwed. If mommy and daddy are rich, you're fine.
Seems like a great society to me.
When you try to hire someone and you can't find any educated people, post back. In the meantime, please don't be so damn selfish.
Taxes are what we buy civilization with. You don't want to pay taxes? Move to Somalia. I hear that's a place with a very small and ineffective central government.
Crap. I work for a utility. You can't believe what people will do. We have to put 2 ground leads on each transformer as they will steal the ground lads. One, OK. Second, you get about 7KV through you.
We have had 1,600 feet of copper wire stolen off a giant spool. Do you have any idea how much effort that takes? I don't know how much a 6' spool of copper wire weighs, but it takes a honking big forklift to move it around.
We had people hacksaw through gate hinges to get at stuff. We had people steal everything that is not nailed down.
Heck, we had someone burn a porta-potty to the ground - purple fluid, crap and all. To the ground. They must have poured a gallon of gasoline into it....
Hehe... I'm a good bit older than you, and I typically don't use the seat back at all. I sit up and "engage the core muscles" to keep my spine aligned. All those nagging respiratory problems, fatigue, etc. go away when you do that. I can actually bring on a respiratory infection by slouching in my chair enough days.
I can't but second the physical movement part. Walk, move, flap your arms, whatever. Every so often, when you talk to a co-worker go outside and walk around the parking lot while talking.
Your body needs movement.
Yup. It sounds like this kid's parents understand the complexity. My kids are smart - both at least a grade above their peers and at the top of their class, but not so smart as to be outside the norm. And I will not put them into a T&G program that isolates them from their peers.
This kid's parents must have that problem in spades. At least my kids have gotten beat both in physical and academic competition. I was a T&G student; smart enough for Mensa, yadda yadda. And I was totally unprepared for academic failure in college. It was crushing to have kids around me who knew more and were smarter and better prepared. It was a totally new environment, and one that I was completely unprepared for.
I would worry about what happens when this kid finally runs into a situation where he doesn't excel. Where others are better than he is. It's good that he's with kids his age; maybe he'll learn that while he's intellectually better other kids can take him in other contests.... A bit of humility is good for the soul.
What, no back seat cramped your style? No bed or what?
Yup. Not happening. At a guess my wife would be prohibited, while my 13 year old daughter would pass.
I work with a woman in her 30s who regularly gets carded and accused of carrying fake ID. She has season tickets to a local college football team, and has been asked to leave because the guards suspect her of underage drinking.
There's just too much variety in human body types and looks to work. Also, how is this thing going to work if the person is on the sofa under a blanket? Are we going to have to stand up and "assume the position" to watch TV now?