Individual schools may seem not to waste a lot of money when you look at line items, but school systems cost 2 to 3 times what they should. It is not necessary to spend a quarter of a million dollars a year to teach one classroom of 28 children.
Part of the problem is parents of morons insisting (by lawsuit) that there should be no limit to the number of tutors that must be hired to keep their precious numbskull at grade level. There's no limit to that black hole.
Social security tax now runs at 12.4%. That is NOT a "small social security amount", it's a HUGE one-eighth of wages, and a much larger portion of disposable income. The economic boom that would result if SS were terminated is beyond what most would imagine, and would easily mop up the people needing very quickly to find a job.
An immediate cutoff is not a good idea, because of the obvious injustice of not paying back what was stolen. But the system should be phased out.
Knowing that you have to provide for your own retirement would have a number of bonuses, one of which would be that people would treat their children better, knowing that they may have to rely on their children late in life.
More money available individually means more money donated to charity. That's another source of goods for those who don't provide for their old age.
It is not the proper responsibility of the public school system to educate those whose mental deficiencies make them an exceptional burden on the system. Part of being a parent is shouldering the responsibility of raising your children, and that includes the risk of children that are expensive to raise. It is just as wrong to insist than one neighbor be responsible for educating your child as it is to insist that 100,000 neighbors be responsible for educating your child. Theft is theft.
He's not evil for sending his children to private school, he's evil (in part) for being a hypocrite: for saying almost everyone else should send their children to public school.
If you can afford to send your child to a better school, doing any less is selfish.
Geez, get some appreciation of scale and context. Is it worth spending $30,000/year to send one child to a private prep school that's only marginally better than the public school? Is it better to send one child of many to a private school, if you can only afford to send one? How far into debt should you put yourself to improve your child's education? Should you spend so much on private schooling that you can't afford to take your kid to a doctor?
And then there's the issue of what it means to be selfish: to act in one's own rational self interest. The most selfish things a person can do, those great deeds for which a person is well remembered, are the things that one selfishly desires because they generate pride, which Aristotle called "the crown of the virtues". To be selfish is to do the best. To be selfless is to be self-destructive, and to take your family and neighbors down with you.
Public schools are worse because the feedback mechanisms that might improve them are both broken and too slow. It takes 12 years for public schools to damage a child's mind, and when it's obvious that something's wrong, unions block improvement. Furthermore, except in extreme circumstances, failing public schools aren't shut down. In private industry, the producers of defective products lose customers, lose money, go bankrupt, go out of business, usually pretty quickly.
Don't think that leftists don't meddle in public education, and the scandals, new ones each time, make headlines on a monthly basis. Contrast this with religious nutjob interference with public education which is limited to a few repeating areas: evolution, biblical literalism, and the like.
Matt Damon said no Los Angeles public school was progressive enough. That means he was looking for a school to destroy his child's mind, not provide a valuable skill set.
There are image processing techniques that are still too compute-intensive for routine use. Linear motion blur correction for a 4000x3000 image can run several minutes on a state-of-the-art processor. Now upgrade that to an algorithm that searches for the sharpest possible image from a set of nonlinear multi-direction blurs: come back tomorrow, and if the CPU hasn't fried itself it still won't be done.
The ability to use CPU power far exceeds any likely improvement in the foreseeable future.
It's surprising how little it takes with the right decisions. With a vacuum cleaner, a bucket and some detergent, earn $30 an hour cleaning houses. With a clientele of only 20 houses visited for 2 hours each week, gross $60,000 a year. Some customers are so desperate for such service that they'll even transport the worker both ways and let him use the homeowner's equipment.
When I was in 7th grade (1962), the doofusses who ran my school decided I wasn't bright enough to take algebra in the 8th grade. Consequently, I had to take "general math", which included such things as checking and savings accounts. Not quite the good stuff you're asking for, but it aimed in the right direction. Maybe the girls, all of whom had to take "home economics", got the finances and budgeting curriculum.
If it weren't for the taxes that make welfare and food stamps possible, take-home wages would be higher and the family wouldn't have fallen behind in the first place. Having a nonproductive bureaucracy is a burden that impoverishes everybody.
Sound financial advice does not require a professional advisor. Any person, even a poor one, can walk into a library or a church or a host of other organizations and ask how to live responsibly.
Many people become rich while working for someone else.
There may not be any way to do it, this is just a numerical observation. If we assume 10% of the people in the US are poor (30 million), and divide the welfare budget ($400 billion) evenly among them, that's $13,333.33 per person (not per family, per person.) That's enough for any healthy person to live on, in a small apartment but not in an expensive city.
You're naming immediate causes, not ultimate causes.
Lack of affordable housing: this is mixed between government regulations, what standard of housing is acceptable, and what "affordable" is. "Affordable" cannot be separated from a person's income, i.e. the next issue, poverty.
Poverty: Although worsened by government mandates, much poverty has the root cause of not being willing to work well. That's a personal choice.
Unemployment: Generally inseparable from poverty, the same personal choice.
Substance abuse: the result of personal choices.
Mental illness: some of this is involuntary, some the result of self-training (choice).
A person may not recognize that downing that fifth of vodka is choosing to be poor, but it is anyway.
That's a right-wing fantasy used to justify the present state of inequality by claiming that people can get ahead if they really try hard.
Let's take the other end of the bargain. Please explain how, in a just world, a person who does not try, gets ahead. Explain how, in any world, barring only extremely unlikely events (money through gambling), a person who does not try, gets ahead.
Think about what happens to civilization, what happens to all wealth, all property, if nobody tries hard. There's nothing for anybody, everybody fails.
What works on the large scale, a productive society full of hard workers, statistically speaking works also on the individual scale.
Citing psychologists to support your argument is only slightly better than citing mystics.
Sure, intelligence is genetic. A human is more intelligent than a tree, and the difference between a tree and a human is just genetic.
No, intelligence is not genetic. A person in a stroke-induced coma with massive brain damage isn't as intelligent as the same person 20 years earlier in good health. Identical genes.
It's necessary to define a particular context; only then can the portion of intelligence that can be attributed to genetics be determined.
FWIW the human brain is remarkably plastic. A dedicated person can do a lot to change his intelligence. For better or worse.
Here's a bonus for you: when retirement is within reach, when you know that you don't have to work to live well, you'll find that concerns about telling your employer or boss "You're doing it wrong" are greatly reduced. In a good company, that will increase your value to the company.
Slashdot Mirror
Individual schools may seem not to waste a lot of money when you look at line items, but school systems cost 2 to 3 times what they should. It is not necessary to spend a quarter of a million dollars a year to teach one classroom of 28 children.
Part of the problem is parents of morons insisting (by lawsuit) that there should be no limit to the number of tutors that must be hired to keep their precious numbskull at grade level. There's no limit to that black hole.
It's OK to help people out in their old age, it's not OK to steal at gunpoint to help people out in their old age.
Social security tax now runs at 12.4%. That is NOT a "small social security amount", it's a HUGE one-eighth of wages, and a much larger portion of disposable income. The economic boom that would result if SS were terminated is beyond what most would imagine, and would easily mop up the people needing very quickly to find a job.
An immediate cutoff is not a good idea, because of the obvious injustice of not paying back what was stolen. But the system should be phased out.
Knowing that you have to provide for your own retirement would have a number of bonuses, one of which would be that people would treat their children better, knowing that they may have to rely on their children late in life.
More money available individually means more money donated to charity. That's another source of goods for those who don't provide for their old age.
It is not the proper responsibility of the public school system to educate those whose mental deficiencies make them an exceptional burden on the system. Part of being a parent is shouldering the responsibility of raising your children, and that includes the risk of children that are expensive to raise. It is just as wrong to insist than one neighbor be responsible for educating your child as it is to insist that 100,000 neighbors be responsible for educating your child. Theft is theft.
He's not evil for sending his children to private school, he's evil (in part) for being a hypocrite: for saying almost everyone else should send their children to public school.
Geez, get some appreciation of scale and context. Is it worth spending $30,000/year to send one child to a private prep school that's only marginally better than the public school? Is it better to send one child of many to a private school, if you can only afford to send one? How far into debt should you put yourself to improve your child's education? Should you spend so much on private schooling that you can't afford to take your kid to a doctor?
And then there's the issue of what it means to be selfish: to act in one's own rational self interest. The most selfish things a person can do, those great deeds for which a person is well remembered, are the things that one selfishly desires because they generate pride, which Aristotle called "the crown of the virtues". To be selfish is to do the best. To be selfless is to be self-destructive, and to take your family and neighbors down with you.
Public schools are worse because the feedback mechanisms that might improve them are both broken and too slow. It takes 12 years for public schools to damage a child's mind, and when it's obvious that something's wrong, unions block improvement. Furthermore, except in extreme circumstances, failing public schools aren't shut down. In private industry, the producers of defective products lose customers, lose money, go bankrupt, go out of business, usually pretty quickly.
Don't think that leftists don't meddle in public education, and the scandals, new ones each time, make headlines on a monthly basis. Contrast this with religious nutjob interference with public education which is limited to a few repeating areas: evolution, biblical literalism, and the like.
Matt Damon said no Los Angeles public school was progressive enough. That means he was looking for a school to destroy his child's mind, not provide a valuable skill set.
I kinda like the AMD Backhoe.
There are image processing techniques that are still too compute-intensive for routine use. Linear motion blur correction for a 4000x3000 image can run several minutes on a state-of-the-art processor. Now upgrade that to an algorithm that searches for the sharpest possible image from a set of nonlinear multi-direction blurs: come back tomorrow, and if the CPU hasn't fried itself it still won't be done.
The ability to use CPU power far exceeds any likely improvement in the foreseeable future.
It's surprising how little it takes with the right decisions. With a vacuum cleaner, a bucket and some detergent, earn $30 an hour cleaning houses. With a clientele of only 20 houses visited for 2 hours each week, gross $60,000 a year. Some customers are so desperate for such service that they'll even transport the worker both ways and let him use the homeowner's equipment.
When I was in 7th grade (1962), the doofusses who ran my school decided I wasn't bright enough to take algebra in the 8th grade. Consequently, I had to take "general math", which included such things as checking and savings accounts. Not quite the good stuff you're asking for, but it aimed in the right direction. Maybe the girls, all of whom had to take "home economics", got the finances and budgeting curriculum.
If it weren't for the taxes that make welfare and food stamps possible, take-home wages would be higher and the family wouldn't have fallen behind in the first place. Having a nonproductive bureaucracy is a burden that impoverishes everybody.
Trivially true, there's no such thing as heaven.
Sound financial advice does not require a professional advisor. Any person, even a poor one, can walk into a library or a church or a host of other organizations and ask how to live responsibly.
Many people become rich while working for someone else.
There may not be any way to do it, this is just a numerical observation. If we assume 10% of the people in the US are poor (30 million), and divide the welfare budget ($400 billion) evenly among them, that's $13,333.33 per person (not per family, per person.) That's enough for any healthy person to live on, in a small apartment but not in an expensive city.
How far can you walk in a day?
You're with the NSA?
You're naming immediate causes, not ultimate causes.
Lack of affordable housing: this is mixed between government regulations, what standard of housing is acceptable, and what "affordable" is. "Affordable" cannot be separated from a person's income, i.e. the next issue, poverty.
Poverty: Although worsened by government mandates, much poverty has the root cause of not being willing to work well. That's a personal choice.
Unemployment: Generally inseparable from poverty, the same personal choice.
Substance abuse: the result of personal choices.
Mental illness: some of this is involuntary, some the result of self-training (choice).
A person may not recognize that downing that fifth of vodka is choosing to be poor, but it is anyway.
Let's take the other end of the bargain. Please explain how, in a just world, a person who does not try, gets ahead. Explain how, in any world, barring only extremely unlikely events (money through gambling), a person who does not try, gets ahead.
Think about what happens to civilization, what happens to all wealth, all property, if nobody tries hard. There's nothing for anybody, everybody fails.
What works on the large scale, a productive society full of hard workers, statistically speaking works also on the individual scale.
Citing psychologists to support your argument is only slightly better than citing mystics.
I contend that ignoring results is immoral; that the means is a part of the end.
Not having sex is also a method of birth control.
Sure, intelligence is genetic. A human is more intelligent than a tree, and the difference between a tree and a human is just genetic.
No, intelligence is not genetic. A person in a stroke-induced coma with massive brain damage isn't as intelligent as the same person 20 years earlier in good health. Identical genes.
It's necessary to define a particular context; only then can the portion of intelligence that can be attributed to genetics be determined.
FWIW the human brain is remarkably plastic. A dedicated person can do a lot to change his intelligence. For better or worse.
Here's a bonus for you: when retirement is within reach, when you know that you don't have to work to live well, you'll find that concerns about telling your employer or boss "You're doing it wrong" are greatly reduced. In a good company, that will increase your value to the company.
Robin Hood was a thief. You are only a wannabe thief, too cowardly to steal for yourself, insisting that the government do it for you.