I can tell you that there IS a lot of money being put into quietly swaying public opinion against unions in general.
Of course there is - there is a huge push against unions. But that's why I find it so amazing that they are being aggressive in this economic climate. It plays right into their opponents hands.
I'll give you my recent experience:
- First, the transit strike in NYC a couple of years ago. The union took on a super-aggressive posture and went on (an illegal!) strike after a couple of weeks without a contract in a city where the very popular firefighters and police had been working without a contract for 2 years. You have to work very hard to make your union hated in liberal NYC, but the TWU managed it. - My own school district. The biggest hang-up is that the teachers don't want to pay any more share of their health care costs. I understand, because it makes their take-home salary go down. That said, they are completely disconnected from the parents at the school board meetings... in the private sector, we have been paying more and more for health care for years! I understand the historical reasons for insulation against health care costs - but it's just not practical anymore. If you take a step back, we don't insulate workers from food or gas price increases... why health care? The other thing that the union doesn't seem to "get" is that they got contractual raises for 2 years while the rest of the economy completely tanked. Now that their contract is over, they don't want to take a pay cut or freeze. While I can understand this position, it puts them at odds with the community. All we see as taxpayers is 75% of the school budget going to salaries and benefits, and whining when the budget goes backwards by 10%. Because of the union's position, they have to fire a whole bunch of young teachers rather than everyone take a pay freeze. This breeds resentment among not just the parents, whose children's education suffers, but also the young teachers who fear for their jobs and see their beloved colleagues fired.
To my own school district's credit, the teachers seem to have made some progress and are currently working under the expired contract - effectively a take-home pay freeze, but still a raise if health spending is included. But my very liberal town is not lining up behind the teachers, and that is really saying something.
Note I'm not anti-teacher - my brother is a teacher. I'm not claiming that they are over-paid. I'm not even totally averse to tenure in some form. But I do wish there were more accountability and I do wish their union was more realistic in their demands. Our district gets something like 600 applicants for every teaching job... their position is not very strong in this economy.
I'm sorry to make this so long, but you asked:)
I must say that the automakers unions do seem to be a shining example of the way to play it correctly. They knew when they were whipped in 2008-9, and they gave up huge concessions. They now have a lot more good will and are doing pretty well in the contract re-negotiations. You don't hear much grumbling about the auto unions these days.
I just thought they were doing a good job copying MS.:)
PS: I'm joking, but if I'm working on OpenOffice, co-workers will sometimes stop in their tracks and say, "Hey, how did you get the old Excel back?" when they walk by my cube. So it can't be THAT ugly...
That was true in the past, but becomes less and less true every moment. They even support macros and custom spreadsheet functions now. It's no excel, but I gradually find myself moving stuff over to it.
Speaking only for myself, the strongest image that springs to mind when you say "Libre" is "Nacho Libre". So naturally I find the product name to be silly-sounding. That said, I am in possession of a demented mind.
Another good name would be "Airplane! Office" or "The Naked Office". "Austin Office, the Suite that Shagged Me". Nah, too far.
Expecting to be insulated from escalating health costs is as delusional as expecting to be insulated from rising gas prices. That absurd demand alone is enough to kill the union.
We could, but at the end of the day you'll still have an inferior education if you don't have the numbers. There are schools that are too big and there are schools that are too small - there is an optimal school size where there are enough students to allow the school to offer a full curriculum, yet not so large that scaling problems creep in.
is that this empowers diversity of thought, so education cannot be used to control society.
That's not a bad thing. I think that it is important to teach kids things like civics. Even if we went to vouchers, I'd still like to see some requirements met by the publicly funded schools. Not everyone can learn how to interact with our society from their parents, who may or may not be engaged with the child's education, and may not even be Americans themselves.
I'm not a big fan of unions, but I don't think you need to crush the unions to reform the schools. You just need to insist on realistic compensation and determine some kind of sane performance metrics. And yes, I do think they have a point about standardized tests not necessarily being that metric. At least, not 100%.
I don't think community colleges are supposed to be self-supporting - they are subsidized by design. They only charge about as much as you can get federal tax credits for; effectively, a community college education is free.
My solution is to give each student a voucher, and to employ free market regarding education. Not public schools, only public funding of education.
I definitely like the idea of vouchers, but it is not a universal solution. It really only works in areas with dense populations. Everywhere else, issues start to crop up.
For instance, transportation becomes a huge problem... my district "solves" it by busing all of the charter kids to the central high school and then busing to the charters from the central high school, but it really racks up the total trip time and makes the main buses very dependent on a late feeder bus. Our district spends more on the special ed, charter, and private school busing than on the main public schools, despite fewer children.
Another problem is class size. Some areas have such a low population that they can barely justify even a single public high school. Below a certain size, it becomes impractical to support many programs.
So I think there still is a place for government-run schools.
I'm not going to jump to his defense, because the tone of his post (and his sig) represents exactly what I think is wrong with political discourse in this country. Treating politics like a team sport is not helping anyone except for the team ownership.
That said, what the hell is going on with the teacher unions in this country? I understand that they need to protect the interests of their members, but between this kind of blatant protectionist-at-the-expense-of-society and delusional expectation of being insulated from the health care costs that are hitting everyone else, it really isn't helping their image.
I can type almost as fast as i can talk and I prefer using a mouse and keyboard than talking to a machine
That's great for you, but how much of the population do you think that describes?
And I seriously doubt that you can type on your phone as fast as you speak.
In 2000 I had a Nokia 3310 with voice dialing and probably every phone I had since has that feature but I never felt the urge to use it and I don't know anyone else who does.
Well, now you can't say that anymore. When I'm driving and using the hands-free, I always use voice dialing. Even on my old flip phone, it was faster to hold down the side button and say the contact's name than it was to dial.
Also any current speech recognition technology I ever saw has been honed over thousands of years to only recognise Californian expensive coffee drinking IT worker's accents.
THAT is exactly the point where I expect this tech to fail:)
The gasoline Mazda 2 does not get better economy than the Prius except in marketing literature, but even if it does eventually equal the Prius the comparison is flawed.
You are also comparing a really small car to a rather mid-sized one - apples to oranges. And with 83HP, you are making the Prius look like a Formula racer. The 100HP 40MPG "sport" edition in the US has 0-60 of 9 seconds, about the same as the Prius. Take away that extra horsepower and performance must be really abysmal. I'm not criticizing - it's plenty of engine for that kind of car and it lets them sell the car for $10,000 less than a Prius, but the comparison is not really valid.
I'm still glad to see them improving ICE efficiency.
That case only impacted the colonists in the unlikely event that an escaped slave were to make it to England. Slavery wasn't abolished in the Empire until the 1830s, and I doubt the American slaveholders had any reason to think they would be the first to lose their slaves.
It may have been on their mind, but it was certainly not their immediate concern.
They'd better issue the teachers and "high color" kids with bulletproof vests if they roll this out nationwide - someone will crack.
In my day, we called it "honor roll", and the names were listed in the hall on a big board. Sometimes the senors got a preferred parking spot or hall pass or something like that. We didn't have FastPass for lunch lines, but it's not a completely wacky extension of honor roll.
It just shows that these secrets are used for evil and bad things, for murdering people.
Secrets are important for defense as well. Even if the US were to completely abandon a foreign intelligence service, there would still need to be counter-intelligence services. And those activities and such would be necessarily secret. Or forget foreign interaction altogether. An ongoing corruption investigation needs to be secret. Wiretapping of a mob boss needs to be secret. The President's schedule details often need to be secret. Many, many, completely legitimate government functions need to be secret.
At least Buddhism teaches real things, real values and there's no imaginary persons, as Buddha himself has actually lived.
Right, and Buddhists have never fought any wars. And they don't keep secrets. And they never get all authoritarian or anything like that. BTW, Jesus was also a real guy. So was Mohammad. Buddha may have "actually lived", but the first written account of his life seems to have occurred hundreds of years after his death. And this written account includes Buddha being advised by invisible men.
In this case, though, I think "interest" and "money" are the same thing. Fortunately, in this case the consumer still benefits (and that's usually the case when there is still heavy competition). Usually the consumer suffers when a company maximizes profits without any competition.
I think they are still acting in their best interests. They are leveraging their physical presence to counteract Amazon's online advantage. If they are willing to lose sales at their physical stores in order to help their online division, publishers will have to take this into account when considering future exclusive deals.
What you have basically said is that if we increase out carbon output, there won't necessarily be any increase in temperature and in fact, there might be a decrease
Exactly!
Say we increase carbon output, but decrease other, more powerful greenhouse gas emissions - net effect could very well be a decrease in temperature. Thus, no simple correlation between carbon output and temperature.
Of course, it is in the technical sense "correlated" through a complex set of equations and algorithms - a model. But it's not correlated in any kind of a classic statistical sense. Science does not require a t-test or ANOVA - it only requires the scientific method.
Then what is the point in trying to reduce our carbon output?!?
Well, I happen to think it is pointless, because we are like locusts and will use up all of the cheap energy no matter how it affects our long-term interest as a species. But the "point" of it is that our best science indicates that pumping out stored carbon will warm the atmosphere. The only people saying otherwise haven't built a model, and in fact are not in the field of climate science.
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I can tell you that there IS a lot of money being put into quietly swaying public opinion against unions in general.
Of course there is - there is a huge push against unions. But that's why I find it so amazing that they are being aggressive in this economic climate. It plays right into their opponents hands.
I'll give you my recent experience:
- First, the transit strike in NYC a couple of years ago. The union took on a super-aggressive posture and went on (an illegal!) strike after a couple of weeks without a contract in a city where the very popular firefighters and police had been working without a contract for 2 years. You have to work very hard to make your union hated in liberal NYC, but the TWU managed it.
- My own school district. The biggest hang-up is that the teachers don't want to pay any more share of their health care costs. I understand, because it makes their take-home salary go down. That said, they are completely disconnected from the parents at the school board meetings... in the private sector, we have been paying more and more for health care for years! I understand the historical reasons for insulation against health care costs - but it's just not practical anymore. If you take a step back, we don't insulate workers from food or gas price increases... why health care? The other thing that the union doesn't seem to "get" is that they got contractual raises for 2 years while the rest of the economy completely tanked. Now that their contract is over, they don't want to take a pay cut or freeze. While I can understand this position, it puts them at odds with the community. All we see as taxpayers is 75% of the school budget going to salaries and benefits, and whining when the budget goes backwards by 10%. Because of the union's position, they have to fire a whole bunch of young teachers rather than everyone take a pay freeze. This breeds resentment among not just the parents, whose children's education suffers, but also the young teachers who fear for their jobs and see their beloved colleagues fired.
To my own school district's credit, the teachers seem to have made some progress and are currently working under the expired contract - effectively a take-home pay freeze, but still a raise if health spending is included. But my very liberal town is not lining up behind the teachers, and that is really saying something.
Note I'm not anti-teacher - my brother is a teacher. I'm not claiming that they are over-paid. I'm not even totally averse to tenure in some form. But I do wish there were more accountability and I do wish their union was more realistic in their demands. Our district gets something like 600 applicants for every teaching job... their position is not very strong in this economy.
I'm sorry to make this so long, but you asked :)
I must say that the automakers unions do seem to be a shining example of the way to play it correctly. They knew when they were whipped in 2008-9, and they gave up huge concessions. They now have a lot more good will and are doing pretty well in the contract re-negotiations. You don't hear much grumbling about the auto unions these days.
I just thought they were doing a good job copying MS. :)
PS: I'm joking, but if I'm working on OpenOffice, co-workers will sometimes stop in their tracks and say, "Hey, how did you get the old Excel back?" when they walk by my cube. So it can't be THAT ugly...
Google Docs doesn't cut it beyond basic tasks.
That was true in the past, but becomes less and less true every moment. They even support macros and custom spreadsheet functions now. It's no excel, but I gradually find myself moving stuff over to it.
Speaking only for myself, the strongest image that springs to mind when you say "Libre" is "Nacho Libre". So naturally I find the product name to be silly-sounding. That said, I am in possession of a demented mind.
Another good name would be "Airplane! Office" or "The Naked Office". "Austin Office, the Suite that Shagged Me". Nah, too far.
I agree. People shouldn't use hyperbole in their writings. It is literally murdering the English language.
Expecting to be insulated from escalating health costs is as delusional as expecting to be insulated from rising gas prices. That absurd demand alone is enough to kill the union.
We could work out the details.
We could, but at the end of the day you'll still have an inferior education if you don't have the numbers. There are schools that are too big and there are schools that are too small - there is an optimal school size where there are enough students to allow the school to offer a full curriculum, yet not so large that scaling problems creep in.
is that this empowers diversity of thought, so education cannot be used to control society.
That's not a bad thing. I think that it is important to teach kids things like civics. Even if we went to vouchers, I'd still like to see some requirements met by the publicly funded schools. Not everyone can learn how to interact with our society from their parents, who may or may not be engaged with the child's education, and may not even be Americans themselves.
Just eliminate the unions
I'm not a big fan of unions, but I don't think you need to crush the unions to reform the schools. You just need to insist on realistic compensation and determine some kind of sane performance metrics. And yes, I do think they have a point about standardized tests not necessarily being that metric. At least, not 100%.
I think if you re-read my comment you'll find that I said I liked the concept and that it is probably suitable in certain places.
This just isn't sustainable.
I don't think community colleges are supposed to be self-supporting - they are subsidized by design. They only charge about as much as you can get federal tax credits for; effectively, a community college education is free.
My solution is to give each student a voucher, and to employ free market regarding education. Not public schools, only public funding of education.
I definitely like the idea of vouchers, but it is not a universal solution. It really only works in areas with dense populations. Everywhere else, issues start to crop up.
For instance, transportation becomes a huge problem... my district "solves" it by busing all of the charter kids to the central high school and then busing to the charters from the central high school, but it really racks up the total trip time and makes the main buses very dependent on a late feeder bus. Our district spends more on the special ed, charter, and private school busing than on the main public schools, despite fewer children.
Another problem is class size. Some areas have such a low population that they can barely justify even a single public high school. Below a certain size, it becomes impractical to support many programs.
So I think there still is a place for government-run schools.
I'm not going to jump to his defense, because the tone of his post (and his sig) represents exactly what I think is wrong with political discourse in this country. Treating politics like a team sport is not helping anyone except for the team ownership.
That said, what the hell is going on with the teacher unions in this country? I understand that they need to protect the interests of their members, but between this kind of blatant protectionist-at-the-expense-of-society and delusional expectation of being insulated from the health care costs that are hitting everyone else, it really isn't helping their image.
I can type almost as fast as i can talk and I prefer using a mouse and keyboard than talking to a machine
That's great for you, but how much of the population do you think that describes?
And I seriously doubt that you can type on your phone as fast as you speak.
In 2000 I had a Nokia 3310 with voice dialing and probably every phone I had since has that feature but I never felt the urge to use it and I don't know anyone else who does.
Well, now you can't say that anymore. When I'm driving and using the hands-free, I always use voice dialing. Even on my old flip phone, it was faster to hold down the side button and say the contact's name than it was to dial.
Also any current speech recognition technology I ever saw has been honed over thousands of years to only recognise Californian expensive coffee drinking IT worker's accents.
THAT is exactly the point where I expect this tech to fail :)
I thought it was an 80s synth-pop band. This makes more sense.
The gasoline Mazda 2 does not get better economy than the Prius except in marketing literature, but even if it does eventually equal the Prius the comparison is flawed.
You are also comparing a really small car to a rather mid-sized one - apples to oranges. And with 83HP, you are making the Prius look like a Formula racer. The 100HP 40MPG "sport" edition in the US has 0-60 of 9 seconds, about the same as the Prius. Take away that extra horsepower and performance must be really abysmal. I'm not criticizing - it's plenty of engine for that kind of car and it lets them sell the car for $10,000 less than a Prius, but the comparison is not really valid.
I'm still glad to see them improving ICE efficiency.
Bit of a stretch :)
That case only impacted the colonists in the unlikely event that an escaped slave were to make it to England. Slavery wasn't abolished in the Empire until the 1830s, and I doubt the American slaveholders had any reason to think they would be the first to lose their slaves.
It may have been on their mind, but it was certainly not their immediate concern.
Are you saying that the British abolished slavery in the colonies and then the Americans re-instituted it once they became independent?
They'd better issue the teachers and "high color" kids with bulletproof vests if they roll this out nationwide - someone will crack.
In my day, we called it "honor roll", and the names were listed in the hall on a big board. Sometimes the senors got a preferred parking spot or hall pass or something like that. We didn't have FastPass for lunch lines, but it's not a completely wacky extension of honor roll.
It just shows that these secrets are used for evil and bad things, for murdering people.
Secrets are important for defense as well. Even if the US were to completely abandon a foreign intelligence service, there would still need to be counter-intelligence services. And those activities and such would be necessarily secret. Or forget foreign interaction altogether. An ongoing corruption investigation needs to be secret. Wiretapping of a mob boss needs to be secret. The President's schedule details often need to be secret. Many, many, completely legitimate government functions need to be secret.
At least Buddhism teaches real things, real values and there's no imaginary persons, as Buddha himself has actually lived.
Right, and Buddhists have never fought any wars. And they don't keep secrets. And they never get all authoritarian or anything like that. BTW, Jesus was also a real guy. So was Mohammad. Buddha may have "actually lived", but the first written account of his life seems to have occurred hundreds of years after his death. And this written account includes Buddha being advised by invisible men.
That's perhaps one of the most naive things I've ever heard. If it came from a child, it would be adorable.
In this case, though, I think "interest" and "money" are the same thing. Fortunately, in this case the consumer still benefits (and that's usually the case when there is still heavy competition). Usually the consumer suffers when a company maximizes profits without any competition.
It still has to cost DC a fortune when B&N rips the covers off and throws them all away.
I decidedly did not say it as if it were a bad thing :)
I think they are still acting in their best interests. They are leveraging their physical presence to counteract Amazon's online advantage. If they are willing to lose sales at their physical stores in order to help their online division, publishers will have to take this into account when considering future exclusive deals.
What you have basically said is that if we increase out carbon output, there won't necessarily be any increase in temperature and in fact, there might be a decrease
Exactly!
Say we increase carbon output, but decrease other, more powerful greenhouse gas emissions - net effect could very well be a decrease in temperature. Thus, no simple correlation between carbon output and temperature.
Of course, it is in the technical sense "correlated" through a complex set of equations and algorithms - a model. But it's not correlated in any kind of a classic statistical sense. Science does not require a t-test or ANOVA - it only requires the scientific method.
Then what is the point in trying to reduce our carbon output?!?
Well, I happen to think it is pointless, because we are like locusts and will use up all of the cheap energy no matter how it affects our long-term interest as a species. But the "point" of it is that our best science indicates that pumping out stored carbon will warm the atmosphere. The only people saying otherwise haven't built a model, and in fact are not in the field of climate science.