Thank you for the links. There's something wrong with the parent's post, and I hope he will clarify it. Has he actually seen people with food stamps driving Cadillacs, or is this something his parents told him?
Point of fact: You get food stamps based on your income, not your assets. So if you're retired or unemployed at age 55, with $100,000 in the bank, but zero income, you'd be eligible for food stamps.
I've heard these "welfare Cadillac" stories ever since Ronald Reagan. Some of RR's stories were patently false, like the one about the man who bought vodka with food stamps and orange juice for a screwdriver with the change.
I've always wondered whether there is some truth to them. I also wondered whether there is a reasonable explanation. For example, maybe people on food stamps get a friend with a car, or a cab, to drive them to the store. Maybe they borrowed the car.
It varies by state, but in New York City, you have to submit elaborate documentation for food stamps, and you have to get fingerprinted. They do a lot of checking, and so far they haven't come up with any evidence of significant fraud. Most of the fraud involves the food stamp vendors.
The funny thing about your story is that, in my understanding, you can't buy carry-out food with food stamps. My local supermarket has a sign at the deli saying that you can't buy prepared food with EBT. You can buy sliced cheese, and sliced salami, but you can't buy a hero sandwich.
it is true that the VA has a formulary, which only includes one preferred drug of a class, and doesn't include Viagra. The drugs are supposed to be equivalent. I'll ask what would happen in a situation like that next time I talk to a VA urologist.
Patient satisfaction is a soft endpoint. Patients can't always tell whether their treatment did them more good than harm. Patients get unnecessary and devastating surgery (for prostate cancer, for example) and insist that the surgery saved their life.
The VA did scientific medicine. They were doing a lot of surgery, etc., and they wanted to find out whether the treatments were actually effective. When they did surgery for prostate cancer, colon cancer, or heart disease, did the surgery actually extend the patients' lives? They tracked their outcomes carefully (using their own open-source medical records program, VISTA) to see how well the patients did, and then they organized randomized, controlled studies to find out for sure.
If you go to a medical conference, and listen to doctors discuss the best evidence for treating common conditions, you keep hearing them refer to "the VA study." I've talked to a lot of VA doctors, and they really are concerned about doing the best for their patients. They do research to find out what's best.
The VA changed medicine for the better in a lot of ways.
I'm glad I'm not an ideologue. I don't have to argue that the government does everything better. There are private hospitals, academic medical centers, and even insurance companies that do similar good research.
But the private institutions are in business to make a profit, and they can't spend a lot of money on basic research that benefits their competitors as much as themselves. The VA does these big studies that benefit everyone. They probably save Medicare more money than the cost of the research, by identifying useless treatments.
Gordon Crovitz lives in lower Manhattan around Wall Street. In fact, he lives near Zuccoti Park that Occupy Wall Street was camped out in.
During the occupation, Crovitz appeared in the local Community Board hearings to argue that OWS should be kicked out because they were making too much noise and disturbing his sleep. Most of the people who came before the Community Board supported OWS (First Amendment and all that), and the Community Board voted to support OWS and let them stay in the park, although they asked OWS to try to keep it quiet at night. Crovitz published a whiny editorial page essay complaining about it.
So Crovitz actually did say, "Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!"
Not only does the VA manage health care cheaper than private industry, they do it better in terms of the results that count: keeping people healthier.
For example, the VA system does a lot of prostate cancer surgery. They just published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (367:203 if you want to look it up) in which they found that surgery for prostate cancer (radical prostatectomy) in most cases doesn't really do any good. The price you pay is that half the men who get prostate cancer surgery wind up sexually impotent.
The VA system does a lot of research on outcomes of different treatments. For a lot of surgery, if you want to find out whether a procedure does any good, and you look up the research, it turns out that the VA did it. And some of the VA hospitals have the best results in the country.
In the private health care system, there are surgeons who rush everybody into surgery, whether they need it or not, because they make $10,000 or so for every procedure. In the VA hospital, they only perform surgery on those vets who actually need it.
Gordon Crovitz lives in lower Manhattan around Wall Street. In fact, he lives near Zuccoti Park that Occupy Wall Street was camped out in.
During the occupation, Crovitz appeared in the local Community Board hearings to argue that OWS should be kicked out because they were making too much noise and disturbing his sleep. Most of the people who came before the Community Board supported OWS (First Amendment and all that), and the Community Board voted to support OWS and let them stay in the park, although they asked OWS to try to keep it quiet at night. Crovitz published a whiny editorial page essay complaining about it.
So Crovitz actually did say, "Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!"
ALL of government was designed to make people rich, and this is why we liberals tax the wealthy more than the poor. It used to be a nice 70% income tax rate for the rich, before Reagan gave all the dumbassess a false sense of hope that they too can be rich if they work hard.
I'm reasonably certain that you could replace a wall switch. However, I don't have the same certainty that you could teach a 5th-grade math or science class.
I'm sure that you could find parents who would choose you, but there are also parents who would choose to have you teach creation science, So the fact that some parents would choose you has no bearing on your competence.
New York City and other districts have programs to give prospective teachers the basics of teaching, under supervision from experienced teachers. If you wanted to teach, you could go through those programs. There are science teachers with PhDs who teach in New York City high schools.
You want to teach without going through those programs -- and without being evaluated on your ability to teach by successful, experienced teachers. Most school districts aren't willing to do that. And for good reason. They can't put somebody in front of a class without knowing whether he's capable of teaching. And long experience has shown that technical competence in science alone isn't enough to teach K-12.
I'm not an educator, so I can't cite the data-filled studies. As I said, Science magazine has had many articles on what works and what doesn't work in STEM education, both case histories and general evidence-based research. Scientists and science teachers study teaching itself in the same way that they study anything else in science. If you read those articles, that would be a good start on understanding how to teach. You claim to understand science because you have a PhD? Then you should understand that a scientist forms his conclusions by looking at the data, and you should look at the data on STEM education before drawing your conclusions.
As for your comment about teachers' unions, the evidence shows that's false. When you do studies of educational achievement around the US, students in the heavily-unionized regions, like the northeast, do better on standardized tests than students in the non-unionized south. Students in unionized Canada do better than students in the US overall. When you rank the countries around the world in education indicators, especially in science, there are many countries that rank above the US, and most of them have unionized teachers. By one index, the top-scoring country in the world was Finland, and as Finns have just pointed out right here on Slashdot, they have well-paid, unionized teachers, and long training programs. They study both the course content and also "pedagogy" (the methods of teaching). There was a recent book on the Finnish education system which you should read before you start bashing unions.
I don't know of any successful school systems around the world where they just turn engineers and scientists loose on K-12 students without any training in education.
Just because you have a PhD in electrical engineering, that doesn't mean you can teach 5th grade students.
Science magazine has had many articles about science teaching, including the successful science teaching projects and the research about science teaching itself.
In order to teach, you have to take everything you know about science, and find out what children of a particular age can understand. If you teach concepts your class isn't able to understand, well, obviously, you're not going to teach them anything.
For example, in biology, there were a lot of projects which taught very young children about DNA. The kids could parrot some answers. But when you talk to them, to find out what they really understand, it turns out that they don't understand DNA at all. You could just as well be teaching them fairy tales about goblins.
In fact, most middle school kids can't understand the concept of atoms and molecules. It's too abstract. That makes sense when you remember that most of the world's best scientists up to about the 17th century didn't understand atoms and molecules either. It also makes sense when you remember that middle school kids aren't actually doing hands-on experimental chemistry that the early chemists did to figure out atoms and molecules. You really can't understand atoms and molecules from a book. Or a teacher's lecture.
Teaching science requires 2 things: An understanding of the subject and an understanding of teaching. You can't succeed unless you have both.
You wouldn't be a competent teacher, for example, if you could only teach the good students, and didn't know how to recognize why a poor student doesn't understand a concept, and how to explain that concept to the student.
If you're going to talk about evidence, Diane Ravitch, who was assistant secretary of education under both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, followed all the data.
Ravitch said that the factor that correlates most strongly with educational achievement (as measured by standardized tests) is family income. The wealthier the family, the better the kids do in school.
That's a proxy for a lot of other things, such as parental involvement, but it reflects the fact that parents can't be involved if they're working two jobs, struggling to make ends meet, and can't afford luxuries like books.
Let's start by attacking the most significant problems first. Eliminate poverty. That's the goal John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and every other politician until recently set for the country. They failed.
Economists have a pretty good idea of the causes of poverty in the U.S. -- the destruction of the union movement, the lowering of the minimum wage, competition from countries like China, and now the growing cost of college education. Those are things the government can change directly. And we should. If we have money to put kids in prison for violating the drug laws, we have money to send kids to college on the government till.
That's not true. The government has been engaged in many productive enterprises, that adds to the economy.
One classic case is the Tennessee Valley Authority. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_valley_authority Most people under the age of 70 don't know about this, unless they studied history or heard about it in Woody Guthrie songs. But when this country became electrified, the government worked together with private industry to bring it about. There aren't too many big dams around the world that were built by private enterprise. The TVA was well known throughout the industry as one of the more efficient producers of electricity, a benchmark for private industry. The private producers in the electrical industry were happy to see government involvement -- you can't sell an electric washing machine to someone who doesn't have electricity.
You could go through the history of science and technology throughout the 20th century to see examples of how the government produced useful products and services that the free market couldn't provide. Another was the interstate highway system. Can't sell cars and trucks without roads to drive them on. One of the reasons the U.S. has the most productive agricultural industry in the world is because of the many ways in which the government stimulated and encouraged the industry, for example spreading new technology like hybrid seed corn through agricultural research stations.
One good example of the government producing useful services is health care. In most developed countries, the government runs the health care industry to a greater or lesser degree, and almost every other developed country provides health care of equal quality at half the cost or less.
Here we're talking about education. The state university systems around the country are the most efficient educational institutions, turning out the great minds and innovators of America, including Nobel laureates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_City_University_of_New_York at a fraction of the cost of private institutions. Educating a scientist or engineer, like Andrew Grove, is certainly a contribution to the economy. And that's what the government was doing through most of the 20th century.
In an eight month period 900 people died of SARS. In an average year during the same period 167,000 to 333, 000 die from the common seasonal flue.
900 deaths were the beginning tail of the curve. We didn't have an epidemic because of an aggressive international effort led by WHO to stop it, by isolating patients. That effort led to the deaths of many doctors and nurses, of whom Carlo Urbani was only the most prominent. It's impossible to prove that the outbreak would have spread with an exponential increase, but the judgment of the doctors who were managing it was that it was highly likely, and they believed it strongly enough that they were willing to risk and give their lives to stop it. There was a good chance of a worldwide outbreak of a viral disease with 10% mortality, and they stopped it.
This is an example of how using technical terms such as pandemic can blow things out of proportion. TB is not a new disease and neither is resistant TB. In the US the incidence of resistant TB is declining. In the last year reported there were 103 cases of resistant TB in the US. And no "outbreaks" of resistant TB.
The problem with Florida is that the Republican governor and legislature just closed down the very hospital they need to treat TB at a time when XDR is emerging as a real threat.
Prove this statement. How does closing down a 50 bed hospital have a major impact on an outbreak.
I don't know what burden of evidence you would demand to prove it, but WHO says that one part of the strategy is, "strengthening health care systems and primary care services". Florida's policies of cutting health care budgets and privatizing services are doing the opposite. The underlying problem is that health care in the U.S. is driven by politics, not rational policies, and while the Democrats are pretty bad, the Republicans are the worst offenders.
You also need to justify the statement that "XDR is emerging as a real threat" when the actual numbers say something completely different. Show me how it is an emerging threat in North America.
According to my reading of NEJM and Science, XDR is appearing in many parts of the world in which TB is treated inadequately, such as Russia, and when it appears, it often can't be treated at all, the TB progresses and the patient often dies.
As the NEJM says, the only way to deal with MDR and XDR strains is prevention.
I think you have very much oversimplified NEJM's position of XDR-TB. Here is an actual quote from a NEJM article;
All evidence suggests that XDR tuberculosis reflects a failure to implement the measures recommended in the WHO's Stop TB Strategy.5 This strategy emphasizes expanding high-quality DOTS programs, addressing HIV-associated tuberculosis and drug resistance, strengthening health care systems and primary care services, encouraging all providers to follow good practices, empowering patients and communities to improve health, and enabling and promoting research.
Prevention is only one part of the above strategy.
The relevant part is:
strengthening health care systems and primary care services
The Republican policies are weakening health care systems and primary care services, particularly among the TB-vulnerable populations.
Many of them have latent disease, which means they feel OK but are transmitting TB
Here is an example where your information is completely incorrect. Here is a quote from the CDC fact sheet'
The big problem that Facebook gets into when reporting sexual crimes is where to draw the line. It's a particular problem when you run into the irrational and hysterical laws and prosecutions on sex with young people.
This sounds like the old stories of photo processors who were required to report all photos with "suspicion" of child sex abuse to prosecutors. As you recall, professional photographers were arrested for taking nude pictures of their own children. Parents were arrested for taking bathtub pictures of infants. Parents had their children taken into custody for months. Innocent people had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses to clear themselves. Prosecutors offered the choice of plea bargains or felony charges.
Most of us would be uncomfortable about a 30-year-old man having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but where does it stop? What about a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl (which would be legal in the UK, I believe).
What about a 19-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl? An 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl? I'll leave it to you to visualize the spreadsheets.
What about two 14-year-olds? That's illegal in a lot of states. I bet there are a lot of 14-year-olds arranging sexual activities on Facebook. The last numbers I saw were that 10% of all 14-year-old girls have had intercourse. What are you going to do -- put 10% of the male population in jail?
Sexual offenses against children constitute a significant proportion of reported criminal sexual acts. Arbitrarily, the age of a person with pedophilia is set at 16 yr, with the age difference between offender and child victim set at 5 yr. The age of the child is usually 13 yr. For older adolescents with pedophilia (ie, 17 to 18 yr old), no precise age difference is specified; clinical and legal judgment is relied on. Legal criteria may be different from psychiatric criteria.
That's reasonable. I think that if you want to prosecute people for having sex, you have to demonstrate that one party was actually harmed. The prosecution shouldn't do more harm than the behavior.
Many much-reported prosecutions are of people who wouldn't fit into that medical definition. 17-year-old boys get prosecuted for having sex with 16-year-old girls. 16-year-olds get prosecuted for having sex with each other. The laws are draconian. Adolescent boys get 10-year prison terms. Teenagers wind up having to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives, drastically limiting where they can live and work. Often, they're forced to plea bargain and accept lifetime sex offender registration or go to trial and risk years in prison. People lose their jobs and have to quit college. The cost of defending yourself against such a prosecution can be tens of thousands of dollars, enough to cost a family its house and its college savings.
The people who pass these laws and prosecute them say that they'll examine each case using "reasonable judgment," and not prosecute "Romeo and Juliet" situations among teenagers, but that's bullshit. There's always some asshole prosecutor who says, "The law says it's rape. Discussion over." Once you start down the roller-coaster of notification and prosecution, there's no turning back.
Many of the defendants are black -- white people, especially wealthy people, have enough influence with the local prosecutors to get out of these situations.
I don't want Facebook reading my personal messages to find out if I wrote something suspicious that they should report to the police. I realize their situation but this will do a lot of damage to a lot of people. First get rational laws on drugs and sex, and then start prosecuting them.
Interesting fact: the age of consent in the U.S. was originally 10 years old, following English common law. Many Americans alive today have great-grandmothers who were married at 12 years of age.
"Experimental time machine?" Please, leave the hype and sensationalism to the "science" reporters.
Have pity on the poor girl. Science and Nature (and the university PR department) keeps telling you how important the public understanding of science is, and how important it is for scientists to explain their work in language the general public can understand. Otherwise you'll lose your grants, the Republicans will teach creationism in school, and your freshman biology students will go blank, fall asleep in class and major in business administration.
I'm glad your local jail is well-staffed, although I don't know where it is. If it's a good program, it's unusual.
According to the Journal of the American Medical association, prison health care is bad around the country. One of the problems is that services are contracted out to a few big corporations, like Correctional Medical Services, which according to JAMA was providing incompetent care which led to many deaths. Another problem is sheer budget-cutting.
Parent said, "Prisoners receive better medical care than most Americans, and it's illegal to let them go untreated."
It's not true that prisoners receive better care than most Americans. If it is, I'd like to see the supporting data.
It may be illegal to let them go untreated. So it's illegal. Prisons do it all the time. Many organizations are suing prisons over health care, and often getting court orders. Sometimes the prisons respond to the court orders, and sometimes they don't.
If they get arbitrary 10% budget cuts, as they did in Texas, they couldn't improve their health care even if they wanted to.
You realize that hospitals have special laundry equipment to sterilize the laundry.
You mean like... bleach? There are lots of reasons they should be in a hospital over a motel, this is a rather weak choice of argument.
Like high-temperature washers and dryers, which have to meet specifications and inspections. There's a difference between laundering and sterilizing.
And you need special handling procedures for contaminated laundry before it's laundered.
The reason I mentioned laundries is that I read about a case in which a small hospital was using a regular commercial laundry (in violation of health regulations) and ran into these troubles.
The numbers are not important. What's important is the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extremely-drug resistant (XDR) strains. MDR strains are difficult to treat. Some doctors say that XDR strains can be treated with great difficulty and expense, but I've read of cases of XDR that doctors couldn't treat at all.
Here's where I get my information from:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0908076 Review Article Current Concepts MDR Tuberculosis — Critical Steps for Prevention and Control Eva Nathanson, M.Sc., Paul Nunn, F.R.C.P., Mukund Uplekar, M.D., Katherine Floyd, Ph.D., Ernesto Jaramillo, M.D., Ph.D., Knut Lönnroth, M.D., Ph.D., Diana Weil, M.Sc., and Mario Raviglione, M.D. N Engl J Med 2010; 363:1050-1058 September 9, 2010
Actually, we've had people flying in aircraft for years, and that caused major outbreaks of many infectious diseases. AIDS Patient Zero, don't forget, was an airline steward. SARS was spread by airline passengers. Like a lot of infectious diseases, SARS went from zero to 900 deaths very quickly. (The movie Contagion was pretty accurate, according to the reviews in the science magazines.) People are flying into the US every day from third world countries, and a lot of them have MDR and XDR TB. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1005750
As the NEJM says, the only way to deal with MDR and XDR strains is prevention. It's difficult (sometimes impossible) and expensive to treat MDR and XDR. Patients don't like to take the drugs for good reason -- isoniazid and rifamycin have serious and sometimes dangerous side effects, particularly liver damage, which is dangerous for patients with HCV or alcoholism. Many of them have latent disease, which means they feel OK but are transmitting TB. They don't want to take a drug for 6 months that makes them sick.
Science magazine had even more pessimistic articles about XDR. They sent a reporter to the former USSR, where they have no functioning health system and herd TB patients, AIDS patients, and drug addicts into the world's largest prison system (the largest after ours). They had XDR patients they couldn't treat even when they had the drugs.
The problem with Florida is that the Republican governor and legislature just closed down the very hospital they need to treat TB at a time when XDR is emerging as a real threat. They're privatizing health care, like the Russians and Chinese did (with disastrous results, and their antibiotic-resistant infections are threatening us). According to TFA, they're putting up TB patients in motels!
And you can't just treat people for their TB, you have to provide comprehensive health care. Which the Republicans are also cutting back.
This country is spending more money to fight Hollywood-fantasy bioweapons attacks than we're spending to fight real, documented, extremely dangerous diseases. There was a new bioweapons "sniffer" that cost I think $100 million, and turned out to be useless because of its false alarms. Who needs Al Qaeda when you've got the Republicans?
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for the links. There's something wrong with the parent's post, and I hope he will clarify it. Has he actually seen people with food stamps driving Cadillacs, or is this something his parents told him?
My favorite line is, "They complain that they can't afford health insurance but they buy lattes every day at Starbucks."
The bigger problem was store owners who traded food stamps for cash at a discounted rate.
Point of fact: You get food stamps based on your income, not your assets. So if you're retired or unemployed at age 55, with $100,000 in the bank, but zero income, you'd be eligible for food stamps.
I've heard these "welfare Cadillac" stories ever since Ronald Reagan. Some of RR's stories were patently false, like the one about the man who bought vodka with food stamps and orange juice for a screwdriver with the change.
I've always wondered whether there is some truth to them. I also wondered whether there is a reasonable explanation. For example, maybe people on food stamps get a friend with a car, or a cab, to drive them to the store. Maybe they borrowed the car.
It varies by state, but in New York City, you have to submit elaborate documentation for food stamps, and you have to get fingerprinted. They do a lot of checking, and so far they haven't come up with any evidence of significant fraud. Most of the fraud involves the food stamp vendors.
The funny thing about your story is that, in my understanding, you can't buy carry-out food with food stamps. My local supermarket has a sign at the deli saying that you can't buy prepared food with EBT. You can buy sliced cheese, and sliced salami, but you can't buy a hero sandwich.
it is true that the VA has a formulary, which only includes one preferred drug of a class, and doesn't include Viagra. The drugs are supposed to be equivalent. I'll ask what would happen in a situation like that next time I talk to a VA urologist.
Patient satisfaction is a soft endpoint. Patients can't always tell whether their treatment did them more good than harm. Patients get unnecessary and devastating surgery (for prostate cancer, for example) and insist that the surgery saved their life.
The VA did scientific medicine. They were doing a lot of surgery, etc., and they wanted to find out whether the treatments were actually effective. When they did surgery for prostate cancer, colon cancer, or heart disease, did the surgery actually extend the patients' lives? They tracked their outcomes carefully (using their own open-source medical records program, VISTA) to see how well the patients did, and then they organized randomized, controlled studies to find out for sure.
If you go to a medical conference, and listen to doctors discuss the best evidence for treating common conditions, you keep hearing them refer to "the VA study." I've talked to a lot of VA doctors, and they really are concerned about doing the best for their patients. They do research to find out what's best.
The VA changed medicine for the better in a lot of ways.
I'm glad I'm not an ideologue. I don't have to argue that the government does everything better. There are private hospitals, academic medical centers, and even insurance companies that do similar good research.
But the private institutions are in business to make a profit, and they can't spend a lot of money on basic research that benefits their competitors as much as themselves. The VA does these big studies that benefit everyone. They probably save Medicare more money than the cost of the research, by identifying useless treatments.
Gordon Crovitz lives in lower Manhattan around Wall Street. In fact, he lives near Zuccoti Park that Occupy Wall Street was camped out in.
During the occupation, Crovitz appeared in the local Community Board hearings to argue that OWS should be kicked out because they were making too much noise and disturbing his sleep. Most of the people who came before the Community Board supported OWS (First Amendment and all that), and the Community Board voted to support OWS and let them stay in the park, although they asked OWS to try to keep it quiet at night. Crovitz published a whiny editorial page essay complaining about it.
So Crovitz actually did say, "Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!"
Not only does the VA manage health care cheaper than private industry, they do it better in terms of the results that count: keeping people healthier.
For example, the VA system does a lot of prostate cancer surgery. They just published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine (367:203 if you want to look it up) in which they found that surgery for prostate cancer (radical prostatectomy) in most cases doesn't really do any good. The price you pay is that half the men who get prostate cancer surgery wind up sexually impotent.
The VA system does a lot of research on outcomes of different treatments. For a lot of surgery, if you want to find out whether a procedure does any good, and you look up the research, it turns out that the VA did it. And some of the VA hospitals have the best results in the country.
In the private health care system, there are surgeons who rush everybody into surgery, whether they need it or not, because they make $10,000 or so for every procedure. In the VA hospital, they only perform surgery on those vets who actually need it.
Gordon Crovitz lives in lower Manhattan around Wall Street. In fact, he lives near Zuccoti Park that Occupy Wall Street was camped out in.
During the occupation, Crovitz appeared in the local Community Board hearings to argue that OWS should be kicked out because they were making too much noise and disturbing his sleep. Most of the people who came before the Community Board supported OWS (First Amendment and all that), and the Community Board voted to support OWS and let them stay in the park, although they asked OWS to try to keep it quiet at night. Crovitz published a whiny editorial page essay complaining about it.
So Crovitz actually did say, "Hey you kids! Get off my lawn!"
ALL of government was designed to make people rich, and this is why we liberals tax the wealthy more than the poor. It used to be a nice 70% income tax rate for the rich, before Reagan gave all the dumbassess a false sense of hope that they too can be rich if they work hard.
I agree, but in support of your argument I would point out that progressive taxation is usually credited to Adam Smith, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations that those who have benefited more from society should pay a proportionately greater portion of their income to support that society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_of_nations#Book_V:_Of_the_Revenue_of_the_Sovereign_or_Commonwealth
That's not what the writers of the Federalist Papers thought.
I'm reasonably certain that you could replace a wall switch. However, I don't have the same certainty that you could teach a 5th-grade math or science class.
I'm sure that you could find parents who would choose you, but there are also parents who would choose to have you teach creation science, So the fact that some parents would choose you has no bearing on your competence.
New York City and other districts have programs to give prospective teachers the basics of teaching, under supervision from experienced teachers. If you wanted to teach, you could go through those programs. There are science teachers with PhDs who teach in New York City high schools.
You want to teach without going through those programs -- and without being evaluated on your ability to teach by successful, experienced teachers. Most school districts aren't willing to do that. And for good reason. They can't put somebody in front of a class without knowing whether he's capable of teaching. And long experience has shown that technical competence in science alone isn't enough to teach K-12.
I'm not an educator, so I can't cite the data-filled studies. As I said, Science magazine has had many articles on what works and what doesn't work in STEM education, both case histories and general evidence-based research. Scientists and science teachers study teaching itself in the same way that they study anything else in science. If you read those articles, that would be a good start on understanding how to teach. You claim to understand science because you have a PhD? Then you should understand that a scientist forms his conclusions by looking at the data, and you should look at the data on STEM education before drawing your conclusions.
To give you an idea of what teaching is all about, I just saw this article in the New York Times which explains one aspect very well. Note that he's describing the teaching of English, but everything he says applies just as well to STEM. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/opinion/the-trouble-with-online-education.html
As for your comment about teachers' unions, the evidence shows that's false. When you do studies of educational achievement around the US, students in the heavily-unionized regions, like the northeast, do better on standardized tests than students in the non-unionized south. Students in unionized Canada do better than students in the US overall. When you rank the countries around the world in education indicators, especially in science, there are many countries that rank above the US, and most of them have unionized teachers. By one index, the top-scoring country in the world was Finland, and as Finns have just pointed out right here on Slashdot, they have well-paid, unionized teachers, and long training programs. They study both the course content and also "pedagogy" (the methods of teaching). There was a recent book on the Finnish education system which you should read before you start bashing unions.
I don't know of any successful school systems around the world where they just turn engineers and scientists loose on K-12 students without any training in education.
You're a scientist, look at the data.
Just because you have a PhD in electrical engineering, that doesn't mean you can teach 5th grade students.
Science magazine has had many articles about science teaching, including the successful science teaching projects and the research about science teaching itself.
In order to teach, you have to take everything you know about science, and find out what children of a particular age can understand. If you teach concepts your class isn't able to understand, well, obviously, you're not going to teach them anything.
For example, in biology, there were a lot of projects which taught very young children about DNA. The kids could parrot some answers. But when you talk to them, to find out what they really understand, it turns out that they don't understand DNA at all. You could just as well be teaching them fairy tales about goblins.
In fact, most middle school kids can't understand the concept of atoms and molecules. It's too abstract. That makes sense when you remember that most of the world's best scientists up to about the 17th century didn't understand atoms and molecules either. It also makes sense when you remember that middle school kids aren't actually doing hands-on experimental chemistry that the early chemists did to figure out atoms and molecules. You really can't understand atoms and molecules from a book. Or a teacher's lecture.
Teaching science requires 2 things: An understanding of the subject and an understanding of teaching. You can't succeed unless you have both.
You wouldn't be a competent teacher, for example, if you could only teach the good students, and didn't know how to recognize why a poor student doesn't understand a concept, and how to explain that concept to the student.
If you're going to talk about evidence, Diane Ravitch, who was assistant secretary of education under both George HW Bush and Bill Clinton, followed all the data.
Ravitch said that the factor that correlates most strongly with educational achievement (as measured by standardized tests) is family income. The wealthier the family, the better the kids do in school.
That's a proxy for a lot of other things, such as parental involvement, but it reflects the fact that parents can't be involved if they're working two jobs, struggling to make ends meet, and can't afford luxuries like books.
Let's start by attacking the most significant problems first. Eliminate poverty. That's the goal John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and every other politician until recently set for the country. They failed.
Economists have a pretty good idea of the causes of poverty in the U.S. -- the destruction of the union movement, the lowering of the minimum wage, competition from countries like China, and now the growing cost of college education. Those are things the government can change directly. And we should. If we have money to put kids in prison for violating the drug laws, we have money to send kids to college on the government till.
That's not true. The government has been engaged in many productive enterprises, that adds to the economy.
One classic case is the Tennessee Valley Authority. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_valley_authority Most people under the age of 70 don't know about this, unless they studied history or heard about it in Woody Guthrie songs. But when this country became electrified, the government worked together with private industry to bring it about. There aren't too many big dams around the world that were built by private enterprise. The TVA was well known throughout the industry as one of the more efficient producers of electricity, a benchmark for private industry. The private producers in the electrical industry were happy to see government involvement -- you can't sell an electric washing machine to someone who doesn't have electricity.
You could go through the history of science and technology throughout the 20th century to see examples of how the government produced useful products and services that the free market couldn't provide. Another was the interstate highway system. Can't sell cars and trucks without roads to drive them on. One of the reasons the U.S. has the most productive agricultural industry in the world is because of the many ways in which the government stimulated and encouraged the industry, for example spreading new technology like hybrid seed corn through agricultural research stations.
One good example of the government producing useful services is health care. In most developed countries, the government runs the health care industry to a greater or lesser degree, and almost every other developed country provides health care of equal quality at half the cost or less.
Here we're talking about education. The state university systems around the country are the most efficient educational institutions, turning out the great minds and innovators of America, including Nobel laureates http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_affiliated_with_the_City_University_of_New_York at a fraction of the cost of private institutions. Educating a scientist or engineer, like Andrew Grove, is certainly a contribution to the economy. And that's what the government was doing through most of the 20th century.
Considering that you do not know the facts them please do not comment on them and make them look like poor decisions.
In science it is a matter of intellectual integrity and custom to acknowledge the limitations of your knowledge. I suggest you adopt that practice.
SARS went from zero to 900 deaths very quickly.
In an eight month period 900 people died of SARS. In an average year during the same period 167,000 to 333, 000 die from the common seasonal flue.
900 deaths were the beginning tail of the curve. We didn't have an epidemic because of an aggressive international effort led by WHO to stop it, by isolating patients. That effort led to the deaths of many doctors and nurses, of whom Carlo Urbani was only the most prominent. It's impossible to prove that the outbreak would have spread with an exponential increase, but the judgment of the doctors who were managing it was that it was highly likely, and they believed it strongly enough that they were willing to risk and give their lives to stop it. There was a good chance of a worldwide outbreak of a viral disease with 10% mortality, and they stopped it.
This is an example of how using technical terms such as pandemic can blow things out of proportion. TB is not a new disease and neither is resistant TB. In the US the incidence of resistant TB is declining. In the last year reported there were 103 cases of resistant TB in the US. And no "outbreaks" of resistant TB.
The problem with Florida is that the Republican governor and legislature just closed down the very hospital they need to treat TB at a time when XDR is emerging as a real threat.
Prove this statement. How does closing down a 50 bed hospital have a major impact on an outbreak.
I don't know what burden of evidence you would demand to prove it, but WHO says that one part of the strategy is, "strengthening health care systems and primary care services". Florida's policies of cutting health care budgets and privatizing services are doing the opposite. The underlying problem is that health care in the U.S. is driven by politics, not rational policies, and while the Democrats are pretty bad, the Republicans are the worst offenders.
You also need to justify the statement that "XDR is emerging as a real threat" when the actual numbers say something completely different. Show me how it is an emerging threat in North America.
According to my reading of NEJM and Science, XDR is appearing in many parts of the world in which TB is treated inadequately, such as Russia, and when it appears, it often can't be treated at all, the TB progresses and the patient often dies.
As the NEJM says, the only way to deal with MDR and XDR strains is prevention.
I think you have very much oversimplified NEJM's position of XDR-TB. Here is an actual quote from a NEJM article;
All evidence suggests that XDR tuberculosis reflects a failure to implement the measures recommended in the WHO's Stop TB Strategy.5 This strategy emphasizes expanding high-quality DOTS programs, addressing HIV-associated tuberculosis and drug resistance, strengthening health care systems and primary care services, encouraging all providers to follow good practices, empowering patients and communities to improve health, and enabling and promoting research.
Prevention is only one part of the above strategy.
The relevant part is:
strengthening health care systems and primary care services
The Republican policies are weakening health care systems and primary care services, particularly among the TB-vulnerable populations.
Many of them have latent disease, which means they feel OK but are transmitting TB
Here is an example where your information is completely incorrect. Here is a quote from the CDC fact sheet'
Persons with latent TB infection are not infe
Would you do it if there was a 100% chance of the vessel rupturing a few minutes after takeoff? Probably not, that would be suicide without any gains.
Vladimir Komarov did. http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/05/02/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage
The big problem that Facebook gets into when reporting sexual crimes is where to draw the line. It's a particular problem when you run into the irrational and hysterical laws and prosecutions on sex with young people.
This sounds like the old stories of photo processors who were required to report all photos with "suspicion" of child sex abuse to prosecutors. As you recall, professional photographers were arrested for taking nude pictures of their own children. Parents were arrested for taking bathtub pictures of infants. Parents had their children taken into custody for months. Innocent people had to spend tens of thousands of dollars in legal expenses to clear themselves. Prosecutors offered the choice of plea bargains or felony charges.
Most of us would be uncomfortable about a 30-year-old man having sex with a 13-year-old girl, but where does it stop? What about a 30-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl (which would be legal in the UK, I believe).
What about a 19-year-old man and a 16-year-old girl? An 18-year-old man and a 17-year-old girl? I'll leave it to you to visualize the spreadsheets.
What about two 14-year-olds? That's illegal in a lot of states. I bet there are a lot of 14-year-olds arranging sexual activities on Facebook. The last numbers I saw were that 10% of all 14-year-old girls have had intercourse. What are you going to do -- put 10% of the male population in jail?
Here's a more reasonable (medical) definition:
http://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/psychiatric_disorders/sexuality_and_sexual_disorders/paraphilias.html
Sexual offenses against children constitute a significant proportion of reported criminal sexual acts. Arbitrarily, the age of a person with pedophilia is set at 16 yr, with the age difference between offender and child victim set at 5 yr. The age of the child is usually 13 yr. For older adolescents with pedophilia (ie, 17 to 18 yr old), no precise age difference is specified; clinical and legal judgment is relied on. Legal criteria may be different from psychiatric criteria.
That's reasonable. I think that if you want to prosecute people for having sex, you have to demonstrate that one party was actually harmed. The prosecution shouldn't do more harm than the behavior.
Many much-reported prosecutions are of people who wouldn't fit into that medical definition. 17-year-old boys get prosecuted for having sex with 16-year-old girls. 16-year-olds get prosecuted for having sex with each other. The laws are draconian. Adolescent boys get 10-year prison terms. Teenagers wind up having to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives, drastically limiting where they can live and work. Often, they're forced to plea bargain and accept lifetime sex offender registration or go to trial and risk years in prison. People lose their jobs and have to quit college. The cost of defending yourself against such a prosecution can be tens of thousands of dollars, enough to cost a family its house and its college savings.
The people who pass these laws and prosecute them say that they'll examine each case using "reasonable judgment," and not prosecute "Romeo and Juliet" situations among teenagers, but that's bullshit. There's always some asshole prosecutor who says, "The law says it's rape. Discussion over." Once you start down the roller-coaster of notification and prosecution, there's no turning back.
Many of the defendants are black -- white people, especially wealthy people, have enough influence with the local prosecutors to get out of these situations.
I don't want Facebook reading my personal messages to find out if I wrote something suspicious that they should report to the police. I realize their situation but this will do a lot of damage to a lot of people. First get rational laws on drugs and sex, and then start prosecuting them.
Interesting fact: the age of consent in the U.S. was originally 10 years old, following English common law. Many Americans alive today have great-grandmothers who were married at 12 years of age.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/02/16_going_on_17.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2007/09/the_mindbooty_problem.html
"Experimental time machine?" Please, leave the hype and sensationalism to the "science" reporters.
Have pity on the poor girl. Science and Nature (and the university PR department) keeps telling you how important the public understanding of science is, and how important it is for scientists to explain their work in language the general public can understand. Otherwise you'll lose your grants, the Republicans will teach creationism in school, and your freshman biology students will go blank, fall asleep in class and major in business administration.
I know. That's why I said, "Why is it right?"
I'm glad your local jail is well-staffed, although I don't know where it is. If it's a good program, it's unusual.
According to the Journal of the American Medical association, prison health care is bad around the country. One of the problems is that services are contracted out to a few big corporations, like Correctional Medical Services, which according to JAMA was providing incompetent care which led to many deaths. Another problem is sheer budget-cutting.
http://www.aaskolnick.com/jama/28oct98a.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/jama/28oct98b.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/jama/28oct98c.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/baddoc1.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/baddoc2.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/baddoc3.htm
That was the most comprehensive series. Here are some more recent stories:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/03/jailhouse_doc.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2005/3/4/harsh_medicine_new_york_times_exposes
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/11/care-prison-healthcare.html
Parent said, "Prisoners receive better medical care than most Americans, and it's illegal to let them go untreated."
It's not true that prisoners receive better care than most Americans. If it is, I'd like to see the supporting data.
It may be illegal to let them go untreated. So it's illegal. Prisons do it all the time. Many organizations are suing prisons over health care, and often getting court orders. Sometimes the prisons respond to the court orders, and sometimes they don't.
If they get arbitrary 10% budget cuts, as they did in Texas, they couldn't improve their health care even if they wanted to.
You realize that hospitals have special laundry equipment to sterilize the laundry.
You mean like... bleach? There are lots of reasons they should be in a hospital over a motel, this is a rather weak choice of argument.
Like high-temperature washers and dryers, which have to meet specifications and inspections. There's a difference between laundering and sterilizing.
And you need special handling procedures for contaminated laundry before it's laundered.
The reason I mentioned laundries is that I read about a case in which a small hospital was using a regular commercial laundry (in violation of health regulations) and ran into these troubles.
The numbers are not important. What's important is the emergence of multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extremely-drug resistant (XDR) strains. MDR strains are difficult to treat. Some doctors say that XDR strains can be treated with great difficulty and expense, but I've read of cases of XDR that doctors couldn't treat at all.
Here's where I get my information from:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra0908076
Review Article
Current Concepts
MDR Tuberculosis — Critical Steps for Prevention and Control
Eva Nathanson, M.Sc., Paul Nunn, F.R.C.P., Mukund Uplekar, M.D., Katherine Floyd, Ph.D., Ernesto Jaramillo, M.D., Ph.D., Knut Lönnroth, M.D., Ph.D., Diana Weil, M.Sc., and Mario Raviglione, M.D.
N Engl J Med 2010; 363:1050-1058
September 9, 2010
Actually, we've had people flying in aircraft for years, and that caused major outbreaks of many infectious diseases. AIDS Patient Zero, don't forget, was an airline steward. SARS was spread by airline passengers. Like a lot of infectious diseases, SARS went from zero to 900 deaths very quickly. (The movie Contagion was pretty accurate, according to the reviews in the science magazines.) People are flying into the US every day from third world countries, and a lot of them have MDR and XDR TB. http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMcp1005750
As the NEJM says, the only way to deal with MDR and XDR strains is prevention. It's difficult (sometimes impossible) and expensive to treat MDR and XDR. Patients don't like to take the drugs for good reason -- isoniazid and rifamycin have serious and sometimes dangerous side effects, particularly liver damage, which is dangerous for patients with HCV or alcoholism. Many of them have latent disease, which means they feel OK but are transmitting TB. They don't want to take a drug for 6 months that makes them sick.
Science magazine had even more pessimistic articles about XDR. They sent a reporter to the former USSR, where they have no functioning health system and herd TB patients, AIDS patients, and drug addicts into the world's largest prison system (the largest after ours). They had XDR patients they couldn't treat even when they had the drugs.
The problem with Florida is that the Republican governor and legislature just closed down the very hospital they need to treat TB at a time when XDR is emerging as a real threat. They're privatizing health care, like the Russians and Chinese did (with disastrous results, and their antibiotic-resistant infections are threatening us). According to TFA, they're putting up TB patients in motels!
And you can't just treat people for their TB, you have to provide comprehensive health care. Which the Republicans are also cutting back.
This country is spending more money to fight Hollywood-fantasy bioweapons attacks than we're spending to fight real, documented, extremely dangerous diseases. There was a new bioweapons "sniffer" that cost I think $100 million, and turned out to be useless because of its false alarms. Who needs Al Qaeda when you've got the Republicans?