The government is allowed to do things that we're not allowed to do. Government agents working undercover are allowed to sell drugs, for example, if that's necessary to keep their cover. In this case they allowed gun dealers to sell guns to straw purchasers. That's no more illegal than allowing a government agent to sell drugs in order to make a case. If you look at the statutes and the cases, there are exceptions for government agents to do things in the course of their job that would be illegal if they weren't done in the course of their job.
The Mexican drug cartels are as dangerous as they are because they're getting illegally smuggled guns from the U.S. The Mexican government is justifiably complaining. It would help a lot of we could stop that traffic.
The first step in stopping gun crimes would be to track guns to see how they get from the U.S. to Mexico, to see who is breaking the law and how we could stop them.
Unfortunately, because of NRA lobbying, we can't track guns effectively, which makes it impossible to enforce the law to a significant degree. This operation was an attempt to find out where the guns were going, so that we could enforce the law.
The operation went wrong. I don't know if it went wrong because it was a stupid idea in the first place, or because even well-planned operations sometimes go wrong.
But there was nothing illegal about what the government did, because there are investigative exceptions to the law. And they were intending to enforce the law.
In Watergate, the burglars weren't government agents, and weren't acting under authorization of the law. They weren't trying to stop crimes. They were trying to help one party win the election by burglarizing the office of the other party. That's a big difference.
I think Obama made a lot of mistakes and supported a lot of bad policies. But this isn't one of them. The Republicans are using it for partisan attacks. They don't hold up. The Republicans are willing to do things that are bad for the country but good for their partisan advantage.
And the Bush Administration didn't do anything to stop the flow of illegal guns to Mexican cartels.
I remember watergate very well...was 14 years old. That summer, you couldn't flip a channel (we only had four tv channels then) without wall to wall 24/7 coverage of the watergate hearings. NOTHING was on but that it seemed. The newspapers, tv, radio stations were all slamming the cover ups, lies, burglary of the watergate issue. Not one person died as a result.
Juxtapose that with today, Benghazi, 4 people died, there are lies & cover ups all over the place,
Watergate was a burglary, which was a felony. The President of the United States knew about it, and tried to cover it up, which is a crime. It's either being an accessory after the fact, or obstruction of justice, or whatever the District of Columbia laws call it.
Benghazi did not involve a felony. That's a significant difference.
Except when the press flagrantly violates those laws, and illegally accesses phone systems, installs malware, and deletes voicemail on dead people's phones, to get their scoops, like murdoch's newscorp scandal.
I don't know when the press has been caught doing that without being prosecuted. Either in the UK or US.
Eliminating poverty is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for improving educational performance.
If you just give cash to people and let them do what they want with it, some people would use it to improve in ways that you would consider socially beneficial and some would not.
However, when the government provides them with social services, such as health care, child care, academic and vocational education, libraries, housing, and even employment, that can change the culture of a neighborhood, even a criminal culture.
Science had a review of the long-term studies of preschool programs in low-income neighborhoods. Some of them did lead to higher lifetime earnings and less crime. Head Start didn't do all that well, but similar programs were effective.
I know that there have been studies of recidivism among convicted criminals in prison. There were programs in New York State that encouraged prisoners to earn a college degree, and they had zero recidivism. They were discontinued.
Intuitively, it seems to me that having large communities of people in poverty would create crime and social pathology. Reversing the poverty should reverse the social pathology.
BTW, I think I've seen people in the Wall Street Journal editorial page argue against eliminating poverty.
I don't know of any prospective, randomized, controlled trials in which they gave a treatment group of poor people enough money to lift them out of poverty and left a control group in poverty for many years.
If that were the kind of evidence we demanded to make policy changes, we'd never be able to do anything.
However, if you look around the world, those countries that have eliminated poverty -- for example, the Scandinavian countries and Germany -- have better educational performance than we do.
It also makes intuitive sense to most people that if you lower family income significantly, children's educational achievement will decline.
Poverty is also associated with other social pathologies, such as crime and poor health.
Considering education, crime, health and other factors, I think it's a good policy to eliminate poverty, as the Scandinavians and Germans have done. They did it with free education and transfer payments, among other things.
The NAEP shows a small but steady increase from 1971 to 2008 in math and reading scores. The major change over that period is that the hispanic students, and especially the black students, had a fairly significant increase. That's the result of ending the blatant discrimination that existed in 1971, and improving the schools in black neighborhoods where they couldn't overcome segregation.
Ravitch said elsewhere that the most significant factor in student achievement is parent income. Raise the parent income and you raise the student achievement. Ravitch said that (based on an NAEP study) charter schools were worse overall than public schools, when you correct for parent income (although a few charter schools did well).
Some Jews want to choose food that was farmed by other Jews. Specifically, they want to choose food that was farmed and processed by Jews who were supervised by their own rabbi.* And most state laws let them do that. ___ *It would take more time than I have to properly make fun of these rabbis.
There's a story about the philosopher in the driving accident.
A philosopher is passenger in a car. The car gets into an accident at an intersection. The drivers sue each other.
At the trial, the philosopher testifies that they had the green light. The other driver's lawyer asks the philosopher: "Are you absolutely certain you had the green light?" The philosopher says, "Well, nobody can be absolutely certain of anything."
Then the other driver's lawyer asks his own client: "Are you absolutely certain you had the green light?" His client says, "Yes, I"m absolutely certain!"
The jury decides to believe the guy who is absolutely certain.
IEEE Spectrum did a story on this, and mentioned the studies where people went around homes near power lines and measured the radiation. It turned out that the highest radiation in ordinary homes came from food blenders and electric razors (which are held against the head).
Incidentally, DNA is constantly damaged during normal cell duplication, and constantly repaired by DNA repair enzymes. I think the numbers were in the thousands of errors every time the cell divides. Every infant has about 60 mutations, most of which don't have any noticeable effect. So DNA isn't this delicate stuff which is going to get the vapors and die when it gets damaged. It's pretty robust and it can take hits from cosmic rays. Of course, you can get real unlucky and be that 1-in-a-million guy who gets cancer and dies. But don't worry, your gene pool will survive.
Of course, but as pipe smokers know, the repeated application of abnormal heat DOES cause dna damage, as well as mouth cancer.
Since I'm a stickler on evidence, I don't think the damage from pipe smoking is due to the heat. There are lots of chemicals in pipe smoke that can damage cells, by damaging proteins, DNA, or whatever.
I don't think anyone has ever demonstrated that people who drink hot tea suffer DNA damage or mouth cancer.
After a while I realized the most important thing about environmental safety debates: Whoever gets the burden of proof loses.
So most environmental debates are about sticking the other guy with the burden of proof.
I was always looking for a clean argument with overwhelming evidence that would finally refute the other side. Unfortunately, the evidence was never quite that good. If the evidence was clearly irrefutable, there wouldn't be a controversy. The people on the other side would always come up with some study, however obscure, that left some remaining doubt.
On the cellphone debate, the last time I looked over the evidence, several years ago, I saw a review article in IEEE Spectrum which tried to prove that cellphones were safe but got all the evidence pro and con. There was one study in cell cultures where the cells exposed to cellphone radiation suffered damage that the unexposed cells didn't suffer. There was a study which found that people were more likely to get brain cancer on the side of the head they used for their cell phone. It's like homeopathy. I'd look at the studies and say, "I know this is ridiculous, but how do you explain these results? Are they just the false positives that wind up at the 95% confidence level 1 out of 20 times?"
Of course as a scientifically educated person you have to at admit that it's always possible that cell phones could cause brain cancer or something with a long latency period. Who knows, maybe 20 years from now cell phone users will finally start dropping dead in the streets, and the doubters will say, "I told you so." I would (and do) bet my life and the life of my family that they're safe, but you can never exclude that last 1-in-a-billion uncertainty.
I guess the lesson is: Engineering is clean. Biomedicine is sloppy.
The same people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Perl who sold us on the idea that we had to attack Iraq, because otherwise Saddam Hussein would attack us with chemical weapons, always wanted us to attack Syria next.
The Iraq story turned out to be a lie, and we are now worse off in Iraq, with Islamist and secular militias carving up the country and giving a big slice to al Qaeda and its successors. (Not to mention the 3,000 Americans killed, and forget about the 300,000 or so Iraqis who were killed.)
Assad is running a stable, secular dictatorship that violates human rights. The anti-government forces are sectarian Islamists who will violate human rights even worse, massacre people in the other sects, destroy Syria as a functioning country and turn it into feuding fiefdoms like Iraq.
No, your world is a dystopia in which art is a hobby for the rich, and ordinary people can't make a living out of it or even do it.
Your world is a dystopia in which people expect to have a comfortable retirement, worked hard, followed the rules, and now had the rules change on them.
Your world is a dystopia in which people like you don't care what happens to anybody else. When things are obviously unfair, instead of trying to change them, you just come up with a reason why nobody, including you, should care about it.
There are better societies. The US may or may not become one of them.
The creation of art is not, nor ever has been, dependent on remuneration. People don't exclusively create to be compensated. People have always created things. It's what we do.
As a creator, I can tell you that my art is extremely dependent on remuneration. When I get paid enough for my work, I can do it full time, 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
When I get paid a pittance, I have to do my work in my spare time, while I'm waiting on tables or something to pay the bills, and I can't do as good a job.
My work is a lot better when I do it full time than when I have to squeeze it into 4 hours in the early morning before I leave for my real job.
After a few months or years of juggling a schedule like this, a lot of people don't have the energy to create any more. Once you add the time and cost of raising a family, something has to go. Unless you abandon your family, the art is going to go.
Perhaps you're thinking of the 18th century, where art was pursued by wealthy gentlemen who didn't have to work. That's a good system for wealthy gentlemen. Unfortunately it leaves out the rest of us. It would be nice if we were all wealthy gentlemen. Unfortunately our economy has been going in the other direction.
More specifically, I have friends who were writers, actors and musicians, not stars but good in their fields, and are now at the end of their career or retired. A lot of them are getting royalties for the work they've done during their 20, 30 or 40 year careers in which they didn't make very much. It's nice to have a royalty or residuals check of $100, $200 or (rarely) $500 a month to supplement your meager Social Security of $1,000 a month or so. It makes the difference between being able to live with some of the comforts of middle-class life, like the difference between a nice apartment and a furnished room. Sure I'd like to be able to hear their music free on the Internet, but I don't like to see them lose their modest income.
Of course, DRM doesn't work, it's easy to get around, and they are going to lose their modest income, whether it's right or wrong. I don't know about the big picture or long-term consequences, but the little picture of these guys here and now is it seems like an awful shame.
I should have said public higher education. In the 1960s, the New York City University system was free (and it turned out many Nobel laureates and industry leaders like Andrew Grove), and the New York and California state university systems were practically free.
The big increases in higher education spending seem to be in the private schools. New York University used to be a third-rate school for frat guys. Now it pulled up its standards and is one of the most expensive schools in the country. They spent a lot on educational improvements, but they also have dorms like 4-star hotels and Olympic gyms.
K-12 is a different story. IN the 1960s, schools were segregated in most of the country, they didn't accept handicapped kids, and they expelled kids who didn't fit in. Now they have to teach them all. As a result, the NAEP scores for black students have risen dramatically to almost while levels since NAEP started keeping track in the 1970s.
Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.
Complete bullshit. Just to pick a name that everybody knows, Bronx High School of Science is as good as, and maybe better than, any suburban schools, by any standard. There are some very good high schools in New York City, and every upscale parent knows which ones they are.
You're ignoring the fact that suburbs are expensive, and they self-select for wealthy families. That's often the reason people move to the suburbs.
It's difficult or impossible to identify the kids who will make major contributions to society in middle school, for God's sake. Read the biographies of Nobel laureates. Many of them were fuck-ups in high school (and beyond).
Assuming that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates contributed to society (or at least made a lot of money), neither of them showed much promise in high school.
Most of the people who made significant contributions came from financially comfortable, and often wealthy, families. Try eliminating poverty and inequality, to the extent that most other developed countries have.
FWIW, I was a "gifted" student in the 1950s (IQ 160). They brought me up to believe that I was part of an elite and everybody else was stupid. I now know that I was wrong. It's a fundamental mistake to write off the other 80% as being too stupid for a good education.
We read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and obviously we were the alphas. The other kids are betas and gammas who just aren't as smart as us and a good education would be wasted on them. (This was a mirror of the British class structure, of course.)
Yes, it's true that 80% of kids can't do well in the educational system, and yes, it's true that a problem is the parents. I draw 2 conclusions:
(1) If you have a bad family background, school gives you a second chance. Not a school dedicated to getting high scores on machine-graded multiple-choice questions, but a school in which teachers act like human beings with feelings, and can relate to kids and support them, the way surrogate parents do.
(2) Every study says that the main factor that correlates with school achievement is family income. Adequate housing, health care, and employment is necessary (if not sufficient) for raising kids. You can't read to your kids if you're working 2 low-paid jobs, morning to night. The U.S. has about the greatest inequality, and the most widespread poverty, of any developed country. We didn't use that science education to eliminate poverty, we used it to make millionaires into billionaires. The upper 1% owns 75% of the wealth. Let's distribute that wealth a little bit and eliminate the poverty.
If you take those 80% and give them the advantages I had (father with a secure, well-paying union job, mother who didn't have to work), I think most of them would learn a lot. I think it would turn out that the percent of kids who can't learn wasn't 80% but much lower -- maybe 40%. Maybe 20%. Maybe less.
We can look at countries like Finland, which has eliminated inequality and poverty as much as possible, to see what an egalitarian society is like. They seem to be doing pretty well.
How much money should we spend on education? Well, if our society invests $1 in tax money in a kid, and we get $2 back in social benefits, we should invest as much money as we can with those returns. Any business would. If we went back to the levels of investment in public education we had in the 1960s and 1970s, I think we'd have the same high rates of economic development we had in that time.
And you can get that return from kids in the top 20% and the bottom 80%.
Slashdot Mirror
The government is allowed to do things that we're not allowed to do. Government agents working undercover are allowed to sell drugs, for example, if that's necessary to keep their cover. In this case they allowed gun dealers to sell guns to straw purchasers. That's no more illegal than allowing a government agent to sell drugs in order to make a case. If you look at the statutes and the cases, there are exceptions for government agents to do things in the course of their job that would be illegal if they weren't done in the course of their job.
The Mexican drug cartels are as dangerous as they are because they're getting illegally smuggled guns from the U.S. The Mexican government is justifiably complaining. It would help a lot of we could stop that traffic.
The first step in stopping gun crimes would be to track guns to see how they get from the U.S. to Mexico, to see who is breaking the law and how we could stop them.
Unfortunately, because of NRA lobbying, we can't track guns effectively, which makes it impossible to enforce the law to a significant degree. This operation was an attempt to find out where the guns were going, so that we could enforce the law.
The operation went wrong. I don't know if it went wrong because it was a stupid idea in the first place, or because even well-planned operations sometimes go wrong.
But there was nothing illegal about what the government did, because there are investigative exceptions to the law. And they were intending to enforce the law.
In Watergate, the burglars weren't government agents, and weren't acting under authorization of the law. They weren't trying to stop crimes. They were trying to help one party win the election by burglarizing the office of the other party. That's a big difference.
I think Obama made a lot of mistakes and supported a lot of bad policies. But this isn't one of them. The Republicans are using it for partisan attacks. They don't hold up. The Republicans are willing to do things that are bad for the country but good for their partisan advantage.
And the Bush Administration didn't do anything to stop the flow of illegal guns to Mexican cartels.
I remember watergate very well...was 14 years old.
That summer, you couldn't flip a channel (we only had four tv channels then) without wall to wall 24/7 coverage of the watergate hearings.
NOTHING was on but that it seemed. The newspapers, tv, radio stations were all slamming the cover ups, lies, burglary of the watergate
issue. Not one person died as a result.
Juxtapose that with today, Benghazi, 4 people died, there are lies & cover ups all over the place,
Watergate was a burglary, which was a felony. The President of the United States knew about it, and tried to cover it up, which is a crime. It's either being an accessory after the fact, or obstruction of justice, or whatever the District of Columbia laws call it.
Benghazi did not involve a felony. That's a significant difference.
Except when the press flagrantly violates those laws, and illegally accesses phone systems, installs malware, and deletes voicemail on dead people's phones, to get their scoops, like murdoch's newscorp scandal.
I don't know when the press has been caught doing that without being prosecuted. Either in the UK or US.
Eliminating poverty is a necessary, although not a sufficient, condition for improving educational performance.
If you just give cash to people and let them do what they want with it, some people would use it to improve in ways that you would consider socially beneficial and some would not.
However, when the government provides them with social services, such as health care, child care, academic and vocational education, libraries, housing, and even employment, that can change the culture of a neighborhood, even a criminal culture.
Science had a review of the long-term studies of preschool programs in low-income neighborhoods. Some of them did lead to higher lifetime earnings and less crime. Head Start didn't do all that well, but similar programs were effective.
I know that there have been studies of recidivism among convicted criminals in prison. There were programs in New York State that encouraged prisoners to earn a college degree, and they had zero recidivism. They were discontinued.
Intuitively, it seems to me that having large communities of people in poverty would create crime and social pathology. Reversing the poverty should reverse the social pathology.
BTW, I think I've seen people in the Wall Street Journal editorial page argue against eliminating poverty.
I don't know of any prospective, randomized, controlled trials in which they gave a treatment group of poor people enough money to lift them out of poverty and left a control group in poverty for many years.
If that were the kind of evidence we demanded to make policy changes, we'd never be able to do anything.
However, if you look around the world, those countries that have eliminated poverty -- for example, the Scandinavian countries and Germany -- have better educational performance than we do.
It also makes intuitive sense to most people that if you lower family income significantly, children's educational achievement will decline.
Poverty is also associated with other social pathologies, such as crime and poor health.
Considering education, crime, health and other factors, I think it's a good policy to eliminate poverty, as the Scandinavians and Germans have done. They did it with free education and transfer payments, among other things.
My staunch Republican friend is complaining that at age 71 he can't afford to retire, and has to keep working.
The free market isn't treating him as well as he thought it would.
Citation needed.
The best data on educational achievement is from the NAEP.
http://nationsreportcard.gov/ltt_2008/
The NAEP shows a small but steady increase from 1971 to 2008 in math and reading scores. The major change over that period is that the hispanic students, and especially the black students, had a fairly significant increase. That's the result of ending the blatant discrimination that existed in 1971, and improving the schools in black neighborhoods where they couldn't overcome segregation.
Diane Ravitch was assistant secretary of education under both GHW Bush and Bill Clinton. At first she supported these reforms. Then when she looked at the data, she decided she was wrong. Here's what she thinks about NCLB.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/ravitch-no-child-left-behind-and-the-damage-done/2012/01/10/gIQAR4gxoP_blog.html
Ravitch said elsewhere that the most significant factor in student achievement is parent income. Raise the parent income and you raise the student achievement. Ravitch said that (based on an NAEP study) charter schools were worse overall than public schools, when you correct for parent income (although a few charter schools did well).
Some Jews want to choose food that was farmed by other Jews. Specifically, they want to choose food that was farmed and processed by Jews who were supervised by their own rabbi.* And most state laws let them do that.
___
*It would take more time than I have to properly make fun of these rabbis.
There's a story about the philosopher in the driving accident.
A philosopher is passenger in a car. The car gets into an accident at an intersection. The drivers sue each other.
At the trial, the philosopher testifies that they had the green light. The other driver's lawyer asks the philosopher: "Are you absolutely certain you had the green light?" The philosopher says, "Well, nobody can be absolutely certain of anything."
Then the other driver's lawyer asks his own client: "Are you absolutely certain you had the green light?" His client says, "Yes, I"m absolutely certain!"
The jury decides to believe the guy who is absolutely certain.
IEEE Spectrum did a story on this, and mentioned the studies where people went around homes near power lines and measured the radiation. It turned out that the highest radiation in ordinary homes came from food blenders and electric razors (which are held against the head).
Incidentally, DNA is constantly damaged during normal cell duplication, and constantly repaired by DNA repair enzymes. I think the numbers were in the thousands of errors every time the cell divides. Every infant has about 60 mutations, most of which don't have any noticeable effect. So DNA isn't this delicate stuff which is going to get the vapors and die when it gets damaged. It's pretty robust and it can take hits from cosmic rays. Of course, you can get real unlucky and be that 1-in-a-million guy who gets cancer and dies. But don't worry, your gene pool will survive.
Of course, but as pipe smokers know, the repeated application of abnormal heat DOES cause dna damage, as well as mouth cancer.
Since I'm a stickler on evidence, I don't think the damage from pipe smoking is due to the heat. There are lots of chemicals in pipe smoke that can damage cells, by damaging proteins, DNA, or whatever.
I don't think anyone has ever demonstrated that people who drink hot tea suffer DNA damage or mouth cancer.
I used to write for an environmental magazine.
After a while I realized the most important thing about environmental safety debates: Whoever gets the burden of proof loses.
So most environmental debates are about sticking the other guy with the burden of proof.
I was always looking for a clean argument with overwhelming evidence that would finally refute the other side. Unfortunately, the evidence was never quite that good. If the evidence was clearly irrefutable, there wouldn't be a controversy. The people on the other side would always come up with some study, however obscure, that left some remaining doubt.
On the cellphone debate, the last time I looked over the evidence, several years ago, I saw a review article in IEEE Spectrum which tried to prove that cellphones were safe but got all the evidence pro and con. There was one study in cell cultures where the cells exposed to cellphone radiation suffered damage that the unexposed cells didn't suffer. There was a study which found that people were more likely to get brain cancer on the side of the head they used for their cell phone. It's like homeopathy. I'd look at the studies and say, "I know this is ridiculous, but how do you explain these results? Are they just the false positives that wind up at the 95% confidence level 1 out of 20 times?"
Of course as a scientifically educated person you have to at admit that it's always possible that cell phones could cause brain cancer or something with a long latency period. Who knows, maybe 20 years from now cell phone users will finally start dropping dead in the streets, and the doubters will say, "I told you so." I would (and do) bet my life and the life of my family that they're safe, but you can never exclude that last 1-in-a-billion uncertainty.
I guess the lesson is: Engineering is clean. Biomedicine is sloppy.
Couldn't the Syrians just buy PCs directly from China?
The same people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Perl who sold us on the idea that we had to attack Iraq, because otherwise Saddam Hussein would attack us with chemical weapons, always wanted us to attack Syria next.
The Iraq story turned out to be a lie, and we are now worse off in Iraq, with Islamist and secular militias carving up the country and giving a big slice to al Qaeda and its successors. (Not to mention the 3,000 Americans killed, and forget about the 300,000 or so Iraqis who were killed.)
Assad is running a stable, secular dictatorship that violates human rights. The anti-government forces are sectarian Islamists who will violate human rights even worse, massacre people in the other sects, destroy Syria as a functioning country and turn it into feuding fiefdoms like Iraq.
We ignored the same human rights violations when Assad was our puppet and we wanted to send prisoners to Syria for him to torture. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/feb/19/syria-us-ally-human-rights
Well, if Law Comics says so.
'We don't have the ability to go to court and say, "We need a court order to effectuate the intercept."...
I think he means, "Without a reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, we don't have the ability to go to court ..."
No, your world is a dystopia in which art is a hobby for the rich, and ordinary people can't make a living out of it or even do it.
Your world is a dystopia in which people expect to have a comfortable retirement, worked hard, followed the rules, and now had the rules change on them.
Your world is a dystopia in which people like you don't care what happens to anybody else. When things are obviously unfair, instead of trying to change them, you just come up with a reason why nobody, including you, should care about it.
There are better societies. The US may or may not become one of them.
During the last century, in many times and many places, artists could make a good living and devote themselves to their work.
I wouldn't want to live in your world.
The creation of art is not, nor ever has been, dependent on remuneration. People don't exclusively create to be compensated. People have always created things. It's what we do.
As a creator, I can tell you that my art is extremely dependent on remuneration. When I get paid enough for my work, I can do it full time, 10 or 12 or 14 hours a day, 7 days a week.
When I get paid a pittance, I have to do my work in my spare time, while I'm waiting on tables or something to pay the bills, and I can't do as good a job.
My work is a lot better when I do it full time than when I have to squeeze it into 4 hours in the early morning before I leave for my real job.
After a few months or years of juggling a schedule like this, a lot of people don't have the energy to create any more. Once you add the time and cost of raising a family, something has to go. Unless you abandon your family, the art is going to go.
Perhaps you're thinking of the 18th century, where art was pursued by wealthy gentlemen who didn't have to work. That's a good system for wealthy gentlemen. Unfortunately it leaves out the rest of us. It would be nice if we were all wealthy gentlemen. Unfortunately our economy has been going in the other direction.
More specifically, I have friends who were writers, actors and musicians, not stars but good in their fields, and are now at the end of their career or retired. A lot of them are getting royalties for the work they've done during their 20, 30 or 40 year careers in which they didn't make very much. It's nice to have a royalty or residuals check of $100, $200 or (rarely) $500 a month to supplement your meager Social Security of $1,000 a month or so. It makes the difference between being able to live with some of the comforts of middle-class life, like the difference between a nice apartment and a furnished room. Sure I'd like to be able to hear their music free on the Internet, but I don't like to see them lose their modest income.
Of course, DRM doesn't work, it's easy to get around, and they are going to lose their modest income, whether it's right or wrong. I don't know about the big picture or long-term consequences, but the little picture of these guys here and now is it seems like an awful shame.
Depends on how you define terrorists. The IRA maintained that they had declared a state, and they were state actors, therefore not terrorists.
I think the term "terrorist" is too political to use in most debates.
I should have said public higher education. In the 1960s, the New York City University system was free (and it turned out many Nobel laureates and industry leaders like Andrew Grove), and the New York and California state university systems were practically free.
The big increases in higher education spending seem to be in the private schools. New York University used to be a third-rate school for frat guys. Now it pulled up its standards and is one of the most expensive schools in the country. They spent a lot on educational improvements, but they also have dorms like 4-star hotels and Olympic gyms.
K-12 is a different story. IN the 1960s, schools were segregated in most of the country, they didn't accept handicapped kids, and they expelled kids who didn't fit in. Now they have to teach them all. As a result, the NAEP scores for black students have risen dramatically to almost while levels since NAEP started keeping track in the 1970s.
Move to suburbia. Even if the kid still doesn't make the cut for the gifted program, he'll receive a far higher quality education than he would in even the best of urban schools.
Complete bullshit. Just to pick a name that everybody knows, Bronx High School of Science is as good as, and maybe better than, any suburban schools, by any standard. There are some very good high schools in New York City, and every upscale parent knows which ones they are.
You're ignoring the fact that suburbs are expensive, and they self-select for wealthy families. That's often the reason people move to the suburbs.
It's difficult or impossible to identify the kids who will make major contributions to society in middle school, for God's sake. Read the biographies of Nobel laureates. Many of them were fuck-ups in high school (and beyond).
Assuming that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates contributed to society (or at least made a lot of money), neither of them showed much promise in high school.
Most of the people who made significant contributions came from financially comfortable, and often wealthy, families. Try eliminating poverty and inequality, to the extent that most other developed countries have.
FWIW, I was a "gifted" student in the 1950s (IQ 160). They brought me up to believe that I was part of an elite and everybody else was stupid. I now know that I was wrong. It's a fundamental mistake to write off the other 80% as being too stupid for a good education.
We read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and obviously we were the alphas. The other kids are betas and gammas who just aren't as smart as us and a good education would be wasted on them. (This was a mirror of the British class structure, of course.)
Yes, it's true that 80% of kids can't do well in the educational system, and yes, it's true that a problem is the parents. I draw 2 conclusions:
(1) If you have a bad family background, school gives you a second chance. Not a school dedicated to getting high scores on machine-graded multiple-choice questions, but a school in which teachers act like human beings with feelings, and can relate to kids and support them, the way surrogate parents do.
(2) Every study says that the main factor that correlates with school achievement is family income. Adequate housing, health care, and employment is necessary (if not sufficient) for raising kids. You can't read to your kids if you're working 2 low-paid jobs, morning to night. The U.S. has about the greatest inequality, and the most widespread poverty, of any developed country. We didn't use that science education to eliminate poverty, we used it to make millionaires into billionaires. The upper 1% owns 75% of the wealth. Let's distribute that wealth a little bit and eliminate the poverty.
If you take those 80% and give them the advantages I had (father with a secure, well-paying union job, mother who didn't have to work), I think most of them would learn a lot. I think it would turn out that the percent of kids who can't learn wasn't 80% but much lower -- maybe 40%. Maybe 20%. Maybe less.
We can look at countries like Finland, which has eliminated inequality and poverty as much as possible, to see what an egalitarian society is like. They seem to be doing pretty well.
How much money should we spend on education? Well, if our society invests $1 in tax money in a kid, and we get $2 back in social benefits, we should invest as much money as we can with those returns. Any business would. If we went back to the levels of investment in public education we had in the 1960s and 1970s, I think we'd have the same high rates of economic development we had in that time.
And you can get that return from kids in the top 20% and the bottom 80%.
Couldn't you just hang yourself instead?