Plame (or Plame-Wilson, whichever you like) was an agent under non-official cover, which is a little different from being "undercover". It's a little more dangerous, actually, since the US would disavow any knowledge of her relationship to the agency in the event of her capture. Most covert agents at the agency carry the black passport, which entitles them to the protections normally accorded to diplomats. Mrs. Wilson carries the same blue passport that you and I do.
The paper-pushing you're talking about occurred at a CIA brass-plate business called Brewster-Jennings, an ersatz energy-research firm that was building relationships with wealthy Arabs to try and get information (build contacts) relating to the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction in muslim nations.
There has been no assertion by anyone that Mrs. Wilson lied. I don't recall seeing any mention in the 9/11 commission report of Mrs. Wilson having lied about anything (I have the hardcopy), though I have seen it said on a few shrill right-wing blogs.
There has been no assertion that Mr. Wilson lied. In fact, Mr. Wilson was the head of the US mission in Iraq prior to Gulf War I, and was singularly responsible for getting all of the diplomatic staff safely out of the country prior to the bombing campaign. George H.W. Bush appointed him, and commended him for his service to the nation. Mr. Wilson was the ambassador to a number of African nations (incuding Niger) and had the necessary contacts to assess the credibility of the yellowcake claim. He discovered the claim was false (it was based on a document passed along by a less-than-reputable informant, and the document was determined to be a forgery) and reported that up the chain prior (by a month, as I recall) to the President's State of the Union address.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but that we disagree. You don't want to pay for private schooling, and I want you to pay for it. You should work hard to pay for your children's private schooling without a tax break. What's more, I want people who can't pay for private schooling to have a public school system that approaches, or challenges, a private education system in terms of class size, materials, and arts/music curricula. You want to give up on poor immigrants and brown-skinned people, and I want to fund a better effort for everyone regardless of economic status.
DC's proposed vouchers are different from ours here, but this extra cash you talk about always gets eaten up by administration of the vouchers. This 2K windfall per child is so much smoke. Let parents decide if they can educate their kids privately, and let them do so, but don't cut funding for public schooling. Imagine what our parents could have done if they got the same quality of public education systems as what was available privately. How many small businesses were lost in that diversion/investment in capital? You don't believe that public education can be as good as private, and I agree in an empirical and practical sense, but that makes me want to have my tax money shoot for parity rather than get divided or diverted from the public schools in a voucher scheme.
Compared to most federal dollars, you spend (and I) more defending heroin dealers in Afganistan than we do on public pre-college public education. 40 billion in Afghanistan per year bears me out. The whole NSF budget is a paltry percentage of that amount (5.5 billion). If the federal government spent a measly 20 billion, you'd have your new materials, your better teachers, your art and music, your smaller class sizes, your 50% discount in public university tuitions. You just don't give a crap. You want a tax cut that's good for a year or two over the kind of 50-year investment in economic vibrancy and productivity that gets released slowly over the same timeframe. I got a 300 dollar check from the president a few years ago and it's already gone. The principal shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway (of which I am a very minor shareholder) made billions they can't possibly spend.
As someone who's seen both public and private schooling systems, I don't see any reason why we can't offer private-school-grade educations to everyone... class size, materials, teacher incentives, new books... we're able to provide the best, but we don't because we want to restrict black and brown skinned people from education. Welfare rolls have shrunk to their lowest levels in 60 years. States simply demand work for payment these days. Why cast the pride to private schools when our nation can feel proud of funding excelsior-quality public educations? For the cost of a middle east police action over a 5 year timeframe, we can supplant 20 years of open public education. I want to see a public school system that has all the funding of the private, less the entrance exams. You seem to want a discount for the nouveau riche.
We just see it differently. I want the moon program of education and you want estes rockets. At some point, handing a kid an estes rocket and his mom & dad a paltry check isn'tt isn't good enough. That point has come and gone, and that's why the USA is the education dumbass, to return to topic.
Don't worry, I'm just passing along more moonbat hippie liberal BS you don't care about. You can dismiss it like everything else you don't like. You probably will. I'm totally okay with that. Education and health care and balanced budgets are fruitcake hippie liberal moonbat kinds of things. I'm a reak whacko about liking them. You're much smarter than that, I'm sure.
Well, having spent awhile working and visiting in Germany, I can say that much of the "bad" english in Germany comes from lack of practice and the length of time since studying it. Almost every 20-something I ran into could speak really good english. Even folks in their 30s and 40s do pretty well. Once you meet people in their 50s and 60s, there's fewer and fewer folks that will even bother to speak english, even though they might understand bits of it.
My solution was to always start off conversations in German, using simple words. My delivery isn't what you'd call fluid, so if the person knows some english, they'll usually meet you halfway after a couple sentences. Sometimes they enjoy just hearing foreigners taking a shot at the language at all. There are sooo many immigrants to Germany that don't even bother to learn the language that you win pretty big points (and patience) if you demonstrate that you're trying to get around without forcing THEM to operate to your language requirement.
I'll tell you why this democrat doesn't support them, and I can also say that I'm not the rule. I have a few lefty friends who like the voucher concept, interestingly enough. You sound conservative, but you seem to be stumping for an entitlement to the "economically disadvantaged", which is hard to gauge. I think what you're really stumping for is a government subsidy for well-off people to pay cheaper private school tuitions, but I could be wrong.
For me, it's about keeping the funding in the school system. The money in that voucher is coming out of the public school budget. Sure, class size gets reduced (which is a good thing, I believe), but the public schools are still out of the money. A lot of art and music programs have been cut from public budgets already, and having the extra money per-student would allow public schools to build those classes back in, better equip the chem lab, add more AP courses, pay the better teachers a little more money, buy newer textbooks, etc.
I went to public school for K-6 and private school from 7-12, so I've seen both. The tuition for each year of my private school education was 16K, back in 1980. (incidentally, I went to public university for my undergrad and grad schooling, spanning some 11 years, and the total cost of those eleven years was about half of what my dad spent on my middle and upper school tuition -- my dad likes to tell me that my private schooling cost him six nicely-appointed corvettes) Anyhow, if you're talking about a voucher for 2-3000 dollars, you're not really making that big a dent in a private school tuition when you have a voucher. It cuts the cost a bit, but not that much.
What seems to get left out of the conversation is that most private schools have an assistance program, built on endowments from alums and benefactors, that would make a much bigger dent in the total cost of tuition than the voucher. For older schools like the one I went to, the amount of cash available for grants and tuition assistance can be in the millions. Several of my classmates paid no tuition -=at all=-.
Another item not often considered by those who see vouchers as the cure-all for education woes is that most private schools have entrance exams and waiting lists. If you don't have the innate ability to study and learn in a more aggressive educational environment, no voucher and no school is going to be able to help that. Parents play a big role in supporting the learning function. You can be the poorest kid on the block and if your mom makes sure that you get good nutrition and healthcare and you're getting your schoolwork done and she keeps in contact with your teachers, you're probably able to pass an entrance exam and get into a private school. If all your parents did with regard to your schooling was give you lunch money and send you out the door, you probably won't get in, voucher or not.
I vote for every education-directed bond issue, prop tax increase and mill levy that comes on the ballot. I don't have any kids. I believe very strongly that public schools really need all the funding they can get. It serves the children and families of the community I live in to do so. Yeah, so I pay a little more on my tax bill, but I believe that the net effect on my community and its economy is a beneficial and long-lasting one.
Finally, I think there are a lot of people who send their kids to public schools even though they could probably afford to send them to private schools. They bitch and kvetch about how bad the publich schools are and then they buy a new lexus every other year. If I'm ever blessed to have kids of my own, they'll go to private school, probably my alma mater, and I'll continue to vote for more funding for the public institutions they could have gone to.
Hope this helps you sort out how one tree-hugging hippie liberal moonbat looks at the issue.
I agree that social promotion is a problem, but I've never heard of it as a raison d'etre for teachers unions. Unions exist to protect the rights of groups of workers, not to protect policy decisions like social promotion. Guidelines for social promotion are set at the level of the school board or superintendent, and there's a certain amount of flexibility given to administrators and education managers (principals) as to how they want to handle it.
As for the experience in California, what public (or any) employee doesn't want to see an increase in compensation? Teachers in the public schools (especially the younger, highly motivated ones) are not paid very well... just barely enough to get by. Some teachers end up having to compensate for inadequate materials by buying supplies themselves. I went to both public and private schools and I can tell you that my sixth grade math book was the same one that had been used for ten years before me. Many of my books were so old and dilapidated that they had to be taped together. In 7th grade (in provate school), we were using texts that were no more than a few years old, and everyone got a new copy that they could keep. Better funding can definetly get past the problems with materials, not to mention bringing art and music classes back to the fore.
Tenure is a somewhat different topic, but any increase in the amount of time required for tenure are always going to be fought by a teacher's union... that's its job. This doesn't mean that fighting it is always going to achieve the desired result, but it's part of the contract bargaining process. Writing a contract that two parties can agree on is a difficult and contentious process. The tone can get quite shrill, sure, and the ads from both sides can become quite hard to listen to after awhile, but it's part of the process.
You say that the teacher's union wants regular raises and tenure for the worst among them. No union wants to coddle the worst among them. In fact, unions offer a lot of training and advice to their memberships to ensure that they're representing the best quality workforce, and a workforce that follows the laws of the state they work in.
As for assessing the quality of teachers and rewarding the good performers, I don't think you'll get much disagreement about that. The hard part is determining what the metric of successful teaching is. Right now, it seems like standardized testing is all the rage, and it may be a good tool for assessing the progress of students, but wrt teachers it may only show how well they can teach to the test.
As much as I hear vouchers described as a panacea for all education problems, what's often missed is that the money for the voucher comes out of the public school budget. Sure, class sizes would shrink (admittedly a good thing), but the level of funding for each student remains the same. The schools still remain underfunded. I make a point of voting for every mill levy and bond issue to increase funding for schools. I don't have any kids, but it's my duty to the community to see that adequate funding is available to educate the children of my community.
What's coming across very clearly in your post is some animosity towards unions in general. Unions are less powerful now than they've ever been. The larger umbrella organizations are fracturing and falling apart. Smaller unions are re-inventing themselves to better fit the needs of workers of the present day. 60-70 years ago unions paved the way for workplace safety, and the US is a pretty safe place to work in comparison to some other nations because of it. Today they're working more to guarantee health and retirement benefits for their rolls. I often hear about how unions are obsolete, but in these days of 15K-100K person layoffs, corporate raiding of employee pensions and easy-peasy bankruptcy reorganizations that leave workers penniless at retirement age, I think they're still required. Your employer may dissolve your pension or health benefits, but uni
Yeah, I've run into that one with some of my older relatives.
Here's my guess as to where the confusion may stem from:
My older relatives grew up in the 50s and 60s. Back then, a computer was this big hulking thing in the back office that you fed stacks of cards in one end and paper flew out of the other end. There were buttons and switches and lights to show the registers or make adjustments to how it functioned. The first teletype I ever used was just a keyboard with a noisy printer attached to it and a little wheel and spool for you to crank your paper-tape programs into it. At some point, instead of the cards and all those little switches and buttons, or the halfway-step of the teletype, there was a B&W TV mounted into the thing along with a keyboard. The little switches got concealed behind a panel or a door somewhere so that the person (the "data processor") didn't accidentally hork the configuration of the thing. (When I was really little in the early 70s, my mother was a systems analyst at the phone company and my dad was an accountant at Control Data. There are pictures of me sitting in front of exactly this kind of hardware, and my very first artistic efforts were enshrined on the punch cards that held mom's old programs.)
The computer was still one big hulking monstrosity with a screen and a keyboard. When terminals came into fashion, the screen and keyboard were still in the same physical package. Even though the actual computing horsepower was not there at the terminal, anyone who didn't understand what a terminal was could guess that the terminal WAS the computer without being too far from the mark. Over time, as the desktop PC thing took off in businesses and then homes, when you bought a computer you got the monitor and keyboard with it -- the whole thing was still "the computer".
Over time, the individual components have become separate and generic. You can use any keayboard or any monitor with your computer, but in the minds of people who built their associations with computers long ago, these devices are still recognized as "the computer".
At least that's where I think it comes from.
As for the difference between "the computer" and the DVD player example, the two have different roots in the collective mindset. When the home entertainment system consisted of nothing more than a big radio and the TV set, these were two components. If you were a radio enthusiast, you might have had a number of components for your radio, each with its own narrow technical function. When the VCR came into the picture, this was an accessory component to the TV, which wasn't much different from accessory radio componentry or what you might encounter if you were into HIFI and had an amplifier, tuner, turntable and reel-to-reel. The DVD player and surround-sound speaker setups borrowed from that traditon of componentry in HIFI setups.
The odd thing is that home entertainment is moving towards having all those devices stuffed into the TV set itself, and some people are really sold on that idea. One of my Dad's friends remarked to me that he was shopping for a VHS-DVD-TV all-in-one for his daughter to take to college and asked me which brand I thought was best. When I told him that none of them were any good because it's a bad design, he asked me why. When I explained that when the DVD and videotape players inside the TV decided to not work anymore (at different times, of course), they'd require repair or replacement that would cause her to go without the TV. If the components are kept seperate, she could choose what to repair or replace without losing the ability to use the TV for anything else. It took awhile, but he understood the point.
Agreed. They've always been locked down to their own formats. I have to confess that I've liked their design aesthetic, but good looks only go so far.
My main beef with Sony (apart from their tightfisted approach to formats) is that their laptops and desktops all use proprietary versions of hardware and drivers. You can only get the parts from sony, and you have to use the sony-fied drivers or you get crap.
One example I'll never forget is when my old boss told me that he wanted the OS on his micro-tiny vaio laptop to be reinstalled, after an HD wipe. He didn't spring for the $400 external -=CDROM=- drive, so you could not boot to the install disk. The machine came with all the system restore disks, but without that drive, you could not use them. I did manage to get an XP installation on it without having to boot from the CD (using a $45 external USB CDROM drive), but it was nearly unusable because the little HD would not let go of the old Win2K partition. It was dual-boot WinXP/Win2K and there wasn't much space left to do anything, and the display drivers were not quite right, so it'd lock up from time to time. What a headache.
There used to be barrier islands and wetlands between Ponchartrain, New Orleans and the sea, up intil the 50s, as I recall. Over time, these eroded away.
The importance of barrier islands and coastal wetlands (bayou and bog) in mitigating storm surges is well known, but the ACE (Army Corps of Engineers) was less concerned with them in favor of maintaining the shipping channels in the delta. The economics drove the focus elsewhere.
With a year of dredging, a new set of barrier islands could be restored and the risk of overpowering storm surges could be reduced. I'm not saying that you could eliminate the need to prepare for flooding that's caused by storm surges, but that their impact could be lessened to a degree such that the existing levee and floodwall system could cope.
I frequently consult the CSM for international news and I have seen almost zero bias in the reporting. Part of the reason why the CSM's international coverage is so good is because they do exactly as you and the GGP agree should be done -- they use multiple sources. Where issues are espcially contentious and perspectives are wide-ranging, they incorporate many viewpoints, accordingly.
Oddly enough, the one criticism I've heard of the CSM is that they use so many sources that the stories are too general -- that is, no one viewpoint really gets very deep coverage. It's a valid argument, but if you want a deeper understanding of just one side of an issue/story, there are plenty of targeted publications available to serve that end.
Thanks for posting (finally). I just recently got promoted to manage the team I currently work with. I found your observations to be very keen and helpful.
I agree with your assessment of the post and the GP.
However, having worked as an engineer for 6 or so years, and also having spent that time going to business school for an MIS (in software dev, the most technical track in the business school), I can say that these axioms -=are=- taught in mgmt coursework -- at least they appeared in mine. I got two full semesters on mgmt, and what you found to be correct in the post and GP were reenforced many times over.
Concidentally with the overall topic, I've just recently been promoted to manage my group, and I do have all the same chops as the rest of the people on my team. Some of us are stronger in certain areas more than others, but we learn from each other. My current boss (the one I'll replace), never had any engineering experience, and while he was great as insulating us from the noise above, he could not summon the interest in the technical improvements we have to make to get the company working more efficiently. He's a great leader from the standpoint of process improvement and leaving people to do their jobs without hovering (how we do what we do), but he's short on ideas and innovation with regard to what we're doing.
When he was faced with having to innovate in a technical manner (instead of a process manner), he knew he wasn't up for it and tapped me to fill his shoes. While I'm delighted at the prospect of being able to advance us from a technological standpoint, I'm worried about how my rapid advancement will affect the relationships I have with the people I work with every day. Out of the four of us, three have been here for more than five years while I've been here for just one. Two out of the four are paid more than me, which I have no problem with.
Anyhow, I'm reading the posts on this topic with great interest. Not that I'd actually follow any recommendations, but more to get a broad perspective on these issues.
I've been a Jew for almost forty years, and I've never heard of "the Jewish Principle". How very interesting.
May I suggest that bringing in more money than you spend is how profits get generated in any business or household. It doesn't have anything to do with Jews or being Jewish.
I recently started walking to one of my neighborhood pubs after work. The girls are less pretty there than the ones at my last saloon of choice, but I'm much less anxious about the possible consequences of having just one more pint.
Check that -- I'm less anxious about being pulled over for traffic infractions. I'm a wee bit more worried (and more cautious) about stumbing into the road or being hit crossing the street.
It struck me that if our Japanese friends put just a teensy bit more effort into combining a few different technologies towards the concept, we might get something really exciting out of it.
So, what you'd get is a female android robot with sensitive skin and a comfy lap to rest your head on, that can sense intruders and fires when you're away, put out the fires and shoot the intruders (maybe with pepperballs?), and send you streaming video of what's happening. Tack on a little Scooba functionality and it could keep the floors clean when there are no fires or intruders.
When I was working at a VOIP company, I was setting up some Netras (Sun pizza boxes) with our software for testing purposes. I had to make some changes to configs in/etc (hosts, password, and the like) and clean out a couple directories beforehand. I made the config changes and then promptly deleted -=everything=- in/etc and subdirs.
Wow. That brings back sooo many good memories. Late nights with the ][+, desperately trying to break my best score. Simple simulation, but very engaging.
Slashdot Mirror
Plame (or Plame-Wilson, whichever you like) was an agent under non-official cover, which is a little different from being "undercover". It's a little more dangerous, actually, since the US would disavow any knowledge of her relationship to the agency in the event of her capture. Most covert agents at the agency carry the black passport, which entitles them to the protections normally accorded to diplomats. Mrs. Wilson carries the same blue passport that you and I do.
The paper-pushing you're talking about occurred at a CIA brass-plate business called Brewster-Jennings, an ersatz energy-research firm that was building relationships with wealthy Arabs to try and get information (build contacts) relating to the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction in muslim nations.
There has been no assertion by anyone that Mrs. Wilson lied. I don't recall seeing any mention in the 9/11 commission report of Mrs. Wilson having lied about anything (I have the hardcopy), though I have seen it said on a few shrill right-wing blogs.
There has been no assertion that Mr. Wilson lied. In fact, Mr. Wilson was the head of the US mission in Iraq prior to Gulf War I, and was singularly responsible for getting all of the diplomatic staff safely out of the country prior to the bombing campaign. George H.W. Bush appointed him, and commended him for his service to the nation. Mr. Wilson was the ambassador to a number of African nations (incuding Niger) and had the necessary contacts to assess the credibility of the yellowcake claim. He discovered the claim was false (it was based on a document passed along by a less-than-reputable informant, and the document was determined to be a forgery) and reported that up the chain prior (by a month, as I recall) to the President's State of the Union address.
Please do your homework.
Excellent observations ...
DC's proposed vouchers are different from ours here, but this extra cash you talk about always gets eaten up by administration of the vouchers. This 2K windfall per child is so much smoke. Let parents decide if they can educate their kids privately, and let them do so, but don't cut funding for public schooling. Imagine what our parents could have done if they got the same quality of public education systems as what was available privately. How many small businesses were lost in that diversion/investment in capital? You don't believe that public education can be as good as private, and I agree in an empirical and practical sense, but that makes me want to have my tax money shoot for parity rather than get divided or diverted from the public schools in a voucher scheme.
Compared to most federal dollars, you spend (and I) more defending heroin dealers in Afganistan than we do on public pre-college public education. 40 billion in Afghanistan per year bears me out. The whole NSF budget is a paltry percentage of that amount (5.5 billion). If the federal government spent a measly 20 billion, you'd have your new materials, your better teachers, your art and music, your smaller class sizes, your 50% discount in public university tuitions. You just don't give a crap. You want a tax cut that's good for a year or two over the kind of 50-year investment in economic vibrancy and productivity that gets released slowly over the same timeframe. I got a 300 dollar check from the president a few years ago and it's already gone. The principal shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway (of which I am a very minor shareholder) made billions they can't possibly spend.
As someone who's seen both public and private schooling systems, I don't see any reason why we can't offer private-school-grade educations to everyone... class size, materials, teacher incentives, new books ... we're able to provide the best, but we don't because we want to restrict black and brown skinned people from education. Welfare rolls have shrunk to their lowest levels in 60 years. States simply demand work for payment these days. Why cast the pride to private schools when our nation can feel proud of funding excelsior-quality public educations? For the cost of a middle east police action over a 5 year timeframe, we can supplant 20 years of open public education. I want to see a public school system that has all the funding of the private, less the entrance exams. You seem to want a discount for the nouveau riche.
We just see it differently. I want the moon program of education and you want estes rockets. At some point, handing a kid an estes rocket and his mom & dad a paltry check isn'tt isn't good enough. That point has come and gone, and that's why the USA is the education dumbass, to return to topic.
Don't worry, I'm just passing along more moonbat hippie liberal BS you don't care about. You can dismiss it like everything else you don't like. You probably will. I'm totally okay with that. Education and health care and balanced budgets are fruitcake hippie liberal moonbat kinds of things. I'm a reak whacko about liking them. You're much smarter than that, I'm sure.
My solution was to always start off conversations in German, using simple words. My delivery isn't what you'd call fluid, so if the person knows some english, they'll usually meet you halfway after a couple sentences. Sometimes they enjoy just hearing foreigners taking a shot at the language at all. There are sooo many immigrants to Germany that don't even bother to learn the language that you win pretty big points (and patience) if you demonstrate that you're trying to get around without forcing THEM to operate to your language requirement.
I like the idea of clothing being able to do as you suggest, but as the e-paper is composed of plastic films, laundering it would be a PITA.
For me, it's about keeping the funding in the school system. The money in that voucher is coming out of the public school budget. Sure, class size gets reduced (which is a good thing, I believe), but the public schools are still out of the money. A lot of art and music programs have been cut from public budgets already, and having the extra money per-student would allow public schools to build those classes back in, better equip the chem lab, add more AP courses, pay the better teachers a little more money, buy newer textbooks, etc.
I went to public school for K-6 and private school from 7-12, so I've seen both. The tuition for each year of my private school education was 16K, back in 1980. (incidentally, I went to public university for my undergrad and grad schooling, spanning some 11 years, and the total cost of those eleven years was about half of what my dad spent on my middle and upper school tuition -- my dad likes to tell me that my private schooling cost him six nicely-appointed corvettes) Anyhow, if you're talking about a voucher for 2-3000 dollars, you're not really making that big a dent in a private school tuition when you have a voucher. It cuts the cost a bit, but not that much.
What seems to get left out of the conversation is that most private schools have an assistance program, built on endowments from alums and benefactors, that would make a much bigger dent in the total cost of tuition than the voucher. For older schools like the one I went to, the amount of cash available for grants and tuition assistance can be in the millions. Several of my classmates paid no tuition -=at all=-.
Another item not often considered by those who see vouchers as the cure-all for education woes is that most private schools have entrance exams and waiting lists. If you don't have the innate ability to study and learn in a more aggressive educational environment, no voucher and no school is going to be able to help that. Parents play a big role in supporting the learning function. You can be the poorest kid on the block and if your mom makes sure that you get good nutrition and healthcare and you're getting your schoolwork done and she keeps in contact with your teachers, you're probably able to pass an entrance exam and get into a private school. If all your parents did with regard to your schooling was give you lunch money and send you out the door, you probably won't get in, voucher or not.
I vote for every education-directed bond issue, prop tax increase and mill levy that comes on the ballot. I don't have any kids. I believe very strongly that public schools really need all the funding they can get. It serves the children and families of the community I live in to do so. Yeah, so I pay a little more on my tax bill, but I believe that the net effect on my community and its economy is a beneficial and long-lasting one.
Finally, I think there are a lot of people who send their kids to public schools even though they could probably afford to send them to private schools. They bitch and kvetch about how bad the publich schools are and then they buy a new lexus every other year. If I'm ever blessed to have kids of my own, they'll go to private school, probably my alma mater, and I'll continue to vote for more funding for the public institutions they could have gone to.
Hope this helps you sort out how one tree-hugging hippie liberal moonbat looks at the issue.
I agree that social promotion is a problem, but I've never heard of it as a raison d'etre for teachers unions. Unions exist to protect the rights of groups of workers, not to protect policy decisions like social promotion. Guidelines for social promotion are set at the level of the school board or superintendent, and there's a certain amount of flexibility given to administrators and education managers (principals) as to how they want to handle it.
As for the experience in California, what public (or any) employee doesn't want to see an increase in compensation? Teachers in the public schools (especially the younger, highly motivated ones) are not paid very well... just barely enough to get by. Some teachers end up having to compensate for inadequate materials by buying supplies themselves. I went to both public and private schools and I can tell you that my sixth grade math book was the same one that had been used for ten years before me. Many of my books were so old and dilapidated that they had to be taped together. In 7th grade (in provate school), we were using texts that were no more than a few years old, and everyone got a new copy that they could keep. Better funding can definetly get past the problems with materials, not to mention bringing art and music classes back to the fore.
Tenure is a somewhat different topic, but any increase in the amount of time required for tenure are always going to be fought by a teacher's union... that's its job. This doesn't mean that fighting it is always going to achieve the desired result, but it's part of the contract bargaining process. Writing a contract that two parties can agree on is a difficult and contentious process. The tone can get quite shrill, sure, and the ads from both sides can become quite hard to listen to after awhile, but it's part of the process.
You say that the teacher's union wants regular raises and tenure for the worst among them. No union wants to coddle the worst among them. In fact, unions offer a lot of training and advice to their memberships to ensure that they're representing the best quality workforce, and a workforce that follows the laws of the state they work in.
As for assessing the quality of teachers and rewarding the good performers, I don't think you'll get much disagreement about that. The hard part is determining what the metric of successful teaching is. Right now, it seems like standardized testing is all the rage, and it may be a good tool for assessing the progress of students, but wrt teachers it may only show how well they can teach to the test.
As much as I hear vouchers described as a panacea for all education problems, what's often missed is that the money for the voucher comes out of the public school budget. Sure, class sizes would shrink (admittedly a good thing), but the level of funding for each student remains the same. The schools still remain underfunded. I make a point of voting for every mill levy and bond issue to increase funding for schools. I don't have any kids, but it's my duty to the community to see that adequate funding is available to educate the children of my community.
What's coming across very clearly in your post is some animosity towards unions in general. Unions are less powerful now than they've ever been. The larger umbrella organizations are fracturing and falling apart. Smaller unions are re-inventing themselves to better fit the needs of workers of the present day. 60-70 years ago unions paved the way for workplace safety, and the US is a pretty safe place to work in comparison to some other nations because of it. Today they're working more to guarantee health and retirement benefits for their rolls. I often hear about how unions are obsolete, but in these days of 15K-100K person layoffs, corporate raiding of employee pensions and easy-peasy bankruptcy reorganizations that leave workers penniless at retirement age, I think they're still required. Your employer may dissolve your pension or health benefits, but uni
My understanding was that Rutan got the prize, and TFA didn't give me much of an idea as for what this specific competition is trying to achieve.
It did talk a lot about states getting their own spaceports, which I find pretty cool.
If someone could point mt to a relevant link, that's be great.
Thanks.
That wasn't it.
There was no mork, then. Not at Disney, anyhow.
I seem to recall going to a big theater at Disneyworld (pre-epcot) that had screens all around the room, except at the very back.
There were no seats in there, so that you could turn around and look at any screen you wanted.
The movie wasn't very long, but it was pretty neat.
I'm pretty sure I didn't hallucinate this, so if anyone can help complete my recollection, that'd be great.
Here's my guess as to where the confusion may stem from:
My older relatives grew up in the 50s and 60s. Back then, a computer was this big hulking thing in the back office that you fed stacks of cards in one end and paper flew out of the other end. There were buttons and switches and lights to show the registers or make adjustments to how it functioned. The first teletype I ever used was just a keyboard with a noisy printer attached to it and a little wheel and spool for you to crank your paper-tape programs into it. At some point, instead of the cards and all those little switches and buttons, or the halfway-step of the teletype, there was a B&W TV mounted into the thing along with a keyboard. The little switches got concealed behind a panel or a door somewhere so that the person (the "data processor") didn't accidentally hork the configuration of the thing. (When I was really little in the early 70s, my mother was a systems analyst at the phone company and my dad was an accountant at Control Data. There are pictures of me sitting in front of exactly this kind of hardware, and my very first artistic efforts were enshrined on the punch cards that held mom's old programs.)
The computer was still one big hulking monstrosity with a screen and a keyboard. When terminals came into fashion, the screen and keyboard were still in the same physical package. Even though the actual computing horsepower was not there at the terminal, anyone who didn't understand what a terminal was could guess that the terminal WAS the computer without being too far from the mark. Over time, as the desktop PC thing took off in businesses and then homes, when you bought a computer you got the monitor and keyboard with it -- the whole thing was still "the computer".
Over time, the individual components have become separate and generic. You can use any keayboard or any monitor with your computer, but in the minds of people who built their associations with computers long ago, these devices are still recognized as "the computer".
At least that's where I think it comes from.
As for the difference between "the computer" and the DVD player example, the two have different roots in the collective mindset. When the home entertainment system consisted of nothing more than a big radio and the TV set, these were two components. If you were a radio enthusiast, you might have had a number of components for your radio, each with its own narrow technical function. When the VCR came into the picture, this was an accessory component to the TV, which wasn't much different from accessory radio componentry or what you might encounter if you were into HIFI and had an amplifier, tuner, turntable and reel-to-reel. The DVD player and surround-sound speaker setups borrowed from that traditon of componentry in HIFI setups.
The odd thing is that home entertainment is moving towards having all those devices stuffed into the TV set itself, and some people are really sold on that idea. One of my Dad's friends remarked to me that he was shopping for a VHS-DVD-TV all-in-one for his daughter to take to college and asked me which brand I thought was best. When I told him that none of them were any good because it's a bad design, he asked me why. When I explained that when the DVD and videotape players inside the TV decided to not work anymore (at different times, of course), they'd require repair or replacement that would cause her to go without the TV. If the components are kept seperate, she could choose what to repair or replace without losing the ability to use the TV for anything else. It took awhile, but he understood the point.
My main beef with Sony (apart from their tightfisted approach to formats) is that their laptops and desktops all use proprietary versions of hardware and drivers. You can only get the parts from sony, and you have to use the sony-fied drivers or you get crap.
One example I'll never forget is when my old boss told me that he wanted the OS on his micro-tiny vaio laptop to be reinstalled, after an HD wipe. He didn't spring for the $400 external -=CDROM=- drive, so you could not boot to the install disk. The machine came with all the system restore disks, but without that drive, you could not use them. I did manage to get an XP installation on it without having to boot from the CD (using a $45 external USB CDROM drive), but it was nearly unusable because the little HD would not let go of the old Win2K partition. It was dual-boot WinXP/Win2K and there wasn't much space left to do anything, and the display drivers were not quite right, so it'd lock up from time to time. What a headache.
I'm hoping that's it's similar to my own Fire Depression System -- a 12-pack of beer.
I'd only add the following observation:
There used to be barrier islands and wetlands between Ponchartrain, New Orleans and the sea, up intil the 50s, as I recall. Over time, these eroded away.
The importance of barrier islands and coastal wetlands (bayou and bog) in mitigating storm surges is well known, but the ACE (Army Corps of Engineers) was less concerned with them in favor of maintaining the shipping channels in the delta. The economics drove the focus elsewhere.
With a year of dredging, a new set of barrier islands could be restored and the risk of overpowering storm surges could be reduced. I'm not saying that you could eliminate the need to prepare for flooding that's caused by storm surges, but that their impact could be lessened to a degree such that the existing levee and floodwall system could cope.
I frequently consult the CSM for international news and I have seen almost zero bias in the reporting. Part of the reason why the CSM's international coverage is so good is because they do exactly as you and the GGP agree should be done -- they use multiple sources. Where issues are espcially contentious and perspectives are wide-ranging, they incorporate many viewpoints, accordingly.
Oddly enough, the one criticism I've heard of the CSM is that they use so many sources that the stories are too general -- that is, no one viewpoint really gets very deep coverage. It's a valid argument, but if you want a deeper understanding of just one side of an issue/story, there are plenty of targeted publications available to serve that end.
Thanks for posting (finally). I just recently got promoted to manage the team I currently work with. I found your observations to be very keen and helpful.
However, having worked as an engineer for 6 or so years, and also having spent that time going to business school for an MIS (in software dev, the most technical track in the business school), I can say that these axioms -=are=- taught in mgmt coursework -- at least they appeared in mine. I got two full semesters on mgmt, and what you found to be correct in the post and GP were reenforced many times over.
Concidentally with the overall topic, I've just recently been promoted to manage my group, and I do have all the same chops as the rest of the people on my team. Some of us are stronger in certain areas more than others, but we learn from each other. My current boss (the one I'll replace), never had any engineering experience, and while he was great as insulating us from the noise above, he could not summon the interest in the technical improvements we have to make to get the company working more efficiently. He's a great leader from the standpoint of process improvement and leaving people to do their jobs without hovering (how we do what we do), but he's short on ideas and innovation with regard to what we're doing.
When he was faced with having to innovate in a technical manner (instead of a process manner), he knew he wasn't up for it and tapped me to fill his shoes. While I'm delighted at the prospect of being able to advance us from a technological standpoint, I'm worried about how my rapid advancement will affect the relationships I have with the people I work with every day. Out of the four of us, three have been here for more than five years while I've been here for just one. Two out of the four are paid more than me, which I have no problem with.
Anyhow, I'm reading the posts on this topic with great interest. Not that I'd actually follow any recommendations, but more to get a broad perspective on these issues.
May I suggest that bringing in more money than you spend is how profits get generated in any business or household. It doesn't have anything to do with Jews or being Jewish.
I recently started walking to one of my neighborhood pubs after work. The girls are less pretty there than the ones at my last saloon of choice, but I'm much less anxious about the possible consequences of having just one more pint.
Check that -- I'm less anxious about being pulled over for traffic infractions. I'm a wee bit more worried (and more cautious) about stumbing into the road or being hit crossing the street.
So, what you'd get is a female android robot with sensitive skin and a comfy lap to rest your head on, that can sense intruders and fires when you're away, put out the fires and shoot the intruders (maybe with pepperballs?), and send you streaming video of what's happening. Tack on a little Scooba functionality and it could keep the floors clean when there are no fires or intruders.
Yup, that would be one hell of a robot.
When I was working at a VOIP company, I was setting up some Netras (Sun pizza boxes) with our software for testing purposes. I had to make some changes to configs in /etc (hosts, password, and the like) and clean out a couple directories beforehand. I made the config changes and then promptly deleted -=everything=- in /etc and subdirs.
Bar none, it was my finest hour.
It's gauging probabilities of success across a range of strategies (abeit simple).
I'm pretty sure that such a question can be explored by math games. It can be explored statistically in study, can't it? Why not then by games?