That is, I think, one of the most important statements in this thread. And the current Western aid process mostly does not let them decide. It is shipped from governments to governments, and the 0.1% use that free aid to feed and arm themselves and their cronies, while pushing down the 99.9% in ways that would make Occupy Wall Street absolutely shiver. If you want to talk about imperialist privilege, talk about the existing aid programs which view themselves as great saviors, and kill a bunch of them off so that a few well-connected corrupt people [Mugabe, for example] lose the resources and power that they currently use to smack down everyone else in their countries.
Agree there's a difference between fault and responsibility. Disagree with being responsible for the actions of people who lived and died during a timespan that I was incapable of influencing. I am responsible for my kid right now because he is a minor under my care. Once he becomes an adult, moves out of my house, and gets his own job, I hope he continues to follow the example I tried to set for him, but his mistakes will be his, and not my, responsibility. My grandfather -- nothing he did before I was born is my responsibility in any form.
I did RTFA. The authors of the paper surveyed 54,000 academics, and about 1,300 responded to say, "Yes we felt pressured." That's 2.5%. Only 1/3 of those named a single journal that pressured them. Another 2.5% said, "We've heard that others have been pressured, but never us." 7.5% said, "We've never heard of it." And 87.5% didn't respond. The survey shows extreme self-selection as 7 of 8 academics did not respond. So before someone gets excited that 20% of academics are pressured, note that under 13% of academics responded.
Sorry it doesn't work for you. I've found multiple places to live on Craigslist. I've bought things, sold things, and given away things for free. It's a classifieds section, not an AppStore, and Craigslist works very well for me on those terms.
But traditionally you think as Democrats as anti-war,
Democrats are only "anti-war" to people that don't read history books. Here is a list of the major wars of the 20th century, along with the party in power when the US went to war:
WWI - Democrat
WWII - Democrat
Korea - Democrat
Vietnam - Democrat
Perhaps Democrats are seen as anti-war, and thus other governments feel greater license to do more provocative things when they are in power. I've known kids who pull stunts around Mom that they wouldn't around Dad, because they know their Dad draws the line sooner. But eventually they cross the line even for Mom, who is forced to act. If Dad had been around, he wouldn't have had to act because his reputation acts as a deterrent.
They aren't paying for the privilege of promoting Twitter and Facebook, they're paying for the privilege of accessing them to use them search rating valutations.. They do it already, but in limited scope. When site is mentioned in Facebook or Twitter (now only publicly), it affects their rankings. They use them as metric. Likewise they can use it for targeting advertising.
So the only way for Google to not be evil is to pay Facebook and Twitter lots of money "for access to their data." Please pardon my tiny violin here. If Google were filtering out Facebook, that would be one thing. Refusing to cough up extortion money or payola is another. Sounds like Google is doing nothing unethical here. And if you think that Google is making a poor business decision, then encourage someone else -- Bing or Yahoo for example -- to do it and eat Google's lunch in the process. Until then...
Or the neighbors could work at the data center... not to get all pipe-dreamy but I live in an area that was built partly to provide housing for employees of a GE manufacturing plant. It wasn't a company town; these were single family residences marketed very heavily to GE employees who worked less than a mile away. Imagine living nearby and walking or bicycling to work -- now you don't have to commute out of the neighborhood and someone else doesn't have to commute in.
And if I had my theater 100% packed solid, I might not mind making all my money on concessions. Remember, the theaters would love to pay less money to the studios but they still sign up for the expensive blockbusters, because they make enough in the end overall. If the studio pushes it too far, the theater will say no and book something else. Unless the theater is owned by the studio, in which case it's just an accounting game about who gets to keep the money.
The blockbuster movie also can afford the accountants who devise the plan whereby Paramount Pictures pays Paramount Catering $25/sandwich and the film loses money so they don't have to pay the high-priced stars working on percentage, but the catering business makes bank for the overall corporation.
If you're in the garage from 8-5, you're an employee in the area. Pricing is lower because you're a regular, and you have time to figure out the best deal; with too high a cost, you'd take the bus or bike instead, or park three blocks away and hoof it. If you're in for a shorter time, you're in sales or a visitor. Pricing is higher because you can easier afford to pay extra money than spend time to price-shop the garages. Plus the short-time visitors sometimes come as mobs (the lunch rush, for example), and if you're going to have enough parking available for the lunch crowd, you have to have the spots vacant and not earning any money other parts of the day.
TANSTAAFL is true, but where will you get the mass movement to drive discounted pricing with the elimination of perks? It annoys me that prices are inflated so that some poor homeless guy who can't get credit and only pays cash has to pay an extra 1% so that the retail store can break even while letting me get my 1% cash back on credit card purchases. But that said, if I can't change the price the store charges, I'm going to get my 1%.
There are a few ways I've seen reduced pricing in effect. Several stores and restaurants near me are cash-only. Some gas stations have cash prices versus credit prices; the difference is usually 2-3%. And some computer stores offered an x% discount for paying cash (since state law forbids a surcharge when using a credit card.) Each of these is neat, but I don't think any of them will expand greatly and push out the credit cards or their perks.
A quarter acre? What are you doing with all that land? Most of the people I know find that too much work to care for. With your quarter acre, you have to hire a gardener or dedicate precious free time upkeep -- do you want lawn, trees, gardens, or bare ugly dirt and weeds? Of course, Long Island was where Levittown was built -- and those first suburbs featured 2br/1ba homes that took all of 750 square feet, and that was considered middle class back then. Someone who calls into radio stations has expectations and entitlement ideas that may not comport with reality.
When the computer kills someone, whom do we punish and how? Do we simply pull the plug on that machine, or do we jail the engineer, the QA team, the marketing guys, and the CEO? When the Romans built a bridge, they made the architect stand underneath it as they put the final pieces in place and removed the supports; if it was badly designed and crumbled, the architect died on the spot. I want to know what responsibility is laid at whose feet before I let society put trust in these person-devoid devices.
Just remember to get a memory chip with some capacity. Look at price per capacity, but I assume a 4 GB should cost next to nothing these days, and it will keep more than a thousand images.
Agreed. Get 3 4 GB cards. That way if you forget to empty your card (or go click-happy), you have another one waiting. And why 3 4 GB cards instead of 1 16 GB card? First, if you get busy, you can be downloading pics from one card to a laptop while still shooting (mostly affects wedding photographers, but we've known unpaid amateurs photographing weddings who were in that situation), and second, if your friend forgot to empty his card for his camera, you can hand him a loaner without stopping your photography. Third, sometimes you can get the multi-pack at your local warehouse store for much cheaper than the one mondo-card.
Finally, know one thing: card size isn't the only factor; write speed can matter too, especially if you end up with a point-and-shoot. Until it stores image #1 of your baby doing a cute thing, it won't let you take image #2 -- and a fast card can make the difference between "got it" and "almost..."
Come on, you are advocating use of a camera for manual zoom to a person who said explicitly they do not want to photograph as part of a serious hobby or profession?
That makes NO SENSE. People who are not seriously into photography DO NOT WANT to manually focus a camera, DO NOT CARE about a critical point of focus.
Please re-read the original post, and then re-read your words. GP is correct. Almost all SLRs today have an autofocus option even though their lenses are manual zoom. We can all agree that manual focus is for serious folks to play with, not someone who is upgrading from a cell phone camera. But manual zoom and manual focus are totally different things.
On camera selection, I would recommend a used Canon Rebel DSLR for its great price-to-performance, and they're always available from folks wanting to upgrade to the next many megapixels. For his described needs, even the original 6 megapixel camera will be fine -- more megapixels is just more hard drive space per individual image and experience, and he's not going to be in PhotoShop all the time. Unless you also want video (which the original poster didn't mention) in which case there are a dozen point-and-shoot cameras that will meet your needs -- the Canon Powershot A570 is one I use and enjoy for that.
You may want to look into Judaism. There originally was a land distribution scheme similar to this (albeit probably slightly imperfect and inequal due to the tools available at the time). Besides having land distributed to every family, every 50 years there was to be a Year of Jubilee in which any land that had been sold to pay debts was returned to the original owning family, among other things. The land was supposed to lie fallow one year out of every seven as well. Looked at through modern eyes, there is a lot of protection for the poor and for the earth in ancient Jewish law.
I am one of those. I am buying LPs because the stuff is better than most of the industrially mass-produced and committee-reviewed stuff coming out nowadays. Not an audiophile, just appreciate the kinds of things they produced back then. I actually smile and laugh when I buy an LP younger than I am.
In general boundaries are useful. In this case, I doubt that you have RTFA. These are not land mass boundaries; this is claiming the majority of the South China Sea (which is bordered by several countries) as exclusively Chinese territory. Such a boundary line conflicts with international law, and is completely unnecessary either to orienting the user in the region in question or to the science explored.
As an addendum, GGP is correct. The majority of ebooks are dreck. The majority of print books are also dreck. Consider any of the books directed at mid-level executives. You can identify them by their titles having semicolons with explanatory subtitles. Most of these would be great as pamphlets; they did not deserve to be expanded into 128-page books (or longer). But because there is no major pamphlet publishing industry, they say, "Make a book out of it," and then the few salient worthwhile points are covered in junk. So it is not merely ebooks, but rather the current expansion of publishing.
Now I will sit back and await an offer to write a book expounding on the declines in the publishing industry, which will appear in every Hudson News (bookstore chain seen mostly in major airports, for those of you not familiar) in America.
in fact you can spend your entire life reading only books written by the greatest writers and you will die before you finish them.
maybe if you had a clue as to what free ebooks were available you might know what you are talking about.
As one who has a clue about Gutenberg, and had it long before there were iPad/Kindle/Nook/etc. devices, I agree. That said, since there are such great writers, you will not catch me wasting my time browsing the free dreck that people put out nowadays. Years ago I spotted on usenet the following lament: "The plus side of advances in digital recording is that anybody can record an album. The down side is that everybody is doing so." We can agree that the filtering mechanisms of the past were imperfect, but to turn off filtering entirely is not an improvement in my eyes. Go -- read your free modern dreck. I shall stick with the old stuff, which is truly beautiful thoughtful work, and does not deserve to be buried by what is being written today.
These are TEACHERS we're talking about! They figure out how to communicate truths to less-informed people (children), give them opportunities to apply their learning, and finally measure their comprehension. That's what they do for a living. Is it so impossible to think that they couldn't come together and develop a set of reasonable ways to understand high quality versus low quality teachers? This union-administration antagonism is real in practice, but stupid in theory: for every teacher wondering if he'd lose his job due to a poor evaluation process, there are 20 or more kids who may lose out on an education. At least the teacher can volunteer for or give input to the team developing the evaluation process; the child's voice is not listened to in the school system which exists solely because there are kids. I hear all your political rebuttals, and I am ignoring them because you on/. are smart enough to step through the snark if you choose and figure out something that could work, where interests are aligned in a way as to promote the education of children more than the maintaining of territories, titles, and tenures.
Bring on Sesame Street, home schooling, charter schools, Khan Academy, and your/. great ideas. Let's stop claiming that school quality can be measured by the number of dollars put into them or the ratio of students to teachers. No other institution is measured that way; we measure outputs versus inputs, or just outputs. We can agree that the current standardized testing regimen is not doing its job, or is ignoring key areas of learning, or that it has cultural biases, or a host of other problems. But what solutions do we have?
In complete agreement with you that I wouldn't want anyone interfering with my routing either. Reading the comments, I think the way they would successfully market this is by selling it cheaper than an average GPS -- and making up for the discount to you by receiving fees from retailers. This would be like how consumer PCs bundled with crapware or trialware sell for less than an identically-equipped business PC with a clean OS build. So you and I wouldn't buy it, but someone who didn't know better and was excited to find a really cheap GPS would... which then makes full sense as to why Target and Walmart and Starbucks are named as potential route-bidders, but not BMW or Crate and Barrel.
And you could score decent grades if you just tried.
You say that like it's a good thing. It's not. It is a total and complete failure of the system.
Oh I fully agree with you. It is not a good thing. It stands in stark contrast to the education that tftp received, perhaps because tftp went to school in Moscow. The frustrating thing about it was seeing my parents stand up for our education, and to have to fight the schools so that we could learn. I cannot say I am performing at my full potential, but I would have tuned out significantly (and still graduated) if not for their efforts to ensure I remained challenged in accordance with my abilities, not some statistical average peer or lowest common denominator level.
These underachievers end up needing significant remedial coursework in college when they go, causing all sorts of strains on the state university system and lowering the average quality and value of an education. It would be better if they didn't pass so easily in high school, so they could decide either to work harder or to stop at the end of high school.
Slashdot Mirror
But they decide, not you.
That is, I think, one of the most important statements in this thread. And the current Western aid process mostly does not let them decide. It is shipped from governments to governments, and the 0.1% use that free aid to feed and arm themselves and their cronies, while pushing down the 99.9% in ways that would make Occupy Wall Street absolutely shiver. If you want to talk about imperialist privilege, talk about the existing aid programs which view themselves as great saviors, and kill a bunch of them off so that a few well-connected corrupt people [Mugabe, for example] lose the resources and power that they currently use to smack down everyone else in their countries.
Agree there's a difference between fault and responsibility. Disagree with being responsible for the actions of people who lived and died during a timespan that I was incapable of influencing. I am responsible for my kid right now because he is a minor under my care. Once he becomes an adult, moves out of my house, and gets his own job, I hope he continues to follow the example I tried to set for him, but his mistakes will be his, and not my, responsibility. My grandfather -- nothing he did before I was born is my responsibility in any form.
I did RTFA. The authors of the paper surveyed 54,000 academics, and about 1,300 responded to say, "Yes we felt pressured." That's 2.5%. Only 1/3 of those named a single journal that pressured them. Another 2.5% said, "We've heard that others have been pressured, but never us." 7.5% said, "We've never heard of it." And 87.5% didn't respond. The survey shows extreme self-selection as 7 of 8 academics did not respond. So before someone gets excited that 20% of academics are pressured, note that under 13% of academics responded.
Sorry it doesn't work for you. I've found multiple places to live on Craigslist. I've bought things, sold things, and given away things for free. It's a classifieds section, not an AppStore, and Craigslist works very well for me on those terms.
But traditionally you think as Democrats as anti-war,
Democrats are only "anti-war" to people that don't read history books. Here is a list of the major wars of the 20th century, along with the party in power when the US went to war:
Perhaps Democrats are seen as anti-war, and thus other governments feel greater license to do more provocative things when they are in power. I've known kids who pull stunts around Mom that they wouldn't around Dad, because they know their Dad draws the line sooner. But eventually they cross the line even for Mom, who is forced to act. If Dad had been around, he wouldn't have had to act because his reputation acts as a deterrent.
Try DuckDuckGo. Yes, it's not Google in so many ways. And their selling point is "We don't track or bubble (filter based on past history) you."
They aren't paying for the privilege of promoting Twitter and Facebook, they're paying for the privilege of accessing them to use them search rating valutations.. They do it already, but in limited scope. When site is mentioned in Facebook or Twitter (now only publicly), it affects their rankings. They use them as metric. Likewise they can use it for targeting advertising.
So the only way for Google to not be evil is to pay Facebook and Twitter lots of money "for access to their data." Please pardon my tiny violin here. If Google were filtering out Facebook, that would be one thing. Refusing to cough up extortion money or payola is another. Sounds like Google is doing nothing unethical here. And if you think that Google is making a poor business decision, then encourage someone else -- Bing or Yahoo for example -- to do it and eat Google's lunch in the process. Until then...
Or the neighbors could work at the data center... not to get all pipe-dreamy but I live in an area that was built partly to provide housing for employees of a GE manufacturing plant. It wasn't a company town; these were single family residences marketed very heavily to GE employees who worked less than a mile away. Imagine living nearby and walking or bicycling to work -- now you don't have to commute out of the neighborhood and someone else doesn't have to commute in.
And if I had my theater 100% packed solid, I might not mind making all my money on concessions. Remember, the theaters would love to pay less money to the studios but they still sign up for the expensive blockbusters, because they make enough in the end overall. If the studio pushes it too far, the theater will say no and book something else. Unless the theater is owned by the studio, in which case it's just an accounting game about who gets to keep the money.
The blockbuster movie also can afford the accountants who devise the plan whereby Paramount Pictures pays Paramount Catering $25/sandwich and the film loses money so they don't have to pay the high-priced stars working on percentage, but the catering business makes bank for the overall corporation.
If you're in the garage from 8-5, you're an employee in the area. Pricing is lower because you're a regular, and you have time to figure out the best deal; with too high a cost, you'd take the bus or bike instead, or park three blocks away and hoof it. If you're in for a shorter time, you're in sales or a visitor. Pricing is higher because you can easier afford to pay extra money than spend time to price-shop the garages. Plus the short-time visitors sometimes come as mobs (the lunch rush, for example), and if you're going to have enough parking available for the lunch crowd, you have to have the spots vacant and not earning any money other parts of the day.
TANSTAAFL is true, but where will you get the mass movement to drive discounted pricing with the elimination of perks? It annoys me that prices are inflated so that some poor homeless guy who can't get credit and only pays cash has to pay an extra 1% so that the retail store can break even while letting me get my 1% cash back on credit card purchases. But that said, if I can't change the price the store charges, I'm going to get my 1%.
There are a few ways I've seen reduced pricing in effect. Several stores and restaurants near me are cash-only. Some gas stations have cash prices versus credit prices; the difference is usually 2-3%. And some computer stores offered an x% discount for paying cash (since state law forbids a surcharge when using a credit card.) Each of these is neat, but I don't think any of them will expand greatly and push out the credit cards or their perks.
A quarter acre? What are you doing with all that land? Most of the people I know find that too much work to care for. With your quarter acre, you have to hire a gardener or dedicate precious free time upkeep -- do you want lawn, trees, gardens, or bare ugly dirt and weeds? Of course, Long Island was where Levittown was built -- and those first suburbs featured 2br/1ba homes that took all of 750 square feet, and that was considered middle class back then. Someone who calls into radio stations has expectations and entitlement ideas that may not comport with reality.
When the computer kills someone, whom do we punish and how? Do we simply pull the plug on that machine, or do we jail the engineer, the QA team, the marketing guys, and the CEO? When the Romans built a bridge, they made the architect stand underneath it as they put the final pieces in place and removed the supports; if it was badly designed and crumbled, the architect died on the spot. I want to know what responsibility is laid at whose feet before I let society put trust in these person-devoid devices.
Just remember to get a memory chip with some capacity. Look at price per capacity, but I assume a 4 GB should cost next to nothing these days, and it will keep more than a thousand images.
Agreed. Get 3 4 GB cards. That way if you forget to empty your card (or go click-happy), you have another one waiting. And why 3 4 GB cards instead of 1 16 GB card? First, if you get busy, you can be downloading pics from one card to a laptop while still shooting (mostly affects wedding photographers, but we've known unpaid amateurs photographing weddings who were in that situation), and second, if your friend forgot to empty his card for his camera, you can hand him a loaner without stopping your photography. Third, sometimes you can get the multi-pack at your local warehouse store for much cheaper than the one mondo-card.
Finally, know one thing: card size isn't the only factor; write speed can matter too, especially if you end up with a point-and-shoot. Until it stores image #1 of your baby doing a cute thing, it won't let you take image #2 -- and a fast card can make the difference between "got it" and "almost..."
" manual zoom, which is much faster and accurate"
Come on, you are advocating use of a camera for manual zoom to a person who said explicitly they do not want to photograph as part of a serious hobby or profession?
That makes NO SENSE. People who are not seriously into photography DO NOT WANT to manually focus a camera, DO NOT CARE about a critical point of focus.
Please re-read the original post, and then re-read your words. GP is correct. Almost all SLRs today have an autofocus option even though their lenses are manual zoom. We can all agree that manual focus is for serious folks to play with, not someone who is upgrading from a cell phone camera. But manual zoom and manual focus are totally different things.
On camera selection, I would recommend a used Canon Rebel DSLR for its great price-to-performance, and they're always available from folks wanting to upgrade to the next many megapixels. For his described needs, even the original 6 megapixel camera will be fine -- more megapixels is just more hard drive space per individual image and experience, and he's not going to be in PhotoShop all the time. Unless you also want video (which the original poster didn't mention) in which case there are a dozen point-and-shoot cameras that will meet your needs -- the Canon Powershot A570 is one I use and enjoy for that.
You may want to look into Judaism. There originally was a land distribution scheme similar to this (albeit probably slightly imperfect and inequal due to the tools available at the time). Besides having land distributed to every family, every 50 years there was to be a Year of Jubilee in which any land that had been sold to pay debts was returned to the original owning family, among other things. The land was supposed to lie fallow one year out of every seven as well. Looked at through modern eyes, there is a lot of protection for the poor and for the earth in ancient Jewish law.
I am one of those. I am buying LPs because the stuff is better than most of the industrially mass-produced and committee-reviewed stuff coming out nowadays. Not an audiophile, just appreciate the kinds of things they produced back then. I actually smile and laugh when I buy an LP younger than I am.
In general boundaries are useful. In this case, I doubt that you have RTFA. These are not land mass boundaries; this is claiming the majority of the South China Sea (which is bordered by several countries) as exclusively Chinese territory. Such a boundary line conflicts with international law, and is completely unnecessary either to orienting the user in the region in question or to the science explored.
As an addendum, GGP is correct. The majority of ebooks are dreck. The majority of print books are also dreck. Consider any of the books directed at mid-level executives. You can identify them by their titles having semicolons with explanatory subtitles. Most of these would be great as pamphlets; they did not deserve to be expanded into 128-page books (or longer). But because there is no major pamphlet publishing industry, they say, "Make a book out of it," and then the few salient worthwhile points are covered in junk. So it is not merely ebooks, but rather the current expansion of publishing.
Now I will sit back and await an offer to write a book expounding on the declines in the publishing industry, which will appear in every Hudson News (bookstore chain seen mostly in major airports, for those of you not familiar) in America.
in fact you can spend your entire life reading only books written by the greatest writers and you will die before you finish them.
maybe if you had a clue as to what free ebooks were available you might know what you are talking about.
As one who has a clue about Gutenberg, and had it long before there were iPad/Kindle/Nook/etc. devices, I agree. That said, since there are such great writers, you will not catch me wasting my time browsing the free dreck that people put out nowadays. Years ago I spotted on usenet the following lament: "The plus side of advances in digital recording is that anybody can record an album. The down side is that everybody is doing so." We can agree that the filtering mechanisms of the past were imperfect, but to turn off filtering entirely is not an improvement in my eyes. Go -- read your free modern dreck. I shall stick with the old stuff, which is truly beautiful thoughtful work, and does not deserve to be buried by what is being written today.
We have told them it is safe to go to the sun as we will send them at night.
These are TEACHERS we're talking about! They figure out how to communicate truths to less-informed people (children), give them opportunities to apply their learning, and finally measure their comprehension. That's what they do for a living. Is it so impossible to think that they couldn't come together and develop a set of reasonable ways to understand high quality versus low quality teachers? This union-administration antagonism is real in practice, but stupid in theory: for every teacher wondering if he'd lose his job due to a poor evaluation process, there are 20 or more kids who may lose out on an education. At least the teacher can volunteer for or give input to the team developing the evaluation process; the child's voice is not listened to in the school system which exists solely because there are kids. I hear all your political rebuttals, and I am ignoring them because you on /. are smart enough to step through the snark if you choose and figure out something that could work, where interests are aligned in a way as to promote the education of children more than the maintaining of territories, titles, and tenures.
Bring on Sesame Street, home schooling, charter schools, Khan Academy, and your /. great ideas. Let's stop claiming that school quality can be measured by the number of dollars put into them or the ratio of students to teachers. No other institution is measured that way; we measure outputs versus inputs, or just outputs. We can agree that the current standardized testing regimen is not doing its job, or is ignoring key areas of learning, or that it has cultural biases, or a host of other problems. But what solutions do we have?
In complete agreement with you that I wouldn't want anyone interfering with my routing either. Reading the comments, I think the way they would successfully market this is by selling it cheaper than an average GPS -- and making up for the discount to you by receiving fees from retailers. This would be like how consumer PCs bundled with crapware or trialware sell for less than an identically-equipped business PC with a clean OS build. So you and I wouldn't buy it, but someone who didn't know better and was excited to find a really cheap GPS would... which then makes full sense as to why Target and Walmart and Starbucks are named as potential route-bidders, but not BMW or Crate and Barrel.
And you could score decent grades if you just tried.
You say that like it's a good thing. It's not. It is a total and complete failure of the system.
Oh I fully agree with you. It is not a good thing. It stands in stark contrast to the education that tftp received, perhaps because tftp went to school in Moscow. The frustrating thing about it was seeing my parents stand up for our education, and to have to fight the schools so that we could learn. I cannot say I am performing at my full potential, but I would have tuned out significantly (and still graduated) if not for their efforts to ensure I remained challenged in accordance with my abilities, not some statistical average peer or lowest common denominator level.
These underachievers end up needing significant remedial coursework in college when they go, causing all sorts of strains on the state university system and lowering the average quality and value of an education. It would be better if they didn't pass so easily in high school, so they could decide either to work harder or to stop at the end of high school.