Well, OK, but that's the standard teachers' union line: Improve the schools! It neatly sidesteps the only really relevant point: We need to produce better-educated youth. Aside from that, who gives a flying fig about the schools? Good schools are only a means to an end. The point of an educational system should not be to have "good schools".
"I think a lot of issues with public schooling would be fixed if we all finally admitted that not everyone will go to college. There need to be more VoTech schools and the like. In some schools the graduation rate is abysmal. Children should be given the choice to learn a trade and quit bothering the students who do want to go on to college"
This is spot on. Our ed system is currently set up to force into the college prep path students who, -- *at that point in their lives, at least* -- simply are not cut out for it. It is a colossal waste of time and resources. It would also be neatly taken care of by a demand-driven, libertarian educational system, which (if you're interested) I outline in my response to the other guy who commented on my comment.
"Want to make public schools better? Get rid of charter schools, get rid of computer teachers, make it hard to home-school kids, tax the hell out of private schools. Force the community to care about the public schools, rather than try to find new ways for the best students and families to pull out of them." etc etc.
This has got to be the most disheartening post I've ever read on Slashdot. Surely, you can see that this is **CRAZY**. Please, please tell me you're just a madly skilled troll. If so, you got me, but I'll be grateful.
What you are saying, restated, is this: Take away competition. Take away choice. Force everyone (particularly, of course, the poor, who don't have the resources to resist) to consign their most precious resource -- their children -- over to the care of a an unaccountable, quasi-governmental bureaucracy, which doesn't have anything invested in them and will institutionalize them in a setting completely different from the world it is "preparing" them for.
Getting to the more abstract implications, what you want to do is the same thing Marx and Lenin wanted to do: Set up a perfect, centralized mechanism where everything functions perfectly. But the system (education in your case, all of society in Marx's) depends on people, and it only works if people act in perfect, idealized ways. And therein lies the fundamental flaw. People aren't perfect. They're not going to act in ways that you think they should. Any system that depends on that assumption is going to fail. (And, of course, that's after you've applied whatever form of coercion you can (in your words, "forced") to untold numbers to try to get them to comply.
This is wrong, wrong, dear God so wrong. Please, please tell me you can see that!! I'm dying here!
I'll resist the urge to be sarcastic, and just note that you simply cherrypicked the countries you wanted. In any list of European countries, I think I would have started with Germany (10.6%), then France (10.1%), then, let's see, I guess Italy (8.6%), then I suppose Spain (10.4%), then England etc. I mean, really, Portugal? LUXEMBOURG!?!?
Using thunderbird, for example, I can choose the RSS feed, and retrieve from that feed any item that contain the word, say, "jayhawk". What I can't get it to do is, from a user-defined set of feeds, get items that do include the term ("jayhawk") but don't contain the terms ("music" OR "band").
Damn, I can't get this to work at work -- must be a firewall or proxy server issue. I'll give it a whirl on my wife's laptop at home.
I wish it was free (big shocker there, huh?). There are a lot of free tools (like the aforementioned Vienna and Thunderbird) that are just SO close in terms of functionality. I mean, for shopping alone, this is such a great idea! You tell it what you're looking for, and boom, there you go.
Another thought -- If implemented via a web interface, this would be a total no-brainer for advertising dollars. You get the items that match your search terms, and the web site throws in a bunch of google-style ads that also seem to apply.
What we need is a tool that gets us the info we want, in a timely and convenient manner, right?
So here's what is needed: A web-based service or client-side program (either one would be fine, I think) that lets me set up finely-tuned RSS "smart folders".
Let's say I am shopping for a 120 gb hard drive.
* First, I tell the folder what feeds I want it to check: DealNews, Fatwallet, etc.
* Then, I tell the folder what criteria or terms I want it to look for. Ex.: Show me all items that, in the title or text, include the word "120" AND "drive" AND ("hitachi" OR "seagate" OR "toshiba" OR "samsung").
* From then on out, I can see the results with just a single click on the folder, like a smart playlist on iTunes or a search folder in Thunderbird.
I've tried doing this so far with Vienna (mac) and Thunderbird (pc). Both support smart folders, but are crippled because they don't allow finely grained searches, (I can't believe no one has written an extension that improves on T-Bird's rudimentary filtering criteria!) like regular expressions.
To me, this sounds like the perfect solution. Does anyone know if it exists?
A agree with you about the degree thing. But I've got news for you -- your post doesn't exactly come across as the epitome of calm, scientific thinking.
Why don't you try knocking the hyperventilation down a few notches. To name just one example, the abolitionists (and here I assume you are talking about slavery in the U.S.) were profoundly motivated by religious arguments, almost to a person. The slavers, in contrast, were motivated mostly by economics. Also, as the NIS pointed out, the consensus of the range of U.S. intelligence agencies (and those of pretty much every other country) was that Saddam had WMDs. Are you seriously suggesting that all the career CIA and NSA bureaucrats who produced the report were blinded by religion?
My neighbor is very religious. Her daughter has a red bike. Are those facts related? I guess they could be, but simply asserting it is so would make me sound somewhat silly, wouldn't it? Especially if I did so in the context of a post blasting someone else for scientific inaccuracy.
Immediately coming to mind is Dr. Carrington, the misguided scientist in the 1951 version of "The Thing." (AKA The Thing From Another World).
He was the prototype for the scientist who, in the face of mortal danger, insists -- "Don't harm it! It is of a higher intelligence than us! We must REASON with it!" Then gets skewered/dismembered/eaten/all of the above.
Any US President can say you are a terrorist, kidnap your whole family in the middle of the night, and have your kids raped to death in front of your wife to make her tell where you are hiding. And Gonzalez will say it's all legal, if anyone ever finds out about it.
Hey, maybe the moderation system is working! This FUD ^h^h^h legal theory certainly is "interesting". And no one (yet) has moderated it "insightful".
Part of me wants to laugh, but the other part keeps murmuring: "Don't laugh -- it's figuring out precisely that sort of stuff that keeps UN and EU bureaucrats in work."
"As their level of economic development rises, China will become its own biggest customer,..."
I think this model is too static. Remember, as China's economic development rises, it loses some of its comparative advantage, and the overall situation changes.
Also, one can make the argument that, like the jaw-dropping gains the Soviet Union made in its early days, the Chinese' gains have come by grabbing the "low-hanging fruit", and it is going to run into significant roadblocks ahead (just to cite one likely example, a growing middle class means growing demand for middle-class rights, etc.)
"After 9/11 the gov. should've just let the US economy go through a recession"
But wait... we did, didn't we? I distinctly remember the Democrats telling us that George Bush was presiding over the worst economy since Herbert Hoover.
5) If "solving" the problem, or a small part of it, would cost an unimaginable amount of resource, convince me that those resources wouldn't be better spent some other way (per Lomborg, for example, providing everyone on earth with clean air, water and shelter).
I don't get it, Doc - Even the most dire predictions I've seen about Global Warming don't include "the survival of the species as we know it." (unless you count The Day After Tomorrow). Are you seriously proposing that human society as we know it would cease to exist following an average rise of, let's say, 3C in temp?
I'm sorry, but if I take a cup and heat it up with ten times the energy I used before to cause a few bubbles, I'm not going to be surprised when it bubbles like roiling boil this time.
Yes, but I'd be very surprised if it spawned a little hurricane.
- AJ
Re:I like gmail.
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Another big flaw -- gMail doesn't search the contents of attachments. When you think about it, this is a pretty serious consideration if you're thinking about using gMail heavily as your main client.
Well, I think there's a lot that could be said about this post, but one thing I'm curious about --
I have what I guess would be called extensive experience with firearms, and I've *never* seen without a safety of some kind. I'm genuinely curious -- can you provide an example?
Seriously, I'm about as libertarian as they come, but your reaction here is way off the scale.
"Just what the world needs: another techno-crutch that will absolve parents of the annoyance of actual parenting."
Or a tool that parents can use to help them "actual[ly] parent".
"Let's not talk to kids about the effects of loud noises on their hearing - that's too difficult."
This makes total sense. After all, everyone knows that if you want a kid to do something, all you have to do is talk to them.
"Instead, let's be passive-aggressive pricks and preempt their judgment with parental-surrogate crippleware."
Pre-empt whose judgement? You can't mean the parents', because this tool just gives parents an additional choice. You must mean the kids'. But that doesn't make any sense either -- sometimes, pre-empting a kid's immature, inexperienced judgement with your own, hopefully more mature and informed judgement is exactly part of what you call "actual parenting."
To each his own, I guess, but I'm amazed to hear anyone say that. You do know i was talking specifically about the "view as tree" option, right? The one that creates a navigation pane on the left.
So I'm curious -- what is it about it that you don't like? I can look at the pane and see at a glance where in the comments hierarchy I'm at. And I can do that at any time, unlike all the other forums I see out there, which have horizontal navigation-tree areas at the top or the bottom of the page, so they're basically useless.
This is a really good comment. I agree with the idea that the core/. experience -- browsing through comments -- is disgracefully clunky, especially WRT to your third point.
My solution to this was a little different -- implement a vertical "tree" pane, like Google Groups. To my mind this is clearly the best forum user interface in existance -- it's so simple and intuitive that frankly, I'm baffled why I don't see it anywhere else.
I explain in a little better in my SourceForge bug report:
Slashdot Mirror
Well, OK, but that's the standard teachers' union line: Improve the schools! It neatly sidesteps the only really relevant point: We need to produce better-educated youth. Aside from that, who gives a flying fig about the schools? Good schools are only a means to an end. The point of an educational system should not be to have "good schools".
"I think a lot of issues with public schooling would be fixed if we all finally admitted that not everyone will go to college. There need to be more VoTech schools and the like. In some schools the graduation rate is abysmal. Children should be given the choice to learn a trade and quit bothering the students who do want to go on to college"
This is spot on. Our ed system is currently set up to force into the college prep path students who, -- *at that point in their lives, at least* -- simply are not cut out for it. It is a colossal waste of time and resources. It would also be neatly taken care of by a demand-driven, libertarian educational system, which (if you're interested) I outline in my response to the other guy who commented on my comment.
- Alaska Jack
"Want to make public schools better? Get rid of charter schools, get rid of computer teachers, make it hard to home-school kids, tax the hell out of private schools. Force the community to care about the public schools, rather than try to find new ways for the best students and families to pull out of them." etc etc.
This has got to be the most disheartening post I've ever read on Slashdot. Surely, you can see that this is **CRAZY**. Please, please tell me you're just a madly skilled troll. If so, you got me, but I'll be grateful.
What you are saying, restated, is this: Take away competition. Take away choice. Force everyone (particularly, of course, the poor, who don't have the resources to resist) to consign their most precious resource -- their children -- over to the care of a an unaccountable, quasi-governmental bureaucracy, which doesn't have anything invested in them and will institutionalize them in a setting completely different from the world it is "preparing" them for.
Getting to the more abstract implications, what you want to do is the same thing Marx and Lenin wanted to do: Set up a perfect, centralized mechanism where everything functions perfectly. But the system (education in your case, all of society in Marx's) depends on people, and it only works if people act in perfect, idealized ways. And therein lies the fundamental flaw. People aren't perfect. They're not going to act in ways that you think they should. Any system that depends on that assumption is going to fail. (And, of course, that's after you've applied whatever form of coercion you can (in your words, "forced") to untold numbers to try to get them to comply.
This is wrong, wrong, dear God so wrong. Please, please tell me you can see that!! I'm dying here!
- Alaska Jack
You write: "the educational bureauracy seems to be mostly concerned with maintaining the status quo."
This is just plain wrong.
The educational bureauracy is *purely* concerned with maintaining the status quo.
Otherwise, right on.
- jc
Ha ha very nice. If I'm ever arrested, I want you as my lawyer!
- AJ
I'll resist the urge to be sarcastic, and just note that you simply cherrypicked the countries you wanted. In any list of European countries, I think I would have started with Germany (10.6%), then France (10.1%), then, let's see, I guess Italy (8.6%), then I suppose Spain (10.4%), then England etc. I mean, really, Portugal? LUXEMBOURG!?!?
- AJ
Yes, it seems like a no-brainer.
Using thunderbird, for example, I can choose the RSS feed, and retrieve from that feed any item that contain the word, say, "jayhawk". What I can't get it to do is, from a user-defined set of feeds, get items that do include the term ("jayhawk") but don't contain the terms ("music" OR "band").
You'd think Google would be all over this, but nope: http://www.google.com/reader/view/
- AJ
Damn, I can't get this to work at work -- must be a firewall or proxy server issue. I'll give it a whirl on my wife's laptop at home.
I wish it was free (big shocker there, huh?). There are a lot of free tools (like the aforementioned Vienna and Thunderbird) that are just SO close in terms of functionality. I mean, for shopping alone, this is such a great idea! You tell it what you're looking for, and boom, there you go.
Another thought -- If implemented via a web interface, this would be a total no-brainer for advertising dollars. You get the items that match your search terms, and the web site throws in a bunch of google-style ads that also seem to apply.
- AJ
- jc
What we need is a tool that gets us the info we want, in a timely and convenient manner, right?
So here's what is needed: A web-based service or client-side program (either one would be fine, I think) that lets me set up finely-tuned RSS "smart folders".
Let's say I am shopping for a 120 gb hard drive.
* First, I tell the folder what feeds I want it to check: DealNews, Fatwallet, etc.
* Then, I tell the folder what criteria or terms I want it to look for. Ex.: Show me all items that, in the title or text, include the word "120" AND "drive" AND ("hitachi" OR "seagate" OR "toshiba" OR "samsung").
* From then on out, I can see the results with just a single click on the folder, like a smart playlist on iTunes or a search folder in Thunderbird.
I've tried doing this so far with Vienna (mac) and Thunderbird (pc). Both support smart folders, but are crippled because they don't allow finely grained searches, (I can't believe no one has written an extension that improves on T-Bird's rudimentary filtering criteria!) like regular expressions.
To me, this sounds like the perfect solution. Does anyone know if it exists?
- AJ
Thank you for serving.
- AJ
A agree with you about the degree thing. But I've got news for you -- your post doesn't exactly come across as the epitome of calm, scientific thinking.
Why don't you try knocking the hyperventilation down a few notches. To name just one example, the abolitionists (and here I assume you are talking about slavery in the U.S.) were profoundly motivated by religious arguments, almost to a person. The slavers, in contrast, were motivated mostly by economics. Also, as the NIS pointed out, the consensus of the range of U.S. intelligence agencies (and those of pretty much every other country) was that Saddam had WMDs. Are you seriously suggesting that all the career CIA and NSA bureaucrats who produced the report were blinded by religion?
My neighbor is very religious. Her daughter has a red bike. Are those facts related? I guess they could be, but simply asserting it is so would make me sound somewhat silly, wouldn't it? Especially if I did so in the context of a post blasting someone else for scientific inaccuracy.
- AJ
They should supplement Anonymous Coward with a new title: Anonymous Jerk.
- AJ
Immediately coming to mind is Dr. Carrington, the misguided scientist in the 1951 version of "The Thing." (AKA The Thing From Another World).
He was the prototype for the scientist who, in the face of mortal danger, insists -- "Don't harm it! It is of a higher intelligence than us! We must REASON with it!" Then gets skewered/dismembered/eaten/all of the above.
- Alaska Jack
It's also the first time in years of commenting I've ever been moderated as "flamebait"! Though I think I got "troll" once.
- AJ
Any US President can say you are a terrorist, kidnap your whole family in the middle of the night, and have your kids raped to death in front of your wife to make her tell where you are hiding. And Gonzalez will say it's all legal, if anyone ever finds out about it.
Hey, maybe the moderation system is working! This FUD ^h^h^h legal theory certainly is "interesting". And no one (yet) has moderated it "insightful".
- AJ
Part of me wants to laugh, but the other part keeps murmuring: "Don't laugh -- it's figuring out precisely that sort of stuff that keeps UN and EU bureaucrats in work."
- AJ
"As their level of economic development rises, China will become its own biggest customer, ..."
I think this model is too static. Remember, as China's economic development rises, it loses some of its comparative advantage, and the overall situation changes.
Also, one can make the argument that, like the jaw-dropping gains the Soviet Union made in its early days, the Chinese' gains have come by grabbing the "low-hanging fruit", and it is going to run into significant roadblocks ahead (just to cite one likely example, a growing middle class means growing demand for middle-class rights, etc.)
- AJ
"After 9/11 the gov. should've just let the US economy go through a recession"
... we did, didn't we? I distinctly remember the Democrats telling us that George Bush was presiding over the worst economy since Herbert Hoover.
a me=sr-109-2-1
/ rtr1328567.html
But wait
DEMOCRATIC POLICY COMMITTEE: "The Bush Economy in 2005: Middle-Class Squeezed, Future Prospects Undermined"
http://democrats.senate.gov/dpc/dpc-new.cfm?doc_n
FORBES: "Kerry's uses 'misery index' to hit Bush on economy"
http://www.forbes.com/markets/newswire/2004/04/11
Surely it must have been true, right? I saw it on TV!
- AJ
(Oblig Disclaimer: Economically, I think both parties suck.)
5) If "solving" the problem, or a small part of it, would cost an unimaginable amount of resource, convince me that those resources wouldn't be better spent some other way (per Lomborg, for example, providing everyone on earth with clean air, water and shelter).
- AJ
I don't get it, Doc - Even the most dire predictions I've seen about Global Warming don't include "the survival of the species as we know it." (unless you count The Day After Tomorrow). Are you seriously proposing that human society as we know it would cease to exist following an average rise of, let's say, 3C in temp?
- AJ
I'm sorry, but if I take a cup and heat it up with ten times the energy I used before to cause a few bubbles, I'm not going to be surprised when it bubbles like roiling boil this time.
Yes, but I'd be very surprised if it spawned a little hurricane.
- AJ
Another big flaw -- gMail doesn't search the contents of attachments. When you think about it, this is a pretty serious consideration if you're thinking about using gMail heavily as your main client.
- AJ
Well, I think there's a lot that could be said about this post, but one thing I'm curious about --
I have what I guess would be called extensive experience with firearms, and I've *never* seen without a safety of some kind. I'm genuinely curious -- can you provide an example?
- Alaska Jack
Overreact much?
Seriously, I'm about as libertarian as they come, but your reaction here is way off the scale.
"Just what the world needs: another techno-crutch that will absolve parents of the annoyance of actual parenting."
Or a tool that parents can use to help them "actual[ly] parent".
"Let's not talk to kids about the effects of loud noises on their hearing - that's too difficult."
This makes total sense. After all, everyone knows that if you want a kid to do something, all you have to do is talk to them.
"Instead, let's be passive-aggressive pricks and preempt their judgment with parental-surrogate crippleware."
Pre-empt whose judgement? You can't mean the parents', because this tool just gives parents an additional choice. You must mean the kids'. But that doesn't make any sense either -- sometimes, pre-empting a kid's immature, inexperienced judgement with your own, hopefully more mature and informed judgement is exactly part of what you call "actual parenting."
Relax, big fella.
- Alaska Jack
To each his own, I guess, but I'm amazed to hear anyone say that. You do know i was talking specifically about the "view as tree" option, right? The one that creates a navigation pane on the left.
So I'm curious -- what is it about it that you don't like? I can look at the pane and see at a glance where in the comments hierarchy I'm at. And I can do that at any time, unlike all the other forums I see out there, which have horizontal navigation-tree areas at the top or the bottom of the page, so they're basically useless.
- AJ
This is a really good comment. I agree with the idea that the core /. experience -- browsing through comments -- is disgracefully clunky, especially WRT to your third point.
t ail&aid=1395676&group_id=4421&atid=354421
My solution to this was a little different -- implement a vertical "tree" pane, like Google Groups. To my mind this is clearly the best forum user interface in existance -- it's so simple and intuitive that frankly, I'm baffled why I don't see it anywhere else.
I explain in a little better in my SourceForge bug report:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=de
"Add Google Groups-style navigation pane"
- Alaska Jack