I have to overcome the inverse-square law and line-of-sight
And if you insist on microwaves you have some serious optical focusing problems. Good luck.
Look at the ratio of wavelength between blue from a DVD burner and a 2.4 GHz microwave oven. That's the ratio in size for your optics to get an equivalent focus.
At 1,500W a 2.4GHz microwave driven by a high capacitance array, steered into place with say a dish antenna will fry electronics. I mean fry! It's just about the right wavelength to do so. Of course anyone standing in the way will get that section within the beam cooked almost immediately but that's just a collateral problem.
Talk to a EE first. I think you want high directionality, high gain. Capacitance isn't going to help you. Also, although this is/., on a regular basis I submit myself to a radiation flux right around 1.5 kilowatts per sq meter and barely sweat (well, as long as its below 80 degrees or so). Its called "sunlight". Not a military codeword, but genuine plain ole fashioned "sunlight". So if you want to "cook immediately" you need to focus to far, far smaller than 3 feet on a side. When you calculate the size of antenna required at 2 GHz to focus to a square inch or whatever, you'll be surprised. Its not going to be mobile.
Another way to put it, is you want to "cook immediately" but it takes a good fraction of a minute for a 1500 watt hotplate to get hot enough to burn my skin, and thats just the surface. Cooking a steak or hamburger all the way thru takes a lot longer.
Another way to put it is blasting unfocused 1.5 kilowatts is about like standing in front of a 1.5 kilowatt infra red space heater. Maybe in a draft-free garage or basement that'll help, but outdoors its just wasting electricity or providing purely psychological comfort.
It's a torture device, plain and simple. All the talk about crowd dispersal is smoke and mirrors.
I'm sure there are people creaming their pants when they think of a device that causes excruciating pain without leaving detectable marks.
AC is most likely correct. Once it gets cheap enough, it'll be deployed elsewhere for non-crowd control reasons.... You can almost hear the sales pitch already. "too many homeless sleeping in your park? Purchase our iArea iDenier and put it on a timer... when the parks closed, the microwaves start, and the homeless leave!"
I believe our teachers are already paid quite a lot more than US teachers as well. Up to about $100K, I believe.
My high school trig and calculus teacher made that much 20 years ago. Of course it took a doctorate in education and 40 years of experience. Frankly he was probably worth every penny.
Something non-teachers don't understand is the slope of pay and how it varies but is generally huge in teaching compared to other fields. You work IT and you'll get basically no pay raise as long as you keep doing the same thing for the same employer plus or minus some inflation adjustment.
Teaching is different and its assumed you'll make lower class wages to hire and before retiring you'll get lower upper class wages. I saw a copy of my school's contracted union payscale and 20 years ago they started at $20K outta school no experience BS degree and topped out around $110K with 40+ years and a doctorate. This is same job day in and out for 40 years, not some kind of IT career starting out on the helpdesk and ending up as an exec. The point is people with an axe to grind will solely discuss an extreme to make their point, the reality of life as a teacher is you bought into a lifestyle where you begin poor and end up rich. There's nothing wrong with that, its just how they budget. If they paid $55K to everyone from 22 yrs to 70 yrs then it wouldn't cost any more or less but there sure would be a lot less whining on both sides.
I guess some people hate them for it, why can they advance their lifestyle as they age whereas mine is stagnant to declining. A bit less hate and a bit more organizing would probably help with that.
OK you need to simultaneously replace the whole licensing system along with firing all the teachers, because the only purpose of the licensing system is to limit the supply to prevent strike breaking. OK fine. Then you rehire almost everyone. So having the same people with the same education and training doing almost the same stuff but lowering their pay and benefits will somehow make the kids smarter. We're beginning to stretch my imagination here.
If their demands are reasonable
And if management's demands are unreasonable, then... fire all the teachers again?
I'm not trying to be a teachers union pawn here. But simplistic "churn" based "change for the sake of change" "solutions" are not going to improve anything.
So lets try your idea and check back in a theoretical 5 years.
1) Management got to fire all the "troublemakers" so they have it slightly easier, a more compliant workforce. Well who cares, F them, we pay them twice as much as the teachers so make them work for it. If they weren't incompetent we wouldn't be in this fix to begin with. Hmm come to think of it, as the responsible party, why aren't they getting punished, only the people they, literally, misled? Hmm....
2) We have about the same number of employees (status quo in class size, as you say) but we pay them less. That means we get worse applicants in general and those staying in and suffering are less happy. That will increase our test scores or whatever metric because... I would guess worse pay and benefits means the quality and results will drop. If we had top of the world compensation and top of the world results, like our doctors and CEOs, perhaps, then dropping pay wouldn't really hurt worldwide competitiveness, but I don't think we've got the slack to dabble in 3rd world educational achievement.
3) Ex teachers will... collect unemployment and then... see its a zero sum game. If you take nameless pawn 34343 with a job and nameless pawn 22626 without a job and swap them, nothing good or bad will really happen. There seems to be a fixation that replacing 1/5th of the teachers will do so much... well, for the 4/5 remaining, I don't think it'll change much other than making them unhappy, poor, and angry, like proles should be, right?
You know, he was responding to the person who suggested that they bring in the "Teamsters" (aka the Mob) to fight back against corporate oppression.
I don't think the teamsters would care very much about a call center. That would be like threatening to unionize plumbers in the IBEW (electricians) union. The mob is probably not amused at being confused with the teamsters. About 100 years ago the railroad union in my city had all kinds of riots and numerous people killed on both side. Ancient history is irrelevant as the modern battles happen in the courtroom, where they belong.
Isn't having to document in detail every poop for your boss a "thug-based coercive tactic"?
every time I think about it, I realize my old, $100 netBook does the job better than any tablet could in most cases.
Boot time, battery life, and hot laps
I have a netbook with androidx86 installed on it so its basically a keyboard equipped tablet. Doesn't get too much use compared to the ipad because:
Pickup and go "boot" time of androidx86 netbook is about 180 seconds, "boot" time of ipad is about 2 seconds to hit button and unlock
Battery life of netbook is 2 hours, ipad is... I donno but its apparently way longer than I'm willing to work on something in one sitting. Every time I use the netbook I have to plan, OK, now when the battery dies I'll either switch to... or plug in to charge there... or...
Netbook is too hot to handle, literally, after an hour or two. Fan is loud and completely ineffective. ipad never gets too warm to handle and no fan and no cooling vents to block.
I would assume an android tablet is equally useful, not ipad specific... basically my android phone with a bigger screen would be a really nice tablet.
I find I task switch with the ipad a lot. Not switch apps inside the ipad, but in real life. I would not be patient enough to boot up a desktop / laptop / netbook to check the weather. Would I pick up a ipad and "button" "swipe" "click" to check the weather, sure, it only takes 5 seconds. You don't talk about a geographic location in theory, you just google map it. I've got a, one, minute this morning to check my email. Do I spend three minutes booting the desktop or fifteen seconds on the ipad? Lots of little task switching like that.
In my company, the processes and procedures are lax, there's usually no follow up unless someone really abuses breaks.
In my experience places like that tend to be lax until someone higher up finds out a peon is the wrong race, wrong religion, wrong demographic in general, then its enforced to the law usually on that individual peon until the peon is forced out or fired or even criminally prosecuted for falsifying timesheets. Once the wrong demographic peon is gone, its back to being lax until the next time someone needs to be disposed of.
You'll eventually see that people in your apartment spend a LOT of time "asking questions/helping customers" and almost nobody has to poop anymore.
And you've just discovered the REAL purpose of rolling something like this out. Anyone mgmt likes (hotties, brownnosers, relatives, etc) will ignored when they falsify records, but anyone they want to get rid of (wrong race, wrong church, wrong political party, whatever) will be fired with cause due to documented fraud resulting in no unemployment benefits because they were falsifying timesheet documents by taking a dump instead of "asking questions". I mean they'd got a timesheet showing you were "asking a question" and a avi file from the security cameras clearly showing you walk into the bathroom, it seems an open and shut case?
This also goes higher level than just employee. Now any team lead / supvr / manager can be disciplined at any time for allowing the falsification to happen... or perhaps not disciplined... depending on how much the boss of the lead / supvr / mgr likes the victims race, church, political party, etc.
What makes you think the kind of place where mgmt daydreams of timing, tracking, and probably training and disciplining bathroom breaks would give people "break time"? They probably make them bring coal to work to keep the place warm in the winter.
The solution, obviously, is if you have to go, then just whip it out at your desk and/or use those "first class" cardboard boxes and some tape to interoffice mail the result "somewhere". Ask for a potted plant in your cubical and a little privacy, or maybe not if you like that kind of thing.
Just to bring it back on task, not reporting in great detail the exact time and duration of a digestive anomaly for later tracking, disciplinary, and promotional purposes is now defined as:
thug-backed coercive tactics
I'm curious what you'll define "not wanting to email a picture of the resulting turd using my smartphone to boss to document the event" will be defined as. I'm guessing something like "unamerican socialist terrorist with something to hide"
So, if teachers have so little effect on what kids learn, why are we paying them at all?
Nuns at the catholic school down the road, well, technically depending on how you account for them... But there's not enough of them. We'd need to go back to 10 child families, and/or kill off 10% of the young male population in (drug or oil) wars to get enough perma-single young women. Of course "real" nuns answering their calling as opposed to being unable to get married or another job are probably always a low rate. Might yet happen anyway.
The macro answer is that home schooling forces all/most 2-parent to have only one worker, and forces all 1-parent households (deeper) into poverty. Not really politically viable, although it sounds like something the Quisling Republicans would probably strongly support. Keeps women barefoot in the kitchen and makes the poor poorer, whats not to love for those guys?
There's at least two signalling effects. Good parents lead to good kids lead to a good school system. They're proud to make everyone know they pay more for teachers than average because it encourages more of "their kind" to move in and be neighbors. Bragging rights, conspicuous consumption. Real estate agents can't or won't talk legally about the culture of your future neighbors, but they're all about talking about "how good" the schools are, in practice this is how non-multicultural or non-ethnic the schools are, but they don't have the social faux pas of actually saying it out loud. That is whats known as signalling. The $ spent on teaching don't really matter to anyone other then probably the paycheck recipients, its all about signalling how the culture of everyone living there prioritizes education, or at least training, or in some cases, the opposite.
Also signals a groupthink belief which no one actually believes anymore, but they like to tell each other over and over, that they'd like to live in a place where education = financial success and financial success = highly paid education. False, of course, but imagine how nice of a place to live if only it were true.. You see this in religion, everyone "knows" you're dead means you're dead and that's it, but you'll end up with endless circular promoting that we'd all like to think there's something afterwards, so we'll all say it over and over to encourage each other. The usual groupthink low level brainwashing stuff.
Finally another way to look at it is about half the graduating class can't get a job at current payrates. Which at least theoretically means we're getting the top half in terms of quality. We'd like to think the top half of quality means teaching ability, but the male administrator (interesting how that works out) is probably hiring on more traditional standards like how hot she is, or how much she brownnoses and agrees with him, or how much she lies but doesn't get caught on the resume. Whatever the "standard" is, relevant or irrelevant, lower pay means we'd end up with sub-standard teachers. This also feeds back into the signalling loop above.
The average inflation over the last four years, according to the Departmen of Labor's CPI, has been somewhere around 2.5%
He's talking about real world inflation, like how much the cost of living has increased, commodity prices that are relevant to the median person, etc. Price of food, price of gasoline, price of real estate/rent, price of sickcare insurance, etc.
You're talking about the completely imaginary govt figure which is a statement of how much the govt has decided to increase CPI indexed transfer payments, social security,.mil pay and pensions, federal pay, etc. What the govt's willing to provide as a pay raise has no interaction what so ever with "how much stuff costs". There's a thing veneer of respectability where they exclude everything not fitting the message. So, yes, the average iphone cost plus maybe the average cost of a cedar 10 foot 2x4 maybe has only gone up 2.5%, but it doesn't "mean anything" in the real world other than SS checks and.mil paychecks are going to be 2.5% higher. What it really means is the politicians think they'll lose too many votes if they only paid out 2.4% more, but they wouldn't get enough extra votes if they paid out 2.6% more to make it worth it compared to other pork barrel expenses.
It would be very much like if instead of arbitrary payraises at work, people we given imaginary cooked books to base their raises. Just admit its arbitrary and mostly made up.
In the US, food and fuel is specifically exempted from determining the amount of inflation.
Yes, that's exactly why that politically motivated figure is meaningless.
If you could exist merely by purchasing iphones, for food, energy, and shelter, then the inflation figure would matter. As it is, its merely a measure of how much the govt has already decided to raise social security payments.
We do the same game with unemployment. Someday, in the American workers paradise, none of us will have jobs anymore while reported unemployment will be 5%, and inflation will always be 2% even if the price of a cup of coffee is doubling every month.
With 8% unemployment or better depending on your local environments, replacing a work force will not be all that hard
For uneducated, untrained, low skill, non-certified jobs. Yes the McDonalds mop pusher would be foolish to strike because he could be replaced in about 5 minutes by another illegal alien.
The law requires that you have a valid teachers license to teach at a public school where I live. That license requires a bachelors degree or post grad degree in a specifically approved "educator preparation program" and only some in state schools are approved. If you went to university in an out of state school, you can apply to request they evaluate your school's program and your transcript but its by no means guaranteed and there's a lot of politics (so if WI admin hates MN admin this year, then maybe no MN teachers are not going to be approved this year). Also only "about as many" licenses are issued as there are teachers... The renewal process is designed to minimize the number of qualified people not working.
So... sure... fire all the teachers... that'll work real well. Graduation rates are about twice annual replenishment rates (aka about half the grads can't get a job in the field requiring a teaching license) so if you assume about a 20 year "career" before burnout/retirement that means your rehiring rate will be about 10% per year for the first few years, with the rate presumably increasing because its a hot field (or maybe grad rates dropping because they don't want to have a career shorter than a pro football lineman when the new union gets them all fired again, and the whole purpose is to crater payrates, making it even less appealing, although of course administrator salaries only and always go up, so...).
You'd end up with something very much like "one room schoolhouse"with a single 22 year old recent grad standing up in the gym trying to teach the entire 300 student elementary school simultaneously, at least for the first couple years.
What that will mean is that teachers will be competing to teach the students more likely to meet the metrics. The good teachers will get those postitions,
There is a leveling effect. The definition of "good" will of course be "hotties" "brownnosers" "groupthinkers". Generally speaking people who are not good teachers or good role models. The bottom half of the barrel due to competition won't even be getting jobs. So its not so much that the bad kids will be stuck with the 2 out of 10s, they'll be stuck with the 6 out of 10s. The long term effect of low quality teachers teaching the good parent's kids and better than average quality teachers teaching the bad parent's kids is a leveling effect on educational outcomes. The weirdest part of the whole story is although its the usual socialist / pinko / commie / leftist technique and goal of social engineering, but its pushed hard by the -R party and opposed by the -D, which is the historical opposite of what you'd expect.
There's nothing quite so cushy in the private sector for low level employees.
Yeah, that's the problem. In my grandparents generation teaching was a pretty cruddy job with poor pay and benefits and long hours compared to private industry (other than having summers off). The problem is that teaching has pretty much stayed the same for a couple generations, in fact we have an excellent 1900 era education system, unfortunately its 2012, while we've destroyed our lower and middle class jobs by shipping them out of the country and/or importing illegals (what does "illegal" mean, if we will never enforce the law, just like financial regulation? Why can't we do this for weed?). So the problem is once you destroy or downgrade every job that's better than teaching, its NOT the teachers fault that they remain as having the best deal around thats not destroyed yet. The R party is playing with fire, if they great unwashed ever see thru their strategy, they're in big trouble.
but are the salaries equal in the private and public schools? If not there is no point in evaluating the teachers in the public schools as all the good teachers will have drained to the private schools with higher salaries.
My sister in law would be LOL at this time. Its the other way around... The primary private school competitor is a nun, willing to teach for free. You'll make more money at McDonalds than as catholic school teacher. They are the minor leagues for the public schools who recruit from them.
The "cream of the crop" at private (usually religious) schools vs "not so good" at public schools is the average parental quality. The kids are about the same (other than having been raised better, on average, by the private school parents)
getting annual raises about four times the rate of inflation
Check your numbers. If the real inflation rate was as low as their request, then gasoline would be about $1.50, a day at the hospital would be about $750, a loaf of bread would still be 50 cents, higher ed tuition would still be about $1000/semester....
There are very large numbers of people waiting to get into teaching
For kindergarten teachers in my sorta-rich suburb, yeah the competition for teaching jobs is incredibly intense. For ghetto areas like big cities, where you need to wear a bullet proof vest, often there's racial hiring quotas, there are serious issues getting enough staffing. Its very much like the demand for police officers in different locales... oddly enough the nice places have 10 applicants per position, and the bad places have 10 positions per good applicant...
"U.S. Department of Education: 79% of Chicago 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading." Teacher evaluations are a must. It is time to get rid of the ineffective teachers that are protected by unions.
Because parents culture and value system has much more of an influence than anything the teachers could ever do, I assume its a given that you already support taking kids away from their parents if the test results are poor, so the logical next step of optimizing a minor impact area does make sense. Setting up an orphanage system / military discipline dorm for kids with bad test scores would be expensive, but probably fairly effective.
Remember, never optimize the small stuff first. In this non-IT non-CS example, start with the high impact areas first, like parents, then once that is nearly perfected, start to worry about the teachers.
Another interesting aspect is indoctrination and groupthink. So... teachers as a group are pretty much indoctrinated and into the whole groupthink thing... not so much in an absolute sense, but relative to artists, or PR people, or CS/IT people they're ultra conformist... Hard to find a more conformist group than teachers, maybe accountants or prison guards? Exchanging one clone for another doesn't help much, does it? Its sort of a "getting out your frustrations" plan rather than a genuine improvement plan. Yes, Lord Vader, the death star would have been saved if we just disposed of the bottom 1% performing stormtroopers... um, no, probably not.
Unfortunately that isn't always sufficient to convince potential customers.
You sure about that? Like the interviewer literally and HONESTLY said the reason you were not picked was:
Since I never studied ICT nor followed a course that resulted in a certificate, I can only prove my knowledge by actually doing stuff or showing what I've done so far
There's a lot of people looking for work... how do you know its not the bosses son who got the job or whatever, regardless of your wallpaper?
I've never had a job interview where they cared about anything other than what I have done, with THREE exceptions:
1) We only hire bachelors degree holders as an idiotic policy (back before I got my otherwise worthless degree)
2) Our contract w/ Cisco means that we "need" to hire a certain percentage of CCNA CCNP CCIE to maintain a lower contract cost or something (been there, done that, got the CCNA and CCNP, long since expired)
3) We're high tech pimps and we spend lots of money to advertise that our hos all have a certain cert... we don't care about the cert but our customers, apparently, do.
Should have asked about Maxim semiconductor stock price for a real "jeopardy style" research project. See they bought dallas semiconductor, who sold a whole line of "i-products" back when apple still meant an apple2-gs. The iButton was like a 256 byte (byte, not kilo or mega or giga byte, just byte) one wire interface storage device. They had a whole herd of one-wire devices. Basically the one wire was really one wire plus ground and it was kind of like sneaking power for I2C off the data bus. Thats a good research question.
Also its a pessimistic outlook... onewire went nowhere and its pretty much gone now. Insinuating that irobot is going the way of the ibutton.
Strange that in Star Trek, they could beam away all of the bad stuff from their bodies, but would still need to eat and drink in traditional fashion.
Naah it was full of anachronisms where they loved to play musical instruments by hand to each other, I think there must be dozens of plays put on by the crew... Food is "fun" for the crew and cooking is even better... think Neelix on Voyager, much as we all try to block him from our memories.
Also about 90% of the holodeck episodes that were not about basically holopr0n involved travel into the past. That goofy car restoration project toward the end of voyager.
It was a generally backward thinking, backward looking mentality, despite the setting in the future.
Tribbles Romulan Ale and synthehol Green skinned orion womens Space Hippies Hand held Hypo sprays full of tranquilizers (There are non-hand held ones available since the 70s) Pesky GD "son of a chief medical officer" ensigns Skin tight leotards as a women's businesswear. Microskirts as traditional women's businesswear. Holodecks full of amorous versions of your female coworkers "I am the goddess of love" or whatever that line was.
Now that I think of it, you keep all that dilithium stuff and just provide the leotards and mini skirts.
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I have to overcome the inverse-square law and line-of-sight
And if you insist on microwaves you have some serious optical focusing problems. Good luck.
Look at the ratio of wavelength between blue from a DVD burner and a 2.4 GHz microwave oven. That's the ratio in size for your optics to get an equivalent focus.
At 1,500W a 2.4GHz microwave driven by a high capacitance array, steered into place with say a dish antenna will fry electronics. I mean fry! It's just about the right wavelength to do so. Of course anyone standing in the way will get that section within the beam cooked almost immediately but that's just a collateral problem.
Talk to a EE first. I think you want high directionality, high gain. Capacitance isn't going to help you. Also, although this is /., on a regular basis I submit myself to a radiation flux right around 1.5 kilowatts per sq meter and barely sweat (well, as long as its below 80 degrees or so). Its called "sunlight". Not a military codeword, but genuine plain ole fashioned "sunlight". So if you want to "cook immediately" you need to focus to far, far smaller than 3 feet on a side. When you calculate the size of antenna required at 2 GHz to focus to a square inch or whatever, you'll be surprised. Its not going to be mobile.
Another way to put it, is you want to "cook immediately" but it takes a good fraction of a minute for a 1500 watt hotplate to get hot enough to burn my skin, and thats just the surface. Cooking a steak or hamburger all the way thru takes a lot longer.
Another way to put it is blasting unfocused 1.5 kilowatts is about like standing in front of a 1.5 kilowatt infra red space heater. Maybe in a draft-free garage or basement that'll help, but outdoors its just wasting electricity or providing purely psychological comfort.
It's a torture device, plain and simple. All the talk about crowd dispersal is smoke and mirrors.
I'm sure there are people creaming their pants when they think of a device that causes excruciating pain without leaving detectable marks.
AC is most likely correct. Once it gets cheap enough, it'll be deployed elsewhere for non-crowd control reasons.... You can almost hear the sales pitch already. "too many homeless sleeping in your park? Purchase our iArea iDenier and put it on a timer... when the parks closed, the microwaves start, and the homeless leave!"
I believe our teachers are already paid quite a lot more than US teachers as well. Up to about $100K, I believe.
My high school trig and calculus teacher made that much 20 years ago. Of course it took a doctorate in education and 40 years of experience. Frankly he was probably worth every penny.
Something non-teachers don't understand is the slope of pay and how it varies but is generally huge in teaching compared to other fields. You work IT and you'll get basically no pay raise as long as you keep doing the same thing for the same employer plus or minus some inflation adjustment.
Teaching is different and its assumed you'll make lower class wages to hire and before retiring you'll get lower upper class wages. I saw a copy of my school's contracted union payscale and 20 years ago they started at $20K outta school no experience BS degree and topped out around $110K with 40+ years and a doctorate. This is same job day in and out for 40 years, not some kind of IT career starting out on the helpdesk and ending up as an exec. The point is people with an axe to grind will solely discuss an extreme to make their point, the reality of life as a teacher is you bought into a lifestyle where you begin poor and end up rich. There's nothing wrong with that, its just how they budget. If they paid $55K to everyone from 22 yrs to 70 yrs then it wouldn't cost any more or less but there sure would be a lot less whining on both sides.
I guess some people hate them for it, why can they advance their lifestyle as they age whereas mine is stagnant to declining. A bit less hate and a bit more organizing would probably help with that.
This is rapidly turning into a bigger project.
OK you need to simultaneously replace the whole licensing system along with firing all the teachers, because the only purpose of the licensing system is to limit the supply to prevent strike breaking. OK fine. Then you rehire almost everyone. So having the same people with the same education and training doing almost the same stuff but lowering their pay and benefits will somehow make the kids smarter. We're beginning to stretch my imagination here.
If their demands are reasonable
And if management's demands are unreasonable, then ... fire all the teachers again?
I'm not trying to be a teachers union pawn here. But simplistic "churn" based "change for the sake of change" "solutions" are not going to improve anything.
So lets try your idea and check back in a theoretical 5 years.
1) Management got to fire all the "troublemakers" so they have it slightly easier, a more compliant workforce. Well who cares, F them, we pay them twice as much as the teachers so make them work for it. If they weren't incompetent we wouldn't be in this fix to begin with. Hmm come to think of it, as the responsible party, why aren't they getting punished, only the people they, literally, misled? Hmm....
2) We have about the same number of employees (status quo in class size, as you say) but we pay them less. That means we get worse applicants in general and those staying in and suffering are less happy. That will increase our test scores or whatever metric because ... I would guess worse pay and benefits means the quality and results will drop. If we had top of the world compensation and top of the world results, like our doctors and CEOs, perhaps, then dropping pay wouldn't really hurt worldwide competitiveness, but I don't think we've got the slack to dabble in 3rd world educational achievement.
3) Ex teachers will... collect unemployment and then ... see its a zero sum game. If you take nameless pawn 34343 with a job and nameless pawn 22626 without a job and swap them, nothing good or bad will really happen. There seems to be a fixation that replacing 1/5th of the teachers will do so much... well, for the 4/5 remaining, I don't think it'll change much other than making them unhappy, poor, and angry, like proles should be, right?
You know, he was responding to the person who suggested that they bring in the "Teamsters" (aka the Mob) to fight back against corporate oppression.
I don't think the teamsters would care very much about a call center. That would be like threatening to unionize plumbers in the IBEW (electricians) union. The mob is probably not amused at being confused with the teamsters. About 100 years ago the railroad union in my city had all kinds of riots and numerous people killed on both side. Ancient history is irrelevant as the modern battles happen in the courtroom, where they belong.
Isn't having to document in detail every poop for your boss a "thug-based coercive tactic"?
every time I think about it, I realize my old, $100 netBook does the job better than any tablet could in most cases.
Boot time, battery life, and hot laps
I have a netbook with androidx86 installed on it so its basically a keyboard equipped tablet. Doesn't get too much use compared to the ipad because:
Pickup and go "boot" time of androidx86 netbook is about 180 seconds, "boot" time of ipad is about 2 seconds to hit button and unlock
Battery life of netbook is 2 hours, ipad is ... I donno but its apparently way longer than I'm willing to work on something in one sitting. Every time I use the netbook I have to plan, OK, now when the battery dies I'll either switch to ... or plug in to charge there... or ...
Netbook is too hot to handle, literally, after an hour or two. Fan is loud and completely ineffective. ipad never gets too warm to handle and no fan and no cooling vents to block.
I would assume an android tablet is equally useful, not ipad specific... basically my android phone with a bigger screen would be a really nice tablet.
I find I task switch with the ipad a lot. Not switch apps inside the ipad, but in real life. I would not be patient enough to boot up a desktop / laptop / netbook to check the weather. Would I pick up a ipad and "button" "swipe" "click" to check the weather, sure, it only takes 5 seconds. You don't talk about a geographic location in theory, you just google map it. I've got a, one, minute this morning to check my email. Do I spend three minutes booting the desktop or fifteen seconds on the ipad? Lots of little task switching like that.
In my company, the processes and procedures are lax, there's usually no follow up unless someone really abuses breaks.
In my experience places like that tend to be lax until someone higher up finds out a peon is the wrong race, wrong religion, wrong demographic in general, then its enforced to the law usually on that individual peon until the peon is forced out or fired or even criminally prosecuted for falsifying timesheets. Once the wrong demographic peon is gone, its back to being lax until the next time someone needs to be disposed of.
You'll eventually see that people in your apartment spend a LOT of time "asking questions/helping customers" and almost nobody has to poop anymore.
And you've just discovered the REAL purpose of rolling something like this out. Anyone mgmt likes (hotties, brownnosers, relatives, etc) will ignored when they falsify records, but anyone they want to get rid of (wrong race, wrong church, wrong political party, whatever) will be fired with cause due to documented fraud resulting in no unemployment benefits because they were falsifying timesheet documents by taking a dump instead of "asking questions". I mean they'd got a timesheet showing you were "asking a question" and a avi file from the security cameras clearly showing you walk into the bathroom, it seems an open and shut case?
This also goes higher level than just employee. Now any team lead / supvr / manager can be disciplined at any time for allowing the falsification to happen ... or perhaps not disciplined ... depending on how much the boss of the lead / supvr / mgr likes the victims race, church, political party, etc.
Needing to use the restroom between breaks
What makes you think the kind of place where mgmt daydreams of timing, tracking, and probably training and disciplining bathroom breaks would give people "break time"? They probably make them bring coal to work to keep the place warm in the winter.
The solution, obviously, is if you have to go, then just whip it out at your desk and/or use those "first class" cardboard boxes and some tape to interoffice mail the result "somewhere". Ask for a potted plant in your cubical and a little privacy, or maybe not if you like that kind of thing.
Just to bring it back on task, not reporting in great detail the exact time and duration of a digestive anomaly for later tracking, disciplinary, and promotional purposes is now defined as:
thug-backed coercive tactics
I'm curious what you'll define "not wanting to email a picture of the resulting turd using my smartphone to boss to document the event" will be defined as. I'm guessing something like "unamerican socialist terrorist with something to hide"
So, if teachers have so little effect on what kids learn, why are we paying them at all?
Nuns at the catholic school down the road, well, technically depending on how you account for them... But there's not enough of them. We'd need to go back to 10 child families, and/or kill off 10% of the young male population in (drug or oil) wars to get enough perma-single young women. Of course "real" nuns answering their calling as opposed to being unable to get married or another job are probably always a low rate. Might yet happen anyway.
The macro answer is that home schooling forces all/most 2-parent to have only one worker, and forces all 1-parent households (deeper) into poverty. Not really politically viable, although it sounds like something the Quisling Republicans would probably strongly support. Keeps women barefoot in the kitchen and makes the poor poorer, whats not to love for those guys?
There's at least two signalling effects. Good parents lead to good kids lead to a good school system. They're proud to make everyone know they pay more for teachers than average because it encourages more of "their kind" to move in and be neighbors. Bragging rights, conspicuous consumption. Real estate agents can't or won't talk legally about the culture of your future neighbors, but they're all about talking about "how good" the schools are, in practice this is how non-multicultural or non-ethnic the schools are, but they don't have the social faux pas of actually saying it out loud. That is whats known as signalling. The $ spent on teaching don't really matter to anyone other then probably the paycheck recipients, its all about signalling how the culture of everyone living there prioritizes education, or at least training, or in some cases, the opposite.
Also signals a groupthink belief which no one actually believes anymore, but they like to tell each other over and over, that they'd like to live in a place where education = financial success and financial success = highly paid education. False, of course, but imagine how nice of a place to live if only it were true.. You see this in religion, everyone "knows" you're dead means you're dead and that's it, but you'll end up with endless circular promoting that we'd all like to think there's something afterwards, so we'll all say it over and over to encourage each other. The usual groupthink low level brainwashing stuff.
Finally another way to look at it is about half the graduating class can't get a job at current payrates. Which at least theoretically means we're getting the top half in terms of quality. We'd like to think the top half of quality means teaching ability, but the male administrator (interesting how that works out) is probably hiring on more traditional standards like how hot she is, or how much she brownnoses and agrees with him, or how much she lies but doesn't get caught on the resume. Whatever the "standard" is, relevant or irrelevant, lower pay means we'd end up with sub-standard teachers. This also feeds back into the signalling loop above.
The average inflation over the last four years, according to the Departmen of Labor's CPI, has been somewhere around 2.5%
He's talking about real world inflation, like how much the cost of living has increased, commodity prices that are relevant to the median person, etc. Price of food, price of gasoline, price of real estate/rent, price of sickcare insurance, etc.
You're talking about the completely imaginary govt figure which is a statement of how much the govt has decided to increase CPI indexed transfer payments, social security, .mil pay and pensions, federal pay, etc. What the govt's willing to provide as a pay raise has no interaction what so ever with "how much stuff costs". There's a thing veneer of respectability where they exclude everything not fitting the message. So, yes, the average iphone cost plus maybe the average cost of a cedar 10 foot 2x4 maybe has only gone up 2.5%, but it doesn't "mean anything" in the real world other than SS checks and .mil paychecks are going to be 2.5% higher. What it really means is the politicians think they'll lose too many votes if they only paid out 2.4% more, but they wouldn't get enough extra votes if they paid out 2.6% more to make it worth it compared to other pork barrel expenses.
It would be very much like if instead of arbitrary payraises at work, people we given imaginary cooked books to base their raises. Just admit its arbitrary and mostly made up.
In the US, food and fuel is specifically exempted from determining the amount of inflation.
Yes, that's exactly why that politically motivated figure is meaningless.
If you could exist merely by purchasing iphones, for food, energy, and shelter, then the inflation figure would matter. As it is, its merely a measure of how much the govt has already decided to raise social security payments.
We do the same game with unemployment. Someday, in the American workers paradise, none of us will have jobs anymore while reported unemployment will be 5%, and inflation will always be 2% even if the price of a cup of coffee is doubling every month.
With 8% unemployment or better depending on your local environments, replacing a work force will not be all that hard
For uneducated, untrained, low skill, non-certified jobs. Yes the McDonalds mop pusher would be foolish to strike because he could be replaced in about 5 minutes by another illegal alien.
The law requires that you have a valid teachers license to teach at a public school where I live. That license requires a bachelors degree or post grad degree in a specifically approved "educator preparation program" and only some in state schools are approved. If you went to university in an out of state school, you can apply to request they evaluate your school's program and your transcript but its by no means guaranteed and there's a lot of politics (so if WI admin hates MN admin this year, then maybe no MN teachers are not going to be approved this year). Also only "about as many" licenses are issued as there are teachers... The renewal process is designed to minimize the number of qualified people not working.
So... sure... fire all the teachers... that'll work real well. Graduation rates are about twice annual replenishment rates (aka about half the grads can't get a job in the field requiring a teaching license) so if you assume about a 20 year "career" before burnout/retirement that means your rehiring rate will be about 10% per year for the first few years, with the rate presumably increasing because its a hot field (or maybe grad rates dropping because they don't want to have a career shorter than a pro football lineman when the new union gets them all fired again, and the whole purpose is to crater payrates, making it even less appealing, although of course administrator salaries only and always go up, so...).
You'd end up with something very much like "one room schoolhouse"with a single 22 year old recent grad standing up in the gym trying to teach the entire 300 student elementary school simultaneously, at least for the first couple years.
What that will mean is that teachers will be competing to teach the students more likely to meet the metrics. The good teachers will get those postitions,
There is a leveling effect. The definition of "good" will of course be "hotties" "brownnosers" "groupthinkers". Generally speaking people who are not good teachers or good role models. The bottom half of the barrel due to competition won't even be getting jobs. So its not so much that the bad kids will be stuck with the 2 out of 10s, they'll be stuck with the 6 out of 10s. The long term effect of low quality teachers teaching the good parent's kids and better than average quality teachers teaching the bad parent's kids is a leveling effect on educational outcomes. The weirdest part of the whole story is although its the usual socialist / pinko / commie / leftist technique and goal of social engineering, but its pushed hard by the -R party and opposed by the -D, which is the historical opposite of what you'd expect.
There's nothing quite so cushy in the private sector for low level employees.
Yeah, that's the problem. In my grandparents generation teaching was a pretty cruddy job with poor pay and benefits and long hours compared to private industry (other than having summers off). The problem is that teaching has pretty much stayed the same for a couple generations, in fact we have an excellent 1900 era education system, unfortunately its 2012, while we've destroyed our lower and middle class jobs by shipping them out of the country and/or importing illegals (what does "illegal" mean, if we will never enforce the law, just like financial regulation? Why can't we do this for weed?). So the problem is once you destroy or downgrade every job that's better than teaching, its NOT the teachers fault that they remain as having the best deal around thats not destroyed yet. The R party is playing with fire, if they great unwashed ever see thru their strategy, they're in big trouble.
but are the salaries equal in the private and public schools? If not there is no point in evaluating the teachers in the public schools as all the good teachers will have drained to the private schools with higher salaries.
My sister in law would be LOL at this time. Its the other way around... The primary private school competitor is a nun, willing to teach for free. You'll make more money at McDonalds than as catholic school teacher. They are the minor leagues for the public schools who recruit from them.
The "cream of the crop" at private (usually religious) schools vs "not so good" at public schools is the average parental quality. The kids are about the same (other than having been raised better, on average, by the private school parents)
getting annual raises about four times the rate of inflation
Check your numbers. If the real inflation rate was as low as their request, then gasoline would be about $1.50, a day at the hospital would be about $750, a loaf of bread would still be 50 cents, higher ed tuition would still be about $1000/semester....
There are very large numbers of people waiting to get into teaching
For kindergarten teachers in my sorta-rich suburb, yeah the competition for teaching jobs is incredibly intense. For ghetto areas like big cities, where you need to wear a bullet proof vest, often there's racial hiring quotas, there are serious issues getting enough staffing. Its very much like the demand for police officers in different locales... oddly enough the nice places have 10 applicants per position, and the bad places have 10 positions per good applicant...
"U.S. Department of Education: 79% of Chicago 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading." Teacher evaluations are a must. It is time to get rid of the ineffective teachers that are protected by unions.
Because parents culture and value system has much more of an influence than anything the teachers could ever do, I assume its a given that you already support taking kids away from their parents if the test results are poor, so the logical next step of optimizing a minor impact area does make sense. Setting up an orphanage system / military discipline dorm for kids with bad test scores would be expensive, but probably fairly effective.
Remember, never optimize the small stuff first. In this non-IT non-CS example, start with the high impact areas first, like parents, then once that is nearly perfected, start to worry about the teachers.
Another interesting aspect is indoctrination and groupthink. So ... teachers as a group are pretty much indoctrinated and into the whole groupthink thing... not so much in an absolute sense, but relative to artists, or PR people, or CS/IT people they're ultra conformist... Hard to find a more conformist group than teachers, maybe accountants or prison guards? Exchanging one clone for another doesn't help much, does it? Its sort of a "getting out your frustrations" plan rather than a genuine improvement plan. Yes, Lord Vader, the death star would have been saved if we just disposed of the bottom 1% performing stormtroopers... um, no, probably not.
Unfortunately that isn't always sufficient to convince potential customers.
You sure about that? Like the interviewer literally and HONESTLY said the reason you were not picked was:
Since I never studied ICT nor followed a course that resulted in a certificate, I can only prove my knowledge by actually doing stuff or showing what I've done so far
There's a lot of people looking for work... how do you know its not the bosses son who got the job or whatever, regardless of your wallpaper?
I've never had a job interview where they cared about anything other than what I have done, with THREE exceptions:
1) We only hire bachelors degree holders as an idiotic policy (back before I got my otherwise worthless degree)
2) Our contract w/ Cisco means that we "need" to hire a certain percentage of CCNA CCNP CCIE to maintain a lower contract cost or something (been there, done that, got the CCNA and CCNP, long since expired)
3) We're high tech pimps and we spend lots of money to advertise that our hos all have a certain cert... we don't care about the cert but our customers, apparently, do.
Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm FLAILING TUBE MAN!!
Um, AC, I donno how to say it, but that tube... um... its not an arm... I think the robot likes you.
Should have asked about Maxim semiconductor stock price for a real "jeopardy style" research project.
See they bought dallas semiconductor, who sold a whole line of "i-products" back when apple still meant an apple2-gs.
The iButton was like a 256 byte (byte, not kilo or mega or giga byte, just byte) one wire interface storage device. They had a whole herd of one-wire devices. Basically the one wire was really one wire plus ground and it was kind of like sneaking power for I2C off the data bus. Thats a good research question.
Also its a pessimistic outlook... onewire went nowhere and its pretty much gone now. Insinuating that irobot is going the way of the ibutton.
Strange that in Star Trek, they could beam away all of the bad stuff from their bodies, but would still need to eat and drink in traditional fashion.
Naah it was full of anachronisms where they loved to play musical instruments by hand to each other, I think there must be dozens of plays put on by the crew... Food is "fun" for the crew and cooking is even better... think Neelix on Voyager, much as we all try to block him from our memories.
Also about 90% of the holodeck episodes that were not about basically holopr0n involved travel into the past. That goofy car restoration project toward the end of voyager.
It was a generally backward thinking, backward looking mentality, despite the setting in the future.
More important:
Tribbles
Romulan Ale and synthehol
Green skinned orion womens
Space Hippies
Hand held Hypo sprays full of tranquilizers (There are non-hand held ones available since the 70s)
Pesky GD "son of a chief medical officer" ensigns
Skin tight leotards as a women's businesswear. Microskirts as traditional women's businesswear.
Holodecks full of amorous versions of your female coworkers "I am the goddess of love" or whatever that line was.
Now that I think of it, you keep all that dilithium stuff and just provide the leotards and mini skirts.