Schools have a captive audience : students and parents have no choices in schools or curriculum, something that most nations take for granted. Consequently, schools don't have to care, and they don't have to hold themselves to high standards.
Abolishing the public school system is necessary for the USofA to recover from the social and economic disaster we are in. The schools cost far too much and have a very high rate of failure, both obvious and hidden. The obvious failures are dropouts and illiterate graduates. The hidden failures are the students who learn to hate learning, who start drugs or anti-social activities as a result of their bad experiences in school.
Around the world, adult illiterates only require 90 hours in a classroom to become literate enough to continue their education, entirely on their own. This is with books, not a computer and the internet. They can then begin college in 2 or 3 years.
There is an 'unschooling' movement in the US that shows that children in groups, given access to games, computers, books,... teach each other to read, write, do arithmetic. Continued through high school, these students go to college just like everyone else.
So, schools are completely obsolete. There is no more hope of 'reforming' the public school system than there is of patching Windows to make it a robust, reliable and secure OS.
Progressives are as more to blame than anyone. They have made anti-Constitutional ideas standard, e.g. that the government is the solution, that people must be improved by government control, that Freedom is not the highest value.
Schools have pushed Progressive ideas forever.
Once the Constitution is eliminated, constraints on religious leaders are gone. There are no Lysander Spooners in modern theology.
People pay taxes. Corporations consider taxes part of their costs, and pass them along to the customers in the sales price, or deduct them from employee's wages -- economists support both POVs, but no economist says that corporations pay taxes.
Sales taxes are widely understood to be regressive, that is, having a larger effect on the poor than the rich. Corporate taxes on food and drug suppliers are equally regressive.
As for 'cheating', there is a serious distinction between tax avoidance and 'cheating'. Most corporations are strictly within the law wrt taxes, and Google is merely taking advantage of the laws as they are written.
Generally, tax avoiders have the same advantage as black-hat hackers, and for the same reason : writers of laws and regulations are fewer and dimmer than the people looking for loopholes.
believe in evolution. A fundamentalist of some kind, as I recall from my grad school days.
He did excellent work, published very many papers in peer-reviewed journals, had an international reputation, his students populate medical school depts of anatomy and neuroscience all over the world.
His papers reported the differences between various species. The species were important in the evolutionary tree of primates, but he didn't have to interpret the results in those terms, just report the data.
So, not every biologist needs to believe in evolution.
The exact argument was made for Japan, as its rate of improvement in manufacturing was staggering in the late 80s and early 90s.
Please cite examples of entire countries that have won from the country's industrial policy? You can find some individual industry successes, but not entire countries, I think.
Laws and regulations are programming for an open environment. A conceptual oxymoron that nobody associated with technology should fall into. Nobody tries to write a handbook for living their life, we all know that our worlds are too complex to allow a finite set of rules to deal with it. Yet, most people seem to think the gov is part of such a simple world.
Empirically, it is pretty clear that laws are written by entities with $ who will be affected by the law, and that all regulatory bodies are quickly taken over by the regulatees. Money buys power, every time.
Even if programming for an open environment were possible, the parallel is hackers vs programmers : Programmers for any given program are few, the tools are flawed. Hackers are many, inevitably some of them find the flaws left by programmers + tools. Hackers have a permanent advantage. Lawyers writing laws/regulations are few, tools are nil, lawyers on the opposite side looking for loopholes are many.
So, laws and regulations of the very specific type, at least, do not and cannot work. We have to give up that model of government.
I see little or no ability to do experiments, observe phenomena in computer systems, or handle scientific thinking coming from CS majors, little in CS profs. They are all applied math types.
When did you last read a paper about observations of real-world network traffic phenomena? About the distribution and intervals for context switches that take time from the main computation in a super-computer cluster and the implications for cluster design?
Bin Laden wanted us out of the Middle East only to increase our involvement?
Can you support that?
I thought he said he was going to bankrupt the US via our stupid responses to his minor terrorist acts. Given our $1.5T deficit for the indefinite future, how long do you think we have to wait for our gov to either hyperinflate the currency or default on the national debt?
Engineers and programmers have the answer to these questions, if only we apply our various understandings.
Do you want to be given the task of designing and implementing a real-time control system for an open system, that is, a system which has major inputs that are not under your control?
Programming for an open system is a conceptual oxymoron. Can't be done.
Even before considering the human/social system, which always leads to the regulators being taken over by the regulatees, and before we realize that the response times of legislation and regulators is orders of magnitude slower than the environment being regulated, regulations don't work because they are trying to do the impossible.
You can't point to regulations that 'work' at a system-level. The FDA is a fine example : a very simple mandate "rules and regulations to make food and medicines safe", yet it has become protection from competition for the few remaining drug companies, drugs are still remarkably unsafe, very few new drugs are developed, the costs of drugs are very high, and the drug companies have thus become one of the major owners of our government. We continue to die because we can't afford the drugs, because they are unsafe and because the needed drugs have not been developed because of the very high costs.
It seems to me that the only laws that make sense are ones that require honesty : In any exchange of value, both sides must disclose all the information needed by the other side to make an intelligent judgment and must check that the other party has indeed understood that information, and this requirement is proportional to the value being exchanged.
Clearly, the regulatory model has not worked. Clearly, it cannot work, based on elementary understanding of mathematical chaos, computational complexity and the emergent properties of systems.
Almost all the daily news is variations on that. The rest is accident, or made up. Like the idea that there is some difference between Democrats and Republicans, that one side is morally superior,...
In all of the companies I have worked in, I have only met 3 US-born black engineers. One in 1982 at a company called OSM, a 2nd at Xerox Parc, and a third who married my wife's best friend about 8 years ago. A friend of 20 years is an African-born engineer, worked at AT&T.
Perhaps 3 Latino-Mexican-Chicano whatever the PC term is these days.
The total number of engineers I have worked with, and known well enough to identify ethnic group, over 30 years is at least 1000, e.g. 100+ at Xerox, 100+ in consulting assignments at a number of semi-conductor companies, 50+ on several software consulting assignments, 20+ in many consulting assignments, 300 in a company where I was FT 10 years ago, 300 in a company 3 years ago, consulting assignment at PacBell with ??, AT&T ditto,...
By this sample,.3% of US-born engineers are black, approximately the same number Mexican.
So, no company anywhere can be hiring engineers from these ethnic groups in proportion to their population -- the engineers don't exist.
This isn't prejudice : in some projects, we would have 20+ languages spoken, and US blacks and Mexicans were hired in a lot of other jobs. So far as I could tell, they weren't treated any differently than any other group.
I had an interesting conversation with a Mexican day laborer some years ago. His theory of the world was that black and brown people could not do as well. Maybe true in Mexico, but here in Silicon valley, we have lots of brown --> black Indians who are doing very well indeed.
Also, being pedantic, 'doing good' is not the same as 'doing net good'. It is far from clear that our society is better off today than it would have been without all of the gov assistance we have paid for.
The proximal causes of WWI were a combination of the secrecy of the treaties and the necessity of starting mobilization N days before any attack by an aggressor.
It was a system-level failure : prudent mobilizations for defense were indistinguishable from those intended for offensive operations, and no country could foresee the effects of their foreign policy actions.
Of course, we can't now, either. Multi-lateral international diplomacy with war is a game that makes 3D or 3-way chess look like tic-tac-toe. Nobody plays 3D or 3-way chess, as you can't play enough games in a lifetime to know whether you are getting better or not.
We just visited Kennedy over XMAS. The 3D iMax film showed a Russian launch, described the facilities. By comparison, NASA's programs are wildly extravagant.
As Russia has accomplished a substantial fraction of what the US has accomplished with a very much smaller budget, and with a similar failure rate, it is clear that NASA has been an incredible waste of our space development dollars.
Cold Fusion has been accepted by the Department of Energy. Read their review on the topic, the one that changed the policy. It makes the point that P & F were correct on every point.
Yes : our kid hurt his finger, got a finger splint, the insurance bill was for a full-arm cast.
I spent time in the hospital recently. Medical exam was 30 seconds in the corridor, billed as a full exam. Every hour some new medical specialty came through to 'do an evaluation', none of which I needed and none of which were prescribed by the physicians, so far as I know.
I felt like a pigeon being plucked, not a patient.
This is to be expected : the amount of dishonesty is proportional to the level of gov control. All times and all places.
We are a country who has been continuously at war for many years. We spend more on national defense than all the other countries put together. We have troops in 130 countries in the world. We have treaties pledging to defend most of them.
We are deeply in debt, and project deficits > $1T for years.
The majority of our Congress is owned by the military-intelligence-industrial complex, Wall Street, police agencies and the prison industry.
Money always can buy power, and otherwise power does what it wants.
So, the idea that we will have mere socialism is silly: We have a fascist version.
There are lots of people involved, lots of 'good' they might like. One person's 'good' may well be another person's 'bad'.
Ditto for corporations.
Then, corporations are made up of people who are employeed by them, owned by other people.
So, I need to see your equations that balance these factors before I can accept that it is possible to "put the good of the people before the good of the corporations".
Otherwise, I have to consider the statement mere rhetoric, words devoid of meaning, communicating emotion and ideology, not facts or ideas.
Then write the equations that define the actions needed by each corporation to meet that definition of national interest.
Then collect the initial conditions that will allow solving those equations.
Then compute for the age of the universe.
Then throw the results away because conditions changed meanwhile. Do it again.
At the end of a long iteration, throw the results away because people don't act like machines, and you can't program for an open system.
How can a slashdot crowd throw away everything it knows about science and technology and allow such propositions to be debated as though they have some basis in external reality?
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't seem to me you dealt with the claims, either at a logical or factual level.
Schools have a captive audience : students and parents have no choices in schools or curriculum, something that most nations take for granted. Consequently, schools don't have to care, and they don't have to hold themselves to high standards.
Abolishing the public school system is necessary for the USofA to recover from the social and economic disaster we are in. The schools cost far too much and have a very high rate of failure, both obvious and hidden. The obvious failures are dropouts and illiterate graduates. The hidden failures are the students who learn to hate learning, who start drugs or anti-social activities as a result of their bad experiences in school.
Around the world, adult illiterates only require 90 hours in a classroom to become literate enough to continue their education, entirely on their own. This is with books, not a computer and the internet. They can then begin college in 2 or 3 years.
There is an 'unschooling' movement in the US that shows that children in groups, given access to games, computers, books, ... teach each other to read, write, do arithmetic. Continued through high school, these students go to college just like everyone else.
So, schools are completely obsolete. There is no more hope of 'reforming' the public school system than there is of patching Windows to make it a robust, reliable and secure OS.
According to the people who wrote the US Constitution, consolidated power == tyranny.
Progressives have a lot to answer for.
Cleaning military bases that are de-comissioned is usually a very expensive task : the military doesn't take care of their own environments.
Did they do better in space?
That is the precise problem in all of this. Don't invoke 'public interest' recursively.
Progressives are as more to blame than anyone. They have made anti-Constitutional ideas standard, e.g. that the government is the solution, that people must be improved by government control, that Freedom is not the highest value.
Schools have pushed Progressive ideas forever.
Once the Constitution is eliminated, constraints on religious leaders are gone. There are no Lysander Spooners in modern theology.
I did.
Valore + Amazon ( Valore's search is useless ) + google checkout is a fine substitute for buying books from Amazon.
People pay taxes. Corporations consider taxes part of their costs, and pass them along to the customers in the sales price, or deduct them from employee's wages -- economists support both POVs, but no economist says that corporations pay taxes.
Sales taxes are widely understood to be regressive, that is, having a larger effect on the poor than the rich. Corporate taxes on food and drug suppliers are equally regressive.
As for 'cheating', there is a serious distinction between tax avoidance and 'cheating'. Most corporations are strictly within the law wrt taxes, and Google is merely taking advantage of the laws as they are written.
Generally, tax avoiders have the same advantage as black-hat hackers, and for the same reason : writers of laws and regulations are fewer and dimmer than the people looking for loopholes.
believe in evolution. A fundamentalist of some kind, as I recall from my grad school days.
He did excellent work, published very many papers in peer-reviewed journals, had an international reputation, his students populate medical school depts of anatomy and neuroscience all over the world.
His papers reported the differences between various species. The species were important in the evolutionary tree of primates, but he didn't have to interpret the results in those terms, just report the data.
So, not every biologist needs to believe in evolution.
The exact argument was made for Japan, as its rate of improvement in manufacturing was staggering in the late 80s and early 90s.
Please cite examples of entire countries that have won from the country's industrial policy? You can find some individual industry successes, but not entire countries, I think.
Laws and regulations are programming for an open environment. A conceptual oxymoron that nobody associated with technology should fall into. Nobody tries to write a handbook for living their life, we all know that our worlds are too complex to allow a finite set of rules to deal with it. Yet, most people seem to think the gov is part of such a simple world.
Empirically, it is pretty clear that laws are written by entities with $ who will be affected by the law, and that all regulatory bodies are quickly taken over by the regulatees. Money buys power, every time.
Even if programming for an open environment were possible, the parallel is hackers vs programmers : Programmers for any given program are few, the tools are flawed. Hackers are many, inevitably some of them find the flaws left by programmers + tools. Hackers have a permanent advantage. Lawyers writing laws/regulations are few, tools are nil, lawyers on the opposite side looking for loopholes are many.
So, laws and regulations of the very specific type, at least, do not and cannot work. We have to give up that model of government.
Political science. Christian Science.
I see little or no ability to do experiments, observe phenomena in computer systems, or handle scientific thinking coming from CS majors, little in CS profs. They are all applied math types.
When did you last read a paper about observations of real-world network traffic phenomena? About the distribution and intervals for context switches that take time from the main computation in a super-computer cluster and the implications for cluster design?
Bin Laden wanted us out of the Middle East only to increase our involvement?
Can you support that?
I thought he said he was going to bankrupt the US via our stupid responses to his minor terrorist acts. Given our $1.5T deficit for the indefinite future, how long do you think we have to wait for our gov to either hyperinflate the currency or default on the national debt?
Engineers and programmers have the answer to these questions, if only we apply our various understandings.
Do you want to be given the task of designing and implementing a real-time control system for an open system, that is, a system which has major inputs that are not under your control?
Programming for an open system is a conceptual oxymoron. Can't be done.
Even before considering the human/social system, which always leads to the regulators being taken over by the regulatees, and before we realize that the response times of legislation and regulators is orders of magnitude slower than the environment being regulated, regulations don't work because they are trying to do the impossible.
You can't point to regulations that 'work' at a system-level. The FDA is a fine example : a very simple mandate "rules and regulations to make food and medicines safe", yet it has become protection from competition for the few remaining drug companies, drugs are still remarkably unsafe, very few new drugs are developed, the costs of drugs are very high, and the drug companies have thus become one of the major owners of our government. We continue to die because we can't afford the drugs, because they are unsafe and because the needed drugs have not been developed because of the very high costs.
It seems to me that the only laws that make sense are ones that require honesty : In any exchange of value, both sides must disclose all the information needed by the other side to make an intelligent judgment and must check that the other party has indeed understood that information, and this requirement is proportional to the value being exchanged.
Clearly, the regulatory model has not worked. Clearly, it cannot work, based on elementary understanding of mathematical chaos, computational complexity and the emergent properties of systems.
This
Almost all the daily news is variations on that. The rest is accident, or made up. Like the idea that there is some difference between Democrats and Republicans, that one side is morally superior, ...
Socially liberal, very strong on individual rights, very strong on limited government.
Some embrace anarchy.
'Lunatics' we are not : this was the position of people like Jefferson, for the most part.
Correlation is not causation, of course, and 2 sort-of-equal correlations don't make a valid analogy.
What evidence do you have for this analogy? In exactly what ways are tumors + blood vessels like government regulations + dishonest businesses?
Sorry to trouble your rhetoric with questions of reality, but ...
In all of the companies I have worked in, I have only met 3 US-born black engineers. One in 1982 at a company called OSM, a 2nd at Xerox Parc, and a third who married my wife's best friend about 8 years ago.
A friend of 20 years is an African-born engineer, worked at AT&T.
Perhaps 3 Latino-Mexican-Chicano whatever the PC term is these days.
The total number of engineers I have worked with, and known well enough to identify ethnic group, over 30 years is at least 1000, e.g. 100+ at Xerox, 100+ in consulting assignments at a number of semi-conductor companies, 50+ on several software consulting assignments, 20+ in many consulting assignments, 300 in a company where I was FT 10 years ago, 300 in a company 3 years ago, consulting assignment at PacBell with ??, AT&T ditto, ...
By this sample, .3% of US-born engineers are black, approximately the same number Mexican.
So, no company anywhere can be hiring engineers from these ethnic groups in proportion to their population -- the engineers don't exist.
This isn't prejudice : in some projects, we would have 20+ languages spoken, and US blacks and Mexicans were hired in a lot of other jobs. So far as I could tell, they weren't treated any differently than any other group.
I had an interesting conversation with a Mexican day laborer some years ago. His theory of the world was that black and brown people could not do as well. Maybe true in Mexico, but here in Silicon valley, we have lots of brown --> black Indians who are doing very well indeed.
acts in their own interest, to the detriment of the citizens who support them?
Also, all gov entities are 'regulated', right?
In case you aren't keeping up, our government is currently engaged in an effort to assassinate a US citizen in Yemen.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
Doesn't seem like the regulation is working.
Also, being pedantic, 'doing good' is not the same as 'doing net good'. It is far from clear that our society is better off today than it would have been without all of the gov assistance we have paid for.
The proximal causes of WWI were a combination of the secrecy of the treaties and the necessity of starting mobilization N days before any attack by an aggressor.
It was a system-level failure : prudent mobilizations for defense were indistinguishable from those intended for offensive operations, and no country could foresee the effects of their foreign policy actions.
Of course, we can't now, either. Multi-lateral international diplomacy with war is a game that makes 3D or 3-way chess look like tic-tac-toe. Nobody plays 3D or 3-way chess, as you can't play enough games in a lifetime to know whether you are getting better or not.
We just visited Kennedy over XMAS. The 3D iMax film showed a Russian launch, described the facilities. By comparison, NASA's programs are wildly extravagant.
As Russia has accomplished a substantial fraction of what the US has accomplished with a very much smaller budget, and with a similar failure rate, it is clear that NASA has been an incredible waste of our space development dollars.
Cold Fusion has been accepted by the Department of Energy. Read their review on the topic, the one that changed the policy. It makes the point that P & F were correct on every point.
Yes : our kid hurt his finger, got a finger splint, the insurance bill was for a full-arm cast.
I spent time in the hospital recently. Medical exam was 30 seconds in the corridor, billed as a full exam. Every hour some new medical specialty came through to 'do an evaluation', none of which I needed and none of which were prescribed by the physicians, so far as I know.
I felt like a pigeon being plucked, not a patient.
This is to be expected : the amount of dishonesty is proportional to the level of gov control. All times and all places.
We are a country who has been continuously at war for many years. We spend more on national defense than all the other countries put together. We have troops in 130 countries in the world. We have treaties pledging to defend most of them.
We are deeply in debt, and project deficits > $1T for years.
The majority of our Congress is owned by the military-intelligence-industrial complex, Wall Street, police agencies and the prison industry.
Money always can buy power, and otherwise power does what it wants.
So, the idea that we will have mere socialism is silly: We have a fascist version.
There are lots of people involved, lots of 'good' they might like. One person's 'good' may well be another person's 'bad'.
Ditto for corporations.
Then, corporations are made up of people who are employeed by them, owned by other people.
So, I need to see your equations that balance these factors before I can accept that it is possible to "put the good of the people before the good of the corporations".
Otherwise, I have to consider the statement mere rhetoric, words devoid of meaning, communicating emotion and ideology, not facts or ideas.
Then write the equations that define the actions needed by each corporation to meet that definition of national interest.
Then collect the initial conditions that will allow solving those equations.
Then compute for the age of the universe.
Then throw the results away because conditions changed meanwhile. Do it again.
At the end of a long iteration, throw the results away because people don't act like machines, and you can't program for an open system.
How can a slashdot crowd throw away everything it knows about science and technology and allow such propositions to be debated as though they have some basis in external reality?
Lew