What if their failure is predictable after a certain number of hours? Feel like having a whole array go down in one night?
Then such a failure would have already been predicted -- it's not like flash memory is a new frontier.
And really, that's not likely. More likely is that they would have X hours of life time ± some percentage. If X is 40,000 (about five years) and the percentage was 1% -- that gives a range of about a month where they would all fail. And really, even if all drives are used in exactly the same way (as they might be in a raid setup) -- the percentage still wouldn't be as small as 1%.
I'm fairly sure that if you actually asked the manufacturers of SSD drives they could give you pretty good details about the expected failure modes.
The current HD manufacturers can milk the shortage for all its worth, then their companies will die and be forgotten.
Considering how much larger and how much cheaper mechanical hard drives are than than SSD drives, it seems like they've got quite a bit of life left in them.
Maybe at some point SSD drives will become cheaper, larger and more reliable -- at that point just about nobody would buy mechanical drives any more -- but that point is likely many years away. Yes, SSD drives are improving -- but mechanical drives are too.
Not until we get that whole "exactly how reliable are SSDs and what is their failure mode" thing worked out, they wont.
If you have proper redundancy and backups, their failure mode isn't terribly important. (Let's assume that they use ECC and checksums and such so that if they do fail they'll throw errors rather than silently give bad data -- if they silently give bad data, then failure modes matter a lot (and such drives should not be trusted), but this is something that the manufacturers would know about, having designed the drives.)
Now, it would be nice if they didn't fail more often than mechanical drives -- as that could get expensive or turn into a real pain in the butt -- but if you've got RAID setups protecting you from the occasional failure of a single drive, and bonafide backups protecting you from human error and the (hopefully rare) more serious hardware failures, it doesn't really matter how much warning your drive gives you before it fails, or how "completely" it fails.
As long as any drives are at all likely to completely fail with no warning -- you need backups and RAID to prevent downtime and lost data. And mechanical drives are already at all likely to do this, so throwing some SSD drives into the mix doesn't require a fundamental change in your planning for it.
I don't see how "games" necessarily need a big drive, seeing as the entire NES collection in the English language will fit in 1 GB.
While I don't have any reason to doubt your figure, I tend to doubt the relevance.
Most people who play "games" in 2011 aren't playing NES games. And anybody who does have the entire NES collection in the English language on their hard drive probably also has significant portions of some combination of the entire N64, NDS, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360, Atari 2600, Genesis, Apple ][, Intellivision, arcade ROMs in general, etc. libraries. Some of these are minuscule by 2011 standards, but some are quite large.
All the games I've bought on Steam take up about 500 GB total installed. That wouldn't require a large mechanical drive (by 2011 standards) but any SSD drive would be quite large and expensive.
In any event, I think that most of the space individuals need beyond 300 GB or so is for media -- movies, music, videos they've taken, pictures they've taken, etc. I did say most, not all -- some people will have terabytes of games -- but I don't think they're the norm.
Of course, one area that most people need more space for that they aren't using is for backups... but that's another matter entirely:)
which reinforces one law for the rulers and one law for the ruled.. i can assure you that if the person the officer sprayed had done that to the officer or even retaliated in the exact same manner (pepper spraying the officer) that person would be doing jail time and there wouldn't be any questions about it.
by not prosecuting the officers and not punishing them for the crime you are giving other officers a very real affirmation that they can get away with the same actions.
If it was up to me, officers would indeed be prosecuted for things like this. I'd be inclined to give them some more leeway than normal citizens when they are clearly doing their job -- but that leeway would have limits, and this would have passed it.
But it's not up to me.
Pointing out what is likely to happen and explaining why is not the same as supporting it.
Reading the ruling, it would seem that what really happened is that the court said that the officers are not entitled to qualified immunity, which isn't quite the same as charging (and convicting!) them of the criminal charge of assault (and/or battery.)
Indeed, the link you gave doesn't even include the word "assault". I'm no lawyer, but it sounds like the case in question was a civil case, not even a criminal case against the police.
The reality is that it's very unlikely that anybody is going to even be charged, let alone convicted, of pepper spraying (or giving the order to do so, or supporting it) the protesters there. Juries really don't like to convict police officers of what could be seen as simply doing their job, and DAs only want to pursue cases they think they can win -- and rarely do they want to go after police anyways except in the most egregious of cases -- and the only really egregious aspect of this case is how many video cameras were on the guy. (It was bad, don't get me wrong -- but nobody was killed, beaten to near death, robbed or raped, and those are the sorts of things that tend to get cops nailed if there's enough evidence -- and by some strange coincidence (since the evidence is often controlled by the police themselves), there rarely is.)
but the video of the event so inflamed public opinion that all involved will either lose their jobs or face criminal prosecution. The use of force in this circumstance is completely unwarranted, and people will do hard time for using it.
Are you talking about the same video? The cop who pepper sprayed the sitting protesters?
Hard time, really? The protesters who were arrested will probably have their charges dropped. The cop is likely to get some sort of discipline applied -- he might even lose his job, depending on how badly they want to scapegoat him. The people who gave the order will receive no official punishment at all. And nobody involved (except maybe the protesters) will be charged with any actual crimes.
This isn't the first time police have used excessive force and it was caught on video. How such cases are handled has been worked out already -- and it only involves criminal charges in the most extreme situations (and this isn't one of them. Nobody was killed or raped or robbed, for example.)
Which government? The internet is a global entity. What constitutes porn in one country shouldn't suddenly apply universally.
I would imagine that the vast majority of governments have already set their own standards about what porn is and what it isn't, and more importantly what porn is legal (if any) and what isn't.
These standards will obviously vary from country to country, but don't think that just because they may vary between countries or even within a single country or from case to case that they don't exist. They do.
I never said that anything should apply universally, or that.xxx was a good idea or a bad idea, or that it would be possible or practical to force all porn onto that domain.
They certainly have little problem nailing people for child porn, for example.
So little problem, in fact, that parents have been prosecuted for innocent pictures of their naked children.
Or to put it another way: it's not as simple as you think it is.
I didn't say there was a clear line -- the line is quite fuzzy.
But there's definitely a line. It's exact location is determined in courtrooms, and this location can vary from case to case, but the line is certainly there.
As for people being prosecuted, I'm aware of a few cases such as this one -- but even this one was thrown out before going to trial. (Though being forced to register as sex offenders before being convicted? That sounds like a violation of one's rights to due process.)
But again -- my point is that don't think that just because a line is hard to draw that nobody in power will draw one. The lines are already drawn. Simple, complicated, whatever -- the lines have been drawn.
it where porn begins that's hard to define. I can show things that everyone would consider porn.
However, just make it part of the equal that the person buying the sight intends to us it as porn. That way the purchases will be using their definition.
Just because there's a vague blur between "porn" and "not porn", that doesn't mean the government can't make a definition. It can, and it has.
People do get arrested, tried and convicted for child porn, for example. Yes, the "child" part is fairly cut and dried, but the porn part requires judgement calls, and police, prosecutors, judges and juries seem to be able to make those judgement calls as needed. Yes, there is a gray area, and that's not idea, but don't pretend that people can't or won't make these decisions -- because they can and will.
Of course, that RFC is just somebody's opinion on the matter. It's hardly the last word.
And really, the title is ".sex Considered Dangerous" -- not "A mandatory *.sex (or *.xxx) domain will not make it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it".
If all porn was forced to be on *.xxx domains by law and was not directly reachable via any other DNS tlds, then it certainly would make it that much easier to identify (though there's the risk of false positives) and filter porn if you didn't want to see it. This doesn't mean it's a good idea, but it *would* make this filtering easier.
(Of course, there's some big ifs in there too, I realize that.)
You would have for that to force all porn to use an.xxx domain, which is impossible, be it only because nobody's able to define porn precisely.
Um, the government has *no* problem defining porn precisely enough to apply laws to it. Yes, the final decisions are made by courts, but don't delude yourself into thinking that they can't make a definition -- they can, and they have.
They certainly have little problem nailing people for child porn, for example. Or the occasional obscenity case.
You have exactly zero personal freedom in the US today
Really? So you don't have the freedom to say things like that?
If you lived in North Korea and said all these things about their government publically, I'm guessing you'd disappear -- but here in the US, you seem to feel free enough to say them.
So if we have "exactly zero personal freedoms" here... in North Korea I guess they have negative personal freedoms?
And I didn't say things aren't bad now. I'm just saying that they were bad in the past too, but I wasn't there, so I can't really compare then to now accurately.
Americans fear their government more now than at any time in history.
I don't know about that. We certainly do fear our government a lot now, but more than at any time in history?
When the Constitution was being written, the authors were extremely worried about overreaching government. During Prohibition, alcohol was still commonly used, but there was the fear of the government finding out. During the Communism scare, many lives were ruined just because politicians would claim that you were a Communist. The CIA, FBI and NSA have been known to violate people's rights for decades now.
As I see it, there is certainly a lot of fear and concern now. But there was a lot in the past too. I guess I'm not old enough to go back far enough in the past (and unfortunately, only somebody who was 250 years old could really give an authoritative answer to this.)
But wiretaps (and search warrants in general) are supposed to be specific in what they're searching for.
If the warrant was specific about searching Verizon towers, then this fake tower would not count being as it wasn't a Verizon tower. Not that I've read the warrants or anything -- this is just a guess about a possible problem.
Still, if the police had a warrant, and it covered what they did -- then it sounds like they did it right.
I should clarify that in the case of teachers, "poor performance" usually means "students perform poorly on standardized tests".
The problem there is that the quality of the teacher is only one factor -- and perhaps the biggest factor is the parents of the student -- if the parents are well educated and successful, they usually make sure their children are as well, and so their children do well on standardized tests, good teacher or not. And conversely, if the parents are poor and uneducated, their children tend to think that education is a waste and do poorly on standardized tests. Yes, there are exceptions, and good teachers can sometimes motivate such students -- but such teachers are the exception rather than the rule.
Would it make sense to fire the teachers who can't motivate their unmotivated students? Probably, but the entire system makes that difficult -- even if there isn't a union.
In any event, the way one fires a poorly performing teacher is the same process one uses to fire a poorly performing employee in the private sector -- document it. Document everything. It's a paper trail that lets you get past HR and any union and policies (nobody is going to make a policy that makes firing problem employees impossible.) The principal may not want to do this, but just because it's hard it doesn't mean it's impossible.
If you need proof of just how much more difficult it is to fire a union employee than at at-will employee, just track down any news article about any decent-sized city trying to fire teachers for poor performance.
"Poor performance" is a long stretch from "assault and battery".
As for teachers, that's not a union issue at all -- teachers are often hard to fire, union or not. "Poor performance" is a pretty vague problem, and for a teacher it's even harder to quantify -- is the performance poor because the person is a poor teacher, or because the children are poor and unmotivated?
Schools tend to be "good old boy" clubs where teachers are only fired for serious mistakes -- failing to come to work for a while, assaulting the principal, having sex with students, getting arrested for felonies, etc. If there's layoffs (rare, but it's happened lately) -- they're often done on the basis of seniority rather than merit because 1) the people who have been there a long time are more likely to be friends with the management (principal, school board, etc.) and 2) it's hard to find personal fault with a perfectly objective system for choosing who stays and goes -- it spares the management the burden of justifying their decision. And really, many government jobs end up working this way, union or not. Unions might make it worse, but it's that way even if there's no union.
Schools also often have "tenure" which has little to do with unions but makes teachers difficult to fire.
So the answer is outlawing unions and having all workers negotiate their own contract terms?
No, but there should be a middle ground.
Unions are good, but this whole "protect every employee at any cost" thing has to go. Outlawing the union is going way too far in the other direction, but there has to be a better solution.
Personally, I think that these claims that people are impossible to fire are largely made up. Maybe people are difficult to fire, but impossible? As for punching his boss in the face, I certainly don't have all the details (or any of them, really), but I'll bet there's more to that story. Certainly, if the guy punched his boss for no reason, he'd be arrested for assault and battery and I'm guessing he'd be easy to fire, union or not.
It's not the governor's job to decide constitutionality.
Then why does he swear to defend the Constitution? Why do so many elected officials, soldiers, public servants, etc. do so?
As I see it, it's *everybody's* job to decide constitutionality, and while it doesn't really matter how good of a job most citizens do, if you're involved in making and enforcing laws -- it *does* matter. Legislators should not make unconstitutional laws, governors should not sign unconstitutional laws, and police should not enforce unconstitutional laws.
That is what the Judiciary and Legislative (i.e senate/assembly) branches exist for.
And I disagree. I think everybody ought to be aware of the issues to some degree, but those who actually make and enforce laws need to have a pretty good grasp on the Constitutionality of what they do.
But yes, if there's disagreement, the judicial branch gets the final word. But *not* the only word.
Where did you get the idea that the bill was remotely unconstitutional?
I didn't (get that idea at all.) I *never* said I though the bill was unconstitutional.
My point was that as I see it, if the governor thinks a bill is unconstitutional, one way of satisfying his oath is to veto it. (There may be other ways to satisfy the oath, of course.)
Defending the Constitution is not only the job of the courts -- in fact, most of our public officials who swear an oath as part of their job swear to uphold and protect it. If our elected officials took this duty more seriously, I think our country would be in better shape today.
I did not say that the bill was unconstitutional -- and in fact I don't really believe it is -- but was instead responding to Scott Sweze's (implied?) idea that he might have vetoed it on Constitutional grounds. (And again, I don't know why he vetoed it, so I'm not commenting on his real reason, whatever it might be.)
To Governor Brown: If the supreme court believes this law is unconstitutional, they can strike it down. Don't overstep your powers and do this for them. Unless *YOU,* on behalf of your constituents, have a specific objection: let the law pass.
Well, it seems that the Governor of California swears an oath that starts out like this --
"I, ______, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California...
It seems to me that if he thinks a bill is unconstitutional (no matter how much *I* might like the bill) it's his duty to veto it.
I'm not saying that this is why he vetoed it -- I don't know why -- but I'm simply saying that vetoing it for being unconstitutional would not strike me as an overstepping of his powers if he really does think it's unconstitutional.
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What if their failure is predictable after a certain number of hours? Feel like having a whole array go down in one night?
Then such a failure would have already been predicted -- it's not like flash memory is a new frontier.
And really, that's not likely. More likely is that they would have X hours of life time ± some percentage. If X is 40,000 (about five years) and the percentage was 1% -- that gives a range of about a month where they would all fail. And really, even if all drives are used in exactly the same way (as they might be in a raid setup) -- the percentage still wouldn't be as small as 1%.
I'm fairly sure that if you actually asked the manufacturers of SSD drives they could give you pretty good details about the expected failure modes.
The current HD manufacturers can milk the shortage for all its worth, then their companies will die and be forgotten.
Considering how much larger and how much cheaper mechanical hard drives are than than SSD drives, it seems like they've got quite a bit of life left in them.
Maybe at some point SSD drives will become cheaper, larger and more reliable -- at that point just about nobody would buy mechanical drives any more -- but that point is likely many years away. Yes, SSD drives are improving -- but mechanical drives are too.
Not until we get that whole "exactly how reliable are SSDs and what is their failure mode" thing worked out, they wont.
If you have proper redundancy and backups, their failure mode isn't terribly important. (Let's assume that they use ECC and checksums and such so that if they do fail they'll throw errors rather than silently give bad data -- if they silently give bad data, then failure modes matter a lot (and such drives should not be trusted), but this is something that the manufacturers would know about, having designed the drives.)
Now, it would be nice if they didn't fail more often than mechanical drives -- as that could get expensive or turn into a real pain in the butt -- but if you've got RAID setups protecting you from the occasional failure of a single drive, and bonafide backups protecting you from human error and the (hopefully rare) more serious hardware failures, it doesn't really matter how much warning your drive gives you before it fails, or how "completely" it fails.
As long as any drives are at all likely to completely fail with no warning -- you need backups and RAID to prevent downtime and lost data. And mechanical drives are already at all likely to do this, so throwing some SSD drives into the mix doesn't require a fundamental change in your planning for it.
I don't see how "games" necessarily need a big drive, seeing as the entire NES collection in the English language will fit in 1 GB.
While I don't have any reason to doubt your figure, I tend to doubt the relevance.
Most people who play "games" in 2011 aren't playing NES games. And anybody who does have the entire NES collection in the English language on their hard drive probably also has significant portions of some combination of the entire N64, NDS, PSP, Xbox, Xbox 360, Atari 2600, Genesis, Apple ][, Intellivision, arcade ROMs in general, etc. libraries. Some of these are minuscule by 2011 standards, but some are quite large.
All the games I've bought on Steam take up about 500 GB total installed. That wouldn't require a large mechanical drive (by 2011 standards) but any SSD drive would be quite large and expensive.
In any event, I think that most of the space individuals need beyond 300 GB or so is for media -- movies, music, videos they've taken, pictures they've taken, etc. I did say most, not all -- some people will have terabytes of games -- but I don't think they're the norm.
Of course, one area that most people need more space for that they aren't using is for backups ... but that's another matter entirely :)
which reinforces one law for the rulers and one law for the ruled.. i can assure you that if the person the officer sprayed had done that to the officer or even retaliated in the exact same manner (pepper spraying the officer) that person would be doing jail time and there wouldn't be any questions about it.
by not prosecuting the officers and not punishing them for the crime you are giving other officers a very real affirmation that they can get away with the same actions.
If it was up to me, officers would indeed be prosecuted for things like this. I'd be inclined to give them some more leeway than normal citizens when they are clearly doing their job -- but that leeway would have limits, and this would have passed it.
But it's not up to me.
Pointing out what is likely to happen and explaining why is not the same as supporting it.
Reading the ruling, it would seem that what really happened is that the court said that the officers are not entitled to qualified immunity, which isn't quite the same as charging (and convicting!) them of the criminal charge of assault (and/or battery.)
Indeed, the link you gave doesn't even include the word "assault". I'm no lawyer, but it sounds like the case in question was a civil case, not even a criminal case against the police.
The reality is that it's very unlikely that anybody is going to even be charged, let alone convicted, of pepper spraying (or giving the order to do so, or supporting it) the protesters there. Juries really don't like to convict police officers of what could be seen as simply doing their job, and DAs only want to pursue cases they think they can win -- and rarely do they want to go after police anyways except in the most egregious of cases -- and the only really egregious aspect of this case is how many video cameras were on the guy. (It was bad, don't get me wrong -- but nobody was killed, beaten to near death, robbed or raped, and those are the sorts of things that tend to get cops nailed if there's enough evidence -- and by some strange coincidence (since the evidence is often controlled by the police themselves), there rarely is.)
but the video of the event so inflamed public opinion that all involved will either lose their jobs or face criminal prosecution. The use of force in this circumstance is completely unwarranted, and people will do hard time for using it.
Are you talking about the same video? The cop who pepper sprayed the sitting protesters?
Hard time, really? The protesters who were arrested will probably have their charges dropped. The cop is likely to get some sort of discipline applied -- he might even lose his job, depending on how badly they want to scapegoat him. The people who gave the order will receive no official punishment at all. And nobody involved (except maybe the protesters) will be charged with any actual crimes.
This isn't the first time police have used excessive force and it was caught on video. How such cases are handled has been worked out already -- and it only involves criminal charges in the most extreme situations (and this isn't one of them. Nobody was killed or raped or robbed, for example.)
My parents do have naked baby pictures of me.
They used to pull them out when I'd bring girlfriends home to meet the parents, much to my dismay.
Embarrassing, yes, but child porn -- no.
Um, the government has *no* problem defining porn precisely enough to apply laws to it
The government? We have a world government now? Why wasn't I informed?
OK, since you're stuck on a single word, let's try something else --
YOUR government has *no* problem defining porn precisely enough to apply laws to it.
I don't even need to know where you live to make this statement.
Which government? The internet is a global entity. What constitutes porn in one country shouldn't suddenly apply universally.
I would imagine that the vast majority of governments have already set their own standards about what porn is and what it isn't, and more importantly what porn is legal (if any) and what isn't.
These standards will obviously vary from country to country, but don't think that just because they may vary between countries or even within a single country or from case to case that they don't exist. They do.
I never said that anything should apply universally, or that .xxx was a good idea or a bad idea, or that it would be possible or practical to force all porn onto that domain.
So little problem, in fact, that parents have been prosecuted for innocent pictures of their naked children.
Or to put it another way: it's not as simple as you think it is.
I didn't say there was a clear line -- the line is quite fuzzy.
But there's definitely a line. It's exact location is determined in courtrooms, and this location can vary from case to case, but the line is certainly there.
As for people being prosecuted, I'm aware of a few cases such as this one -- but even this one was thrown out before going to trial. (Though being forced to register as sex offenders before being convicted? That sounds like a violation of one's rights to due process.)
But again -- my point is that don't think that just because a line is hard to draw that nobody in power will draw one. The lines are already drawn. Simple, complicated, whatever -- the lines have been drawn.
it where porn begins that's hard to define. I can show things that everyone would consider porn.
However, just make it part of the equal that the person buying the sight intends to us it as porn. That way the purchases will be using their definition.
Just because there's a vague blur between "porn" and "not porn", that doesn't mean the government can't make a definition. It can, and it has.
People do get arrested, tried and convicted for child porn, for example. Yes, the "child" part is fairly cut and dried, but the porn part requires judgement calls, and police, prosecutors, judges and juries seem to be able to make those judgement calls as needed. Yes, there is a gray area, and that's not idea, but don't pretend that people can't or won't make these decisions -- because they can and will.
Using a .xxx TLD makes it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it.
RFC 3675 disagrees with you.
Of course, that RFC is just somebody's opinion on the matter. It's hardly the last word.
And really, the title is ".sex Considered Dangerous" -- not "A mandatory *.sex (or *.xxx) domain will not make it that much easier to identify and filter porn if you don't want to see it".
If all porn was forced to be on *.xxx domains by law and was not directly reachable via any other DNS tlds, then it certainly would make it that much easier to identify (though there's the risk of false positives) and filter porn if you didn't want to see it. This doesn't mean it's a good idea, but it *would* make this filtering easier.
(Of course, there's some big ifs in there too, I realize that.)
You would have for that to force all porn to use an .xxx domain, which is impossible, be it only because nobody's able to define porn precisely.
Um, the government has *no* problem defining porn precisely enough to apply laws to it. Yes, the final decisions are made by courts, but don't delude yourself into thinking that they can't make a definition -- they can, and they have.
They certainly have little problem nailing people for child porn, for example. Or the occasional obscenity case.
You have exactly zero personal freedom in the US today
Really? So you don't have the freedom to say things like that?
If you lived in North Korea and said all these things about their government publically, I'm guessing you'd disappear -- but here in the US, you seem to feel free enough to say them.
So if we have "exactly zero personal freedoms" here ... in North Korea I guess they have negative personal freedoms?
And I didn't say things aren't bad now. I'm just saying that they were bad in the past too, but I wasn't there, so I can't really compare then to now accurately.
Americans fear their government more now than at any time in history.
I don't know about that. We certainly do fear our government a lot now, but more than at any time in history?
When the Constitution was being written, the authors were extremely worried about overreaching government.
During Prohibition, alcohol was still commonly used, but there was the fear of the government finding out.
During the Communism scare, many lives were ruined just because politicians would claim that you were a Communist.
The CIA, FBI and NSA have been known to violate people's rights for decades now.
As I see it, there is certainly a lot of fear and concern now. But there was a lot in the past too. I guess I'm not old enough to go back far enough in the past (and unfortunately, only somebody who was 250 years old could really give an authoritative answer to this.)
But wiretaps (and search warrants in general) are supposed to be specific in what they're searching for.
If the warrant was specific about searching Verizon towers, then this fake tower would not count being as it wasn't a Verizon tower. Not that I've read the warrants or anything -- this is just a guess about a possible problem.
Still, if the police had a warrant, and it covered what they did -- then it sounds like they did it right.
Some people don't even have enough money to get it in their homes.
Do we need to make sure that every prisoner is treated worse than the worst treated person who isn't in prison?
After all, most prisoners at least get fed and get health care -- there's no such guarantees outside.
If they're good prisoners, let them have a gaming console. It's another carrot that can be taken away if they become bad prisoners.
The "article" did appear to be a machine translation of the original Hebrew, so odd wording should not be unexpected.
I should clarify that in the case of teachers, "poor performance" usually means "students perform poorly on standardized tests".
The problem there is that the quality of the teacher is only one factor -- and perhaps the biggest factor is the parents of the student -- if the parents are well educated and successful, they usually make sure their children are as well, and so their children do well on standardized tests, good teacher or not. And conversely, if the parents are poor and uneducated, their children tend to think that education is a waste and do poorly on standardized tests. Yes, there are exceptions, and good teachers can sometimes motivate such students -- but such teachers are the exception rather than the rule.
Would it make sense to fire the teachers who can't motivate their unmotivated students? Probably, but the entire system makes that difficult -- even if there isn't a union.
In any event, the way one fires a poorly performing teacher is the same process one uses to fire a poorly performing employee in the private sector -- document it. Document everything. It's a paper trail that lets you get past HR and any union and policies (nobody is going to make a policy that makes firing problem employees impossible.) The principal may not want to do this, but just because it's hard it doesn't mean it's impossible.
If you need proof of just how much more difficult it is to fire a union employee than at at-will employee, just track down any news article about any decent-sized city trying to fire teachers for poor performance.
"Poor performance" is a long stretch from "assault and battery".
As for teachers, that's not a union issue at all -- teachers are often hard to fire, union or not. "Poor performance" is a pretty vague problem, and for a teacher it's even harder to quantify -- is the performance poor because the person is a poor teacher, or because the children are poor and unmotivated?
Schools tend to be "good old boy" clubs where teachers are only fired for serious mistakes -- failing to come to work for a while, assaulting the principal, having sex with students, getting arrested for felonies, etc. If there's layoffs (rare, but it's happened lately) -- they're often done on the basis of seniority rather than merit because 1) the people who have been there a long time are more likely to be friends with the management (principal, school board, etc.) and 2) it's hard to find personal fault with a perfectly objective system for choosing who stays and goes -- it spares the management the burden of justifying their decision. And really, many government jobs end up working this way, union or not. Unions might make it worse, but it's that way even if there's no union.
Schools also often have "tenure" which has little to do with unions but makes teachers difficult to fire.
So the answer is outlawing unions and having all workers negotiate their own contract terms?
No, but there should be a middle ground.
Unions are good, but this whole "protect every employee at any cost" thing has to go. Outlawing the union is going way too far in the other direction, but there has to be a better solution.
Personally, I think that these claims that people are impossible to fire are largely made up. Maybe people are difficult to fire, but impossible? As for punching his boss in the face, I certainly don't have all the details (or any of them, really), but I'll bet there's more to that story. Certainly, if the guy punched his boss for no reason, he'd be arrested for assault and battery and I'm guessing he'd be easy to fire, union or not.
It's not the governor's job to decide constitutionality.
Then why does he swear to defend the Constitution? Why do so many elected officials, soldiers, public servants, etc. do so?
As I see it, it's *everybody's* job to decide constitutionality, and while it doesn't really matter how good of a job most citizens do, if you're involved in making and enforcing laws -- it *does* matter. Legislators should not make unconstitutional laws, governors should not sign unconstitutional laws, and police should not enforce unconstitutional laws.
That is what the Judiciary and Legislative (i.e senate/assembly) branches exist for.
And I disagree. I think everybody ought to be aware of the issues to some degree, but those who actually make and enforce laws need to have a pretty good grasp on the Constitutionality of what they do.
But yes, if there's disagreement, the judicial branch gets the final word. But *not* the only word.
Where did you get the idea that the bill was remotely unconstitutional?
I didn't (get that idea at all.) I *never* said I though the bill was unconstitutional.
My point was that as I see it, if the governor thinks a bill is unconstitutional, one way of satisfying his oath is to veto it. (There may be other ways to satisfy the oath, of course.)
Defending the Constitution is not only the job of the courts -- in fact, most of our public officials who swear an oath as part of their job swear to uphold and protect it. If our elected officials took this duty more seriously, I think our country would be in better shape today.
I did not say that the bill was unconstitutional -- and in fact I don't really believe it is -- but was instead responding to Scott Sweze's (implied?) idea that he might have vetoed it on Constitutional grounds. (And again, I don't know why he vetoed it, so I'm not commenting on his real reason, whatever it might be.)
To Governor Brown: If the supreme court believes this law is unconstitutional, they can strike it down. Don't overstep your powers and do this for them. Unless *YOU,* on behalf of your constituents, have a specific objection: let the law pass.
Well, it seems that the Governor of California swears an oath that starts out like this --
"I, ______, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California ...
It seems to me that if he thinks a bill is unconstitutional (no matter how much *I* might like the bill) it's his duty to veto it.
I'm not saying that this is why he vetoed it -- I don't know why -- but I'm simply saying that vetoing it for being unconstitutional would not strike me as an overstepping of his powers if he really does think it's unconstitutional.