The local climate is South Florida.
So what you want to do is restrict people from being active in their community and improving their community. I guess things like Beach Cleanups should also not be allowed since only rich people can spend the time cleaning a beach?.....
The Land of Oz called -- they want their strawman back.
Stopping schools fundraising for themselves doesn't stop them fundraising. It does far more to generate community spirit when the schoolkids are selling cookies for the local homeless shelter or to get the swings repainted at the local playpark.
In fact, I remember my primary school headteacher being quite put out when the village wanted to hold a jumble sale raising money for the famine in eastern Africa because it would compete with the primary school's own annual jumble sale (in aid of primary school funds). In the end, she reluctantly backed down and had the charity sale in the school instead of the school jumble sale. This did nothing to develop community spirit, especially among us school kids -- the national campaign was organised by a TV programme with a big "totaliser" loaded with flashing lights, and by delaying the sale until when the school wanted to hold it, they ensured that the TV campaign was over, the totaliser put away, and we felt cheated that our efforts weren't going to be included in the flashing lights on TV.
The funding would never be "equal" because you would not have unlimited resources so those areas that lean one way or the other would be starved for funds and swing areas would get more resources.
Ah, the old "the system will never be perfect, so we might as well not try to improve it" argument.
But not while driving to pickups/away from drop-offs. Those are still business miles and alter the drivers' driving behaviour. It makes them a bigger insurance risk, and Kansas has given the insurers an explicit opt-out from covering them on the same terms as lower risk personal-use-only drivers. Seems fair.
Normal car insurances in Europe cover commercial use.
Driving from home to work is, surprisingly, commercial, wow, a no brainer.
If I use my car to drive myself around or deliver Pizza or urgent mail or medicals: same insurance!
What the hell would be the difference for me or my car for what I use it regarding my liability towards anyone I (might) harm?
There's a difference between "incidental" commercial use and primary commercial use. Driving to work is incidental. Some policies will consider occasional transport of goods as incidental, but others might not. However, while they might cover accidents, they almost never include the goods being transported in that. In the UK, I believe the most common clause is that if you are on (non-incidental) commercial business, your cover automatically defaults to "third party only" -- ie you're only insured against damages to others outside the car, not anyone or anything inside. And those pizzas and meds are not people -- commercial transportation of people is a whole different kettle of fish. Policy documents are very carefully worded to cover car-sharing (in some circumstances limited to people with a common employer) but explicitly excluding passengers taken expressly for monetary reward.
Can you explain further, please? Does NHS pay for medical treatement no matter what? Or is there such a concept as, "your negligence or malice directly caused this medical expense that otherwise would not have happened, so yes you are liable?".
Or (more likely) the ones who get injured in accidents and then have to pay for their own hospital bills because the driver's consumer insurance policy specifically states that commercial passenger transport is not covered. This isn't good for the driver either, as he'll lose his house. Professional, insurance is a pretty good thing to have, all told...
Putting aside for a moment the very rich, what do you say to those people that have worked hard to buy a home in a neighborhood with good schools? If school funding is somehow leveled out what happens to the value of those homes, now that it is no longer seen as being in a "good" school district relative to other neighborhoods?
The same argument can be used to justify any unfair policy. For example:
Regulating banks is all well and good, but what to you say to those people that have worked hard to get profitable jobs in banks?
Of course you should take steps to mitigate the effects on individuals, but yes, equality always comes at the cost to privileged individuals.
Rich people can always send their kids to private schools and hire tutors and give their kids advantages that the rest of us don't have. Nothing we can do about that.
Not true -- we can ban it. It may seem radical, and it's unlikely any government would ever approve such measures (as most politicians are personally invested in the private education system, but it certainly is "something we could do about it".
These sorts of things always start out as "punish the rich" and end up being "punish the middle class" because the rich can always find a way around these things.
Ah, that hoary old "punish the rich" chestnut. Equality isn't about "punishing" anyone, it's about removing privilege and giving everyone a level playing field. Was it "punishing white people" when non-whites were finally allowed to keep their seats on busy buses? Hell no. So why is it "punishing rich/middle class people" when anyone suggests that children in poor areas should have the same access to education as people in well-off areas?
Clue: it's not. It's just a convenient slogan for protecting your own privilege.
At the risk of sounding harsh, perhaps *some* disadvantaged people should be taking a look in the mirror. Maybe, just maybe, they play a part in their current circumstances.
You should have been more concerned about sounding stupid than sounding harsh. We were discussing funding to schools. Let's be clear about this: children play no part whatsoever in determining the funding to their schools. Children are not politicians, and they do not pay property taxes. Yes, some children pay no attention in schools. Some children play traunt. Some children bully teachers. But as it stands, none of this is a factor in school funding, so your statements are nothing more than post-facto justification with a good measure of "just world" fallacy in the mix.
I went to high school in a country where schools are funded equitably (to within a certain margin of error), and my school served a rather disadvantaged demographic. We had a wide range of problems: bad behaviour, vandalism, truancy, occasional violence, teen pregnancies, substance abuse. But we did at least have books, windows, heating etc (although we did have fewer books than more middle-class schools as kids kept damaging them). Some of the stories I've heard about schools in the US turn my stomach.
And yet a really good teacher can still be better than an adaptive system, because a really good teacher weaves stories out of the subject and engages the imagination in a way that a computer screen can't. Timing, dramatic pauses, recovering from interruptions -- these things draw the kids in and make them relate to the teacher.
Is it just a coincidence that the best schools tend to be in affluent areas? Probably not but I think it's more than money that contributes to it. The best teachers tend to want to teach at the best schools. Successful parents tend to be better role models. The kids of those parents learn from a very young age the importance of school.
This is all true, and it is also true over almost the entire world that the best pre-indicator of success in school is to be part of a middle class family. The US system (school funding from local property tax) then adds a second advantage to those same children, rather than even attempting to redress the balance for the disadvantaged kids.
So you are saying the local PTA that raises funds for a school should be forced to pay it all to a national fund?
No, the national fund from taxation should be big enough that schools shouldn't have to put on fundraisers for themselves. After all, that only amplifies the problem of lower school budgets in low-income areas (poor people can't buy as much home baking, after all).
So for example my school had no AC so my mother worked to raise enough money to put in AC at my elementary school. So she should have just dumped the money to some national system?
Better would be for the national system to mandate a range of acceptable working temperatures and to fund the installation of AC and/or central heating where the local climate is likely to take the school out of this range during the academic year (excluding extreme weather events that would likely lead to children being told to stay at home), wouldn't you say...?
How do you fund a Wyoming school the same as an NYC school?
Even if you applied the same dollars, do you think the dollar you spent in NYC buys the same things as a dollar in Wyoming?
The GP was very naive (clearly didn't grow up in a rich school district) but it's a very, very small step of logic from "funded equally" to "funded centrally on an equitable basis related to local costs". That difference isn't really a matter for the voter to be too concerned with, but something for the civil servants to work out.
Do you agree that some teachers are better than others, and that they should be payed more?
Should I have been forced to go to a school with 40 students per class instead of 20 just because my parents couldn't afford to pay enough to hire double the number of teachers in the entire country?
Comments like yours are typical "fuck the rich" but with no thoughts of actual consequences.
Are you feeling sorry for yourself because you chipped a tooth on your silver spoon? This is not about "fucking the rich" -- you were not rich, you were a child of no independent means. Your parents were rich. Why should that mean a better education for you?
Yes, learning pays off long-term, but there are big short-term concerns that drown that out.
A lot of people believe that the best way to encourage equality in schooling is free healthy school meals, across the board. Even if it means some kids get only one proper meal a day, it can make a world of difference.
Some of us just have different metrics for drawing a line between "programming" and "stumbling around in a programming language doing dangerous, stupid, and occasionally functional things."
In the world of solid items, you can divide the design team into 3 rough tiers: designers, industrial designers and design engineers. Only the engineers are allowed to do the parts of the design that have potentially dangerous, because they're the only ones qualified to do it. In IT, we have software engineers, but not every programmer has to be a software engineer. The trick in any enterprise is to assign appropriate work to appropriate staff. Hell, you wouldn't ask a psychiatrist to give you an appendectomy, would you?
It's like kids with crayons. They're all artists! Special butterflies! Call the Louvre!
many users inexplicably believing that programming requires a "special mind", dividing people in to two groups: "can program" and "can never program".
This is not "inexplicable". It is obvious to anyone who has taught programming to beginners, or any type of introductory abstract math. About a third of the population is simply incapable of abstract reasoning.
Nope, all that this proves is that you and many of your colleagues haven't been able to teach programming or abstract maths to them. To generalise that it is "obvious" that they are "incapable" is a lazy shortcut. Now I'm not suggesting that you personally are inadequate as a teacher -- all of us have limited time and resources to deal with our classes, and we can't do everything.
However, we must always bear in mind that students ability to pick up new things is limited by the prior knowledge they enter the classroom with. We bear that in mind, but we accept that we do not have the time to address all the failings of their previous teachers or of their home environment. In doing so, we leave ourselves open to identifying some of the most prominent knowledge gaps, and we can slowly, year after year, find ways of making things clearer to the struggling students, without slowing down the successful students at all.
And no, I've never taught programming. But if there's any other subject that's affected as strong as programming with the talent myth, it's human languages, and that's what I teach.
They possibly see a public good in this 'Khan Academy' model of education, but I'm put off at the for-profit motive.
In general, I wouldn't say "for-profit" is necessary a motive per se. In part, it's a function of the market philosophy and ideology -- if the system generates profits, it can fund itself, therefore it is sustainable. This view denies the idea that "infrastructure" shouldn't fund itself (see also rural broadband or lack thereof).
The other half of the equation needs consideration that true corruption can only affect people with good intentions. Every charity executives remuneration scandal starts with executives who really believe in the work of the charity, and therefore believe they're personally doing good work. The next logical step is for them to conclude that they deserve a reward for their good work, so they give it to themselves.
So the people putting money into this believe that it has to be a self-sustaining business, and that it therefore needs to be built on VC money, so the VCs are doing good work (even if that's not their primary goal) and therefore they deserve to be rewarded (which is the VCs primary goal). But then the logic of corruption kicks in: the VCs aren't doing it for the public good, so the guys who are doing it for the public good are clearly better and more deserving of reward than the VCs, so of course they too should be rewarded. But they're still doing it "for the kids".
OP was talking about people with a broad enough background where Haskell isn't inimidating. Just neat.
Where does he say that? It's not in TFA, TFS or the ACs post.
There are some significant paradigm differences between superficially similar languages. If you don't know list/generator comprehensions, you don't know them. I started learning Python several years ago for a project that has been going quite slowly, and even now I stumble across the odd for loop that I struggle to understand because I wrote it in a C style. Refactoring to a comprehension makes the code more readable and debuggable, but when I came to Python with the mindset of "if you know one language, you can pick up any other language easily", so I wasn't on the lookout for that sort of thing.
I had also completely glossed over the power of local functions -- even though I read lots about them -- because they weren't in my active mindset. Then I did Dan Grossman's Programming Languages course on Coursera, and was forced to look properly at local functions, and learn them. Now whenever I'm debugging my code, I find myself abstracting out bits and pieces to local functions wherever appropriate.
When I first "learned Python", I was basically coding in braceless C with Python objects thrown in for good measure. If you have a specific task to complete while you're learning, all too often you end up just focusing on getting the job done and you hack through it, and the knowledge of the language you glean from the process is incomplete and hacky.
The point here is that there is a message conveyed. If I look at a nude photograph from an unknown source, I cannot state categorically that was done with intentions that objectify women. But this image is not from an unknown source - it is from a magazine that exists to objectify women and titillate men. When attitudes and intentions are the issue under debate, "ad hominem" is no longer a fallacy.
Slashdot Mirror
There are public safety concerns, but the law of diminishing returns says the risks don't justify the cost of inspecting every house.
The local climate is South Florida. So what you want to do is restrict people from being active in their community and improving their community. I guess things like Beach Cleanups should also not be allowed since only rich people can spend the time cleaning a beach?.....
The Land of Oz called -- they want their strawman back.
Stopping schools fundraising for themselves doesn't stop them fundraising. It does far more to generate community spirit when the schoolkids are selling cookies for the local homeless shelter or to get the swings repainted at the local playpark.
In fact, I remember my primary school headteacher being quite put out when the village wanted to hold a jumble sale raising money for the famine in eastern Africa because it would compete with the primary school's own annual jumble sale (in aid of primary school funds). In the end, she reluctantly backed down and had the charity sale in the school instead of the school jumble sale. This did nothing to develop community spirit, especially among us school kids -- the national campaign was organised by a TV programme with a big "totaliser" loaded with flashing lights, and by delaying the sale until when the school wanted to hold it, they ensured that the TV campaign was over, the totaliser put away, and we felt cheated that our efforts weren't going to be included in the flashing lights on TV.
The funding would never be "equal" because you would not have unlimited resources so those areas that lean one way or the other would be starved for funds and swing areas would get more resources.
Ah, the old "the system will never be perfect, so we might as well not try to improve it" argument.
But not while driving to pickups/away from drop-offs. Those are still business miles and alter the drivers' driving behaviour. It makes them a bigger insurance risk, and Kansas has given the insurers an explicit opt-out from covering them on the same terms as lower risk personal-use-only drivers. Seems fair.
You have to murder 19 passengers to justify paying for a $1,000,000 insurance. :-)
Paralysing one person would more than do it.
Uber has very detailed records, so they would be knowingly facilitating criminal activity if they didn't sanction drivers for crossing the line.
Normal car insurances in Europe cover commercial use.
Driving from home to work is, surprisingly, commercial, wow, a no brainer.
If I use my car to drive myself around or deliver Pizza or urgent mail or medicals: same insurance!
What the hell would be the difference for me or my car for what I use it regarding my liability towards anyone I (might) harm?
There's a difference between "incidental" commercial use and primary commercial use. Driving to work is incidental. Some policies will consider occasional transport of goods as incidental, but others might not. However, while they might cover accidents, they almost never include the goods being transported in that. In the UK, I believe the most common clause is that if you are on (non-incidental) commercial business, your cover automatically defaults to "third party only" -- ie you're only insured against damages to others outside the car, not anyone or anything inside. And those pizzas and meds are not people -- commercial transportation of people is a whole different kettle of fish. Policy documents are very carefully worded to cover car-sharing (in some circumstances limited to people with a common employer) but explicitly excluding passengers taken expressly for monetary reward.
it appears that their thought process is, "I'm getting what I want as cheaply as possible, screw everyone else."
Much like the people who buy meat that isn't technically fit for human consumption.
Can you explain further, please? Does NHS pay for medical treatement no matter what? Or is there such a concept as, "your negligence or malice directly caused this medical expense that otherwise would not have happened, so yes you are liable?".
More information than you could ever possibly want to know on the matter (from the UK Chartered Institute of Loss Adjusters).
Or (more likely) the ones who get injured in accidents and then have to pay for their own hospital bills because the driver's consumer insurance policy specifically states that commercial passenger transport is not covered. This isn't good for the driver either, as he'll lose his house. Professional, insurance is a pretty good thing to have, all told...
Putting aside for a moment the very rich, what do you say to those people that have worked hard to buy a home in a neighborhood with good schools? If school funding is somehow leveled out what happens to the value of those homes, now that it is no longer seen as being in a "good" school district relative to other neighborhoods?
The same argument can be used to justify any unfair policy. For example:
Regulating banks is all well and good, but what to you say to those people that have worked hard to get profitable jobs in banks?
Of course you should take steps to mitigate the effects on individuals, but yes, equality always comes at the cost to privileged individuals.
Rich people can always send their kids to private schools and hire tutors and give their kids advantages that the rest of us don't have. Nothing we can do about that.
Not true -- we can ban it. It may seem radical, and it's unlikely any government would ever approve such measures (as most politicians are personally invested in the private education system, but it certainly is "something we could do about it".
These sorts of things always start out as "punish the rich" and end up being "punish the middle class" because the rich can always find a way around these things.
Ah, that hoary old "punish the rich" chestnut. Equality isn't about "punishing" anyone, it's about removing privilege and giving everyone a level playing field. Was it "punishing white people" when non-whites were finally allowed to keep their seats on busy buses? Hell no. So why is it "punishing rich/middle class people" when anyone suggests that children in poor areas should have the same access to education as people in well-off areas?
Clue: it's not. It's just a convenient slogan for protecting your own privilege.
At the risk of sounding harsh, perhaps *some* disadvantaged people should be taking a look in the mirror. Maybe, just maybe, they play a part in their current circumstances.
You should have been more concerned about sounding stupid than sounding harsh. We were discussing funding to schools. Let's be clear about this: children play no part whatsoever in determining the funding to their schools. Children are not politicians, and they do not pay property taxes. Yes, some children pay no attention in schools. Some children play traunt. Some children bully teachers. But as it stands, none of this is a factor in school funding, so your statements are nothing more than post-facto justification with a good measure of "just world" fallacy in the mix.
I went to high school in a country where schools are funded equitably (to within a certain margin of error), and my school served a rather disadvantaged demographic. We had a wide range of problems: bad behaviour, vandalism, truancy, occasional violence, teen pregnancies, substance abuse. But we did at least have books, windows, heating etc (although we did have fewer books than more middle-class schools as kids kept damaging them). Some of the stories I've heard about schools in the US turn my stomach.
Seriously? Would you really want the government educational system doing weird experiments with schools?
The GP poster said:
I know a better headline I'd like to see: "New fair taxes enable feasible education budget. Donations not neccesary anymore."
Do you consider giving schools enough money to do their jobs properly a "weird experiment"? I think of it more as an eminently sensible policy....
And yet a really good teacher can still be better than an adaptive system, because a really good teacher weaves stories out of the subject and engages the imagination in a way that a computer screen can't. Timing, dramatic pauses, recovering from interruptions -- these things draw the kids in and make them relate to the teacher.
Is it just a coincidence that the best schools tend to be in affluent areas? Probably not but I think it's more than money that contributes to it. The best teachers tend to want to teach at the best schools. Successful parents tend to be better role models. The kids of those parents learn from a very young age the importance of school.
This is all true, and it is also true over almost the entire world that the best pre-indicator of success in school is to be part of a middle class family. The US system (school funding from local property tax) then adds a second advantage to those same children, rather than even attempting to redress the balance for the disadvantaged kids.
So you are saying the local PTA that raises funds for a school should be forced to pay it all to a national fund?
No, the national fund from taxation should be big enough that schools shouldn't have to put on fundraisers for themselves. After all, that only amplifies the problem of lower school budgets in low-income areas (poor people can't buy as much home baking, after all).
So for example my school had no AC so my mother worked to raise enough money to put in AC at my elementary school. So she should have just dumped the money to some national system?
Better would be for the national system to mandate a range of acceptable working temperatures and to fund the installation of AC and/or central heating where the local climate is likely to take the school out of this range during the academic year (excluding extreme weather events that would likely lead to children being told to stay at home), wouldn't you say...?
Schools should be funded equally.
Do you even think about what you say?
How do you fund a Wyoming school the same as an NYC school?
Even if you applied the same dollars, do you think the dollar you spent in NYC buys the same things as a dollar in Wyoming?
The GP was very naive (clearly didn't grow up in a rich school district) but it's a very, very small step of logic from "funded equally" to "funded centrally on an equitable basis related to local costs". That difference isn't really a matter for the voter to be too concerned with, but something for the civil servants to work out.
Do you agree that some teachers are better than others, and that they should be payed more? Should I have been forced to go to a school with 40 students per class instead of 20 just because my parents couldn't afford to pay enough to hire double the number of teachers in the entire country? Comments like yours are typical "fuck the rich" but with no thoughts of actual consequences.
Are you feeling sorry for yourself because you chipped a tooth on your silver spoon? This is not about "fucking the rich" -- you were not rich, you were a child of no independent means. Your parents were rich. Why should that mean a better education for you?
Yes, learning pays off long-term, but there are big short-term concerns that drown that out.
A lot of people believe that the best way to encourage equality in schooling is free healthy school meals, across the board. Even if it means some kids get only one proper meal a day, it can make a world of difference.
Did you come to me because you are beginning to think this Dice account is just an autopost with a random list of possible values?
Some of us just have different metrics for drawing a line between "programming" and "stumbling around in a programming language doing dangerous, stupid, and occasionally functional things."
In the world of solid items, you can divide the design team into 3 rough tiers: designers, industrial designers and design engineers. Only the engineers are allowed to do the parts of the design that have potentially dangerous, because they're the only ones qualified to do it. In IT, we have software engineers, but not every programmer has to be a software engineer. The trick in any enterprise is to assign appropriate work to appropriate staff. Hell, you wouldn't ask a psychiatrist to give you an appendectomy, would you?
It's like kids with crayons. They're all artists! Special butterflies! Call the Louvre!
Now get off my nursing home's lawn
Wow wow wow. Issues much?
many users inexplicably believing that programming requires a "special mind", dividing people in to two groups: "can program" and "can never program".
This is not "inexplicable". It is obvious to anyone who has taught programming to beginners, or any type of introductory abstract math. About a third of the population is simply incapable of abstract reasoning.
Nope, all that this proves is that you and many of your colleagues haven't been able to teach programming or abstract maths to them. To generalise that it is "obvious" that they are "incapable" is a lazy shortcut. Now I'm not suggesting that you personally are inadequate as a teacher -- all of us have limited time and resources to deal with our classes, and we can't do everything.
However, we must always bear in mind that students ability to pick up new things is limited by the prior knowledge they enter the classroom with. We bear that in mind, but we accept that we do not have the time to address all the failings of their previous teachers or of their home environment. In doing so, we leave ourselves open to identifying some of the most prominent knowledge gaps, and we can slowly, year after year, find ways of making things clearer to the struggling students, without slowing down the successful students at all.
And no, I've never taught programming. But if there's any other subject that's affected as strong as programming with the talent myth, it's human languages, and that's what I teach.
Indeed. But the headline says "give", which is horrendously misleading.
No good deed goes uncriticized, right?
Setting up a company to cash in on private education sounds like a business plan, not a good deed.
They possibly see a public good in this 'Khan Academy' model of education, but I'm put off at the for-profit motive.
In general, I wouldn't say "for-profit" is necessary a motive per se. In part, it's a function of the market philosophy and ideology -- if the system generates profits, it can fund itself, therefore it is sustainable. This view denies the idea that "infrastructure" shouldn't fund itself (see also rural broadband or lack thereof).
The other half of the equation needs consideration that true corruption can only affect people with good intentions. Every charity executives remuneration scandal starts with executives who really believe in the work of the charity, and therefore believe they're personally doing good work. The next logical step is for them to conclude that they deserve a reward for their good work, so they give it to themselves.
So the people putting money into this believe that it has to be a self-sustaining business, and that it therefore needs to be built on VC money, so the VCs are doing good work (even if that's not their primary goal) and therefore they deserve to be rewarded (which is the VCs primary goal). But then the logic of corruption kicks in: the VCs aren't doing it for the public good, so the guys who are doing it for the public good are clearly better and more deserving of reward than the VCs, so of course they too should be rewarded. But they're still doing it "for the kids".
OP was talking about people with a broad enough background where Haskell isn't inimidating. Just neat.
Where does he say that? It's not in TFA, TFS or the ACs post.
There are some significant paradigm differences between superficially similar languages. If you don't know list/generator comprehensions, you don't know them. I started learning Python several years ago for a project that has been going quite slowly, and even now I stumble across the odd for loop that I struggle to understand because I wrote it in a C style. Refactoring to a comprehension makes the code more readable and debuggable, but when I came to Python with the mindset of "if you know one language, you can pick up any other language easily", so I wasn't on the lookout for that sort of thing.
I had also completely glossed over the power of local functions -- even though I read lots about them -- because they weren't in my active mindset. Then I did Dan Grossman's Programming Languages course on Coursera, and was forced to look properly at local functions, and learn them. Now whenever I'm debugging my code, I find myself abstracting out bits and pieces to local functions wherever appropriate.
When I first "learned Python", I was basically coding in braceless C with Python objects thrown in for good measure. If you have a specific task to complete while you're learning, all too often you end up just focusing on getting the job done and you hack through it, and the knowledge of the language you glean from the process is incomplete and hacky.
The point here is that there is a message conveyed. If I look at a nude photograph from an unknown source, I cannot state categorically that was done with intentions that objectify women. But this image is not from an unknown source - it is from a magazine that exists to objectify women and titillate men. When attitudes and intentions are the issue under debate, "ad hominem" is no longer a fallacy.