Being an illegal foreigner doesn't prevent one from paying taxes. In fact, many illegal aliens pay taxes, based on the false social security numbers given to their employers.
There are problems with illegal aliens in general, and more specific problems with the vast majority in the country:
1) The federal government has no control over their entry. Like many nations, the US bars entry by convicted felons, terrorists, etc. These people can be perfectly nice to their neighbors, pay taxes, etc. They're still not the sort of folks I want as neighbors.
2) A certain minimum command of the English language is a requirement for citizenship in the US. Legal non-citizen immigrants need not speak English, but generally have sufficient income or are staying for a brief enough time that economic factors are not an issue. Many, if not a majority of illegal immigrants speak little to no English, and as a result of this and their immigration status, cannot get jobs doing anything but minimum (or below minimum) wage menial labor.
3) Even if these people have employers who give lip service to the rules and pay employment taxes (and many do not), those taxes are a tiny fraction of the cost of providing social services for these workers - almost none of whom will ever pay income taxes (the bottom 40+% of income earners in the US now pay none). In fact, those that have social security numbers and file tax returns actually cost the government tax money, since thanks to our tax code they can get "refunds" greater than the amount of money they paid in.
4) In numbers, they strain the social services of anywhere they live. Since they almost never have health insurance, they use the nearest hospital's ER for all their health care needs - for which they rarely pay. Hospitals in areas with large numbers of illegal immigrants tend to go out of business for this reason, and legal residents and citizens find it difficult to get emergency care. Schools too have a difficult time - not only because the tax base does not support the extra children, but also because many of those children also speak little or no English - and additional resources must be emplaced to teach English as a second language.
5) In places where the local government is not willing to step on federal toes in immigration matters, illegals tend to get a free pass when they commit anything but the most violent crimes. If released before trial, they simply do not appear in court. They have few assets in country, so fines mean nothing. If deported, they pay a mule to get them back across the border - often in a matter of weeks.
6) Given the economic differences between the US and Mexico (from which the majority of our illegals come), they tend to spend a bare minimum of their money here, and send the rest out of country, where it is worth more to their families. So in addition to paying less in taxes than the social services they use cost, they don't even add much to the economy.
7) Illegals form a ready made class of people to be exploited, since they are afraid to go to the police. This attracts criminals, who prey not only on the illegals, but on legal residents and citizens as well.
8) Illegal immigrants very often do not wish to be Americans. They are here to exploit our economy and send the money home. Evidence of this can be found anywhere you see a rally regarding immigration reform, and see all the flags of foreign nations (usually Mexico, but sometimes others) being waved. If they wanted to be Americans, they could start by respecting our traditions (rather than demanding they be changed for their convenience), and our laws.
I find it interesting that people are getting upset about one state actually doing something about a situation that is harming the state and its residents due to the federal government failing to enforce existing laws.
I also find it somewhat disingenuous that people are arguing against the state law on the basis that immigration control is the province of the federal government - if the federal government were enforcing its own laws, state action would be unnecessary.
That said, there is a simple process by which illegal immigration can be stopped cold, and we can simultaneously rid ourselves of the illegals already here:
For purposes of this process, "employer" shall mean anyone with direct hire/fire authority over the worker in question AND the overall manager in charge of the location at which the worker is employed.
1) Require that all employers verify citizenship or legal immigration status of each worker as a condition of employment for that worker.
2) Anyone found to be knowingly employing an illegal alien will be subject to fines and penalties as follows:
a) A fine of one year's pay for the illegal alien worker, for each worker so employed (or $5000 per illegal alien worker, whichever is greater), shall be paid by the employer.
b) Employers shall be subject to 5 years prison at hard labor per illegal worker, sentences for multiple offenses to run consecutively.
3) Illegal alien workers shall be subject to 5 years prison at hard labor each time they are caught. They will be paid nothing for this time in prison, and at the end of their sentence they will be deported.
4) Employers and illegal workers serving prison terms under the above points shall be put to hard labor building roads as chain gangs or doing other hard labor, as the state where they were captured shall dictate. This hard labor may include leasing inmate labor to corporations or other states at a rate of up to one half the federal minimum wage. Funds received for inmate labor must be used first for the feeding and housing of the inmates, and then for the general expenses of the prison system should any funds remain.
5) One half of the amount of any fines collected under section 2a above will be paid in a lump sum to informants who lead authorities to illegal workers and employers, once those individuals are convicted and the fines levied.
---------------
Follow the above process, and employers will stop hiring illegal workers - it won't be worth the fines and prison time.
Illegal workers will stop coming here - it won't be worth the prison time, and 5 years of making absolutely no money, even if they can find someone to employ them.
Even the illegals will be reporting their employers, to get the financial windfall that their share of the fines will represent. For a large employer, a whistleblower might never have to work again.
The source of cheap (prison) labor would still be there, long enough for the country to grow acclimated to not having a huge pool of unskilled workers available who are basically economic slaves.
In six months, you wouldn't be able to find an illegal worker in the country, outside of prison... and if they can't work, there is no reason for them to be here.
With the illegals gone, the country can then see about adjusting its immigration policies accordingly, to ensure the necessary labor pool is available.
I had a similar experience, returning to college after 10 years out of school.
Even though I didn't (in theory) -need- to take it, I started with College Algebra, and worked my way up through the math courses.
Algebra was a breeze.
I could do Trig and Analytic Geometry without any trouble, though I didn't really understand them.
I got my first B (as opposed to straight As) in Calc I, being able to apply what I knew without understanding it...
...and then crashed and burned in Calc II, because that -required- a full understanding of the groundwork on which it was based.
That was 17 years ago. I never did finish my degree, and haven't had any great need for math above the Algebra level since.
I'd love to go back and finish my CS degree, just to have it - I've been working in the field for over 30 years (yes, I started on mainframes) and it would be nice to have the piece of paper, though it isn't likely to do me any good at this point.
Something to consider, that the people advocating this sort of legal change rarely do, is that policy drives behavior - but not necessarily in the ways that they want it to.
They believe they will change the behavior of consumers by making the cost of music piracy high.
They may succeed in changing behavior - but likely not in the way they hope to. Most consumers who currently pirate music will continue to do so, but they will do so using different methods so as to not be caught.
The OP is correct in that the music industry is attempting to use legislation to avoid having to change their business model.
A good example of an industry that is affected by piracy and the second-hand market in a similar way to the music industry, is the computer software industry. The computer softeware industry has tried many of the same methodologies the music industry has to combat piracy, mainly involving various sorts of copy protection and security codes, all of which failed to curb piracy, and some of which encouraged it due to legitimate customers being locked out of their legally purchased software by overzealous security measures.
Like the music industry, the software industry has attemtped to use legislation to resolve their problems, and has been nearly completely unsuccessful in doing so. For the most part, their last line of defense has been the "Inquisition" (the Business Software Alliance) which relies for the most part on disgruntled employees denouncing their employers or former employers.
The one bright spot in this is the computer game industry. It is not nearly so monolithic or moneyed as the software giants or the music industry and as a result it has had to find different solutions. Though it has ridden on the coattails of the legislation sponsored and passed by the giants, it is also well aware that said legislation has not had the desired effect, nor have the standard copy protection schema - and so it has begun to move to a different business model, involving downloadable content. While a base game may be pirated, even someone who didn't buy it needs the downloadable content to get the full experience, and the only easy way to get that is to purchase it. This has allowed revenue generation from people who did not actually purchase the base software (in addition to those that did).
One effect of this new model has been a necessary improvement of the quality of the product. If a company wants to generate revenue from downloadable add-on content, the original product must be high enough quality that people want that additional content, and the additional content itself must be worth spending money on. It is also of note that while the total price of all downloadable content may be significant, the individual pieces of it cost far less than the original product. The time and effort of the programmers/artists certainly deserves appropriate recompense, as does the capital risk of the production company - but the true measure of "worth" is what the market will bear. If the music (or game) industry suddenly quintupled the price of their product because that is what they decided it was worth (even if such an increase were absolutely necessary to recoup their costs), their sales would plummet because the market would likely not agree that either was actually worth the price.
That concept - that the consumer sets the price of any commodity by choosing whether or not to purchase it at that price - is what the music and software industries have been trying circumvent. Governments have the same sort of issues when they impose high taxes on goods that end at some arbitrary border - an instant trade in untaxed goods springs up between the taxed and untaxed sides of the border, which the government must then shut down to maintain its revenue. Music and software present an additional challenge because they can be copied and moved digitally at near zero cost.
While some will argue that the worth of a product is directly t
Adding time in school won't help, because the problem isn't the number of hours or days spent in school.
In fact, there are a host of problems which all contribute to the issue, none of which will be addressed by keeping children in school longer.
The issues as I see them are:
1) Fundamental flaws in the theory of education at the policy making and administrative levels. An example of one such: I am old enough to have been in school when grading systems began to be changed from A-F to E(xceeds expectations), S(atisfactory), and U(nsatisfactory). The reason given for the change was that children who got poor grades felt inferior to those who were doing better, and that this was bad. Some time later, the 'E' grade was disposed of for the same reason. While that grading system is gone, the fundamentally flawed premise that caused it remains to this day. American education became for a long time, all about making students feel good about how much they didn't know. The flawed premise here is the same as in Communism - when you remove the rewards for doing well, you also remove the incentive to excel.
2) Use of schools as a platform to indoctrinate students with the current popular ideology. Whatever the ideology in question, this -always- happens at the expense of useful learning, both because the 'facts' presented by the curriculum tend to be skewed to present that ideology in the most favorable light, and because students are discouraged from questioning the 'facts' presented (as that represents questioning the ideology itself).
3) Fundamental flaws in the theory of education at the classroom level. Schools used to use rote memorization only for the purpose of teaching the basic building blocks of a subject. The next step was to teach critical thinking and problem solving to allow students to figure out how to solve problems given the basic information. As a result of the second point above (and the reliance on teaching to the standardized tests), critical thinking is now discouraged.
4) Standardized tests are presented in such a way that teachers (and those who create the curriculum the teachers use) are able to teach to the test, and spend a large portion of the school year doing so via rote memorization. The concept of standardized testing being necessary grew out of the poor performance of American students. Unfortunately, the manner in which it was implemented allowed rote memorization to be used to prepare for the tests, rather than teaching the fundamentals of the subject and encouraging the development of problem solving skills.
5) Colossal waste of money in education. Most of this money is wasted in administration and bureaucracy, some in fraud, and some to genuine attempts to improve the quality of education at the student level. A problem here is that (except for the poorest school districts where there is not enough money to cover essentials), spending more money per student does not increase the quality of education. Some experiments were done to vastly increase the amount of money being spent per student - those experiments universally resulted in no measurable improvement in test scores. When the educational process is flawed at its most basic level, throwing money at the problem is not the answer.
6) Failure of certain American subcultures to value education. When you are told from birth by the people who are raising you, the people around you, and the leaders in your community that you aren't good enough to make it without handouts; that you are by virtue of your ethnicity or skin color doomed to substandard employment and a substandard lifestyle; that people who succeed despite that are traitors, and that crime is the best way to get ahead... then the students tend to see education as a waste of time. They know that if they choose to avoid crime as a way of getting ahead, that jobs in menial labor will always be available, and require no education. Since they don't believe they can do better, they don't see t
Interesting that the chart ends at Bush, given that the current budget under Obama's presidency will add twice as much to the national debt through 2016 as Bush did during his entire presidency, and the current spending plans will double the national debt over the next decade.
http://www.heritage.org/research/budget/bg2249.cfm
In principle, I'm against the idea of ISPs doing this due to the slippery slope argument - that they will start with "Malware" and move on to other types of traffic that someone decides is undesirable.
For practical reasons, I'm all for it, if it can be done well - it will basically shut down botnets and most spam if it becomes widely adopted, as eventually ISPs that don't adopt it will become havens for malware sites and home to the remaining botnets - at which point, their upstream providers will shut off their access if they refuse to clean up their traffic.
A few comments on this.
First, if this catches on, it will eventually (as others have said) become mandatory in all vehicles.
By necessity, once it becomes mandatory, it will become a crime to impair or disable the camera, in the same way that it is a crime to obscure your license plate, have a burned out light over it, or drive without liability insurance.
On the other hand, in Texas where I live, 30% of drivers have no liability insurance. They only get caught when they are stopped or involved in an accident - and even then, given that a significant percentage are illegals, they simply fail to show up for court.
Regarding children and privacy, much of the privacy concerns stem from people treating children as miniature adults.
They aren't.
They are children - which means that parents need to know what is going on in their lives in order to guide them through the process of becoming adults. Treating them as miniature adults, particularly with regard to privacy, simply guarantees they will grow up without ever learning how adults are supposed to act.
Slashdot Mirror
Being an illegal foreigner doesn't prevent one from paying taxes. In fact, many illegal aliens pay taxes, based on the false social security numbers given to their employers.
There are problems with illegal aliens in general, and more specific problems with the vast majority in the country:
1) The federal government has no control over their entry. Like many nations, the US bars entry by convicted felons, terrorists, etc. These people can be perfectly nice to their neighbors, pay taxes, etc. They're still not the sort of folks I want as neighbors.
2) A certain minimum command of the English language is a requirement for citizenship in the US. Legal non-citizen immigrants need not speak English, but generally have sufficient income or are staying for a brief enough time that economic factors are not an issue. Many, if not a majority of illegal immigrants speak little to no English, and as a result of this and their immigration status, cannot get jobs doing anything but minimum (or below minimum) wage menial labor.
3) Even if these people have employers who give lip service to the rules and pay employment taxes (and many do not), those taxes are a tiny fraction of the cost of providing social services for these workers - almost none of whom will ever pay income taxes (the bottom 40+% of income earners in the US now pay none). In fact, those that have social security numbers and file tax returns actually cost the government tax money, since thanks to our tax code they can get "refunds" greater than the amount of money they paid in.
4) In numbers, they strain the social services of anywhere they live. Since they almost never have health insurance, they use the nearest hospital's ER for all their health care needs - for which they rarely pay. Hospitals in areas with large numbers of illegal immigrants tend to go out of business for this reason, and legal residents and citizens find it difficult to get emergency care. Schools too have a difficult time - not only because the tax base does not support the extra children, but also because many of those children also speak little or no English - and additional resources must be emplaced to teach English as a second language.
5) In places where the local government is not willing to step on federal toes in immigration matters, illegals tend to get a free pass when they commit anything but the most violent crimes. If released before trial, they simply do not appear in court. They have few assets in country, so fines mean nothing. If deported, they pay a mule to get them back across the border - often in a matter of weeks.
6) Given the economic differences between the US and Mexico (from which the majority of our illegals come), they tend to spend a bare minimum of their money here, and send the rest out of country, where it is worth more to their families. So in addition to paying less in taxes than the social services they use cost, they don't even add much to the economy.
7) Illegals form a ready made class of people to be exploited, since they are afraid to go to the police. This attracts criminals, who prey not only on the illegals, but on legal residents and citizens as well.
8) Illegal immigrants very often do not wish to be Americans. They are here to exploit our economy and send the money home. Evidence of this can be found anywhere you see a rally regarding immigration reform, and see all the flags of foreign nations (usually Mexico, but sometimes others) being waved. If they wanted to be Americans, they could start by respecting our traditions (rather than demanding they be changed for their convenience), and our laws.
I find it interesting that people are getting upset about one state actually doing something about a situation that is harming the state and its residents due to the federal government failing to enforce existing laws.
I also find it somewhat disingenuous that people are arguing against the state law on the basis that immigration control is the province of the federal government - if the federal government were enforcing its own laws, state action would be unnecessary.
That said, there is a simple process by which illegal immigration can be stopped cold, and we can simultaneously rid ourselves of the illegals already here:
For purposes of this process, "employer" shall mean anyone with direct hire/fire authority over the worker in question AND the overall manager in charge of the location at which the worker is employed.
1) Require that all employers verify citizenship or legal immigration status of each worker as a condition of employment for that worker.
2) Anyone found to be knowingly employing an illegal alien will be subject to fines and penalties as follows:
a) A fine of one year's pay for the illegal alien worker, for each worker so employed (or $5000 per illegal alien worker, whichever is greater), shall be paid by the employer.
b) Employers shall be subject to 5 years prison at hard labor per illegal worker, sentences for multiple offenses to run consecutively.
3) Illegal alien workers shall be subject to 5 years prison at hard labor each time they are caught. They will be paid nothing for this time in prison, and at the end of their sentence they will be deported.
4) Employers and illegal workers serving prison terms under the above points shall be put to hard labor building roads as chain gangs or doing other hard labor, as the state where they were captured shall dictate. This hard labor may include leasing inmate labor to corporations or other states at a rate of up to one half the federal minimum wage. Funds received for inmate labor must be used first for the feeding and housing of the inmates, and then for the general expenses of the prison system should any funds remain.
5) One half of the amount of any fines collected under section 2a above will be paid in a lump sum to informants who lead authorities to illegal workers and employers, once those individuals are convicted and the fines levied.
---------------
Follow the above process, and employers will stop hiring illegal workers - it won't be worth the fines and prison time.
Illegal workers will stop coming here - it won't be worth the prison time, and 5 years of making absolutely no money, even if they can find someone to employ them.
Even the illegals will be reporting their employers, to get the financial windfall that their share of the fines will represent. For a large employer, a whistleblower might never have to work again.
The source of cheap (prison) labor would still be there, long enough for the country to grow acclimated to not having a huge pool of unskilled workers available who are basically economic slaves.
In six months, you wouldn't be able to find an illegal worker in the country, outside of prison... and if they can't work, there is no reason for them to be here.
With the illegals gone, the country can then see about adjusting its immigration policies accordingly, to ensure the necessary labor pool is available.
I had a similar experience, returning to college after 10 years out of school.
...and then crashed and burned in Calc II, because that -required- a full understanding of the groundwork on which it was based.
Even though I didn't (in theory) -need- to take it, I started with College Algebra, and worked my way up through the math courses.
Algebra was a breeze.
I could do Trig and Analytic Geometry without any trouble, though I didn't really understand them.
I got my first B (as opposed to straight As) in Calc I, being able to apply what I knew without understanding it...
That was 17 years ago. I never did finish my degree, and haven't had any great need for math above the Algebra level since.
I'd love to go back and finish my CS degree, just to have it - I've been working in the field for over 30 years (yes, I started on mainframes) and it would be nice to have the piece of paper, though it isn't likely to do me any good at this point.
Well of course its invalid...
;)
God could claim Prior Art.
Something to consider, that the people advocating this sort of legal change rarely do, is that policy drives behavior - but not necessarily in the ways that they want it to.
They believe they will change the behavior of consumers by making the cost of music piracy high.
They may succeed in changing behavior - but likely not in the way they hope to. Most consumers who currently pirate music will continue to do so, but they will do so using different methods so as to not be caught.
The OP is correct in that the music industry is attempting to use legislation to avoid having to change their business model.
A good example of an industry that is affected by piracy and the second-hand market in a similar way to the music industry, is the computer software industry. The computer softeware industry has tried many of the same methodologies the music industry has to combat piracy, mainly involving various sorts of copy protection and security codes, all of which failed to curb piracy, and some of which encouraged it due to legitimate customers being locked out of their legally purchased software by overzealous security measures.
Like the music industry, the software industry has attemtped to use legislation to resolve their problems, and has been nearly completely unsuccessful in doing so. For the most part, their last line of defense has been the "Inquisition" (the Business Software Alliance) which relies for the most part on disgruntled employees denouncing their employers or former employers.
The one bright spot in this is the computer game industry. It is not nearly so monolithic or moneyed as the software giants or the music industry and as a result it has had to find different solutions. Though it has ridden on the coattails of the legislation sponsored and passed by the giants, it is also well aware that said legislation has not had the desired effect, nor have the standard copy protection schema - and so it has begun to move to a different business model, involving downloadable content. While a base game may be pirated, even someone who didn't buy it needs the downloadable content to get the full experience, and the only easy way to get that is to purchase it. This has allowed revenue generation from people who did not actually purchase the base software (in addition to those that did).
One effect of this new model has been a necessary improvement of the quality of the product. If a company wants to generate revenue from downloadable add-on content, the original product must be high enough quality that people want that additional content, and the additional content itself must be worth spending money on. It is also of note that while the total price of all downloadable content may be significant, the individual pieces of it cost far less than the original product. The time and effort of the programmers/artists certainly deserves appropriate recompense, as does the capital risk of the production company - but the true measure of "worth" is what the market will bear. If the music (or game) industry suddenly quintupled the price of their product because that is what they decided it was worth (even if such an increase were absolutely necessary to recoup their costs), their sales would plummet because the market would likely not agree that either was actually worth the price.
That concept - that the consumer sets the price of any commodity by choosing whether or not to purchase it at that price - is what the music and software industries have been trying circumvent. Governments have the same sort of issues when they impose high taxes on goods that end at some arbitrary border - an instant trade in untaxed goods springs up between the taxed and untaxed sides of the border, which the government must then shut down to maintain its revenue. Music and software present an additional challenge because they can be copied and moved digitally at near zero cost.
While some will argue that the worth of a product is directly t
Adding time in school won't help, because the problem isn't the number of hours or days spent in school.
In fact, there are a host of problems which all contribute to the issue, none of which will be addressed by keeping children in school longer.
The issues as I see them are:
1) Fundamental flaws in the theory of education at the policy making and administrative levels. An example of one such: I am old enough to have been in school when grading systems began to be changed from A-F to E(xceeds expectations), S(atisfactory), and U(nsatisfactory). The reason given for the change was that children who got poor grades felt inferior to those who were doing better, and that this was bad. Some time later, the 'E' grade was disposed of for the same reason. While that grading system is gone, the fundamentally flawed premise that caused it remains to this day. American education became for a long time, all about making students feel good about how much they didn't know. The flawed premise here is the same as in Communism - when you remove the rewards for doing well, you also remove the incentive to excel.
2) Use of schools as a platform to indoctrinate students with the current popular ideology. Whatever the ideology in question, this -always- happens at the expense of useful learning, both because the 'facts' presented by the curriculum tend to be skewed to present that ideology in the most favorable light, and because students are discouraged from questioning the 'facts' presented (as that represents questioning the ideology itself).
3) Fundamental flaws in the theory of education at the classroom level. Schools used to use rote memorization only for the purpose of teaching the basic building blocks of a subject. The next step was to teach critical thinking and problem solving to allow students to figure out how to solve problems given the basic information. As a result of the second point above (and the reliance on teaching to the standardized tests), critical thinking is now discouraged.
4) Standardized tests are presented in such a way that teachers (and those who create the curriculum the teachers use) are able to teach to the test, and spend a large portion of the school year doing so via rote memorization. The concept of standardized testing being necessary grew out of the poor performance of American students. Unfortunately, the manner in which it was implemented allowed rote memorization to be used to prepare for the tests, rather than teaching the fundamentals of the subject and encouraging the development of problem solving skills.
5) Colossal waste of money in education. Most of this money is wasted in administration and bureaucracy, some in fraud, and some to genuine attempts to improve the quality of education at the student level. A problem here is that (except for the poorest school districts where there is not enough money to cover essentials), spending more money per student does not increase the quality of education. Some experiments were done to vastly increase the amount of money being spent per student - those experiments universally resulted in no measurable improvement in test scores. When the educational process is flawed at its most basic level, throwing money at the problem is not the answer.
6) Failure of certain American subcultures to value education. When you are told from birth by the people who are raising you, the people around you, and the leaders in your community that you aren't good enough to make it without handouts; that you are by virtue of your ethnicity or skin color doomed to substandard employment and a substandard lifestyle; that people who succeed despite that are traitors, and that crime is the best way to get ahead... then the students tend to see education as a waste of time. They know that if they choose to avoid crime as a way of getting ahead, that jobs in menial labor will always be available, and require no education. Since they don't believe they can do better, they don't see t
Interesting that the chart ends at Bush, given that the current budget under Obama's presidency will add twice as much to the national debt through 2016 as Bush did during his entire presidency, and the current spending plans will double the national debt over the next decade. http://www.heritage.org/research/budget/bg2249.cfm
In principle, I'm against the idea of ISPs doing this due to the slippery slope argument - that they will start with "Malware" and move on to other types of traffic that someone decides is undesirable.
For practical reasons, I'm all for it, if it can be done well - it will basically shut down botnets and most spam if it becomes widely adopted, as eventually ISPs that don't adopt it will become havens for malware sites and home to the remaining botnets - at which point, their upstream providers will shut off their access if they refuse to clean up their traffic.
A few comments on this. First, if this catches on, it will eventually (as others have said) become mandatory in all vehicles. By necessity, once it becomes mandatory, it will become a crime to impair or disable the camera, in the same way that it is a crime to obscure your license plate, have a burned out light over it, or drive without liability insurance. On the other hand, in Texas where I live, 30% of drivers have no liability insurance. They only get caught when they are stopped or involved in an accident - and even then, given that a significant percentage are illegals, they simply fail to show up for court. Regarding children and privacy, much of the privacy concerns stem from people treating children as miniature adults. They aren't. They are children - which means that parents need to know what is going on in their lives in order to guide them through the process of becoming adults. Treating them as miniature adults, particularly with regard to privacy, simply guarantees they will grow up without ever learning how adults are supposed to act.
I'm betting that cartoons lampooning the scientific hoaxes of the last year won't be well recieved.