Having just returned from Disneyland, it struck me that they would be a very good foot in the door for a smart company wanting build public trust in autonomous cars. If Disney could convince Anaheim to perform an emminent domain and allow Disney to make a raised roadway just far enough to get away from the buildup around the park, Disney could partner with Google to produce self driving cars that would be in real use. Just as the Disney monorail was first daily operating monorail in North America, it would become an attraction in itself if Disney could run the first real world autonomous vehicle roadway in North America.
This would allow Disney to expand outside of their current physical confines. It would be an attraction ride in and of itself. It would be a convenience to their customers. And, for the company that supplied the vehicles, it would create as safe of an environment as possible to let millions of people experience riding in the companies autonomous vehicles. This would be a huge foot in the door for convincing people that these vehicles are safe.
If you ask just about any competent doctor, they'll tell you that MMR vaccine is making everyone healthier.
That is an invalid argument. It is the Emperor's New Clothes argument.
They'd almost definitely argue that even if the completely discredited study about MMR and autism is true, MMR is still worth it because it has saved roughly 500,000 lives a year.
THAT is the kind of argument that sane people make when talking about vaccinations. Leave off the part where you make claims that disagreeing with you makes others incompetent.
On the other hand, the absolute best case scenario for the chicken pox vaccine is that here in the US, even if 100% effective, it could only save about 100 lives a year. Home cooked meals are more dangerous. And, it is known not to be 100% effective. It is also known to not offer permanent immunity. This means that we are likely not only simply delaying the disease, we are delaying it to an age where it becomes 10x more dangerous.
Herd immunity gets thrown out like a mantra. While it is great, we are now starting to vaccinate against diseases where herd immunity will save fewer lives than the vaccine harms. Herd immunity is not the end all be all answer. To think it is, is to be just as scientifically inclined as Jenny McCarthy.
OK, to be fair, I only know of one vaccine that poses a real threat, and that is only because it is misused. That would be the chicken pox vaccine. It should not be used on children. The data supplied by virtually every source shows this, even when the sources conclusion recommends the vaccine. The problem is that those who support vaccination rarely if every draw a distinction between a vaccine like the chicken pox vaccine and the polio vaccine. Then the Anti-"Anti-Vaxers" come out and start screaming about how all vaccines are good, and anyone who would question the righteousness of the all mighty vaccine is a murderer who should have their children removed from them.
When we were fighting polio, there was no question that A vaccine was a good thing. The big killers and maimers are largely gone now. We have had effective vaccines for a long time. Now we are trying to add vaccines that prevent diseases that are less likely to kill or maim than a home cooked meal. That's right. If the chicken pox vaccine were never developed, you would still have a greater chance of being killed or maimed by a home cooked meal than by chicken pox.
Even worse is that the vaccine is known not to offer life long immunity, so we are very likely just pushing the disease off for a decade or so. This is particularly unfortunate because chicken pox is 10x more deadly for an adult than a child.
That would lead to massive abuses. Get your tiger repelling vaccine on the list, and it becomes a mandatory sale. We are already seeing this kind of behavior as it is. Doctors/the government/schools are telling parents that chicken pox is just as dangerous a polio. Heck, companies with money to be made are telling people that shingles is a life threatening disease. They are telling them that shingles is a deadly disease and that they have a 1 in 3 chance of getting it if they don't get a vaccine.
The medical industry needs to get it's house in order concerning vaccines, because by stretching the truth and outright lying, they give credence to those that would argue against them. This leads to people skipping important vaccines like those for polio.
Or... More people die of home cooked meals than die form chicken pox. My guess is that most parents here have both vaccinated their children with the chicken pox vaccine, yet keep the kitchen in their home for convenience. Many probably even think that kitchen is healthy.
You are more likely to die by being burned to death from a home cooked meal than you are from chicken pox. If your goal is to protect children, your efforts would be better spent having kitchens banned from homes, as well as the cooking that happens in them. While there are vaccines that are simply awesome like the polio vaccine, the trend of implying, or outright saying that mild diseases like chicken pox are just as bad as polio, does more harm than good. When the 'experts' are behaving just as bat-shit insane as Jenny McCarthy, they lose credibility. Even worse is that they should know better.
I recommend that people look at the data provided about chicken pox. Take the data from those that support use of the vaccine. Don't just take their conclusion. Look at their data. The data doesn't support universal use of the vaccine. It supports use of the vaccine in high risk patients and adults. Use in children actually increases the individual's risk because the vaccine is well documented as not offering life long immunity. By pushing the risk of infection from childhood to adulthood, the vaccine may be producing as much as a 10x greater risk. The data also shows cases of shingles increasing with the increased use of the vaccine.
Interestingly enough, the chicken pox vaccine is also a shingles vaccine, so the typical scare tactic of telling people that if they don't get the vaccine, they will get shingles is an outright lie. Not only does childhood vaccination not offer protection against shingles, adult vaccination can be used as a vaccine against shingles irrelevant of whether you were vaccinated against chicken pox, or gained immunity by catching the disease.
Even worse is that the varicella vaccine is known to fail at offering life long protection. The prevailing theory being that the vaccine requires the booster created by the wild strains of varicella to keep it's potency. This means that tests on small groups work great, but when the entire population has been vaccinated, the vaccine is on a time limit. The has the very real potential of leaving a majority of the adult population without immunity to a highly contagious disease.
While I don't think that the mortality/morbidity rate is high enough for varicella to warrant worrying about a vaccine, (You are after all, more likely to die from a home cooked meal than chicken pox) it should be noted that the mortality rate of chicken pox is 10x higher in adults than it is in children. So, the herd immunity through universal vaccination that helps us with diseases like polio are likely dramatically increasing the risk of death from chicken pox.
That is a good observation. I have to wonder though, do Finnish really need to learn to read to be able to understand American movies? The impression I get is that something like 90% of the Finnish population speaks English as a second language.
That being said, I could believe that the subtitle do help. Just in a different way. Having the words printed on the screen all of the time likely imprints the shape of the words, even if the people are not actively reading it. As a home schooling parent, I have met a lot of families that belong to the 'Unschooling' school of education. What that means is that they don't actually teach their kids anything. The kids are completely self taught. The parents will answer direct questions, but they don't actively teach their kids anything. While I wouldn't go this route, I have noticed a very interesting thing. All of the kids learn to read. Not some of them. All of them. They usually don't start reading until somewhere between 7 and 10, but with zero teaching, they learn to read. I attribute this to the fact that in the US, you simply cannot get away from the written word. How many times does a kid have to pass a McDonald's before they learn that the letter 'M' makes a mmmmm.... sound? If you sit around and watch TV all day, you have things like the word 'Disney' displayed on the screen and a voice saying 'Disney'. It is like something out of Sesame Street but with corporate logos and names instead of furry monsters and well... corporate names.
I would argue that your fix for the education system is completely backwards. Teachers, while not earning rock-star salaries, are in the top half of all earners in every state in the Union. More education for teachers wouldn't solve the problem. Having a teacher with a masters degree is like having a McDonald's employee with 8 years of culinary school training. The extra training doesn't bring anything to the table. A person only needs to be about two levels ahead in a subject to be able to effectively teach the subject. That means that to teach 2nd grade math, the teacher only needs to be competent in 4th grade math. More education isn't going to help the teacher that currently only has a 4th grade education.
Likewise, students working more hours isn't going to help them. Students are already wasting most of their time as it is. They don't need more work. They need less busy work. As a home schooling parent, I can tell you that it only takes a couple of hours a day to blaze past public schooled children's education. More money to the schools won't help them. The schools are already a black hole for money. The problem with school budgets is accountability.
I'll agree taht changes in parenting culture need to happen, but not in the way you think. Currently we live in an orphanage state. The vast majority of kids spend more waking hours in the care of the state than they do the people who are supposed to be their parents. The school has become the parent. This is encouraged by both the school and the people who are supposed to be the kids parents.
Your suggestion basically boils down to more of the same. Fixing our education system will require far more radical thinking than "more money, more time". Our public educational system is the 'Emperor's New Cloths'. No one wants to point out that the whole thing is a sham.
Notice that this guy's position normally pays over $300k a year, and the starting pay for the teachers is $41k a year. I'm not going to complain about the teacher's pay, but starting a career at $41k isn't poverty.
An awful lot of those people had math skills. They know that they couldn't afford the houses that they were buying. They were just mistaken in thinking that they were in on the scam.
To have a lower entropy state, you must have gotten there somehow. Humanity doesn't know how that happened, so scientists do what everyone else does when they are not even close to understanding something. They declare Magic!
I had this argument in another thread just yesterday. The laws of thermodynamics are obviously wrong. Wrong in the same way that Newtonian physics is wrong. Meaning that it is close enough for anything I will ever get my hands on, but that it clearly does not explain everything that is happening, and it is clearly violated at some point.
The thing is that we are rapidly approaching the time when it will be bad even for those who profit from the corporate economy. Once you get past a certain point in wealth, it starts making it worth it for the poor to kill the rich and take their wealth. Sure, the rich can hire security, but living in a world where they cannot travel freely and safely because someone might kill them for their shoes isn't a good world for them. They don't have to reduce their wealth to an equal level with the rest of us. If Mr. Wealth has 10x the assets as Mr. Poor and Mr. Poor has food and shelter, it is unlikely that Mr. poor is going to jeopardize what he has to kill Mr Wealth. If Mr. Wealth has 10000x the assets of Mr. Poor, Mr Poor might start thinking that "If I can get just one percent of Mr. Wealth's stuff, I won't every have to worry about money again. Even my children will never have to worry about money.
Part of the unfortunate path we are taking is that people have a hard time with the idea that one type of government/economic system could be right for one level of human progress, while a different government/economic system could be right for a different level of human progress.
That's the thing. Capitalism was great for it's day, but capitalism and automation at a level that we are moving towards are incompatible. There is a tendency for people to think that there is a single best economy/government system. The reality is that different economies/government systems have different pros and cons depending on the level of technology in play. ( As well as a lot of other factors )
OWS was a symptom of what you are talking about. The very wealthy would be smart to make sure that they don't push wealth disparity too far. At some point, they will either have to militarize their entire life for protection, or they will run into someone desperate enough to think that their shoes are worth the risk of killing them. They would be much better off in molding a system where they still have enough wealth to buy anything and everything they ever wanted without having to work another day in their life, while keeping the 'poor', at least rich enough that they don't become desperate.
I had to correct one of those copy and past problems just this week because of a contractor the company brought in for a 3 month stint to "help get us caught up".
And the kids with red shirts will always be the ones that end up dead.
* Don't take that as derogatory to your comment. You just can't expect to make a comment about putting people in read shirts without people thinking that they will get killed. It doesn't matter how insightful your comment is.
One of the problems is that technology is rarely used. The reason is one of my big gripes with the teaching profession, but irrelevant of that, teachers just don't generally use technology even when it is made available to them. Some areas where tech has improved education:
* Over head projectors are technology, and they have been very useful. Why? Teachers used them. I don't know how much the use them today, but when I was in school, they were used heavily.
* Typing classes. Using computers really did revolutionize teaching typing. (Do they still teach typing in school?)
* Checking for plagiarism. I was sitting next to a teacher at one of my son's events, and she was using an iPhone to search for strings of text from papers she was grading.
Students might be more inclined to participate when those around them do, but what they are participating in is not always what you want. You hope to encourage the slacker to participate more in the learning process, but at the same time, you are just as likely to be encouraging the good student to participate in getting high under the bleachers. There is a very large portion of the population that thinks this is just fine because their goal isn't to improve education, but to normalize it to a base value. This is not something I want my children involved in. Amongst my son's peers, graduating and going to college at 15 or 16 is normal. It would be a travesty to take these kids and put them into an environment where they are shooting for high school graduation at 19.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone wants to make a car physically crash, there are much easier ways than trying to hack the software.
http://xkcd.com/538/
Having just returned from Disneyland, it struck me that they would be a very good foot in the door for a smart company wanting build public trust in autonomous cars. If Disney could convince Anaheim to perform an emminent domain and allow Disney to make a raised roadway just far enough to get away from the buildup around the park, Disney could partner with Google to produce self driving cars that would be in real use. Just as the Disney monorail was first daily operating monorail in North America, it would become an attraction in itself if Disney could run the first real world autonomous vehicle roadway in North America.
This would allow Disney to expand outside of their current physical confines. It would be an attraction ride in and of itself. It would be a convenience to their customers. And, for the company that supplied the vehicles, it would create as safe of an environment as possible to let millions of people experience riding in the companies autonomous vehicles. This would be a huge foot in the door for convincing people that these vehicles are safe.
If you ask just about any competent doctor, they'll tell you that MMR vaccine is making everyone healthier.
That is an invalid argument. It is the Emperor's New Clothes argument.
They'd almost definitely argue that even if the completely discredited study about MMR and autism is true, MMR is still worth it because it has saved roughly 500,000 lives a year.
THAT is the kind of argument that sane people make when talking about vaccinations. Leave off the part where you make claims that disagreeing with you makes others incompetent.
On the other hand, the absolute best case scenario for the chicken pox vaccine is that here in the US, even if 100% effective, it could only save about 100 lives a year. Home cooked meals are more dangerous. And, it is known not to be 100% effective. It is also known to not offer permanent immunity. This means that we are likely not only simply delaying the disease, we are delaying it to an age where it becomes 10x more dangerous.
They could have also given the father custody. The father could then just take his kids to the doctor for their immunizations.
Herd immunity gets thrown out like a mantra. While it is great, we are now starting to vaccinate against diseases where herd immunity will save fewer lives than the vaccine harms. Herd immunity is not the end all be all answer. To think it is, is to be just as scientifically inclined as Jenny McCarthy.
OK, to be fair, I only know of one vaccine that poses a real threat, and that is only because it is misused. That would be the chicken pox vaccine. It should not be used on children. The data supplied by virtually every source shows this, even when the sources conclusion recommends the vaccine. The problem is that those who support vaccination rarely if every draw a distinction between a vaccine like the chicken pox vaccine and the polio vaccine. Then the Anti-"Anti-Vaxers" come out and start screaming about how all vaccines are good, and anyone who would question the righteousness of the all mighty vaccine is a murderer who should have their children removed from them.
When we were fighting polio, there was no question that A vaccine was a good thing. The big killers and maimers are largely gone now. We have had effective vaccines for a long time. Now we are trying to add vaccines that prevent diseases that are less likely to kill or maim than a home cooked meal. That's right. If the chicken pox vaccine were never developed, you would still have a greater chance of being killed or maimed by a home cooked meal than by chicken pox.
Even worse is that the vaccine is known not to offer life long immunity, so we are very likely just pushing the disease off for a decade or so. This is particularly unfortunate because chicken pox is 10x more deadly for an adult than a child.
That would lead to massive abuses. Get your tiger repelling vaccine on the list, and it becomes a mandatory sale. We are already seeing this kind of behavior as it is. Doctors/the government/schools are telling parents that chicken pox is just as dangerous a polio. Heck, companies with money to be made are telling people that shingles is a life threatening disease. They are telling them that shingles is a deadly disease and that they have a 1 in 3 chance of getting it if they don't get a vaccine.
The medical industry needs to get it's house in order concerning vaccines, because by stretching the truth and outright lying, they give credence to those that would argue against them. This leads to people skipping important vaccines like those for polio.
Your right. The fact that this is a custody case, not a medical case is lost on most people.
Or... More people die of home cooked meals than die form chicken pox. My guess is that most parents here have both vaccinated their children with the chicken pox vaccine, yet keep the kitchen in their home for convenience. Many probably even think that kitchen is healthy.
You are more likely to die by being burned to death from a home cooked meal than you are from chicken pox. If your goal is to protect children, your efforts would be better spent having kitchens banned from homes, as well as the cooking that happens in them. While there are vaccines that are simply awesome like the polio vaccine, the trend of implying, or outright saying that mild diseases like chicken pox are just as bad as polio, does more harm than good. When the 'experts' are behaving just as bat-shit insane as Jenny McCarthy, they lose credibility. Even worse is that they should know better.
I recommend that people look at the data provided about chicken pox. Take the data from those that support use of the vaccine. Don't just take their conclusion. Look at their data. The data doesn't support universal use of the vaccine. It supports use of the vaccine in high risk patients and adults. Use in children actually increases the individual's risk because the vaccine is well documented as not offering life long immunity. By pushing the risk of infection from childhood to adulthood, the vaccine may be producing as much as a 10x greater risk. The data also shows cases of shingles increasing with the increased use of the vaccine.
Interestingly enough, the chicken pox vaccine is also a shingles vaccine, so the typical scare tactic of telling people that if they don't get the vaccine, they will get shingles is an outright lie. Not only does childhood vaccination not offer protection against shingles, adult vaccination can be used as a vaccine against shingles irrelevant of whether you were vaccinated against chicken pox, or gained immunity by catching the disease.
Even worse is that the varicella vaccine is known to fail at offering life long protection. The prevailing theory being that the vaccine requires the booster created by the wild strains of varicella to keep it's potency. This means that tests on small groups work great, but when the entire population has been vaccinated, the vaccine is on a time limit. The has the very real potential of leaving a majority of the adult population without immunity to a highly contagious disease.
While I don't think that the mortality/morbidity rate is high enough for varicella to warrant worrying about a vaccine, (You are after all, more likely to die from a home cooked meal than chicken pox) it should be noted that the mortality rate of chicken pox is 10x higher in adults than it is in children. So, the herd immunity through universal vaccination that helps us with diseases like polio are likely dramatically increasing the risk of death from chicken pox.
That is a good observation. I have to wonder though, do Finnish really need to learn to read to be able to understand American movies? The impression I get is that something like 90% of the Finnish population speaks English as a second language.
That being said, I could believe that the subtitle do help. Just in a different way. Having the words printed on the screen all of the time likely imprints the shape of the words, even if the people are not actively reading it. As a home schooling parent, I have met a lot of families that belong to the 'Unschooling' school of education. What that means is that they don't actually teach their kids anything. The kids are completely self taught. The parents will answer direct questions, but they don't actively teach their kids anything. While I wouldn't go this route, I have noticed a very interesting thing. All of the kids learn to read. Not some of them. All of them. They usually don't start reading until somewhere between 7 and 10, but with zero teaching, they learn to read. I attribute this to the fact that in the US, you simply cannot get away from the written word. How many times does a kid have to pass a McDonald's before they learn that the letter 'M' makes a mmmmm.... sound? If you sit around and watch TV all day, you have things like the word 'Disney' displayed on the screen and a voice saying 'Disney'. It is like something out of Sesame Street but with corporate logos and names instead of furry monsters and well... corporate names.
I would argue that your fix for the education system is completely backwards. Teachers, while not earning rock-star salaries, are in the top half of all earners in every state in the Union. More education for teachers wouldn't solve the problem. Having a teacher with a masters degree is like having a McDonald's employee with 8 years of culinary school training. The extra training doesn't bring anything to the table. A person only needs to be about two levels ahead in a subject to be able to effectively teach the subject. That means that to teach 2nd grade math, the teacher only needs to be competent in 4th grade math. More education isn't going to help the teacher that currently only has a 4th grade education.
Likewise, students working more hours isn't going to help them. Students are already wasting most of their time as it is. They don't need more work. They need less busy work. As a home schooling parent, I can tell you that it only takes a couple of hours a day to blaze past public schooled children's education. More money to the schools won't help them. The schools are already a black hole for money. The problem with school budgets is accountability.
I'll agree taht changes in parenting culture need to happen, but not in the way you think. Currently we live in an orphanage state. The vast majority of kids spend more waking hours in the care of the state than they do the people who are supposed to be their parents. The school has become the parent. This is encouraged by both the school and the people who are supposed to be the kids parents.
Your suggestion basically boils down to more of the same. Fixing our education system will require far more radical thinking than "more money, more time". Our public educational system is the 'Emperor's New Cloths'. No one wants to point out that the whole thing is a sham.
Here is a good example how messed up our school system is: http://news.yahoo.com/school-superintendent-gives-800k-pay-150206667.html
Notice that this guy's position normally pays over $300k a year, and the starting pay for the teachers is $41k a year. I'm not going to complain about the teacher's pay, but starting a career at $41k isn't poverty.
An awful lot of those people had math skills. They know that they couldn't afford the houses that they were buying. They were just mistaken in thinking that they were in on the scam.
Because one way or the other... "MAGIC!"
Because Magic!
To have a lower entropy state, you must have gotten there somehow. Humanity doesn't know how that happened, so scientists do what everyone else does when they are not even close to understanding something. They declare Magic!
Our existence is an example of such violation.
I had this argument in another thread just yesterday. The laws of thermodynamics are obviously wrong. Wrong in the same way that Newtonian physics is wrong. Meaning that it is close enough for anything I will ever get my hands on, but that it clearly does not explain everything that is happening, and it is clearly violated at some point.
The thing is that we are rapidly approaching the time when it will be bad even for those who profit from the corporate economy. Once you get past a certain point in wealth, it starts making it worth it for the poor to kill the rich and take their wealth. Sure, the rich can hire security, but living in a world where they cannot travel freely and safely because someone might kill them for their shoes isn't a good world for them. They don't have to reduce their wealth to an equal level with the rest of us. If Mr. Wealth has 10x the assets as Mr. Poor and Mr. Poor has food and shelter, it is unlikely that Mr. poor is going to jeopardize what he has to kill Mr Wealth. If Mr. Wealth has 10000x the assets of Mr. Poor, Mr Poor might start thinking that "If I can get just one percent of Mr. Wealth's stuff, I won't every have to worry about money again. Even my children will never have to worry about money.
Part of the unfortunate path we are taking is that people have a hard time with the idea that one type of government/economic system could be right for one level of human progress, while a different government/economic system could be right for a different level of human progress.
That's the thing. Capitalism was great for it's day, but capitalism and automation at a level that we are moving towards are incompatible. There is a tendency for people to think that there is a single best economy/government system. The reality is that different economies/government systems have different pros and cons depending on the level of technology in play. ( As well as a lot of other factors )
OWS was a symptom of what you are talking about. The very wealthy would be smart to make sure that they don't push wealth disparity too far. At some point, they will either have to militarize their entire life for protection, or they will run into someone desperate enough to think that their shoes are worth the risk of killing them. They would be much better off in molding a system where they still have enough wealth to buy anything and everything they ever wanted without having to work another day in their life, while keeping the 'poor', at least rich enough that they don't become desperate.
I had to correct one of those copy and past problems just this week because of a contractor the company brought in for a 3 month stint to "help get us caught up".
It would be cheaper than implementing this system.
And the kids with red shirts will always be the ones that end up dead.
* Don't take that as derogatory to your comment. You just can't expect to make a comment about putting people in read shirts without people thinking that they will get killed. It doesn't matter how insightful your comment is.
One of the problems is that technology is rarely used. The reason is one of my big gripes with the teaching profession, but irrelevant of that, teachers just don't generally use technology even when it is made available to them. Some areas where tech has improved education:
* Over head projectors are technology, and they have been very useful. Why? Teachers used them. I don't know how much the use them today, but when I was in school, they were used heavily.
* Typing classes. Using computers really did revolutionize teaching typing. (Do they still teach typing in school?)
* Checking for plagiarism. I was sitting next to a teacher at one of my son's events, and she was using an iPhone to search for strings of text from papers she was grading.
Well, that pretty well sums it up....
Students might be more inclined to participate when those around them do, but what they are participating in is not always what you want. You hope to encourage the slacker to participate more in the learning process, but at the same time, you are just as likely to be encouraging the good student to participate in getting high under the bleachers. There is a very large portion of the population that thinks this is just fine because their goal isn't to improve education, but to normalize it to a base value. This is not something I want my children involved in. Amongst my son's peers, graduating and going to college at 15 or 16 is normal. It would be a travesty to take these kids and put them into an environment where they are shooting for high school graduation at 19.