Studies show that adding pay to a task decreases the internal perceived motivation for that same task. Actors conclud, subconsciously, that money is why they did it. Hence they are less likely in the future to do it unless they are paid again. Perilous to do this with the pursuit of knowledge.
Of course in a typical public school, there are already serious problems with busywork versus genuine pursuit of understanding. In that context, payment might be the right thing to do, because as others have noted, payment is indeed what humans expect in exchange for busy work.
You have sugar in bread? That's crazy, and I had to check I wasn't missing a joke. That article says someone is selling bread with aspartame in the USA.
Yeast requires sugar in order to produce the carbon dioxide that creates the tiny bubbles in the final product. Not all of the sugar gets eaten, so there will be some left over for the human... but some bread companies are probably adding even more sugar in order to make their bread sell better.
I did an experiment at home and discovered that commercial yeast can eat splenda (sucralose) just as well as sugar (sucrose), but cannot eat aspartame (nutrasweet). No doubt the splenda molecule is so close to sucrose that the yeast don't notice... IIRC splenda is sugar with one carbon swapped out for a chlorine.
You can try it yourself, just mix 120-degree-F water with a packet of yeast and a teaspoon of something you want the yeast to eat.
At 10% unemployment, I'd say the USA government has not managed to establish a proper program to use up the supply of domestic labor either.
Sure it has. Unemployment benefits expire after a little while, at which time job-seekers will lower their asking price and the rest will sort itself out.
Anybody can find work. They are just having trouble finding work they like, at a pay rate that supports their prior lifestyle.
that Stubhub is owned by Ticketmaster? I can't believe this. The last two times I tried to get into concerts at the Rochester Auditorium Theater and the War Memorial (Blue Cross Arena), it was difficult. Somehow all the good seats vanished almost immediately. But no, there are seats that magically appear on Stubhub. All you have to do is pay $300 for a $75 seat. Infuriated, I refused (obviously, I've been out of the loop for a while). So for one concert I bought tickets from someone on eBay (double the face value!) and for the other I just got cheap tickets in a poor location. Apparently this kind of poor service has no effect since the venues are sold out anyway.
Wow do you ever need a semester of Micro 101. The "face value" of a ticket is just noise -- it has little bearing on the actual value of a ticket. The actual value can only be determined by a market that is allowed to clear.
Since the auditorium is full despite the 300+% markups, the face value must be incorrect. And now you are bent out of shape because the incorrect face value set your expectations erroneously low.
Ticketmaster uses artificially low face values in order to give the scalpers, who are its risk-mitigation division, some wiggle room. Scalpers could not perform their service if they had to buy the tickets (and hence risk getting stuck with excess inventory) at their full real value.
Additionally, every society that has ever existed has had both capitalistic and socialistic aspects. Simply being able to barter your goods and services, or being able to whittle a piece of wood for your own enjoyment, is Capitalism, and having any sort of government whatsoever is Socialism.
You are free to define 'socialism' and 'government' in that manner if it pleases you, but I find those definitions to be useless, because even a pure-barter society needs protection of property and enforcement of contracts. The third-party agent that does so needs a name, yes? And such an agent must always be a monopoly.
I find it more useful to define socialism as government-mandated transfers of wealth -- presumably to destinations that Capitalism would normally shy away from -- that are not inherent in the protection of property and the enforcement of contracts. In this meaning, all societies have some elements of Socialism, with Communism being the system in which nearly 100% of generated wealth is directly transferred away (with other benefits presumably arriving back later).
The scary thing is, I just don't think age has much to do with maturity.. I've met plenty of minors who seem to have a really decent grasp on maturity, while I've met plenty of 18+ who will never grow up.
The difficulty here is that 'child', 'teen', 'adult', 'elderly', and 'infirm' are points drawn on what is actually a smooth continuum. From conception until death, you pass through the continuum of humanity. Your apogee occurs around age 35, which is when you are probably wisest and strongest and most independent... that is: your humanity is greatest.
There is no way to defend any line drawn on a continuum. Therefore, 18 is not defensible versus 17 or 19, but there nevertheless remains the need to draw a line somewhere in that vicinity. So we must be prepared to deal with many border-cases and exceptions. Any request, such as the submitter is making, for a logically defensible "bright line" are fundamentally misguided and immature along the lines of "Waah, I want my reality to be neat and tidy!".
Ditto the abortion debate. Both sides are trying to draw a "human here!" line on a continuum, but at different arbitrary spots. They'll never resolve it until they realize it's a smooth continuum.
Bonus: Not only does the class action include the 1,800 students, but all their family members. That school district is fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked
Yep.
On the one hand, that will be a nice loud signal to other demigovernmental agencies (transit authority, anyone?) who are executing or contemplating similar shenanigans.
On the other hand, this evil sprung from the minds of probably just a few individuals... but the punishment upon the school district will cause pain for many more people than that. In the final analysis, it will raise the school taxes (by requiring issue of a new bond) levied on all citizens, in order to pay out to the parents whose children attend. As such, it will be yet ANOTHER transfer of wealth from non-parents to parents.
And IMO this is exactly why everyone should be wary of putting scripting languages into documents. We have a well-established convention of distinguishing "documents" from "applications"; "documents" are passive collections of information, whereas "applications" do stuff.
You are making the "keep the code separate from the data!" argument. You forget the one place in every application where code and data intermingle: the stack.
There is no getting around the stack. It is itself data about what code to execute next.
What a great thing -- lots of reliably generated power that is greener than burning fossil fuels. The only bad thing about this is that it has taken 30 years for more people to realize that safe nuclear power generation is possible.
That realization was never lacking. The problem all along has been $/KWH.
The onerous regulations and protests and Jane Fondas simply added to the $/KWH. Government loan guarantees lower the $/KWH back down by increasing the plants' bond ratings (which lowers their cost of financing).
It would've been better to just reduce the regulatory burden, rather than cripple the industry with regulations and then prop it back up with subsidies... but such is the democratic method of inculcating dependence on the State.
You really don't understand how science works, do you? Scientists *want* to prove each other wrong.
No, they want to be published, given additional grants (or political powers), tenure, and a research staff. Proving others wrong may or may not be the route to such things. It is an empirical question which one prevails in the AGW world.
They *want* to see the status quo broken.
Bulls***.
That's why they hate seeing a half-assed job of it being done. Nobody would be more thrilled than a physicist if a working perpetual motion machine could be created, or less thrilled with the job of having to sort through all such proposed devices to find ones that might work.
Some people would be thrilled. Anyone earning a living off the existence of friction (to continue your example). and any researcher who has already staked their ego (e.g. their early theoretical insights, now integrated into their psyche) would add their voice to those trying to shout down the new paper.
The scientific consensus can be changed, but you've got to start small. You can't waltz in the party at the last minute and tell everyone that everything they've learned in the last hundred years is wrong. You've got to start with individual cases and work your way up. Papers beating up on previously published results happen all the time -- "even" in climate science.
Have you ever tried to be published in a journal whose editor holds an opinion clearly contrary to your own? Have you ever had to find the will to push a negative result through the process -- a process that, like newspapers, is hungry for positive findings? I swear to you, you are not cynical enough about the publication process.
As to this victimization fantasy of the monied interests backing AGW... that's almost too weird to respond to.
I consider it a properly cynical application of "follow the money", a principle observed in all human interactions. Your off-the-cuff argument from intimidation does not answer this. Rather, it is YOU who need to explain why people would STOP following the money/power offered by the prospect of the looming enormous AGW regulatory regime.
The number one funder of research in this country is the US government, which would *love it* if scientists discovered that burning all the coal we can get our hands on was the best thing for the environment.
You say that people in our government would welcome the news that their forcoming new regulatory powers are NO LONGER justified? Your view of human nature is breathtakingly optimistic.
AGW justifies grabbing every individual, and every society, by the throat: by regulating the use of energy. It's the wet dream of every control freak and empire builder in government.
How many more "mistakes", falsifications, and fabrications need to be exposed before this scam goes buh-bye?
It no longer matters if AGW is real (even though I think it probably is). It will never EVER go bye-bye, because there are now thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs, research grants, professorships, researchers' egos, bureaucratic hegemonies, and enforcement regimes riding on it. Too much money is flowing now for this thing to be put to bed, EVEN IF tomorrow we discovered a magical proof that AGW is bunk.
At this point the incentives are in place and we are stuck in a self-reinforcing pattern. Truth mattered thirty years ago, before the patten was strong enough to self-reinforce. It doesn't matter now.
No, seriously, I mean it is cool that the notion of a free press could be so powerful that an entire nation could be moved to enshrine it in law, thereby creating a beacon of truth for the rest of the world, or a thorn in their side, depending on what got posted. [sigh...] I remember when the United States was something like that.
It's a trap.
Seriously. Iceland is broke, and this is a get-rich-quick scheme: once you have a reputation for being an irrepressible beacon of truth, you can charge an enormous sum to repress certain truths.
Newspapers do this in a small way, by withholding news articles that are critical of their advertisers. But if Iceland becomes wikileaks, then it's only a matter of months before they start invoicing the guilty parties when a new leak comes up for publishing.
Here's why loser-pays is a horrible idea: "Mr. Jones, you claim that Atoyot Motors was negligent in failing to adequately test the accelerators in its cars, leading to an accident that killed your family. The jury has -- just barely -- decided that your evidence wasn't strong enough, and found in Atoyot's favor. You owe them $500,000 in legal fees." After that, nobody else dares to sue, and Atoyot keeps making defective product that kills people.
How is that worse than today? "Mr. Jones, you might have a case, just maybe, but it's not a sure thing so I'll need the fees up front. We'll start with a $10,000 retainer but that will get used up fast, so have more ready. You may or may not win it back."
Neither solution is good for the little guy who has an iffy case. I submit that we should not create perverse incentives elsewhere, as we do today, in order to handle this situation.
It's really humourous when you live on the same Continent and watch with complete confusion as their entire country sues itself to death. I truly can't believe how litigious their society has become.
Indeed. We humans are controlled by our incentives, and there presently are perverse incentives in place that encourage litigious behavior. Viz: most lawsuits settle due to attorneys' fees, which means it is not very necessary to actually be right in order to win. And settlements are big.
Switching to loser-pays would go a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng way towards reducing the perverse incentives.
It doesn't take long for an industry to develop (or simply realize) the reality that it is cheaper to lobby the government to ban your competitors than it is to out-compete them (or become commoditized). Even the good guys have to pay, because even if they are not seeking government protection, their competitors are.
If you allow the government any control over economic activity, for totally virtuous reasons, you'll end up here. Eventually it becomes more profitable to regulate (i.e. to destroy) than to produce. At which time a cultural reboot is necessary.
I don't doubt a bit of data mining went into that. I don't see the harm it could have produced. I only see a successful result, both her and the companies are happier for it.
Yes, we all know that data-mining makes a market more efficient. Why should my mailbox be stuffed with ads that I do not care about? I, and the marketer and the retailers and everyone else, would rather the ads were relevant.
The problem is that this same data can be used to identify and persecute people who behave unfashionably. Their behavior may be perfectly moral (e.g. spanking a child, or buying a rifle, to take some pop examples), but is no longer en vogue. Privacy allowed them to continue behaving morally when the tide of fashion turned against them (i.e. society tried to drive them to immoral/inefficient behavior).
Obviously there are a multitude of inhibitors to such growth but, if we can confirm there is no existing life on Mars there is nothing preventing us from launching a giant rocket to Mars fill with a good cocktail of microbes, algeas, etc and seed bombing the piss outta the planet and letting natural selection establish an ecosystem. I argue the opposite. Make the planet into a giant industrial factory where raw pollutants are just dumped out the window. Anything capable of living in that environment would have to thrive on said wastes.
Why convert Mars into a meat-friendly environment? We already have one of those, and given similar engineering effort, we could turn Venus back into a second. Mars, by contrast, is ALREADY a very nice environment for silicon-based life -- by which I mean AI robots and so forth.
I consider AI robots to be the future of intelligence, which we are blessed/fated/doomed to create. They will absolutely ADORE the cold no-oxygen environment, and the low light conditions are fine for fission-/fusion-/other-powered critters as they will be. So don't mess Mars up, because they can't happily live here on Earth.
I wouldn't bother. It turns out that it's less expensive than a diamond, so women won't be as happy with it.
Women are only that way because men are ever scheming to hit-and-run their womb space. Women need an un-fake-able signal of a man's seriousness, so the signal must take the form of something very (to the suitor) expensive.
That we use diamonds for this purpose is a benefit to the man, because DeBeers has made sure that there is no resale market. If there was a resale market that offered even 50% value, then the man would first need an un-fake-able signal of the woman's seriousness before passing the rock across the table.
How do you address the social aspects of school? A valuable part of being in school was learning how to interact with new people, larger groups, and authority respectfully and responsibly. Its unfortunate, but part of being a productive adult is working with difficult strangers or at least working around them.
They're in martial arts twice a week. They're in scouts and sports. We live on a cul-de-sac full of kids. They are on robotics competition teams organized by the homeschool supply store. And they have responsibilities at home which we treat like a salaried job. If anything they are spending too much time with others -- I miss having them around every afternoon.
Where was the line for you between, "I'll do this myself" and "Extend/correct/expound/refine what they learned at school"? Of the teachers I know, the best students weren't always the smartest but they were the ones whose parents took an active interest in what they were learning and who added on to that at home. Even the ultra-religious, "Harry Potter is a sin", parents got some respect for actually being aware of what their kids were being exposed to.
What tipped the scale for me was hearing them grouse about being bored at school -- even at the private schools (Montessouri and then Lutheran) that we sent them to for four years. Having now taught two students for two years, it seems insane to try to educate more than one or two kids at a time -- they end up sitting bored while the slow kid soaks up all the teacher's attention.
Yes, it was clearly the US they were targeting. If they wanted to home-school their German-speaking children, they could easily and freely moved to Switzerland (the eastern part of the country speaks German). No political asylum needed, much cheaper to travel. Also their kids could speak with their new-found friends, and read books, and watch TV, without a huge learning curve.
Moving to Switzerland is quite an undertaking, did you know? You can't even own land unless you're a citizen, which you won't be if you immigrate -- assuming you are allowed in at all.
I have no problem with homeschooling, but there needs to be a check and balance to ensure that the kids are being taught the same or better than kids in a regular school. Maybe there should be standardized testing, and recommended curriculum, for all schools including home schools.
Otherwise what is to stop someone from brainwashing their kids under the guise of homeschooling?
It's not clear to me that a homeschool religious brainwashing is worse than a left-pop-PC brainwashing at public school. And the homeschool brainwashing will nevertheless provide the fast pace and high intensity that implicitly teaches the child to enjoy learning. Compare that to your (and my) experience being bored out of our minds in public school.
I'm just guessing here, but I suspect that a homeschool brainwashed child probably still has a better chance of discovering the real world, and luxuriating in the pleasures of the understanding, when he eventually grows up and gets free of his parents... simply because he was never taught to loathe education.
While interesting on a social or educational perspective, what has this to do with 'news for nerds'? There isn't anything technical about this. Nothing geeky. It's just a random news story you'd find on Yahoo News (for example)...
The nerd angle is this: an increasing number of us nerds (where 'nerd' == cerebral) are dissatisfied with the dull slow lowest-common-denominator pop-psychology politically-correct schlock ladled out at public schools. Meanwhile private schools are not a whole lot better, and cost too much anyway (typically $650/month/child with discounts for multiple children). So we are homeschooling.
TFA represents a major political victory for homeschooling, at a time when that right is under attack (re: California). I, as a homeschooler, feel like celebrating because this judge's decision will be invoked hither and thither in my defense. It may have had a whack-job religious basis, but the decision stands in defense of my ability to give my sons a non-religious hyper-rational high-intensity education.
I homeschool my kids. In Texas the laws for home-schooling are quite permissive, since Texas has so many religious whack-jobs. We are required to teach the "basic educational goals of reading, spelling, grammar, math, and a study of good citizenship" -- language from the original statute authorizing private schools. No requirements to teach teh nasty atheist science.
In the 1980s Arlington ISD pulled the same stunt as the German authorities in the article did. The family went to court (Leeper v. Arlington ISD), squandered a fortune, and eventually won a major smack-down to the school district. Since then, we homeschoolers have mostly been left alone. Occasionally a truant officer may harass the kids if they are outside during school hours, but homeschool organizations give instruction to the parents in how to handle the discussion with the truant officer.
We have to keep a basic record of what we taught and when, in case we are challenged about whether we are meeting the "basic educational goals..." listed above, but I do that anyway so that I know what to review later. It's a piece of cake. I can't believe I used to think homeschooling was a scarey responsibility; today I find it equally scarey to trust my sons' minds to a public edifice.
So basically, you're part of the problem. You've somehow swallowed the line that BlackBerry, Android and Symbian phones are a danger to the network because they can run software that hasn't been approved by a single vendor.
Nope, I don't give a flying rip about "the network". What I care about, is smooth automatic pristine OS updates, and hard TPM to prevent my phone from catching viruses or getting rooted.
When I heard about the first virus observed infecting unlocked iPhones, I knew I'd chosen well. I just don't want to worry about it -- I already have eight different computers (and six gasoline engines!) that I have to maintain.
Apple keeps it simple: Here's what this does. It's elegant and does what it does very well. We don't want you screwing that up by messing around with it without our approval. If you want open and free, go somewhere else and take your chances.
Yep yep. I've hated on Apple from the beginning, because I'm a hacker (in the take-it-apart/tinker/design/build sense) from way back and I very very much like to control all of the assets in my world. And I too was offended at the iPhone's integrated battery.
BUT...
I bought an iPhone this year. This is one asset that is so important that I just want it to WORK. I don't want to worry about viruses, or ongoing maintenance. This is my ONLY TELEPHONE LINE, and so I finally do approve of somebody keeping it locked down and pristine.
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Studies show that adding pay to a task decreases the internal perceived motivation for that same task. Actors conclud, subconsciously, that money is why they did it. Hence they are less likely in the future to do it unless they are paid again. Perilous to do this with the pursuit of knowledge.
Of course in a typical public school, there are already serious problems with busywork versus genuine pursuit of understanding. In that context, payment might be the right thing to do, because as others have noted, payment is indeed what humans expect in exchange for busy work.
Yeast requires sugar in order to produce the carbon dioxide that creates the tiny bubbles in the final product. Not all of the sugar gets eaten, so there will be some left over for the human... but some bread companies are probably adding even more sugar in order to make their bread sell better.
I did an experiment at home and discovered that commercial yeast can eat splenda (sucralose) just as well as sugar (sucrose), but cannot eat aspartame (nutrasweet). No doubt the splenda molecule is so close to sucrose that the yeast don't notice... IIRC splenda is sugar with one carbon swapped out for a chlorine.
You can try it yourself, just mix 120-degree-F water with a packet of yeast and a teaspoon of something you want the yeast to eat.
Sure it has. Unemployment benefits expire after a little while, at which time job-seekers will lower their asking price and the rest will sort itself out.
Anybody can find work. They are just having trouble finding work they like, at a pay rate that supports their prior lifestyle.
Wow do you ever need a semester of Micro 101. The "face value" of a ticket is just noise -- it has little bearing on the actual value of a ticket. The actual value can only be determined by a market that is allowed to clear.
Since the auditorium is full despite the 300+% markups, the face value must be incorrect. And now you are bent out of shape because the incorrect face value set your expectations erroneously low.
Ticketmaster uses artificially low face values in order to give the scalpers, who are its risk-mitigation division, some wiggle room. Scalpers could not perform their service if they had to buy the tickets (and hence risk getting stuck with excess inventory) at their full real value.
You are free to define 'socialism' and 'government' in that manner if it pleases you, but I find those definitions to be useless, because even a pure-barter society needs protection of property and enforcement of contracts. The third-party agent that does so needs a name, yes? And such an agent must always be a monopoly.
I find it more useful to define socialism as government-mandated transfers of wealth -- presumably to destinations that Capitalism would normally shy away from -- that are not inherent in the protection of property and the enforcement of contracts. In this meaning, all societies have some elements of Socialism, with Communism being the system in which nearly 100% of generated wealth is directly transferred away (with other benefits presumably arriving back later).
The difficulty here is that 'child', 'teen', 'adult', 'elderly', and 'infirm' are points drawn on what is actually a smooth continuum. From conception until death, you pass through the continuum of humanity. Your apogee occurs around age 35, which is when you are probably wisest and strongest and most independent... that is: your humanity is greatest.
There is no way to defend any line drawn on a continuum. Therefore, 18 is not defensible versus 17 or 19, but there nevertheless remains the need to draw a line somewhere in that vicinity. So we must be prepared to deal with many border-cases and exceptions. Any request, such as the submitter is making, for a logically defensible "bright line" are fundamentally misguided and immature along the lines of "Waah, I want my reality to be neat and tidy!".
Ditto the abortion debate. Both sides are trying to draw a "human here!" line on a continuum, but at different arbitrary spots. They'll never resolve it until they realize it's a smooth continuum.
Yep.
On the one hand, that will be a nice loud signal to other demigovernmental agencies (transit authority, anyone?) who are executing or contemplating similar shenanigans.
On the other hand, this evil sprung from the minds of probably just a few individuals... but the punishment upon the school district will cause pain for many more people than that. In the final analysis, it will raise the school taxes (by requiring issue of a new bond) levied on all citizens, in order to pay out to the parents whose children attend. As such, it will be yet ANOTHER transfer of wealth from non-parents to parents.
You are making the "keep the code separate from the data!" argument. You forget the one place in every application where code and data intermingle: the stack.
There is no getting around the stack. It is itself data about what code to execute next.
That realization was never lacking. The problem all along has been $/KWH.
The onerous regulations and protests and Jane Fondas simply added to the $/KWH. Government loan guarantees lower the $/KWH back down by increasing the plants' bond ratings (which lowers their cost of financing).
It would've been better to just reduce the regulatory burden, rather than cripple the industry with regulations and then prop it back up with subsidies... but such is the democratic method of inculcating dependence on the State.
No, they want to be published, given additional grants (or political powers), tenure, and a research staff. Proving others wrong may or may not be the route to such things. It is an empirical question which one prevails in the AGW world.
Bulls***.
Some people would be thrilled. Anyone earning a living off the existence of friction (to continue your example). and any researcher who has already staked their ego (e.g. their early theoretical insights, now integrated into their psyche) would add their voice to those trying to shout down the new paper.
Have you ever tried to be published in a journal whose editor holds an opinion clearly contrary to your own? Have you ever had to find the will to push a negative result through the process -- a process that, like newspapers, is hungry for positive findings? I swear to you, you are not cynical enough about the publication process.
I consider it a properly cynical application of "follow the money", a principle observed in all human interactions. Your off-the-cuff argument from intimidation does not answer this. Rather, it is YOU who need to explain why people would STOP following the money/power offered by the prospect of the looming enormous AGW regulatory regime.
You say that people in our government would welcome the news that their forcoming new regulatory powers are NO LONGER justified? Your view of human nature is breathtakingly optimistic.
AGW justifies grabbing every individual, and every society, by the throat: by regulating the use of energy. It's the wet dream of every control freak and empire builder in government.
It no longer matters if AGW is real (even though I think it probably is). It will never EVER go bye-bye, because there are now thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs, research grants, professorships, researchers' egos, bureaucratic hegemonies, and enforcement regimes riding on it. Too much money is flowing now for this thing to be put to bed, EVEN IF tomorrow we discovered a magical proof that AGW is bunk.
At this point the incentives are in place and we are stuck in a self-reinforcing pattern. Truth mattered thirty years ago, before the patten was strong enough to self-reinforce. It doesn't matter now.
It's a trap.
Seriously. Iceland is broke, and this is a get-rich-quick scheme: once you have a reputation for being an irrepressible beacon of truth, you can charge an enormous sum to repress certain truths.
Newspapers do this in a small way, by withholding news articles that are critical of their advertisers. But if Iceland becomes wikileaks, then it's only a matter of months before they start invoicing the guilty parties when a new leak comes up for publishing.
How is that worse than today? "Mr. Jones, you might have a case, just maybe, but it's not a sure thing so I'll need the fees up front. We'll start with a $10,000 retainer but that will get used up fast, so have more ready. You may or may not win it back."
Neither solution is good for the little guy who has an iffy case. I submit that we should not create perverse incentives elsewhere, as we do today, in order to handle this situation.
Indeed. We humans are controlled by our incentives, and there presently are perverse incentives in place that encourage litigious behavior. Viz: most lawsuits settle due to attorneys' fees, which means it is not very necessary to actually be right in order to win. And settlements are big.
Switching to loser-pays would go a lonnnnnnnnnnnnnng way towards reducing the perverse incentives.
It doesn't take long for an industry to develop (or simply realize) the reality that it is cheaper to lobby the government to ban your competitors than it is to out-compete them (or become commoditized). Even the good guys have to pay, because even if they are not seeking government protection, their competitors are.
If you allow the government any control over economic activity, for totally virtuous reasons, you'll end up here. Eventually it becomes more profitable to regulate (i.e. to destroy) than to produce. At which time a cultural reboot is necessary.
Yes, we all know that data-mining makes a market more efficient. Why should my mailbox be stuffed with ads that I do not care about? I, and the marketer and the retailers and everyone else, would rather the ads were relevant.
The problem is that this same data can be used to identify and persecute people who behave unfashionably. Their behavior may be perfectly moral (e.g. spanking a child, or buying a rifle, to take some pop examples), but is no longer en vogue. Privacy allowed them to continue behaving morally when the tide of fashion turned against them (i.e. society tried to drive them to immoral/inefficient behavior).
Why convert Mars into a meat-friendly environment? We already have one of those, and given similar engineering effort, we could turn Venus back into a second. Mars, by contrast, is ALREADY a very nice environment for silicon-based life -- by which I mean AI robots and so forth.
I consider AI robots to be the future of intelligence, which we are blessed/fated/doomed to create. They will absolutely ADORE the cold no-oxygen environment, and the low light conditions are fine for fission-/fusion-/other-powered critters as they will be. So don't mess Mars up, because they can't happily live here on Earth.
Women are only that way because men are ever scheming to hit-and-run their womb space. Women need an un-fake-able signal of a man's seriousness, so the signal must take the form of something very (to the suitor) expensive.
That we use diamonds for this purpose is a benefit to the man, because DeBeers has made sure that there is no resale market. If there was a resale market that offered even 50% value, then the man would first need an un-fake-able signal of the woman's seriousness before passing the rock across the table.
They're in martial arts twice a week. They're in scouts and sports. We live on a cul-de-sac full of kids. They are on robotics competition teams organized by the homeschool supply store. And they have responsibilities at home which we treat like a salaried job. If anything they are spending too much time with others -- I miss having them around every afternoon.
What tipped the scale for me was hearing them grouse about being bored at school -- even at the private schools (Montessouri and then Lutheran) that we sent them to for four years. Having now taught two students for two years, it seems insane to try to educate more than one or two kids at a time -- they end up sitting bored while the slow kid soaks up all the teacher's attention.
Moving to Switzerland is quite an undertaking, did you know? You can't even own land unless you're a citizen, which you won't be if you immigrate -- assuming you are allowed in at all.
It's not clear to me that a homeschool religious brainwashing is worse than a left-pop-PC brainwashing at public school. And the homeschool brainwashing will nevertheless provide the fast pace and high intensity that implicitly teaches the child to enjoy learning. Compare that to your (and my) experience being bored out of our minds in public school.
I'm just guessing here, but I suspect that a homeschool brainwashed child probably still has a better chance of discovering the real world, and luxuriating in the pleasures of the understanding, when he eventually grows up and gets free of his parents... simply because he was never taught to loathe education.
The nerd angle is this: an increasing number of us nerds (where 'nerd' == cerebral) are dissatisfied with the dull slow lowest-common-denominator pop-psychology politically-correct schlock ladled out at public schools. Meanwhile private schools are not a whole lot better, and cost too much anyway (typically $650/month/child with discounts for multiple children). So we are homeschooling.
TFA represents a major political victory for homeschooling, at a time when that right is under attack (re: California). I, as a homeschooler, feel like celebrating because this judge's decision will be invoked hither and thither in my defense. It may have had a whack-job religious basis, but the decision stands in defense of my ability to give my sons a non-religious hyper-rational high-intensity education.
I homeschool my kids. In Texas the laws for home-schooling are quite permissive, since Texas has so many religious whack-jobs. We are required to teach the "basic educational goals of reading, spelling, grammar, math, and a study of good citizenship" -- language from the original statute authorizing private schools. No requirements to teach teh nasty atheist science.
In the 1980s Arlington ISD pulled the same stunt as the German authorities in the article did. The family went to court (Leeper v. Arlington ISD), squandered a fortune, and eventually won a major smack-down to the school district. Since then, we homeschoolers have mostly been left alone. Occasionally a truant officer may harass the kids if they are outside during school hours, but homeschool organizations give instruction to the parents in how to handle the discussion with the truant officer.
We have to keep a basic record of what we taught and when, in case we are challenged about whether we are meeting the "basic educational goals..." listed above, but I do that anyway so that I know what to review later. It's a piece of cake. I can't believe I used to think homeschooling was a scarey responsibility; today I find it equally scarey to trust my sons' minds to a public edifice.
Nope, I don't give a flying rip about "the network". What I care about, is smooth automatic pristine OS updates, and hard TPM to prevent my phone from catching viruses or getting rooted.
When I heard about the first virus observed infecting unlocked iPhones, I knew I'd chosen well. I just don't want to worry about it -- I already have eight different computers (and six gasoline engines!) that I have to maintain.
Yep yep. I've hated on Apple from the beginning, because I'm a hacker (in the take-it-apart/tinker/design/build sense) from way back and I very very much like to control all of the assets in my world. And I too was offended at the iPhone's integrated battery.
BUT...
I bought an iPhone this year. This is one asset that is so important that I just want it to WORK. I don't want to worry about viruses, or ongoing maintenance. This is my ONLY TELEPHONE LINE, and so I finally do approve of somebody keeping it locked down and pristine.