Not bad at all, though I suspect that if a car that efficient could be designed for that price, it probably already would exist.
This is based on the assumption that markets work efficiently. The only place markets work efficiently is in Economics textbooks. In real life, it is often easier and safer to just replicate what the guy before you did. Business has huge inertia 'We do it this way because that's the way we did it before and it worked well enough.' Risk-takers, people who want to try new ideas, are not rewarded ('you spent how much, on that? you're fired!'), or often simply not given an opportunity to make mistakes.
Solar meets all our current demands, whatever "form" the (very old, in the case of uranium) solar energy may be stored in. You may want to re-evaluate, or at least rephrase.:)
One possible explanation for the difference is in our perspective. Americans consider corporations to be distinct entities, independent of and removed from the people who make them up. In fact, corporations have all the rights of individuals (freedom of speech, etc), thanks to the 14th Amendment (yea, the one meant to free the slaves). There is a whole raft of other legal and cultural traditions that serve to separate the individual from the group for whom he or she works. Individuals working for a corporation (in the US) bear almost no responsibility, legal, moral, or otherwise, for their own actions as an employee, or the actions of the company as a whole. The responsibility is shifted to the corporate entity. This divorce could keep employees from identifying with their employer and employers from being considered groups of people.
It isn't the same everywhere, obviously. It's interesting how language can reveal underlying differences in perception.
It's also why being borderline obsessive/compulsive tends to get you ahead academically and in many work environments.
I think this is often underrated and/or ignored. I went to an Ivy League school for undergrad, and once got into a conversation with a group of friends about this. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a 'thing' they did when they were little. The most successful friends I had, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, double majors, theses that make most grad students look like slackers, were the ones who literally couldn't stop studying , even to go to meals. I heard of one kid who spent hours a day cleaning his bathroom.. and this wasn't considered crazy, just a personality quirk.
I had friends who were obviously OCD, medicated, etc, but what surprised me was that when I talked to other people who didn't display symptoms, every single person I mentioned it to immediately related and remembered their personal habits. Everyone. It isn't surprising: being mildly obsessive compulsive (without the disorder part) IS a superpower. It makes it much easier to achieve the mono-focus needed to accomplish tasks that many people would not be able to maintain interest in, which in turn allows greater education, work output, whatever. The success formula in our society is not a secret; it just requires the effort, ethic, and self-denial to pursue it. Being mildly obsessive compulsive makes all of those easier.
Getting things moving again can be a real pain in the ass.
Quite true, both figuratively and literally.
Also, opioid painkillers should not give you a high when used correctly. Having had multiple major surgeries requiring post-op narcotics, I have never gotten high while using them for pain control. Recreation use, or taking more than needed to control pain, can give a high, but all the medical evidence suggests that even when extremely high doses of opioids are necessary for pain control, they do not give the user a high.
Completely stalled government is about the best we can hope for, wouldn't you say? I don't trust either party to do anything right, and giving either party control of the presidency AND congress (two of three branches, with strong influence on the third) is just a recipe for disaster.
At least when control of the branches is split, less happens, meaning they create less problems. And all the excesses of the fringes of both parties are moderated, because they have to compromise to get anything passed. I'm not suggesting that I support 'less' government, in the way that Republicans usually endorse. Government regulation of markets, environmental, labor laws, etc, are all vitally important. But BOTH parties are too susceptible to special interests, and start giving handouts to whoever has the best lobbyists when they get a supermajority.
I think it's ludicrous to believe that members of either party care about the opinions of anyone other than the people who fund their campaigns. That is to say, they don't care about 80% or more of the population.
The fact of the matter is that we're uncertain about a great many things, and until we are certain, we should be careful about making drastic and potentially irreversible changes to the biosphere, AKA the only known self-sustaining environment capable of supporting human life.
There, that's a much more rational viewpoint. Sorry, but when you're gambling with an entire planetary ecosystem, being pessimistic and over-cautious is still too risky.
Given that most people have at best very limited, and more likely non-existent or critically flawed understanding of statistics, giving everyone access to the raw data isn't going to do very much. If you don't have the tools (in terms of software, knowledge, and skill) to do the statistical analysis necessary to get information out of the data, having the data isn't much help.
Raw data is pretty much incomprehensible and meaningless. Data != information.
Point is, doubters don't have to admit they're wrong if they can't understand the methodology, which, given the (most) doubters views about hard science, is doubtful.
Re:of course, sue now
on
Facebook In Court
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Having recently graduated from the (not so) illustrious institution from which this case originates.. I can safely say that anyone who was around at the time and paid attention knows Zuckerberg essentially stole the idea. As the parent poster says, the legalities of that reality are something else.
I can also say that hardly anyone actually cares. Competition, he won. We only pretend to be less cutthroat than other schools.
Excellent points, and I agree. However, remember that the value of a product (whether it's tangible, like a car, or intangible data) varies from person to person. Some people walk into car dealerships and pay list price without any haggling. Some people wait til the end of the model year, buy the floor model, and pay less than invoice.
Companies take advantage of this by practicing price discrimination. Think airline tickets, lower-priced matinees, or 'sale' prices. Companies know that the same product has different values for different people, and they try to capture as much of the difference between their cost (the minimum at which they would sell) and how much the product is worth to someone (the maximum price at which they would buy). This is known as the surplus, and how it is divided is drives companies' pricing decisions and our buying decisions. 'Is this a good deal?' doesn't refer to whether we want something, but to whether we think the price is more or less than we are willing to pay.
So, while the post-piracy justification/rationalization that one would not have paid for the movie/software/music anyways breaks down on an individual level, on a wider level it has some truth. Some of the people that pirated Mega_Summer_Blockbuster_001 would not have paid $10 to see it in the theater. Some of them wouldn't have even paid $2 to rent it. But some of them would have paid full price. And since we cannot (ever, hopefully) determine which people would have paid, from the law's standpoint it must be black and white.
Part of the problem is people's perception that they aren't 'getting a good deal': consumers feel that companies are extracting more than their fair share of the surplus. Why should you pay $10 each to see a movie once in the theater when you can wait a couple months, buy it for $10 and watch it as much as you want? Why should songs recorded decades ago still cost a dollar a track? Why is copyright so skewed from its original intent, giving far broader and more permanent rights to copyright holders, instead of the original limited time period? I shouldn't have to pay the great-grandchildren of an artist, or worse, some corporation which has done nothing creative, ever.
We are getting a bum deal on copyright. That doesn't justify stealing. But it doesn't justify defending (or supporting, or not arguing against) what is a deeply flawed system designed to protect the profits of corporations rather than to foster creativity and innovation.
If these bots are all trying to take each other out.. how hard would it be to introduce variants that ONLY delete other bots?
Users are lazy, and will never take care of their own security in numbers large enough to change the situation. If done correctly, though, the problem could be its own solution.
I love how the US has put Thailand on its watch list for piracy even though compulsory licensing is completely legal under internation patent agreements. This is the only reason we don't see a lot more poor countries doing the same thing: even though it's legal, they get leaned on by the US gov't because the pharmacy companies are whining about their profits.
Brazil has fulfilled the "attempts to obtain a licence under reasonable commercial terms must have failed over a reasonable period of time" requirement. As others have mentioned, they have threatened this before. Another nice loophole that was or soon will be closed is that India's patent system only allow a process to be patented, not an end product. This allowed production of AIDS drugs at cost. But of course, India has been under pressure to 'normalize' its patent laws (ie make them the same as US laws) and this loophole will be closed either this year or next. Unfortunate, as the availability of cheap drugs from India has been a major factor in forcing pharmaceutical companies to negotiate prices.
Let's remember that supply and demand are curves, and that any intersection is only for a given price/quantity combination. At a lower price, more people would buy, but whether the supplier would have higher or lower revenue/profit is ambiguous. With effective use of price discrimination, suppliers can capture more surplus.
To expand the LCD TV example used above, let's say the original, static price was $700 (with a cost of $500). Before price discrimination, they make one sale to Mr. MBA and receive $200 profit. After price discrimination, they make one sale to Mr. MBA for $300 profit and one to Mr. Bargainhunter for $100 profit. Mr. MBA is still happy: he would have paid at least $800 for the TV. Mr. Bargainhunter is happy: he got a TV, which he would not have purchased for $700. The supplier is happy, because they sold two TVs instead of one, and made more profit.
As others have noted, price discrimination has been in use forever. Haggling, anyone?
Also, the ability to price discrimination does NOT imply monopoly power. It does imply that the market is not a case of perfect competition. Almost all markets are oligopolies, which give suppliers a limited ability to price discriminate.
Are we trying to raise another* generation of corporate drones who are so obedient they can never pose a competitive threat to existing oligarchy.
It certainly appears that way. We started quite a while ago, say around a hundred years ago. The '60s were just a minor bump in the road, flattened quite effectively by a few well-placed bullets.
every single power source on the planet (save perhaps nuclear) derives from a solar process.
since elements heavier than carbon? (I forget) are only created inside stars, even nuclear power plants ultimately derive their fuel from a star. It's merely a different, much older star.
I'm all for "Fair Use". Now, "Fair Use" doesn't exist in and of itself, it's a notion created by us (humans). And its extent is defined by us (and varies by country / jurisdiction). But this bloke went too far.
I'm all for Copyright. Now, Copyright doesn't exist in and of itself, it's a notion created by us (humans). And its extent is defined by us (and varies by country / jurisdiction). But this jurisdiction has gone too far.
Actually, the best beta period for laws in the US is states. A wonderful benefit of Federalism: we have 50 different experiments going at once. Some very good laws (at the national level) have come from state laws, and the state laws have often gone through multiple iterations. Experiment, fix the problems, try again, another state thinks it's a good idea but tries something slightly different.. and eventually enough people think it's a good idea that it gets implemented on the national level. Health care legislation is a great recent example of this can progress (Mass, now Cali. and every state's differences in Medicaid. If/when we have a national plan, it will most likely be modeled on existing, successful state plans.)
Unfortunately Congress also has the ability to shove untested junk at us, and all too often it creates more problems than it solves. Politicians at the national level are too susceptible to influence by very narrow special interest groups. It's too expensive to buy off all 50 states, and/or actually demonstrate widespread support for your ideas. Congress is a much better value.
Believe it or not, formalized education isn't necessary to learn most basic skills. Advanced, highly technical skills, yes. You don't learn to be a surgeon or theoretical physicist without formalized education, but you can learn to fix cars, write code, build a computer, write a novel, play the guitar, ride a bike, drive a car, almost anything else without formal (or informal) education. And, I mean.. saying that knowing how to learn is a learned skill is circular. C'mon.
Lots of kids teach themselves to read. Through osmosis? Precisely. Did someone teach you how to talk? walk? No. Tens of millions of children learn to talk their native language every year, without any formal instruction, just by "osmosis" as you call it. They learn to walk largely the same way, with some help to avoid injuring themselves. Would kids start walking without all the fancy crap we have to help them learn? Well, humans seem to have done just fine for the first couple million years, so I'd say yes.
Do people need to be taught to learn? Not in a joke. Humans are born learning machines: it is, simply put, what we do, what evolution has equipped us for. For you to say that children are born incapable of learning and somehow need to be taught to do so is simply ludicrous, and flies in the face of every shred of available evidence.
You are right to say that basic needs are obviously a first priority. And a child who starts with more advantages ends up better off. But that doesn't mean that anyone needs a formalized education in order to learn, even to learn to read (which, let's face it, isn't that complex). Formalized education does not have a monopoly on learning. Giving kids laptops, and access to the Internet, however rudimentary, is vastly increasing the amount of information they have access to, and can learn by osmosis, just because they think it's interesting. It's not a panacea, but it's a fantastic idea.
A friend of mine is currently living in Fiji. She related a story to me where the daughter in law of the chief (the chief is a woman) decided she didn't want to have more children, and asked the American doctor for birth control.
"Likewise, birth control is clearly prohibited here. And yet the wife of one of the Chief's sons, after already bearing eight children, secretly asked the American doctor I am staying here with for birth control. The doctor gave it to her. And then yesterday, this woman showed up at our home late at night, one eye swollen shut, her cheekbone protruding at an unnatural angle, her back criss-crossed with welts. Her husband had found the pills, and had beaten her savagely."
This is not an anomaly, this is the real world, where a large majority of births are occurring.
Do some sociological research, or, if you want to be a little more scared by the results, look at demographic economics (I suggest the work of Amartya Sen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen and Partha Dasgupta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partha_Dasgupta for starters.) There is a substantial body of literature specifically linking cultural norms for children to fertility rates. Parents do have children to satisfy their own egos and lifestyles, especially in third-world countries where fertility rates are the highest. There is some difference due to availability of birth control, but studies of variance across cultures, controlling for the availability of contraception, still find culture to have a substantial and statistically significant impact on total fertility rates.
With the availability of highly effective birth control, the decision whether or not to have children has obviously become just that, a decision, and even in areas without access to birth control, TFR is strongly influenced by cultural norms. So to suggest that parental motives have nothing to do with the decision to have children (and the total number of children) is inaccurate, and yes, it has been shown in numerous studies. I'm unfortunately not at home or I'd dig up some bibliographies for you.
once embryos are more than a few days old (or less, I'm a bit rusty) cells are too differentiated to be used as embryonic stem cells, so this (somewhat facetious?) idea isn't viable, unless you meant that doctors could collect the stem cells found in the amniotic fluid without any increased risk (since miscarriage is obviously no longer a concern).
Um, no.. why? because the rich don't spend all of their money, while the poor have to spend all their money (just to survive).
Sales tax is the one of, it not the most regressive form of taxation there is. Why is a regressive tax bad? because the people who don't have a lot can't afford to pay a lot - they need to pay rent/mortage, buy food, and are, in general, trying to make ends meet.
The justification for a progressive tax scheme (such as we have in the US, and pretty much every other OECD country) is that the people who make a lot can afford to pay a lot, because they don't need all that extra income to survive. It's a luxury, and the government is (or isn't, depending on your opinions. Opinion, not fact.) justified in taking a portion of the income you don't actually need and giving it to someone who does need it, spending it on public goods, or redistributing it in order to produce a more egalitarian society (e.g. the Scandinavian countries).
How much the government takes is based, roughly, on a consensus decision/negotiation by/within society that determines how much that society wants to spend on redistribution and public goods. There is no right or wrong answer, only opinions and preferences. We in the US have chosen to have our government tax and redistribute less than any other western democracy (I would say OECD country, but with the more recent additions I'm uncertain). The reasons for this are complex but essentially come down to a (relatively) more heterogenous society, lack of trust in government, and higher perceived (but not actual) social mobility.
yes, IAAE.
Slashdot Mirror
Not bad at all, though I suspect that if a car that efficient could be designed for that price, it probably already would exist.
This is based on the assumption that markets work efficiently. The only place markets work efficiently is in Economics textbooks. In real life, it is often easier and safer to just replicate what the guy before you did. Business has huge inertia 'We do it this way because that's the way we did it before and it worked well enough.' Risk-takers, people who want to try new ideas, are not rewarded ('you spent how much, on that? you're fired!'), or often simply not given an opportunity to make mistakes.
Solar meets all our current demands, whatever "form" the (very old, in the case of uranium) solar energy may be stored in. You may want to re-evaluate, or at least rephrase. :)
One possible explanation for the difference is in our perspective. Americans consider corporations to be distinct entities, independent of and removed from the people who make them up. In fact, corporations have all the rights of individuals (freedom of speech, etc), thanks to the 14th Amendment (yea, the one meant to free the slaves). There is a whole raft of other legal and cultural traditions that serve to separate the individual from the group for whom he or she works. Individuals working for a corporation (in the US) bear almost no responsibility, legal, moral, or otherwise, for their own actions as an employee, or the actions of the company as a whole. The responsibility is shifted to the corporate entity. This divorce could keep employees from identifying with their employer and employers from being considered groups of people.
It isn't the same everywhere, obviously. It's interesting how language can reveal underlying differences in perception.
It's also why being borderline obsessive/compulsive tends to get you ahead academically and in many work environments.
I think this is often underrated and/or ignored. I went to an Ivy League school for undergrad, and once got into a conversation with a group of friends about this. Everyone, and I mean everyone, had a 'thing' they did when they were little. The most successful friends I had, Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude, double majors, theses that make most grad students look like slackers, were the ones who literally couldn't stop studying , even to go to meals. I heard of one kid who spent hours a day cleaning his bathroom.. and this wasn't considered crazy, just a personality quirk.
I had friends who were obviously OCD, medicated, etc, but what surprised me was that when I talked to other people who didn't display symptoms, every single person I mentioned it to immediately related and remembered their personal habits. Everyone. It isn't surprising: being mildly obsessive compulsive (without the disorder part) IS a superpower. It makes it much easier to achieve the mono-focus needed to accomplish tasks that many people would not be able to maintain interest in, which in turn allows greater education, work output, whatever. The success formula in our society is not a secret; it just requires the effort, ethic, and self-denial to pursue it. Being mildly obsessive compulsive makes all of those easier.
Getting things moving again can be a real pain in the ass.
Quite true, both figuratively and literally.
Also, opioid painkillers should not give you a high when used correctly. Having had multiple major surgeries requiring post-op narcotics, I have never gotten high while using them for pain control. Recreation use, or taking more than needed to control pain, can give a high, but all the medical evidence suggests that even when extremely high doses of opioids are necessary for pain control, they do not give the user a high.
Completely stalled government is about the best we can hope for, wouldn't you say? I don't trust either party to do anything right, and giving either party control of the presidency AND congress (two of three branches, with strong influence on the third) is just a recipe for disaster.
At least when control of the branches is split, less happens, meaning they create less problems. And all the excesses of the fringes of both parties are moderated, because they have to compromise to get anything passed. I'm not suggesting that I support 'less' government, in the way that Republicans usually endorse. Government regulation of markets, environmental, labor laws, etc, are all vitally important. But BOTH parties are too susceptible to special interests, and start giving handouts to whoever has the best lobbyists when they get a supermajority.
I think it's ludicrous to believe that members of either party care about the opinions of anyone other than the people who fund their campaigns. That is to say, they don't care about 80% or more of the population.
Allow me to revise your last sentence slightly:
The fact of the matter is that we're uncertain about a great many things, and until we are certain, we should be careful about making drastic and potentially irreversible changes to the biosphere, AKA the only known self-sustaining environment capable of supporting human life.
There, that's a much more rational viewpoint. Sorry, but when you're gambling with an entire planetary ecosystem, being pessimistic and over-cautious is still too risky.
Given that most people have at best very limited, and more likely non-existent or critically flawed understanding of statistics, giving everyone access to the raw data isn't going to do very much. If you don't have the tools (in terms of software, knowledge, and skill) to do the statistical analysis necessary to get information out of the data, having the data isn't much help.
Raw data is pretty much incomprehensible and meaningless. Data != information.
Point is, doubters don't have to admit they're wrong if they can't understand the methodology, which, given the (most) doubters views about hard science, is doubtful.
Having recently graduated from the (not so) illustrious institution from which this case originates.. I can safely say that anyone who was around at the time and paid attention knows Zuckerberg essentially stole the idea. As the parent poster says, the legalities of that reality are something else.
I can also say that hardly anyone actually cares. Competition, he won. We only pretend to be less cutthroat than other schools.
Excellent points, and I agree. However, remember that the value of a product (whether it's tangible, like a car, or intangible data) varies from person to person. Some people walk into car dealerships and pay list price without any haggling. Some people wait til the end of the model year, buy the floor model, and pay less than invoice.
Companies take advantage of this by practicing price discrimination. Think airline tickets, lower-priced matinees, or 'sale' prices. Companies know that the same product has different values for different people, and they try to capture as much of the difference between their cost (the minimum at which they would sell) and how much the product is worth to someone (the maximum price at which they would buy). This is known as the surplus, and how it is divided is drives companies' pricing decisions and our buying decisions. 'Is this a good deal?' doesn't refer to whether we want something, but to whether we think the price is more or less than we are willing to pay.
So, while the post-piracy justification/rationalization that one would not have paid for the movie/software/music anyways breaks down on an individual level, on a wider level it has some truth. Some of the people that pirated Mega_Summer_Blockbuster_001 would not have paid $10 to see it in the theater. Some of them wouldn't have even paid $2 to rent it. But some of them would have paid full price. And since we cannot (ever, hopefully) determine which people would have paid, from the law's standpoint it must be black and white.
Part of the problem is people's perception that they aren't 'getting a good deal': consumers feel that companies are extracting more than their fair share of the surplus. Why should you pay $10 each to see a movie once in the theater when you can wait a couple months, buy it for $10 and watch it as much as you want? Why should songs recorded decades ago still cost a dollar a track? Why is copyright so skewed from its original intent, giving far broader and more permanent rights to copyright holders, instead of the original limited time period? I shouldn't have to pay the great-grandchildren of an artist, or worse, some corporation which has done nothing creative, ever.
We are getting a bum deal on copyright. That doesn't justify stealing. But it doesn't justify defending (or supporting, or not arguing against) what is a deeply flawed system designed to protect the profits of corporations rather than to foster creativity and innovation.
If these bots are all trying to take each other out.. how hard would it be to introduce variants that ONLY delete other bots?
Users are lazy, and will never take care of their own security in numbers large enough to change the situation. If done correctly, though, the problem could be its own solution.
I love how the US has put Thailand on its watch list for piracy even though compulsory licensing is completely legal under internation patent agreements. This is the only reason we don't see a lot more poor countries doing the same thing: even though it's legal, they get leaned on by the US gov't because the pharmacy companies are whining about their profits.
See a decent explanation of compulsory licensing here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license
Brazil has fulfilled the "attempts to obtain a licence under reasonable commercial terms must have failed over a reasonable period of time" requirement. As others have mentioned, they have threatened this before. Another nice loophole that was or soon will be closed is that India's patent system only allow a process to be patented, not an end product. This allowed production of AIDS drugs at cost. But of course, India has been under pressure to 'normalize' its patent laws (ie make them the same as US laws) and this loophole will be closed either this year or next. Unfortunate, as the availability of cheap drugs from India has been a major factor in forcing pharmaceutical companies to negotiate prices.
Let's remember that supply and demand are curves, and that any intersection is only for a given price/quantity combination. At a lower price, more people would buy, but whether the supplier would have higher or lower revenue/profit is ambiguous. With effective use of price discrimination, suppliers can capture more surplus.
To expand the LCD TV example used above, let's say the original, static price was $700 (with a cost of $500). Before price discrimination, they make one sale to Mr. MBA and receive $200 profit. After price discrimination, they make one sale to Mr. MBA for $300 profit and one to Mr. Bargainhunter for $100 profit. Mr. MBA is still happy: he would have paid at least $800 for the TV. Mr. Bargainhunter is happy: he got a TV, which he would not have purchased for $700. The supplier is happy, because they sold two TVs instead of one, and made more profit.
As others have noted, price discrimination has been in use forever. Haggling, anyone?
Also, the ability to price discrimination does NOT imply monopoly power. It does imply that the market is not a case of perfect competition. Almost all markets are oligopolies, which give suppliers a limited ability to price discriminate.
Are we trying to raise another* generation of corporate drones who are so obedient they can never pose a competitive threat to existing oligarchy.
It certainly appears that way. We started quite a while ago, say around a hundred years ago. The '60s were just a minor bump in the road, flattened quite effectively by a few well-placed bullets.
*note minor revision.
It's a good explanation of the economics.
every single power source on the planet (save perhaps nuclear) derives from a solar process.
since elements heavier than carbon? (I forget) are only created inside stars, even nuclear power plants ultimately derive their fuel from a star. It's merely a different, much older star.
heads exploded like Dantooine
/nitpick
Dantooine didn't explode.. Alderaan was the only time the Death star was ever used to destroy a planet.
I'm all for "Fair Use". Now, "Fair Use" doesn't exist in and of itself, it's a notion created by us (humans). And its extent is defined by us (and varies by country / jurisdiction). But this bloke went too far.
I'm all for Copyright. Now, Copyright doesn't exist in and of itself, it's a notion created by us (humans). And its extent is defined by us (and varies by country / jurisdiction). But this jurisdiction has gone too far.
Actually, the best beta period for laws in the US is states. A wonderful benefit of Federalism: we have 50 different experiments going at once. Some very good laws (at the national level) have come from state laws, and the state laws have often gone through multiple iterations. Experiment, fix the problems, try again, another state thinks it's a good idea but tries something slightly different.. and eventually enough people think it's a good idea that it gets implemented on the national level. Health care legislation is a great recent example of this can progress (Mass, now Cali. and every state's differences in Medicaid. If/when we have a national plan, it will most likely be modeled on existing, successful state plans.)
Unfortunately Congress also has the ability to shove untested junk at us, and all too often it creates more problems than it solves. Politicians at the national level are too susceptible to influence by very narrow special interest groups. It's too expensive to buy off all 50 states, and/or actually demonstrate widespread support for your ideas. Congress is a much better value.
Believe it or not, formalized education isn't necessary to learn most basic skills. Advanced, highly technical skills, yes. You don't learn to be a surgeon or theoretical physicist without formalized education, but you can learn to fix cars, write code, build a computer, write a novel, play the guitar, ride a bike, drive a car, almost anything else without formal (or informal) education. And, I mean.. saying that knowing how to learn is a learned skill is circular. C'mon.
Lots of kids teach themselves to read. Through osmosis? Precisely. Did someone teach you how to talk? walk? No. Tens of millions of children learn to talk their native language every year, without any formal instruction, just by "osmosis" as you call it. They learn to walk largely the same way, with some help to avoid injuring themselves. Would kids start walking without all the fancy crap we have to help them learn? Well, humans seem to have done just fine for the first couple million years, so I'd say yes.
Do people need to be taught to learn? Not in a joke. Humans are born learning machines: it is, simply put, what we do, what evolution has equipped us for. For you to say that children are born incapable of learning and somehow need to be taught to do so is simply ludicrous, and flies in the face of every shred of available evidence.
You are right to say that basic needs are obviously a first priority. And a child who starts with more advantages ends up better off. But that doesn't mean that anyone needs a formalized education in order to learn, even to learn to read (which, let's face it, isn't that complex). Formalized education does not have a monopoly on learning. Giving kids laptops, and access to the Internet, however rudimentary, is vastly increasing the amount of information they have access to, and can learn by osmosis, just because they think it's interesting. It's not a panacea, but it's a fantastic idea.
Which you would have known if you had followed the link and read before commenting...
Then, since when has that stopped anyone?
I guess that's one way of proving you're too dumb to stay in college...
This is not an anomaly, this is the real world, where a large majority of births are occurring.
Do some sociological research, or, if you want to be a little more scared by the results, look at demographic economics (I suggest the work of Amartya Sen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen and Partha Dasgupta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partha_Dasgupta for starters.) There is a substantial body of literature specifically linking cultural norms for children to fertility rates. Parents do have children to satisfy their own egos and lifestyles, especially in third-world countries where fertility rates are the highest. There is some difference due to availability of birth control, but studies of variance across cultures, controlling for the availability of contraception, still find culture to have a substantial and statistically significant impact on total fertility rates.
With the availability of highly effective birth control, the decision whether or not to have children has obviously become just that, a decision, and even in areas without access to birth control, TFR is strongly influenced by cultural norms. So to suggest that parental motives have nothing to do with the decision to have children (and the total number of children) is inaccurate, and yes, it has been shown in numerous studies. I'm unfortunately not at home or I'd dig up some bibliographies for you.
once embryos are more than a few days old (or less, I'm a bit rusty) cells are too differentiated to be used as embryonic stem cells, so this (somewhat facetious?) idea isn't viable, unless you meant that doctors could collect the stem cells found in the amniotic fluid without any increased risk (since miscarriage is obviously no longer a concern).
Um, no.. why? because the rich don't spend all of their money, while the poor have to spend all their money (just to survive). Sales tax is the one of, it not the most regressive form of taxation there is. Why is a regressive tax bad? because the people who don't have a lot can't afford to pay a lot - they need to pay rent/mortage, buy food, and are, in general, trying to make ends meet. The justification for a progressive tax scheme (such as we have in the US, and pretty much every other OECD country) is that the people who make a lot can afford to pay a lot, because they don't need all that extra income to survive. It's a luxury, and the government is (or isn't, depending on your opinions. Opinion, not fact.) justified in taking a portion of the income you don't actually need and giving it to someone who does need it, spending it on public goods, or redistributing it in order to produce a more egalitarian society (e.g. the Scandinavian countries). How much the government takes is based, roughly, on a consensus decision/negotiation by/within society that determines how much that society wants to spend on redistribution and public goods. There is no right or wrong answer, only opinions and preferences. We in the US have chosen to have our government tax and redistribute less than any other western democracy (I would say OECD country, but with the more recent additions I'm uncertain). The reasons for this are complex but essentially come down to a (relatively) more heterogenous society, lack of trust in government, and higher perceived (but not actual) social mobility. yes, IAAE.