Ah, except the US has conveniently said "but this isn't torture, it's enhanced interrogation" for the stuff they do.
Awesome, isn't it?
I think the day you decide to act as if facts matter will be awesome.
Of course that will take a lot of the fun out of emoting, "Papers please!"
Somehow I don't think you would have a hard time choosing between being held for investigation and interrogation by typical American law enforcement versus typical Communist Chinese law enforcement. You may be reckless, and "a bit" of an ideologue, but you don't seem to be stupid.
That would probably have been clearer if you would have had a seat at the pizza party he had at the Russian embassy in Hong Kong for his birthday.
Why did he release documents that embarrassed the US that just showed the NSA was doing its job?
Because it rendered some of those methods useless while causing diplomatic problems for the US and the NATO alliance. It is the sort of thing that someone schooled in the Soviet school of political warfare might do. Funny that Snowden is being guarded by the FSB, formerly known as the KGB, and his Russian lawyer is on the public committee for the FSB and a friend of former KGB officer and current Russian president Putin. I suppose it could all be a coincidence.
Snowden's history shows that he was disaffected long before taking the job as an NSA contractor. I hear that the disaffected are sometimes recruited by foreign intelligence services.
So you think it is now "+5 insightful" to state that nobody can steal NSA secrets from me because I have no NSA secrets, and people that want to see NSA secrets would not be interested in non-NSA secrets stolen from me? . . . . . I'm reminded of an old Mad magazine bit in which Idi Amin demanded that idiocy be declared to be a form of intellect. It is also "highly relevant" in light of the story: "US Military Will Soon Begin Testing NSA's New, Post-Snowden Security Measures"
He isn't "Snowden proof,' he is irrelevant.
Snowden took the NSA contracting job with the intent of stealing documents from the very beginning - he has directly stated that. His theft wasn't motivated by anything he saw while working at NSA, including any claims of "illegal actions." His claims of making complaints are either misdirection or a farce. There is no proof of that, which is funny when you think of it. He managed to steal 1.7 million documents from many parts of the NSA and defense networks, but couldn't manage to steal a single email documenting that he tried and failed to have concerns addressed within the system. Also unexplained is why he didn't go to Congress.
Are you really "Snowde-proof"? That is most impressive.... if true. Even if you support what he did you must know that Snowden went through considerable long term effort to obtain a position of trust with high level (root) system access, repeatedly abused that trust, repeatedly lied to his management and coworkers (reportedly fooling some of them into giving him their passwords), and massively violated the trust he was extended. In short, Snowden broke tons and tons of laws, and committed tons and tons of crimes to achieve his goals. And you think that can't happen to you? You're either amazing or endowed with epic hubris.
And frequently, it was Opsec failures by German operators that allowed the British to crack encrypted German communications. For example, there was a German operator in the field who would start every communication by hitting the same key three (or four) times.
There was another spectacular one:
From: Solving the Enigma: History of the Cryptanalytic Bombe, by Jennifer Wilcox
The British took no action based solely on Ultra intelligence without first providing the Germans with a deceptive reason for the actions taken. Most commonly, British aircraft flew a reconnaissance mission over an area that Ultra intelligence had shown to be significant. When the Allies subsequently attacked that area, the Germans believed their forces had been spotted by the aircraft, not given away by Enigma.
Admiral Doenitz, however, was not satisfied. He intended to change the U-boat Enigma machines. He could not radically alter the machine itself as it had to continue to work with the rest of the German Navy. His change added a thin fourth rotor between the leftmost rotor and the reflecting plate.When necessary, the rotor could be set in a straight-through position, enabling it to act as a three-rotor machine.
Bletchley Park learned of the impending change from decrypts and captured material, but until it was actually implemented there was little they could do to prepare. Fortunately, the Germans made an error. In December 1941, before the change had been made official, a U-boat sent a message using the four-rotor machine. To compound the mistake, the same message was retransmitted using only three rotors. From this seemingly innocuous error, the cryptanalysts at BP determined the wiring of the fourth rotor.
The capture of U110 and the Enigma machine was the greatest kept secret of the war. It was expunged from the official Naval records and only a few persons in the Allied war effort were informed that the German Navy cyphers were being broken. The information obtained was, of course, given to all necessary commands, but the source was kept camouflaged. In fact, even after the war when Captain Roskill, the official Naval war historian, came to write the history of the war at sea, he found no mention of it in the records. . ..
That evening, of the 9th May 1941 the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, signalled Baker-Cresswell: "Hearty congratulations. The petals of your flower are of rare beauty". When David Balme, who led the boarding-party from HMS Bulldog, went to Buckingham Palace to receive the Distinguished Service Cross he had earned in the action, His Majesty King George VI remarked, according to Roskill, that the operation was the most important single event in the whole war at sea.
It had been intended that the capture of the Enigma was never going to be divulged, but when the Blunt/Philby spy ring was broken in the 1950s, it was found that information of the Enigma had been given to the Russians as the spies had been working in British Intelligence and another spy, Cairncross, had worked at Bletchley.
As Britain's allies, the Russians had been given information relative to their theatre of war, but the source had remained camouflaged, as it was to other recipients. It is interesting to note that the information which Blunt/Philby gave to the Russians on the enigma did not leak out to the Germans. Subsequently, the records were released under the normal thirty-year rule and are now available from the Government Archives at Kew to anyone of any nationality.
In 1981 the German Sunday paper, Bild am Sonntag, ran a serial on the Battle of the Atlantic. The editor interviewed David Balme, the Boarding Officer, and Dönitz. When Dönitz was told how the British captured the Enigma from U110 and had used it, he would not believe it, forty years after the event. Dönitz died still not believing it.
Historians writing today state that the enigma probably shortened the war by two years. As things turned out, that is probably a fair assessment, but in May 1941, Britain was losing the war in the Atlantic and North Africa. The enigma from U110 saved her from defeat in that crucial time before the USA joined her.
There was also a NOVA program with some interesting detail:
NARRATOR: The only document on the U-110 that did not end up in British hands was the book of love poems to Edith. The papers that were captured, including the bigram tables, were priceless. When the documents reached Bletchley Park, the codebreakers rejoiced. The tables and charts would lead to a drastic improvement in fixing U-boat positions, so convoys could be routed evasively around the wolf packs.
VALERIE EMERY: The prize were the bigram tables and they were magnificent, although some of them had got a bit wet and we had to dry them. Geoffrey Tandy, having been at the Natural History Museum, had access to proper drying paper which he brought down by a load, and we had to dry those and clean them up and distribute them as necessary.
NARRATOR: Almost immediately the results were evident. On June 23rd, 1941, Bletchley Park decoded a U-boat message that would save a convoy. It was heading for England laden with supplies, and the codebreakers discovered that a wolf pack of 10 U-boats was lying in wait. Armed with this knowledge, the Ad
One should keep in mind how things worked out. Thing were so bad under the Soviet regime that the invading Germans were initially welcomed as liberators. The Soviets put NKVD (secret police) units behind the Soviet Army units in attack or defense to capture or kill people moving away from the front. The Germans raised the equivalent of several divisions of volunteer troops to assist them in their fights. Soviet prisoners had a high mortality rate in German camps from substandard and abusive treatment and substantial percentages of them died. German prisoners in Soviet hands didn't fare well either. In some camps things were so bad that the prisoners turned to cannibalism and the Soviets had to form special anti-cannibal patrols. About 60% of German POWs in Soviet hands died. German units fought their way past Soviet units in order to surrender to the western Allies. Only about 1% of prisoners from the western Allies dies in German hands. Only about 1% of German prisoners died in captivity by the western Allies. Allied propaganda was an easier sell to the Germans.
. . . The final version of the "passierschein" has been called the most effective single leaflet of the war. It was considered so powerful that in 1944 the Allied Supreme Headquarters issued a directive forbidding reproduction of the safe conduct pass on other leaflets. They wanted to protect the authenticity of the document. . . .
Within a very few months after the landings In Normandy, American and British PW Interrogators were able to gather plenty of evidence to show that SHAEF appeals, by voice and leaflet, were getting results. In October 1944, it was officially reported that 77% of prisoners taken by the Allies had read one or more of the leafletsAbout 80% of the prisoners taken on the Brest peninsula had leaflets in their Possession. On one occasion, three Germans surrendering had only one leaflet for the trio. They gave themselves up, each with one hand held high and the other clutching a corner of the precious documentAnother German gave himself up with the statement that he had "a document bearing General Eisenhower's personal signature." In one day 44 men of the 256th Volksgrenadier division deserted to a Third Army unit and nearly all carried the Safe Conduct surrender pass.
My wife was telling me about a story she read regarding a North Korean defector who fled across the border to China and then eventually made it to the West. The thing that convinced him he needed to leave? A soldier from the other side of the DMZ accidentally dropped nail clippers and didn't care enough to come back and get them later. When he realized that something as "incredible" as nail clippers were basically worthless to the other side's soldiers, he knew he had been lied to about how things were outside of his country.
Take it with the requisite grain of salt, but it's an interesting anecdote, nonetheless.
What you see is a miracle. This is the pinnacle of civilization, in its own way. No king in the history of mankind had access to riches like this. Look - here. (picks u box of special expensive gourmet crackers) This is someone's livelihood. Someone got a loan, started a business, hired people, paid someone to design this, because he or she wanted to make a special cracker, and here it is next to all the other special crackers, and this is just the special cracker department in the cheese department. There's another special cracker section in the cracker aisle. He might fail, he might win, but you can do that here, you can try. And if someone says why do we need so many cracker choices, this is why. Do you want some governing Cracker Bureau to say no, don't make crackers, make pretzels. But I don't want to make pretzels. I want to make crackers. Sorry, we have enough crackers. But I have this new taste. SORRY.
Now apply that to everything here! And the other store that has the stuff this one doesn't! And the other chain that carries a different line of speciality stuff!
As Michael Mandel documents copiously in his Bloomberg Businessweek column, what government statistics call “consumer spending” is not — get this! — consumer spending. Most of it isn’t, anyway. Lots of that so-called consumer spending is in fact government spending; Medicare and Medicaid, for instance, are lumped in there, as is most health-care spending, which amounts to, oh, $2 trillion a year, which might tend to throw the consumer-spending numbers off a bit. Health-care spending isn’t really driven by consumers (which is why our health-care market is so messed up, incidentally!), but by insurance companies, government, and other non-consumer enterprises. Something on the order of 15 percent of health-care spending actually comes out of consumers’ pockets. Chickenfeed, in the vulgate. All sorts of other stuff is dumped into that category: the money spent by nonprofits, for instance, along with political parties and campaigns. Never mind, for the moment, that a big chunk of that actual consumer spending goes to things like clothes and electronics and shoes made abroad (and the consumption of which therefore has little direct impact on domestic economic activity), the truth is that consumer spending, in reality, represents less than half of U.S. economic activity, probably around 40 percent.
If you would have read the linked stories (following to the study) you would have found the answer - those were the high performing schools within the existing system so they were left alone.
Nope. I didn't write that you didn't write what you intended, I wrote that you should have written something else. That means that I believe your statement is faulty in some regards, as is this one. Contrary to your assertion the politicians don't need some company to tell them that there are failing schools, they know that already. They can see it in the existing test scores and graduation rates. How would you think otherwise?
The school districts of these failing schools are already receiving millions of dollars in funding. Changing the recipient of the funding from a school district running the school to a charter school run by either government employees or a private company doesn't really change much in that regard. Your disagreement seems to be with charter schools themselves, although you don't seem to acknowledge there is more than one way to form and run them.
I also think it is ridiculous to claim that a private company is "interesting in making a quick buck" if they are in the education business. That is a long term commitment, and I doubt it is high profit. It might very well be more profitable than the razor thin margins of groceries, but way less than software. I like the scare quotes you use for "education" too. If the charter schools, even if run by a company, are teaching state mandated courses of instruction and take the same mandated state tests how do you think that differs from any other school?
I doubt that an organization brought in to improve scores and graduation rates in a school would remain in place indefinitely if its scores get worse instead of improve. That is self-defeating. How do you think they would win future opportunities based on a history of failure? "Let us run your school and your test scores will plummet like they have everywhere we have come in!!" That's not really a "winning" strategy, is it? (Maybe if you are Charlie Sheen....)
I don't think most places would run their affairs in the manner you have been describing, but you do claim to be in New York which is in the running to become one of several national centers of excellence in dysfunction and corruption.
For what it's worth, I hope things work out for you and your son. Those sorts of situations are an unnecessary burden. Have you spoken with a lawyer that practices in the ADA and/or education area? I've got to wonder if someone or some school isn't meeting their legal obligations. Sometimes it does take the threat or actuality of a lawsuit to move things along.
Today, about 91 percent of New Orleans students attend charter schools.
These reforms altered public education in New Orleans, but they did not eliminate it: Charter schools are public schools, although they do not answer to school-district administrators. They are still paid for by the taxpayers, but the government’s principal role, apart from channeling the funding to the various schools, is oversight — that is, holding schools accountable and, if a school is found to be ineffective, closing it.
A team of academic researchers, led by Tulane University’s Douglas Harris, has been studying the impact of New Orleans’s education revolution. In a recent report, Harris and his colleagues found that the reforms have produced enormous gains. Test-score improvements for New Orleans students are of a life-changing size — on average, the students’ percentile rankings on standardized exams are up by about 15 points. New Orleans students are now more likely to graduate from high school and attend college.
The Big Easy’s experience demonstrates that radical education reform can fundamentally improve the lives of poor urban kids.... Previous research had suggested that incremental education reform can be positive. New Orleans demonstrates that comprehensive reform can be a stunning success.
If 91% of the students are in charter schools it is hard to claim that they are only taking the cream of the crop, isn't it? And yet they are still making large gains in performance.
Job creation is being stifled by administration policies, regulations, and the "reforms" that the president's party pushed though. Two examples:
"Angel" investors have traditionally played an important part in funding startups in the early stages. Under the "reforms" pushed through by the Democrats there have been significant limitations placed on that which make it more difficult for startups to develop their business.
"Obamacare" has resulted in many businesses restricting their growth to stay below the thresholds in various ways. Some businesses keep their total staff count below the levels where they would be hit fully by the regulations and costs, and other businesses have significantly cut back on full time employment while simultaneously greatly expanding part time jobs. This is a major force driving the US towards being a "part-time" nation of workers.
Regulatory uncertainty is another issue. The Obama administration is opening the floodgates to huge numbers of new regulations, and I doubt many of them will be friendly to business and job creation. The Obama administration has made its hostility clear to a number of industries, and that isn't helping either.
On the bright side, the firearms industry is doing very well under Obama... so far. It looks like he will shortly remedy that.
I would say the failure is yours. I doubt the assertions he made, and the claims of influence are nonsense. If anything he probably has things backwards, and you probably join him.
...sadly, these politicians refuse to look at the studies that show poverty is the leading factor and instead want to channel public school funds to companies that donate to their campaigns.
You wrote "company" when you should have written "union," as in "teachers union."
You do know that teachers unions have been fighting tooth and nail against charter schools, school choice, and other measures that have been helpful in raising student achievement?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, except the US has conveniently said "but this isn't torture, it's enhanced interrogation" for the stuff they do.
Awesome, isn't it?
I think the day you decide to act as if facts matter will be awesome.
Of course that will take a lot of the fun out of emoting, "Papers please!"
Somehow I don't think you would have a hard time choosing between being held for investigation and interrogation by typical American law enforcement versus typical Communist Chinese law enforcement. You may be reckless, and "a bit" of an ideologue, but you don't seem to be stupid.
Much as most people here are willfully ignorant of Article II of the Constitution, its jurisprudence, and the scope of the 4th Amendment.
Have you ever looked into the case of Kim Philby?
Exactly what were Snowden's motives?
That would probably have been clearer if you would have had a seat at the pizza party he had at the Russian embassy in Hong Kong for his birthday.
Why did he release documents that embarrassed the US that just showed the NSA was doing its job?
Because it rendered some of those methods useless while causing diplomatic problems for the US and the NATO alliance. It is the sort of thing that someone schooled in the Soviet school of political warfare might do. Funny that Snowden is being guarded by the FSB, formerly known as the KGB, and his Russian lawyer is on the public committee for the FSB and a friend of former KGB officer and current Russian president Putin. I suppose it could all be a coincidence.
Snowden's history shows that he was disaffected long before taking the job as an NSA contractor. I hear that the disaffected are sometimes recruited by foreign intelligence services.
So you think it is now "+5 insightful" to state that nobody can steal NSA secrets from me because I have no NSA secrets, and people that want to see NSA secrets would not be interested in non-NSA secrets stolen from me? . . . . . I'm reminded of an old Mad magazine bit in which Idi Amin demanded that idiocy be declared to be a form of intellect. It is also "highly relevant" in light of the story: "US Military Will Soon Begin Testing NSA's New, Post-Snowden Security Measures"
He isn't "Snowden proof,' he is irrelevant.
Snowden took the NSA contracting job with the intent of stealing documents from the very beginning - he has directly stated that. His theft wasn't motivated by anything he saw while working at NSA, including any claims of "illegal actions." His claims of making complaints are either misdirection or a farce. There is no proof of that, which is funny when you think of it. He managed to steal 1.7 million documents from many parts of the NSA and defense networks, but couldn't manage to steal a single email documenting that he tried and failed to have concerns addressed within the system. Also unexplained is why he didn't go to Congress.
Are you really "Snowde-proof"? That is most impressive .... if true. Even if you support what he did you must know that Snowden went through considerable long term effort to obtain a position of trust with high level (root) system access, repeatedly abused that trust, repeatedly lied to his management and coworkers (reportedly fooling some of them into giving him their passwords), and massively violated the trust he was extended. In short, Snowden broke tons and tons of laws, and committed tons and tons of crimes to achieve his goals. And you think that can't happen to you? You're either amazing or endowed with epic hubris.
That tends to be the rub.
And frequently, it was Opsec failures by German operators that allowed the British to crack encrypted German communications. For example, there was a German operator in the field who would start every communication by hitting the same key three (or four) times.
There was another spectacular one:
From: Solving the Enigma: History of the Cryptanalytic Bombe, by Jennifer Wilcox
The British took no action based solely on Ultra intelligence without first providing the Germans with a deceptive reason for the actions taken. Most commonly, British aircraft flew a reconnaissance mission over an area that Ultra intelligence had shown to be significant. When the Allies subsequently attacked that area, the Germans believed their forces had been spotted by the aircraft, not given away by Enigma.
Admiral Doenitz, however, was not satisfied. He intended to change the U-boat Enigma machines. He could not radically alter the machine itself as it had to continue to work with the rest of the German Navy. His change added a thin fourth rotor between the leftmost rotor and the reflecting plate.When necessary, the rotor could be set in a straight-through position, enabling it to act as a three-rotor machine.
Bletchley Park learned of the impending change from decrypts and captured material, but until it was actually implemented there was little they could do to prepare. Fortunately, the Germans made an error. In December 1941, before the change had been made official, a U-boat sent a message using the four-rotor machine. To compound the mistake, the same message was retransmitted using only three rotors. From this seemingly innocuous error, the cryptanalysts at BP determined the wiring of the fourth rotor.
There is a good article that discusses the capture and the wider circumstances here (note the author's name).
OPERATION PRIMROSE - The Story of the Capture of the Enigma Cypher Machine from U11O by David Balme
An excerpt:
The capture of U110 and the Enigma machine was the greatest kept secret of the war. It was expunged from the official Naval records and only a few persons in the Allied war effort were informed that the German Navy cyphers were being broken. The information obtained was, of course, given to all necessary commands, but the source was kept camouflaged. In fact, even after the war when Captain Roskill, the official Naval war historian, came to write the history of the war at sea, he found no mention of it in the records. . . .
That evening, of the 9th May 1941 the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, signalled Baker-Cresswell: "Hearty congratulations. The petals of your flower are of rare beauty". When David Balme, who led the boarding-party from HMS Bulldog, went to Buckingham Palace to receive the Distinguished Service Cross he had earned in the action, His Majesty King George VI remarked, according to Roskill, that the operation was the most important single event in the whole war at sea.
It had been intended that the capture of the Enigma was never going to be divulged, but when the Blunt/Philby spy ring was broken in the 1950s, it was found that information of the Enigma had been given to the Russians as the spies had been working in British Intelligence and another spy, Cairncross, had worked at Bletchley.
As Britain's allies, the Russians had been given information relative to their theatre of war, but the source had remained camouflaged, as it was to other recipients. It is interesting to note that the information which Blunt/Philby gave to the Russians on the enigma did not leak out to the Germans. Subsequently, the records were released under the normal thirty-year rule and are now available from the Government Archives at Kew to anyone of any nationality.
In 1981 the German Sunday paper, Bild am Sonntag, ran a serial on the Battle of the Atlantic. The editor interviewed David Balme, the Boarding Officer, and Dönitz. When Dönitz was told how the British captured the Enigma from U110 and had used it, he would not believe it, forty years after the event. Dönitz died still not believing it.
Historians writing today state that the enigma probably shortened the war by two years. As things turned out, that is probably a fair assessment, but in May 1941, Britain was losing the war in the Atlantic and North Africa. The enigma from U110 saved her from defeat in that crucial time before the USA joined her.
There was also a NOVA program with some interesting detail:
"Decoding Nazi Secrets"
NARRATOR: The only document on the U-110 that did not end up in British hands was the book of love poems to Edith. The papers that were captured, including the bigram tables, were priceless. When the documents reached Bletchley Park, the codebreakers rejoiced. The tables and charts would lead to a drastic improvement in fixing U-boat positions, so convoys could be routed evasively around the wolf packs.
VALERIE EMERY: The prize were the bigram tables and they were magnificent, although some of them had got a bit wet and we had to dry them. Geoffrey Tandy, having been at the Natural History Museum, had access to proper drying paper which he brought down by a load, and we had to dry those and clean them up and distribute them as necessary.
NARRATOR: Almost immediately the results were evident. On June 23rd, 1941, Bletchley Park decoded a U-boat message that would save a convoy. It was heading for England laden with supplies, and the codebreakers discovered that a wolf pack of 10 U-boats was lying in wait. Armed with this knowledge, the Ad
Can you think of a modern analog?
Track & Field: the 800km relay
Loser goes to jail.
One should keep in mind how things worked out.
Thing were so bad under the Soviet regime that the invading Germans were initially welcomed as liberators.
The Soviets put NKVD (secret police) units behind the Soviet Army units in attack or defense to capture or kill people moving away from the front.
The Germans raised the equivalent of several divisions of volunteer troops to assist them in their fights.
Soviet prisoners had a high mortality rate in German camps from substandard and abusive treatment and substantial percentages of them died.
German prisoners in Soviet hands didn't fare well either. In some camps things were so bad that the prisoners turned to cannibalism and the Soviets had to form special anti-cannibal patrols.
About 60% of German POWs in Soviet hands died.
German units fought their way past Soviet units in order to surrender to the western Allies.
Only about 1% of prisoners from the western Allies dies in German hands.
Only about 1% of German prisoners died in captivity by the western Allies.
Allied propaganda was an easier sell to the Germans.
THE ALLIED "PASSIERSCHIEN" SAFE CONDUCT PASSES OF WWII
. . . The final version of the "passierschein" has been called the most effective single leaflet of the war. It was considered so powerful that in 1944 the Allied Supreme Headquarters issued a directive forbidding reproduction of the safe conduct pass on other leaflets. They wanted to protect the authenticity of the document. . . .
Within a very few months after the landings In Normandy, American and British PW Interrogators were able to gather plenty of evidence to show that SHAEF appeals, by voice and leaflet, were getting results. In October 1944, it was officially reported that 77% of prisoners taken by the Allies had read one or more of the leafletsAbout 80% of the prisoners taken on the Brest peninsula had leaflets in their Possession. On one occasion, three Germans surrendering had only one leaflet for the trio. They gave themselves up, each with one hand held high and the other clutching a corner of the precious documentAnother German gave himself up with the statement that he had "a document bearing General Eisenhower's personal signature." In one day 44 men of the 256th Volksgrenadier division deserted to a Third Army unit and nearly all carried the Safe Conduct surrender pass.
My wife was telling me about a story she read regarding a North Korean defector who fled across the border to China and then eventually made it to the West. The thing that convinced him he needed to leave? A soldier from the other side of the DMZ accidentally dropped nail clippers and didn't care enough to come back and get them later. When he realized that something as "incredible" as nail clippers were basically worthless to the other side's soldiers, he knew he had been lied to about how things were outside of his country.
Take it with the requisite grain of salt, but it's an interesting anecdote, nonetheless.
I wouldn't discount it in the least.
When Boris Yeltsin went grocery shopping in Clear Lake
For a wider perspective:
Grocery stores are a marvel. ...
What you see is a miracle. This is the pinnacle of civilization, in its own way. No king in the history of mankind had access to riches like this. Look - here. (picks u box of special expensive gourmet crackers) This is someone's livelihood. Someone got a loan, started a business, hired people, paid someone to design this, because he or she wanted to make a special cracker, and here it is next to all the other special crackers, and this is just the special cracker department in the cheese department. There's another special cracker section in the cracker aisle. He might fail, he might win, but you can do that here, you can try. And if someone says why do we need so many cracker choices, this is why. Do you want some governing Cracker Bureau to say no, don't make crackers, make pretzels. But I don't want to make pretzels. I want to make crackers. Sorry, we have enough crackers. But I have this new taste. SORRY.
Now apply that to everything here! And the other store that has the stuff this one doesn't! And the other chain that carries a different line of speciality stuff!
And a different perspective:
Bernie Sanders: Don’t Need 23 Choices of Deodorant, 18 Choices of Sneakers When Kids Are Going Hungry
Not so much.
70 Percent: The Myth of the Consumer Economy
As Michael Mandel documents copiously in his Bloomberg Businessweek column, what government statistics call “consumer spending” is not — get this! — consumer spending. Most of it isn’t, anyway. Lots of that so-called consumer spending is in fact government spending; Medicare and Medicaid, for instance, are lumped in there, as is most health-care spending, which amounts to, oh, $2 trillion a year, which might tend to throw the consumer-spending numbers off a bit. Health-care spending isn’t really driven by consumers (which is why our health-care market is so messed up, incidentally!), but by insurance companies, government, and other non-consumer enterprises. Something on the order of 15 percent of health-care spending actually comes out of consumers’ pockets. Chickenfeed, in the vulgate. All sorts of other stuff is dumped into that category: the money spent by nonprofits, for instance, along with political parties and campaigns. Never mind, for the moment, that a big chunk of that actual consumer spending goes to things like clothes and electronics and shoes made abroad (and the consumption of which therefore has little direct impact on domestic economic activity), the truth is that consumer spending, in reality, represents less than half of U.S. economic activity, probably around 40 percent.
If you would have read the linked stories (following to the study) you would have found the answer - those were the high performing schools within the existing system so they were left alone.
Nope. I didn't write that you didn't write what you intended, I wrote that you should have written something else. That means that I believe your statement is faulty in some regards, as is this one. Contrary to your assertion the politicians don't need some company to tell them that there are failing schools, they know that already. They can see it in the existing test scores and graduation rates. How would you think otherwise?
The school districts of these failing schools are already receiving millions of dollars in funding. Changing the recipient of the funding from a school district running the school to a charter school run by either government employees or a private company doesn't really change much in that regard. Your disagreement seems to be with charter schools themselves, although you don't seem to acknowledge there is more than one way to form and run them.
I also think it is ridiculous to claim that a private company is "interesting in making a quick buck" if they are in the education business. That is a long term commitment, and I doubt it is high profit. It might very well be more profitable than the razor thin margins of groceries, but way less than software. I like the scare quotes you use for "education" too. If the charter schools, even if run by a company, are teaching state mandated courses of instruction and take the same mandated state tests how do you think that differs from any other school?
I doubt that an organization brought in to improve scores and graduation rates in a school would remain in place indefinitely if its scores get worse instead of improve. That is self-defeating. How do you think they would win future opportunities based on a history of failure? "Let us run your school and your test scores will plummet like they have everywhere we have come in!!" That's not really a "winning" strategy, is it? (Maybe if you are Charlie Sheen ....)
I don't think most places would run their affairs in the manner you have been describing, but you do claim to be in New York which is in the running to become one of several national centers of excellence in dysfunction and corruption.
For what it's worth, I hope things work out for you and your son. Those sorts of situations are an unnecessary burden. Have you spoken with a lawyer that practices in the ADA and/or education area? I've got to wonder if someone or some school isn't meeting their legal obligations. Sometimes it does take the threat or actuality of a lawsuit to move things along.
Oh that's right! More unfunded mandates, in an attempt to legislate by someone who isn't a legislator!
This is known in most countries as "rule by decree". This is a feature that isn't normally found in democracies. "Transformed" indeed.
Eric S. Raymond: Why I joined the NRA - After 20 years of evading joining the NRA, I finally did it last week - 2016-01-03
(Yes, this Eric S. Raymond - Eric Raymond's open-source collection )
You don't have that quite right, and there seem to be some things that you don't realize.
It’s Not ‘Unfair’ for Charter Schools to Expel Disruptive Students
After Katrina, Fundamental School Reform in New Orleans
Today, about 91 percent of New Orleans students attend charter schools.
These reforms altered public education in New Orleans, but they did not eliminate it: Charter schools are public schools, although they do not answer to school-district administrators. They are still paid for by the taxpayers, but the government’s principal role, apart from channeling the funding to the various schools, is oversight — that is, holding schools accountable and, if a school is found to be ineffective, closing it.
A team of academic researchers, led by Tulane University’s Douglas Harris, has been studying the impact of New Orleans’s education revolution. In a recent report, Harris and his colleagues found that the reforms have produced enormous gains. Test-score improvements for New Orleans students are of a life-changing size — on average, the students’ percentile rankings on standardized exams are up by about 15 points. New Orleans students are now more likely to graduate from high school and attend college.
The Big Easy’s experience demonstrates that radical education reform can fundamentally improve the lives of poor urban kids. ... Previous research had suggested that incremental education reform can be positive. New Orleans demonstrates that comprehensive reform can be a stunning success.
If 91% of the students are in charter schools it is hard to claim that they are only taking the cream of the crop, isn't it? And yet they are still making large gains in performance.
Have you submitted any of those stories? Why not?
Successes like this go against many comfortable rationalisations ....
Indeed they may. Take this snippet from the article, for example:
Part of the funding for these efforts comes from donations from Jennings residents and many local businesses.
Imagine that, local voluntary donations .... including from businesses.
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That's why people get upset. It breaks their comfortable bigotry.
Does that include knee-jerk hatred of businesses? What about making automatic assumptions of hateful bigotry?
It works either way.
Job creation is being stifled by administration policies, regulations, and the "reforms" that the president's party pushed though. Two examples:
"Angel" investors have traditionally played an important part in funding startups in the early stages. Under the "reforms" pushed through by the Democrats there have been significant limitations placed on that which make it more difficult for startups to develop their business.
"Obamacare" has resulted in many businesses restricting their growth to stay below the thresholds in various ways. Some businesses keep their total staff count below the levels where they would be hit fully by the regulations and costs, and other businesses have significantly cut back on full time employment while simultaneously greatly expanding part time jobs. This is a major force driving the US towards being a "part-time" nation of workers.
Regulatory uncertainty is another issue. The Obama administration is opening the floodgates to huge numbers of new regulations, and I doubt many of them will be friendly to business and job creation. The Obama administration has made its hostility clear to a number of industries, and that isn't helping either.
On the bright side, the firearms industry is doing very well under Obama ... so far. It looks like he will shortly remedy that.
I would say the failure is yours. I doubt the assertions he made, and the claims of influence are nonsense. If anything he probably has things backwards, and you probably join him.
...sadly, these politicians refuse to look at the studies that show poverty is the leading factor and instead want to channel public school funds to companies that donate to their campaigns.
You wrote "company" when you should have written "union," as in "teachers union."
Fourteen of America’s 25 Biggest Campaign Donors Are Unions
You do know that teachers unions have been fighting tooth and nail against charter schools, school choice, and other measures that have been helpful in raising student achievement?
Blue Civil War: Knives Drawn in Education Fight
That seems to be a declaration that you either know little of Christianity, or misunderstand what you think you know.