I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree. I think your reasoning is unsound. It seems to start with a basic premise of the student being unable to avoid that initial score of less than 50%.
Getting an initial score of less than 50% is not a random event or an act of God. It illustrates that the child either a) can't do the work or b) didn't do the work. In the first case, the student needs remedial help and probably shouldn't be in that class. In the second case, the student is willfully not learning. That's the initial problem that needs to be addressed.
The analogy about being underwater is inadequate. Again, it presupposes that you suddenly find yourself underwater and asks the question: would you rather be 6' underwater or 600'? Well, obviously if I'm mysteriously appearing underwater I would rather be 6' underwater.
But in this case I'm actually starting on a dock, not underwater. I'm also carrying a big-ass pack on my back that weighs 100 pounds, and there's a tall boat about to set sail. I have several choices:
1. Fall into the water and sink to 600'. Requires minimal effort.
2. Take off the pack, then fall into the water and sink to 6'. Requires a bit of effort to take off the pack.
3. Take off the pack, then walk up a set of stairs to the deck of the boat. Requires more effort...but not THAT much effort.
All of this is explained to me in advance, so I know what the repurcussions are. I have to make a choice to move forward. If I make a bad choice, that decision making process is what needs to be addressed. Kids should know that if they don't study and don't do any work that they're going to get a 0 (or a 20%, or a 40%, or whatever). The process doesn't start AFTER they've received that grade...it starts BEFORE they've received that grade when they're deciding whether or not to attend class, study, do homework and take the tests.
There are certainly some people who absolutely cannot afford to plan for their own retirement. That number is certainly much smaller than the number of people who reach age 65 and have not planned for their own retirement.
Planning for your own retirement requires discipline and sacrifice (unless you make ludicrous amounts of money). Discipline and sacrifice are (generally speaking) in short supply here in America. The less money you make and the more necessary expenses you have (i.e., children) the more discipline and sacrifice is required. That's neither fair or unfair; it's an unavoidable ramification of the fact that not everyone makes the exact same amount of money and not everyone has the same necessary expenses.
There are some people who (for whatever reason) are unable to ever make more than a certain salary. Some of those people will cut their expenses to the bone just to survive and still won't have enough left over to save for retirement. This post is not about those people.
Most people that claim that they can't save for retirement haven't learned to sacrifice to that level or they don't have the discipline to sacrifice to that level. There is a large sense of entitlement and expectation of comfort here in America that is hard to overcome.
If you actually talk to people that are at or near retirement age and quiz them on their spending and saving habits for the past 40 years, you will in almost all cases discover that they either didn't address savings at an early enough age or they didn't sacrifice enough creature comforts to enable them to save sufficiently (and, more likely, both).
Americans need support to help them plan for retirement, because it's a hard thing to do. The kind of support they need is assistance in overcoming the constant bombardment of advertising that instills that sense of entitlement and learning to live within their means. They need assistance in understanding at an early age that they need to start planning for retirement as soon as they enter the workforce, and that it is not something they can put off or do casually but must do consistently and agressively.
What Americans do not need is assistance from the government. Seeing senior citizens at Wal-Mart working as greeters is not a sign that the government has failed its citizens. It is a sign that the culture that produced those senior citizens is not a culture that enables and encourages the kind of responsible behavior that would have led to a different outcome.
Every social ill that can be observed is not a candidate for government involvement. Government should not be brought in to solve the obviously visible symptom of an underlying cultural problem. If a social problem can be solved by people learning to be better and more responsible than they have been in the past, then that is what needs to happen. It is not in any way reasonable for the citizens of a country to say "We have been irresponsible and self-indulgent. We don't want to be responsible, so we would like for our government to provide us with a solution that allows us to continue to be irresponsible."
I loved the Wheel of Time books...all of them. This was one of my favorite series. I loved the length and breadth of the stories. I loved the character development. I never thought of it as great literature, but I thought it was a great story. Anything can be critiqued, and the WoT series is no exception to that rule. But I loved it. Period.
I think it's incredibly sad that he died before he could finish the series. And I admire the way he fought the disease and refused to give in to despair (at least based on the public face he portrayed).
Xiard
PS: I also love Orson Scott Card. He remains one of my favorite authors. I've seen a lot of (tangential) critique of his work on this thread. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so I won't suggest that those people are "wrong". I just wanted to voice my opinion that he think his work is generally fantastic, and I love the moral questions he raises. Maybe I'm just not discriminating enough...but the end result is that I get a lot of pleasure from reading his books, and I'm not going to argue with that or try to convince myself that I should hate them based on any of the criticisms I've read here.
I thought about that, but it seems like the immediate problem would be the sheer number of people needing to vote. ATMs are feasible because the percentage of people that need to get money out at a particular point in time is relatively small. Imagine everyone in your neighborhood going down to Kroger to try to vote before heading into work. It would never work, particularly considering how long it can take to vote when there are a lot of candidates and a lot of issues. Think about how many voting machines there are in your polling place, and how long the line is even with that many voting machines. That's why you need the concept of stretching voting out over a longer period of time, to reduce the load on a smaller number of permanently installed machines (which, like you say, could potentially even be the ATM machines).
I'm totally with you. I think that was kind of where I was heading with my previous comment. Once you add in permanence and remove the time crunch, accurate electronic voting becomes much more feasible. Hell, you could even allow people to change their vote if they change their mind during the course of the (more drawn out) election. And I love the idea of it being a permanent feedback mechanism.
I could actually envision a further extension. Come up with a secure way to handle it all over the internet, including the inclusion of the physical security token (i.e., the "ATM card" would need to be part of the process when voting or providing feedback). While I don't like the implications for personal privacy (that is, it is close cousins with the concept of a national identity card), I like the overall concepts of increased feedback to our elected representatives, improved security for voting, and ability to factor the actual voting process out from the "voting precinct". And if done correctly, the physical token could be tied to "a" unique identity, not "your" unique identity (thus providing anonymity while still ensuring one vote per person).
That's a good point. Admittedly, though, the issues are somewhat different. If you could issue a magentic unique card to each voter, with a PIN that the voter picked, and have every voting machine hooked up to a network enabling real-time guaranteed transaction against a centralized voting database, then I'm sure you could get the same kind of accuracy as ATMs.
There's also the substantial issue of the requirement to handle processing all voters on the same day within a certain number of hours. That requirement, along with the rarity of elections, requires that you have a very large number of voting machines that are not permanently installed in a particular location. Imagine the logistical nightmare of having to quickly install thousands upon thousands of temporary ATM machines, hook up communications so they can communicate over a network in a completely secure fashion, have them work perfectly for 12 hours or so, and then uninstall them and put them back in storage.
I'm certainly not saying it couldn't be done, by any means. But comparing voting machines to ATM machines isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.
Damn, I knew I should have previewed. And now, a more legible version.
I think I understand the rationale for changing the law, but as an application developer it worries me. I'm not interested in trying to patent software that I create, or any of the techniques that I use. I'm more interested in creating applications that are so compelling that they set a high standard that is difficult for competitors to meet, and then continously innovate to stay ahead of them.
However, I have always felt like I could rely on the fact that I would be able to prove that I had "invented" the software techniques I use in my applications by keeping good records of my design documents, source code control history, etc. My worry with this new proposed law is that someone could take advantage of the fact that I don't care to go through the hassle of patenting aspects of my software and swoop in and patent the concepts themselves.
It almost seems like it could foster a new age of "patent squatters" similar to URL squatters. Opportunists took advantage of the fact that many companies didn't acquire their trademark URLs in the web's infancy. I could easily see a similar technique arising with patents. All you would have to do is:
pick some successful web sites
check to see if they're doing anything remotely worth patenting
see if there's a patent yet for that - file the patent if there's not
blackmail the web site, threatening to shut them down if they don't pay you a royalty/settlement for the use of "their" technique.
Am I off base here? Of course, I haven't read TFA yet, so I very well could be.
I think I understand the rationale for changing the law, but as an application developer it worries me. I'm not interested in trying to patent software that I create, or any of the techniques that I use. I'm more interested in creating applications that are so compelling that they set a high standard that is difficult for competitors to meet, and then continously innovate to stay ahead of them.
However, I have always felt like I could rely on the fact that I would be able to prove that I had "invented" the software techniques I use in my applications by keeping good records of my design documents, source code control history, etc. My worry with this new proposed law is that someone could take advantage of the fact that I don't care to go through the hassle of patenting aspects of my software and swoop in and patent the concepts themselves.
It almost seems like it could foster a new age of "patent squatters" similar to URL squatters. Opportunists took advantage of the fact that many companies didn't acquire their trademark URLs in the web's infancy. I could easily see a similar technique arising with patents. All you would have to do is:
- pick some successful web sites
- check to see if they're doing anything remotely worth patenting
- see if there's a patent yet for that
- file the patent if there's not
- blackmail the web site, threatening to shut them down if they don't pay you a royalty/settlement for the use of "their" technique.
Am I off base here? Of course, I haven't read TFA yet, so I very well could be.
Alright...I'm going to take a chance and move off the sex worker/Skype topic for a sec to respond to the CEO comment.
I find this to be a very unfortunate comment, and a good example of a strong anti-business bias that seems all to common these days. Do you actually know any CEOs? I do, along with various other people in high positions in companies. Contrary to the popular belief, most of these people are extremely hard-working, extremely ethical people. If anything, I would say their greatest "flaw" is that they have to spend too much of their lives on their job, because the job is so demanding.
Certainly they are conscious of the bottom line. They have to be aware of what makes money and what doesn't, or they wouldn't be in their position. But if they're good at what they do, they've also learned through experience that beating their employees up and sucking the life out of them is not only unethical, it also isn't good for business.
When you actually witness the decision making process that executives go through, you're typically not going to see them looking purely at financial factors. They also look at the human factors involved, and think about how the decisions will affect customers, employees, vendors, etc. They may feel that they have to ask people to work late to get a particular project done, for example, but if they do they might also think about what they can do to make people feel better about it. They'll see if they can find money in the budget for buying bagels and pizza, for example, or find some other way to reward them after the project is done.
Of course there can be exceptions. There can always be CEOs that rise to power based on their ability to be ruthless, not caring how many good people they piss off and lose in the process. But in my experience those people are the exception, not the rule, and when they are involved in a company the company usually suffers for it...which means the CEO is considered a failure, not a model to which other executives aspire.
I don't have time to say much on this, but it sparked a thought. I believe that you're on to something with the idea about trying to introduce "concern" as a weighting when a computer explores multiple options.
Where it gets interesting, though, is when you realize that the "concern" will be different from different points-of-view. When I'm trying to decide whether to take my kids to Six Flags, I think about the problem from many points-of-view:
- The loving dad wants them to have fun - The thrifty dad worries about whether we can afford it an the opportunity cost of the money - The work ethic dad wonders if he can take a day off work to do this - The forward-looking dad wants to save days off work for a longer Christmas vacation - The tired dad doesn't want to spend the energy walking around Six Flags all day - etc.
Each of these perspectives would have a different focus in the decision making process, and a different kind of weighting for "concern". The next part of that, of course, is how you combine the results of these different "concern paths". How do you weight the concerns shared by different roles? How do you determine the pros and cons? And the really difficult parts, to me, have to do with incorporating other knowledge you have about the different roles. For example:
- The loving dad knows that the kids lost their dog recently so they've been really sad - The thrifty dad expects a bonus in the next two weeks - The work ethic dad knows there is a crucial meeting that morning that he has to be at - The forward-looking dad knows the family is going to Hawaii for Christmas so he needs all the vacation days he can get - The tired dad has a knee problem that will get worse if he spends all day walking around
Okay...that's all the time I can spend on that for now.:-)
That's actually not true at all. I've been using Turbo Tax for the Web for several years now. Each year I've ended up paying about $20 for my federal tax return. This year, I went to the irs.gov web site and followed the link from that web site back to TurboTax...and I didn't have to pay for my federal tax return. It definitely was free, and I didn't have to buy the software product or go through a professional.
WARNING! There was one major caveat there. By going through the irs web site I lost ALL of my information from previous years, which blew. Normally TurboTax pre-fills lots of information for me, which saves a lot of time. This year I got no help, because it considered it a different account. It was still free, though, and next year I believe it will remember me again.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but I respectfully disagree. I think your reasoning is unsound. It seems to start with a basic premise of the student being unable to avoid that initial score of less than 50%.
Getting an initial score of less than 50% is not a random event or an act of God. It illustrates that the child either a) can't do the work or b) didn't do the work. In the first case, the student needs remedial help and probably shouldn't be in that class. In the second case, the student is willfully not learning. That's the initial problem that needs to be addressed.
The analogy about being underwater is inadequate. Again, it presupposes that you suddenly find yourself underwater and asks the question: would you rather be 6' underwater or 600'? Well, obviously if I'm mysteriously appearing underwater I would rather be 6' underwater.
But in this case I'm actually starting on a dock, not underwater. I'm also carrying a big-ass pack on my back that weighs 100 pounds, and there's a tall boat about to set sail. I have several choices:
1. Fall into the water and sink to 600'. Requires minimal effort.
2. Take off the pack, then fall into the water and sink to 6'. Requires a bit of effort to take off the pack.
3. Take off the pack, then walk up a set of stairs to the deck of the boat. Requires more effort...but not THAT much effort.
All of this is explained to me in advance, so I know what the repurcussions are. I have to make a choice to move forward. If I make a bad choice, that decision making process is what needs to be addressed. Kids should know that if they don't study and don't do any work that they're going to get a 0 (or a 20%, or a 40%, or whatever). The process doesn't start AFTER they've received that grade...it starts BEFORE they've received that grade when they're deciding whether or not to attend class, study, do homework and take the tests.
David Cater
There are certainly some people who absolutely cannot afford to plan for their own retirement. That number is certainly much smaller than the number of people who reach age 65 and have not planned for their own retirement.
Planning for your own retirement requires discipline and sacrifice (unless you make ludicrous amounts of money). Discipline and sacrifice are (generally speaking) in short supply here in America. The less money you make and the more necessary expenses you have (i.e., children) the more discipline and sacrifice is required. That's neither fair or unfair; it's an unavoidable ramification of the fact that not everyone makes the exact same amount of money and not everyone has the same necessary expenses.
There are some people who (for whatever reason) are unable to ever make more than a certain salary. Some of those people will cut their expenses to the bone just to survive and still won't have enough left over to save for retirement. This post is not about those people.
Most people that claim that they can't save for retirement haven't learned to sacrifice to that level or they don't have the discipline to sacrifice to that level. There is a large sense of entitlement and expectation of comfort here in America that is hard to overcome.
If you actually talk to people that are at or near retirement age and quiz them on their spending and saving habits for the past 40 years, you will in almost all cases discover that they either didn't address savings at an early enough age or they didn't sacrifice enough creature comforts to enable them to save sufficiently (and, more likely, both).
Americans need support to help them plan for retirement, because it's a hard thing to do. The kind of support they need is assistance in overcoming the constant bombardment of advertising that instills that sense of entitlement and learning to live within their means. They need assistance in understanding at an early age that they need to start planning for retirement as soon as they enter the workforce, and that it is not something they can put off or do casually but must do consistently and agressively.
What Americans do not need is assistance from the government. Seeing senior citizens at Wal-Mart working as greeters is not a sign that the government has failed its citizens. It is a sign that the culture that produced those senior citizens is not a culture that enables and encourages the kind of responsible behavior that would have led to a different outcome.
Every social ill that can be observed is not a candidate for government involvement. Government should not be brought in to solve the obviously visible symptom of an underlying cultural problem. If a social problem can be solved by people learning to be better and more responsible than they have been in the past, then that is what needs to happen. It is not in any way reasonable for the citizens of a country to say "We have been irresponsible and self-indulgent. We don't want to be responsible, so we would like for our government to provide us with a solution that allows us to continue to be irresponsible."
Shit shit shit shit goddamn bloody hell shit.
I loved the Wheel of Time books...all of them. This was one of my favorite series. I loved the length and breadth of the stories. I loved the character development. I never thought of it as great literature, but I thought it was a great story. Anything can be critiqued, and the WoT series is no exception to that rule. But I loved it. Period.
I think it's incredibly sad that he died before he could finish the series. And I admire the way he fought the disease and refused to give in to despair (at least based on the public face he portrayed).
Xiard
PS: I also love Orson Scott Card. He remains one of my favorite authors. I've seen a lot of (tangential) critique of his work on this thread. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so I won't suggest that those people are "wrong". I just wanted to voice my opinion that he think his work is generally fantastic, and I love the moral questions he raises. Maybe I'm just not discriminating enough...but the end result is that I get a lot of pleasure from reading his books, and I'm not going to argue with that or try to convince myself that I should hate them based on any of the criticisms I've read here.
I thought about that, but it seems like the immediate problem would be the sheer number of people needing to vote. ATMs are feasible because the percentage of people that need to get money out at a particular point in time is relatively small. Imagine everyone in your neighborhood going down to Kroger to try to vote before heading into work. It would never work, particularly considering how long it can take to vote when there are a lot of candidates and a lot of issues. Think about how many voting machines there are in your polling place, and how long the line is even with that many voting machines. That's why you need the concept of stretching voting out over a longer period of time, to reduce the load on a smaller number of permanently installed machines (which, like you say, could potentially even be the ATM machines).
I'm totally with you. I think that was kind of where I was heading with my previous comment. Once you add in permanence and remove the time crunch, accurate electronic voting becomes much more feasible. Hell, you could even allow people to change their vote if they change their mind during the course of the (more drawn out) election. And I love the idea of it being a permanent feedback mechanism. I could actually envision a further extension. Come up with a secure way to handle it all over the internet, including the inclusion of the physical security token (i.e., the "ATM card" would need to be part of the process when voting or providing feedback). While I don't like the implications for personal privacy (that is, it is close cousins with the concept of a national identity card), I like the overall concepts of increased feedback to our elected representatives, improved security for voting, and ability to factor the actual voting process out from the "voting precinct". And if done correctly, the physical token could be tied to "a" unique identity, not "your" unique identity (thus providing anonymity while still ensuring one vote per person).
That's a good point. Admittedly, though, the issues are somewhat different. If you could issue a magentic unique card to each voter, with a PIN that the voter picked, and have every voting machine hooked up to a network enabling real-time guaranteed transaction against a centralized voting database, then I'm sure you could get the same kind of accuracy as ATMs.
There's also the substantial issue of the requirement to handle processing all voters on the same day within a certain number of hours. That requirement, along with the rarity of elections, requires that you have a very large number of voting machines that are not permanently installed in a particular location. Imagine the logistical nightmare of having to quickly install thousands upon thousands of temporary ATM machines, hook up communications so they can communicate over a network in a completely secure fashion, have them work perfectly for 12 hours or so, and then uninstall them and put them back in storage.
I'm certainly not saying it couldn't be done, by any means. But comparing voting machines to ATM machines isn't exactly comparing apples to apples.
I think I understand the rationale for changing the law, but as an application developer it worries me. I'm not interested in trying to patent software that I create, or any of the techniques that I use. I'm more interested in creating applications that are so compelling that they set a high standard that is difficult for competitors to meet, and then continously innovate to stay ahead of them.
However, I have always felt like I could rely on the fact that I would be able to prove that I had "invented" the software techniques I use in my applications by keeping good records of my design documents, source code control history, etc. My worry with this new proposed law is that someone could take advantage of the fact that I don't care to go through the hassle of patenting aspects of my software and swoop in and patent the concepts themselves.
It almost seems like it could foster a new age of "patent squatters" similar to URL squatters. Opportunists took advantage of the fact that many companies didn't acquire their trademark URLs in the web's infancy. I could easily see a similar technique arising with patents. All you would have to do is:
- pick some successful web sites
- check to see if they're doing anything remotely worth patenting
- see if there's a patent yet for that - file the patent if there's not
- blackmail the web site, threatening to shut them down if they don't pay you a royalty/settlement for the use of "their" technique.
Am I off base here? Of course, I haven't read TFA yet, so I very well could be.I think I understand the rationale for changing the law, but as an application developer it worries me. I'm not interested in trying to patent software that I create, or any of the techniques that I use. I'm more interested in creating applications that are so compelling that they set a high standard that is difficult for competitors to meet, and then continously innovate to stay ahead of them. However, I have always felt like I could rely on the fact that I would be able to prove that I had "invented" the software techniques I use in my applications by keeping good records of my design documents, source code control history, etc. My worry with this new proposed law is that someone could take advantage of the fact that I don't care to go through the hassle of patenting aspects of my software and swoop in and patent the concepts themselves. It almost seems like it could foster a new age of "patent squatters" similar to URL squatters. Opportunists took advantage of the fact that many companies didn't acquire their trademark URLs in the web's infancy. I could easily see a similar technique arising with patents. All you would have to do is: - pick some successful web sites - check to see if they're doing anything remotely worth patenting - see if there's a patent yet for that - file the patent if there's not - blackmail the web site, threatening to shut them down if they don't pay you a royalty/settlement for the use of "their" technique. Am I off base here? Of course, I haven't read TFA yet, so I very well could be.
Alright...I'm going to take a chance and move off the sex worker/Skype topic for a sec to respond to the CEO comment. I find this to be a very unfortunate comment, and a good example of a strong anti-business bias that seems all to common these days. Do you actually know any CEOs? I do, along with various other people in high positions in companies. Contrary to the popular belief, most of these people are extremely hard-working, extremely ethical people. If anything, I would say their greatest "flaw" is that they have to spend too much of their lives on their job, because the job is so demanding. Certainly they are conscious of the bottom line. They have to be aware of what makes money and what doesn't, or they wouldn't be in their position. But if they're good at what they do, they've also learned through experience that beating their employees up and sucking the life out of them is not only unethical, it also isn't good for business. When you actually witness the decision making process that executives go through, you're typically not going to see them looking purely at financial factors. They also look at the human factors involved, and think about how the decisions will affect customers, employees, vendors, etc. They may feel that they have to ask people to work late to get a particular project done, for example, but if they do they might also think about what they can do to make people feel better about it. They'll see if they can find money in the budget for buying bagels and pizza, for example, or find some other way to reward them after the project is done. Of course there can be exceptions. There can always be CEOs that rise to power based on their ability to be ruthless, not caring how many good people they piss off and lose in the process. But in my experience those people are the exception, not the rule, and when they are involved in a company the company usually suffers for it...which means the CEO is considered a failure, not a model to which other executives aspire.
I don't have time to say much on this, but it sparked a thought. I believe that you're on to something with the idea about trying to introduce "concern" as a weighting when a computer explores multiple options.
:-)
Where it gets interesting, though, is when you realize that the "concern" will be different from different points-of-view. When I'm trying to decide whether to take my kids to Six Flags, I think about the problem from many points-of-view:
- The loving dad wants them to have fun
- The thrifty dad worries about whether we can afford it an the opportunity cost of the money
- The work ethic dad wonders if he can take a day off work to do this
- The forward-looking dad wants to save days off work for a longer Christmas vacation
- The tired dad doesn't want to spend the energy walking around Six Flags all day
- etc.
Each of these perspectives would have a different focus in the decision making process, and a different kind of weighting for "concern". The next part of that, of course, is how you combine the results of these different "concern paths". How do you weight the concerns shared by different roles? How do you determine the pros and cons? And the really difficult parts, to me, have to do with incorporating other knowledge you have about the different roles. For example:
- The loving dad knows that the kids lost their dog recently so they've been really sad
- The thrifty dad expects a bonus in the next two weeks
- The work ethic dad knows there is a crucial meeting that morning that he has to be at
- The forward-looking dad knows the family is going to Hawaii for Christmas so he needs all the vacation days he can get
- The tired dad has a knee problem that will get worse if he spends all day walking around
Okay...that's all the time I can spend on that for now.
That's actually not true at all. I've been using Turbo Tax for the Web for several years now. Each year I've ended up paying about $20 for my federal tax return. This year, I went to the irs.gov web site and followed the link from that web site back to TurboTax...and I didn't have to pay for my federal tax return. It definitely was free, and I didn't have to buy the software product or go through a professional.
WARNING! There was one major caveat there. By going through the irs web site I lost ALL of my information from previous years, which blew. Normally TurboTax pre-fills lots of information for me, which saves a lot of time. This year I got no help, because it considered it a different account. It was still free, though, and next year I believe it will remember me again.