I implemented the strictest controls possible for a site that was being heavily phished and it worked very well. Here's the things you have to understand about DMARC, DKIM, and SPF (since SPF matters to DMARC too).
As a basic overview, here's what these do.
SPF = Only allow emails from specific domains / ip addresses DKIM = When an email arrives, verify the signature with the domain it claims to be from to ensure it actually came from there DMARC = How strict should we be with SPF and DKIM?
DMARC in itself isn't an actual verification system. What DMARC does is allows you to tell mail servers exactly how to handle emails that do not pass SPF and/or DKIM checks. Without DMARC, mail servers have to guess and basically follow their own rules. If you've taken the time to document where email from a particular domain comes from (including 3rd party services), ensured that your SPF includes everything, and have verified that all emails are signed with DKIM then eventually you can be strict enough with your DMARC settings to say that anything not passing both SPF and DKIM can simply be trashed. That's what the strictest setting looks like. You can also tell mail servers to send it to the spam folder, just in case you missed something. You can tell it to treat SPF strictly and ignore DKIM or vice versa. You can tell it to apply your DMARC rules to a percentage of your emails (to make it easier to transition into to using it with a small group of messages). You can also have providers send you an XML based email of the days activity to see how messages were handled from different services and where those messages originated. The reports can be a pain to make sense of but once you have everything setup properly you tend to stop looking at them.
It's important to remember, because SPF if easier to implement since it's just a DNS rule. For DKIM you have to actually sign the email before it's sent which may or may not be possible from all of your various points of email origin. DKIM is better, but that makes it more complicated. And that's why you have to have something like DMARC so that you can tell mail servers just how thoroughly those rules have been implemented.
The site that I implemented it for was a very old site where people managed high dollar transactions over email. Phishing was RAMPANT but even more so because there was a good chance a phisher could pass off an email as actually coming from our domain. The combination of 3 protocols in strict mode stopped that completely. It didn't stop PHISHING, but it did secure our domain against it. After that phishers had to use other domains, leaving off a middle letter, trying spelling variations, etc. This gave us the ability to work with registrars to either buy the domains or report the domains for abuse.
As an early poster said, you can't completely stop phishing but there are preventative measures you can take to protect compromised accounts.
After that we took additional steps to secure users accounts. We started recording ip addresses with all logins or return visits along with geographic data from MaxMind. Once we had enough sample data to create a general point of origin, we started locking accounts if they were accessed more than 200 miles from their normal center point and always if they logged in from a different country. As soon as the account was locked for a geographic reason, we sent users an email notifying them that their account had been accessed from another country or outside of their area and that if this lock was in error, they could click a link to disable that function for 2 weeks while they were traveling. Otherwise they should change their password. Users really appreciated it. We expected some usability frustration, but overall these users were very happy to know we were watching out for them.
People also tried to create fake accounts on the system to initiate transactions. For that, we took a page out of Fark's playbook. On Fark, when you get blocked / banned you don't KNOW you've been banned.
It's good advice in terms of the math, but it's not in terms of the reality of hacks.
What's most important is that you aren't using the same password in multiple places. Otherwise, no matter how you chose it, if a hack of a service exposes that data then your email and password are going to be tested against a plethora of other sites just to see where else you used it. If you're using a password manager and creating random passwords that even you don't know, then if one service is compromised you only have to worry about updating your password for that one service.
At some point, we need to start giving huge tax discounts to corporations based on how much they spend on labor. Right now we seem hell bent on making hiring people as expensive as possible.
Also, give huge corporate tax discounts based on how much you spend on labor. Right now this country seems focussed on creating policies that incentive employers to reduce their workforce by making employees more expensive. Stop that and start rewarding employers who ACTUALLY create jobs.
This has REPUBLICAN backers. It's called the Fair Tax.
The Fair Tax involves eliminating income tax, replacing it with a federal sales tax, then giving ALL legal US citizens a check every month to offset the tax against basic needs. At the time it was originally proposed I think the suggestion was a $400 / month check.
To make it a basic income and take it a step further, bump it up to $700 / month (effectively doubles the minimum wage) and reduce social security and welfare payouts by the same amounts. Eliminate unemployment since everybody gets this now and institute a flat 10% income tax to go with the 10% federal sales tax.
The combination of the two creates a tax system that ensures if you're in this country, you pay taxes. If you're a citizen, you get the payout.
The most important part of the equation is eliminating unemployment. In some parts of the country where the cost of living is low there's a lot of unemployment abuse. Unemployment gives somebody the choice of whether or not to continue having all of their time while getting a check or giving up that check and going to work. That's important, because under this structure if you go to work you make more without giving anything up. Period. Part time work becomes much more viable.
Unless you're talking about AWS re:Invent, the bulk of conferences are not worth it. re:Invent was by far and away the best conference I've ever attended though and I'm still implementing things that came out of it last year.
Java as a language is a pain to develop with. Java selling points have always revolved around the JVM itself and a bullet proof, over-engineered backbone that is needed for "enterprise" workloads. In big company's who don't have urgent timelines where they are willing to invest time to micro-engineer solutions it's used very heavily. For applications under heavy workloads, the high stress parts are usually built in Java for maximum efficiency but it's been the JVM, JDBC, server infrastructure and the polished library of tools around it that have buoyed it's success.
With the ability to run other languages on the JVM and get ALL those benefits without actually being required to code in Java though...now that's pretty cool. jRuby, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, etc are making the Java world a heck of a lot more interesting. If the early rumblings around the dramatic gains that jRuby is making with Java 8 are true you might just see the world implode at the idea of Java performance with Ruby development timelines. Early public benchmarks on Techempower are already looking about 30% faster than Scala.
Pushing to Github is nice and all but for a project to get any type of traction you need to tell people about what problem it helps to solve, show them how, and ideally make it easy for them to try it. Something up on a corporate blog. Compare it to other solutions. Have an instructional site in your space review it and write about it.
Unless you can show what it does and then differentiate why it's better than existing options, rust is exactly what will happen.
Liberals want an improved education system handed down from on-high at the level of the department of education.
Complete bollocks. That's how libertarians like to demonize liberals, but that's not the truth of the matter. Most liberals aren't happy with common core - I certainly found it ridiculous.
The main issue libertarians make a big deal of, as I say before, is having to pay taxes at all, at any level. You can look through all the comments on this article, and you'll find a dozen libertarians saying taxation is theft, with no distinction between federal taxes or state taxes.
Stop trying to claim principles for yourself that are not exclusive to you.
Show me a liberal that advocates for states rights and I'll accept your "bollocks".
I'll not deny that there's a segment of libertarians that are anti-all government. I'll not deny that libertarians are generally anti-tax as well, because taxes feed the size of government.
Imagine a corporation that could simply decide, despite it's inefficiencies, that it needed more money to operate or that it's employees all really deserved raises despite almost 2 months of paid vacation, almost no fear of job loss, excellent retirement packages and the best health coverage...so they simply choose to make everybody may them more money. That's what government does every single day and that's where the idea that "taxation is theft" comes from. Government is the only part of the economy that doesn't have to get more efficient as technology improves. The salaries remain comparable to private sector but the benefits on top of them are dramatically better. It used to be that choosing to be a "public servant" warranted all of those protections and benefits at the expense of private sector comparable salaries.
Also, I'm aware states "chose" it. But they chose it based on having money dangled at them from the federal government for choosing it. That's how the federal government elicits control over states and it's been going on since Reagan started the trend with highway funds being tied to raising the drinking age. Reagan set the playbook for Federal control which is something that a lot of conservatives aren't comfortable hearing.
Libertarians have no issue with paying for education.
The majority comments from libertarians on all issues is "tax is theft" - indicating they don't want to pay for public education.
What libertarians want is a more scientific approach to education. 50 experiments. 50 states, competing with each other to provide the best possible education that they can for their citizens.
So do us "liberals". The difference between libertarians and liberals is libertarians don't want to pay for public schools and want them to compete for survival. We can have competition, but libertarians want to go the extra step of introducing some form of social darwinism - that for whatever reason some kids can't go to a better school, tough luck to them as though their situation is entirely in their control and therefore their own fault.
Liberals also want an improved education with room to experiment with ways of teaching. That libertarians try to claim ownership of that desire is ridiculous.
Liberals want an improved education system handed down from on-high at the level of the department of education. Libertarians want education localized enough that people can decide what the educational needs are for their area. Some people advocate for private schools or school choice and there are certainly good arguments for that, but the best argument for private schools is simply allowing them to make their own decisions based on their own research.
I was curious so I actually toured a private school in my area recently where the cost per student is $1000 more per year than the cost per student everywhere else in the county. The differences were staggering though. The administrators actually had to justify WHY their school was the best place for my children. They provided numbers. They provided programs that teach principles I wish were taught in public schools. They have 3rd graders doing BUSINESS PLANS. The music program is amazing...every kid learns an instrument. The build the entire curriculum around teaching life skills with every single lesson at every single level. If you're going to learn information you're going to learn a skill while you do it. Despite all of the hullaballoo around the common core approach to math, they actually settled on using it...but it wasn't forced on them. They researched programs. They studied them for a few years. Then they presented them to their teachers and got proper training for all those teachers on HOW to teach it. Additionally, they developed strategies for teaching it to kids at different levels who hadn't started out in those methods.
Contrast that with how common core was thrust upon the country from an on-high dictate and the ensuing chaos that resulted from it. With a school choice program in place, I could take the entire "cost per student" amount and send my kids to that school, only having to come up with the $1000 difference per year. As other schools in the area saw parents flocking there, they would find out what was being implemented that worked so well and follow suit.
I see this as a way of applying competition to education but not in a sense of number crunching. You can throw out numbers all day long, but the real success of a business is word of mouth and repeat customers. People choosing to use that business. That's the aim of school choice programs and certainly, it's a really interesting solution.
Wouldn't it be something if a state could decide they were going to try that while another state could stick to the current approach but watch curiously to see what happened? We'll never know under the current system.
Taxes are necessary as a society. Federal taxes and policies are not.
And intelligent and rationality requires education on mass, which libertarians also don't want to pay for, making libertarianism a self-defeating system.
Libertarians have no issue with paying for education. Libertarians have issue with CENTRAL education at the federal level. The FEDERAL Department of Education that's constantly throwing out blanket changes across the entire country and making us live with an educational system that cannot adapt.
What libertarians want is a more scientific approach to education. 50 experiments. 50 states, competing with each other to provide the best possible education that they can for their citizens. Learning from each others successes and failures to continually improve. What libertarians do not want is one blanket system in place at the federal level that you're stuck with because it's nearly impossible to change anything at that level.
That is the Libertarian approach to just about EVERYTHING and I'm hard pressed to understand how anybody could view that as a bad idea. People like to talk up the education system in Finland (population 5.4 million), which has been extremely successful. What if Finland had to stick to some set of European Union regulations that prevented them from making the education system work the way it does? Instead of being a shining example they would be a blip on the map in a blanket discussion to fix all EU schools. Instead, Finland is free to make it's own decisions and policy regarding education and that autonomy led to a level of success that others wish to emulate.
Except in the US, nobody can emulate it regardless of how badly they want to...because that's the system we have. Finland's population is roughly the size of a smaller state like Minnesota.
Twitter, LinkedIn, Github, Yellow Pages, AirBnB, SlideShare, Shopify, Cruncbase, Groupon, Bloomberg, Indiegogo, SoundCloud, Square, The City, Heroku, Zendesk, Hulu, Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp (of course), Urban Spoon, Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, Foreman....
That's just off the top of my head. But yea, basically nowhere....
I put Rails on my LinkedIn profile after getting about a year of experience with it at a company after doing mostly Java, PHP and Perl for the prior 15 years. My phone started ringing off the hook with full relocation package offers to Austin, LA, San Fran, and NY. The demand is insane right now.
There is no language that seems to have more web relevance these days. The community and available libraries are amazing. For rapid web dev you have Rails, pretty much "the" web framework.
It's great for quick shell scripts. It's excellent as a DSL language (think Vagrant, Puppet, Chef, Capistrano, Rails).
It's extremely flexible too. Just about every web start up that you've managed to hear of is a Rails shop. Rails programmers are in "write your own ticket" levels of demand too.
JRuby is under extremely heavy and active development, giving you access to do everything you can do with Java as well. Thanks to jRuby you get access to native threading, best of breed garbage collection, the insane library of Java tools that are out there and Java's JIT compiler. You can deploy to servers anywhere Java can too which even makes it viable for many enterprise shops and means you'll have access to excellent database drivers for...anything.
Lastly, thanks to RubyMotion you can write Ruby to code apps for iOS and more.
People love to hate on Ruby, but it's everywhere for a reason.
Fairness is impossible. You send 1000 kids to the same school, some will excel, some will hang in the middle, some will end up just scraping by, and others will fail. It happens in every single school.
And regarding the typo response, there wasn't an edit button and the internet has trolls. That you felt a need to comment on it and summarily go after my level of "disconnect" without actually proposing a single solution yourself says quite a bit more.
One other consideration, is that the parents have to care. To care, they need to value education. Many parents who did poorly in school, do not value education. This is a problem not easily solved. Vouchers just aren't a panacea.
I agree. In my opinion parents caring is the defining factor. All things being equal, if parents want to find a way to give their kids a leg up...they will find a way. If parents provide a stable home environment, that goes a long way on it's own. My wife used to work in a public school. She had kids that didn't know if they were going to be sleeping INSIDE a lot of nights because mommy might have a "friend" over. That's 1 part "parents not caring" and another part "school doesn't seem that important by comparison to making sure I have food and shelter".
You see all aspects of the spectrum: - Parents trying to create an advantage. - Parents simply providing stability. - Parents not caring. - Parents creating a disadvantage.
It's the simple reality.
There's not a feasible way to create "fairness" short of taking kids away from their parents and putting them in boarding schools with uniforms. That's the only way that you can control all circumstances for all students.
The next best thing that we can hope for is public school choice OR school vouchers (or a combination of the two) because that way if a kid has parents who care but lack the financial means to relocate, at least the parent will have the ability to make the best decision to enable that child.
For children with parents who do not care or are creating a disadvantage for them...those are the more complicated challenges to solve and usually involved social services in some way.
Or think of it this way - besides being born well off, in what way did those kids "work hard enough to earn" a nice school?
The kids didn't. Their parents worked hard enough to make sure they could put their kids in a nice school. Parents work hard to put their kids in a position to succeed. That's why houses with zoned for better schools are worth more, because the parents buying them are willing to pay more to make sure their kids have access to it.
Involved parents that care that much also lead to the schools themselves being better by donating to fund raisers, volunteering to help with school events, taking an interest in their kids school work and making sure it's getting done. Having your kids around other kids who care about their education because it's been instilled in them creates a culture of success (and vice versa).
As a parent, if you're kids are zoned for a school that you don't feel is doing as well you can do one of two things if you want to better enable your children:
1. You can get involved with the school, school board, organize parents and get the entire community more involved to make the school a better place for kids to succeed. 2. You can send them to another school where people already are involved.
The ironic thing here is that the school voucher policy favored by conservatives would actually make it more feasible for people to send their kids to better schools without having to move for zoning reasons. This allows parents to cast a direct vote related to the quality of a school, because if it's bad parents will simply choose to send their kids elsewhere.
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I implemented the strictest controls possible for a site that was being heavily phished and it worked very well. Here's the things you have to understand about DMARC, DKIM, and SPF (since SPF matters to DMARC too).
As a basic overview, here's what these do.
SPF = Only allow emails from specific domains / ip addresses
DKIM = When an email arrives, verify the signature with the domain it claims to be from to ensure it actually came from there
DMARC = How strict should we be with SPF and DKIM?
DMARC in itself isn't an actual verification system. What DMARC does is allows you to tell mail servers exactly how to handle emails that do not pass SPF and/or DKIM checks. Without DMARC, mail servers have to guess and basically follow their own rules. If you've taken the time to document where email from a particular domain comes from (including 3rd party services), ensured that your SPF includes everything, and have verified that all emails are signed with DKIM then eventually you can be strict enough with your DMARC settings to say that anything not passing both SPF and DKIM can simply be trashed. That's what the strictest setting looks like. You can also tell mail servers to send it to the spam folder, just in case you missed something. You can tell it to treat SPF strictly and ignore DKIM or vice versa. You can tell it to apply your DMARC rules to a percentage of your emails (to make it easier to transition into to using it with a small group of messages). You can also have providers send you an XML based email of the days activity to see how messages were handled from different services and where those messages originated. The reports can be a pain to make sense of but once you have everything setup properly you tend to stop looking at them.
It's important to remember, because SPF if easier to implement since it's just a DNS rule. For DKIM you have to actually sign the email before it's sent which may or may not be possible from all of your various points of email origin. DKIM is better, but that makes it more complicated. And that's why you have to have something like DMARC so that you can tell mail servers just how thoroughly those rules have been implemented.
The site that I implemented it for was a very old site where people managed high dollar transactions over email. Phishing was RAMPANT but even more so because there was a good chance a phisher could pass off an email as actually coming from our domain. The combination of 3 protocols in strict mode stopped that completely. It didn't stop PHISHING, but it did secure our domain against it. After that phishers had to use other domains, leaving off a middle letter, trying spelling variations, etc. This gave us the ability to work with registrars to either buy the domains or report the domains for abuse.
As an early poster said, you can't completely stop phishing but there are preventative measures you can take to protect compromised accounts.
After that we took additional steps to secure users accounts. We started recording ip addresses with all logins or return visits along with geographic data from MaxMind. Once we had enough sample data to create a general point of origin, we started locking accounts if they were accessed more than 200 miles from their normal center point and always if they logged in from a different country. As soon as the account was locked for a geographic reason, we sent users an email notifying them that their account had been accessed from another country or outside of their area and that if this lock was in error, they could click a link to disable that function for 2 weeks while they were traveling. Otherwise they should change their password. Users really appreciated it. We expected some usability frustration, but overall these users were very happy to know we were watching out for them.
People also tried to create fake accounts on the system to initiate transactions. For that, we took a page out of Fark's playbook. On Fark, when you get blocked / banned you don't KNOW you've been banned.
Ideally we should want a society where no one has to work unless they feel like it.
I have no idea where to even begin with this. You can't possibly believe that.
It's good advice in terms of the math, but it's not in terms of the reality of hacks.
What's most important is that you aren't using the same password in multiple places. Otherwise, no matter how you chose it, if a hack of a service exposes that data then your email and password are going to be tested against a plethora of other sites just to see where else you used it. If you're using a password manager and creating random passwords that even you don't know, then if one service is compromised you only have to worry about updating your password for that one service.
At some point, we need to start giving huge tax discounts to corporations based on how much they spend on labor. Right now we seem hell bent on making hiring people as expensive as possible.
Also, give huge corporate tax discounts based on how much you spend on labor. Right now this country seems focussed on creating policies that incentive employers to reduce their workforce by making employees more expensive. Stop that and start rewarding employers who ACTUALLY create jobs.
This has REPUBLICAN backers. It's called the Fair Tax.
The Fair Tax involves eliminating income tax, replacing it with a federal sales tax, then giving ALL legal US citizens a check every month to offset the tax against basic needs. At the time it was originally proposed I think the suggestion was a $400 / month check.
To make it a basic income and take it a step further, bump it up to $700 / month (effectively doubles the minimum wage) and reduce social security and welfare payouts by the same amounts. Eliminate unemployment since everybody gets this now and institute a flat 10% income tax to go with the 10% federal sales tax.
The combination of the two creates a tax system that ensures if you're in this country, you pay taxes. If you're a citizen, you get the payout.
The most important part of the equation is eliminating unemployment. In some parts of the country where the cost of living is low there's a lot of unemployment abuse. Unemployment gives somebody the choice of whether or not to continue having all of their time while getting a check or giving up that check and going to work. That's important, because under this structure if you go to work you make more without giving anything up. Period. Part time work becomes much more viable.
Although, on further examination it looks like it is structured almost EXACTLY the same.
No idea. Hadn't seen XL before.
I saw that EnterpriseDB offered to support XC though. http://www.enterprisedb.com/se...
Have you seen Postgres-XC? It's pretty much built for this purpose.
http://postgresxc.wikia.com/wi...
Unless you're talking about AWS re:Invent, the bulk of conferences are not worth it. re:Invent was by far and away the best conference I've ever attended though and I'm still implementing things that came out of it last year.
Java as a language is a pain to develop with. Java selling points have always revolved around the JVM itself and a bullet proof, over-engineered backbone that is needed for "enterprise" workloads. In big company's who don't have urgent timelines where they are willing to invest time to micro-engineer solutions it's used very heavily. For applications under heavy workloads, the high stress parts are usually built in Java for maximum efficiency but it's been the JVM, JDBC, server infrastructure and the polished library of tools around it that have buoyed it's success.
With the ability to run other languages on the JVM and get ALL those benefits without actually being required to code in Java though...now that's pretty cool. jRuby, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, etc are making the Java world a heck of a lot more interesting. If the early rumblings around the dramatic gains that jRuby is making with Java 8 are true you might just see the world implode at the idea of Java performance with Ruby development timelines. Early public benchmarks on Techempower are already looking about 30% faster than Scala.
Pushing to Github is nice and all but for a project to get any type of traction you need to tell people about what problem it helps to solve, show them how, and ideally make it easy for them to try it. Something up on a corporate blog. Compare it to other solutions. Have an instructional site in your space review it and write about it.
Unless you can show what it does and then differentiate why it's better than existing options, rust is exactly what will happen.
Or mine bit coins maybe. Could help pay for the remaining lease term.
Liberals want an improved education system handed down from on-high at the level of the department of education.
Complete bollocks. That's how libertarians like to demonize liberals, but that's not the truth of the matter. Most liberals aren't happy with common core - I certainly found it ridiculous.
The main issue libertarians make a big deal of, as I say before, is having to pay taxes at all, at any level. You can look through all the comments on this article, and you'll find a dozen libertarians saying taxation is theft, with no distinction between federal taxes or state taxes.
Stop trying to claim principles for yourself that are not exclusive to you.
Show me a liberal that advocates for states rights and I'll accept your "bollocks".
I'll not deny that there's a segment of libertarians that are anti-all government. I'll not deny that libertarians are generally anti-tax as well, because taxes feed the size of government.
Imagine a corporation that could simply decide, despite it's inefficiencies, that it needed more money to operate or that it's employees all really deserved raises despite almost 2 months of paid vacation, almost no fear of job loss, excellent retirement packages and the best health coverage...so they simply choose to make everybody may them more money. That's what government does every single day and that's where the idea that "taxation is theft" comes from. Government is the only part of the economy that doesn't have to get more efficient as technology improves. The salaries remain comparable to private sector but the benefits on top of them are dramatically better. It used to be that choosing to be a "public servant" warranted all of those protections and benefits at the expense of private sector comparable salaries.
"country from an on-high dictate "
Also, I'm aware states "chose" it. But they chose it based on having money dangled at them from the federal government for choosing it. That's how the federal government elicits control over states and it's been going on since Reagan started the trend with highway funds being tied to raising the drinking age. Reagan set the playbook for Federal control which is something that a lot of conservatives aren't comfortable hearing.
Libertarians have no issue with paying for education.
The majority comments from libertarians on all issues is "tax is theft" - indicating they don't want to pay for public education.
What libertarians want is a more scientific approach to education. 50 experiments. 50 states, competing with each other to provide the best possible education that they can for their citizens.
So do us "liberals". The difference between libertarians and liberals is libertarians don't want to pay for public schools and want them to compete for survival. We can have competition, but libertarians want to go the extra step of introducing some form of social darwinism - that for whatever reason some kids can't go to a better school, tough luck to them as though their situation is entirely in their control and therefore their own fault.
Liberals also want an improved education with room to experiment with ways of teaching. That libertarians try to claim ownership of that desire is ridiculous.
Liberals want an improved education system handed down from on-high at the level of the department of education. Libertarians want education localized enough that people can decide what the educational needs are for their area. Some people advocate for private schools or school choice and there are certainly good arguments for that, but the best argument for private schools is simply allowing them to make their own decisions based on their own research.
I was curious so I actually toured a private school in my area recently where the cost per student is $1000 more per year than the cost per student everywhere else in the county. The differences were staggering though. The administrators actually had to justify WHY their school was the best place for my children. They provided numbers. They provided programs that teach principles I wish were taught in public schools. They have 3rd graders doing BUSINESS PLANS. The music program is amazing...every kid learns an instrument. The build the entire curriculum around teaching life skills with every single lesson at every single level. If you're going to learn information you're going to learn a skill while you do it. Despite all of the hullaballoo around the common core approach to math, they actually settled on using it...but it wasn't forced on them. They researched programs. They studied them for a few years. Then they presented them to their teachers and got proper training for all those teachers on HOW to teach it. Additionally, they developed strategies for teaching it to kids at different levels who hadn't started out in those methods.
Contrast that with how common core was thrust upon the country from an on-high dictate and the ensuing chaos that resulted from it. With a school choice program in place, I could take the entire "cost per student" amount and send my kids to that school, only having to come up with the $1000 difference per year. As other schools in the area saw parents flocking there, they would find out what was being implemented that worked so well and follow suit.
I see this as a way of applying competition to education but not in a sense of number crunching. You can throw out numbers all day long, but the real success of a business is word of mouth and repeat customers. People choosing to use that business. That's the aim of school choice programs and certainly, it's a really interesting solution.
Wouldn't it be something if a state could decide they were going to try that while another state could stick to the current approach but watch curiously to see what happened? We'll never know under the current system.
Taxes are necessary as a society. Federal taxes and policies are not.
And intelligent and rationality requires education on mass, which libertarians also don't want to pay for, making libertarianism a self-defeating system.
Libertarians have no issue with paying for education. Libertarians have issue with CENTRAL education at the federal level. The FEDERAL Department of Education that's constantly throwing out blanket changes across the entire country and making us live with an educational system that cannot adapt.
What libertarians want is a more scientific approach to education. 50 experiments. 50 states, competing with each other to provide the best possible education that they can for their citizens. Learning from each others successes and failures to continually improve. What libertarians do not want is one blanket system in place at the federal level that you're stuck with because it's nearly impossible to change anything at that level.
That is the Libertarian approach to just about EVERYTHING and I'm hard pressed to understand how anybody could view that as a bad idea. People like to talk up the education system in Finland (population 5.4 million), which has been extremely successful. What if Finland had to stick to some set of European Union regulations that prevented them from making the education system work the way it does? Instead of being a shining example they would be a blip on the map in a blanket discussion to fix all EU schools. Instead, Finland is free to make it's own decisions and policy regarding education and that autonomy led to a level of success that others wish to emulate.
Except in the US, nobody can emulate it regardless of how badly they want to...because that's the system we have. Finland's population is roughly the size of a smaller state like Minnesota.
You can solve illegal immigration with the Fair Tax.
If by basically nowhere you mean:
Twitter, LinkedIn, Github, Yellow Pages, AirBnB, SlideShare, Shopify, Cruncbase, Groupon, Bloomberg, Indiegogo, SoundCloud, Square, The City, Heroku, Zendesk, Hulu, Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp (of course), Urban Spoon, Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, Foreman....
That's just off the top of my head. But yea, basically nowhere....
I put Rails on my LinkedIn profile after getting about a year of experience with it at a company after doing mostly Java, PHP and Perl for the prior 15 years. My phone started ringing off the hook with full relocation package offers to Austin, LA, San Fran, and NY. The demand is insane right now.
There is no language that seems to have more web relevance these days. The community and available libraries are amazing. For rapid web dev you have Rails, pretty much "the" web framework.
It's great for quick shell scripts. It's excellent as a DSL language (think Vagrant, Puppet, Chef, Capistrano, Rails).
It's extremely flexible too. Just about every web start up that you've managed to hear of is a Rails shop. Rails programmers are in "write your own ticket" levels of demand too.
JRuby is under extremely heavy and active development, giving you access to do everything you can do with Java as well. Thanks to jRuby you get access to native threading, best of breed garbage collection, the insane library of Java tools that are out there and Java's JIT compiler. You can deploy to servers anywhere Java can too which even makes it viable for many enterprise shops and means you'll have access to excellent database drivers for...anything.
Lastly, thanks to RubyMotion you can write Ruby to code apps for iOS and more.
People love to hate on Ruby, but it's everywhere for a reason.
Exactly the point of school choice / voucher programs.
Fairness is impossible. You send 1000 kids to the same school, some will excel, some will hang in the middle, some will end up just scraping by, and others will fail. It happens in every single school.
The differentiating factor in most cases is the kids home life, as described better here: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
And regarding the typo response, there wasn't an edit button and the internet has trolls. That you felt a need to comment on it and summarily go after my level of "disconnect" without actually proposing a single solution yourself says quite a bit more.
One other consideration, is that the parents have to care. To care, they need to value education. Many parents who did poorly in school, do not value education. This is a problem not easily solved. Vouchers just aren't a panacea.
I agree. In my opinion parents caring is the defining factor. All things being equal, if parents want to find a way to give their kids a leg up...they will find a way. If parents provide a stable home environment, that goes a long way on it's own. My wife used to work in a public school. She had kids that didn't know if they were going to be sleeping INSIDE a lot of nights because mommy might have a "friend" over. That's 1 part "parents not caring" and another part "school doesn't seem that important by comparison to making sure I have food and shelter".
You see all aspects of the spectrum:
- Parents trying to create an advantage.
- Parents simply providing stability.
- Parents not caring.
- Parents creating a disadvantage.
It's the simple reality.
There's not a feasible way to create "fairness" short of taking kids away from their parents and putting them in boarding schools with uniforms. That's the only way that you can control all circumstances for all students.
The next best thing that we can hope for is public school choice OR school vouchers (or a combination of the two) because that way if a kid has parents who care but lack the financial means to relocate, at least the parent will have the ability to make the best decision to enable that child.
For children with parents who do not care or are creating a disadvantage for them...those are the more complicated challenges to solve and usually involved social services in some way.
And yes, I'm aware there are a lot of typos in that post about education and caring about schooling.
Or think of it this way - besides being born well off, in what way did those kids "work hard enough to earn" a nice school?
The kids didn't. Their parents worked hard enough to make sure they could put their kids in a nice school. Parents work hard to put their kids in a position to succeed. That's why houses with zoned for better schools are worth more, because the parents buying them are willing to pay more to make sure their kids have access to it.
Involved parents that care that much also lead to the schools themselves being better by donating to fund raisers, volunteering to help with school events, taking an interest in their kids school work and making sure it's getting done. Having your kids around other kids who care about their education because it's been instilled in them creates a culture of success (and vice versa).
As a parent, if you're kids are zoned for a school that you don't feel is doing as well you can do one of two things if you want to better enable your children:
1. You can get involved with the school, school board, organize parents and get the entire community more involved to make the school a better place for kids to succeed.
2. You can send them to another school where people already are involved.
The ironic thing here is that the school voucher policy favored by conservatives would actually make it more feasible for people to send their kids to better schools without having to move for zoning reasons. This allows parents to cast a direct vote related to the quality of a school, because if it's bad parents will simply choose to send their kids elsewhere.