> An untrained teacher is not likely to be able to help students who are, say, emotionally disturbed.
The number of students who are failing academically because they are emotionally disturbed is probably very low. I doubt emotional problems are a driving force in our academic system.
>So when some one says "Parents need to be involved", my antennae twitters. >Consider your example, if a kid is not motivated, clearly the parent has the >best chance to persuade them. However, that is not absolute and we certainly cannot beat >our kids unless we want to land in jail. Some times the parents ARE part of the >problem, esp. where psychological problems are involved.
I agree that it is not absolute, but in most places you can spank your kids all you like. In any case punishment doesn't have to be physical.
>Parental involvement will not solve all the problems either.
No, but I believe lack of parental involvement is the biggest problem. And moreover, parental involvement can overcome a lot of other problems.
>In north america, unless you live in a small town, there is little reality to a 'school community.'
I agree. Busing has played a large part in this. When kids go to school an hour or more away from their home, it becomes difficult for parents to be involved in their kids' education. PTA, for example, goes by the wayside.
>So I don't think that there's anything wrong about thinking of the school as services. >We just need to be honest about what services we want and be willing to actually pay for them.
The problem is that the school service cannot motivate your child to learn. If they tried, they would get sued. No matter how much you pay them, the only people who can motivate most children are their parents. Until and unless you are willing to give the school service the authority to force your child to see to his studies it can never function effectively without parental involvement.
Your experience is also my experience when I was a student, and it's exactly what I'm talking about.
Parents have largely become disconnected from the educational process. Parent-Teacher Associations have dwindled, in no small part because of busing kids an hour or more from their homes. Parents aren't going to tack an extra 4 hours onto the end of the work day to make PTA that is an hour away from home.
Parents have come to view the educational system as a service that they are paying for (via taxes) for their kids to be sent and educated. They have abdicated all responsibility for the education of their child to the State. The flaw here is that the State has no power to force your child to perform academically - if they try they will get sued. The only people with any shot at forcing their children to perform academically are parents.
>My kids are smart and motivated and we (mom AND dad) are involved parents.
Sounds to me like you proved my point.
You have a sucky school, but your kids are still smart and motivated. Why? innate talent, sure, but also probably because you ARE involved parents.
Involved parents can overcome great flaws in the educational system. But the post I responded to said that if the schools are good enough, you don't need parental involvement. My claim is that even with an AWESOME educational environment, without parental involvement most kids won't be motivated to make use of it, because most kids are lazy.
This is also why I believe kids tend to do better at private schools, in spite of the fact that private school teachers typically get paid less than their public school counterparts. When Mom and Dad are paying out of their own pocket for an education, they are naturally more likely to be more involved in monitoring the progress of their investment - they are not just involved to their kids' education they are committed financially.
>I remember studying history and politics in high school, and none of it made any sense.
Speaking specifically to this point, I have found that the study of history and politics makes much more sense as an adult, simply because you can talk about and understand adult motivations.
Most history and politics, indeed probably most of human behavior, is dictated by greed and lust for money, power, and sex.
It would be taboo to discuss these motivations frankly with school-age kids, so it is then no surprise that studying history and politics in this light makes no sense.
>So you are saying that there is nothing wrong with what and how we teach in the schools, >and the problem is only a problem of motivation? If so, then I strongly disagree.
No, that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that the single most important thing to fix education is to increase parental involvement. This is not to say that there are other things wrong, including how and what we teach in schools. It is rather to say that no matter how good what and how you teach is, if you don't have motivated students, it won't matter, and the primary motivation for most kids is their parents. The teachers have no power to motivate.
>So, pushing this crap harder with more beatings from parents is precisely the WRONG approach.
Like it or not, scholastic success is the metric you must pass muster with to determine your career track for the rest of your life. Thus students must be motivated to put up with and learn the crap whether they like it or not. Moreover when the educational material IS crap parental involvement is even MORE critical to supplement the crap with good information.
>If the subject matter was fascinating and sensical/relevant to daily life, you'd not need saints >and butchers to motivate students to learn it.
And if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their butts when they jump.
But there is only one thing that kept me in line academically as a kid, and that was fear of my father's foot in my ass.
See for me, I could blow off rewards. Oh yes, it would be nice to get $5 for A's on my report card, but I don't really/need/ the $5 for anything. Oh it might be nice to watch a movie, but I could just as easily watch it on the internet. Leaving class might be nice, but where would I go? The only consistent motivator for me was FEAR of PUNISHMENT.
But that is merely a personal anecdote. I readily admit that motivation can be both positive and negative. But either way, I still beleive the most motivating influence on students is usually their parents. In my experience, teachers are usually either non-empowered or un-inspired to motivate.
>Do things right at school, and perhaps there won't be any need to get the parents involved.
This simply is not possible.
I used to be a huge proponent of "teacher accountability" until I shared a 7 hour plane ride with a teacher friend of mine.
She explained the obvious to me.
All students require motivation to learn. Most students are not self-motivated. Teachers lack the authority to instill motivation in their students through punitive means, and there are very few inspirational teachers. Thus for most students, their primary motivator is their parents.
You can have the most intelligent teacher on the planet combined with the most patient, compassionate teacher on the planet - Albert Einstein crossed with Mother Theresa - and it won't matter a whit if the student is not motivated to learn.
Some very few students are self-motivated. But by and large students require external motivation, and the only people with the authority to do that are parents. The days of teachers beating students into their studies are long gone. But not so for Mom and Dad.
The single-most important thing to "Fix Education" is to increase parental involvement and stop the mentality that school is a place where you "send" your kids "to be educated". Too many people have come to view the educational system as a "service" - a place where you pay your taxes and then send your kids to be educated, with the whole burden of the process on the system. In fact, the system is merely the water - they can't force the kids to drink it. Only Mom and Dad have that power.
Unless you are extremely lucky and find the rare self-motivated student you simply cannot remove parents from a successful edcuation.
Barring some revolution in technology, we are all going to be driving much smaller vehicles very soon, out of necessity, regardless of safety. Only the rich will be able to afford to drive armor. The rest of us will be driving covered motorcycles.
You are absolutely right - these small electric vehicles are, as I said, basically covered motorcycles.
I, too, am afraid to ride a motorcycle because of the safety issues. Fortunately, I only live 8 miles from work, and only on surface streets, so I believe the risk is probably acceptable.
The thing is, however, that pretty soon, people won't have a choice. My 6-cylinder pickup truck gets 16 miles to the gallon, which means it costs me about $4 a day to get to work and back. It costs about $90 to fill up. What will life be like for us when gas costs $8 per gallon?
I think we are going to be seeing a whole lot more motorcycles on the road. It's not going to be an issue of safety, it's going to be an issue of necessity.
Given that, I'll take a covered motorcycle so at least I'm out of the rain.
80 MPH, 100 mile range. This will suit the majority of people's daily driving needs. We'll all still have our gas-burning minivan or SUV for weekend trips to granny's or the lake or whatever, but most of the time we'll be driving our electric covered motorcycle to work and back.
All you need for this is an electrical outlet at home.
But what incentive is there to go out and seek something faster? Rather, why don't I hear advertisements that quote bandwidth? There seem to be lots of trumpets blaring but everyone is light on details. "It's the Network!" Yeah, so what? What does it actually GIVE ME?
I mean seriously. If I was tasked right now to go buy the fastest mobile internet service I would not have a clue where to start. If someone asked me to go buy the fastest home internet service I'd know just where to start looking. Why do mobile vendors make it so obscure? My guess is because the reality is their bitrates all suck, plus they don't want to get into commodity comparison pricing/shopping.
I've got a Blackberry through T-mobile. The only time I use the internet on it is if I absolutely must have some information, like an address or phone number, that I forgot to write down before I left.
It is so painfully slow it makes dial-up, which I haven't done in over a decade, look good.
What is the appeal of wireless internet if this is as good as it gets?
I have read recently (no cite, sorry) that there is some thought that if all these cars are charging at night when demand is usually lower, then the additional generation load may not be too bad.
Also it was said in the same article that perhaps by having so many batteries tied into the grid it could actually stabilize peak generation requirements, or something like that.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion on this key sentence from the article:
"There is, however, one concession to the past: a library stocked with novels."
Why is it that I can go to the library and check out physical copies of books for free, but I can't read them digitally over the internet for free? And yes, before everyone starts, I'm aware of the Gutenberg Project but basically these are all old works.
The library, with all it's overhead for electricity, janitorial staff, and library staff could be reduced to a closet with a server in it. And one such "library" could serve dozens or even hundreds of schools.
Even textbooks can be checked out from the library. Imagine if digital copies were available - no more buying text books.
This, of course, is exactly what the content producers don't want to happen.
That'll go over like a lead balloon as soon as the first worm comes out that looks for other infected boxes and begins exchanging the contents of/dev/urandom with them.
Maybe, just maybe, once these things start to cost people visible cash, people will start going after the people responsible for them. Maybe they'll even penalize people for not securing their systems sufficiently.
Because provides no protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, so someone who actually wants to read your communications would have little trouble doing so. Of course, there is the catch that they would have to actually be in the middle when the encryption keys are exchanged, and then actively re-encrypt each packet going each way (because the attack basically means the attacker acts as a proxy for the server to the client and as a proxy for the client to the server). This is obviously a lot more work than dumping traffic onto a disk with some filtering for review later, which is already a rather daunting task with the amount of traffic on the internet.
OK, so what you are saying is that it does no good to encrypt end-to-end communications if someone in the middle also was in the middle when the keys were exchanged.
So I have a question (actually two):
1) I thought with public key encryption you only needed public keys available so there was no danger of such MITM attacks? Doesn't SSL use public key encryption?
2) How does a certificate prevent a MITM attack during the key exchange process?
It sounds like if I make a web site, but set it up to go through https instead of http, users will get an error that I have an unverified certificate?
Why is this?
Why can't I just enable encryption on my web site, without any attempt at proclaiming my identity, and just have the browser start communicating with my web site via an encrypted channel?
In my view the only way we are going to get all these net neutrality and FISA issues resolved is by making it too hard to randomly eavesdrop - and this is done by encrypting everything. Why is this so hard to do?
What do you expect would happen when the biggest mall in the Southeast opens 10 miles down the highway?
That might explain the mall, but not the entire area. Basically everything east of I-85, south of Pleasant Hill, North of I-285 and east of Lawrenceville Hwy has gone way downhill since I lived there.
Do you believe that non-white people make land cheap, or is it that non-white people live on the land no one else wants to buy?
I believe that for whatever reason, predominantly black or predominantly mexican neighborhoods tend to be run-down, with all the social problems that go with that such as crime and school quality, at least in the Atlanta area. Consequently people with the means won't live there. That usually means white people. Right or wrong, people vote with their dollars, and the people most able to vote with dollars are white people.
In the case of Norcross, I think it used to be a nice bedroom community with starter-priced homes in the $100K to $150K range - that is what drew us there. This happened to also be the target range for immigrants and their families looking to buy homes, sometimes multiple families living in the same home. My guess is it eventually reached a tipping point where enough white people left that the local area economy tanked.
Why is this? I can only guess the immigrants barely had enough money to buy the homes and not enough money to support all the other local businesses. Also there was an influx of crime (cause or effect?) which didn't help. My police friends tell me the Norcross area is now struggling with more and more mexican vs. chinese gang problems.
Whatever the cause and effect, the bottom line is the whole area has gone to shit, and there are less and less white people living there.
Anyway, I laugh at the white flight. Those peons were OTP to begin with, and they're even more OTP now. Enjoy the commute.
When I lived there, I lived and worked outside the perimeter. I only traveled inside the perimeter for entertainment. Ultimately I moved to another state for a better salary and commute. I've never understood the "OTP" elitism. What's fun about living in concrete city with postage-stamp yards?
It seems now that all the white flight is now back INSIDE the perimeter - all those run-down communities down by the Hill Street Community Center have been renovated and now sell for $250K+. Not to mention that huge new walk-able community they built downtown in and around that old train yard. I bet that isn't a haven of multiculturalism. I bet it's white as rice.
I never understood RSS either. To me, it's like signing up for an email newsletter. I hardly ever do that, either. Most of my web browsing is for entertainment. I don't want or need to be hounded by my entertainment. When I want to read Slashdot or Digg, I'll surf on over and read a bit. It's OK with me if I missed some stuff since the last time I was on - this is entertainment not life-critical information.
Slashdot Mirror
> An untrained teacher is not likely to be able to help students who are, say, emotionally disturbed.
The number of students who are failing academically because they are emotionally disturbed is probably very low. I doubt emotional problems are a driving force in our academic system.
>So when some one says "Parents need to be involved", my antennae twitters.
>Consider your example, if a kid is not motivated, clearly the parent has the
>best chance to persuade them. However, that is not absolute and we certainly cannot beat
>our kids unless we want to land in jail. Some times the parents ARE part of the
>problem, esp. where psychological problems are involved.
I agree that it is not absolute, but in most places you can spank your kids all you like. In any case punishment doesn't have to be physical.
>Parental involvement will not solve all the problems either.
No, but I believe lack of parental involvement is the biggest problem. And moreover, parental involvement can overcome a lot of other problems.
>In north america, unless you live in a small town, there is little reality to a 'school community.'
I agree. Busing has played a large part in this. When kids go to school an hour or more away from their home, it becomes difficult for parents to be involved in their kids' education. PTA, for example, goes by the wayside.
>So I don't think that there's anything wrong about thinking of the school as services.
>We just need to be honest about what services we want and be willing to actually pay for them.
The problem is that the school service cannot motivate your child to learn. If they tried, they would get sued. No matter how much you pay them, the only people who can motivate most children are their parents. Until and unless you are willing to give the school service the authority to force your child to see to his studies it can never function effectively without parental involvement.
Your experience is also my experience when I was a student, and it's exactly what I'm talking about. Parents have largely become disconnected from the educational process. Parent-Teacher Associations have dwindled, in no small part because of busing kids an hour or more from their homes. Parents aren't going to tack an extra 4 hours onto the end of the work day to make PTA that is an hour away from home. Parents have come to view the educational system as a service that they are paying for (via taxes) for their kids to be sent and educated. They have abdicated all responsibility for the education of their child to the State. The flaw here is that the State has no power to force your child to perform academically - if they try they will get sued. The only people with any shot at forcing their children to perform academically are parents.
>My kids are smart and motivated and we (mom AND dad) are involved parents.
Sounds to me like you proved my point.
You have a sucky school, but your kids are still smart and motivated. Why? innate talent, sure, but also probably because you ARE involved parents.
Involved parents can overcome great flaws in the educational system. But the post I responded to said that if the schools are good enough, you don't need parental involvement. My claim is that even with an AWESOME educational environment, without parental involvement most kids won't be motivated to make use of it, because most kids are lazy.
This is also why I believe kids tend to do better at private schools, in spite of the fact that private school teachers typically get paid less than their public school counterparts. When Mom and Dad are paying out of their own pocket for an education, they are naturally more likely to be more involved in monitoring the progress of their investment - they are not just involved to their kids' education they are committed financially.
>I remember studying history and politics in high school, and none of it made any sense.
Speaking specifically to this point, I have found that the study of history and politics makes much more sense as an adult, simply because you can talk about and understand adult motivations.
Most history and politics, indeed probably most of human behavior, is dictated by greed and lust for money, power, and sex.
It would be taboo to discuss these motivations frankly with school-age kids, so it is then no surprise that studying history and politics in this light makes no sense.
>So you are saying that there is nothing wrong with what and how we teach in the schools,
>and the problem is only a problem of motivation? If so, then I strongly disagree.
No, that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that the single most important thing to fix education is to increase parental involvement. This is not to say that there are other things wrong, including how and what we teach in schools. It is rather to say that no matter how good what and how you teach is, if you don't have motivated students, it won't matter, and the primary motivation for most kids is their parents. The teachers have no power to motivate.
>So, pushing this crap harder with more beatings from parents is precisely the WRONG approach.
Like it or not, scholastic success is the metric you must pass muster with to determine your career track for the rest of your life. Thus students must be motivated to put up with and learn the crap whether they like it or not. Moreover when the educational material IS crap parental involvement is even MORE critical to supplement the crap with good information.
>If the subject matter was fascinating and sensical/relevant to daily life, you'd not need saints
>and butchers to motivate students to learn it.
And if frogs had wings they wouldn't bump their butts when they jump.
Rewards work also, no doubt.
But there is only one thing that kept me in line academically as a kid, and that was fear of my father's foot in my ass.
See for me, I could blow off rewards. Oh yes, it would be nice to get $5 for A's on my report card, but I don't really /need/ the $5 for anything. Oh it might be nice to watch a movie, but I could just as easily watch it on the internet. Leaving class might be nice, but where would I go? The only consistent motivator for me was FEAR of PUNISHMENT.
But that is merely a personal anecdote. I readily admit that motivation can be both positive and negative. But either way, I still beleive the most motivating influence on students is usually their parents. In my experience, teachers are usually either non-empowered or un-inspired to motivate.
>Do things right at school, and perhaps there won't be any need to get the parents involved.
This simply is not possible.
I used to be a huge proponent of "teacher accountability" until I shared a 7 hour plane ride with a teacher friend of mine.
She explained the obvious to me.
All students require motivation to learn. Most students are not self-motivated. Teachers lack the authority to instill motivation in their students through punitive means, and there are very few inspirational teachers. Thus for most students, their primary motivator is their parents.
You can have the most intelligent teacher on the planet combined with the most patient, compassionate teacher on the planet - Albert Einstein crossed with Mother Theresa - and it won't matter a whit if the student is not motivated to learn.
Some very few students are self-motivated. But by and large students require external motivation, and the only people with the authority to do that are parents. The days of teachers beating students into their studies are long gone. But not so for Mom and Dad.
The single-most important thing to "Fix Education" is to increase parental involvement and stop the mentality that school is a place where you "send" your kids "to be educated". Too many people have come to view the educational system as a "service" - a place where you pay your taxes and then send your kids to be educated, with the whole burden of the process on the system. In fact, the system is merely the water - they can't force the kids to drink it. Only Mom and Dad have that power.
Unless you are extremely lucky and find the rare self-motivated student you simply cannot remove parents from a successful edcuation.
That'd be a great vehicle for the winter.
Winter, you know that "weather" thing with the white stuff and the smooth slippery stuff and all the cold?
Oh yeah, I keep forgetting about that, since it doesn't snow here. :)
Transportation cost will be yet another reason for people to move to more temperate climates.
See my post "On Safety" below.
Barring some revolution in technology, we are all going to be driving much smaller vehicles very soon, out of necessity, regardless of safety. Only the rich will be able to afford to drive armor. The rest of us will be driving covered motorcycles.
You are absolutely right - these small electric vehicles are, as I said, basically covered motorcycles.
I, too, am afraid to ride a motorcycle because of the safety issues. Fortunately, I only live 8 miles from work, and only on surface streets, so I believe the risk is probably acceptable.
The thing is, however, that pretty soon, people won't have a choice. My 6-cylinder pickup truck gets 16 miles to the gallon, which means it costs me about $4 a day to get to work and back. It costs about $90 to fill up. What will life be like for us when gas costs $8 per gallon?
I think we are going to be seeing a whole lot more motorcycles on the road. It's not going to be an issue of safety, it's going to be an issue of necessity.
Given that, I'll take a covered motorcycle so at least I'm out of the rain.
I believe we are approaching the era of the "commuter car". Things like this:
http://www.greenvehicles.com/specs/triac.html
80 MPH, 100 mile range. This will suit the majority of people's daily driving needs. We'll all still have our gas-burning minivan or SUV for weekend trips to granny's or the lake or whatever, but most of the time we'll be driving our electric covered motorcycle to work and back.
All you need for this is an electrical outlet at home.
I suspected this was the case.
But what incentive is there to go out and seek something faster? Rather, why don't I hear advertisements that quote bandwidth? There seem to be lots of trumpets blaring but everyone is light on details. "It's the Network!" Yeah, so what? What does it actually GIVE ME?
I mean seriously. If I was tasked right now to go buy the fastest mobile internet service I would not have a clue where to start. If someone asked me to go buy the fastest home internet service I'd know just where to start looking. Why do mobile vendors make it so obscure? My guess is because the reality is their bitrates all suck, plus they don't want to get into commodity comparison pricing/shopping.
I've got a Blackberry through T-mobile. The only time I use the internet on it is if I absolutely must have some information, like an address or phone number, that I forgot to write down before I left.
It is so painfully slow it makes dial-up, which I haven't done in over a decade, look good.
What is the appeal of wireless internet if this is as good as it gets?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/11/1125_031125_turkeyoil.html
These guys set up shop next to a turkey processing plant. They take the waste and turn it into oil.
Unlikely - how would we all conduct e-commerce and e-banking?
It's time for encryption of electronic communications to be the standard rather than the exception.
Make it too expensive to eavesdrop.
I have read recently (no cite, sorry) that there is some thought that if all these cars are charging at night when demand is usually lower, then the additional generation load may not be too bad.
Also it was said in the same article that perhaps by having so many batteries tied into the grid it could actually stabilize peak generation requirements, or something like that.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion on this key sentence from the article:
"There is, however, one concession to the past: a library stocked with novels."
Why is it that I can go to the library and check out physical copies of books for free, but I can't read them digitally over the internet for free? And yes, before everyone starts, I'm aware of the Gutenberg Project but basically these are all old works.
The library, with all it's overhead for electricity, janitorial staff, and library staff could be reduced to a closet with a server in it. And one such "library" could serve dozens or even hundreds of schools.
Even textbooks can be checked out from the library. Imagine if digital copies were available - no more buying text books.
This, of course, is exactly what the content producers don't want to happen.
That'll go over like a lead balloon as soon as the first worm comes out that looks for other infected boxes and begins exchanging the contents of /dev/urandom with them.
Maybe, just maybe, once these things start to cost people visible cash, people will start going after the people responsible for them. Maybe they'll even penalize people for not securing their systems sufficiently.
Because provides no protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, so someone who actually wants to read your communications would have little trouble doing so. Of course, there is the catch that they would have to actually be in the middle when the encryption keys are exchanged, and then actively re-encrypt each packet going each way (because the attack basically means the attacker acts as a proxy for the server to the client and as a proxy for the client to the server). This is obviously a lot more work than dumping traffic onto a disk with some filtering for review later, which is already a rather daunting task with the amount of traffic on the internet.
OK, so what you are saying is that it does no good to encrypt end-to-end communications if someone in the middle also was in the middle when the keys were exchanged.
So I have a question (actually two):
1) I thought with public key encryption you only needed public keys available so there was no danger of such MITM attacks? Doesn't SSL use public key encryption?
2) How does a certificate prevent a MITM attack during the key exchange process?
Thanks.
I'm a little confused on this certificate stuff.
It sounds like if I make a web site, but set it up to go through https instead of http, users will get an error that I have an unverified certificate?
Why is this?
Why can't I just enable encryption on my web site, without any attempt at proclaiming my identity, and just have the browser start communicating with my web site via an encrypted channel?
In my view the only way we are going to get all these net neutrality and FISA issues resolved is by making it too hard to randomly eavesdrop - and this is done by encrypting everything. Why is this so hard to do?
What do you expect would happen when the biggest mall in the Southeast opens 10 miles down the highway?
That might explain the mall, but not the entire area. Basically everything east of I-85, south of Pleasant Hill, North of I-285 and east of Lawrenceville Hwy has gone way downhill since I lived there.
Do you believe that non-white people make land cheap, or is it that non-white people live on the land no one else wants to buy?
I believe that for whatever reason, predominantly black or predominantly mexican neighborhoods tend to be run-down, with all the social problems that go with that such as crime and school quality, at least in the Atlanta area. Consequently people with the means won't live there. That usually means white people. Right or wrong, people vote with their dollars, and the people most able to vote with dollars are white people.
In the case of Norcross, I think it used to be a nice bedroom community with starter-priced homes in the $100K to $150K range - that is what drew us there. This happened to also be the target range for immigrants and their families looking to buy homes, sometimes multiple families living in the same home. My guess is it eventually reached a tipping point where enough white people left that the local area economy tanked.
Why is this? I can only guess the immigrants barely had enough money to buy the homes and not enough money to support all the other local businesses. Also there was an influx of crime (cause or effect?) which didn't help. My police friends tell me the Norcross area is now struggling with more and more mexican vs. chinese gang problems.
Whatever the cause and effect, the bottom line is the whole area has gone to shit, and there are less and less white people living there.
Anyway, I laugh at the white flight. Those peons were OTP to begin with, and they're even more OTP now. Enjoy the commute.
When I lived there, I lived and worked outside the perimeter. I only traveled inside the perimeter for entertainment. Ultimately I moved to another state for a better salary and commute. I've never understood the "OTP" elitism. What's fun about living in concrete city with postage-stamp yards?
It seems now that all the white flight is now back INSIDE the perimeter - all those run-down communities down by the Hill Street Community Center have been renovated and now sell for $250K+. Not to mention that huge new walk-able community they built downtown in and around that old train yard. I bet that isn't a haven of multiculturalism. I bet it's white as rice.
I moved to the Indian Trail area in 1998. It was booming.
A year or so ago we were in the area and decided to drive around the area, including Gwinett Place Mall up on Pleasant Hill.
The whole area, particularly the area east of I-85 on Jimmy Carter is a disaster. The mall was desolate. The whole area just looks run down.
If this is what having an ethnically diverse region does for your community it's no wonder they resisted mass transit to speed its coming.
I have friends on the Norcross Police force. They corroborate my impression of the area where I used to live.
I never understood RSS either. To me, it's like signing up for an email newsletter. I hardly ever do that, either. Most of my web browsing is for entertainment. I don't want or need to be hounded by my entertainment. When I want to read Slashdot or Digg, I'll surf on over and read a bit. It's OK with me if I missed some stuff since the last time I was on - this is entertainment not life-critical information.
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