Firing a teacher is hideously complex and takes about 3 years and thousands of dollars. Unless the teacher does something AMAZINGLY bad (i.e. sleep with a student, get caught with drugs, physically abuse a student, etc) then there's almost no chance they'll be fired. A lot of school can't actually afford to fire teachers. That's a few thousand dollars that can be spent on better textbooks, or on firing a teacher who will be replaced by one that might not be any better.
I believe this was all detailed in a Newsweek article about a year ago.
Of course, "bad" teachers usually don't do anything against policy or against the law. They usually just suck at teaching to the point that students don't actually learn. This is where the teachers unions come in. They'll try to pin the teacher's lousy performance on: A) Lack of reviews done by the administration on the teacher B) Too many reviews giving the kids the impression that the teacher is not in control of the class C) Students not willing to learn and thus not the teacher's fault D) Lack of parent support E) Something else entirely.
In any case, the teacher either stays on or takes a severance package and leaves to go to a different school and fuck everything up there.
You are a stupid fuck. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's have a rational argument:
Creationism is not science, it's religion. You have no scientific evidence or support of creationism. Thus, there is not a valid challenge here. Science is still science because it does not address anything that cannot be investigated scientifically. Just as science cannot issue a valid challenge to religion (as any scientific claim is countered with "god did it that way to test us" or similar) religion cannot issue a valid challenge to science (as any religious claim can not be supported with scientific evidence). Go ahead and teach creationism in bible study or a religious studies class, but it is not science and therefore should not be taught in science class.
Furthermore, evolution makes absolutely no statement about the origins of the universe. The theory you're looking for is called "the big bang", not evolution. Thus, any challenge religion attempts (I say attempts because it cannot, as shown above, actually issue a valid challenge) to have against evolution regarding the origin of the universe is invalid because it has nothing to do with the beginning of the universe. You might as well try to argue the creation of the universe against the intermediate value theorem (a calculus concept), it simply makes no sense.
As for the disclaimers put on textbooks, they make no sense either. Nothing in science can ever be proven absolutely for every situation. It's simply that the effect is observed and the calculations are shown to be correct for every imaginable instance and thus we call it a "theory". We cannot prove that gravity exists absolutely everywhere in the entire universe, but every single experiment ever conducted has shown it to be true. We see it here on earth, on the moon, we can see the effects of gravity on the stars, etc. It is possible, although very, very, unlikely that one day we will discover a piece of matter that does not act like it should with respect to gravity. If and when that time comes, the theory of gravity will have to be reworked.
However, it should be noted that science is not simply "I observe this effect, therefore we'll call it a theory". There is experimentation, calculation, etc. All experiments MUST be repeatable. All calculations MUST be verifiable. Religion is neither of these things. We can't test for god (or the lack of it). If we could, the experiment wouldn't be repeatable. For example, let's say there was a case of cancer in a patient that suddenly went into remission, 6 months later the patient is cancer free. You say "it was a miracle from god". We can't test for this. There's no experiment we can do that will show a divine influence on the patient. It's also not repeatable. If we give another patient cancer in the exact same way, the miracle would not happen twice. (We know this because there are a lot of people with cancer and this hasn't happened before).
In short, "god did it" is not science, it's religion.
As for abstinence only sex education. You're presenting a straw man argument. No one is encouraging teenagers to have sex before marriage. Furthermore, no one is suggesting that teen pregnancy is a good thing. These are not arguments presented by your opposition and therefore warrant no further consideration. (The fact that you mentioned them means that you are either confused about the arguments actually being presented, or that you are intentionally attempting to mislead your opposition).
Your statement about "most abstinence organizations... birth control methods" has no support. Please provide a link to some study that was done or something similar. unfortunately, I cannot take your word for it, just as I don't expect you to take mine if I were to say "most abstinence organizations do NOT teach birth control methods". I also cannot take your word that you are a former president of an abstinence organization, just as I don't expect you to take mine if I say "I am a former king of England
Actually, he's relatively correct. Yeah, a bit of a troll, but not amazingly far off. My sex ed class didn't have birth control covered. It was all this nonsense "don't have sex... condoms don't work, etc". Fortunately, that's started to change here (Colorado) with a law that was passed a couple years ago mandating that government money could not be spent on abstinence-only sex ed. But it's still pretty piss poor. Sex ed is a 3 day section in health class, which isn't nearly enough to teach it. 2 days are "don't have sex" with bullshit statistics about how condoms don't work and pregnancies happen 100% of the time if you're not married.
The last day they actually discuss birth control... but only to extent that it doesn't work. Condoms only PREVENT STDS!!! THAT MEANS YOU'LL GET AIDS IF YOU HAVE SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE!!!! etc.
As for creationism, when we have a state (Kansas) that is trying to mandate disclaimers on textbooks stating that evolution is only a theory and blah blah blah, it really says something about the educational system. Gravity is only a theory, why don't we have disclaimers for that? I'm willing to bet that any test on evolution in Kansas must accept as a correct answer "I refuse to answer because of my beliefs" or "god did it" lest the teacher be fired due to public outcry.
"not bitching that "the taxpayers pay you to teach so we own all of your creative works and you can't ever make money off of them". "
That is EXACTLY how it works with the government. Any work produced by a government official in the performance of their duties is automatically placed int he public domain and may not be copyrighted. Why shouldn't it be the same for teachers being paid BY THE PUBLIC. There is NO practical difference here whatsoever. The only difference is that instead of making geological survey maps, they're making lesson plans. They're both made by people being paid by the public and should thus both be in the public domain.
I agree that teachers are not paid enough, but the solution is not to start letting them sell stuff that should be free. We don't let underpaid government employees sell off their work that's int he public domain because they aren't making enough money, why should this be any different?
It's once per year per agency. You can request your information every 4 months from a different agency. Of course, if there's problems on your report that were added right after you checked it, it's impossible for you to see until next year.
Like I said, it's as close to secret as humanly possible.
There exists the ability for the US to encrypt the signal such that only military receivers can use it. They claim that the newer satellites will be incapable of using this "selective availability". Of course, this is either a complete lie or they already have another system to deny GPS that's called something else that they haven't made public yet.
No, voting for idiot third parties like that means that you bothered to show up because: A) You were bored and had nothing to do B) You were stoned (i.e. legalize cannabis party) C) Thought that the ballot was a coloring book and filled in random boxes
I mean, voting for the green party, the libertarians, etc at least says something about the opinion of the populous, but voting for parties like "legalize cannabis" is completely nonsense. The only reason they're on the ballot is because someone read a book one day about election laws and decided it'd just be fucking hilarious to fill out some paperwork to get on the ballot.
If you want to not vote then please move your sorry ass out of my country and go to one where they don't have the freedom to vote. You have no right to any political opinion at this point.
You have an obligation to research the candidates and determine which one would best serve your country and then vote accordingly. Not voting will NOT result in neither party getting elected. Even if both candidates are complete shit, you still have an obligation to vote for the least shitty.
And then how do you verify the million or so people that misread the paper or just want to cause shit and claim their vote was not counted properly? Not trying to rail on your idea, but this does present one hell of a practical problem that needs to be taken into account.
"I claim that there is no flaw. It is now your job to find the flaw and prove me wrong."
Not really. It is your job to prove to me that there is no flaw. It's the same thing with a paper ballot. You still have to prove to me that there is not a flaw in the paper ballot. Of course, I can look over the ballot in all of about 15 seconds and see that it's the correct ballot. It's far harder to find a race condition in a voting machine running proprietary software that causes miscounted votes.
There is no way for you to verify that the paper ballot you are using is an actual legitimate ballot. I suppose you could call some city department and have them certify the ballot, but you could do the same thing for the voting machines. Electronic voting is not necessarily undemocratic. It's only undemocratic if it's being used in an undemocratic way. You could abuse paper ballots the exact same way you could abuse electronic machines.
The only real difference here is that no one has tried to sell the government paper ballots that don't count your votes, or lose your votes, or change your votes, or fail to leave a paper trail. Electronic machines done right are just as secure as paper ballots.
It chokes the supply a significant amount. There's a large number of people here (myself included) that wouldn't know where to find drugs if they wanted them this week. That's one hell of a step away from them being available at your local supermarket/drugstore.
Not that this is how it should be, but yes, it does stop the supply somewhat.
"Perhaps they really OUGHT to be kept secret, for some reason beyond yourself. If we had access to TSA internal memos, so could terrorists, who could then evade TSA screeners."
No, no, no, absolutely NOT! I don't know how you made the jump from "terrorists could get the memos" to "terrorists can evade the screeners". A terrorists knowing that the TSA is "checking for bombs" doesn't help them for shit. Furthermore, this disclosure doesn't apply to shit that needs to be kept secret. It applies to shit that needs to be made public.
There is a reason this needs to be made public. If you allow them to keep this secret then you allow them to slap a "classified in the interest of national security" sticker on anything and everything. This includes secret policies, illegal laws, illegal programs (i.e. secret police). If you trust the government that much and want to give up this much freedom, then move to china where blind faith in the government is expected of you and get the hell out of my country.
Who modded this as flamebait?? This is a reasonably funny joke. I suspect someone was a tad too quick on the trigger with the moderation and mistook AAA (automotive association of America) for whatever spam post above is spamming "GNAA".
We should be given access on a completely unrestricted basis 24/7/365 including holidays, weekends, etc. This is data that is used to deny you bank loans, car loans, causes higher rates on many things, etc. No one should be allowed to keep this data without allowing the affected parties to view every single fucking record. Furthermore, there should be financial penalties for any inaccuracies. They accidentally show that you paid late once when you really didn't? That's a $20000 fine, paid to YOU. I don't know why we think that companies need to be allowed to keep records like this and use them in business dealings but keep them completely secret. (Access once per year is nonsense, that's as close to secret as humanly possible)
"Ask yourself, what would you want running if the entire city or region was nuked?"
If part of the US was nuked then your servers matter exactly nothing. I don't understand your comment about having redundancy in different areas of the world. Any event large enough to affect an entire country is large enough to affect the world to the point that your business matters nothing. Global free-for-all war? Yeah, no one's going to be visiting your website to check up on the latest furniture prices.
On the other hand, it's also spoken like someone with some idea of what he's doing.
If you need something that is outside your area of expertise, then you hire someone who knows what he's doing. For example, let's say I have an idea for a website and I know how to run all the servers and deal with the IT side of things, but can't actually design the website to save my life. I then hire someone who knows how to design and code a website.
She got irritated about being billed? Did she seriously expect you to provide tech support to her BUSINESS for FREE? If so, I've got to wonder how that business is actually doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Firing a teacher is hideously complex and takes about 3 years and thousands of dollars. Unless the teacher does something AMAZINGLY bad (i.e. sleep with a student, get caught with drugs, physically abuse a student, etc) then there's almost no chance they'll be fired. A lot of school can't actually afford to fire teachers. That's a few thousand dollars that can be spent on better textbooks, or on firing a teacher who will be replaced by one that might not be any better.
I believe this was all detailed in a Newsweek article about a year ago.
Of course, "bad" teachers usually don't do anything against policy or against the law. They usually just suck at teaching to the point that students don't actually learn. This is where the teachers unions come in. They'll try to pin the teacher's lousy performance on:
A) Lack of reviews done by the administration on the teacher
B) Too many reviews giving the kids the impression that the teacher is not in control of the class
C) Students not willing to learn and thus not the teacher's fault
D) Lack of parent support
E) Something else entirely.
In any case, the teacher either stays on or takes a severance package and leaves to go to a different school and fuck everything up there.
You are a stupid fuck. Alright, now that that's out of the way, let's have a rational argument:
Creationism is not science, it's religion. You have no scientific evidence or support of creationism. Thus, there is not a valid challenge here. Science is still science because it does not address anything that cannot be investigated scientifically. Just as science cannot issue a valid challenge to religion (as any scientific claim is countered with "god did it that way to test us" or similar) religion cannot issue a valid challenge to science (as any religious claim can not be supported with scientific evidence).
Go ahead and teach creationism in bible study or a religious studies class, but it is not science and therefore should not be taught in science class.
Furthermore, evolution makes absolutely no statement about the origins of the universe. The theory you're looking for is called "the big bang", not evolution. Thus, any challenge religion attempts (I say attempts because it cannot, as shown above, actually issue a valid challenge) to have against evolution regarding the origin of the universe is invalid because it has nothing to do with the beginning of the universe. You might as well try to argue the creation of the universe against the intermediate value theorem (a calculus concept), it simply makes no sense.
As for the disclaimers put on textbooks, they make no sense either. Nothing in science can ever be proven absolutely for every situation. It's simply that the effect is observed and the calculations are shown to be correct for every imaginable instance and thus we call it a "theory". We cannot prove that gravity exists absolutely everywhere in the entire universe, but every single experiment ever conducted has shown it to be true. We see it here on earth, on the moon, we can see the effects of gravity on the stars, etc. It is possible, although very, very, unlikely that one day we will discover a piece of matter that does not act like it should with respect to gravity. If and when that time comes, the theory of gravity will have to be reworked.
However, it should be noted that science is not simply "I observe this effect, therefore we'll call it a theory". There is experimentation, calculation, etc. All experiments MUST be repeatable. All calculations MUST be verifiable. Religion is neither of these things. We can't test for god (or the lack of it). If we could, the experiment wouldn't be repeatable. For example, let's say there was a case of cancer in a patient that suddenly went into remission, 6 months later the patient is cancer free. You say "it was a miracle from god". We can't test for this. There's no experiment we can do that will show a divine influence on the patient. It's also not repeatable. If we give another patient cancer in the exact same way, the miracle would not happen twice. (We know this because there are a lot of people with cancer and this hasn't happened before).
In short, "god did it" is not science, it's religion.
As for abstinence only sex education. You're presenting a straw man argument. No one is encouraging teenagers to have sex before marriage. Furthermore, no one is suggesting that teen pregnancy is a good thing. These are not arguments presented by your opposition and therefore warrant no further consideration. (The fact that you mentioned them means that you are either confused about the arguments actually being presented, or that you are intentionally attempting to mislead your opposition).
Your statement about "most abstinence organizations... birth control methods" has no support. Please provide a link to some study that was done or something similar. unfortunately, I cannot take your word for it, just as I don't expect you to take mine if I were to say "most abstinence organizations do NOT teach birth control methods". I also cannot take your word that you are a former president of an abstinence organization, just as I don't expect you to take mine if I say "I am a former king of England
Actually, he's relatively correct. Yeah, a bit of a troll, but not amazingly far off. My sex ed class didn't have birth control covered. It was all this nonsense "don't have sex... condoms don't work, etc". Fortunately, that's started to change here (Colorado) with a law that was passed a couple years ago mandating that government money could not be spent on abstinence-only sex ed. But it's still pretty piss poor. Sex ed is a 3 day section in health class, which isn't nearly enough to teach it. 2 days are "don't have sex" with bullshit statistics about how condoms don't work and pregnancies happen 100% of the time if you're not married.
The last day they actually discuss birth control... but only to extent that it doesn't work. Condoms only PREVENT STDS!!! THAT MEANS YOU'LL GET AIDS IF YOU HAVE SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE!!!! etc.
As for creationism, when we have a state (Kansas) that is trying to mandate disclaimers on textbooks stating that evolution is only a theory and blah blah blah, it really says something about the educational system. Gravity is only a theory, why don't we have disclaimers for that? I'm willing to bet that any test on evolution in Kansas must accept as a correct answer "I refuse to answer because of my beliefs" or "god did it" lest the teacher be fired due to public outcry.
"not bitching that "the taxpayers pay you to teach so we own all of your creative works and you can't ever make money off of them". "
That is EXACTLY how it works with the government. Any work produced by a government official in the performance of their duties is automatically placed int he public domain and may not be copyrighted. Why shouldn't it be the same for teachers being paid BY THE PUBLIC. There is NO practical difference here whatsoever. The only difference is that instead of making geological survey maps, they're making lesson plans. They're both made by people being paid by the public and should thus both be in the public domain.
I agree that teachers are not paid enough, but the solution is not to start letting them sell stuff that should be free. We don't let underpaid government employees sell off their work that's int he public domain because they aren't making enough money, why should this be any different?
"According to some studies over in europe, after pot was made 'legal', usage went down,"
Alright, seriously? my post was modded down to 1, but this mention of "studies" gets modded up to "+5 insightful"?
Alright fine, I guess I'll do the same:
According to some studies done in America, when pot was made illegal, it caused usage to go down.
Mod this +5 please!!! I mentioned "Studies"!!!
It's once per year per agency. You can request your information every 4 months from a different agency. Of course, if there's problems on your report that were added right after you checked it, it's impossible for you to see until next year.
Like I said, it's as close to secret as humanly possible.
"The free market ALWAYS works...if it exists."
No, no, no, absolutely not!
It does not always work.
Look up:
Moral hazard problem
Coase theorem (negative externalities in an unowned resource, e.g. the air/environment)
Those two things should be enough to show that the free market doesn't always work. And, of course, there's the problem with monopolies as you said.
There exists the ability for the US to encrypt the signal such that only military receivers can use it. They claim that the newer satellites will be incapable of using this "selective availability". Of course, this is either a complete lie or they already have another system to deny GPS that's called something else that they haven't made public yet.
apt-gets you!
No, voting for idiot third parties like that means that you bothered to show up because:
A) You were bored and had nothing to do
B) You were stoned (i.e. legalize cannabis party)
C) Thought that the ballot was a coloring book and filled in random boxes
I mean, voting for the green party, the libertarians, etc at least says something about the opinion of the populous, but voting for parties like "legalize cannabis" is completely nonsense. The only reason they're on the ballot is because someone read a book one day about election laws and decided it'd just be fucking hilarious to fill out some paperwork to get on the ballot.
If you want to not vote then please move your sorry ass out of my country and go to one where they don't have the freedom to vote. You have no right to any political opinion at this point.
You have an obligation to research the candidates and determine which one would best serve your country and then vote accordingly. Not voting will NOT result in neither party getting elected. Even if both candidates are complete shit, you still have an obligation to vote for the least shitty.
Yeah, but Gore wasn't.
And then how do you verify the million or so people that misread the paper or just want to cause shit and claim their vote was not counted properly? Not trying to rail on your idea, but this does present one hell of a practical problem that needs to be taken into account.
"I claim that there is no flaw. It is now your job to find the flaw and prove me wrong."
Not really. It is your job to prove to me that there is no flaw. It's the same thing with a paper ballot. You still have to prove to me that there is not a flaw in the paper ballot. Of course, I can look over the ballot in all of about 15 seconds and see that it's the correct ballot. It's far harder to find a race condition in a voting machine running proprietary software that causes miscounted votes.
There is no way for you to verify that the paper ballot you are using is an actual legitimate ballot. I suppose you could call some city department and have them certify the ballot, but you could do the same thing for the voting machines. Electronic voting is not necessarily undemocratic. It's only undemocratic if it's being used in an undemocratic way. You could abuse paper ballots the exact same way you could abuse electronic machines.
The only real difference here is that no one has tried to sell the government paper ballots that don't count your votes, or lose your votes, or change your votes, or fail to leave a paper trail. Electronic machines done right are just as secure as paper ballots.
It chokes the supply a significant amount. There's a large number of people here (myself included) that wouldn't know where to find drugs if they wanted them this week. That's one hell of a step away from them being available at your local supermarket/drugstore.
Not that this is how it should be, but yes, it does stop the supply somewhat.
Solient green is PEOPLE!
The difference is that alcohol became legal again.
"Perhaps they really OUGHT to be kept secret, for some reason beyond yourself.
If we had access to TSA internal memos, so could terrorists, who could then evade TSA screeners."
No, no, no, absolutely NOT! I don't know how you made the jump from "terrorists could get the memos" to "terrorists can evade the screeners". A terrorists knowing that the TSA is "checking for bombs" doesn't help them for shit. Furthermore, this disclosure doesn't apply to shit that needs to be kept secret. It applies to shit that needs to be made public.
There is a reason this needs to be made public. If you allow them to keep this secret then you allow them to slap a "classified in the interest of national security" sticker on anything and everything. This includes secret policies, illegal laws, illegal programs (i.e. secret police). If you trust the government that much and want to give up this much freedom, then move to china where blind faith in the government is expected of you and get the hell out of my country.
Who modded this as flamebait?? This is a reasonably funny joke. I suspect someone was a tad too quick on the trigger with the moderation and mistook AAA (automotive association of America) for whatever spam post above is spamming "GNAA".
I hope to god you're being sarcastic. Unfortunately there are dipshits that truly believe what you just said.
We should be given access on a completely unrestricted basis 24/7/365 including holidays, weekends, etc. This is data that is used to deny you bank loans, car loans, causes higher rates on many things, etc. No one should be allowed to keep this data without allowing the affected parties to view every single fucking record. Furthermore, there should be financial penalties for any inaccuracies. They accidentally show that you paid late once when you really didn't? That's a $20000 fine, paid to YOU. I don't know why we think that companies need to be allowed to keep records like this and use them in business dealings but keep them completely secret. (Access once per year is nonsense, that's as close to secret as humanly possible)
"Ask yourself, what would you want running if the entire city or region was nuked?"
If part of the US was nuked then your servers matter exactly nothing. I don't understand your comment about having redundancy in different areas of the world. Any event large enough to affect an entire country is large enough to affect the world to the point that your business matters nothing. Global free-for-all war? Yeah, no one's going to be visiting your website to check up on the latest furniture prices.
On the other hand, it's also spoken like someone with some idea of what he's doing.
If you need something that is outside your area of expertise, then you hire someone who knows what he's doing. For example, let's say I have an idea for a website and I know how to run all the servers and deal with the IT side of things, but can't actually design the website to save my life. I then hire someone who knows how to design and code a website.
She got irritated about being billed? Did she seriously expect you to provide tech support to her BUSINESS for FREE? If so, I've got to wonder how that business is actually doing.