Marx directly claimed that machines cannot lower the cost of goods, because machines would naturally be sold for the value of the labor they replaced.
Are you sure that criticism wasn't made specifically as a critique of how automation worked, from the point of view of labor-hours of income that had to be exchanged for a given quantity of goods, specifically in a capitalist society (and, remember, Marx was critiquing 19th Century capitalism, not modern "capitalism" in which every "capitalist" state has -- largely to address the same ills of 19th century capitalism that Marx critiqued -- adopted a wide variety of state programs, many of which are closely related to specific recommendations in the Communist Manifesto.)
Most of the benefit of capitalism is that technology reduces the cost of goods
Insofar as that is true, how is that a benefit of capitalism?
The theory of Communism proposes that humans will work for the betterment of their fellow tribe members.
No, actually, it doesn't. Like democracy (which it is, in a sense, an analog of, addressing economic rights instead of political rights) it relies on the idea that humans will work for the betterment of themselves, individually, so that widely and equally distributing power among the population will result in the broadest possible benefit. As with democracy, one of the places that communism breaks down in practice (and, in fact, is "broken by design" in all real-world attempts to implement anything called "Communism", which are based not directly on Marx and Engels work, but on Lenin's adaptation which introduce the idea of a priviledged self-selected elite working -- in Leninist theory -- on behalf of the masses, because it was intended to work in places that hadn't met the prerequisites Marx had identified for a Communist revolution. This replacement of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" with what amounted to a dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat was pretty contrary to the whole idea of Communism, and in theory as well as in practice is very similar to fascist corporatism.)
The theory is bunk because it utterly fails to understand the fact that personal economic incentives are the primary driver of human behavior.
The critique of capitalism at the center of Marx's communism relies, in part, on that fact; it is particularly central to the idea that the "alienation of labor" is a social problem as well as a personal problem for workers. It is true that it is a common criticism (from very early times -- the criticism is specifically addressed in the Communist Manifesto) that Communism would do away with personal incentive because it would abolish property. But, while the Manifesto talks about eliminating "bourgeois property", it specifically draws an analogy to the destruction of feudal property with the creation of "bourgeois property". The Manifesto, on its own, lays out some of how Communists sought to transform the model of property -- particularly, Communists sought an end to private ownership of land in favor of renting from the State, and to end the heritability of wealth; just as what Communists refer to as "bourgeois" property involved the transition to entailments and other encumbered forms of ownership as the norm for property rights -- particularly in land -- the Communist model of property was essentially and end to fee simple ownership and other permanent rights as the dominant norm in favor of life or (particularly in the case of real property) term interests. The Manifesto clearly sees the mode of property it adopts as providing personal economic incentives -- and actually providing personal economic incentives that are better at promoting economic progress than those produced by "borgeois" property just as the "bourgeois" property model was seen as doing compared to feudal property. One can certainly argue that the Communist model is wrong about how the personal incentives would work out in the environment its programs proposed, but it is clearly wrong to say that the theory of Communism failed to recognize that personal economic incentives are a primary driver of human behavior, since that observation is at the center of Communist theory.
I believe it is fair to say parity exists and that SQLAlchemy likely even provides a superior ORM than ActiveRecord.
Sure, as you point out Rails isn't exactly standing still, just the same I don't have a problem offering Python has reached web framework parity with Rails.
Perhaps, but there are other, arguably better, Ruby ORMs (Sequel, DataMapper) -- which can be used with Rails, and some of which are the preferred ORMs on other Ruby web frameworks -- than ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord is dominant because it comes with Rails as part of the basic "all-in-one" solution, but its easily replaceable even when using the rest of Rails, and there are several alternatives within the Ruby ecosystem. Ruby -- even when it comes to web frameworks in general and ORMs in particular -- is more than Rails (and certainly more than the core components of Rails), though Rails is one of the big engines that drives Ruby.
Jython exists for the very same reasons jRuby does. Anyone not threatened by Python, as you clearly are, is going to compare Jython to RJuby and nothing else. You don't see other people running around making such odd claims. When people say Ruby they mean Ruby. And when people say Python, they mean Python.
Ruby and Python are languages. MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius, Ruby Enterprise Edition, etc., and CPython, Jython, IronPython, etc. are implementations. If you want to compare language-to-language on implementation-dependent features (like speed), the fair way is to compare the best implementation of each language across the feature set you are comparing. Jython and JRuby share a focus on Java integration, but beyond that aren't really similar; Jython is one of the slower Python implementation (in most tests I've seen, much slower than CPython), JRuby is in most tests the fastest Ruby implementation (although the main 1.9 implementation is often close to JRuby.) So, if you are talking about the speed you can get out of the language, comparing JRuby to CPython is fairly reasonable.
Furthermore, those that did migrate largely did so because of rails. Now that Python has a huge bucket of competing solutions, some arguably superior, especially in ORMs, the draw of Ruby vs Python seems to have been drastically reduced.
I'm not really sure that's all that true: even if Python frameworks caught up with where Rails was, there are lots of Ruby frameworks -- inspired by people hitting places where Rails wasn't ideal -- that are better than Rails for lots of things (including Merb, which is merging into Rails with Rails 3), and for ORM particularly there are a lot better solutions than ActiveRecord for general use, like Sequel.
While I don't have direct experience, Jython is very mature. It supports 100% of Python 1.5 and a good chunk of Python 1.6.
You mean 2.5/2.6, instead of 1.5/1.6, right?
Even so, JRuby -- which supports essentially all of Ruby 1.8 except Continuations, and has a 1.9 mode that is close on the heels of the mainline Ruby 1.9 -- is a more current Ruby than Jython is for Python.
For Python, Google is actively pushing the LLVM effort forward, made initial steps to make it an OS project, and has already made significant strides in the JIT-Python realm. Whereas, Ruby is still a community effort. Take from that what you will.
Both JRuby and Rubinius (one of two--MacRuby being the other--Ruby implementations that leverage LLVM, Rubinius using it for JIT) are open sources projects that are coordinated by (small, to be sure) full-time teams at Engine Yard (the JRuby team was formerly at Sun). Sure, Engine Yard isn't Google , but it is a for-profit company with real sales that has dedicated full-time resources to Ruby, sponsoring the core teams for two of the most important Ruby implementations (and sponsoring full-time developers assigned to Rails 3, as well.)
I really never figured out exactly who Ruby appeals to. It seems those who would be interested in Ruby would also be attracted by the more mature Python.
Lots of Rubyists are also attracted by Python, though even many of those that like Python in general often dislike particular aspects of Python (the whitespace handling is a big one.) Also, lots of people prefer Ruby because they like particular Ruby frameworks (Rails, of course, is a big one) or because they found it an easier transition from Perl. And lots of people have particular features that make them prefer Ruby (blocks are the one I've seen cited most often.)
The second you add anything that "works around" the standard way of doing things, whatever standard you've adopted, you've abandoned all hope of having standard operating procedures and consistent production management.
CPAN, Rubygems, and Python easy_install don't "work around" the standard way of doing things, they are tools that work across a wide variety of platforms, which don't share a standard way of doing things (and some of which don't have much of a standard to start with.)
It would certainly be good to have, for a each, seamless integration with the standard package manager or equivalent for each platform on which they work, but that's no small task for any of them.
I happen to be Uruguayan and currently live in Uruguay... and while I endorse the OLPC project in my country (Plan Ceibal), I'd say you're grossly exaggerating its results - we already had a very good literacy prior to it (as in, better than the US), and the XO itself might not even have been the cheapest option.
The assessment from the study cited in the article I linked to might exaggerate the results, but note that the reference was to computer literacy, not literacy -- there's a pretty big difference between the two. (And, incidentally, the US has pretty abysmal levels of functional literacy, so if you are using any meaningful measure of literacy to compare with, I wouldn't classify "better than the US" as necessarily "very good" when it comes to literacy.)
and the XO itself might not even have been the cheapest option.
The XO may not be the cheapest (or even, what is more important, cost effective) option, perhaps -- though "might not be" isn't the same as a credible basis for believing that its not -- but certainly, the existence of the XO has spurred lots of efforts by big players in the hardware and software industry whose place would be threatened by widespread adoption of another platform to compete directly with it, and those other companies are defending long-term profit interests that go well beyond the immediate market for the XO and similar devices. But those other choices wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the OLPC project.
And, whether its necessarily the best product or the best solution, its hard to call the XO's that have been delivered, and what they have enabled, not a real product or a real solution.
Though if the OLPC project had not existed, I doubt such a far-reaching and ambitious plan would have been implemented, so even if it was more PR than anything, it WAS important, in making the politician's minds open to the possibility (and it was a HUGE selling point for politicians of the current party in power at the recent elections which they won).
Exactly. But Negroponte is about PR and vapor, not producing actual solutions or products.
So, ignoring the rest of what OLPC has delivered, the 380,000+ computers in the hands of Uruguayan students that have raised the average computer literacy of 8 year olds to the average level of 18 year olds prior to the project aren't "actual solutions or products"?
(And, yes, while XO are used, the local project is a lot broader than just getting OLPC laptops -- which is exactly the point of the OLPC project, to enable broader projects in the countries that use it.)
This doesn't solve anything really. They have very little water. They have very little food.
The developing world is not composed exclusively of places with "very little water" and "very little food", and, really, the parts of it that meet those descriptions aren't the principle target for the OLPC. The OLPC is targetted largely for countries where basic subsistence needs aren't the primary concern (if nothing else, because countries where those are the primary needs aren't likely to be able to purchase even cheap computers, though there has been some discussion of the possibility of other countries purchasing OLPC laptops for some of the poorest-of-the-poor countries.)
I think the country currently closest to deploying OLPC on a "one laptop per child" basis is Uruguay, which is -- while a developing country -- far from the kind of situation you describe.
I still am not entirely sure about this project -- there seems to be more of a reliance on technology as an end in itself, simply crossing fingers for some kind of digital third-world transformation to occur.
From the beginning, the OLPC project has been clear that it is an education project in which technolgoy is a means of enabling a particular mode of education, not a project in which technology is an ends.
Instead of outcomes, they seem to be focusing on outputs, namely laptops distributed. But what are they supposed to do with them practically? Does it give them a pocket library, replacing books if not thousands of books?
Yes, one focus of the project has been developing Free (libre) content.
Will this help them with agriculture?
Its not intended to, directly, though if it succeeds either in increasing the quality or (by being a more efficient replacement for other materials) reducing the cost (or both) of education, it is likely to do so as a secondary effect, but improving skill base and/or freeing resources.
Are there any structured curriculums for learning?
There is some work on those in some of the content projects, though, remember, that the prime focus of the OLPC has been to sell to national education ministries. Constructing structured curricula around the provided resources would remain the responsibility of those users, for the most part. (Also, the focus of the OLPC project has been on enabling constructivist education, which has less focus on structured curricula; still, its features are also useful for more traditional education.)
Can it do anything with disaster recovery, like help locate food and water?
Not that I know of. Nor is it advertised or promoted as a disaster recovery tool.
Are there guides on it for setting up sanitation systems and preventing disease?
Really 400 Mhz is a decent speed, so it can take some overhead, but not the overhead of code being interpreted.
That depends what the code is doing. When I was in junior high, my dad and I wrote a household finance tracking program with tolerable performance (because there weren't a lot of complicated calculations, probably the most significant being the one to calculate the current value of savings bonds) in a combination of interpreted BASIC and DOS batch scripts that ran on a 10MHz 8088. While you probably don't want to try to run a JavaScript-based FPS on a 400MHz machine, there are probably lots of applications for which a 400MHz processor is more than sufficient to run interpreted apps in JavaScript and other interpreted languages at tolerable speeds.
"Green Maraschino" seems to be their cloud service, not the OS; the Debian-based distro, I would imagine, is a customized spin of Xubuntu (at least, that's what other sites I've seen have referred to being used on other CherryPal machines, so it would be the natural choice for the Africa.)
If you pay lawyers and marketers and crap all over computer scientists and engineers in terms of pay, status, holiday work hours, then why do you expect anyone with a lick of brains to go into these fields?
I don't think, either in terms of average starting salary, average salary in the profession, or general degree of respect from the public lawyers do better than engineers. Probably better than scientists (including computer scientists), but that more immediately practical professions pay better than academic and theoretical pursuits isn't all that suprising, especially in a capitalist society (the benefits of theoretical pursuits being distant and diffuse, which markets inherently fail to value.)
pay for a public school teacher is more than sufficient, if you consider 2 months off in the summer, a winter break, a spring break, plus not a minute of unpaid overtime!
If the people who we'd want to be teaching these classes are, in fact, choosing to do other work in part because of pay and working conditions, then the pay and working conditions are, empirically, not sufficient.
Whether they are what is morally warranted, which seems to be your argument, is entirely unrelated to the practical problem.
Maybe the student should have made some good points, or tried to answer, or did anything but "????".
Whether or not that is a reasonable expectations depends on things that weren't related in the story of what happened -- such as the questioners relationship to the student. If some random person comes up and asks me a nonsense question like that, I'm certainly not going to feel obligated to discuss it with them. I might feel like doing so, I might just give them a weird look and continue with my business.
On the other hand, they don't like foreign languages, shop class, literature classes, or home ec class, so we dumped them.
We did? Most districts whose requirements I've see never had shop as a requirement, have literature as a component (a bigger component in more advanced classes, but a component even in the most basic classes) of core English classes, and either require foreign language or have a requirement which can be filled with a foreign language or a short list of alternatives. Some also have home ec (usually under a different name) as a requirement in some "tracks" (primarily, those not intended as college prep tracks.)
The biggest problem is the demand that kids learn something old, so that decades later they'll have amazing 'puter skills.
That's a big problem with the focus of most computer classes, which are focussed on developing narrow proficiency in particular popular applications (and, for this purpose, programming languages are included) rather than basic principles. Really, I think that what is needed isn't so much a computer curriculum per se as process analysis practice integrated into the general curriculum, but computer programming can be a pretty ideal component of teaching that (that is not to say that computer classes -- even programming classes -- that don't focus on that goal are particularly good for that purpose, just that if you are focussed on that goal, computer programming is a good way of teaching it.)
No, they don't, because you're skewing your data. You're looking at the entire comp sci profession and comparing it to those who play football in the NFL
I didn't say "in the NFL".
in other words, the general field of one against those who made it to the very top in the other.
Well, no, I was referring to the general field of each profession.
Admittedly, one profession may well be harder to get into at all, and it may well be that investing time and effort into computer skills is a lower risk investment than investing time and effort into football skills.
I think a lot of young people just don't find it interesting. I think a lot of older people feel the same way. People tend to do what they're passionate about, and passionate people tend to think less of the opinions of others and more about what they want to do. Do we really need to press this field on more people?
A lot of young people don't find reading, writing, or basic mathematics -- or general science, civics or economics -- interesting either, and we press those on people as educational requirements. Given that computing is a fairly fundamental tool of modern society in every field, a certain baseline understanding of the basic principles involved may be quite reasonable to expect as a core educational requirement.
I asked a 20 year old full time student who the former vice president of America was for the past 8 years was.. I get a "?????".
Since that question is framed in a way which is both extremely awkward and does not have a correct answer, "?????" is an appropriate response. There are usually several former Vice Presidents of the United States of America -- even if you restrict it to living former Vice Presidents, otherwise there have been more than one since the second VP left office and that will always be the case -- at any one point of time, much less in any eight year period. Except when there is only one such person, none is "the" former Vice President at the time.
Computer science is far more practical/pragmatic (and really productive for society as a whole) and monetarily rewarding later in life than football.
The mean annual incomes of professionals in the fields of computer science and football might call into question the "monetarily rewarding" part of that statement.
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Are you sure that criticism wasn't made specifically as a critique of how automation worked, from the point of view of labor-hours of income that had to be exchanged for a given quantity of goods, specifically in a capitalist society (and, remember, Marx was critiquing 19th Century capitalism, not modern "capitalism" in which every "capitalist" state has -- largely to address the same ills of 19th century capitalism that Marx critiqued -- adopted a wide variety of state programs, many of which are closely related to specific recommendations in the Communist Manifesto.)
Insofar as that is true, how is that a benefit of capitalism?
No, actually, it doesn't. Like democracy (which it is, in a sense, an analog of, addressing economic rights instead of political rights) it relies on the idea that humans will work for the betterment of themselves, individually, so that widely and equally distributing power among the population will result in the broadest possible benefit. As with democracy, one of the places that communism breaks down in practice (and, in fact, is "broken by design" in all real-world attempts to implement anything called "Communism", which are based not directly on Marx and Engels work, but on Lenin's adaptation which introduce the idea of a priviledged self-selected elite working -- in Leninist theory -- on behalf of the masses, because it was intended to work in places that hadn't met the prerequisites Marx had identified for a Communist revolution. This replacement of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" with what amounted to a dictatorship on behalf of the proletariat was pretty contrary to the whole idea of Communism, and in theory as well as in practice is very similar to fascist corporatism.)
The critique of capitalism at the center of Marx's communism relies, in part, on that fact; it is particularly central to the idea that the "alienation of labor" is a social problem as well as a personal problem for workers. It is true that it is a common criticism (from very early times -- the criticism is specifically addressed in the Communist Manifesto) that Communism would do away with personal incentive because it would abolish property. But, while the Manifesto talks about eliminating "bourgeois property", it specifically draws an analogy to the destruction of feudal property with the creation of "bourgeois property". The Manifesto, on its own, lays out some of how Communists sought to transform the model of property -- particularly, Communists sought an end to private ownership of land in favor of renting from the State, and to end the heritability of wealth; just as what Communists refer to as "bourgeois" property involved the transition to entailments and other encumbered forms of ownership as the norm for property rights -- particularly in land -- the Communist model of property was essentially and end to fee simple ownership and other permanent rights as the dominant norm in favor of life or (particularly in the case of real property) term interests. The Manifesto clearly sees the mode of property it adopts as providing personal economic incentives -- and actually providing personal economic incentives that are better at promoting economic progress than those produced by "borgeois" property just as the "bourgeois" property model was seen as doing compared to feudal property. One can certainly argue that the Communist model is wrong about how the personal incentives would work out in the environment its programs proposed, but it is clearly wrong to say that the theory of Communism failed to recognize that personal economic incentives are a primary driver of human behavior, since that observation is at the center of Communist theory.
Where does anything in your long rambling recitation of results of the "Computer Language Benchmarks Game" contradict anything I've said?
Perhaps, but there are other, arguably better, Ruby ORMs (Sequel, DataMapper) -- which can be used with Rails, and some of which are the preferred ORMs on other Ruby web frameworks -- than ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord is dominant because it comes with Rails as part of the basic "all-in-one" solution, but its easily replaceable even when using the rest of Rails, and there are several alternatives within the Ruby ecosystem. Ruby -- even when it comes to web frameworks in general and ORMs in particular -- is more than Rails (and certainly more than the core components of Rails), though Rails is one of the big engines that drives Ruby.
Ruby and Python are languages. MRI, JRuby, IronRuby, Rubinius, Ruby Enterprise Edition, etc., and CPython, Jython, IronPython, etc. are implementations. If you want to compare language-to-language on implementation-dependent features (like speed), the fair way is to compare the best implementation of each language across the feature set you are comparing. Jython and JRuby share a focus on Java integration, but beyond that aren't really similar; Jython is one of the slower Python implementation (in most tests I've seen, much slower than CPython), JRuby is in most tests the fastest Ruby implementation (although the main 1.9 implementation is often close to JRuby.) So, if you are talking about the speed you can get out of the language, comparing JRuby to CPython is fairly reasonable.
I'm not really sure that's all that true: even if Python frameworks caught up with where Rails was, there are lots of Ruby frameworks -- inspired by people hitting places where Rails wasn't ideal -- that are better than Rails for lots of things (including Merb, which is merging into Rails with Rails 3), and for ORM particularly there are a lot better solutions than ActiveRecord for general use, like Sequel.
While I don't have direct experience, Jython is very mature. It supports 100% of Python 1.5 and a good chunk of Python 1.6.
You mean 2.5/2.6, instead of 1.5/1.6, right?
Even so, JRuby -- which supports essentially all of Ruby 1.8 except Continuations, and has a 1.9 mode that is close on the heels of the mainline Ruby 1.9 -- is a more current Ruby than Jython is for Python.
Both JRuby and Rubinius (one of two--MacRuby being the other--Ruby implementations that leverage LLVM, Rubinius using it for JIT) are open sources projects that are coordinated by (small, to be sure) full-time teams at Engine Yard (the JRuby team was formerly at Sun). Sure, Engine Yard isn't Google , but it is a for-profit company with real sales that has dedicated full-time resources to Ruby, sponsoring the core teams for two of the most important Ruby implementations (and sponsoring full-time developers assigned to Rails 3, as well.)
Lots of Rubyists are also attracted by Python, though even many of those that like Python in general often dislike particular aspects of Python (the whitespace handling is a big one.) Also, lots of people prefer Ruby because they like particular Ruby frameworks (Rails, of course, is a big one) or because they found it an easier transition from Perl. And lots of people have particular features that make them prefer Ruby (blocks are the one I've seen cited most often.)
CPAN, Rubygems, and Python easy_install don't "work around" the standard way of doing things, they are tools that work across a wide variety of platforms, which don't share a standard way of doing things (and some of which don't have much of a standard to start with.)
It would certainly be good to have, for a each, seamless integration with the standard package manager or equivalent for each platform on which they work, but that's no small task for any of them.
The assessment from the study cited in the article I linked to might exaggerate the results, but note that the reference was to computer literacy, not literacy -- there's a pretty big difference between the two. (And, incidentally, the US has pretty abysmal levels of functional literacy, so if you are using any meaningful measure of literacy to compare with, I wouldn't classify "better than the US" as necessarily "very good" when it comes to literacy.)
The XO may not be the cheapest (or even, what is more important, cost effective) option, perhaps -- though "might not be" isn't the same as a credible basis for believing that its not -- but certainly, the existence of the XO has spurred lots of efforts by big players in the hardware and software industry whose place would be threatened by widespread adoption of another platform to compete directly with it, and those other companies are defending long-term profit interests that go well beyond the immediate market for the XO and similar devices. But those other choices wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the OLPC project.
And, whether its necessarily the best product or the best solution, its hard to call the XO's that have been delivered, and what they have enabled, not a real product or a real solution.
Really? Because I can remember writing without a keyboard.
In fact, plenty of touch-sensitive devices without keyboards are designed for accepting writing as an input method.
So, ignoring the rest of what OLPC has delivered, the 380,000+ computers in the hands of Uruguayan students that have raised the average computer literacy of 8 year olds to the average level of 18 year olds prior to the project aren't "actual solutions or products"?
(And, yes, while XO are used, the local project is a lot broader than just getting OLPC laptops -- which is exactly the point of the OLPC project, to enable broader projects in the countries that use it.)
The developing world is not composed exclusively of places with "very little water" and "very little food", and, really, the parts of it that meet those descriptions aren't the principle target for the OLPC. The OLPC is targetted largely for countries where basic subsistence needs aren't the primary concern (if nothing else, because countries where those are the primary needs aren't likely to be able to purchase even cheap computers, though there has been some discussion of the possibility of other countries purchasing OLPC laptops for some of the poorest-of-the-poor countries.)
I think the country currently closest to deploying OLPC on a "one laptop per child" basis is Uruguay, which is -- while a developing country -- far from the kind of situation you describe.
From the beginning, the OLPC project has been clear that it is an education project in which technolgoy is a means of enabling a particular mode of education, not a project in which technology is an ends.
Yes, one focus of the project has been developing Free (libre) content.
Its not intended to, directly, though if it succeeds either in increasing the quality or (by being a more efficient replacement for other materials) reducing the cost (or both) of education, it is likely to do so as a secondary effect, but improving skill base and/or freeing resources.
There is some work on those in some of the content projects, though, remember, that the prime focus of the OLPC has been to sell to national education ministries. Constructing structured curricula around the provided resources would remain the responsibility of those users, for the most part. (Also, the focus of the OLPC project has been on enabling constructivist education, which has less focus on structured curricula; still, its features are also useful for more traditional education.)
Not that I know of. Nor is it advertised or promoted as a disaster recovery tool.
There's at least one project for that, yes.
That depends what the code is doing. When I was in junior high, my dad and I wrote a household finance tracking program with tolerable performance (because there weren't a lot of complicated calculations, probably the most significant being the one to calculate the current value of savings bonds) in a combination of interpreted BASIC and DOS batch scripts that ran on a 10MHz 8088. While you probably don't want to try to run a JavaScript-based FPS on a 400MHz machine, there are probably lots of applications for which a 400MHz processor is more than sufficient to run interpreted apps in JavaScript and other interpreted languages at tolerable speeds.
"Green Maraschino" seems to be their cloud service, not the OS; the Debian-based distro, I would imagine, is a customized spin of Xubuntu (at least, that's what other sites I've seen have referred to being used on other CherryPal machines, so it would be the natural choice for the Africa.)
I don't think, either in terms of average starting salary, average salary in the profession, or general degree of respect from the public lawyers do better than engineers. Probably better than scientists (including computer scientists), but that more immediately practical professions pay better than academic and theoretical pursuits isn't all that suprising, especially in a capitalist society (the benefits of theoretical pursuits being distant and diffuse, which markets inherently fail to value.)
If the people who we'd want to be teaching these classes are, in fact, choosing to do other work in part because of pay and working conditions, then the pay and working conditions are, empirically, not sufficient.
Whether they are what is morally warranted, which seems to be your argument, is entirely unrelated to the practical problem.
Whether or not that is a reasonable expectations depends on things that weren't related in the story of what happened -- such as the questioners relationship to the student. If some random person comes up and asks me a nonsense question like that, I'm certainly not going to feel obligated to discuss it with them. I might feel like doing so, I might just give them a weird look and continue with my business.
We did? Most districts whose requirements I've see never had shop as a requirement, have literature as a component (a bigger component in more advanced classes, but a component even in the most basic classes) of core English classes, and either require foreign language or have a requirement which can be filled with a foreign language or a short list of alternatives. Some also have home ec (usually under a different name) as a requirement in some "tracks" (primarily, those not intended as college prep tracks.)
That's a big problem with the focus of most computer classes, which are focussed on developing narrow proficiency in particular popular applications (and, for this purpose, programming languages are included) rather than basic principles. Really, I think that what is needed isn't so much a computer curriculum per se as process analysis practice integrated into the general curriculum, but computer programming can be a pretty ideal component of teaching that (that is not to say that computer classes -- even programming classes -- that don't focus on that goal are particularly good for that purpose, just that if you are focussed on that goal, computer programming is a good way of teaching it.)
I didn't say "in the NFL".
Well, no, I was referring to the general field of each profession.
Admittedly, one profession may well be harder to get into at all, and it may well be that investing time and effort into computer skills is a lower risk investment than investing time and effort into football skills.
A lot of young people don't find reading, writing, or basic mathematics -- or general science, civics or economics -- interesting either, and we press those on people as educational requirements. Given that computing is a fairly fundamental tool of modern society in every field, a certain baseline understanding of the basic principles involved may be quite reasonable to expect as a core educational requirement.
And how, exactly, do you get those people to accept the combination of pay and working conditions given to high school teachers?
Since that question is framed in a way which is both extremely awkward and does not have a correct answer, "?????" is an appropriate response. There are usually several former Vice Presidents of the United States of America -- even if you restrict it to living former Vice Presidents, otherwise there have been more than one since the second VP left office and that will always be the case -- at any one point of time, much less in any eight year period. Except when there is only one such person, none is "the" former Vice President at the time.
The mean annual incomes of professionals in the fields of computer science and football might call into question the "monetarily rewarding" part of that statement.
I hate to break it to you, but those things you can install Windows on are called "computers", not "friends".