JayB

Inspiring me to price out 50cc motorcycles....

What desirable end would engaging in a dialogue with Hamas achieve, in your estimation? "Hey - how's it going?" "Not bad, not bad." "You guys still determined to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, dreaming of the day when 'Even the rocks and trees will cry out "Oh Muslim, there's a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him..." etc." "Yeah, pretty much." "I see. Keep in touch..."

Not trying to advance a claim for or against a particular model - just found this interesting. "Hurricane Expert Reassesses Link to Warming By Andrew C. Revkin New OrleansNew Orleans after Katrina struck. (Associated Press) A fresh study by a leading hurricane researcher has raised new questions about how hurricane strength and frequency might, or might not, be influenced by global warming. Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle nicely summarized the research on Friday. Kerry EmanuelKerry Emanuel of M.I.T. (Jodi Hilton for The New York Times) The research is important because the lead author is Kerry Emanuel, the M.I.T. climate scientist who in the 1980’s foresaw a rise in hurricane intensity in a human-warmed world and in 2005, just a few weeks before Hurricane Katrina swamped New Orleans, asserted in a Nature paper that he had found statistical evidence linking rising hurricane energy and warming. That work was supported by some subsequent studies, but refuted by others. Despite the uncertainty in the science, hurricanes quickly became a potent icon in environmental campaigns, as well as in “An Inconvenient Truth,” the popular climate documentary featuring former Vice President Al Gore. The message was that global warming was no longer a looming issue and was exacting a deadly toll now. The new study, in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, is hardly definitive in its own right, essentially raising more questions than it resolves. But it definitely rolls back Dr. Emanuel’s sense of confidence about a recent role for global warming. (The abstract is here. A pdf is downloadable on Dr. Emanuel’s ftp page.) I queried Dr. Emanuel about it and he sent this note Friday night: The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us. There are various interpretations possible, e.g. a) The big increase in hurricane power over the past 30 years or so may not have much to do with global warming, or b) The models are simply not faithfully reproducing what nature is doing. Hard to know which to believe yet. The study essentially meshed two kinds of computer models — the massive global climate simulations used to project long-term consequences of building greenhouse gases and small high-resolution simulations of little atmospheric disturbances that can grow into hurricanes. When hundreds of potential storms were seeded across warming oceans, some places in some computer runs — like the North Pacific — saw more activity, but others saw less intensification and fewer storms. As Dr. Emanuel told Eric in the Chronicle: “The take-home message is that we’ve got a lot of work to do,” Emanuel said. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty in this problem. The bulk of the evidence is that hurricane power will go up, but in some places it will go down.” The fresh findings, and Dr. Emanuel’s willingness to follow the science, remind me of something he told my colleague Claudia Dreifus in 2006: “t’s a really bad thing for a scientist to have an immovable, intractable position.” On his SciGuy blog, Eric discusses some of the ramifications of Dr. Emanuel’s new storm study: • This should put to rest a lot of the nonsense about a global warming conspiracy among scientists. Emanuel, faced with new evidence, has moderated his viewpoint. That’s what responsible scientists do, and most are responsible. The amount of scientist-bashing when it comes to global warming is generally quite deplorable. • Anyone who doubts that the threat of large hurricanes is still being used as part of global warming campaigns should look no further than the energy and climate platform of a presidential candidate [pdf alert], who writes, “Global warming is real, is happening now and is the result of human activities. The number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes has almost doubled in the last 30 years.” • If you’re a skeptic, and you welcome these results, please remember that these are the same climate models you bash when they show global temperatures steadily rising during the next century. They are solid points that hold lessons for advocates on both sides of the charged debate over climate science and its implications for society. There are lessons here for journalists, too. Science is a trajectory toward understanding, not a set of truths. Sometimes that can be inconvenient, whether writing a headline or advocating for a climate bill. But somehow society has to learn how to be comfortable with this aspect of the scientific enterprise, while not fuzzing out because things aren’t crystal clear. As Stephen Schneider, a veteran climatologist at Stanford, recently mused, the question is, “Can democracy survive complexity?” It’s clear that Dr. Emanuel’s admonition about the need for a lot more work applies beyond the realm of science, as well." http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/hurricane-expert-reassesses-climate-link/

Good point. No, it's not a good point. If you define marriage as "between a man and a woman" both gay marriage and polygamy are equally wrong. Personally I'd like to see the state *out* of religious marriage, and religion *out* of civil unions. A church should not need a "marriage license" to wed a couple (or whatever) and the state should only define the legal contract bound between individuals (or groups thereof). I agree with what you say if you treat the definition of what constitutes marriage (man + woman = marriage) as an axiom. If you start to inquire as to the logical, legal, and moral basis that that particular axiom rests on - then I think it gets problematic. In our society, with the Constitution that we have - religious arguments for upholding this particular axiom simply aren't legitimate. I think that the notion of consent has a much stronger moral, legal, and philosophical basis - but that doesn't necessarily exclude polygamy. It may be possible to make arguments against polygamy that are consistent with the principles established in the founding documents, but I haven't come across any that I can recall. I'm with you on the state granting the legal rights - and the church or whatever organization you choose granting whatever blessing they choose to confer on the legal arrangement.

Good point.

Seems like Seattle isn't the best posterchild for sustained economic decline, since it bounced back from Boeing's decline pretty quickly and rapidly diversified its economic base. The differences between the two are especially striking when you consider that Boeing was probably even more vital to Seattle's local economy than any single employer in Rochester. And it's not just Rochester. Pretty much every major city in New York outside of the NYC commuter zone has sustained a substantial and prolonged economic decline. Not totally the fault of unions, but when you toss labor inputs that cost more than they earn on top of a tax and regulatory environment like the one that prevails in New York, you have the recipe for the sustained implosion that's going to leave most of the rural Northeast a series seasonal tourist attractions separated by a decaying economic wasteland. As things stand now, that's not too far from the case. When the medical and pension liabilities for all of the boomer-era government employees go critical, that's only going to accelerate the decline.

The polygamy story is nothing new, but the raid in Texas constitutes the largest crackdown on the practice in some time. That got me thinking. Can there be a liberal (classical sense) argument against polygamy? The only(?) truly liberal legal argument that I can come up with against the practice as conducted by the Mormons has to do with the forced marriage of underage women. Forcing women who are too young to give their informed consent into binding life commitments like marriage, much less forcing them to marry someone against there will - is clearly counter to the liberal notion that people should be free to choose how they live their lives, so long as they don't violate anyone else's right to do the same. When it comes to adults - the picture is far less clear. I'm not sure that there can be a truly liberal argument against consenting adults choosing to engage in "plural marriage." I suppose that you can argue that in practical terms, the practice of polygamy establishes an institutional framework where young-women will always be forced into non-consensual marriage, but others might argue that if you can establish adequate legal protections against forced and/or underage marriage, there shouldn't be any legal prohibition against polygamy amongst consenting adults. This seems to be the de-facto stance taken by the attorney general in Utah. He's said that he won't prosecute consenting adults, but he will aggressively prosecute people who force underage women into marriage, commit welfare fraud, etc. Is he wrong on this one?

Businesses come and go. It takes structural impediments to competitiveness to bring about prolonged declines in employment.

Don't have anything to add, other than my sincere condolences and the hope that what Don and others have put forth here will help you work through the pain and grief that your brother's death has caused you.

Who - Aooonga! Aoooonga! Aoonga! Resize! Resize! Resize! Bottom line is that when the cost of a labor input exceeds its value it's just a matter of time before the people who constitute the said labor input are out of a job. Pretty much no way to avoid that, unless you convince the legislature to pass laws that thwart competition and allow employers to pass the higher labor costs onto consumers.

Kinda makes me wonder how the *trails* at the end of these roads are going to fare if neither hikers nor crews can access them? Anyone have a running tally of how many significant access roads are no longer passable by car for one reason or another? I'm starting to think it'd be worth investing in a bike-trailer and/or a small motorcycle at some point, even though, if the roads in Darrington are any indication, it won't take too many years for the slide alder to take over and make the roads impassable by anything short of a buldozer sporting a giant lateral chainsaw mounted on the front...

Why - exactly, did the business and industry there fall apart?

"Posts: 1917 Loc: Russia With Love" Hey - is that the real post-count or am I just slow on the uptake...

Plenty of guns and god in Texas, and plenty of jobs as well. How can this be? Quite a bit less of the G&G in rural New-England, and yet there are no jobs. How to explain this conundrum?

stressed societies = those remaining in rustbelt America - you know, the ones clinging to god and guns because there ain't much left for employment in rural Pennsyltucky So these predilections were absent from these areas when times were good, back in the day? Seems like if there's any outmoded belief that's been irrationally clung to out there, it's the belief in the union-protectionist model. It's telling that his comments concerning "anti-trade sentiments," another of the sentiments being clung to, didn't register with the congregants at this particular sermon.

think i've been pretty flame-low on this thread. i don't see the union as being your biggest opponent or enemy on many of your listed items. i don't happen to put a lot of stock in a teaching certificate either, mostly b/c the process of getting one is pretty bureaucratic and meaningless, as is the process of re-newing it. most education classes are circle-jerks and utterly worthless. so, to your list: 1. i don't run rough-shod over my admin now, here or in any state. my last school in particuliar had a very strict, command/control style leadership taht was highly effective for the inner-city environmnet it operated it. do you think teachers/unions are in charge? the reality varies from school to school. in my current school, the rich parents pretty much own/control everythign. 2. i don't mind being evaluated by my peers, but they'll have to come in for observations, which is extra work for them and will require substitutes. the reality of a teacher's life is we pretty much all work in obscurity - that is, no one really knows what the hell i'm doing or how good i am b/c they're all busy working in their own rooms w/ their own kids during the school day. 3. i don't mind some small evaluation from my students/their parents either 4. i've already said standardized tests are fine as a part of evaluation. 5. i already take on "project kids" each year, and for that to be meaningful, it can't really be evaluated - the kids i try to take special interest in are deeply damaged or deranged, and the succes of any strategy of dealing w/ them heavily governed by chance. if you evaluate someone on this, they'd game the system and pick easy targets, ignoring the kids who truly need them. 6. you're mistaken if you think all kids are being pushed towards college. the esd i'm in has a very strong skills center program, and our career center in my school works very hard to put kids in all kinds of apprentice programs and highlight non-college pathways. that said, i believe the stats show an increasingly huge divide between the eventual salaries of folks w/ college degrees and those w/o. 7. you want teachers to have the right to strike their kids? i certainly wouldn't mind whaling on some of my charges, but in case you haven't noticed, society at large has turned its back on CP as a discipline tool, for better or worse. 8. you want to pay male teachers more than female teachers in order to recruit them more heavily? uhhh, okay. i'm sure that won't piss off a huge # of folks. at any rate, i don't see the need. at least in high school, there are already a large # of males. my humanities department is more than 50% male. assuming we're still somewhat stuck to that 20th century notion as the male in a family being the chief bread-winner though, it makes sense that men would prefer something more high-paying then teaching. 9. WA state already requires all teachers to have credentials to teach w/n their subject area. 10. cut admin pay? okay. their high pay is necessary to attract competence too of course. even if you pay them the same as teachers you're not reintroducing that much money into the system. i don't see that much "fat" walking around my school. most staff members are doing something useful that directly involves kids. that may not be as true at the district level admin, but then i have no real sense what the hell at all those folks are doing. 11. this point is not a suggestion, but does explain why schools are always going to have problems, no matter what you change. schools are mirrors - they reflect society. you can distort the mirror all you want and it doesn't change reality. 12. i'll take 100k$ a year and certianly think i'd be good enough to earn it. someone more math-happy then myself can figure this out, but assumign that salaries for teachers makes up the principle cost of education, adn seeing as how 100K is at least twice as much as the current average, are you prepared to increase spending on schools that much? regardless, unless the compensation is made more attractive to attact a much larger pool of qualified teachers, you're not going to improve a damn thing. no one will swim through an ocean of shit for a pair of plastic earrings. my recommendation, at least for high school - make the kids have to earn their place. kids who can't maintain an acceptable gpa or discipline record should be shown the door. public schools are instead essentially jails, housing a huge population of disaffected, disinclined dipshits who divert me from my purpose. feel free to have "work camps" on some sorta ccc-model for those who can't make the schools work for them so you don't have a large teen-gang element on the street. i'm tired of having classes where 50% of the kids are failing and damn near 90% are proud of never studying and never working. I'd be in favor of this last recommendation in particular. We can't bemoan the lack of discipline in public schools and simultaneously deny the teachers the ability to enforce it. On second thought, I guess we can - since we are - but we shouldn't. Figuring out a constructive mechanism for dealing with the delinquents and the deadbeats that doesn't translate into much higher public expenditures in the corrections system later on, and that would let them earn their way back into mainstream classrooms and /or vocational training if they changed their ways would be the kicker - but I think it'd be worth trying to figure that part of the puzzle out.

Nah, he's a "straight shooter". Didn't see much in Obama's statement flattering to egos and pretensions - more an accurate statement of the proclivities of stressed societies. I agree. Imagine the stress his audience has been under for a great deal of their adult lives. First the hope of the world is extinguished by the implosions east of the Iron curtain, then the options grant is out of the money, then theres the two lost elections, and now the I/O ARM on the 4/3 in Marin is about to reset - gotta take refuge in something....

Joke?

Seems like most of the data suggests that the schools that perform the worst aren't schools in the sticks, but schools in highly urbanized areas catering to kids with low incomes, and parents that are unable or unwilling to make a personal contribution to their children's education at best - and who are active detriments at worst. Rural and suburban schools, and urban schools in area's that are relatively prosperous seem to be doing a fairly good job, so I suspect that the factors that you cite won't consign many kids outside of urban war-zones to a life spent trapped in the underclass. I don't think that limitations on the voucher model in the sticks is really and effective argument for prohibiting it in those places where it could do some good. I didn't read the study mentioned in the link, but if this is the most damning finding: "A voucher program designed to send low-income children in the District to better-performing private schools has allowed some students to take classes in unsuitable learning environments and from teachers without bachelor's degrees, according to a government report." Then I suspect that the students and there families are prepared to brave such hazards to their well being, when you consider the alternative awaiting them elsewhere. Looks like the parents generally agree: "The report also says that the fund had high turnover and weak internal controls for handling the federal grant money. It attributed those issues to a rapid three-year expansion because of high parent demand. Cork said yesterday that the nonprofit program has improved operations. One example cited was shifting from paper invoices to an electronic system. A report in May from the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute showed that of 100 parents and students surveyed, most were satisfied with the program, and about 90 percent said they would remain at least another year." Here's more on the DC schools from the same paper: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/interactives/dcschools/ I don't think that any system will be a panacea, but trapping the poorest kids in the worst schools looks just doesn't seem fair. "

I'd also be opposed to direct funding, but when you leave the matter in the parent's hands, things get a bit fuzzier. How do you feel about Pell grants for students that get educated at Georgetown or Notre Dame? How about the tax deductions for the interest on the loans that they took out to attend private universities with a denominational bent? The public schools may not get any better - they may have to consolidate or close down entirely, but in the end I think that the welfare of individual students outweighs the well-being of the institution. For me the thorniest issue has been what happens to the people with the most disadvantages under a voucher system. Seems like that's a problem that'd have to be addressed before the idea of transferring control of the funding mechanism from the state to individual parents.

uh, hate to rock your world, but for kids this is true of everything that happens in school, excepting lunch and the dismissal bell you should come on in and teach a lesson to my class dude, you seem like you got it all figured out! if you hang around for the test to proudly measure your ROI you might be a wee bit suprised too. having spent a ton of time on all the things you mention in that last line, i'd still guarentee you a large # of my kids could not point out tibet, tell you who the DL is, or anything sensible about buddhism. and yes, i fail them for it. and yes, the rich parents go right on buying them bmws. the dirty truth is, you can lead a horse to water... field trips are inevitable "fluffy" as you say - montesorri schools though, which are private and enjoy incredibly high reputations as effective schools, base their entire curriculum on the constructivism school of learning, whihc stresses real world, "experiential" learning, which is exactly what you get from field trips a field trip can be a incredibly useful teachign tool - as w/ any tool, it all boils down to how it's wielded - if you have shitty teachers, you get shitty product. duh. I have to agree that a huge percentage of the problems associated with public schools have their origin outside of the classroom, and considering the quality of the input - the quality of the output from public schools can be pretty remarkable.

I am curious how teachers fighting for more pay makes the school system worse or un-good? I work for an increase every year, and I do not see a connection between that and the organization I work for needing to be "fixed". i would also ask, given that i'm in a union you dislike, despite its stated top priority being the welfare of students, how exactly do you think my organization is an absolute roadblock to your solutions? Opposition to public education vouchers?

I bitch about the mortgage interest deduction because you can't justify it on economic or social grounds. In Canada, and Australia - for example, the rate of private home-ownership is just as high as in the US, yet they do so without any subsidization of private mortgage debt. People would still be able to buy homes for themselves without a mortgage subsidy - they'd just be either smaller and/or less expensive, since the subsidies wouldn't be capitalized into the price of homes. And there's the fact that the subsidy, and the capital gains exclusion, contribute to a massive misallocation. Justifiable as an economic policy? Nope. Then there's the fact that the cost of the subsidy is second only to the tax-deductions for employer sponsored health-care, and the benefits increase in direct proportion to the size of the mortgage. It's also several times more than expenditures on low income housing. It's expensive, and the less you need it, the greater the dollar value of the benefit you are likely to accrue from it. Justifiable as a social policy? Nope. You simply can't pretend that the arguments for public expenditures on public education are anything like those for private mortgage debt. One creates a public good that simply wouldn't exist without public expenditures, and the other uses public money to unnecessarily subsidize a private good in a manner that's both economically destructive and morally unjustifiable. Big difference.

That's what I thought. What's with the unholy fascination with the mortgage industry? Is it like when people like to watch stuff get blown up? Only if you're tethered to the bomb by an unbreakable bungee-cord that might not extend beyond the blast radius, and the blast will be triggered by the collapse of a "Jenga" set where the rules of the game establish disproportionate incentives and perceived rewards for everyone around you to yank a piece out of the stack and cross their fingers...or something.