Turn General Motors into a Public School | Hacker News Reader

Turn General Motors into a Public School

blogs.law.harvard.edu

45 pointstc20 comments

I don't understand why so many ideas that are critical of something get immediately shot down in hacker news. I opened this thread hoping to see discussion that was going to have some depth and substance, and yet again just as I saw with the Obama thread that was critical of the United States' broadband penetration, I see very simple statements being made and entirely dismissing the person who wrote the article.

Is this being voted up because people just want to see this get ridiculed/discussed, or is this being voted up because people actually enjoyed it? I'm really curious.

There is approximately zero advantage to being abstractly critical of something. Compare two options and pick the better one is logical, but abstractly saying X sucks has little meaning. "M$ is z SUXORS" might build credibility with some people, but saying BSD Unix is a better foundation for web services due to security issues might be useful information if true.

Now I did not up vote it, but I thought the article was funny at the basic LOL cats type humor. It's somewhat crude satire of the US owned auto industry and the US educational system. Personally I say let them fail, but due to their debt load they can't survive at 20% market share which is going to be a big shock to some groups when they fail. Long term getting rid of large poorly run systems makes an economy stronger, but few people are willing to take their medicine when times are good and they get sympathy when times are bad.

It's not that the article is critical that bugs me. It's that Greenspun has bitched for about 40 (100?) consecutive blog posts about how lazy, wasteful, and doomed the American economy is. It's the same thing over and over again, and most of them have been on the front page of HN.

Having said that, I thought his Economy Recovery Plan (http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/economic-recovery) was excellent reading even though I didn't agree with parts of it. I'd vote up something thoughtful and productive like that any day.

I thought the flippancy of the article was funny and being able to laugh a little at sad things makes them bearable. I've wondered quite often over the last few years if laughing at our problems is a good thing or not. Most of the people I know enjoy things like the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. On the occasions when I watch them, I find them funny. I think to myself that even if I can't change it, I can laugh about it and I have too much to do already. Maybe I would find it intolerable and do something about it if I couldn't joke about buyouts or our decaying education system, but I don't have to deal with it yet because I can still laugh at it.

I often vote up because I want to see other folk's opinions on the linked article. And because Phil is an old but well-known hacker, I think it was relevant.

Sure, Greenspun has a rule related to Lisp, and he made millions from an internet company, but he usually just whines about how terrible American and Massachusetts are. Sure, there's a grain of truth to his posts, but his incessant whining is getting on my nerves. Could we leave his posts on http://www.nonhackernews.com/ ?

Meanwhile, in actual school-related news:

"American fourth and eighth grade students made solid achievement gains in math in recent years and in two states showed spectacular progress, according to an international survey of student achievement, released Tuesday."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/education/10math.html?hp

Second paragraph:

"The results showed that several Asian countries continue to greatly outperform the United States in science and math, subjects that are key to economic competitiveness and research."

Gasp! What's that, Watson? Greenspung actually might have warrant to complain about our education relative to other countries!?

I think in terms of international competitiveness, our schools are doing a little better than our cars. The article says that American math scores were on average comparable to German scores. If only American cars were comparable to German cars....

Greenspun's tag line is "A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months." This isn't one of the interesting ones. It's about as useful as your typical /. comment.

So why don't you show how he's wrong?

It might be sarcasm, and he does already post a fair amount about both subjects, but he has a point. You just have a smear.

(I'd still take a slashdot comment over many other websites)

Because the article is satire (at least I hope).

Deleted comment

I think his criticism that GM is poorly from top to bottom is spot on. However, his solution of installing school superintendents as managers at GM is completely illogical. Doesn't that make it satire?

The point for me is that the failure, inefficiency, whatever you want to call it of our public schools is a deeper threat to the economy in the long term than the failure of GM in the short term.

But we are managing our way from headline to headline and crisis to crisis. We can't fund and improve public schools over the long haul the way we fund GM in the short term, just because we lack attention spans (and because the public schools lack a lobbying arm proportionate to their reach).

Public school administration that is. Teachers have one of the more powerful unions, and their PAC is one of the bigger spenders.

While I don't claim to know much about public school administrators in the United States in general, I have to say that my experience growing up under the WCCUSD (http://www.wccusd.k12.ca.us/) makes me believe that that may be more of a blessing than a curse.

In Greenspun's analogy, students == auto workers. However, students and parents aren't unionized to the point where they have made crippling demands on the school system.

The teachers and administration are auto workers, and they are heavily unionized. The students would be the cars in his analogy.

No, teachers are the auto workers and students are the cars.

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