Mark Zuckerberg and his wife to donate $120M to needy Bay Area schools

Not really. This is what American Capitalism is known as around the world. In oil and gas you know to sell your shares and not work for a firm that gets an American CEO because everything the article talks about happens without fail within the first three years.

The short and simple of it is that Americans businesses just plain have no morals and everyone expects to be screwed over by them.

>It gives me more appreciation for Bill Gate's approach

Is just as bad as everyone else.

Remember that amazing mosquito zapper he demoed 4 years ago[1]? Turns out the reason you haven't heard anything more about it is because he hired his patent troll friends over at Intellectual Ventures to do it for him [2]. Since they own the patents for it no one else can develop it and they aren't cross licensing, kind of obvious for a patent troll. Since they are a patent troll they aren't doing anything but holding the intellectual property and not producing any units.

So all in all, it's just another green washing bullshit fest as are most of his other investments in the region.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwyMuwNYKvI

[2] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB123680870885500701?mg=...

My math teacher, however, handed out the same tattered calculus books students had been using since the 1980's and forbid the use of calculators on all tests or exams. We learned math by proving theorems and solving word problems involving few, if any, numbers. I went on to study math in university and freshman honors calculus was a cakewalk compared to Mr. Sidhu's twelfth grade calculus and vectors class and his 30 year old textbooks.

I fail to see how any amount of money could improve education unless it's spent on hiring better teachers (which the unions would never allow). You really don't need much besides a chalkboard, a copier, and a high-quality, engaged teacher.

The reason that schools can spend a lot of money on flashy projects when regular, annual needs are not being met is because it's often much easier to fund flashy new projects. School districts can fund technology purchases through bond measures or through grants, but funders are unlikely to be interested in paying money for everyday non-flashy things like cafeterias. It's entirely possible to get grant money that's specifically earmarked for one particular project and also have longstanding needs that aren't being met.

Even here in Iceland, where we are really not doing too great on the PISA exams (and getting steadily worse - so it's hard to say the problem is lack of technology), and there is not sufficient funding for schools, you have people calling for "modernisation" of the school system which always involves spending inordinate amounts of money on giving iPads to students.

This is at the same time as competent teachers are moving jobs in droves as they get paid shit, and only the bad ones who can't get jobs elsewhere remain.

I just don't understand these priorities.

relevant excerpt:

“Is this a vision of what shall be, or of what might be only?” Well, a visionaries as diverse as Martin Luther King, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman have proposed something called a Basic Income Guarantee. When society becomes so advanced that it produces more than enough for everybody – but also so advanced that most individuals below genius level have little to contribute and no way of earning money – everyone should get a yearly salary just for existing. Think welfare, except that it goes to everybody, there’s no stigma, and it’s more than enough to live on. This titanic promise has run up against a giant iceberg with BUT HOW WOULD WE PAY FOR IT written in big red letters on the front. If we cancelled all existing welfare and entitlement programs – which makes sense if we’re giving everyone enough money to live comfortably on, we would only free up enough money together for a universal income of $5,800. I don’t know if you can live on that, but I’d hate to have to try.

But we’ve gotten off track. We were counting the benefits of formal education. We did not do so well in trying to prove that it left you more knowledgeable, but it did seem like it had some practical value in getting you a little bit more money. With your shiny college degree, you can confidently assert “I’ve got mine”, just as long as you take care not to notice the increasingly distant hordes of manual laborers or the statistics showing that the yours you’ve got is less and less every year.

What of the costs of education? What have you lost out on?

Well, first about twenty thousand hours of your youth. That’s okay. You weren’t using that golden time of perfect health and halcyon memories when you had more true capacity for creativity and imagination and happiness than you ever will again anyway. If you hadn’t had your teachers to tell you that you needed to be making a collage showing your feelings about The Scarlet Letter, you probably would have wasted your childhood seeing a world in a grain of sand or Heaven in a wild flower or something dumb like that.

I’m more interested in the financial side of it. At $11,000 average per pupil spending per year times thirteen years plus various preschool and college subsidies, the government spends $155,000 on the kindergarten-through-college education of the average American.

Inspired by a tweet: what if the government had taken this figure (adjusted for inflation) and invested it in the stock market at the moment of your birth? Today when you graduate college, they remove it from the stock market, put it in a low-risk bond, put a certain percent of the interest from that bond into keeping up with inflation, and hand you the rest each year as a basic income guarantee. How much would you have?

And I calculate that the answer would be $15,000 a year, adjusted for interest. We can add the $5,800 basic income guarantee we could already afford onto that for about $20,000 a year, for everyone. Black, white, man, woman, employed, unemployed, abled, disabled, rich, poor. Welcome to the real world, it’s dangerous to go alone, take this. What, you thought we were going to throw you out to sink or swim in a world where if you die you die in real life? Come on, we’re not that cruel.

So when we ask whether your education is worth it, we have to compare what you got – an education that puts you one grade level above the uneducated and which has informed 3.3% of you who Euclid is – to what you could have gotten. 20,000 hours of your youth to play, study, learn to play the violin, whatever. And $20,000 a year, sweat-free.

That is so obviously not the point. Education needs a bunch of investment in teachers, buildings and equipment, and your volunteering is going to make minimal difference to that.

Also, not having too rich and too poor people is a goal in itself - to move wealth from rich to poor creates a society where everyone is equal. Equal people are more happy and peaceful, and that is what it's all about.

Please explain.