james1071

As I said, employing clever people to work as teachers seems obvious to everyone except those in power.

Replying to the reply below-unable to reply directly.

Pretty much everything you have written is wrong-you can check out your claim on future healthcare spending with what everyone else thinks.

Proving the point that Americans are totally blind to what everyone else can see.

1 Obesity-apparently not a problem because it didn't exist 30- years ago.

That, I find hard to believe if I remember my first trip to the US in the late 1980s and the free food restaurants in Las Vegas.

2 Healthcare -an obvious disaster, due to lack of access and the lifestyle of a large part of the population. Oh, it will also bankrupt the country without major reforms.

3 The universities-rankings are based on research, which in turn are based on buying in talent.Don't kid yourself that they reflect the quality of undergraduates that are turned out or the population as a whole.

4 As for guns-no need to bother with that one.

I am from London, in the UK.

Pretty much everyone has enough calories (too many in most cases).

As for schools-of course the rich people send their children to much better schools.

Those who can't send their children to local schools. What happens there depends on how bright they are, how hard they work and how committed their parents are to education.

In the case of some ethnic groups there is a strong aversion to educating their girls properly.

None of this has much to do with poverty, emotional closeness or whatever else you claim.

where are you?

Well,each to their own. The US has proved spectacularly inept in a number of areas (healthcare, obesity, guns and education) and the causes are indeed blindingly obvious to anyone who is not an American.

I am from the UK and,based on my experience of attitudes to education, will say that a lot of white people are going to be in for a shock as they and their children will be working for immigrant bosses.

I don't think so.

For example, I once had a mini cab ride where the driver was very poor indeed (a new immigrant from somewhere not so nice).

He was teaching his very young daughter to play blindfold chess.

I have not met him since, but would be surprised if he didn't do a great job in educating his daughter with very little in the way of money or time.

The issue is not poverty-it is intelligence (not saying that bad home lives are not a factor).

I am not sure what you are saying. Those who are able to learn will do so, given the right environment. Those who cannot, will not, whatever help you give them. Poverty has nothing to do with it, though those who lack the ability to learn may well also be poor.

Haven't read the piece, but will say this (which is blindingly obvious to everyone except those in control of the system):

All you need to do to get a good secondary education system is to hire good graduates,train them and support their professional development.

What does not work is hiring idiots, de-skilling the job, filling the day with busy work and other pointless nonsense.

'Another an example of how, the fact that a person can contribute to the design and construction nuclear bombs does not automatically make him qualified to condemn the rest of the society to produce what he and his brethren deem desirable.'

No it is not that at all.Someone with more awareness would understand that his comments would have reflected the concerns of the day-namely the perceived failures of capitalism.

To which you respond, "If you are not a <insert appropriate bad thing>, why are you spying on me?"

There is more than one thing going on.

Balance sheet recession. Mistaken policy response-austerity, German unhelpfulness in Eurozone. Globalization-i.e. cheap labour Automation Financial industry acting against interests of wider economy.

Americans don't get irony, do they?

Lucy Kellaway writes a humorous column for the FT, the main subject of which is management nonsense.

The twist of this piece is that a new graduate considers her to be one of the dumb management that she has been mocking since the early 1990s (when I started reading her column), if not before.

Yes, DM undervalued within the Euro.

The surplus is used to accumulate claims on other countries (i.e. Germany is lending foreigners money). Unfortunately, Germany is not going to be repaid in full, so the policy is utterly stupid.

You are completely wrong.

Germany has not had anything like this level of current account surplus before. It is entirely due to mistakes in macro economics (wrong parity within the Euro and a refusal to boost domestic demand).

Sadly Germans seem unable to understand that their surplus is not a sign of economic success, but the result of misguided policies that keep the rest of Europe in recession.

No, Germany has not always had a huge export surplus.

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/charts/germany-current-accou...

The current surplus is not a feature of German productivity but the result of having an undervalued Euro and depressed domestic demand.

How does this help? Once they know the machines are losing,they will get the code changed.

More of a bluff than a prisoner's dilemma.

Those guys did not invent RSA.

The market is what you are selling and close substitutes to it.

A close substitute is something that someone would buy instead of your product.

Thought he said something quite different, which is that people explain the fact that scientists don't make money from their discoveries by saying that they aren't interested in doing so.

His point was that it was the nature of scientific discovery that made it hard to capture any value from it, not a characteristic of scientists.

It will be hard to maintain the current structure when Uber can offer a better, cheaper service.

MIT cannot play this game, because it only offers hard courses.

The main differences will be labour rates-i.e. how much the driver is paid (or earns) per shift and the utilization rate (i.e how much of the time the driver is working).

Yes, of course they are a taxi company and they are playing a game of words in pretending not to be.

The reason that they do so is that the licensing rules for taxis protect the incumbents from new entrants.

These are euphemisms for 'the right sort of people'.

This is an argument against the style, but not the substance of what the person has said.