There is a deliberate effort in academia to downplay, or in the case of this piece, distort and even place blame on the Protestant Christian educational movements of early America. The Great Awakenings that spurred the creation of U.S. colleges and universal public education were fueled by a moral tradition and were an enormous success. That tradition has nothing to do with todays failing public schools. The author also fails to note that the current American home school movement has explicitly Christian roots.
Another key constituency are the school builders. Schools are in constant need of construction and renovation (often because they are poorly built). It is one of the larger budget items in any school district.
Today's Boston can't even build a traffic tunnel. The Big Dig was a disaster-- took decades, costs billions more than planned, and was so shoddy the finished roof fell and killed someone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
The actual problem was the federal Interstate Commerce Commission regulated routes and ticket prices and wouldn't give passenger rail companies the flexibility needed to compete with cars and growing air travel. Central planning failed and completely destroyed U.S. passenger rail.
The main obstacle in the U.S. is that the interstate passenger rail system was nationalized by Congress. Congress forces unprofitable long-distance routes on Amtrak and keeps the monopoly company undercapitalized. Amtrak owns amazing assets like the Northeast corridor rail lines, but there's almost no innovation as the monopoly loses billions of dollars and can't really tap private capital markets.
Meanwhile American freight rail-- totally privately owned and managed-- is the best in the world.
You should control for geographical differences in pay and language distribution. California likely has more Ruby programmers-- the higher cost of living and higher salaries there may explain the entire difference between Ruby and PHP.
California is so large it has many great public schools, but other states like Virginia (UVA and William & Mary) have public schools that rival the best in California, and most large states have an elite public school (Texas, Michigan, UNC, Georgia Tech, etc etc) that would be top tier in California. To some degree, California's support for its universities has slipped and the reputation is based on the past.
Student loans are unsecured, so if they could be discharged, the market rate would be akin to a credit card with a huge balance-- 15% to 20% a year in the current interest rate environment. Plus if they could be discharged, such action would become commonplace, a rite of passage at graduation.
These entrepreneurs all appear to be legal immigrants. Most of the "ranting" in the U.S. is towards the law-breaking immigrants who now want amnesty. There is a consensus in America in favor of legal immigration, the political fight is over the inability of America to secure its borders and how to assimilate the millions of people who entered the country illegally.
It is a UK developed plane and did do well in the Falklands-- a testament to the skill of British pilots as much as anything. In the U.S., one third of our Harrier fleet has crashed, here's the article cited in the parent:
It's actually really stupid. Car sharing models mean you'll have a car waiting for you at the destination. There's no reason to bring your own steel and rubber.
American high speed rail was more advanced in the 1930s than it is today. The Zephyr diesel passenger engine was faster than Amtrak's Acela speeds today.
Musk is not financially Gates but he's already had a greater impact. PayPal, Telsa, SpaceX, and even that Solar company could easily be more important than creating the most successful PC operating system. The PC boom would have happened without Gates but Musk is pioneering entirely new business categories.
Absurd to blame Murdoch for a war that had majorities of Congress vote for it. If any media outlet deserves some blame for Iraq, it was the New York Times. In any event, the Iraq war has saved lives compared to the sanctions regime that it replaced.
That's not really a useful definition. More specifically fascism elevates the interests of the state over the interests of individuals. While similar to communism in that regard, fascism uses private economic production rather than state ownership of production. So hallmarks of fascism are things like state-granted monopolies to specific companies, organized cartels, and heavy handed industrial policies. Fannie Mae, U.S. Farm programs, and subsidized green energy loans are little slices of American economic fascism.
Actually ESPN doesn't create much original TV content-- they are so expensive because they pay for the rights to sports events. A la carte ESPN likely means less money for pro athletes, and if you spend the saved money on actual channels, more money for TV content.
You're wrong about this. Mice and other small mammals carry deer tick nymphs, which are the most common source of Lyme in people, but deer are necessary to sustain the adult ticks that bring new generations of ticks. If there are no deer in the equation, ticks will die out in four years lifecycle.
A friend of mine in college suffered terribly from Lyme in the early 1990s, when the disease wasn't as readily diagnosed and treatment protocols weren't established. He lost 100 pounds and dropped out of school. Lyme today is the most common infectious disease in New England.
The core problem with the original vaccine is that 80% effectiveness is terrible-- that's not sufficient, you still need to take all normal precautions. The second problem is that many people at high risk for Lyme may already have it, or have other tick-borne diseases that are difficult to diagnose and can be chronic-- that probably explains the "side effects" problem.
Lyme is at the center of a number of nasty bacteria and parasites that you can get from a deer tick. The most effective thing we can do is reduce deer populations.