Oh that was pithy, mean, and just the right amount of taking-it-personally. Well done!
886 karma · joined April 2, 2021
Mixed results. There's whining about standard testing .. . There's whining without it too. But states brought that on themselves.
I raised two boys one a plain-joe kid, one with special needs. The older, regular kid got into and out of university in four years.
Seeing what I see now, and what I saw over those years:
- pay teachers more with commensurate increase in accountability. (You can't have only one.)
- focus on academics only. Too much resources are wasted in our American daydreaming that schools can be some kind of utopia superceding home, family. Regretably, if parents don't care, there's a tiny chance only the kid will change in school. Here i mean anything that detracts from language, math, science, arts, sports. Having different makes and models of kids at school? That's great; i like that. My kids have got to see our house isn't the only game in town.
- maybe eliminate all federal forms of funding by sending less money to the fed redistributed back later. Control and accountability has to be less complex with fewer regs from fewer places. Education is operationally local in the US and yet somehow the fed and national unions are big players too. We can't be serving two masters.
- withhold kids by class until they succeed. Kids must be held accountable too. If you can't deal with algebra I you are not doing algerbra II so you can suck at that too.
- contribute to kid's self esteem and confidence right: you're not graduating in this class, and I (as a teacher) will help you figure out a way forward by tackling what's in front of you. That's real success. That's real learning. That's better for kids.
- put principals and teachers top echelon. If they want/need admin staff, fine counter balanced by cost & success on accountability side. US schools like US medicine is phenomenal at having paper pushers suck up resources. Yah, I'm not a fan of this to put it politely.
The bosses - hell management's job leading into organizational culture - is to stop politics from derailing good engineering and customer satisfaction.
It's not too tough for me. Now that you know where I stand the other side better get it's act together.
Drowning in politics helps nobody including the boss. It's a net loser.
Now I'm practical and empathetic: a surprise can bring heat. But then you breath and get a grip. Cool. But thereafter the right things better get done. Politics for a day - np - politics sapping know how making cynical SE'S think twice? Never.
Clearly Ukranians have the muscle and want-to to put it to good use for their own.
You plead recognition of realistic constraints, but Europe hasn't even seriously tried moving the bar beyond check writing (We, the US, haven't either. Under Biden we were concerned about giving plausible excuses to russia by direct involvement so we gave money too. Ok, we gave some hardware but not the serious stuff.)
I have during trump's administration and Ukraine/Russia war reluctantly come to face the truth others have worked out long before: Europe can't make a damn decision then do it. Who's in charge there?
Nato will be better when Europe is more coequal and we Americans get our own house in order. We put a clown show into office twice. Our own democrats sucked so bad, voters actually bought trump's BS (listen to Marshal tucker's "heard it on a love song" to see what I mean.)
Without for one moment saying trump's whining about nato and Europe is right --- it's counter productive for all; it's rank stupidity; nato helps the US a lot --- there remains a kernel of truth Europe needs to change their tune and be more offensive/defensive.
Here in the US I've heard too many morons tell me the west brought this on ourselves leaving russia no alternative but try to create buffer room in ukraine. Some by plain Americans, several times by one generation ago immigrants from Russia.
I don't buy that for a nyc minute. Eastern Europe dealt with russia through two world wars and being part of the USSR.
Forget the US: they had they're own experiences and wanted something better for them: closer relations to western Europe maybe the US and better security guarantees. No amount of russian BS will gain say that. If they want better, they should try. Russia isn't entitled to stop them, and they are not obligated to play along with this russian hussle. You know damn well kissing the Russian ring won't work.
In short Ukraine needs better hardware.
But in this case, given how hard P=NP is, it might create wiggle room for progress.
Ideally it would have gone on and said in view of lemma/proof/conjecture X, sampling enumerated programs might shine light on ... no doubt that'd be better.
But here I'm inclined to let it slide if it's a new attack vector.
Less talk. More consequences. Fines. Contempt. Jail etc
I mean geez, if not now when?
What I don't want is outsourcing risk to tax payers,beyond leverage discussed last.
Using 80s rock-n-roll to criticize? Priceless. It's a rock-n-roll damnation, baby, now deal with it.
Now this situation is complicated. Take the border. The dems (plus cnn, ms-now) cannot bring themselves to say: illegal immigrants must be deported, and those adjudicated in court ordered to leave but didn't must be deported. That kind of stupidy doesn't help force Republicans to get a backbone as it may keep the voting public somewhat on trump side, which happened on 2024.
At the same time ICE's execution is so piss-poor including ignoring habius corps, ignoring court orders, snd killing US citizens Republicans without backbone cannot delay their reckoning overly long.
Indeed republican congressman are uniquely positioned to effect law+funding to deport lawfully, to require operational control at the border, and to mark off limits those that are here legally and do something about the multi-year backlog in cases. And importantly hold the executive branch in check.
For those in the US like me: Trump will be the single largest reason for the rise of popularist left politics here, which we don't need either.
Granted like the Marshal Tucker song "I heard it in a love song" ... "can't be wrong" Trump isn't actually popular right. Trump is about vanity and self enrichment.
Where in the hell is Congress? Talk about useless, a blankin' useless institution. The checkbook is a 1a or 1b named, explicit role and responsibility.
Now the return of the 1960s seems nieve when the middle class was more secure. The return of clothing manufacturers, umbrella, USB cords, and a lot of the misc stuff made in China we get at Kmart is not and should not come back to the US.
We could do better by getting more of our supply chain in medicine, manufacturing into NA or Europe. We could also help by a 10 year plan to get debt down with consequent reduction on interest payments in DC. Interest payments on debt are among the top 3 largest federal spends.
Bush junior tried to increase housing ownership which indirectly lead to the 2008 crisis since lenders and brokers passed risk to the fed among other things. Perhaps the fed ought to work with states to simplify and make zoning uniform. From what I understand zoning complications are a major contributor to housing shortage on the supply side.
This is an incomplete list ... but you're right: Washington is a 100 light years away from a technocratic industrial policy that is hybrid capitalism through state strategy.
I'll redo the argument slightly differently. The core management problem is demands on resources always exceed resources. So perhaps the single salient aspect of management is the strategy and parameters which yields a procedure on what demand to reject leaving YES to remaining demands.
One weakness of the current strategy is it's too greedy and short termed. Now perhaps the Chinese take it too far the other way (not consequence free btw) but we USA are too anemic short term.
Perhaps one change post 1980 is prices may have to go up to trade for longer term stability and jobs in the US. Second, although I think corps and top 5% are under taxed (after writeoffs are incl) Washington's congress doesnt have the institutional credibility to tax it because perpetual debt spending is normal ... which is variation on all that matters is the next election ie short term thinking.
Congress is really competent about getting voters stuff now --- they have no self sourced and self disiplined way to manage demands --- and paying for it after the next election by more debt. Nowadays they even stopped faking concern about debt.
I once ran into Tom Keene of Bloomberg news around 2014. In discussing this his view of Washington's view was we can print whatever we want. I was surprised he didn't criticize that ... but it's stuck we me ever since.
Now apart from that I enjoyed the article advocating for guile. I thought it made some compelling points.
Well, it's way beyond sucks. But ok: is it even possible to run windows with just a command line ... no ui, no graphics, start menu, no file manager or is the ui too integrated into the OS?
I checked reports on linked site ... triangular shapes and lights are a common theme. It seems both vaguely human designed to be seen without function just the kind of ambiguity that doesnt help. I remain skeptical.