02.18.10
Posted in Political at 20:23 by lnxwalt
Left and right united in opposition to controversial SCOTUS decision – Yahoo! News
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that the vast majority of Americans are vehemently opposed to a recent Supreme Court ruling that opens the door for corporations, labor unions, and other organizations to spend money directly from their general funds to influence campaigns.
As noted by the Post’s Dan Eggen, the poll’s findings show “remarkably strong agreement” across the board, with roughly 80% of Americans saying that they’re against the Court’s 5-4 decision. Even more remarkable may be that opposition by Republicans, Democrats, and Independents were all near the same 80% opposition range. Specifically, 85% of Democrats, 81% of Independents, and 76% of Republicans opposed it. In short, “everyone hates” the ruling.
The poll’s findings could enhance the possibility of getting a broad range of support behind a movement in Congress to pass legislation that would offset the Court’s decision. Of those polled, 72% said they supported congressional action to reverse its effects. Sen. Charles Schumer, who’s leading the reform effort in the Senate, told the Post that he hoped to get “strong and quick bi-partisan support” behind a bill that “passes constitutional muster but will still effectively limit the influence of special interests.”
This is possibly the best news that could come for our nation right now. The Supreme Court’s decision pairs with an earlier error in which corporations (which are state-chartered groups of individuals organized for a specific purpose) were declared to have “personhood” and the rights that go with it. One of those rights is the right to petition for redress of grievances–to lobby and to campaign–which is where the SCOTUS’ corporate political “free speech” decision is based.
I only hope that any amendment strikes at the heart of corporate personhood, which is the root of most of our nation’s problems. What is needed is a much restricted definition of personhood. For example, the legal shield known as the “corporate veil” makes sense–although we should broaden it to cover the forms of business that smaller, locally-owned businesses frequently take: sole proprietorships and partnerships–while giving lobbying and campaigning rights to corporate-style entities is one hundred percent wrong.
Why? Because this gives the few people who control the organization more of a voice than their investors and employees or members, more of a voice in the running of this country than large numbers of individuals, couples, families, and smaller organizations. (Corporations include most unions [Teamsters, UAW], non-profit groups [United Way, American Red Cross], churches [Presbyterian Church-USA, United Methodist Church], industry groups [AHIP, ABA], and advocacy groups [GreenPeace, MoveOn.org], as well as many for-profit entities [GM, Microsoft]). The person who owns stock in Microsoft may have a different view on an issue than the company’s managers. Why should they be able to take his money and use it to oppose his viewpoint? The truth is, any issue that will seriously affect the organization will also affect its members, employees, or stockholders, each of whom already has the right to lobby and campaign.
Please note that the organizations listed are merely examples. I have no personal knowledge of how well any of those groups represent the interests of their employees, shareholders, or members. What I do know is that when organizations have more of a voice in governing our nation than individuals have, the effect is corrosive, with continual erosion of individual and consumer rights by this group or that one.
Have you ever wondered why the financial regulators didn’t watch the banks and insurance companies they were supposed to oversee? Those companies had billions of dollars riding on decisions the regulators made. They could flood congressional offices with lobbyists within a few hours of an initiative to tighten supervision. You and I, on the other hand, have to work 10 hours, drive an hour to get home, pick up Junior from soccer practice, stop and pick up something for dinner, get Junior in the bathtub, get him to bed, and then remember that we were going to write a letter to Senator so-and-so about the banks and insurance companies misbehaving.
Wondering why it seems like no matter who is in office, nothing ever changes? Well, while you are busy working, pressure groups like the AARP are busy canvassing congresspeople for their views on some new tax proposal. Letting corporation-type organizations lobby or campaign (which also includes financial or “in-kind” donations to candidates’ campaigns) guarantees that those organizations with the most to gain or lose from a proposal will work hard to out-shout and out-lobby the rest of us. Most of us may be interested in this proposal or that one, but not to the point of it being vital for our next quarter’s earnings. Thus, we are going to be less active in lobbying and campaigning than they are.
One final point: Our founders were well aware of corporations and their power. One of the precipitation acts that led to our independence was the British government selling an exclusive franchise for tea sales in the American continent to the British East India Company, a corporation! So it is interesting that neither the Articles of Confederation, nor the Constitution that replaced them, mention corporations or their rights. I speculate (rightly, I believe) that they believed this made it plain that rights remained in the hands of individuals, and that the government had no power to recognize nor grant most rights (such as the right to lobby and campaign) to corporations of any type.
The only solution that makes sense is a constitutional amendment which dramatically curtails corporate personhood. If the above-mentioned amendment only reacts to this specific court decision, it will be easily misdirected away from its intended purpose. Further, it is dangerous to make amendments focus only on specific court decisions (not that it hasn’t happened before). Instead, we should consider the universe of potentially-related decisions and craft an amendment that states in broad strokes which ones should be allowed and which ones should not. In my opinion, focusing only on for-profit corporations’ lobbying doesn’t begin to solve the problems of this decision, nor the related problems that have already cropped up in the past.
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01.09.10
Posted in Political at 03:06 by lnxwalt
Federal judges on Friday seemed unwilling to accept the FCC’s argument for censuring Comcast after it was discovered in 2008 to be throttling or slowing down file-sharing traffic on its Internet connections, according to a story published by The Wall Street Journal.
“You can’t get an unbridled, roving commission to go about doing good,” the WSJ quoted Chief Judge David Sentelle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Judges question FCC authority in Comcast case | Signal Strength – CNET News
In a way, it is a good thing that judges are questioning the authority of government agencies to act. On the other hand, Comcast and the cable industry are creations of the FCC, in that it was federal rules that gave them the ability to do what they do. Just as with the telephone companies, FCC rules, including the choice to allow them to cut out ISP intermediaries for their high-speed Internet access services, is at the heart of the problem.
You see, if I sign up for dial up service, I might be able to get it through my local telephone company. There are, or were, dozens of companies (including AOL) that offered such Internet access across the country. Locally, Sunrise Internet Services offers it to this day.
If I want high-speed Internet across DSL or cable connections, the company that owns the lines does not have to allow other companies to compete, thanks to decisions made by the Commission. This decision was the one that enabled Comcast to take anti-consumer actions such as polluting the downloads of its paying customers. The errors the FCC (and Congress and the Department of Justice) made dating back into the late 1990s are what allowed Comcast and other “last-mile” owners to act with impunity toward consumers.
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12.03.09
Posted in Political at 03:28 by lnxwalt
With a Senate showdown looming, the politically potent AARP rode to the rescue of Democrats on Wednesday, supporting $460 billion in Medicare cuts to help pay for landmark health insurance legislation.
As Republicans pressed to restore the cuts, AARP said Democrats merely were recommending elimination of waste and inefficiency within the giant health care program for seniors.
“Most importantly, the legislation does not reduce any guaranteed Medicare benefits,” A. Barry Rand, the AARP’s CEO, said in a letter to senators.
Believe me, I am in favor of health care reform. We definitely need something. In my years of employment, I have never yet had employer-sponsored health insurance. What I have learned through attempting to obtain individual coverage is that I could eat and have a roof over my head or I could have a decent health care plan, but not both.
For this reason, I think this bill is going to be a hugely expensive flop. First of all, the health insurance industry promised us sixteen years ago, when Bill Clinton’s administration proposed something similar, that they would take care of us without government taking over health care. The current mess that we have is what privately-owned insurance companies gave us. Is this really the best we can do? Seriously?
Secondly, the bill repeats the mistake of Massachusetts’ law. MA’s law presumed that the problem was that healthy younger workers were choosing not to buy coverage, and were therefore depriving health insurers of the funds needed to adequately cover older and sicker people without huge price increases. The truth is, twenty-somethings struggling with the cost of college; struggling with the cost of buying, repairing, maintaining, insuring, and driving a car; struggling with their sub-twenty-thousand-dollar incomes; and trying to lay the foundation for the rest of their lives.
Thirdly, those who think government subsidies will do the job needs to turn their brains in for refunds, since they are not using them. Government subsidy programs come with all manner of verification requirements and little details that exclude otherwise-eligible people from consideration. It is true in Social Security, and in Medicaid, and in school lunches, and even in student financial aid for those attending college.
I can tell you from experience what is likely to happen: those who are already struggling will not buy medical insurance, because the additional costs would mean missing their car payments or skipping meals or wearing clothing that shows private personal body parts. Or, my favorite, skipping utility payments. Ooh, here’s one I forgot: being forced to move back into mom and dad’s place, because that’s the only way they can afford to pay their bills.
Unfortunately, not everyone who will be skipping payments is fresh out of high school. Thirty, forty, and fifty year-olds are also working for hugely profitable but low-paying companies, too. It sounds funny to hear it, but the reason I cannot support this proposal is because it takes money out of people’s pockets to give to the insurance companies, the very same insurance companies whose mess we are trying to fix.
I do have to say that all the ultra-conservatives who are calling this “socialized medicine” need to put down their crack pipes. Requiring citizens to purchase the services of certain favored corporations is the farthest thing from socialism. If anything, it is a step toward fascism.
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10.30.09
Posted in Political at 03:44 by lnxwalt
Let Kids Sleep Late on Weekends to Fight Fat: Study – Yahoo! News
Letting children sleep late on weekends and holidays might help them avoid becoming overweight or obese, a new study suggests.
Researchers in Hong Kong found that children who got less sleep tended to be heavier (as measured by body mass index, or BMI) than children who slept more. But among children who slept less than eight hours a night, those who compensated for their weekday sleep deficit by sleeping late on weekends or holidays were significantly less likely to be overweight or obese.
The study, which confirmed previous research linking sleep deficits to obesity in children, also found that, on average, children slept significantly longer on weekends and holidays than on school weekdays. However, the overweight children tended to get less weekend/holiday sleep than their normal-weight peers.
Or how about cutting some time off of the beginning of the school day? Does anyone seriously believe that half-asleep kids are learning anything? And get rid of most of the homework. When MJ was younger, he often spent his entire time after school working on homework. It was really frustrating, because he was so busy trying to do the busywork that he wasn’t learning anything. Once I started limiting his homework time, he started learning a lot more–although most of it was not whatever the class was covering at the time–and doing a lot of reading on his own.
The time after school can best be spent doing what we did: playing in groups with other children who live nearby with little or no adult supervision. This is where people learn to get along and especially how to deal with people who are not pleasant. We didn’t shoot each other, because we had already learned to deal with problems, generally without resorting to violence (although fighting was sometimes necessary). By not allowing our young to learn these things (because their lives are spent with school-related activities, complete with the constant presence of adult supervisors), they bring that dependence on adult supervision to arbitrate disputes, instead of learning to work through them.
I still remember my school years, even though many years have passed. That is why I oppose calls for increased time in school and increased school intrusion into the home. Just as you need time to unwind after a hard day of work, students need time away from schooling and its effluents, such as homework and school-sponsored day care / tutoring programs. One of the key reasons college students learn so much more than high school students is that college students are in the classroom much, much less. They learn to find time for themselves, even while scheduling an increased homework load. Personally, I think that starting the day at ten in the morning and ending it by two or three in the afternoon is likely to increase performance, if and only if schools don’t fill that time with busy work.
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09.30.09
Posted in Political at 02:32 by lnxwalt
President Obama wants to Extend School Year
Peppi is worried that more kids would drop out instead of staying in school.
“We don’t want that,” Peppi says. “We’re trying to put back in to school. To stay out of poverty and hopefully keep the college rates going up.”
George says there’s one positive to President Obama’s idea of having schools in session on some Saturdays.
“We’re providing food and safety and having them here as opposed to having them out where we don’t have control of them,” George says.
But George says the process would take a lot of time and planning to extend the school year.
George says the President should look at all the options before proposing the idea of shortening summers for kids.
He says they should look at test scores throughout the nation before coming to a decision.
Mr. President, I appreciate what you are trying to accomplish, but you are going about it totally bass-ackwards. The problems with our schools are not caused by students not spending enough time in class. You yourself should know that our thirteen year school program covers subject matter that most students can probably absorb in seven years. Making it the equivalent of fifteen or sixteen years to cover this content isn’t going to help much.
Instead, we need to ask ourselves why high school graduates cannot count back change, but they are fully versed in the pseudoscience of humans’ activities destroying the planet. We need to ask ourselves why we insist on trying to make every student’s education identical, when our job market demands that students be given individualized and specialized training. We need to ask ourselves why so many educational decisions are being made in Washington DC and in state capitals like Sacramento, when the people who best know what children need are his or her parents and teacher(s).
I submit that our present “make students meet a certain score on a standardized test or we punish the school” environment is doomed to failure. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, most students that finished school were going on to a factory somewhere. They were not individuals, but were instead more or less identical cogs in the wheel of the factory’s production mechanism. Schools were really good at supplying the identically-trained laborers that this set-up needed.
The national and world economies changed since those days. Asia is our “factory district”, where large numbers of identically-trained graduates can be employed. Americans have historically not been into docilely accepting the dictates from on high, which is why factories spawned unions here. You will no doubt have noticed that China’s factories do not seem to attract organized labor. Nor does their society tolerate the little bit of resistance that may spring up. So when Asian nations spend longer days, six days per week, all year long in school learning, they are not learning to be inventive or creative. They are learning to be interchangeable parts of a machine. Since the United States is long past that stage, we need to let the whole idea of top-down, standardized, near-identical instructional programs die a well-deserved death.
These days, there is really not even a reason to have students congregate in classrooms beyond fourth, fifth, or sixth grade. Students should be pursuing their education through individualized online instruction, including a very prominent Internet research component. About the only reasons for on-campus meetings are physical education classes, team sports, and performing arts programs. There is therefore no need for uniforms, for anti-cell-phone policies, for repressive policies about hair color, or for overpaid administrators such as “assistant deputy superintendent for student discipline”.
We could even get rid of most homework. It isn’t like homework helps with learning. After you’ve sat in the classroom for six hours, taking the pain of schoolwork home just does not help for most subjects. I remember MJ spending his entire after-school day doing homework. All it did was frustrate him, until I decided that it was time to stop spending all our time chasing an unattainable goal. We got a book, a long one, and spent most of his after-school time reading (he still did some homework). By the end of the year, he was getting kudos as “most improved” student in his classes. Why? Because we stopped burying him in the homework that was sent home and focused on the area where he was having problems.
And you see, that is what is wrong with most homework. The student and the teacher is buried in frustrating busy-work. Some students already get it, and the homework bores them with unending repetition. Other students don’t get it, but the homework keeps them from having the time or motivation to focus on the things they are missing. Reading and math I concede should be assigned, but history? Science? “Language”? Get real. You know better.
Let me make it clear that I like history. Yet, I have to be honest. Most school history is taught as a series of events and explanations that come down from the mountain. If the students don’t understand or absorb it, assigning homework is not going to help. Science, unfortunately, is taught the same way, through guided reading in a text book, followed by “study questions”. Taking more of the same home does not make it stickier.
If we want to help improve our schools, we can start by getting the federal and state governments to minimize their involvement, including funding, and letting local parents and teachers have most of the say in what is taught, how it is taught, and how that teaching is funded. Fire almost all educrats (the parasitic educational bureaucrats that stifle teachers and resist parents’ input into how their children are instructed) above the level of principal (and get rid of assistant principals and other unneeded hangers-on), and make that principal directly responsible to a committee of parents. Make parents and local residents aware that schools cost them money, so they’d better seek the highest return on investment they can get.
In this way, parents are fully-invested in their children’s education, and will not hesitate to prescribe additional study or to enforce school-assigned additional study. Parents will not hesitate to assist with student discipline problems. Parents will get involved in school “parent night” events. Parents will seek to motivate their offspring to achieve and accomplish.
Look, Mr. President, I know you’ll never read this. I really wish you would, because you could really help the country if you listen to what I am saying here. I know how much the federal government wants to help with every conceivable problem. But the truth is, education is necessarily a local issue, as local as the school little Johnny attends and the home or apartment where little Johnny and one or more of his parents lives. There is no “one size fits all” solution, and this means that the closer that a solution gets to the local level, the better it can fit the need. Every town and city in America needs to understand that schools can’t be fixed on the cheap, but that we can’t pawn off the responsibility to far-away state and federal agencies that don’t even know the individual parents, teachers, and students.
Parents React To President’s Plan For More School Time – KWQC-TV6 News and Weather For The Quad Cities -
Hammill is a dad of two kids in the Davenport School District. He’s also a cook and works weekends. As is, he feels he doesn’t have enough time with his kids and does not want them in school longer.
…
Hammill says after-school time is also education, but with mom and dad, and he’s not the only one who doesn’t want the school day lengthened.
“For a parent who works full-time, we struggle already. We maybe get two hours a night together. By the time we’re done with showers and homework the night’s already over with,” Kerri Baumer, a mother of one said.
In our Southern California district, students who weren’t doing so well were required to take Summer school classes to make up what they missed. I never understood the reasoning: the school had students for most of their waking hours for about nine months. If they couldn’t teach the subject in nine months, stealing the kids’ relax and enjoy time isn’t going to make a difference. And sure enough, it didn’t.
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03.29.09
Posted in Economy, Political at 23:35 by lnxwalt
Wow! Even a cheerleader like Robert Scoble is starting to doubt that California is the promised land. This is big news.
Scobleizer: Technology, innovation, and geek enthusiasm » Blog Archive Is California setup for a brain drain? «
But that’s just my stories. For California as a whole I’m sensing that the whole state is primed for a major brain drain.
Why? Our state is bankrupt. What was the response? Lay off a bunch of teachers. Our education system is already in the toilet, but this will make it worse. Other states, like Texas, that aren’t bankrupt and aren’t laying off teachers, are looking more and more attractive to parents. It’s that, or spend 10s of thousands on private schools.
There’s a general feeling that crime is getting worse. That’s part a PR problem due to four Oakland police officers getting killed last week, but how will we solve those problems if we don’t have any money to hire more cops, build more prisons, etc, etc? Callers to KGO radio yesterday made it sound like the crime problem is getting worse. Rubbed into the wound is the fact that as a state we’ve decided to stop spending money on education and I predict we’ll see the problem get even worse as uneducated kids hit the job market and find no one is willing to hire them. The crime rate is about to head up big time because of this.
The truth is pretty simple. The Bay Area does not equal California. Given that most of the state’s resident live in the southern part of the state, I would argue that for most Californians, the Bay Area’s particular characteristics are unlike the state they know. We’re not suddenly aware that crime is here. We’ve known this for many years and aren’t freaking out because of the killing of 4 Oakland police officers. Since our state has gone to great lengths to prevent people from protecting themselves, we cringe whenever we hear of violence against our protectors (the police), but this isn’t anything we haven’t seen before.
Our education is in the toilet, but it isn’t because of lack of money. With a recent high school graduate in the house, I can tell you that the school system was the obstacle that almost prevented MJ and most of his friends from learning and growing into thinking adults. Why? Because the schools are political and environmental indoctrination machines, with Fascist-like dictatorial powers used in administering prison-like campuses. A well-educated person questions the answers and doctrine given by those in authority, but this very thing brings a young person into conflict with power-tripping teachers, principals, and counselors.
Let us talk about the money for a minute. A local superintendent is about to retire from a pay of $240,600 per year. He may be a very good school administrator (or not so good), but his work is certainly not worth $200k+ a year. One of the big problems with our schools is that local campuses and the districts themselves are too large. I would assume that a superintendent who makes over $200k per year will have a couple of $150k deputies, who would each have two to four $100 – $120k people reporting to them. Below that would be several school principals, deputy principals, and finally the actual teachers who do the work of education. Seeing that teachers universally complain that there aren’t enough resources at the classroom level, the thing we must do is get rid of the highly-paid administrators (smaller districts helps immensely by making it obvious to all that these guys are superfluous).
Remember that $1 out of every $2 of the state budget is spent for the schools. The schools’ voracious appetite for money is unquenchable, so much that school spending is slowly strangling highways, mass transit, and other essentials of such a populous state’s budget. We keep hearing that this is inadequate, that California must dramatically increase its school funding, even if this results in sharp increases in taxation for our working families.
California’s school situation is dire simply because we’ve centralized funding and control in Sacramento. Just as with the nation’s financial system, our problem is the dominance and control by large, out-of-area institutions. There are thousands of locally-owned banks, savings & loans, and credit unions that are not in need of bailouts. But the big nationwide institutions were mismanaged and our whole nation is suffering as a result. It is the same with schools.
Funds from outside the local community, coupled with a profound lack of parental control of the whole educational process, mean that the schools do not have to adapt or be responsive to the concerns of the parents who know their children best. For example, MJ used to spend 4 hours or more each night on homework, and frequently wasn’t finished even after that. After spending 6 to 7 hours at school, pouring on the homework that way is–in my opinion–unconscionable.
One of my nephews used to do his full week’s homework schedule in half an hour on Monday. When his mother met with the teachers to request harder work, they informed her that they were not allowed to deviate from their predefined grade-specific content. This child’s brother is more like MJ, and used to spend his entire after-school time doing homework. Do you see the point? Each child is different, and has different capacities for school-based learning. State-issued standards about homework and classroom content fail to take into account that some students in a typical thirty-student classroom are probably a year or more advanced over some others.
What is the solution? We need to make sure that school districts are smaller, and that parents have more control over them than do professional educrats. In fact, we need to make legal changes to our educational system so that are unresponsive to parent and students’ needs are denied permission to operate. Secondly, we need to change the way we fund schools, so that the majority of their funds come from the local community. This will probably necessitate changes to Proposition 13’s controls on property taxes. And thirdly, we need to stop trying to recapture what schools did in 1940 and 1950. The nation, the economy, and the world around us are quite different now than they were back then. We must also stop indoctrinating children. If it is true, let them figure it out because they are intelligent thinkers. I’m talking to you, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), also known as “climate change”.
Back then, we knew that many graduates would go into factory jobs where a fixed set of basic skills served as the entry requirements for a life-long career. For this reason, schools tried to give each student the same training, the same content, as any other student. Today, there are few factory jobs awaiting graduates. Instead, they are faced with retail (many graduates will work for the large discount chain we know as “Big Blue”), foodservice (the “Golden Arches” is the first employer for a huge number of people), and other low-wage service jobs. The best futures are available to those who go out and start their own enterprises and do something differently from the way everyone else does. However, this requires that schools stop being “education factories” and reform themselves around “boutique training programs” tailored to the needs and plans of each individual student.
To be sure, This is going to be time-consuming, expensive, and contentious. We can do some things to reduce the costs, however. Knowing what we know, why do students have to sit in classrooms every day, when much of their learning could be just as effective in an online format? I got my Master’s Degree online, so I know that it takes personal investment in one’s own success. But that is exactly what is needed for those who go on to start and run their own enterprises. Best of all, this kind of training is very amenable to personal research.
And, yes, I am among those looking into Texas and other states. California’s decision to raise taxes during a recession is going to hurt state residents more. This includes those who are already struggling, those who have no healthcare insurance, and college students.
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03.12.09
Posted in Economy, Political at 02:21 by lnxwalt
Unemployment ‘is now a national emergency’ – USATODAY.com
The unemployment rate in Michigan was 11.6%, up 4.3 percentage points from a year earlier and the highest for any state, the Labor Department said. The unemployment rates in California, Rhode Island and South Carolina rose in January to top 10%. That was the first time those states had jobless rates in the double digits during this recession, which began in December 2007.
A number of people who still employed are working suchminiscule schedules that they are also, for all practical purposes, unemployed. Twelve hours per week is just enough to buy a couple of video games or rent a few DVDs each month.
I have a suggestion that may help California. Take all public officials statewide who collect $100,000 or more and cut their pay by 80%, using the savings to fund continued employment for lower-paid state and local government employees and grants for small business startups. The Pete Wilson horrendous tax increase during a recession trick is just going to make it worse and longer for Californians–again–the way that namesake governor Pete Wilson’s tax and fee and tuition increase prolonged and deepened that recession. (There was a campaign commercial for Ron Unz that made many Californians aware of just how badly this tactic backfired on us.)
What else? Abandon, at least until after the recession ends, the state carbon reporting and regulation plan. Consolidate state tax collections and funds custodian operations into a single “division of revenue”. Make it a felony for any state official to spend transportation funds (e.g., DMV taxes) for any non-transportation purpose. Kick off a comprehensive evaluation of the effect of state regulations and taxation on smaller businesses, the kind that produce jobs.
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03.11.09
Posted in Political at 02:44 by lnxwalt
Obama backs teacher merit pay, charter schools
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama called for tying teachers’ pay to students’ performance and expanding innovative charter schools Tuesday, embracing ideas that have provoked hostility from members of teachers unions.
He also suggested longer school days — and years — to help America’s children compete in the world.
Charter schools can help. Merit pay might also be helpful, but do we really want teachers that are only motivated by their wallets? Longer days? I think not
I believe Mr. Obama missed a lot of what is going on because he spent some of his school years in foreign schools. Let me lay it out briefly.
Schools still rely on industrial age concepts, in a technology age world. They expect to produce a uniform product when it is neither socially nor economically desirable to have a cohort of clones each year. Schools rely on state and federal handouts that come with strings. Schools have rigid, theory X management structures, much like those in the failing automobile manufacturers. Schools have obscenely overcompensated administrators whose pay depends on building empires of subordinates (including teachers and their assigned students). Schools relegate parents to subservient and advisory roles, when the schools should be subservient and advisory to the parents’ leading roles in training their children.
Any reform plan that does not deal with these issues will be a dismal failure, just like the “No Child Left Behind Act”. Schools need to be locally-funded, locally-controlled, and to target locally-created standards. In that sense, the charter school movement has shown that much of the educracy that clogs our school districts can be successfully jettisoned without ill effect on the students.
As for merit pay, the teachers believe that merit pay is an attempt to damage their unions. They also believe that determining who merits what pay will not be objective. I agree that the merit computation will be subjective and will be manipulated by cynical administrators.
As for the daily length of school, I believe that learning to play outside without the teachers’ looking on is probably the most important part of education. This is when people learn to get along with others who may be older or younger than they (something they cannot get in the schools), and learn to work together to set objectives and to achieve them. You can hear them discussing it: one wants to play kickball, another wants to play dodgeball, and a third wants to play football. They learn how to get along and enjoy themselves, even when they don’t always get their own way.
This depressurizing time is also critical to absorbing the myriad facts and figures that were spouted at students that day. Yes, I realize that many foreign nations have longer school days and longer school years, and that those nations often have higher scores on learning tests. But reality is not learning tests–reality is a changing world, in which unexpected situations and choices come up. That kind of mind-numbing process beats down the inventive and innovative parts of students’ minds, so that they become mindless drones in the workplace. Think about it. Teacher says “homework tonight is …” so the student never has to plan or allocate time and resources toward a goal that is several months off. Often, the work requirement is so detailed that there is no room for personalization.
WRONG, WRONG, WRONG. Destined to fail. Student performance comes from home, and is stifled by the school. Until the imbalance between the two is righted, plans like these are destined to fail.
Personally, I believe that school districts need to be small, locally-funded, and controlled by local parents. If there is one thing that the past forty years have shown, it is that funding and control by large, out-of-the-area entities like state and federal educational bureaucracies merely makes schools even less responsive to the students and their parents.
IceRocket: school reform, educracy
school reform, educracy
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01.27.09
Posted in Economy, Political, Small Business at 07:10 by lnxwalt
Population Density
One of the biggest challenges for the CCCDC to overcome as they work to get Cincinnati’s downtown and uptown revitalized is the lack of a dense enough and sufficiently socioeconomically diverse population. The stores wait for people to move downtown before they commit to providing services, while people won’t move downtown until there are stores so they don’t have to trek to the suburbs for groceries.
Chicken, meet egg. Egg, meet chicken.
This is where trying to draw in outside resources fall flat. Unless there is something else going on that is beyond your control, basing your town’s development plans on outside investment and population influx is going to be a rough, and not often successful, endeavor.
The key to reviving Cincinnati, Ohio, is their local residents, local businesses, and local resources. Outsiders are not interested. In my own local area of California, the local town and cities have spent thousands of dollars over the past twenty years promoting the area to outside businesses. The result is that retail stores, gas stations, and restaurants (including fast food restaurants) have proliferated, with their substandard wages. Our population is still unemployed and underemployed, with many commuting fifty miles or more to obtain decent pay.
Troy, the author of this blog post, often talks about the local businesses and other quirks of Cincinnati that make it a recognizable place, distinct from similar cities around the country. I believe that this is the key to building up that city, just as it is the key to building up California’s Victor Valley. We cannot allow our cities to become giant strip malls, full of dozens of chain stores and look-alike knock-offs. We have to build locally-owned businesses, encourage local citizen involvement, and devote local resources to solving local problems. We cannot depend upon federal or state funds, nor on large, out-of-area corporations (LOOACs) to solve our problems for us.
«We cannot depend upon federal or state funds, nor on large, out-of-area corporations to solve our problems for us.»
This is where local politicians have to have guts. When every other city is spending its money trying to attract still another chain store to open a branch in town, a smart, locally-focused politician will be working to build up small, locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) and local non-profit groups. He or she will be trying to get local citizens to become involved, and to actually give them a voice in the choices that affect their lives. The smart, locally-focused leader recognizes that the best way to attract outside investment is for local businesses to prosper. The best way to attract an influx of residents is to have relatively low housing costs, but a high quality of life, including sufficient well-paying local jobs to support your local population plus extra move-ins. And one of the best things to do is to have strong community-based medical and substance abuse programs, as drugs are one of the leading causes of criminal activity and a large segment of the population has no health care insurance. These things gradually improve the local quality of life, relative to similar areas around the nation.
population density and Cincinnati
Like so many other things economic, it’s all about volume. Here in Corryville we have a few abandoned properties. Not a huge number, but one is too many. A house across the block from us is reported to have had no utilities since the 1970s! This is one of many properties in Hamilton County with an absentee owner. This doesn’t help the density situation because the owner isn’t interested in renting or selling–if they can be found–and some of these buildings just need to be taken down in spite of the architectural loss.
Again, with locally-focused, active leadership, such problem properties can be pruned. Forty years is a long time for a house to be abandoned. It should long ago have been either torn down or turned into a museum. Perhaps the current downturn will finally cause municipal governments to wake up and recognize that LOOACs have little incentive to stick with the city during hard times, while SLOBs will stay, sometimes even longer than they should, because with SLOBs the key concept is locally-owned, while LOOACs’ key concept is out-of area.
One of the keys is building the local economy around local resources. Turn off the spigot of incentives that taxes SLOBs and local residents more heavily in order to subsidize LOOACs that come into town. If it does not make sense for a large company to be there, let them go where it does make sense. Otherwise, your town can end up stuck with an abandoned building, where the big company closed their local branch once the incentives ran out.
I believe that giving away the town treasure to attract hundreds or thousands of minimum-wage jobs is a betrayal of the local tax payers and business community. If we instead spend those resources to make the area better for the people and businesses that are already there, we will avoid many of the ills that go along with these giveaways.
IceRocket: urban renewal
urban renewal
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11.11.08
Posted in General Management, Political, Small Business at 23:24 by lnxwalt
Starting, growing, and operating a small business is an all-encompassing job. It includes many tasks that we do not always associate with business. For example, if you are in business, you are affected by (and in turn have some minimal effect upon) the economy. You are affected by taxation. You are affected by education. You are affected by policy decisions made by pointy-headed bureaucrats, decisions that benefit LOOACs at the expense of SLOBs.
This means that any small business forum or discussion must admit that questions of faith, politics, societal improvement, and economics are germane to any competent business discussion. After all, if your faith does not influence or govern the way you run your business, you don’t really have a faith. If your voice is not allowed in a political or social discussion, then whose voice will be? If you, the provider of jobs, are not included in talks about jobs in the inner cities or jobs for ex-convicts, how can these problems be addressed? When talk turns to taxation, you, the payer of taxes, need to be the first and foremost part of the discussion.
Zoning issues, environmental regulations, safety regulations, all affect you, and not just negatively. Safety regulations, for example, reduce your insurance costs by reducing accidents and reducing the damage caused by those that do occur. Zoning can prevent “Big Blue” from opening a superstore across the street from your little grocery, or it can keep you from opening in the part of town you desire to serve. Even economic empowerment initiatives, which often involve tax subsidies for businesses that open / move into certain areas and hire local residents, affect you. This is especially true if you are already in the area and your taxes are being used to subsidize competitors who move into your market area.
Small business is an everything job. Everything you are, everything you do, everything you believe is all wrapped up in that enterprise. And if it is not, you should be thinking about how you’re going to replace your business, because you have certainly lost your hunger and desire.
Therefore, do not feel that you cannot or should not be involved in the debate around any issue, whether schools, the economy, taxes, or foreign imports. You will be among the first affected by any decision that is made, so get involved. Attend your town’s board and council meetings. You cannot hit them all, but pick one or two and hit those (school board, water district, sewer district, cemetery district, irrigation district, public power district, resource conservation district, park district, fire protection district, et cetera). If we are going to make this country run right, it is going to be small business owners that make it happen.
small business
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