Category Archives: Business

Business, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Educational Malpractice

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Is the fact that the majority of children in public schools are not learning to read malice, or incompetence?

Now, I realize that an illiterate peasantry is needed for a proper neo-feudal regime, but I wonder how many of these people are actually malicious, and how many are just full of their own self-importance and convinced that they are doing what is best for these children?

Judging by those I dealt with, most of them aren’t bright enough to see any overarching social aims in this. They are simply full of their own “good intentions” and they’ve been TAUGHT this is the best way of teaching to read. In fact, if you push them they become either irate or lachrymose and tell you that you don’t UNDERSTAND, you’re not an expert and you weren’t taught the latest METHODS. (This reminds me of when we stayed in NYC in a new hotel and every night our bed was, essentially, short sheeted – it’s more complicated than that, but that was the effect. When we complained the maid, with an accent stronger than mine, informed us it was “latest, Russian bed-making technology. … that one too didn’t end well, at least as soon as I stopped rolling on the floor laughing.)

Dave, yesterday, made a comment that the public school system for all its flaws might teach a kid to read who would otherwise not know how. Since I don’t know every teacher in every corner of the US – but I know from other contexts that at least some of them will be decent and competent and tell the system to stuff it – nor every kid, nor every school, this is POSSIBLE. What I guarantee and would put my hands in the fire for is that the percentage of those is dwarfed by the MASS of what would otherwise be competent “middle brow” C students, who could read and express themselves passably in writing, if they were left alone/had online teachers with just a class supervisor/were taught by anyone (retirees? Mothers?) BUT people who had been convinced they were education experts and that teaching children to read – something that village teachers managed for centuries. (And BTW my first village teacher was a discarded fallen woman, whom some guy had seduced and set up in a little cottage with no running water and only two rooms. She was, it was rumored “of good families” and left with no other means of support, taught the kids to read and fancy work (needlework, guys!) to the girls and died respected and almost revered in her eighties.)

But whether it’s from malice or misguided credentialism and do-goodism, what I can tell you is that our system of education is accomplishing the “miracle” of turning out a population MORE illiterate than the poor never-taught people in Tudor England.

Malice or incompetence, it comes to the same. If you have kids in the system, look to their future. If they read by “guessing” (the signs are easy. They’ll think words that start and end with the same letter are the same) stop that right now and teach them to sound it out. They’ll hate you for a month, but the hatred will pass and the literacy will remain.

Always remember J. Porter Clark’s law: any sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice. (I think it was originally prompted by spammers.)

Over thirty years ago, a report on public education started out with words to the effect (if not literally — it may have) that if some foreign power had imposed on us the educational system with which we’ve afflicted ourselves, it would rightly be considered an act of war. If anything, it’s gotten worse.

Business, Technology and Society

Thunderbird Spam Filter, WTF!?

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OK, I’ve been living with this for too long, and I can’t find anything about it anywhere with web searches.

Thunderbird’s spam filter is absolutely stupid. Every effing day I have to dig through the junk folder to find legitimate email from people whom I’ve repeatedly (as in dozens of times) told it are not spammers, and from subjects (e.g., mailing lists, like arocket) that I’ve repeatedly told it is legitimate email I want to read. It absolutely refuses to learn. I can handle false negatives in spam reporting, but when it continually buries legitimate emails after I’ve implicitly whitelisted them, I can no longer tolerate this.

Am I the only one with this problem?

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Space

SLS, The Backup System

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This sort of stupidity is on a par with calling it an “insurance policy.” Dana has it right:

Last year’s request for this “back-up system” was more than 300% of the appropriated level of the primary system. By acting on this type of faulty logic, we have created a national debt as large as our GDP and still our nation refuses to take its foot off the deficit spending accelerator. SLS is unaffordable, and with relatively modest expenditures on specific technology development, we do not need a heavy lift vehicle of that class to explore the Moon, Mars, or near-Earth asteroids.”

Of course, it has nothing to do with “exploring” any of those places. It’s pork and workforce preservation.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, Technology and Society

Green Cars’ Dirty Little Secret

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They’re not very green. All they do is move the emissions to a different location.

The electric car might be great in a couple of decades but as a way to tackle global warming now it does virtually nothing. The real challenge is to get green energy that is cheaper than fossil fuels. That requires heavy investment in green research and development. Spending instead on subsidizing electric cars is putting the cart before the horse, and an inconvenient and expensive cart at that.

It’s not about the economics. It’s about feelings, which are of course the highest value.

Business, Economics, Education, Political Commentary

The Blue Civil War

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The battle for California:

For decades, Democrats have straddled a divide: they sought to represent both the producers of government services and the low and middle income citizens who depend on those services. Democrats want the votes and the contributions of teacher unions, and they want the votes of the parents whose kids attend public schools. As long as the blue model worked, the contradictions could be managed.

Increasingly, however, the contradictions have come to the fore. Teacher unions want life employment for incompetent teachers; their representatives negotiate farcically unsound pension arrangements with complaisant politicians and want taxpayers to pony up when the huge bills come due. Other producers of government services also have their sweetheart deals.

The result is that the consumers of government services, many of whom of course are Democrats, are getting a raw deal. They are paying too much money in taxes to support a system of government that, however outstanding and dedicated some people in it may be, simply cannot deliver acceptable services at a reasonable cost. The Democratic claim to represent both sides fairly is getting harder to sustain.

What can’t go on, eventually won’t.

[Update a while later]

Beautifully medieval California.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

How To Grow The Economy

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Cut spending, stupid:

Barack Obama has been trying to stimulate the economy with record-high government spending funded by higher tax rates and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s low interest rates.

But as Stanford economist Michael Boskin points out in the Wall Street Journal, “Japan tried that, to little effect, in the 1990s.” Slow growth has become the new normal there.

There are alternative policies. One is to cut government spending, or cut it more than you raise taxes. As Boskin points out, the Netherlands in the mid-1990s and Sweden in the mid-2000s “stabilized their budgets without recession [with] $5-$6 of actual spending cuts per dollar of tax hikes.”

And he notes that Canada reduced government spending in the mid-1990s and early 2000s by an amount equal to 8 percent of gross domestic product.

Those cuts weren’t painless, but they put Canada on a trajectory different from ours. Canadian voters value budget surpluses, and Canada managed to avoid almost all the bad effects of the 2007-09 recession.

I think that Keynes himself would be appalled to see the things being done in his name.

Business, Culinary, Economics, Political Commentary

The Pizza Police

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Example 1,876,342 of why there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats:

So, as usual, what has Republican leaders grumbling is not the principle that free people ought to be at liberty to conduct routine business without federal mandates. What irks them is that Obama bureaucrats are marginally more domineering than, say, Bush-era light bulb bureaucrats. (By the way, Daniel Horowitz of RedState reminds us that Rep. Upton’s light bulb ban “made its way into the 2007 energy bill [signed by President Bush], which turned out to be the Obamacare of the energy industry.”) Upton and Rodgers object to what they call FDA’s inflexible “‘my way or the highway’ approach” to the imposition of government standards. That the imposition itself, quite apart from its obnoxious manner, is offensive never dawns on them. And speaking of offensive, how’d you like this Upton-Rodgers line: “In fact, Congress has previously partnered with the restaurant industry to improve consumers’ access to information.” Michael Bloomberg and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz wouldn’t have written it any differently.

As he notes, this is why Obama managed to win again with four million fewer votes than the last time.