I always laugh when some knucklehead(s) try to do post-mortem IQ estimates on great men of history. Thomas Hobbes had a 165, whilst his contemporary, Descartes had only a 162, huh? Anyone with the confidence to estimate with such precision on long-dead people is a fool.
Tony raises an interesting theory, but I'd like to expand it and stay away from the traps of racial-oriented explanations. Yes, prima facie evidence does lend itself to asserting that "something" must be different about the African people themselves. I'll offer that perhaps it's not the people's genetics (their intelligence, their race, or whatever) that has hampered their ability to self govern, but rather a lack of "western experience".
The great Western Democracies were based on 2500 years of cultural foundations from Ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, &c. There were a whole lot of successes, failures, and ultimately learning about how to run a government that happened during that time. Most of Africa missed all of it! We expect them to act like we do when the population is largely illiterate and almost wholely ignorant of what took us a couple millenia to pick up ourselves.
Literacy is the first step to resolving their condition. WIthout literacy, learning is forvever handicapped. Without learning, a people will live in perpetual ignorance and the problems never get solved -- they'll only move from one strongman/dictator to the next without ever achieving peace or achieving living standards close to the developed world.
@Nominus- you said: "Without an organized labor force, there would be no leverage to seek fair compensation, humane working conditions, and health/retirement benefits."
How is it I am fairly compensated, work under humane conditions, and have health/retirement, yet I'm not in a union? My situation is not unique. Most of teh hite-color world (and a lot of blue collar jobs as well) are non-union. I can understand unions at one time working for health & safety standards for miners and other hazardous professions, but in the modern world, especially a white color position like a writer, there's really no need for it. They just serve as a barrier to entry to keep other writers out of the market. Same thing with the Screen Actors Guild...
@Alex- Yeah, I know that points of view aren't censored. The Wordpress "hold for moderation" feature seems to snag me at least a third of the time, though, and probably a lot more if I post something lengthy. Short stupid quips almost always go right through, though. Aren't there any knobs on it that can be turned?
Sigh... nothing like posting a profanity-free comment @ 8:30 a.m., and not having it finally clear the censors for >6 hours (not sure exactly when). In the meantime, there have been a pile of "a-hole" comments, which seem to get through fine right away. When mine finally pops up, it's sequenced way up atop all those where people folowiing the thread are apt to miss it.
I'm not sure how the auto-censor algorithm works, but it's terrible -- why bother posting?
It does look a bit Gaudi-esque -- reminds me a little of the facade of Casa Milà, one of his more famous works.
That said, the interior doesn't look especially livable. It's evident he likes the aesthetic offered by rusting steel, but this doesn't really make a great surface to live in - brown flecks forever sprinkling over everything and everyone within. Also, something tells me that the steel walls, ceiling, and floors give the interior a wicked acoustic reverberation time. He's gonna need to read up a little on Wallace Sabine's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Clement_Sabine) work on this. I'm not sure how this would get solved w/o destroying the artist's vision, though.
Zimbabwe got itself into trouble in 2000 when the government confiscated all the land owned by efficient and productive farmers (who happened to be white). It was redistributed to blacks who happened to have little experience or expertise in farming. The results were predictable and drastic -- production plummeted, prices skyrocketed, people starved, and unrest ensued. Starving people and rampant inflation = revolution. Mugabe will be fortunate if his head doesn't end up in basket like Louis XVI.
I have no arugment with writers trying to get a chunk of the residuals. Like everything else (outright pay, benefits, vacation, the corner office, &c.), it should be negotiable.
The bigger question is WHY there needs to be writer's guild (union) in the first place! It exists only to limit entry of competing writers into the market and to keep the supply of writers artificially low. If you try to hire a writer outside the guild, all the other unions on your set will strike.
The reality is that free market forces should apply. Writers should be able to negotiate their own individual contracts or employment, like most other workers in the world. If they think their work is good enough to survive into residuals, let them negotiate for that. If they think they are stuck writing for a crappy show that will soon be gone, let them push for more $ up front and forego the residuals.
Such guilds in the entertainment industry are a tremendous anachronism and the reason why a lot of production moves to Canada or offshore. As an example of absurdity, In film cinematography, I am pretty sure the union rules still require 4 people on the set to run a film camera, even though modern cameras can be operated by a single person. Likewise, George Lucas got in trouble with the Directors' Guild because he refused to have director credits at the *beginning* of Star Wars, like their rules require. They were mad at him for creatively controlling his own film (he wanted the famous "In a Galaxy Far...") Pure wasteful foolishness, just like the need for a Writers' Guild.
@everybody--- OK, let me clarify myself... I was being overly brief when commenting on a complicated problem. Yes, if you grow up to be an ignoramus, ultimately you have NOBODY to blame but yourself. There are plenty of ways to improve yourself and blaming your crappy deal in life on poor teachers is never going to help you or your descendents escape that. Plenty of history's successes were auto-didacts. Never stop learning.
Also, while I didn't state it, lackadaisical parents who don't care if their kids are idiots is a huge part of the problem as well (Thanks, aj, you are correct and I suspect we probably agree more than you realize). Said sad excuses for parents are all about getting "free" pre-school (really just group babysitting) and all day "free" kindergarten (group babysitting plus coloring books & alphabet learning) for their kids, but they don't take control and *ensure* their kids have the best education possible and take steps that that education doesn't end the minute they get dropped off the school bus. Whatever you do with your kids offers opportunities to be a learning experience. I certainly remember having my parents "help them" (they were really teaching me) how to figure out percentage discounts and calculate tips, whenever I was out with them. Such "real world" math would have helped this lottery nitwit as well.
I will however, continue to harp on the abysmal sham that is the public school system in the U.S. They are an ill-performing government monopoly, that only continue to exist because so much government (taxpayer) dollars are continually dumped upon their heads. In the absence of this, competition from secular private schools, parochial schools, and home-schooling would have decimated them years ago. And, I include the teachers' unions (though not all teachers) in my attacks, because they vehemently oppose any measure that would improve results and/or enable competition (pay-per-performance, school vouchers, end of tenure system, charter schools, &c.) The unions like cushy protected employment without standards or accounting for results. Exactly what are they afraid of?
My goodness... I thought it was only we Americans who are so retarded in basic mathematics.
True story: At the end of the season, a local home center had some unsold shrubs marked down and the price kept dropping as time went on. They had been 50% off, but then they had a special to take ANOTHER 50% off. The cashier was dumbfounded on how to handle this -- she was very concerned I would be getting the shrubs for free since that would be 100% off, right? Try as I might, she couldn't understand that 75% off the original price was the correct answer. I had a very difficult time keeping a straight face.
The kids use calculators in 4th grade, but can't figure out even a 10% discount without one. They have NO IDEA where to start. Frankly, it's little wonder the Red Chinese will technologically pass us very very soon.
It's yet another example of our government school monopolies at work. Thank the teachers' unions and a plethora of lazy administrators for the sorry state we are in. I don't feel better knowing the Brits are likewise afflicted. The Western democracies are screwed and it's our own fault. We better learn Mandarin soon.
I'm not sure why it is world news, but the kid did a decent job. Fair enough.
That granted, why it is his job to lower the seat when finished? Why doesn't his lazy mother raise it WHEN SHE IS DONE? Why is the optimum default position "down" ? Who made that rule up?
Each person should set it however they like and leave it however they like. Freedom, man!
@c-dub- My local fire department is all volunteer, so I don't think your question applies. Beer, a blue light on their cars, and a place to hang out away from their wives keeps them happy :-)
Getting past that, though... You are ignoring the fact that in the presence of competition, things re-equilibrate. If private fire-fighting firms exist, yes all firefighter wages would go up, but better people would be drawn into the profession as well. Additionally, there is not an inexhaustible demand for firemen. Hirings at private firms would also LESSEN THE NEED for as many government-employed firemen. In the unlikely event that private fire fighting became a large scale phenomenum, governments would scale back the size of their forces. (If half the homes in Mailbu had private fire service, the city fire department could be smaller). This alone would reduce expenditures, but it would also reduce the wage competition for the good people as well. In the end, you'd just see a shift of some portion of the firefighting work force from public to private sector and probably a net savings to the taxpayer. It's hard to prove that in advance of course, but that is the net result whenever other government services are opened up to private competition -- the work gets done better and cheaper and the public benefits.
Very few services really should remain in the domain of the government: I would argue that these include the military (I am rather uneasy about growing reliance on Blackwater-type contractors... we should be able to pay our best military guys much more, especially those in the most dangerous service), the police, and the court system.
Economics... it's more than an idea; it's the law.
Ugj, maybe the BBC reported it wrong, but that sure sounds like a flawed study to me: 1. You can't have the test groups (including the control) in different schools! They've got different teachers and perhaps different textbooks and/or learning methods. To do a test like this, EVERYBODY need to be in the same class so that the other variables are controlled & kept constant. At the end of this test, all it proved was that St. Columba's kids did better than the other schools' kids. You can't state why, though! It could have been ANY of the differences among the schools, even the type of food served up at lunch.
2. It looks like the "control group" didn't play any games, but didn't do anything structured either. What would have happened if they just had a 15 minute longer lesson? Add this in as a test variant.
---> To proper structure an experiment like this, they should have broken those 30 children up into 3 groups, each with a different teach/play method. That starts getting small sample sizes, so then you repeat the same partitioning over the other 2 schools as well. If you want to try competiting software, add more schools and break the classes up finer (say 5 schools and groups of 6 kids on each method in each school). The thing to avoid is doing it the way they did, which is an AWFUL interpretation of scientific method.
The great Western Democracies were based on 2500 years of cultural foundations from Ancient Greece, Rome, medieval Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, &c. There were a whole lot of successes, failures, and ultimately learning about how to run a government that happened during that time. Most of Africa missed all of it! We expect them to act like we do when the population is largely illiterate and almost wholely ignorant of what took us a couple millenia to pick up ourselves.
Literacy is the first step to resolving their condition. WIthout literacy, learning is forvever handicapped. Without learning, a people will live in perpetual ignorance and the problems never get solved -- they'll only move from one strongman/dictator to the next without ever achieving peace or achieving living standards close to the developed world.
Straight talk from Sid.
you said:
"Without an organized labor force, there would be no leverage to seek fair compensation, humane working conditions, and health/retirement benefits."
How is it I am fairly compensated, work under humane conditions, and have health/retirement, yet I'm not in a union? My situation is not unique. Most of teh hite-color world (and a lot of blue collar jobs as well) are non-union. I can understand unions at one time working for health & safety standards for miners and other hazardous professions, but in the modern world, especially a white color position like a writer, there's really no need for it. They just serve as a barrier to entry to keep other writers out of the market. Same thing with the Screen Actors Guild...
Yeah, I know that points of view aren't censored. The Wordpress "hold for moderation" feature seems to snag me at least a third of the time, though, and probably a lot more if I post something lengthy. Short stupid quips almost always go right through, though. Aren't there any knobs on it that can be turned?
I'm not sure how the auto-censor algorithm works, but it's terrible -- why bother posting?
That said, the interior doesn't look especially livable. It's evident he likes the aesthetic offered by rusting steel, but this doesn't really make a great surface to live in - brown flecks forever sprinkling over everything and everyone within. Also, something tells me that the steel walls, ceiling, and floors give the interior a wicked acoustic reverberation time. He's gonna need to read up a little on Wallace Sabine's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_Clement_Sabine) work on this. I'm not sure how this would get solved w/o destroying the artist's vision, though.
The bigger question is WHY there needs to be writer's guild (union) in the first place! It exists only to limit entry of competing writers into the market and to keep the supply of writers artificially low. If you try to hire a writer outside the guild, all the other unions on your set will strike.
The reality is that free market forces should apply. Writers should be able to negotiate their own individual contracts or employment, like most other workers in the world. If they think their work is good enough to survive into residuals, let them negotiate for that. If they think they are stuck writing for a crappy show that will soon be gone, let them push for more $ up front and forego the residuals.
Such guilds in the entertainment industry are a tremendous anachronism and the reason why a lot of production moves to Canada or offshore. As an example of absurdity, In film cinematography, I am pretty sure the union rules still require 4 people on the set to run a film camera, even though modern cameras can be operated by a single person. Likewise, George Lucas got in trouble with the Directors' Guild because he refused to have director credits at the *beginning* of Star Wars, like their rules require. They were mad at him for creatively controlling his own film (he wanted the famous "In a Galaxy Far...") Pure wasteful foolishness, just like the need for a Writers' Guild.
OK, let me clarify myself... I was being overly brief when commenting on a complicated problem. Yes, if you grow up to be an ignoramus, ultimately you have NOBODY to blame but yourself. There are plenty of ways to improve yourself and blaming your crappy deal in life on poor teachers is never going to help you or your descendents escape that. Plenty of history's successes were auto-didacts. Never stop learning.
Also, while I didn't state it, lackadaisical parents who don't care if their kids are idiots is a huge part of the problem as well (Thanks, aj, you are correct and I suspect we probably agree more than you realize). Said sad excuses for parents are all about getting "free" pre-school (really just group babysitting) and all day "free" kindergarten (group babysitting plus coloring books & alphabet learning) for their kids, but they don't take control and *ensure* their kids have the best education possible and take steps that that education doesn't end the minute they get dropped off the school bus. Whatever you do with your kids offers opportunities to be a learning experience. I certainly remember having my parents "help them" (they were really teaching me) how to figure out percentage discounts and calculate tips, whenever I was out with them. Such "real world" math would have helped this lottery nitwit as well.
I will however, continue to harp on the abysmal sham that is the public school system in the U.S. They are an ill-performing government monopoly, that only continue to exist because so much government (taxpayer) dollars are continually dumped upon their heads. In the absence of this, competition from secular private schools, parochial schools, and home-schooling would have decimated them years ago. And, I include the teachers' unions (though not all teachers) in my attacks, because they vehemently oppose any measure that would improve results and/or enable competition (pay-per-performance, school vouchers, end of tenure system, charter schools, &c.) The unions like cushy protected employment without standards or accounting for results. Exactly what are they afraid of?
Straight talk from Sid.
True story: At the end of the season, a local home center had some unsold shrubs marked down and the price kept dropping as time went on. They had been 50% off, but then they had a special to take ANOTHER 50% off. The cashier was dumbfounded on how to handle this -- she was very concerned I would be getting the shrubs for free since that would be 100% off, right? Try as I might, she couldn't understand that 75% off the original price was the correct answer. I had a very difficult time keeping a straight face.
The kids use calculators in 4th grade, but can't figure out even a 10% discount without one. They have NO IDEA where to start. Frankly, it's little wonder the Red Chinese will technologically pass us very very soon.
It's yet another example of our government school monopolies at work. Thank the teachers' unions and a plethora of lazy administrators for the sorry state we are in. I don't feel better knowing the Brits are likewise afflicted. The Western democracies are screwed and it's our own fault. We better learn Mandarin soon.
That granted, why it is his job to lower the seat when finished? Why doesn't his lazy mother raise it WHEN SHE IS DONE? Why is the optimum default position "down" ? Who made that rule up?
Each person should set it however they like and leave it however they like. Freedom, man!
My local fire department is all volunteer, so I don't think your question applies. Beer, a blue light on their cars, and a place to hang out away from their wives keeps them happy :-)
Getting past that, though... You are ignoring the fact that in the presence of competition, things re-equilibrate. If private fire-fighting firms exist, yes all firefighter wages would go up, but better people would be drawn into the profession as well. Additionally, there is not an inexhaustible demand for firemen. Hirings at private firms would also LESSEN THE NEED for as many government-employed firemen. In the unlikely event that private fire fighting became a large scale phenomenum, governments would scale back the size of their forces. (If half the homes in Mailbu had private fire service, the city fire department could be smaller). This alone would reduce expenditures, but it would also reduce the wage competition for the good people as well. In the end, you'd just see a shift of some portion of the firefighting work force from public to private sector and probably a net savings to the taxpayer. It's hard to prove that in advance of course, but that is the net result whenever other government services are opened up to private competition -- the work gets done better and cheaper and the public benefits.
Very few services really should remain in the domain of the government: I would argue that these include the military (I am rather uneasy about growing reliance on Blackwater-type contractors... we should be able to pay our best military guys much more, especially those in the most dangerous service), the police, and the court system.
Economics... it's more than an idea; it's the law.
1. You can't have the test groups (including the control) in different schools! They've got different teachers and perhaps different textbooks and/or learning methods. To do a test like this, EVERYBODY need to be in the same class so that the other variables are controlled & kept constant. At the end of this test, all it proved was that St. Columba's kids did better than the other schools' kids. You can't state why, though! It could have been ANY of the differences among the schools, even the type of food served up at lunch.
2. It looks like the "control group" didn't play any games, but didn't do anything structured either. What would have happened if they just had a 15 minute longer lesson? Add this in as a test variant.
---> To proper structure an experiment like this, they should have broken those 30 children up into 3 groups, each with a different teach/play method. That starts getting small sample sizes, so then you repeat the same partitioning over the other 2 schools as well. If you want to try competiting software, add more schools and break the classes up finer (say 5 schools and groups of 6 kids on each method in each school). The thing to avoid is doing it the way they did, which is an AWFUL interpretation of scientific method.