[ale] Palladium/MS: ideas for retaliation - WAY, WAY, WAY OTnow!!!

[James P. Kinney III]

I couldn't find a single point on which I agree with you! 

rebuttals below:


> > The kid who is educated today at the expense of every
> > taxpayer, childless or not, may be the genius who
> > discovers the cure for Alzheimer's, or AIDS, or cancer,
> > or develops the perfect, non-polluting energy source.
> 
> A) There are already cures for those diseases (*1), and there have been
> alternative, non-polluting energy source for as long as there have been cars
> (*2).
Please elaborate on the sources of these cures and power sources. As an
active scientist with interests in many fields, I have not heard of a
solution for for either.
> 
> > The kid who is _not_ educated today has a great chance
> > of becoming the asshole who burglarizes your home, or
> > shoots you for the $50 you just pulled from the ATM.
> 
> Lets see - I wonder where these 'assholes' are coming from now?  You guessed
> it - *PUBLIC SCHOOLS*.

I have friends who are lawyers in the criminal justice system. They are
public defenders. The vast majority of the repeat offenders didn't
complete 12 grade. The crimes they commit are of a one-on-one personal
nature, i.e. theft, murder, rape, etc. Yes, they went to public school.
If the schools had been better, maybe these people would have been doing
something usefull instead of the crime they committed.

The private school criminal, however, is much more insidious. They
commit crimes against large numbers of people. They get business and
accounting degrees and embezzle pension funds, they pull stunts like at
Enron, they make the decisions that lead to the layoffs of thousands of
people. They head organizations that make poisonous byproducts and ship
the sludge to South America to dump it there instead of cleaning up the
mess. They make the decisions to purchase known, inferior industrial 
hardware to save $100 on a $2000 valve, which fails in use later causing
a cyanide plant in Bophal, India to explode and kill 11,000 people with
the toxic cloud. I could go on with this line for months on end. Hitler
went to a private school.
> 
> > I would gladly pay double my tax rate on my home to better
> > fund the education system of Dekalb  county. I absolutely
> > seethe at the discussions from people who want to cut
> > taxes and in the next breath bitch and moan about "how
> > hard it is to get good help these days".
> 
> Sorry, Jim, you are making the same mistake many other make.  Think about it.
> If throwing money or raising taxes were the answer to the problem, everyone
> would be Einsteins.  The simple fact is, the more government controls our
> schools, the *worse* they have gotten.  And the more taxes are raised and
> spent on schools, the *worse* they have gotten.  The *answer*, my friend, is
> to go back to what works.  *Private*, *community* schools.

You missed the point of this paragraph. Unlike so many others, I see the
merit in having a well funded educational system. As this is a social
system that uses the monetary token as a means of exchange, it is the
only possible way to ensure the availability of resources needed to
provide the environment for OPTIMAL educational benefit. Having the cash
is not the only solution, though. Spending it correctly is the key.
Linux would be a real good winner here!
> 
> Home-schooled children *consistently* score higher on all of the government
> tests, and consistently win national spelling bees, etc.  And I guarantee you,
> a child who is home-schooled costs the mother/father paying for it *much* less
> than they would if they had gone to the public fool system.

The cost of a home schooling process is vastly higher than what is spent
on a per child basis in _any_ school system, public or private. One
parent stays home from work to be teacher. At a national teacher pay
average of $30k for a 2 kid classroom, that $15k per year on staffing
alone. The ENTIRE amount spent per kid in Dekalb county is a whopping
$1600/year. That is the annual school budget divided by the number of
students. I would be shocked if a school system that could afford a 2:1
student:teacher ratio didn't perform off the charts. 
> 
> > I would gladly suffer a tripling of my property taxes
> > if it was used to hire people who had a college degree
> > in something other than education to replace those who
> > took the easy route and majored in education.
> 
> Since I am in complete agreement with the supreme Court of the United States,
> and believe that the taking from one to give to another is nonetheless
> *theft*, regardless if it is called 'taxation', I cannot disagree with this
> more.

I always get a sarcastic giggle out of this argument. It brings out the
philosophy of the nature and purpose of government. Since a
disproportionate number of elected decision makers were educated by a
private school, they have a very particular viewpoint on society as a
whole. And like most people, they tend to make decisions that favor the
elevation of their personal power base. 

The process of taxation is often seemingly unfair. I know that some of
federal tax money has built roads in California. If I go there I can
drive on them. I know that some of federal tax money has gone to give a
$240 per month check to someone who is too mentally ill to hold a job. I
know that some of my state tax money has gone to subsidize peanut
farming advertising in south Georgia. I happen to like peanuts. I did
see the adds for peanuts in the MARTA trains. "What else can make both
beer and chocolate better?" I have problems with tax money spent to
purchase proprietary software. I have a huge problem with tax money
being spent on purchasing stuff from for-profit companies that spend
money lobbying to support the purchase of more stuff from them.

Taxes are how governments get the income to provide the services that
the population demands of them. It's the population making the demands
that I am having the biggest problem with. Very little thought is given
to long range benefits of society as a whole. Or so it seems. 

I personally think that we should be spending 3-5% of GNP on pure and
applied research focused on how to get vast numbers of people of this
little orbiting rock and surviving elsewhere.
> 
> The only people who should have to pay for schools/teachers should be the
> people who use them.  Anything else is communistic in nature (one of the ten
> planks of communism is *mandatory*, free, public education (controlled by the
> government) for all children.  Hmmm, sounds suspiciously like what we have
> now, with the exception that we still have private schools and are still
> 'allowed' to home-school our children, as if the government had the powe to
> *deny* this Right.

So you should have to pay the full cost for your Internet connection? 
You don't want the cost of the development of that technology and
infrastructure spread out over the entire population? As the research to
develop the Internet has cost in the billions and fewer than 50 million
Americans actively use it, are you sure that the direct use cost model
is something you are truly willing to swallow. You mean to tell me that
you aren't happy that the unconnected 50% of the population is
subsidizing your Internet access?

Remember, governments are not a bunch of machines. They are people that
sit there and make those decisions. We do elect, in a twisted way, those
decision makers. It doesn't happen at the ballot box the way we were
taught. It happens at the grocery store, the mall, the myriad of places
we spend our money. That funds the process that has the ear of the
government decision makers.
> 
> > As I have had the distinct pleasure of teaching education
> > majors who were working on a masters degree, I know now
> > the decrepit state of affairs of the education system in
> > this country.
> 
> I agree - but it is *because* of government controls and the 'publicly funded'
> nature of them now.

It was due entirely to the lack of funding for schools that a shortage
of teachers was recognized. The teacher training schools realized that
they had to make it possible for more people to become teachers. Thus th
education degree was born. The rigorous nature of the college degree
gave way to the lower entrance requirements to get teachers at least
halfway trained.

The public school system did not collapse because of public funding. It
collapsed because of a series of events. Let me elaborate:

During WWI, the industrialists realized that the factory workers were
too uneducated to be truly useful. After WWI, they asked for, in
conjunction with other people, and got the formation of a nation-wide
public school system. It's purpose was to provide a basic rudimentary
education for simple literacy for factory workers. At that time, there
were few vocations for women; Teacher, nurse, secretary, bank clerk,
retail sales, housewife and prostitute were the fields that were
available. Of these, the highest status and responsibility, and pay, was
teacher. For the women who wanted to work, the best and brightest went
into teaching. As a country, we had the Einsteins of the female half of
the population readying the next generation.

WWII came and men went off to war and women moved into areas that they
had never been in. Suddenly the opportunity for other work areas arose.
Many of the best and brightest left teaching and went into business. A
brain drain at the top of the traditional womens profession occurred.
The need for teachers escalated with the baby boom. So to fill the void,
less capable people had to be used. I am a product of the first wave of
that crowd. The problem has only become worse. As the gap between
management pay and worker pay has increased, the highest quality women,
the group who would otherwise have chosen teaching for the challenge,
chase the jobs with the fat paychecks. We are now having children taught
by products of the first declination wave of teachers. It is a vicious
cycle with no good end or solution.
> 
> > I would vigorously support a $1-$5 per ticket additional
> > surcharge on sporting events tickets and movie tickets
> > if the money was sent directly to the ticket purchasers
> > school district of choice. Far too many kids (and parents)
> > count on that athletic program or that beauty contest for
> > their future.
> 
> I have no problem with this, because I can avoid the tax by doing something
> more productive with my time.

This would specifically apply a fee to those poeple who need a better
education. Sort of the sin taxes on booze. 
> 
> > In this country, we pay the lowest percentage of our per
> > capita income to taxes than any other industrialized country.
> 
> So?? Just because other peopl live as slaves in their countries, are you
> saying that we should too??

So the normal vacation time of 4 weeks in England, or the 35 hour work
week in France is slavery?  Both of those countries still have a higher
percentage of non-working mothers than we do. It is required for both
parents to work here to make ends meet in any reasonable manner. And
what the other countries provide to their citizens for the tax money is
a list of services that far exceed ours. Kids that can actually think,
as opposed to regurgitate "facts", and a health care system (of sorts)
are two things I don't see here.
> 
> > We have the worst rated K-12 school system of any industrialized
> > country.
> 
> Yes - and we had the *best* schools before the federal government took them
> over.  They started going downhill when they became publicly funded, but
> really started free-falling in 1962(?) when the feds took them over.

It's not the presence of federal control that is the problem. 1962 was
the watershed year for education. Not only was that when I was born, it
was the beginning of the fight between the states rights and local
control people vs. the attempted minimum standards of the federal policy
makers. That was also the beginning of widespread  busing and numerous
other federal mandates designed to "level the playing field" of the
education. The popular uprising to this was the rapid rise of private
schools. It was a truly racist process. Those that could afford to
pulled their lily white brats out of public school and put them into
private ones. This "white flight" still occurs. The economic conditions
of the people left in public school is such that immediate survival
needs are a higher priority than the long range benefits of high quality
education. As the students who traditionally have performed the best go
elsewhere, the intellectual leadership within the student body has
withered to the point where the remaining bright kids are ridiculed. The
teachers are up their eyeballs trying to keep the low income monster
kids from causing problems, so education time gets lost. Classroom
discipline will have no effect if the parents at home have no long range
plans beyond this months rent.

Federal control of schools? Lay it on and level the field. Set the
minimums and have the teeth to enforce them. If states and locals want
higher standards, do it. But point the blame finger where it belongs. On
all of us, the parents, the schools, the teachers, the government, we
are all to blame. And it will take all of us to clean up this mess. Too
bad we have lost 3 generations of people in the process.
> 
> <snip> lots of examples of why we should return to privately funded and
> controlled (by the people actually using them) schools.

Privately funded schools will make education the opportunity only for
the wealthy. Look back at the history of this country before 1920 for
what it was like in terms of the social structure. No one on the ALE
list would be in the top part so don't even wish for it. If you weren't
in the top 1%, you didn't know if you would be eating the next day or
not. 
> 
-- 
James P. Kinney III   \Changing the mobile computing world/
President and CEO      \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244             \.___________________________./

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 



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