And I think that Common Core is doing it the wrong way around. First teach the method, then teach the model, if at all needed. The smart kids will have figured out the model simply due to practice, the not-so-smart kids might have a little benefit from being taught the model. Most of them have forgotten when they're 16 though (you know, hormones), but at least they will have the method to fall back on. Rote learning sticks.

Common Core is obviously invented by mathematicians, reasoning from a Platonic ideal. It would have been nice to have first done some science on it, i.e., figure out if it really leads to improved skill and understanding before rolling it out. You need psychologists for that.

I truly am waiting for the first psychological study that will show that Common Core training leads to better arithmetic than skills training does at the age of, say, 50. Because that's the the important bit. People not going into any kind of higher education will simply forget about the concepts. People that have learned algorithms will remember the algorithms, even if the concepts have faded away.

My mother in law of 71 does not have a higher education, and doesn't have a clue about the concepts behind numbers. Old-fashioned education. However, when confronted with a math problem in the supermarket, she beats my 12 year old by a mile. Algorithms and lots of exercise.

Google isn't *publishing* information, it's just indexing information (web page) already available elsewhere (on 3rd-party webservers).

Not entirely true. Google's claim to fame is not that it can index information, even altavista could do that, it is that it can rank it in a meaningful way. I'm pretty sure this lawsuit wouldn't have come up if Google would have shown this bit of information on page 10, instead of 1. In other words, the Google algorithms have decided that this is the most important bit of information to divulge about this person. And you think it's weird that the person in question wants this to stop?

There's a bit more to that. The Germans are perfectly capable of cooking the books, and perfectly capable of hiding this just enough so that they can offload the bagage to somebody else. The fun part of the crisis in Greece was where Merkel was forcing Greece to keep the Euro and take the money just so long that the German Landesbanken could offload their toxic (but highly profitable) Greek debts to the French banks (backed by the state). This because many German politicians actually own those banks. Clean economy? Not so much. Of course, the French retailiated by pushing more money to Greece so that their banks would not fail. And everyone is happy...

Au contraire. Switzerland needs to keep their end of the bargain, and are therefore subject to many, if not most of the random dictats from Brussels as they refer to free trade. They just don't have the right to influence them, just obey.

Determinism of state is fundamentally at odds with quantum mechanics. But that doesn't preclude the fact that the mind is a machine, as also machines are not deterministic for the same reason.

A && B == C | D

What happens?

There is such a movement. The approach is to get 51% of the states (measured in electoral votes) to sign a compact that will force them to vote in the electoral college for the winner of the popular vote, regardless of the results in their state. They are currently 61% of the way.

We typically shy away from a risk of death of less than a a percent. We get completely shocked when 250 people on a population of 5 billion die due to an airplane crash. We would not take a means of transportation if the risk of dying of it in your lifetime is as high as 1 percent. So, say that a global extinction event has a probability of 1%, or even of 0.1%. According to our normal risk patterns, that is considered highly probably, and all alarm bells should go off and we should start to act. Personally, I guess that the probability is indeed in the 1-5% range. What is your estimate?

Not really, economic theory is, and has been, completely lacking any kind of consensus. About practically anything. What we've seen up to 2008 was the worship of one particular cult of economic theory because it was so damned convenient. There were plenty of economists crying murder about it. And they still are. Contrast this with climate science. It must be very frustrating for the US population that there are not two schools of thought on the issues, allowing them to pick the one that's most convenient and stop thinking. No. There's an actual consensus in the field, and there's some pretty solid science being done in this very complex field. Not so much in economics: it's still fighting itself tooth and nail about all fundamental questions.

I think the logical conclusion from this thought experiment is that because it works well for us in the past, we should continue doing it. Therefore, we should simply take the lands of all people that have been here for more than 4 generations, call them natives, put them in reservations, and call this the American way. That's what you're saying, right?

Have you ever looked at physics, and how it separates state from function? Where are the side-effects in math? Do you really think an OO based view of particles would have gotten us anywhere? Well, I have this particle, and then this other particle, and they update their own states independently. Now, sometimes, if they are near, one particle sends a message to the elastic collision controller, which will ask then the other particle to update its state a bit differently. With trillions of particles, this becomes a bit awkward, but hey, that's how nature works.

Yes, from the inside, by its government.

You live in a fairy-tale land where the market will always self-correct. Companies with a price arrangement are typically in a Nash equilibrium, which essentially means that there is no incentive to cheat as both parties know they are worse off if they cheat the other party. If I am in a pricing agreement with another company, and I break it by lowering my prices, I know that we will go into a downward spiral of lowered prices until we settle on a level that has less profit for either of us.

This leaves competition from other companies. A well set up monopoly or oligopoly can readily create such significant barriers to entry (price wars) that it will take a tremendous amount of effort to break through the status quo. However, once through, the competing company will be invited to join the price-fixing strategy. It is the more profitable move for all involved.

Price-fixing is a stable and profitable strategy for companies. There is no natural mechanism that opens up a market that is dominated by a few players that fix price. In short: a laissez-faire market is not necessarily competitive.

When people start to make decisions based on merit instead of familiarity, you might have a point.