It could be better. In our state it's considered mediocre among comparable towns, but to give you an example of what that means 86% of students score as "proficient" or "advanced" by national math standards. In most states that'd be accounted as a pretty good school.

I'd be very interested to know which city and state you taught in, and whether you were regular faculty. But I think your approach to reasoning about this is misguided. Rather than taking your experiences in dysfunctional school and generalizing from that, you should be looking at how the top performing schools operate.

Special needs isn't just squirming kids. Despite having lackluster marks, our daughter was screened by the school system as gifted, which in my state is considered "special needs". The school brought in a cognitive psychologist to run an elaborate battery of tests, including a comprehensive neurological assessment. What they found was very specific, narrow deficit: slow processing speed. She was capable of solving complex math problems and generating sophisticated answers to open response questions, but even simple questions took her a long time to answer. So the action plan was to put her on a more challenging course load, but to give her longer time if necessary to complete tests. On top of that we paid for training with an educational psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities. Eighteen months later she no longer required any special accommodations and was near the top of her class.

In a nutshell, all that new-fangled bullshit worked. 30 years ago she'd have been tracked into an easy CP courseload based on her marks, but the school actually put the effort into finding out that what she really needed was to be tracked into honors and AP courses. And the school system manages to do this while spending about the national average per student -- $11,505.

You don't have to be an analyst to figure out that the cost of living in New York City is astronomically higher than it is in Utah. A one bedroom apartment in New York City costs an average $2700/month. That same apartment in Salt Lake City would cost $750. A dozen eggs in NYC cost $3.19; in Salt Lake City it's $2.03. If you want to join a gym in Salt Lake, that's about $29/month. In New York it's $86.

So you're drawing the wrong lesson here. Adjusted for its cost of living, Utah spends slightly less than middle-of-the-pack amounts per student and gets slightly better than middle-of-the-pack results. Clearly Utah deserves praise for financial efficiency, but their results could be better.

Sorry, I can't argue in the hand waving style of "schools nowadays", I need actual data specific data about real places.

My town administration takes 5.5% of the total budget. In the best performing town in my region, it's about half that, but they pay their teachers 79% more and lay out over $17k/student.

My town's high school has 88 staff positions involved directly with student instruction (teachers, teaching aids, special subject tutors), 2 librarians, 3 janitors, three principals/asisstant principals, 4 guidance counselors, and 4 secretaries. That works out to about 85% of the positions involved in instruction. 74% of the head count is teachers in the traditional sense and 11% offload tasks that teachers would have to do otherwise or provide special content area expertise. So as far as my town is concerned your dystopian scenario is pure fantasy.

I totally agree, by the way: you could save a lot of money by not educating special needs students. From the budgets I've seen it takes up maybe as much as 1/3 of the per pupil expenditures. But is not educating those students something you're actually proposing? Or do you have an idea for doing it more efficiently.

That's easy to figure out. Pull the school system budgets for your town and read them. It's public record and it takes about twenty minutes to get a feel where the money is going. For example my town spends about $1.4 million in central administration salaries, including the IT department and curriculum support services. This is out of total system-wide salaries of $22.5 million. So about 6%. If you go by total expenses central administration takes up about 5.5% of the budget.

Now here's an exercise that'll make you better informed than 99.99% of the people who weigh in on this topic. Find another school system that gets better results than yours and do the same thing. How are they spending money differently from your town?

"Gee it seems like a lot of money to me," is meaningless drivel. What you want to do is compare your town to the best performing towns; or if we're talking about national policy what a typical school system does vs. what the best school systems do. I have no patience with people who parrot complaints about "administrative costs" they've heard on Fox but can't be bothered to find out how their own local tax money is being spent.

15,000 per student is not "endless resources". To put it in perspective, it's less than half of what is spent on a student at an elite prep school, which I think is a more reasonable model for what cost-is-no-object education would look like.

But let's agree for the moment that not every student needs to have class sizes of four or five with a PhD instructors. I'd be very happy if every a typical student in Baltimore has $15,000 spent on him. But one thing you apparently didn't learn is the difference between "average" and "median". I pulled one of the elementary school budgets for Baltimore, and found that it was spending about 20% of its total budget on special needs personnel -- speech pathologists, psychologists, special ed instructors. Note that this doesn't include the fraction of regular teacher time taken up by this. So it's not unreasonable to assume that per-pupil spending if you discount the mainstreamed special needs kids would look more like $11,000.

I also note that you chose two of the highest cost places in the country to run a school as representative of the whole. Really, it's expensive to educate kids in NYC? Who'd a thunk it? As long as we're cherry picking, let me in the same spirit of fairness reach into the bag of scrabble tiles and "randomly" pick -- Mississippi. Mississippi spends close to the bottom of states on a per pupil basis, and is at the very bottom of the nation in student achievement.

Let's pick another state at "random" -- oh, look I got Massachusetts. Massachusetts perennially tops the list of states by student achievement by nearly every conceivable measure. But at $14k it's in the top quintile for per student spending . To a certain mentality Mississippi is getting a better deal because it gets away with spending only $7.9k/student. Specifically that's the mentality that isn't alarmed by the fact that almost 2/3 of Mississippi's eighth graders fail to meet minimum standards of proficiency and reading and math.

Here's a fun fact. The same percentage of Massachusetts eight graders score "advanced" by national standards for mathematics as Mississippi students score "proficient" -- 18%. How much would it be worth for the 18% advanced score to be *typical* of states rather than twice the national average? How much do you reckon it would be worth to pay on a per-student basis for the impact that would have on America's long-term economic prospects? Well compared to the national average, Massachusetts spend $3000/student more. That seems like a bargain to me.

"Renewable" means that natural processes replenish the energy extracted so that we can repeat that extraction indefinitely. It's quite possible to exhaust a renewable resource sustainably, so long as that resource will be replenished. For example you can completely harvest an annual crop from a field and use it for biomass, and that resource is fully expended. But you can harvest that same field next year. I think the confusion comes from other renewables like hydropower that are replenished continually rather than intermittently. Those renewables are in a sense inexhaustible, but finite. You can only draw so much power from those, but you can draw it continuously and indefinitely.

The idea of moving from extractive resources to renewable ones is identical to the idea of living off interest rather than principle. If a twenty year-old inherits two million dollars he can live quite magnificently by spending that money for what seems to someone that young to be a very long time. But if he invested that money he could live very comfortably for the rest of his life, although that entails difficult choices and work.

We are entering an interesting period of human history -- a transitional one. It's like we're that 20 year old at age 30. We've still got a lot of natural resources in the bank, but pretty soon we're going to have to cut back on our lifestyle unless we get a lot smarter about using them.

It's not a doom-and-gloom scenario, we just have to smarten up. We've been through this before. I remember in the 70s people thought that fuel economy and emission standards were going to emasculate our beloved cars. Now we look back at those cars and they look laughably bad and obnoxiously dirty. It may be cool to drive that '66 Barracuda in the classic car parade, but it's still a filthy low-tech brick that takes 9.1 seconds to do 0-60. A modern family mini-van would smoke it in a drag race, handle better, and go twice as far on a gallon of gas.

In what universe would that be?

Well as usual it depends upon what you choose as your baseline. By choosing the baseline year you can get either a very slight increase or more or less flat suicide rate for 15-24 year old up through 2013, the last year for which we have complete data. But it's nothing like the rate of smartphone or social media adoption.

This doesn't preclude a clinician from experiencing a dramatic trend in her practice that would alarm any reasonable person. That's why we have to look at both the statistical aggregate and clinical experience. When experience tells you there has been a dramatic change, and the statistically aggregated data say there's been no change, you put those together and what you're seeing is a change in the circumstances of suicide. That's not as alarming as a dramatic and systematic increase in rates, but it's still important.

True. But the "obvious" targets illustrate my point about the depraved mind not being able to comprehend unintended consequences. These targets only work if the enemy reacts to attacking them exactly the way you hope he will. If he instead acts the opposite way, if he becomes more aggressive and indiscriminate in his drone attacks, that will only make you to double-down on your impotent strategy.

You can see this in Japan's strategy in WW2. In retrospect most of Japan's strategic aims in WW2 seem irrational. Their attempts to secure oil militarily only resulted in oil which would otherwise have been sold to them as a neutral or friendly power being cut off. And it was entirely predictable. In fact Japan itself predicted this, so they attacked Pearl Harbor in part on the assumption that a devastating attack would destroy the American public's support for a war to deny Indonesian oil to the empire -- a notion that could only be entertained by someone who was seriously self-deluded. It was a classic case of deranged men mistaking ruthlessness for realism.

Once someone loses his capacity to feel remorse for the consequences of his actions, horrors that would deter an ordinary person from doing something only feed his sense of self-importance and self-righteousness. This is true across the board no matter what your religion or ideology; the only thing that stops any of us from becoming monsters is our awareness of impending remorse.

Take the US drone strike programs in the Middle East. For the most part I feel these are a less destructive than the other military options open to us, and I think the technologies and practices used have become more accurate and precise over the years. But still there are mistakes in intelligence, human and technical errors, and plain bad luck which means despite our best efforts innocent people are being killed. And I feel remorse, even shame over that. Nobody likes feeling those things, but it's important for us to preserve our ability to feel them. Without them we would no longer weigh the negative consequences of our actions, and any rational restraint on our actions would be gone.

If you want a portrait of what that looks like, look at ISIS. They are fighting a brutal but futile campaign; even without the west Muslims themselves would refuse to be united under them. But the irrational futility of their actions only feeds their fanaticism.

You don't get to shoot back if you're dead.

Put yourself in the place of someone who wants to murder an identified US serviceman. Could the victim do anything to stop you if you were determined and patient enough, and willing to die?

Our system protects people by instilling fear of consequences. That works very well for most crimes and criminals, but not if the criminal believes he has the skills to avoid being caught (the beltway sniper) or is intent on committing blue suicide (Adam Lanza).

While it's true that a diesel without emissions control emits more highly dangerous particulates, this is not 1970. In an advanced economy any properly maintained, recent model diesel vehicle is going to be as clean as its gasoline counterpart.

It's worth considering banning the most polluting vehicles rather than arbitrarily banning half of all vehicles, but you can't do it this way. One way to do it would be to ban older vehicles, or vehicles of a certain weight carrying fewer than two or three passengers. But the even/odd license plate thing will work to reduce pollution and is simple to implement in a short term emergency -- although a massive inconvenience to people who can't carpool for some reason.

The source of the E. coli is more likely to be migrant farm workers who are not allowed bathroom breaks during harvest. State regs since the 90s require bathroom facilities, but they're often dirty, far away, and using them is frowned on by foremen on a tight schedule.

Having worked with a number of H1Bs from India, I'd say their level of technical competency was pretty comparable to what you'd expect from Americans. Some were horrible, a few were outstanding, most were OK.

There were two big differences. The first was the large number of masters degrees. This is obviously helpful in the visa process, but I don't think a CS or IT master's degree obtained right after college without any intervening work experience means much in practical terms. This is the kernel of truth in the "dodgy diploma" complaint, except there's nothing wrong with the diploma. It's often from a perfectly good program at a US university, it's just gilding the inexperienced lily.

The second big difference is culture. I don't think either culture has an overall advantage, but Indian engineers tend to be can-do and highly conscientious but are often conflict-averse and reluctant to convey bad news. Americans tend to be more assertive in the face of authority and somewhat less likely to tell the boss what they think he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear. But it's important to realize that engineers are individuals, not cultural automatons. Some Americans are door mats and some Indian engineers are firebrands. And overall engineers from either country are more like each other than they are like ordinary people.

While I think the economic arguments for H1B are bogus, I am grateful to the program for having introduced me to so many interesting people.

My take on the issue of cheating in India is that the stakes are so much higher for some Indians it'd be surprising not to have scandals like this. We Americans see being middle class as a birthright. There isn't a bottomless bit of poverty waiting to swallow us up if we're a few points short of par on our SATs, the way there is for many Indians trying to climb onto the lower rungs of the middle class ladder. But even so *we* cheat plenty. Remember the Air Force officers who shared answers for tests that were supposed to measure their ongoing competency to handle nuclear weapons? That was sheer laziness.