"like most non-partisans"...like most rational people actually...thanks for the hackery.

Very well put: "Basically the only reason you like the electoral college is because it makes your vote count more than the vote of someone who you don't consider as fully human enough to have equal say in a democracy." I'm not even saying the electoral college is "wrong," (I would have stopped short of fully human as overbroad—no part of our federal democracy is majoritarian and that's not necessarily bad :) just that you capture the distortion that is applied. I do think it is time to revamp the system; this popular/electoral vote split is just embarassing.

Because I haven't seen this posted yet: https://xkcd.com/1319/

Surely UID 27417 (I am humbled) is one of the Old Ones and knew this. Very amusing.

OMG, self-deprecation on the web. Seriously, kudos. (I am not being sarcastic.)

You're very right that the way the law uses certain words and expressions—"terms of art"—can be very different from expected. "Weapons of mass destruction" for example. :)

Good link provided in above comment: http://www.treasury.gov/resour...

The quote "I like it because you get rewarded for your good behavior — like a dog does when it gets a treat" should be plenty to flag a really archaic approach to school that's going to work for some kids and poison the rest. The article mentions the criticism for the underlying theory as well. Teachers should be connecting with their kids. What's next? Food pellets for good behavior? Arf! Johnny's a good boy.

Thx for the informative digression. :-) On the airwaves in the States we have heard plenty of broadsides against "Africa," likewise against Muslims everywhere. It gets old.

Well, we'll have to differ then. The free market is an ideal, but a self-executing free market is a rarity. No regulation (or no government) is a nice jingle but there will always be something. (Is anyone saying more regulation/govenrment for its own sake? No, but they can be nasty side effects.) It's the law itself. Even the criminal law is a form of regulation—especially unlikely to be banned—and yes amending, sometimes repealing, it can improve it. That said, I do sympathize with the libertarian perspective (versus dogma) and think the government can be seen as just another ... corporation. Which means, regulate with care, not never.

"Robber baron" just sounds cool. I don't think we have classic monopolies like oil and steel, but less the landscape is pretty messed up, and getting worse so with the repeal of Glass-Steagal and so on..... Just my 2 against $2 trillion.

And I suppose big business loves non-regulation, with the opportunities of monopoly. So win-win?

I'll agree that regulation risks just shifting wealth from one corporate interest to another. Also, that regulaiton introduces its own barriers to competition. But to condemn regulation per se is mindless. We got enough of the robber barons ages ago.

Now, back to my question.... which way will things tilt, and how much will the public interest matter.

Well said. I would be even more specific and say you don't want the carriers to discriminate or, god forbid, they'll redefine common carriers. ;-) I'm not sure most congresspeople understand the issue anywhere near as well as they understand who is for or against—politics.

Pretty damn well. You can't believe the difference things like lifting the bar to pre-existing conditions makes to families like ours. That they could have better job with this behemoth project, I don't doubt. That they would have done a better job if the other half Congress hadn't been obstuctionist jerks, I don't doubt either. Growing pains, not fault with the basic concept.

To drift back on topic: ditto for net neutrality. Sometimes we do better without the market carved into big corporate fiefdoms and fake competition.

It seems to me the lobbying forces on the part of the content providers, Netflix et al., would be pretty formidable—unless they think the price is worth it to suppress upstart competition. Which is it?

AMEN.

No, that is not ironic.

That's very much the ideal of the SAT, to draw out kids who are bright but haven't shown in through grades. It does happen. Statistically however, GPA is still a better predictor. It's just not the only one, and the SAT is overrated—hence even its creator talking about reform (again). My (totally unscientific) experience has been that a lot of the super-groomed kids don't come across so great. Having a soul is valuable too.

Ideally of course you have good grades *and* SAT scores! My kid has, to put it mildly, a very wide spread between SATs and GPA. I have no idea what the schools will think. They *are* in fact looking to GPA more and more. I think they are aware of the reputations of a great many schools and of grade inflation. Like you, I went to a prep school where everyone went to college, and its reputation stood for a lot. And straight A's in all AP classes at a school people have heard of is a fair criterion.

I think most admissions decisions are made on relatively little info and reflection. A lot of schools admit half or more of their applicants, and only a fraction actually matriculate. I doubt the 20-somethings doing most of the review are working too hard at analyzing the applicants. None of the schools my son applied to, for example, had interviews. On the other hand, yes, some schools get into it a little harder.

Oh BTW—congrats on pulling through the morass!

No. My scores for example were "so what" at Harvard. At those schools, the SAT scores of many applicants tend to be so good that they don't matter. The school can admit all the 800 scores they want, but do go looking for other qualities. The statistical validity of the SAT above 700 or so is not very good and is not useful for distinguishing among candidates—the test is designed around the much lower and heavily populated mean. Moreover, the SAT is technically not an IQ test any more, rather a measure of scholastic "achievement." (The "A" in SAT used to stand for aptitude, until 1992 or so. Mensa no longer accepts SAT scores I think. I'm not endorsing IQ tests here either.)

Consider http://www.washingtonpost.com/...