Humans aren't just descended from apes - we are apes. Anything that is part of Hominoidea is an ape (great or lesser).

Humans are technically great apes (Hominidae) - part of a family that includes gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and orangutans.

As long as they're both in salt water...

I've only had a chance to skim over the latest OECD document, but I went pretty far into the weeds on previous OECD documents on the same issues.

One thing that became very clear was that the US actually did quite well at educating second-generation or greater Americans - the numbers were quite high (as in top 3 in literacy) and even better at "highly proficient" (for category 4-5, the US was either 1 or 2 depending on how you sliced the numbers).

The core problem for the US that weighed on its average was the number of recent immigrants who were functionality illiterate in their original language and their children. The US has a very large recent immigrant population that is low-skilled and neither speaks English fluently nor reads adult level Spanish. The children of these immigrants typically score terribly and this significantly skews the US figures downward. I can't remember the exact numbers off the top of my head, but the percentage of first-generation low-skilled Hispanics (children) in the lowest quintile for reading was astronomically high.

Among second-generation Hispanic immigrants, literacy was actually slightly above average and then regressed back in subsequent generations.

Canada and many of the nations at the top of the list have fairly restrictive immigration policies - Canada uses primarily uses skill-based immigration (followed by family reunification). Recent Canadian immigrants and their children actually outperformed native Canadians on most tests. The high scoring Scandinavian countries had immigrant populations that were largely fellow Scandinavians (Norwegian Swedes, etc.). Japan has highly restrictive immigration policies.

Given that the difference between Canadian literacy and US literacy in the latest study is three points (273 vs 270), the entire difference is likely due to differences in immigrant population. It may even indicate that the US does a slightly better job as our low-skilled, low literacy immigrant population dwarfs yours.

(I'm not looking at these figures as an immigration restrictionist - they just need to be understood as part of the difference in outcomes. In a small sense, the US is increasing the literacy of the entire continent by educating the children of the Latin American diaspora.)

Which might give you a clue that your reputable news services may not always be completely neutral. (I'm not a huge fan of Fox News or the Examiner, but even they can occasionally break a story.)

Yeah, the Wikipedia grid of good/bad to private/common leaves a lot to be desired as both axes in real life are continuums and not binary choices. Even the heading of "common ownership" can be considered a flaw, as traditional Tragedy of the Commons is often modeled on open access resources rather than common ownership, which have subtle but real differences both in how they arise and the best ways to ameliorate their problems.

Classic case of The Tragedy of the Anticommons.

Of course, we'll get a bunch of comments on how this proves that business men are hypocrites because they are against regulation accept where it benefits them and how stupid the libertarians are.

But this is precisely the libertarian argument - if government becomes (overly) involved in business, rent seeking behavior is the natural result. Capitalism is a cruel mistress and businesses routinely fail, so they look for any edge they can get.

In a lightly regulated market with low barriers to entry, they have to compete on service, price, convenience, etc. In a more heavily regulated market, first movers and existing and heavily capitalized businesses look to create new barriers to entry to prevent competition and create artificial scarcity to keep prices high. This can be via licensing (taxis and beauticians), regulations that have high fixed costs but low per unit/worker costs, monopoly/captive markets like dealerships and liquor distribution, and other regulatory structures that that favor fewer, larger firms to more, smaller firms.

Ironically, the dealership structure began as a true capitalist trade-off - dealership networks allowed automobile companies to become large, centralized and efficient by helping to limit their capital costs - as inventory was created, it was immediately purchased and distributed across the country to local sources of capital. Car manufacturers got less money per vehicle but could concentrate their capital on plants, raw goods, workforces, etc. That dealership network absorbed a huge amount of the capital costs of the vehicles themselves. Once a lot of the manufacturers' fixed costs were paid off, the dealers saw the writing on the wall and used their local political connections to modify state laws everywhere to fix the existing model in place.

Playing devil's advocate for one minute, the summary is misleading when it says dealers are "working behind the scenes to change state laws". In fact, they are working in the open to preserve the existing state laws - Tesla was the company attempting to have various laws changed to their benefit (in the Texas case, to their sole benefit as it was very narrowly written). That said, I would prefer a more broadly written version of the "Tesla law" to prevail.

You do realize that the pasture analogy was used because that was the original analogy used by Grant Hardin in his Science article The Tragedy of the Commons which is where the term and concept originated, right?

Ownership of less bounded resources (open access resources) is trickier but at some level ownership of all resources within a polity are granted by the state. With all but the most hardcore minarchists or anarcho-capitalists, there is an assumption that one of the roles of the state is enforcement of contract, one of which is ownership of resources. Ownership without rule-of-law is somewhat meaningless - anyone more aggressive than the current owner will simply take what s/he wants. (Anarcho-capitalists would outsource enforcement of contract to non-governmental entities but it seems to me that would quickly devolve into something akin to government anyway.)

Most libertarians would look for a set of laws that put the minimal possible burden and maximal possible rights on ownership - not no burdens and infinite rights. Ironically, the objection you raise (airwaves) has moved strongly in a libertarian direction - frequency auctions with ownership rights. (Some more minarchist libertarians would argue that in a perfect world the original airwave frequency space would have been "homesteaded" by private individuals and then been subjected to property protections, but that ship sailed a long time ago.) The FCC has not been abolished but its scope has been trimmed. Some frequencies are owned by an industry (say WiFi) rather than by individual corporations but the concept is similar (the ownership of WiFi frequency is largely governed by physical location - my neighbor can't impinge on my use of those frequencies on my property by using a transmitter strong enough to overwhelm my router).

No, libertarians argue that the problem is conceptually hard not that it doesn't exist. Liberals generally feel the problem is fairly easy conceptually (just regulate it) but hard politically.

The problem is that there is no one simple answer (as the linked video acknowledges - straight from the mouth of libertarians). Some commons problems are amenable to privatization schemes (land and fisheries ownership - Ronald Coase did a lot of work on this idea) while others work more smoothly based on cooperative communities (Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for her work on this tactic). Both of these tactics are well respected in libertarian circles because they use locality to solve the knowledge problem.

Where it gets truly complicated is in open-access resources that don't lend themselves to either method (air and water being two common examples). In this area, there may be areas where regulation is necessary but it should try to be as locally and market focused as possible. Which is why libertarians have put a lot of thought behind ways to get pricing into those types of markets. Libertarians like Jonathan Adler have been advocating carbon taxes for years and the entire Summer 2013 issue of Cato's Regulations magazine features deeply researched and well argued cases for implementing carbon taxes and how best to price them for maximum gain at reasonable cost.

I think you are arguing against straw man libertarians rather than real ones.

Yup - libertarians don't think about this problem at all. Oh wait...

Uruguay and Argentina are "whiter" the the USA, while Costa Rica, Cuba and Chile are majority Caucasian descent. Brazil is just under 50% and Columbia and Venezuela have large Caucasian populations. Most of Latin America is still ruled by Spanish descendants and once you move into Mestizo (mixed Caucasian/native) you're talking about the vast majority of the population having "recent" Caucasian ancestry.

Libertarians (and libertarian Republicans) couldn't give a damn about English First or English Only. Look at the sponsors of H.R. 997 (English Language Unity Act) - Steve King, Louis Gohmert, Michelle Bachmann - the part of the party so looney they manage to embarrass other Republicans enough to be denounced by them fairly regularly.

In contrast, the National Vice Chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus, Eduardo Jesus Lopez-Reyes, is Spanish speaking, Puerto Rican born and of Guatemalan descent. (He's also a Mormon who lives in New Hampshire - the Venn intersection he's in is pretty damn small...).

Of course, we may get to test this theory if Puerto Rico ever becomes the 51st State. More likely than not, it would keep Spanish as the primary "state" language - and you'd probably get some movement at the federal level to make Spanish even more of an official auxiliary language.

Technically, a libertarian think tank.