How America survives to this day with people this fucking stupid going out to vote, just astounds me.

You fucking idiot: A pension just is an employer-run plan WHERE YOU PUT ASIDE A PORTION OF YOUR EARNINGS INTO RETIREMENTS SAVINGS. THAT'S WHAT A PENSION IS!

Your salary isn't the entirety of your compensation, it's your salary plus benefits, which partly means pension. For decades employers have been offering (and unions accepting) lower salaries plus guaranteed pension benefits. You didn't have to save out of your salary because it's structured into your employment--they withhold part of your money, invest it, and pay it out later to you. Besides the benefits of large pension fund investing rather than a single small investor, you get professionals managing your retirement money, not some coal miner or factory worker who doesn't understand investing.

It's at the point now where I'd tell my kids "never accept a pension deal because someone dickhead down the road is going to blame you for budget problems and steal it back. Demand your money up front."

No, what's killing them is the requirement to pre-pay their projected medical obligations 75 years into the future. If it weren't for that requirement and the requirement to pre-pay retirement money out 50 years, they'd be profitable.

I think it's the former

And you'd be wrong. It's not only legally required to operate without receiving tax funds, it's by law not allowed to raise the price of stamps, or determine its own service hours, and it has incredibly onerous restrictions placed on it to fund its retirement and medical benefits for decades more than any private corporation would ever consider doing. In other words, Republicans set it up to fail so they could point to it as an example of inefficient government.

the Republican party has been working very hard to set up the USPS to fail

FTFY

The claim to which I was responding was recasting the original claim as turning volunteer FreeBSD code into "Apple Gold", i.e., profiting off work done by outside volunteers. I read the act of highlighting "Apple profits off other's freely given work" as containing a certain moral condemnation in it, as if Apple's profits were unfairly gained (additionally, the whole "fixed that for you" meme explicitly implies that the fixed version is somehow a more essential or more accurate characterization). Given that this is done deal, I imputed bitterness to it. Perhaps I mistook Andy Prough's intent, but I don't think my reading of his comment is implausible.

The tone of the post to which I was responding has a distinct odor of bitterness to it, as if Apple has shamelessly exploited the FreeBSD coders and offered nothing in return, and that's somehow wrong. I agree it's not a problem, just because the licencing terms explicitly allow for it. It's the bitterness that's misplaced.

Wouldn't be a problem if they'd chosen a licence that didn't explicitly permit Apple to do what it did.

30 million plus people have or are about to get health care, that didn't have it before--and wouldn't have it if McCain had won. The most obviously mind-bogglingly stupid part of the U.S. that the rest of the world just can't get--that you don't have UHC--and Obama and the Dems put a big dent in it against a unified Republican party dedicated to killing anything and everything Obama did.

Playing false equivalency is a juvenile way to avoid having a real opinion.

As Canadians, we tend of overestimate the power of the presidency because we equate it to being the prime minister, and having a friendly congress to having a majority in Parliament. It's similar, but crucially it's without any party discipline. Members of your own party are likely to agree broadly with you in general, but there's no guarantee they'll vote with you, and they can actually be terrible burdens. A big part of what happened to Obama was that Blue Dog Dems, realizing they were swing votes, could command a high price for their support (e.g., Bart Stupak, a centrist Dem from Michigan, trying to add pro-life clauses to the Health Care Reform bill). Had the Dems in Congress shown any kind of unity, they could have steamrolled the Republicans. But while the Republicans have shown more discipline, it's still herding cats.

A Canadian PM with a majority can pass pretty much any legislation that he wants that doesn't cause a PR uproar that threatens re-election. Simple as that. No American president has ever had that much power domestically.

Your post would be more repugnant if it weren't so laughably wrong, Mr. genetic determinist. Regardless, the causation I was addressing is circumstantial, not genetic (poor diet, not poor genes), and is well documented, so I'm neither wrong, nor have the polarity of the correlation reversed.

If you want one reason you're obviously long, look up "regression to the mean". Applying it to the heritability of intelligence is left as an exercise for the reader.

Why don't you explain it to me with small words?

We don't need standardized testing, beyond the minimum that already existed, to know that poor kids do badly in school because they're poor. There are hundreds of indicators demonstrating this without taking away from limited teaching time for yet another standardized test.

Another issue with standardized testing is that it's the backbone of merit pay arguments for teachers--increase standardized scores, get a raise (or don't get fired). But with poor kids, the teacher can't start working on increasing test scores without mitigating the effects of poverty--in other words, the poor kids who need great teachers the most, are abandoned by the great teachers because they can't get the raises they deserve because the circumstances preventing an increase in test scores are out of their control. The thing test scores are supposed to measure--the quality of the teacher--just end up endlessly reflecting what everyone already knows, that poor kids are doing badly in school because they're poor.

In a thread about how $80K is clearly too much for teachers to be paid, a post about how they're complaining about their compensation while lying because it's actually awesome, is an attack on teachers. Saying "wow, they get paid LOTS for doing LITTLE, and that's awesome... I wish I did that", is pretty clearly being ironic.

When did the U.S. become a nation that hates people who get paid well for doing a job that takes skill and training? When did a job that paid well and offered good benefits and the possibility of a good retirement, become something that you should be ashamed of having, rather than being a core part of the engine of the economy, the middle class?

More than 80% of students in Chicago public schools are poor enough to qualify for free lunches. Try improving the test scores of a group of kids living under the poverty line.

My wife teaches at an inner city high school. She has kids who skip school to work fast food jobs because their parent is a junkie and they're the only one bringing money in; students who skip to watch siblings while their single parent works; students who can't sleep because they hear sirens all night; students whose parents didn't teach them to wash with soap; students whose parents get drunk and trash their textbooks because they're offended that their kid might try to be smarter than them; students who haven't eaten in days, or whose only meal is the free lunch.

She had a student approach a speaker she brought in on bullying (afterwards), and tell him that he was being raped several times a week by a group of boys in the school.

Every problem to do with poverty shows up in the public schools. Among the many idiocies of standardized tests is that poor kids require a ton of effort just to get them to focus on being in school. You can't even start educating them until you've mitigated the worst of their circumstances somehow. You can't even start on test scores until you've solved basic social issues with poverty that are far out of your scope as a teacher--and in Chicago's public school system, that's a majority of the kids.