Teachers around here make considerably more than $30,000 per year once they've got more that a couple years' experience. The salary ranges can go upwards of $60K without even being a department head. Admittedly it does require the individual to take continuing education, but there are those two and a half summer months available for that, and the teachers have the option of having their salaries paid-out over twelve months instead of over ten and a half.

Also, around here, a matter of a mile can be the difference between a wealthy neighborhood and a poor neighborhood, and there are lots of neighborhoods that fall right in between. Cost of living in this state is fairly low, and most teachers do not live within their school's boundaries, and many don't even live within the school district boundaries. It wouldn't be excessively burdensome to the individual to tie school free and reduced lunch demographics to teacher 'hazard pay' or bonuses, and a lack of those conditions to a lack of enhanced pay. There are literally dozens of elementary school and numerous junior high and high schools (almost a hundred sites in total) for staff to work at; those that want it easy can be paid less and still have a decent living, and those that want more can work in the more challenging environments.

I don't deny that this approach won't work everywhere, but I think it would work around here.

At least they're not going on about attacking the communists over their precious bodily fluids...

Wow. "no true Scotsman" fallacy in the context of the sexual mores of women and the men that might appreciate them.

Given that the vast majority of prostitutes are women, and also given how the use of a pejorative as a modifier is designed to attach characteristics associated with that word to both subjects being tied together with it, it's not a stretch to see how saying something like, "Ethel is a Wall Street Whore" can imply the use of whore in the original intent of the word. After all, isn't that the point of using such words?

There are other words that one could use instead of whore when paid sex and prurient submission are not the topics at hand. Words like stooge, lackey, tool, mouthpiece, blowhard, and others convey the point too.

I don't see a reason to use gender-inflected words to demean someone when their actions aren't gender-derived. I also don't see a reason for manufactured outrage when someone attempts to take someone else's words out of context, like the Sarah Palin lipstick / lipstick on a pig silliness several years ago.

I'm saying that I don't want to pay for channels that I won't watch. I also believe with the package-based approach that the networks take with the carrier, there's a lot of garbage channels and garbage TV that wouldn't exist if customers weren't forced into an all-or-nothing model. We may need more than three networks, but do we need dozens of networks with hundreds or thousands of shows, with most of those shows simply existing to fill timeslots on barely-watched networks?

My state collects the property taxes for the school districts, and then budgets that money on a per-student basis to the enrolled schools and districts. School districts are political subdivisions of the state in this case. They are able to raise bonds if the populace in their boundaries passes them, but the bulk of their funding is derived from the state.

Also in my state, the poorest schools are usually the those with the least experienced teachers. Teachers make effort to get out of the poor schools and into the wealthy ones and it's seen as a career path improvement. The wealthy schools do not require as much off-hours involvement and the teachers are under far less stress than at the poor schools, as they have less disciplinary issues to deal with. They're almost assured of being a, "meets expectations," or, "exceeds expectations," teacher at those schools too, without effort.

That's why I want to tie teacher salaries, in part, to the difficulty of the campus. Teachers start out in easy schools, the wealthy schools, but eventually reach a pay ceiling if they remain there. Start them out easy, then move to a campus with say, 40% free and reduced lunch. Increase the pay ceiling, so teachers can earn more in that harder environment. Eventually move them to a school with 80% free and reduced lunch, and make the upper limit on pay even higher. In any event, to get the higher pay, the teacher needs to demonstrate performance in these environments. If they can't demonstrate that then they either don't advance or they get to try a different school in the same tier, and if they still can't perform then either they drop back to the previous tier or they really ought to consider other changes to their career.

I don't want to sound harsh, but at the same time if I don't perform then I don't get to move up in the organization, and if I really underperform then I cannot expect to retain my job, regardless of how much education or training I've undergone. I don't think that it's unreasonable to expect the same from everyone else. I'm not even saying that the metrics used to measure teachers should apply through the course of a year only, but if a teacher's students consistently underperform year after year then something needs to change. That individual teacher might be teaching the wrong grade, or be teaching the wrong subject, or not relate well to the student demographics at a given campus, but if changes or further training still don't rectify the situation then it's not fair to the students to continue subjecting them to that teacher.

I was under the impression that until the trial was completed, the judge was supposed to remain impartial to the course of justice and to refraining from coming to judgement about the defendant. Additionally, if the judge is the person that is supposed to convey information and instructions to the jury, and if members of the jury found the judge's posts on the Internet, could that, for legal purposes, be considered the judge addressing this information to those jurors? The jurors are supposed to avoid finding information on their own, but if the very authority that they're beholden to is publishing then I could see how reading that might fall within the letter of the rules for jury service.

Baby Smasher?

I've always found the use of "slut" in the pejorative to be a curious thing. Don't most single men want a woman that will have sex with them without a whole lot effort and without having to have something as burdensome as a relationship with them in order to get it?

And here I was reminded of comedies from the eighties for some reason...

We'll give you ten free transactions in Farmville if you "Like" us and allow us to go through your contacts list to see who else you know that likes us!

Just because a statement is in an EULA doesn't mean that it's legally binding, especially if there are already laws governing the use of collected data.

Back in the day, Tucker prototyped a car that had a headlight that aimed with the steering. Citroen had headlights on the DS that would steer with the car, to help the driver look around corners. More recently and most commonly in the seventies, many cars had cornering lamps that illuminated a bright flood to the side when the turn signal indicator was partially pulled or was fully engaged; my buddy's '72 Dodge Monaco has them and my '78 Chrysler Cordoba has them.

Sounds to me like they need to just design fog lamps that can follow the steering and whose light is emitted at visible wavelengths best suited to less refraction when in contact with water. Do that and the car can possibly still have a user-serviceable bulb. Worst case, have some way for the car to detect the horizon or the road height/angle at the distance that the headlights are shining, so that the lights shine on the road ahead instead of at the sky or at the ground too close to the car when the road is hilly or undulating. That's a function of the headlamp bucket more than the illumination system though.

This is actually why I don't have cable TV. I do not want to pay for a hundred channels when I want to watch five, and given how so many of the channels that I used to enjoy like Discovery, History, Learning, Scifi, have all gone lowest-common-denominator for their programming, I don't have a lot of reason to watch those channels either anymore.

I was about ten years too late when I was free to make my own television choices; I would have loved C-band satellite where one could subscribe to the channels one wanted and only those channels, as opposed to being stuck with packages. If ESPN's business model collapses when consumers are not forced to pay for their service whether they use it or not, then their business model is flawed and deserves to collapse.

Define greed, in the context of education.

There will always be gradation in society. Some people will achieve more than others. Thing of it is, while it's not necessarily fair that family involvement will, on average, allow a student to succeed more than a student without family involvement, it does seem to bear-out as a fact, and it doesn't seem to matter how much the school helps, if the school is putting all in to helping kids, the kids with parental involvement will still, on average, outperform the kids without parental involvement.

This is why I ask about greed. We are all competing with each other. It should be the responsibility of the parent to help their children succeed, but it's also good for all of us as a society if achievement is high across the board. For the context of the family or the individual, competition (which can be interepreted as greed) is good, but for everyone, cooperation is also good. If that competition is widely participated in by children and their families then it actually contributes to cooperation in a sense that the whole is improved.

Parents need to be involved.