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.

Russian specialists on board of the aircraft will ensure strict compliance with the agreed flight schedule

Over Soviet Russia, the observed observe you!

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.

There's one big, fat problem with simply saying "OMG we spend $$$$$ on every student!"

Most schools spend that money nowadays on more than just teachers, facilities, and equipment. In fact, those three are usually the categories which get the scraps. The lion's share of the money goes towards administration, counselors, and most of all, to "specialists" - which is another term for a middle-management make-work position.

30 years ago, a typical large-ish high school (let's say ~2000 students) would have 40-60 general teachers, a vice principal, a principal, a couple of janitors, one or two facilities people, and maybe a small handful (around 10) other staff to handle attendance, records, counseling, etc. So you'd have a ratio of 60 teachers to maybe 25 staff for that school.

Nowadays, you still have 60 general teachers, but now you have 20 special education teachers atop that, about 5-10 ESL teachers, 5-10 special education "specialists", 7-10 counseling staff, 3-5 "curriculum specialists", about 3-4 middle managers that act as layers between the teachers and vice principal, 3-4 teacing specialists (for state testing standards, PSATs, etc) a full HR staff of 10-20, a union steward, a certification/CE specialist (for the teachers), an IT department of sorts with 1-2 people in it, etc etc etc... roughly as many (if not more) staff as you have teachers.

Oh, and did I mention that whoever runs the local school board in a larger town can rake in as much as a typical CEO, often more? For example, the Portland School District Manager in Portland, OR shovels in a salary of around $150k/year, and an additional $75k/yr in bonuses and benefits...

Long story short? Until they clean out the $#@%^! cruft, throwing more money at the problem will only mean more make-work jobs that do approximately nothing for the students, the teachers, equipment, or facilities.

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.

Yes, it's all a giant conspiracy and no respectable media outlet anywhere will dare break ranks. Thankfully we have a bunch of bloggers posting links to YouTube rants which link to other YouTube rants to get the truth out. GamerGate should do 9/11 next, and then maybe debunk the moon landings.

To mis-read what I wrote to that point shows your ignorance. Your "friend" was inside the hydrogen explosion and escaped unharmed. The reactor was inside the hydrogen explosion and escaped unharmed. Everyone else who reads this understands it. Your willful mis-reading to try to make your story stand up crosses into the pathetic.

The only "fuckup" at Fukushima, other than the lack of backup emergency generators for cooling, was having a 9.0 earthquake strike a reactor designed to survive an 8.0 earthquake. The fact it survived as well as it did shows not a failure of engineering, but a survival of 10 times the destructive energy it was designed to withstand.

A "materials engineer" should realize that.

I say again, "Troll".

I also hear the sun is bright, and rain is wet.

Who knew?

Sorry, but I don't read religious screeds. Try real science.

"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.

I have no idea who you are replying to, because nowhere do I say "stupid bitches". And I wonder exactly why you choose to decide that I wrote something that I never wrote, would never write, and then make a complete untruth the basisi of a presumed argument I was making. That you want to believe I was making?

The problem is who do you listen to? That there are women who hate men with a passion is no more untruth than that there are men who hate women with a passion. There is Andrea Dworkin and Robin Morgan, and there is John Knox and Pat Robertson

And these radical oppressed women are not exactly ready to extend their experience and sympathy to others, as many oppose sexual equality with transgenders.

Which is exactly why both of the kook groups should get no more attention than the guy wearing a placard yelling at people to repent because the end is near.

Back to your odd deciding what I said then beating me up for it

I was giving an example of what happens when you decide to implement policies by women who have fringe beliefs.

Because there is a huge gulf between making certain that women are not mistreated in the workplace, and making telling a woman you think her new hairstyle looks nice - which was considered harassment by the kooks.We were told exactly that. Do not tell a woman you think she looks nice. Kooks.

Because in the darkest deepest reality, vengeance is not removing harassment. Men and women should be able to speak among each other, share jokes and camaraderie and become friends with each other, not make one gender avoid any interaction. And there are people on both ends of this argument who will implement exactly that if we decide to listen to them.

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.

That's one of its biggest problems: it doesn't support all the characters in Chinese. In fact it doesn't really support any of them, because they tried to merge them with Japanese and Korean characters. The result is that Unicode contains a sort of amalgamation that can be used to approximate any of those three languages, but not represent them properly.

I listen to both Japanese and Chinese music. Unicode is broken for me. There is no way to tell if a character is a Chinese or a Japanese one. The character has the same Unicode code for both languages. The software is supposed to somehow magically know which language is in use and select a Japanese or Chinese font. When you have file names or metadata tags there is no simple way of determining language, you just have to guess. Humans are pretty good at guessing, machines not so much.

That problem has nothing to do with encoding, it's to do with the standard body trying to merge characters from different languages that shouldn't be merged.