California is in the process ... "pushes Algebra 1 back to 9th grade, de-emphasizes calculus, and applies social justice principles to math lessons,"

This is how Argentina went from being one of the richest countries in the world in 1900 to a backward upper income developing country in 2021. Their education system was a huge failure. And without education, you can't have functioning democratic institutions, a market economy, or reasonable infrastructure.

Basic literacy and numeracy is such a necessity. Our prosperity is built on it.

We are giving up on talented youth. We should be nurturing their abilities, not suffocating them. The US has actually regresssed in math since 2000. We introduced "new methods" which were worse than the old ones from the 1990s.

And now they want to get rid of grades in high school based on exams too. California is moving away from traditional point-driven grading systems. Los Angeles and San Diego Unified have recently directed teachers to base academic grades on whether students have learned what was expected of them during a course — and not penalize them for behavior, work habits and missed deadlines.

Has it occurred to anyone that instead of dragging down the top 50% to the bottom, that we nurture each child so they reach their potential. We could raise standards for teachers not lower them as was done recently in New York State. We fail almost all students otherwise.

We are headed to Brazilian style educational failure along with the society they have over there.

I hope the someone has the courage to fight this decay.

I find it so annoying that "game changing" green tech is announced and then you never hear about it again. I'm sure some advances are real but don't advance for practical reasons.

I would be interested in reading a retrospective analysis looking at previously announced advances and seeing how they proceeded.

I would also be interested in finding out how funding changes things. The Bush administration heavily funded hydrogen technology. The Obama administration yanked much of the funding. Did that help kill hydrogen.

And what about the fundamental questions:

- How do people who do not have a garage or their own parking spot charge their automobiles? Are they going to be expected to wait a long time?

- Will electric charging ever become as quick as refueling an internal combustion engine?

- Will electric vehicles get a real work range of over 500 miles?

- How do we charge taxes without tracking a vehicle with a GPS while avoiding deadbeats? Right now too many people simply drive uninsured and I'm afraid that privacy respecting taxation would potentially allow people to get away without paying. Currently people cannot avoid the gas tax.

It is hard for me take Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser seriously. The issue is working 100 hours a week. Not doing Zoom calls on Friday is a cop out and a clever way to void dealing with the issue that we are all human and that we should not be working 100 hours a week for an employer (doing it completely voluntarily when working for yourself is different although eventually severe sleep deprivation will kill your mental health).

So how about this? Just tell people never to work more than 6 days a week and never to work more than 12 hours a day. But of course that would mean employing more people and eating into their profits. And they can burn through 20 somtheing year olds who are desperate for money to pay off the crazy debt that comes from the kind of schools that Citi hires from.

I do not agree with European style draconian restrictions on the number of hours a week a person can work. Healthy adults in high powered jobs are perfectly capable of dealing with working 50 hours a week. Sadly medicine forces interns to work crazy hours which then makes them much less caring people because they've been made to suffer and view people who cannot work a 20 hour shift as less worthy.

And as far as anyone in Citi earning below $500,000 (including bonus), they should not be working more than 50 hours a week. Expecting such a person to put in a 12+ hour day, 5 days a week is simply not acceptable.

This reminds me of story in the UK:

"In July this year, he moved to London from his home town of Staufen near the Swiss border to take part in a summer internship with Bank of America Merrill Lynch that would pay him £6,000. It was a highly competitive environment: Moritz had fought 1,500 other candidates to get one of two places in the investment banking division. The hours were brutal. Working through the night was almost a rite of passage.

In August, Moritz was nearing the end of his seven-week placement. He had shown himself to be so capable that the bank was preparing to offer him a full-time job as a £45,000 a year analyst after his graduation.

Over a 72-hour period, he got a taxi back from the office to his flat in Bethnal Green, east London, at around 5am each morning. He would then shower briefly before returning to his desk. This exhausting ritual is known in banking circles as the "magic roundabout" – so-called because the taxi driver will sometimes wait outside while an intern washes, puts on a fresh shirt and re-emerges blinking in the dawn light."

He died of overwork at age 21 just to get a £45,000 a year job. The bank no doubt put subtle pressure on him.

https://www.theguardian.com/bu...

I canâ(TM)t find it for sale anywhere at any time, although I donâ(TM)t spend 24/7 checking inventory. Maybe bots are buying it online. Iâ(TM)m beginning to give up.

So I really wonder if all these sales are really to end users.

I feel bad for Google. They are sending sites free traffic and thereby increasing their revenue. The sites should be paying Google, not the other way round. People should be free to link to whomever they want. You can always block requests if you do not want the traffic. This just comes down to freedom. Sadly France is not good at that in some respects.

Small correction- minimum wage should go up to 74% of GDP per capita (not 38%) which would put it inline with what it was in 1938. And if you think about it, thatâ(TM)s still stingy. Of course we need to raise it gradually over 30 years. But we need to end the idea of any full time worker living in poverty.

I donâ(TM)t think technology per service lowers national income . Although it can increase inequality which means 90-99% of people do not benefit from the economic prosperity of technology.

The important point is: will the labor market be rigged to further lower wages. Between 1973 and 2013 real median household income went up by about 12%. Yet productivity roughly doubled.

So new technology needs to be thoughtful implemented. For example airlines will have lower costs without pilots. But if the rest of their employees who now are more consequently productive do not see higher wages, then the benefit is rather pointless. The C-suite benefits greatly as do the shareholders. But what about the employees?

That’s not true. Our GDP per capita has more than doubled since 1973. Of course we can afford to pay higher wages. This is a clever excuse given to pay horribly low wages. I discussed this at great depth while taking an advanced economics class on international trade. There is nothing efficacious overpaying a CEO.

I agree that UBI is a scam. Able bodied people can earn good wages so long as we do not rig the labor market. Had the $0.25 minimum wage of 1938 kept up with productivity, then minimum wage would now be about $24 an hour. There is no reason why the median income of a full time worker cannot be around $80,0000 - $90,000 a year. And before anyone asks, low paid positions have seen huge increases in productivity. Consider how few people are needed to flip burgers per customer relative to the 1970s or how wireless communication technology enable retail workers to be hugely efficient.

By using UBI you enable employers to pay poverty wages. The only people who need UBI are disabled people, retirees, and those otherwise temporarily unable to work. People forget that GDP per capita has continued to rise and the money has to go somewhere. Right now a tiny few earn tens of millions of dollars annually while even fewer manage to earn over $100 million a year.

Often these excessively paid people fail. Intel just had a change of leadership and activist investors pointed this out. Daniel Loeb, the influential activist investor wrote “From a governance point of view, we cannot fathom how the boards who presided over Intel's decline could have permitted management to fritter away the company's leading market position while simultaneously rewarding them handsomely with extravagant compensation packages.”

It’s not just CEOs and corrupt compensation committees. It’s excessive intellectual property where even a building is now copyright. They even tried (but failed) to make clothing copyright. And land use restrictions cleverly enable a tiny few who own expensive real estate to watch their artificially limited supply skyrocket in value.

This has to end. No able bodied person who is not mentally retarded should ever even need welfare when working. And we should make sure that instead of putting regulations and taxes just in full time workers, that we create incentives to stop using excessively low paid part time workers by for example requiring not merely 1/40 of health individuals to be paid per weekly hour worked, but to place a 25% premium in it. We have to make it cheaper to employ full time labor.

And then we can consign the earned income tax credit and other such schemes to the ash heap of history. Such schemes merely enable employers to pay poverty wages. At the very least we must index the minimum wage to GDP per capita (37% - 40%) sounds reasonable to me although we would need to gradually raise it to that point over 30 years.

Im all for progress and technological innovation but when they say that part of the purpose is to eliminate "expensive human labor”, I think they just don’t get it. That expensive labor feeds, clothes, houses, and educates a family. Can we try to get back to a society with higher wages relative to GDP per capita. Wages right now relatives to GDP per capita are much lower than they were in the 1950s and the federal minimum wage is the lowest relative to GDP per capita since it started in 1938.

Oh and yes I recognize that some time this century most pilots on commercial airlines will be eliminated as all / most commercial aircraft become drones. But please let’s not use that to depress wages further.

Thank you for your kind words. Thank you for being kind enough for pointing out the abuse of the mod points. I feel better knowing at least some people value reason.

I was wondering the same thing. In recent years I have found that if I developed a well reasoned and sourced argument of the type that would be appreciated in a college paper, it still sometimes would be heavily modded down.

I think people are so generally angry (on all sides) that calm debate has become increasingly difficult/impossible.

You seem to very angry, and once I saw your âoeyou foolâ comment I realized that wasnâ(TM)t much I could say to engage you. But for the sake of everyone else.

1. The NY state law banning the sale of hate materials on state land is unconstitutional l. Iâ(TM)m not going to give a whole treatise why here. But to quote from a recent new article:

âoeThe First Amendment generally protects the expression of even hateful speech, and a statute banning the sale of materials expressing those views on state-owned land is highly likely to be held unconstitutional,â said attorney Floyd Abrams, who has argued frequently before the Supreme Court in First Amendment cases.

2. My point about free speech limitations was not to enunciate the exact cutoff just to express in general terms that there be a very proximate danger. The current standard - that unless speech is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action it is permitted- falls along a similar standard albeit a narrower exception. You are just being pedantic. My point is that organizing violence is a crime and a reasonable exception to free speech. But when itâ(TM)s not an imminent threat, we need not worry.

3. Apparently my denunciation of the violent riot in the capitol building was not comprehensive enough for you leading to the âoeyou foolâ comment. My point was not to analyze all the different manifestations of their misbehavior. You are merely ranting.

4. â But they're inevitably either complete bullshitâ(TM) - you say that about Trumpâ(TM)s voters. Imho this is the crux of the issue. They are increasingly extremely right wing. And you form the opposite end of the spectrum. They are not all evil or all deluded. â for one find it quite difficult to be sympathetic to people so cruel, so stupid...â(TM) - your utter contempt is part of the problem of any ability of our country to get something accomplished. You spew hatred upon them. Ironic that when the left engages in literal hate speech, itâ(TM)s ok.

One of their key complaints is that the left looks down upon them. And indeed you do. You exemplify why they voted for Trump. Indeed were the left to show more of an interest in their values, grievances, and desires, some at least would vote for different candidates. You are othering them in much the same way that people used to of a different race.

5. You justify Shermanâ(TM)s March to the Sea and wish there was more. I donâ(TM)t know what you think of the use of nuclear weapons in 1945 on Japan or the bombing of Dresden. The left used to have deep qualms about those actions because they too were war crimes (potentially). In the 19th century there was no welfare state. If you had all your food and cattle taken, your house burnt, and your possessions stolen, you would likely starve. Many died. Without shelter life was very short too. Does it occur to you that the harshness created a backlash after the war?

At least conceive of the notion even if you boil with hatred at the southern states. Perhaps you are right that more war crimes and mass slaughter may have helped bring about civil rights earlier. But you are saying that the USA should have committed atrocities to secure civil rights. Itâ(TM)s rather a huge contradiction! And historians note that such actions followed by the Russians in Circassia in the late 19th century created precedents for the Armenian genocide that began the horrors of the 20th century.

I detect such anger and hatred in you that Iâ(TM)m not surprised that you would limit the first amendment. The left is the rising power. Trump and his minions are history. Demographics alone have guaranteed that as has a political realignment. Allowing them to communicate will not endanger our democracy. Each presidential election they will gain a lower percentage of the popular vote. It is the hard left which is the new danger.

Iâ(TM)m reminded of Tzarist Russia in 1917. People obsessed for too long about the danger of a counterrevolution instead of realizing that the left would eat its own. First liberals, then democratic socialists, and then even the Mensheviks. Finally even Bolsheviks were not safe as the party became ever more extreme in the late 1920s.

Now liberal professors at universities are afraid of the radicalism and extremism of their own students. You sadly personify this new trend, and many newly woke people are far older than college students. (That is not to say that Trump and his ilk are not extreme, just that they are rapidly declining in power.)

I fear even being able to write this comment in 20 years time. Will it be illegal? I hope not.

I find it amusing that you presume to know my politics, despite me stating that I donâ(TM)t support Trump. Your conspiratorial mindset mirrors that of the far right. But you are blind to your own prejudices.

As to the summer protests, the mainstream media did everything it could to use the word âoepeacefulâ and yet far more violence occurred than did at the Capitol. Democratic politicians in large part glossed over blocks set ablaze. Local politicians in those cities did address it though because they had to. But out of state left wing politicians did everything they could to ignore it.

In no way do I condone the violence at the Capitol or itâ(TM)s implicit advocation by the president. I donâ(TM)t like him, or most of his policies. But I do note that the media is full of the words âoetreasonâ, âoetraitorâ, âoeinsurrectionâ, âoeriotâ, âoemobâ. They used deliberately inflammatory language and see the perpetrators with a contempt that equals or surpasses Islamic terrorists.

There used to be a time when you could be a centrist or even center left, and note these things. Now if you do, you get called called names and are attacked. It *is* possible to be entirely appalled by President Trumps behavior (and policies) while also worrying about a backlash that goes to far. Liberals did that after 9/11 and conservatives acted towards them as you are to me - namely refusing to see any nuance. The left used to be about moving past black and white thinking (something the right often did and still does). Sadly much of the left has forgotten their own values.

I am not a Trump supporter. I never have been. I find his many of his views to be deeply objectionable. And I deplore all violence and destruction of property, particularly the assault on the Congress.

However, I am also quite aware that sometimes the backlash to a horrendous event goes overboard. It happened with 9/11 and the Patriot Act. It happened in Turkey after the attempted coup in 2016. It happened during the French Revolution when counterrevolutionaries tried to reverse the democratic republic and bring back absolute monarchy. But that backlash led to the Reign of Terror. It happened during the US civil war with Sherman's March to the Sea, when he arguably committed war crimes and became one of, if not the first example of total war, that eventually led to the atrocities of WWII. It happened during WWII when the USA interned Japanese-Americans and thereby violated their civil rights.

Advocating and coordinating violence is wrong and illegal, and actions must be taken to prosecute the people involved. That is not too difficult. If appropriate even the President Trump can later be prosecuted. There is a clear and present danger legal test best enunciated by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in 1919.

But that does not mean that much of the rest of what I consider to be mostly repugnant Trumpian commentary is illegal. You have the right to offend. In 1978, the American Civil Liberties Union took a controversial stand for free speech by defending a neo-N$z$ group that wanted to march through the Chicago suburb of Skokie , where many Holocaust survivors lived. It has since given up on genuine free speech for all and now only believes in free speech for some.

There are lot of people who have been banned from Twitter and Facebook and Parler was one of the few places where they could present their views. But it's not just Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Google that are censoring free speech. Simon & Schuster canceled from its summer line-up of new releases Sen. Josh Hawley's (R-Mo.) book The Tyranny of Big Tech.

Simon & Schuster did not directly accuse Hawley of being one of the mob who attacked the Capitol. Its beef was ]the pro-Trump way he’s been shooting his mouth off in recent weeks. He was the first senator to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory as he trafficked in preposterous theories of election fraud. Of course I think he spread lies. But freedom of speech means you can say things that are not true.

Various Congressman and senators have put pressure on tech companies to censor speech on their networks and this gives the lie to the idea that free speech is only lacking if the government stops it. Well putting pressure on companies including financial and regulatory pressure is simply a backdoor to censorship. Authoritarian regimes such as in Egypt and Turkey use this clever ruse of manipulating private ownership of the media to suppress free speech all the time.

Some will say that we are just talking about private companies. But the reality is that we are moving away from paper based speech. If there is no practical way to disseminate your views (if you are not close to being a billionaire) then free speech exists on paper only (pardon the pun). We recognize that public utilities form natural monopolies and realize that traditional market forces do not work. Consequently we insist they supply certain universal services. Similarly a few large tech companies are coming to dominate the world of the dissemination of ideas. With smartphone in the USA, it's basically Google and Apple and if they both ban an app, then for practical purposes it does not exist. We need to insist that they allow all legal speech on their platforms because they are de-facto monopolies.

There are huge double standards in play too. During the past summer Antifa and a small minority of BLM activists indulged in rioting, looting and wanton violence. Most of the media and the leaders of the Democratic Party framed that particular wave of lawlessness as “peaceful” protests. The AP told its reporters not use the word "riot" even when city blocks were set ablaze. Using critical thinking that supposedly we are sent to college to learn, it is rather easy to deduce that "hate speech" is broadly ok if it comes from the left and violence was even occasionally praised.

Last summer outside the Minneapolis Police Department’s Third Precinct, protests turned violent, as people looted businesses, threw projectiles, and set the station house on fire; police in riot gear fired rubber bullets and sprayed tear gas at the crowds. Yet various media outlets discussed when violence was legitimate and at the very least sought to downplay it. They sought to understand the grievances of the protesters. 74 million people voted for Trump. They too have grievances and by denying their leaders the ability to articulate what they feel, you create a tyranny of the majority.

A mild letter asking for "toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity" published in Harper's Review in 2020 was bitterly castigated and many of the signers of the letter either retracted their signature or denied ever having done so because of the social ostracism that quickly followed. This included many minority writer and public intellectuals. When Tom Cotton wrote an Op Ed in the New York Times the editorial page editor was quickly forced out after a huge backlash from the public and the company’s own employees. Even though the purpose of Op Eds in the New York Times is to engender debate, and raise controversial points of view, because his viewpoint was not acceptable to the progressive left, extreme action was taken.

Taken as a totality, the double standards, and the choices as to when and how vigorously to enforce various speech polices, it is clear we are losing free speech. It has even gotten tot he point of blatantly unconstitutional state laws. In New York State the sale or display of Confederate flags, swastikas and other “symbols of hate” on state property is banned under a law signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo despite the fact that such a law violates free speech protection under the U.S. Constitution. I am sure that what is considered "hate" now will be vastly different to how that term is defined in 2031.

Prof Anne Glover, a former chief scientific adviser to the Scottish government was forced out forced out by Jean-Claude Juncker because she correctly asserted that such crops were safe. The scientific community was outraged that a scientific advisor was sacked just for stating scientific truth. At the time Dr Roberto Bertollini, Chief Scientist and World Health Organization representative to the EU, attacked a decision that shows Mr Juncker's "unwillingness to accept independent scientific opinion". This is where we are heading.

I have seen other cases where scientific evidence or facts cannot be openly discussed because many people object to such ideas being discussed. I have seen this firsthand.

We cannot have a liberal and functioning democracy without free speech. Yes President Trump has said and done some horrific things. Let us not allow the backlash to those things to cause us to lose valuable freedoms.

We can either fight for free speech for all, or slowly lose it. Right now it's just far right speech that is under threat. Do not be naive and assume it

I’m deeply uncomfortable with what Barack Obama said. He’s saying that the government should essentially sponsor censorship of viewpoints online. It’s breaking the first amendment through the back door.

The purpose of free speech is not to say things that are popular. It’s to say things that are offensive, hard to hear, disagreeable, or perhaps uncomfortable truths that will be conventional wisdom in the future.

And of course the way the law will work will be to ban conservative viewpoints but not lard left viewpoints. There are plenty of scary things or clever lies on the left too. And the words “hate speech” means almost anything that those who endive political correctness say it does. While I support get marriage, we have to tolerate those religious people who do not support gay marriage for example.

What if someone opposes affirmative action? I’m sure it will get labeled at hate speech and be banned. What if someone wants better relations with Russia? What if someone disagrees with the interpretation of Covid-19? Originally masks were bad, and then they were good. What if someone wants to oppose masks? What if someone says that Covid-19 is a huge threat but they don’t want regulations to bankrupt their business? What if someone merely wants to defend themselves when accused of a crime? We all know some people accused of terrorism turned out to be innocent. After 9/11 Muslims weren’t liked very much and I’m sure these proposed laws would have limited their speech.

To be clear I’m not denying that there are lies and fabrications online. People have lied about Covid-19 and said it was a conspiracy against Trump. But increasingly we are losing our freedom of speech. Recently Politico deleted an oped because the French Government rigorously disputed it. The New York Times forced out the editorial editor from the newspaper for publishing a Republican Senator’s oped. Yes, people disagreed with him, but he was articulating a point of view. Just remember the cancel culture. Recently an academic conference on the cancel culture in Australia was itself canceled.

Saying you can buy your own URL is silly because first companies have started to not offer server space to super controversial (but legal) points of view. And second, if your site gets too popular you too will get regulated. Or if it doesn’t, then no one will see it and your freedom of speech is fake. It would be like saying, you can give a speech and say what you want in a public forum. But if more than 5 people are listening, then the government will regulate the content.