"The real problem is the tendency of mankind to accept things as given without checking up on it." That isn't a problem that is one of the fundamental pieces to how our minds process a complex world.

Well I buy their argument that figuring out which teachers are truly bad teachers is exceptionally hard. Stakes are high, evaluation is tough, results play out over a long time, and there are really important corner cases for any evaluating. Parents should have a say but not too much. Peers should have a say but not too much. I guess it falls on administrators but that is our current scheme.

Not to undermine your point, but where is this: "job where people didn't habitually harass them"? I've supported several industries and I don't know that I could chart a course for my daughter to have a career "safe" from this.

Fair enough. I did notice you were avoiding that. Paying them like rockstars probably wouldn't but paying them enough to compete with other careers in their field might give us a few more good ones and a little more flexibility in tossing out the bad.

If a teacher is one or maybe two standard deviations then skill doesn't matter that much. However, a bad teacher can traumatize a kid against learning and a good teacher can inspire a kid to pursue education beyond what they would have. My wife and I are trying to undo the harm that my child's kindergarten teacher did to his perception of education. He does math above his grade level for fun but he isn't interested in stepping foot in school again. I probably wouldn't be starting my dissertation now without the influence of my high school Chemistry teacher way back then.

I know a lot of folks who are genuinely irritated with the day to day affairs of the federal government. They aren't out to limit anyone's rights and are quite convinced that your rights will be expanded, but the potential for abuse is pretty high given history. Even worse, a more local focused rule doesn't seem to historically offer as strong a protection against powerful corporate abuse. We will live with corporate abuse but we won't stand for abuse by the state.

That government ended in 1865 because allowing the more local governments broad authority resulted in many states creating a class of people who were subhuman.

Yeah, but it gives Comcast the wiggle room to say exactly what they said.

I used to think this way, but we are already doing that organically. If you look at the overall inflation numbers, it is getting easier and easier for people to afford things. Even conservatives are complaining that the poor have things that are too nice for their social standing. But the kicker is that the things we don't have a good grasp on automating are the very things that are core needs. We aren't seeing the same trend in food, energy, health care, and education.

Someone astutely put it somewhere else that a cancelation is probably a "failed customer problem resolution" and negatively impacts a performance review or bonus consideration.

I don't know, but I think a libertarian just got his wings.

It does look nice but next time we make a hardware standard can we avoid naming it so close to an important programming concept. Using threads in my thread device would get incredibly annoying in the comments and source searches.

Anything plastic on a car is already competing with free, zip tie, or bondo for repairs.

Since the only time this happened to me I got a script answer about how they would fix it just this once, I've wondered could I do a credit card challenge if Amazon refused to refund. Essentially, to me the consumer, Amazon is charging my card without authorization. Since Amazon refuses to resolve the situation after the first occurance, isn't that grounds for me to pursue it with my card company or did I sign that right away in a EULA somewhere?

It would be nice if we were a bit progressive and as a planet got ahead of the clear human abuses that typically come with our historic examples of frontiers.