As a long-term Japanese resident who interacts with high-school-age Japanese kids daily (they're my students), let me inform you that that's not the whole story. She may be one of the kids on the straight and narrow, but there are plenty of kids here who don't bat an eye at drinking. Heck, even plenty of the "good" kids do some not-so-legitimate things from time to time, just like they do anywhere else. People are kept in line less by appeals to some high concept of honor or tradition and more by the simple fact that Japan is full of people so there's always someone watching you.

Interestingly, there's less concern over underage drinking than underage smoking - as you say, alcohol vending machines just require you insert money, but cigarette machines require a Taspo card.

From the same article, under "Misconceptions":

Life expectancy rates throughout history look weak because a huge proportion of children never lived to adulthood. When half your population dies by age 5 and the other half lives to 45, you get a life expectancy of around 25. I can't think of any time period where people who lived through childhood couldn't presume to live long enough to raise a family without having to get started at 14.

Well, I don't know where they get their numbers from, but the official statistics (http://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp) show a steadily increasing literacy rate over time that didn't break 95% until 1930. 1 in 4 blacks were illiterate until 1920, historical data showing more like 80% illiteracy among blacks around the time of emancipation (1870, the oldest figures immediately available).

There has long been a tradition of excellent elite schooling among the upper class, but the data just doesn't support the thesis for the population as a whole. Public education was key for all those who weren't already on top of the social ladder.

It looks like his website is linked in his profile as http://thewaxwingslain.com/ with the music itself a few clicks away at http://thewaxwingslain.com/dlmusic.htm . Music's available in mp3 and (limitedly) in ogg. No donation link I can find.

C'mon guys, let's give it a listen.

That's the same situation as Japanese, then. I thought so, but I wanted to be sure.

Thanks.

That's an interesting thought, but the characters in question have a long, long history in the Japanese language. The summary can sound misleading, but these are not new words to anyone but the list-makers: by and large, they're words like "key", "curse", "depression", "pot", and a particularly manly but common-as-dirt way of saying "I". Really, the list still excludes plenty of characters used every day, while including some quite rare ones, too.

I must admit to a certain level of ignorance here, but how many new characters are being created in China? Not considering the simplification of the character set, of course.

As cool as that would be, it would give Japanese the same difficulties English has with obscure words: adding more roots to build words out of only complicates the process of learning the vocabulary. As it is, most new words are made by putting together the roots of existing words (which, conveniently, are typically represented by a kanji), and consequently it can be much easier to understand the meaning of an unfamiliar word. Often, in Japanese people will ask of an unfamiliar word how it is written; in English this occurs somewhat too, but it seems to be a more prevalent feature in Japanese.

Really, although the prospect of 2000+ kanji is quite daunting to people when they're starting out, once you have them as a solid base they make new vocabulary acquisition so much easier. It's wonderful.

I believe the GP was giving the English plural ending of -s as an example of an inflectional ending, rather than as an example of an actual Japanese inflectional ending, but I'll agree it's somewhat unclear for those who don't already know what we're talking about.

To make things a bit clearer: nouns are often written with kanji, although there are exceptions; verbs and many adjectives are written with kanji + hiragana. One of the primary functions of the hiragana on verbs and adjectives is to conjugate them: for example, in contrast to English go/went, in Japanese it's iku/itta, where the 'i' in both words uses the same kanji, and hiragana are used for ku/tta respectively.

Terms need wikipedia pages to prove legitimacy now?

FWIW, I read the GP's use of "corporate anarchists" to refer to those who wish for an essentially unfettered market (there's the anarchy) whose primary actors are corporations. I don't quite understand the GP's scare-bolding of Republican and Dick Cheney (or, for that matter, Bob Weir), but the terms he uses, at least, aren't so unclear.

And here I always thought that home was your environment: your friends, your family, the community you contribute to and are a part of. Apparently none of that has any validity, and it's instead dependent on some mystical property of the land on which you are born, or of the purity of the blood that runs through your veins, as decided by other people hundreds of years ago and upheld by yet others who may be thousands of miles away who neither you nor I will likely ever meet nor be able to hold accountable. Maybe it's just me, but that argument has little resemblance to any idea of "home" I can conjure up.

You would declare America to be the home of the children of expats who have never seen the country and never want to, while denying it to those born a few miles south of the right patch of soil who live their whole lives working to make their place in pursuit of the American dream. Furthermore, your argument ignores (or simply isn't aware of?) the 45% of illegal immigrants who are overstays, and therefore entered the country illegally, many of whom are in the process of naturalizing as citizens but whose status in the meanwhile is either in legal limbo or technically illegal.

Japan doesn't like admitting the Zainichi (Korean multi-generational permanent residents of Japan, leftovers from Japanese colonial rule) exist. And there are plenty of us white gaijin who do just fine, too.

That's quite a feat, given that the 2000 Chinese Census put the population of China at only 1,242,612,226, not much over half that.

Some census.

Certainly, math from the level of Algebra onward is an exercise in abstraction. However, that's a far cry from saying that abstraction is the goal of math education. As the GP and others (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1557648&cid=31215548 for example) suggest, many people understand math better when they have concrete examples to work with. This concept makes me think of a gem from Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann, from a chapter titled A Different Box of Tools:

I don't mean to knock abstraction, as it's vital to learn, as you argue in your blog post, with your wonderful Introductory Algebra example. As you say, trying out all values would take "a hella long time". Still, many students understand the abstract generalization better after you give a few concrete examples. That's all people are asking for: solid applications of things in order to connect them to what they know and can understand, instead of sequences of meaningless rules of operations.

Thanks for the response.

It is certainly true, as you suggest, that the damage would be limited much more in a private system. I'm a bit torn whether that's really better, though; if a large settlement is justified in a case like this (which I think we'd all agree, as it's an egregious breach of privacy), the school district has the pockets to pay for it, whereas little barebones private schools could only pay out the proceeds from the fire-sale prices of the now-defunct school's property. In other words, the school district has the money to actually pay up; a private school would fold and grant little restitution.

Of course, the "best" solution would be the fee being levied upon those ultimately culpable for the situation (the voters whose elected officials either condoned or didn't stop it), with their resultant wising up and electing responsible and right-respecting school board leadership. The much more likely scenario for public schools is a pay freeze or cut for staff and a freeze on repairs and maintenance for the foreseeable future, which is considerably less appealing. Because of this, I can't say that I'm at all unsympathetic to your position on limiting damages.

Err...

I'll grant that it would be nice if taxpayers didn't have to pay for the school's wrongdoing, but I think you'd find that privatizing schools wouldn't stop such a thing from destroying local education. If a school is driven to ruin, regardless of the circumstances, it's a disruption to the education of hundreds of students. The schooling market is also not quick to respond to a change in demand, as well; it would be quite difficult to spit the defunct school's students among the few other schools in the area, likely result in overcrowding of the classes and schools, nor could you expect a new school to jump right into existence to fill the gap.

There are strengths to the idea of a privatized school system, but it's not a total panacea, that's for sure.