I agree. The problem is that the barrier to entry has been placed impossibly high, in the form of the amount of money needed to campaign for national office in a way that will reach enough voters. One is all but obligated to get backing (with all of the strings attached) to run.

Which is why the most valuable reforms must begin with campaign regulation. Contributions and capping expenses are a good place to start. Replacing simple plurality voting with an alternative system (like adjusted district voting) would also be huge.

The trick, of course, is getting any of it to be legislated by the people it will regulate who are already controlled by the people whose power it would diminish.

That is how it should work in theory.

Unfortunately in practice these days, the money tends to exchange hands between investors a fair few times before it finally gets to something that will actually use it to generate work. By that time, the investment must generate an obnoxiously high return in order to satisfy all of the middlemen, which can limit who qualifies for that investment.

Which is all part of the problem with finance these days. There is a huge, bloated infrastructure of money men that are moving money around, keeping a cut, and allowing precious little of it to actually go to work, at which point the returns have to be unreasonably high. Recipe for disaster, as we've been experiencing firsthand.

I admit I chuckled a bit at "may even be testable".

I realize that particle physics must often invert the scientific premise of observe-then-theorize due to the cost of creating observable conditions, but it's kind of humorous when testability, the cornerstone of science, has to be remarked on in this fashion.

Not really a valid comparison. The apple app store is not just a storefront for apple-created products, it's a market for third party products as well. This potentially includes apps that access information about companies and products that compete with Apple.

Any right Apple has to run their app store the way they see fit must be tempered with consideration to competition law. Whether this act violates antitrust is subject to opinion (I don't feel that it is), but I do think it shows an intent by Apple to compete on grounds other than pure merit, and that's unfortunate.

What if Google retaliated by biasing apple-oriented search results to negative press, reviews, etc.? Or simply stopped building indices on Apple's sites? I think we'd all agree that's a bad thing, yet this is what Apple is dabbling with. I think Apple needs to be very careful.

This report from the ACLU of Texas pretty much sums it up. The TSBOE has always been able to abuse its power to push an agenda, but we've never seen it done this flagrantly before. This must not come to pass. We need legislation to halt these amendments immediately and reassess the Board's purview. Specifically, more checks and balances are needed to avoid the realization of personal agendas by a select few, and to allow more input into the process by the educators of our state.

Exactly. While I definitely agree that this could be a litmus test of sorts to weed out poor employers, the problem is you won't be able to determine why they didn't touch base for an interview.

That being said, I don't think there's anything you need to do to "fix" this problem. The fact of the matter is that this will simply be one of quite a few possible reasons a company doesn't hire someone. I honestly don't see this as hurting your overall chances of finding work. If it really bothers you (and I can understand why it would), then take the advice of others and create a web presence of your own.

Either way, best of luck to you. :)

Oh, I wouldn't go so far to label it a conspiracy, just an obvious conflict of interest.

The fact that they themselves sell software that benefits from the results of a study that they themselves conduct just degenerates the whole thing into the realm of the ludicrous.