That's exactly what's happening.

The solar power industry's entirely dependent on subsidies. Solar power doesn't make any sense on an economic basis and the people who think solar power's the next step in power generation can't change that so they've thrown in with commercial interests, which are perfectly happy to take government money while it flows, in the hopes that those subsidies will "prime the pump".

But even government subsidies have an upper limit and that limit's clearly been reached. Now the "invisible hand", having been thwarted by those subsidies, is going about the business of setting things right by putting an end to companies that offer products not for their economic value but for their narcissistic value.

There's a rising tide of African voices that agree with you since most of that aid never leaves the capitals of the nations being "helped".

Other times the aid ends up trashing the local economy since aid agencies are quite often less concerned with the results of their efforts then with shaking down rich donors.

the hypothesis is that some number of climate scientists, noting which side their bread is buttered on, are quite capable of artfully, in some cases not so artfully, slanting the science. Can we at least agree that scientists are human and thus vulnerable to the same pressures that motive other human beings?

With all due respect to your smart-aleckiness, I don't think so.

At the very least the density of water, while resulting in a superficially similar motion to wing-flapping in air, is just such so much more dense a medium I'd guess the adaptations necessary for the penguin wouldn't easily translate to the adaptations necessary for flight. Then there's the problem of intermediate forms. What are the intermediate steps between a penguin adapted to "flying" in water and a penguin-descendent adapted to flying in air?

The "intermediate steps" problem is why I have doubts about birds evolving from purely gliding to powered flight.

Wings adapted to the production of thrust, to improve running performance, will also generate lift when held still in an air stream. The skeletal, musculature and nervous system adaptations can occur incrementally because incremental improvements result in incremental benefits. For a bird adapted to gliding the incremental benefit that accrues incremental, but immediate, benefits is a further perfection of gliding adaptations.

I don't know about Zerglings but it's always struck me that the use of wings to improve land speed would be a good evolutionary intermediate step to flapping-winged flight.

The bone and muscle structure and all the supporting bodily systems wouldn't be much different between a bird that's improved its running speed by wing-flapping and a bird that can take flight for short but worthwhile distances.

How about a bit less in the way of hysteria? All the folks who were having kittens over the phony reduction in the Greenland ice sheet are looking like schmucks now so perhaps a few people, like the editors of Slashdot for instance, could forgo schmuckdom by not engaging in heavy breathing ahead of the facts?

I wonder if it's premature to short the euro? If Germany really does follow through it can't help but pull down the value of the euro which brings up the question of who'll bail out Greece the next time they spend their way towards oblivion?

It's the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss subsidized dollars per job. It's also the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss how many non-subsidized jobs it cost to pay for one subsidized job.

Let's see how that notion works for decision about, oh, medicine for instance.

How many parents, when faced with a decision between modern medicine and a medicine man will opt for the latter? A few but then the responsibility, and the consequences, are where they ought to be so in the vast majority of cases the importance of the decision outweighs fads, fond hopes and feverishly-held beliefs of the parent(s). If parents ought to have the final say-so when it comes to life and death decision what kind of sense does it make to mandate deference to the "experts" over how that child's going to learn to read?

Sorry but parental choice is pivotal. It's the basis for everything that's wrong with the public education system.

Even the problem of intransigent, irresponsibly demanding or uninterested parents can be traced back to either compulsory attendance or the lack of parental choice.

Both undercut parental authority and both also negate any penalties for bad parental behavior. If you can't make choices you either make a nuisance of yourself, in the hopes of getting what you want for your child or you give up and trouble yourself to the least degree possible with a situation you can't escape, can't change and deprives you of important responsibilities of parenthood.

You know, I believe this may be the very first time that anyone, unable to make a response has decided to blow up the conversation as a means of diverting from the fact that they can make no substantive response.

But in case anyone's followed the thread this far, my delightful correspondent made the claim that charter schools select their entrants. That's a lie but a lie supporters of the current system repeat at every opportunity reacting angrily when challenged on th claim. A child gains entry to a charter school either via the luck of the draw or by being lucky enough to have parents who will camp out to get one of the limited number of seats a charter has to offer.

It's a district-based school that's allowed to select among applicants and even set standards for entry. That would be what's referred too as a "magnet" school. Charters aren't magnet schools therefore they can't select therefore the charge of "cherry-picking" is false.

There are various other falsehoods that supporters of the district system are driven to as a means of deterring people from investigating the interesting concept of parents deciding which school their child attends but I'm sure anyone who is interested in the evolution of the public education system that's currently underway will be exposed to all those very necessary falsehoods in due time.

And for you Anonymous Coward, are you really unaware of how silly your studied outrage makes you look or don't you care because posting as an Anonymous Coward? My suggestion is that you grow up a bit but I'm pretty sure that's advice you're incapable of taking to heart.

Charter schools go a good deal of the way towards fixing the structural problems of public education by putting the power of organizational life and death in the hands of parents. If enough parents are dissatisfied with a particular charter school that charter school will close. You think maybe the prospect of having to close their doors will get the attention of charter operators? I think so and for those charter operators who can't be bothered with parental concerns being forced to close their doors solves the problem as well. The charter school has no power to compel attendance so exists because parents are satisfied that their kids are safe and getting an education.

As for the moral evil of "maximizing their profit" the charge takes on a somewhat less damning aspect when compared to the grotesque and cruel way in which many district schools fail the children they're supposed to be educating.

Nice try but charter schools are in every way public schools which means, unlike magnet schools which are district schools, charters cannot be selective. It's a widely promulgated falsehood but it is a falsehood.

Also, being public schools federal funding which is available for the education of problematic kids is available to charters

We value teachers. It's the public education system that doesn't value teachers as can be seen in the fact that good teachers receive compensation no different from bad teachers. The public education system doesn't differentiate between good and bad teachers and, in fact, resists attempts to measure differences in teaching skill. A further item of evidence to prove the indifference of the district-based public education system to teaching skill is the fact that it required state law to force districts to hire teachers who've received special training to deal with kids with serious problems. Previous to the passage of such law mandating properly-trained teachers any warm body with a teaching certificate could be stuck in a special education classroom. And were.

No, many teachers are afraid of accountability since they've never had to live up to any standards but their own, if they have any. Remember, teaching skill doesn't matter in and to the public education system. Care to guess what sort of teachers that situation selects for?

You really don't know much about this issue, do you? Charters schools are one reform of the public education system and vouchers are another, and unrelated, reform.

I don't believe you've actually helf forth on what those fundamental issues might be. But since I've seen your like before I'll help out.

Those fundamental issues are the large income disparity in this country. They're also subtle, institutional racism and the facts that kids are either on drugs or not. Another fundamental issue is that parents aren't concerned enough when they're not making a nuisance of themselves by demanding that their kid get an "A". Dreadfully inadequate funding is also a fundamental problem since it's simply impossible to properly education kids for the pittance of $10,000 per year. That's the average per student funding last year up from the year before and up, well, every year since forever.

By the way, when a billionaire like Gates starts to become aware of what a busted promise the public education system has become you know the end's got to be in sight.

Khan Academy, along with all other ideas that undermine the school district model, the dominant form, are already under attack by those entrenched powers. However, public sentiment has clearly swung away from either support for the status quo or your apathetic acceptance of the status quo as proven by the widespread adoption of policy ideas which undermine that status quo.

No Child Left Behind under the Bush administration and Race To The Top under the Obama administration both passed with wide, bi-partisan support. Arne Duncan, Obama's original and current Secretary of Education is running around the country talking up vouchers, charters, accountability, standards and everything else that sets the teacher's unions teeth on edge. Despite that, and despite the NEA's overt and public effort to have Duncan dismissed Obama hasn't shown any indication that he's listening. So there's the federal level, executive and legislative.

At the state level the list of substantive reforms is just too long to detail but this year, as a result of the mid-terms, there's been a quite a wave of reforms. Like I wrote in my post above (hint, hint) the number of states enacting serious reforms of the sort that simply wouldn't have been debated previously is getting up toward half the states in the union. So there's your state level.

As for the local level, that's not where the sort of policy that qualifies as "education reform" is decided. Still, there is some variability among school districts and one, at least, has given Khan Academy a whirl. I don't think this is the start of a trend given the realities of the law that established public education but stranger things have happened. We'll see.

Your understanding is incorrect.

Gates has been guided for some time by the conventional wisdom about what constitutes innovation like small classes and small schools. I think there were a couple of other self-serving prescriptions adopted by Gates that are on the wish list of people who are quite happy with the public education status quo.

As you'd expect from an organization that's been unaccountable to parents since its inception those prescriptions did nothing but funnel large sums of money from the Gates Foundation, ultimately, into the pockets of the professionals and suppliers who enjoy a parasitic relationship with the public education system. Not that any other sort is possible but that's immaterial.

The basic fact is the public education system, as it's currently constituted, is beyond reform. I don't know if Gates has come to that realization yet although he seems to be headed in that direction with his enthusiasm for Khan Academy and the change of focus to the politics of public education. There seems to be a gradually building national consensus in favor of the view that the public education system is beyond redemption which is what's propelled charter school law adoption in forty states and, more recently, a burst of legislation to enact vouchers, tax credits, trim tenure and increase accountability. All those are the sorts of substantive changes that erode the foundation of the monopoly the public education system enjoys and as the catastrophes predicted by the supporters of the status quo fail to emerge they'll be the encouragement for more such law.

As for Ray Ozzie's work on the use of computers in education, sorry, the utility of the technology for any particular purpose is based on more then feasibility or even successful execution.

Costs, seemingly unimportant technical factors, the readiness of the prospective market to embrace the technology all play into when the technology makes its mark. Ozzie was too early so he gets a footnote. The same may yet happen to Sal Kahn although right now it's looking like he's going to revolutionize education. We can revisit the question in five years by which time it ought to be clear whether Khan Academy is a flash in the pan or a water-shed. I'd give small odds right now that it's the latter but education is very much an area of development now that it's finally starting to escape the deadening hand of government.