Except that even if 1/3rd of it is credited or subsidized the remaining 2/3rds may not be within reach of the current owner. A considerable number of people in the US alone live paycheck to paycheck and could never afford the 2/3rds costs to update such a thing. Especially the poor in the 'country' outside of the cities tend to own (with mortgages) their homes, rather than targeting landlords in cities (who may have the funds and just not want to spend them).

Actually since water vapor in clouds is a 'green house' gas, many hot days are rainy or overcast. Though this varies by region. Places like Nevada tend to have dry hot days, places like Florida or other parts of the east coast of the US (for instance) tend to be wet and hot.

The US would look radically different if it was a direct democracy and reallly there would probably be a good chance of some sort of ACA being inacted given that the house/senate would be the voting public as a whole.

We would also have a radically different form of lobbying... Though executive and judicial branches would likely remain.... However without an example of a real direct democracy it is hard to say what the real effect would be.

From my time as the network admin (and defacto director of technology as the 'highest' official IT position) for a school district, I can guess how things went. The rest of the administrators likely had no clue that it even takes people to setup the devices when they arrive, let alone thought to budget for such.

When I was working for the school (pre-tablet days) they wanted to replace two very old 'mobile labs' of laptops that could be moved around rather than relying on static machines taking up lots of space in general classrooms. I looked at current options and suggested a two part plan: Netbooks (to lower overall costs) and a campus-wide wireless network. The plan was approved for the netbooks and I assumed was for the wireless as well, however I was kept busy planning for the deployment of the netbooks with the vendor and couldn't keep an eye on the wireless part that was needed to really make it work. Then the netbooks arrived and I asked about the status of the wireless (which was supposed to be handled by a contractor in my plan), since I had not heard anything about that end of things. Well it turns out they hadn't bothered to approve that part as it was 'expensive' for something 'unneeded'. I then had to explain the netbooks were near useless without wireless connectivity. So they gave me a $300 budget and said 'Do something about it'. So yeah... great wireless solution for $300. Definitely not the planned for campus wide setup I had planned.

I think a good 'fix' to alot of issues would be that while you can horde your money all you want while alive, you cannot give more than a average years wage to any adult offspring or other person (outside a wife/husband who you have mutual accounts with). Once both parts of a couple pass away the joint properties must be liquidated (offspring can pay for any items they wish to keep). If you want to create a legacy you need to donate these funds to the general good in some way. This levels the playing field for kids of someone rich and or famous. They must succeed or fail on their own.

If you combine this with eliminating private education on favor of public education we should see improved public schools bringing up the education level of all students instead of a few chosen offspring.

I have no thoughts on how to fix the rich getting their kids a job with a 'friend's business', but if I had an idea for it I'd at that in as well.

I've done 120 mph with my '95 Nissan Sentra when I owned it... And later with a Dodge Dakota pickup... And even a twice with my current '99 LHS. Not a one anything designed for 'racing'... None in Cali either... Late night (2 am ish) on the interstate in most eastern states in the US are pretty bare...

My personal experience has been I could stand on a chair and wave my arms as I shouted about it and if it either costs them money or inconveniences them in the slightest (even if that is just not being able to use 'god' as their password) then they refuse to listen. Then if their is a security issue they blame you for not 'fixing' it.

Another factor which relates to the cost of employees is health care costs. I've been working with the IT department of a university for awhile and starting this summer they gave all their employees over 50 a early retirement option because they simply 'cost to much in health insurance costs' and 'were inflating the health insurance fees for younger staff'.

This was at a 'state financed' university, so professor contracts are handled at the state level. The state has also created a split budget system for the universities. One budget covers the costs of running and maintaining the school. The other budget is for new construction or reconstruction of old buildings. The second budget is now higher than the first and the university cannot use funds from the bigger one on things covered by the smaller one. Hence each semester there they demolish an old building from the 70's and rebuild it as a modern structure. To add to this the state has recently told the school that they have to many classrooms and should demolish more buildings with no replacements. Which is funny as their class sizes have gone up to the point where 100 level classes have upwards of 70 students in each class and there are few rooms that can hold them.

When I graduated high school I had looked at attending this particular university and tuition then was ~$6000/year (that was '96) it is now $15k/year.

Well by canon only 3-4 Gallifreyans are sort of left... The Doctor's old nemesis is supposed to have died... again. His wife/amy pond's daughter, ie River Song, is supposed to be dead, but did regenerate at least twice. He does have a cloned daughter who we saw a couple years ago and dissapeared. Though she would have to be reintroduced after all this time (I was hoping for a spin off then).

There is already a massive problem where fairly normal active boys get stuck in special education because boys are more likely to be disruptive than girls. If you look at special education numbers they tend to be at least 10:1 male:female, if not higher. This is already where problem kids go. Though most special education teachers realize only a handful of these kids actually have issues learning.

The problem is taking care of special education kids costs at least 5 times what normal kids do. Which makes this an expensive option. The school I use to work for as their network admin eventually decided to keep special ed kids in the classrooms for the majority of the day, because they had so many that they would need an extra 'special ed' classroom at each grade level to handle them. The local school district liked to use that school as a dumping ground for every kid who had already been kicked out of other schools, which doesn't quite mesh with the schools goal of being a enhanced education better than what the local school district was offering.

The problem became the kids even that school could not handle. It was nearly impossible to kick out the worst offenders because they had already been kicked out everywhere else. They had all been stuck in special education before we had even seen them as well. Eventually the staff psychologist would end up watching 5-10 kids every day, because they were simply to disruptive. Not a task she enjoyed.

You forgot the War of 1812... You know the one where we invaded British Canada...

Requiring a user, after the fact, to recall an error message is futile. They simple have seen to many varied ones and their brain goes 'oh an error message' not 'oh a 504 error' or 'oh a invalid data type error'. This is when we have to write error handling code to be able to provide a text message, email, or simply a text file that records the details around a crash so you get the robustness you need to fix these types of errors without relying on iffy recall of users.

As an network admin, and closer to your 2nd paragraph, I would spend considerable time filtering fire wall logs for different criteria trying to see things like what sites are most blocked over a week to try to catch these sorts of things without having to have details from users. As strange as it sounds I would hear about connectivity issues often third hand (when they are all in the same building and I had an open door policy). So if I was not actively hunting for these things I knew I'd be having the CEO call me into his office (he never just dropped in to mine) and explain why he keeps hearing people are having issues with 'x' and if I didn't have an answer I'd have to hear him yell at me 'until I did'. I simply could not rely on users to tell me when they had issues or even correctly explain what those issues were.

Not all hikimori (to use the Japenese term) live with their parents. In Japan many hikimori actually go to the 'big city' (ie Tokyo in most cases) trying to get into university and when they fail some of become hikimori living on a stipend form their parents and not leaving their 1-room apartments.

Especially in Japan, but also in other parts of the world, getting into the 'right' school can mean the difference between being 'somebody' and being 'average'. Lots of people are set up to fail if they cannot be 'somebody'.

Oh please...

First, yes I have been in a position to hire people. Second if you actually did search for the video I mentioned, done at a presentation of a Pittsburgh law firm that specializes in visa hires, you would have seen how the ENTIRE point of what they were 'selling' companies on was how to make it impossible to hire an american. It wasn't about qualifications. It wasn't about 'capable, creative, etc.'. It was about specifically excluding anyone from the US for jobs in the US.

If you don't find that absurd then I guess It's unlikely we can ever agree.

Slashdot alone has been collecting anecdotal evidence for... 15 years now...? I think it's been 15 anyways...

There have also been videos of presentations by firms who work in this area that teach companies how not to hire americans (You can google that). If their really was no advantage to hiring H1-B over a US worker, then why would companies go out of their way to disqualify US workers...?

I think they real factor in "recent study suggests, the growth of immigrant workers in American companies helps younger American technical workers" is that the few who do get in as US workers are the top of the crop and the rest simply are left to pick there way through other fields after getting their expensive degrees.