Glass is if its obsidian.

So if I understand your argument correctly. We would be better off firing you to save money because you are incapable of stimulating or teaching 5/6th of your class to do better?

Myself, I would rather see 5/6 of my tax money wasted on trying to get kids educated regardless of the outcome, than seeing my taxes go up so that guys like MItt Romney can pay an annual rate of 13% on his annual income, while I have to pay 28%. That way you can hire more effective teachers and raise the general level of education in this country, which is precisely why we see the kind of failure you describe in the first place.

"Time to run screaming in the opposite direction."

Yeah, right into the hands of privatized education and diploma mills that are generating the most student debt.

That's the beauty of the President's plan. It asks for those who already are doing well to give something back so that deserving students can go to community college at virtually no cost.

I would rather see loopholes for "good will", "forward carry", "depletion allowances" and preferential tax credits for owning "rolling stock" eliminated, but since the GOP isn't going to do this, the only viable option is to ask those who make $500,000 per year to pay the same rates they did under Ronald Reagan.

Why should guys like Mitt Romney only get to pay 13% on his annual income in tax, while the rest of us pay 28% or more?

Why do so many advocate more tax breaks for Mitt Romney and less to educate average Americans?

Watch as the GOP and their ilk will generate countless efforts to belittle the President's efforts at job creation here. They must in order to mask the reality that they offer nothing substantive as an alternative other than more tax breaks and benefits for the already wealthy. The modern GOP represents the debt holders, who want to hold the US economy hostage to their dictates and insure that the bulk of other's labors benefit the "job creators", but not the people actually doing the work.

You could see it in Ernst's response. All rhetoric and no concrete plans for anything. The concrete will be attached to the ankles of the working man in the backrooms filled with GOP and corporate lobbyists, who will draft the legislative language for them.

Perhaps you are unaware that the US is currently spending nearly 5 billion dollars in discovering new ways to use photosynthesis to produce and deliver new fuel mixes. There are a lot of jobs that are currently supported by that 5 billion. Because only a tiny fraction of available sunlight has been harvested for this purpose, there is far more than 5 billion to be made in the future. This will be a good investment and a good career move for many. Certainly, a lot better than investing in more tax cuts for billionaires.

Nonsense. If you train a million doctors the worse that could happen is that you have nearly a million paramedics, some trained to do many of the simple or relatively specialized tasks that doctors already farm out to their nurses and aides already. The result would be no excuse for such high health care costs and wages for doctors, since much of what they currently do could be done for far less by paramedics or even in some cases by robots or medical devices.

Lets end the nonsense that the status quo is the best we can do.

"How about instead of focusing on teaching everybody how to 'code' we start teaching people how to apply logic to solve problems? "

What are you trying to do, destroy News Corporation's business model?

"It gives the impression that a high-paying job is relatively easy to get, and that's just not true."

I didn't get that impression at all and suggest that your thoughts and biases about what the president said gave you that impression. There was nothing in his remarks that implied it in a logical sense, although the president is almost certainly correct. If you can get more people coding, there will be better coders and some will get paid better than if they did not have such skills. Not all code leads to new insights into the structure of the universe or changes how the world works. Nonetheless, one can make a lot of money just coding financial transactions for a great many businesses, nothing earthshaking in terms of novel or brilliant code, but the stuff economies are built and run on nonetheless.

I applaud the President for this initiative as it gets people thinking about coding and computer science, as well as other technical professions. Sure beats more tax breaks for the wealthy as the solution to all the world's problems.

Actually, you are mistaken for assuming than any educational effort that is national in scope doesn't start with speechmaking and "propaganda". Bright ideas that occur in a vacuum twinkle out quickly. Its only when those ideas are amalgamated and become an enterprise or new field of study and disseminated widely do they really make a difference.

The reality is that ALL of the best coders start somewhere. One can't say that someone who is at college age is "too old" to be a good programmer any more than one could say that there are no mathematicians or physicists who made any important contributions after 30. It is often at the "community college level" that many are first introduced to technical subjects that do not lend themselves well to the way our high school curricula are structured.

Anyway, that's not the point, its the final outcome of having a more educated workforce to remain relatively competitive in an increasingly technological world that is the goal toward which our society should strive. After all, among all populations, there is one tail of the distribution curve that will produce the most innovation. The bigger the number of the people getting educated, the larger that tail of the curve will be.

The kind of group think you are talking about can best be found on Fox News, where unlike the for the science community, evidence for any assertions are either not required or purely optional. However, hey, you convinced yourself your rhetoric sounds great, even if it is irrelevant.

" So called "green" electricity tends to be simply expensive. "

Perhaps true, but in relative terms once one factors in the costs of not doing it, it is actually very cheap and one reason that alternative energy companies are continuing to thrive even as oil prices plummet. Solar and wind energy are getting cheaper and this recent change in oil prices will only cause more intense economic selection to make them cheaper still.

"I think change is inevitable. Who are we to fight it?"

Sounds like the approach Neville Chamberlain was making right after he returned from Munich. Sadly, the consequences of such think often prove catastrophic.

Arizona may have beaches, but sadly it will also have soil temperatures that will make it extremely difficult to grow crops, unless you raise cactus for tequila.