Agree with you that C#- and C-derived languages in general- aren't perfect though. *Every damn one* uses the same mistake-prone choice of "=" as the assignment operator.

At least Java throws an error when you accidentally leave off the second '=' in a '==' comparison; the real problem is that the purer C derived languages let assignments act as values, and cast them automatically to booleans without complaint.

Then again, it's easy enough to set up warnings for that type of thing, so...

The only ones that think Visual Basic has a bad reputation are kids in bedrooms that think there's some inherent value in using the lowest level language available, rather than the right tool for the job.

In my experience, people think Visual Basic sucks specifically because of the fact that it's easy to use for inexperienced coders. They've had to deal with (i.e. inherit, maintain, and fix) tons of crap code created by people that program just enough to get by, and that type of code just doesn't show up as much in C because of the steeper learning curve.

You really don't understand true pain until you've had to maintain a significant codebase created primarily by aspiring non-programmers in the financial industry that thought learning VBA would increase their employment prospects. Unfortunately these people slip through the resume screens and get jobs coding all the time because the recruiters can tick off the VBA box, completely overlooking the fact that their "extensive" VBA experience amounts to a 2 week "Intro to Excel Programming" course at the local community college, and a lot of these places don't even make people write code during interviews.

Not to say that similar stuff doesn't happen with C or Java, but...anecdotally, at least, the overall quality of Visual Basic code that I've seen tends to be extremely low, probably more on par with your typical basement PHP code than anything else. That's not a reason not to use it if it's the right tool for the job, of course, but it is a reason to initially put most VB programmers into the "suck" bin until proven otherwise, especially if that's all they know how to do.

FWIW, even though I program a lot of Java, and I find that for many purposes it's the best tool for the job (esp. when C# is not a realistic option or when Java libraries are more mature than the alternatives), the same thing holds true there - if it's all someone knows how to do, they're probably not very good.

Ah, you mean "popularity" in the high school sense. Point taken, and agreed with. :)

No, you're utterly wrong on this. FTA, the law will only take effect if enough other states get on board to deliver an election, which means we'd have (nationwide) a popular vote election. So your vote would count exactly as much as every other American's does, and this whole electoral college thing would just be a formality.

Where you live has absolutely nothing to do with it, though in some cases it's true that the value of your vote might decrease. But that's only because your vote was (unfairly) more important than mine to begin with, so I'm not very sympathetic to your plight. We're not living in a real democracy if we don't have equally important votes when electing our collective leader.

Protection against mob rule comes from the Constitution, not from weighting small town votes more than big city ones. If there are more people in population centers, damn straight they should have more say in things, there's more of them!

The presidential election has become a popularity contest today, and removing the electoral college would just make it even more so.

Erm...what exactly were you thinking democracy was supposed to be?

http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Acad

From what I can tell, it's only the hop directly from your internet provider to your house that will be affected. The hop that you've already paid for. And yup, the whole idea is that Comcast et al will start trying to extort Google to send Google data from Comcast to your house.

An analogous situation would arise if you ordered an item from Amazon, and an "enterprising" FedEx delivery guy with an interesting idea to make some extra cash for himself came to your house, stood outside your door, and despite the fact that both the delivery fee and his personal salary had already been paid, refused to hand over the package to you until he personally received a payoff from Amazon, totally disregarding the fact that Amazon had already paid FedEx. In the real world, that delivery guy would be fired and replaced quickly. Unfortunately, in the world of internet access, there's usually only one or two delivery guys that are able to serve any particular house, so if they're both trying to pull off this scam, you don't really have an option other than either paying them off or putting some regulations in place to make sure they can get in trouble.

What Republicans want is 100% tax cuts.

Actually, based on the current outrage over Obama's plans to cut taxes mostly for the lower 50% of earners, I'd say that this isn't even strictly true - who hasn't heard angry "conservatives" ranting lately about how cutting taxes on people who barely pay them is unfair?

What they appear to really want is to reduce the progressivity of the tax system, not reduce taxes anywhere that's politically feasible given the current climate.

Personally, I have no problem with lowering the overall tax burden; however, I've seen no evidence that the level of progressivity in our distribution of that burden is excessive, and in fact, I think measured in terms of how much each income level "hurts" due to taxes, it's probably just about right. If you look at the tax burden relative to total wealth, you'll see that the middle class is hurt very slightly less than the rich or the poor, which is exactly what you should find in a democracy with more people in the middle class than at the edges: the middle class pushes the tax burden to the edges based on their increased numbers.

Huh? How did the 2006 and 2008 elections prove that conservative principles work? We haven't seen economically conservative principles at work in our government for a long time (unless you buy the current party line that arguing for tax cuts for the rich and arguing against them for the poor automatically qualifies you as a conservative...).

Maybe that has something to do with the fact that more phone calls coming into the White House say don't support the stimulus package than ones that say support it...something like a ratio of 100:1.

Sorry, not that I don't find that plausible, but that's quite interesting if true, and I couldn't find a source (the closest I could come was that only 37% of people support the stimulus plan) - is that a real stat, or a bit of hyperbole?

Taking money out of the economy to process it through government hands and put less money back into the economy is insanity.

Not at all, or at least not as obviously as you seem to think. It's certainly theoretically possible (probable, even) for an economy to respond better to an optimal distribution of wealth than a less optimal one, even if the total initial wealth in the optimal case is lower due to waste while achieving that configuration. An economy is not a zero sum situation like a reservoir; wealth does not just sit around, it is the raw material which new wealth is forged of, and it is almost certain that in our current economy there are bottlenecks where wealth has pooled and could be more effectively exploited elsewhere, even factoring in a hefty price for the reallocation.

The question, of course, is whether the people doing the shuffling really have any clue about what those bottlenecks really are and where the optimal places to move wealth to would be. Liberals and conservatives generally assert that the bottlenecks are completely opposite, so I'd venture a guess that nobody has a goddamn clue what they're talking about, or if they do, it's completely and utterly by accident.

Of course, it's also worth considering that we're not all trying to optimize the same utility function - overall economic progress may be a lofty goal, but some people will feel that things like median wealth (as opposed to mean) speak better to our collective success, so it's completely possible that everyone may be right, they're just using different measures of success.

What if, the only thing that makes the stock markets rise is artificial inflation?

Define "artificial." Artificial or not, the money that freely flowing credit spreads through the system actually turns into real production, and generates tangible wealth that would not have been created without the use of credit.

What we're seeing now is that turning off that spigot causes contraction in production, and that was certainly in part because it was left wide open before; that doesn't indicate to me that there's anything economically unsound about a partial reliance on credit. It just suggests that we can't push it too far either way or it causes unpredictable effects.

Real analysis? Woof. I suppose if you want to make your students passionately despise math forever, that's one way to go.

High school kids need to be exposed to the fun parts of math, not the parts that make people that love math groan. Even complex analysis is far more enjoyable (not to mention useful) than real analysis. Nobody likes to sit around proving the obvious for no other reason than to prove that you can do it, and high school students will never realize that the reason for all of the rigor is to expose the edge cases where things break down.

A good example is Douglas Hofstadter.

An English teacher of mine lent me "Godel, Escher, Bach" in eighth grade (I suspect he taught English by necessity, not choice!), and I found it one of the most fascinating pieces of reading I'd come across in my life. Frankly, it still holds up, if you ask me - even though I don't agree with a lot of what Hofstadter says, almost everything he writes is worth reading because it brings up so many thoughts. After practically every page I would find myself feverishly jotting down my own notes and going on my own tangents, often to discover that Hofstadter would pursue exactly those ideas in the next few pages. Quite a fun read.

That simple act of lending probably had more of an impact on my future intellectual path than almost anything else in school. Gotta remember to send a thank you to that teacher one of these days.

IMO, abstract algebra is a great way to turn off all but the best of the best to math in general. I know many math majors that switched to stats and econ after floundering in the intro to abstract algebra class.

And I strongly object to trying to slip those things into early math classes; even concepts like commutativity, associativity and distributivity are simply counterproductive to students until they have some reason to need to use them in the abstract.

And FWIW, I was not personally put off by this stuff, so that's not my reason for saying this (I almost bailed thanks to calculus, though, thanks to the unreasonable focus on limits and all that garbage which any competent person can pick up practically by osmosis once they know how to actually use the damn techniques). I got quite far along in abstract math (and had the pleasure to learn some of it from Serge Lang himself, and the displeasure of fighting through the sadistic exercises in his textbooks - the guy was far more comprehensible in person!), and I absolutely love it now; however, I think it's the type of thing that a person needs to realize they want to learn about before they will be receptive to it.

On that note, I think number theory is a good soft intro to higher math, because the open problems are so easy to state and understand (3k+1, Goldbach, etc.), and you can at least see "evidence" for them using simple methods. It's hard to draw connections between number theory and the abstract stuff without a lot of machinery in place (I don't think high school students are quite ready for adeles!), but interest in those problems is what spurs a lot of work in abstract techniques, so I think it's worth nurturing.