The Queen's official car is a 1958 Rolls-Royce, but as of a few months ago the Crown Prince uses a Tesla Model S.

"The Beast" exists mostly because of Kennedy and various other attempts on American presidents

That's true, but there's some middle ground between riding completely open-air in a convertible, and riding around in a quasi-tank. All you need to stop JFK-style attacks is an enclosed vehicle that can stop bullets, like the Popemobile.

If Bill Gates is involved, I suspect some devious plot, though not necessarily Microsoft based. Actually, history would suggest that it's also Microsoft based, but he hasn't been in charge for awhile now, so perhaps he's got something else to push.

Every time I've checked one of his "benevolent" actions, it's turned out to be control motivated (or wealth motivated) so I'm now suspicious whenever his name appears.

FWIW, axioms cannot be understood. They can only be postulated. If they are said to apply to reality, then they can also be observed to be invariably true. (Well, actually they can be observed to be true when you are noticing them, except in minor edge cases that can be explained away.)

What *can* be understood is how the axioms interact to describe an instance. (I'm being general here, so that I'm not *just* talking about math, but math is included.)

One useful way of talking about axioms is to use metaphors, some times historic. E.g., the equals sign is a symbol representing a balenced set of scales (as used in Babylon). In this system numbers are mapped to weights. So the scales remain balanced if you add or remove the same number from both pans of the scale. But this is an analogy, and there are places where it breaks down. (E.g., a square root has two valid answers...which doesn't fit the analogy, but does fit the axioms.)

Yet.

But automation is continuing at a rapid pace. Currently the designs are such that complex machines are often replaced rather than being repaired. (When is the last time you heard of a disk drive or a keyboard being repaired? Refridgerator?) And that's NOW, not when those currently in grade schoold have graduated from college/vocational school.

FWIW, I would have no idea what to recommend people learn...beyond certain basics: logic, critical thinking, how to evaluate reliability, etc.

A few decades ago I recommended that one should "be a garbage man", on the grounds that this would probably not be quickly automated. Well, automation hasn't advanced quite as quickly as I expected, but garbageman has remained a viable career path, if not a particularly attractive one. Part of the reason for this recommendation was that there aren't many openings in top management, and they are the ones who decide what jobs won't be automated, so that's the last job that will go. Today, though, I'm not so sure. Automated trucks are on the horizon, and that will eliminate huge swaths of jobs. And garbage collection has already been redesigned to increase the automation. (I'm not real inspired by the efficiency of the automation, but it has reduced the number of workers/truck and, perhaps, increased the speed of collection.) Further redesign is clearly needed, however...and by the time that happens, it's quite likely that the truct will drive itself.

Supermarket checkout clerk? RFID tags are already changing that. Currently there's no requirement that the cashier be more than very minimally literate. Self-checkout is spreading. How far will it spread?

Have you heard about the automated paralegal? It does searches through legal cases for useful references. This is work that used to be delegated to the entry lawyers of a firm. I don't know how widespread it is, but it's clearly something that is amenable to improvement.

Etc. I can't predict where automation will strike next, or how rapid will be its proliferation. But predicting what will be needed 20 years from now seems more than a bit risky. I might venture 5 years. At 10 years I'd be likely to overestimate the changes. At 20, however, I'd be likely to grossly underestimate the changes. That's enough time for something to be expected to come out of left field that will totally change things in unexpected ways. And education is supposed to prepare one for the long term.

One of the main problems with the current system is micro-management by distant administrators. This isn't going to improve that. The tax system restructuring that was supposed to fund schools equally has, surprisingly, resulted in schools in poor areas subsidizing those in wealthier areas.

I don't have a good answer, as high mobility has basically destroyed most local communities (and by local I'm including neighborhoods, as well as small towns). But it's also had lots of good effects. The basic problem is the increased spread of inequality of income, and the abuses of power that it leads to. (If it didn't lead to abuse of power, I'd be more willing to listen to the "free market" people despite the fact that there has never, in all of history, been a free market larger than an extended family, and even that size is uncommon.)

Well, FWIW, I was against the reform that replaced basic arithmetic via memorization with set theory. I'm still opposed. Mind you, I hated that memorization, and I'm not really convinced that it's a good idea as calculators become more ubiqutous, but "Set Theory"? Logic I could see, though I doubt that the students would like it much more than they do memorization, but it's a basic tool. Set theory was dreamed up by people who wanted to reduce the observed world to a minimal number of beliefs. Useful, but hardly appropriate for elementary math. Particularly as it leads immediately to things like the secretary of the non-secretaries club, and the Spanish barber. Wait at least until high school. (Even there I think classical Geometry, algebra, and trig, with possible analytic geometry is a better sequence. Set theory should be mentioned occasionally for those who want to investigate it, but not be central.)

I haven't investigated was the Core Curriculum is about, but if Bill Gates is in favor of it, I'm skeptical without checking further. If he proposed it, I suspect malicious entrapment. He may sometimes have done more good than harm, but I don't know. His PR agents tend to whitewash his deeds, and ignore any commercial ties. Whenever I've actually looked carefully, it has seemed to me that he has done more harm than good. (Admittedly, I usually rely on presuming that current actions are similar to prior actions, and don't investigate.)

That's what it says on the cover. It also says on the cover that Ada has optional garbage collection...but somehow nobody implements it, and no program dares to rely on it.

When I was in school we often did not get even half way through to mandated text...I don't think optional extras will get much coverage..

Sick citizens cost a state, not in on-the-book expenditures, but in lost productivity and higher hospitalization costs -- especially because of the large number of very sick people covered by hospitals' indigent care pools. This directly translates into higher dollar costs in health care and insurance.

The same insurance that would cost my family $8811/year in Massachusetts would cost an unbelievable $12576 in Mississippi, even though everything else is much more expensive here. Mississippi has the lowest cost of living in the country; Massachusetts is among the highest. Yet they pay 40% more for the same health insurance, when all things being equal you'd expect them to pay 30% less. Why? Is medical care cheaper here? Absolutely not. We're chock full of very expensive, high tech teaching hospitals where the cost of an aspirin would give you a stroke. We have the most expensive cost for medical procedures in the country of any state but Alaska.

So why is health insurance such a relative bargain here? Because we have by far the lowest rate of uninsured people in the country (4.0%) thanks to Mitt Romney's implementation of what later came to be called "Obamacare". Yes, our medical care is more expensive here but because we get preventive care and screening we use less of it.

Mississippi's uninsured rate is 15%, and consequently it's full of poor, unnecessarily sick people. the number of unnecessarily sick people. Here in Massachusetts when you hit 65 you can expect to enjoy 15 years of *healthy* life before your health fails. In Mississippi it's 10.8 years. Mississippi has a shocking infant mortality rate -- a total of 1% of live births. And all those unnecessarily sick babies who didn't get prenatal care cost people living in Mississippi a fortune.

So while Mississippi saves immediate cash outlay by not expanding Medicaid, that's penny wise and pound foolish. People carrying insurance end up spending so much more they could expand Medicaid for a fraction of the costs, and if you're a Mississippian you can expect to get more sick and die younger than any other state in the country. Some deal.

Mississippi has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country -- a shocking 1% (10 per 1000 live births) of newborns in Mississippi don't make it. Sick, uninsured babies are very expensive.

I have a family with kids. Under ACA my cost for a silver level plan, after my tax credit, works out to $712/month. That's a lot: almost as much as we pay for food. But considering how much we use the doctor and even the hospital, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

How high is "insanely high"?

For a family with two 40 year-old non-smokers and two children under 21, making the median household income of $50,054/year, the average annual silver plan premium, nation-wide would be $9700/year. That's a lot, but not unreasonable given what a silver plan covers. But here's the kicker: Uncle Sam cuts your taxes to the tune 65% of your premium, so effectively you only pay $3373/year. If you were getting anything close to silver plan coverage for much less than $281/month, I'd be very surprised. You can do this calculation for yourself at http://kff.org/interactive/sub... if you like. If you have a reasonably profitable consultancy, the prospect of paying $9/day to insure four people shouldn't be that daunting.

But some small businesses don't generate much income at first, and the tax breaks in Obamacare don't help you because you aren't paying much federal income tax yet. That's what the Obamacare Medcaid expansion is for. It covers *all* your health care expenses if you make 138% of the poverty line or less. Unfortunately about half of the states have opted not to expand Medicaid, even though the expansion woulds be entirely funded by the federal government. If you live and work in one of these states and make less than 138% of the poverty line, you need to get coverage at work or you're screwed. Even a bronze plan, at $249/month, is more than people who are supposed to be covered by Medicaid expansion can pay. Blocking Medicaid expansion at the state level is a key tactic in ensuring that working people experience Obamacare as ruinously expensive.

Finally, it's important to remember that Obamacare doesn't set insurance premiums. What you pay *for* is regulated, but the *amount* you pay for it is determined by the market. Increases in premiums, or too-good-to-be-true plans that are dropped, result from outlawing practices like dropping you from your insurance when you get sick, or raising the premiums so much when you get sick that you're forced to drop your coverage. So the increased premiums under ACA are simply the market price for insurance that actually works the way people expect it to (i.e., when you get sick, it pays for care until you are no longer sick).

If you are one of those people who pre-ACA had awesome health insurance for your entire family below $100/month, your old insurance was almost certainly too good to be true. Insurance companies dropped those policies when the ACA outlawed the deceptive practices that made them profitable.