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Comment Re:B52 Today Bears No Resemblance to B52 in 1965 (Score 1) 403

They have hundreds of engines in depot from the aircraft that were sent to Davis-Monthan. Now if they want to run these birds past 2040, it might get a little problematic, but I don't see the AF spending $10 billion to re-engine a bird that already is long in the tooth when they're dreaming of things like the Next Generation Bomber...

Comment Re:Extend the lifespan of B-52 beyond 2040? (Score 1) 403

Raise your hand if you know nothing about the term "collateral damage." Thought so.

The days of carpet bombing Iraqi divisions is long gone. Even during GW1, it wasn't common. And in Afghanistan, PGMs are the most likely weapon to be used so we can avoid having Al Jazeera rage about us wiping out a wedding party. Hell, we didn't even use carpet bombing in Tora Bora when OBL was holed up in the hills.

Sure, carpet bombing has a great psychological effect on its target, but today's civilian authorities won't use it.

Comment Re:B52 Today Bears No Resemblance to B52 in 1965 (Score 1) 403

There have been proposals throughout the last few decades to re-engine the youngest B-52s, but they've never gotten off the ground. It's not really clear that the fuel savings would pay off when you consider all the costs involved. Part of me thinks that the AF would rather keep buying shiny new fighters.

Plus the CFM-56 is a straightforward one for one re-engining on the 707 series planes like the KC-135. Re-engining the B-52 would involve dramatically modifying the fuel delivery system as well as modifying the engine pod mounting points.

Comment Re:The evaluations take this into consideration (Score 1) 557

Show me a report that shows a correlation between per student funding and performance. Despite what "seems" to be a common sense idea, it's not founded in reality. Same with classroom size. I'm not talking about how a classroom "feels" but how effective size is on determining student success. If size was important, then you wouldn't have mega sized Freshman Intro to Calculus at so many schools.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/03/california-school-distric_n_870921.html

http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Adam-Smith-Institute-Blog/2010/0428/No-correlation-between-education-funding-and-student-performance

Comment Re:Won't someone think of the children? (Score 1) 557

If Special Education is so expensive, then it needs to be improved. There's simply no way for a school district to be able to afford to pay $250K/year in your extreme example for each kid with special needs. At that rate, you could hire a full-time nurse, a special ed coordinator, a speech pathologist, and a couple of interns from the community college looking for job experience FOR EACH KID. Of course, schools don't operate this stupidly, they spread the cost over numerous schools and SE students. That overhead is going to remain, even if a lot of students use the voucher system. So unless you can point to some concrete figures, your example seems a bit bogus.

Here's the deal that public school fans really have a hard time coping with: the fact that people want to take their kids out of such shining, well-functioning establishments.

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