I stayed in school for a couple of years to get my MSEE after getting my bachelor's. It was like being in Montessori school again and I loved it. It was the first time I had really manage my time over the long stretch - not just to get through this week's test, but to make my overall project successful. My advisor was more or less hands off, but available if I got stuck. Otherwise, it was up to me. That was 25 years ago. About 5 years ago I made the transition to leadership roles to be that advisor to the new guard, but I still value an MS if it was done with the right intent. A lot of colleges today will throw you an MS if you just take a few extra classes, but when I see a well-planned thesis that the candidate can demonstrate true understanding in an interview, it tells me (along with many other things) that they can manage goals, timelines, requirements, and do the validation work to tie it all up. It's nice when I don't have to spend their first 2 years at the company developing those skills in them.

To me the whole point of the MS is to give you something to figure out on your own and make you learn how to manage it. Taking a bunch of classes only makes you better at getting through this week and temporarily memorizing enough formulas to get through a final. There's little true understanding in that.

The violence in the Middle East dates back to the early Bronze Age. The Shah was violent and assassinated political rivals. In the 1940s, half of the Middle East sided with the Nazis.

The violence did not start in the 1970s, it didn't even start with Islam. It predates all of that.

Blaming individual X or modern event Y is to ignore the violence and open warfare leading up to those.

Only an idiot fixates purely on Iran. One genocidal Syrian despot has been replaced with another genocidal Syrian despot. IS is back on the rise. Egypt is a military dictatorship. Libya went from military dictatorship to perpetual civil war. The Arab Spring was ultimately crushed not because of a hatred of freedom but because the entire region is riddled with corruption.

Iran is a minor side show.

In America, laws are made by paying the politicians under the table. That's common knowledge. It's how the DMCA got passed, for example. But it's also made by having financially valuable information information, particularly that which permits politicians to have insider information that they can sell for votes/influence or use to make a killing on the stock market.

(You notice anything odd about oil price fluctuations recently?)

Musk had access to money, some of the largest databases the USG had, and the ability to fire civil servants who might have been inconvenient to Congress.

He was in government for how many years? If he wanted the statute of limitations altered, then surely that would have been the time to do it.

It would seem to me that he didn't care about the statute of limitations until AFTER other people started getting rich and he didn't.

I was under the impression that an appeal against a not guilty verdict was not permitted in the US, and was only permissible in the UK in the event of murder when overwhelming evidence showed wilful interference of the trial or exceptional new evidence.

What rubbish.

You must be one of those uneducated because in terms of most of things you mention there kids today have it better than almost all children throughout history, with possibly the narrow exception of those of us lucky enough to be born between the end of WWII and maybe 2001 in the USA anyway.

For anything you wrote there to be sensible we'd have to assume that the above cohort is the only mentally health group of children in most of history.. LOL

There are stupid posts, and there are rsilvergun stupid posts, this is one of the latter an amazingly it isnt even an rsilvergun post...

Even if true - irrelevant.

Why because even in the most affluent districts we still see a long term decline in academic performance. The only conclusion that can be support is driver of our education problems is not 'spending'

This complete bullshit. I have multiple teachers in the family. First through third year teachers work a lot. After that you mostly just refresh stuff a little bit at a time.

As to your whole Vietnam fairy tail also nonsense, but cause it completely neglects the demand side of the equation. It is not like any little town or burg anywhere just build some more schools and added classrooms because there was glut of teachers on the market. Honestly the stuff you post here, is fucking retarded dude, it does not pass even the basic smell test, let alone 10 seconds of google research anyone can do because they are already accessing a website.

So now we return to teacher pay... No you won't get rich, but you get incredible job security, summers off, and PTO during the year, generally solid benefits, and also a very average salary on an hourly basis using actual school days + required in service days. Is that a compensation structure that is ideal for every house hold, possibly not, but that is NOT the same saying they are under paid, in terms of career and time investment vs market value of total compensation.

That and this

We took away accountability because it hurt little Johny's "feels" and Shaikwa moaned it was 'racist'

Which a really good documentary might, simply offer the statement or some analysis to the effect that John and Yoko where conceptual artists and not everything they record offered great insights, but we can take a listen anyway to perhaps gain some insight into their process.... During which for visuals you don't then need to try and represent the conversation, you probably just show them and what their surroundings might have been at the time.

I don't know I have heard the subject materials either but at least on the surface here it seems like perhaps the wrong problem is being solved here. He notes he ran out of money. So was the real problem that he ran of actually interesting material he could produce on his budget said "i have stretch this thing out another 20min here, lets just play this old tape of some conversation that did not really go any place and does not add anything but hey it will run the clock, if play the melody of Imagine in the background his fans will watch anything" which then lead us to "ok now what can I put on the screen to while I play this"

The other question is why would you want abstract imagery to accompany a philosophical conversation?

I don't see how that could ever be helpful in a documentary where we are supposed to be learning about what Lennon and Yoko were thinking.

Either philosophy has some concrete premises that can be shown, and should be to help anchor the conversation or it is going to be ideas of a conceptual nature that does not have an visual representation that people would understand in a shared way.

I fail to see how some machine-generated-acid-trip to distract viewers from what is being said helps anybody.

Wrong again. I am running modern catalytic equipped wood stoves. They are 80% efficent and should be effectively reburning in particulate.

So if anything only slightly dirtier in terms of smoke stack emissions vs the natural gas or propane counter parts, and using a renewable fuel. Similarly my wood lot is great space for wild life and preservation of bio diversity.

I would bet the environmental foot print of my home, and domestic energy use is rather dramatically less than yours.

I partially agree with you, but would like to bring something to your attention. I would say about five countries in the Middle East have been formenting a great deal of trouble for the others, along with a number of terrorist organisations. There is no particular reason to assume that the Middle East will deal with one problem and not the others. Yes, Iran has infuriated a great many countries, none of which (individually) can do much but could collectively act.

We could well see a genuine Middle East Union of nations that simple says enough is enough and clears the deck of all warring parties in the region -- and may well tell the US government that it needs to calm the F down or face a few reprisals of its own. Of course, if it does, then the subcontinent will likely join in - India and Pakistan are closely tied to Iran, and I shouldn't need to tell you both are armed with nuclear weapons. This is something the US also needs to consider, if it tries to invade Iran - you don't need missiles to attack a nation that's on the same landmass you're in, you just need trucks and an unsecured route.

Equally, this is a war that has been going on for the past 4,000-5,000 years now without showing much sign of anyone coming to their senses. This might not be enough to push everyone else over the edge. Precisely because several nations with a vested interest are indeed nuclear armed, there may well be a realpolitik view that kicking the collective arses of all of the power abusers in the region carries unacceptable escallation risks.

My hope is that the current wars being fought, all of which are mindboggingly expensive and stupid beyond all possible definitions of sanity, have a similar result as WW1 and WW2 - to push the world governments into saying that they will not tolerate this continued juvenile delinquency, but this time decide to do something effective about it.

The world has become vastly more destabilised with the wars since the 1990s, and I think there's just a glimmer of realisation amongst some of the politicians that they might well have pushed their luck too far.

Exams are a waste.

Rather, you want continuous practice that is also continuous assessment.

But US methods of teaching are also pretty 18th and 19th century. They are not sensible methods and result in students who are more advanced than the material being penalised. The US obsession with standardising is a recipe for subnormalising.