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Originally Posted by muhmuh
either way any data you can find leads inevitably to:
1) theres a hell of a lot of guns in the us
2) guns arent what makes people want to kill each other
3) giving people an easy and relatively impersonal way of killing others isnt a good idea in a country, where the populations favourite pasttime is hunting human
#2 was my main point (whether or not I expressed it well is another issue entirely), if we agree on that then our positions really aren't that different after all! ;)
As to #3, I consider the bigger issue is this violent crime. To me our country's problem with violence and violent crime is far more troubling than how those crimes are being committed.
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considering the us is a democracy the answer is probably no. either that, or the ruling in a democracy are as ignorant to the real issues, the average citizen faces, as monarchs used to be.
Why can't it be both?
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and we think we have a major school crisis, which gets discussed on tv a lot without politicians ever doing anything about it.
No one does anything about it here other than making standardized tests. Out side of impoverished areas, it isn't really funding that is to blame. The games the suburbs are playing these days is, since Americans have this tax-phobia, is asking for whatever they want in the budget- and if the budget is passed (the local communities vote on budgets in most areas here), then that's what the funding is.
If the budget fails to pass the ballot however, then the school will usually do one of a few things. They may run off of a contingency budget (where they cut out a lot of stuff that barely costs anything like afterschool sports, causing kids to get all sad- hoping it will guilt trip the parents into approving the new budget "for the children"), they may just blanketly raise school taxes (say 25% increase in a year, stuff like that), or- and this is the new thing that's getting popular, the towns in the district will just magically over-appraise everyone's property.
School taxes here are done via a tax on the appraised value of your real estate. Say I buy a house for a dollar, I don't pay taxes on it as if it were worth a dollar- but what they will do is have a tax appraiser in each town whose sole job it is to "adjust" what the gov says your house is worth, and you pay a % based off of that. In the district I graduated from it was roughly 10% of your property value IIRC (which is on the high side). If the tax appraiser is taking some meth and thinks your beat to shit shack is worth $800,000, there are protocols to fight it which usually involve saying "all these other shacks that are like mine are appraised much lower so I should be paying as if it were worth $28,000, not $800,000"-> but you can't fight it this way if (and this is the new trick) EVERYONE is over appraised. Better yet, now since your house is "worth" more than real market value, now you can take out a 2nd or 3rd mortgage based on that appraisal and have more debt than your assets SHOULD allow (and we wonder why we're having a housing crisis!?).
Then the school's get money from the state (like the poverty/math illiteracy tax... I mean lotto), and the feds. A lot of the gov funding is dictated based on how many students the school has per day, which is why a school will get so bent out of shape when you skip a day.
But they spend like the gov, and no matter how well funded a school is its "never enough."
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it is but its gradually and contiunously getting worse with examns becoming easier all the time and the lowest tier of schooling being turned into a place, where you might as well drop out of as graduation doesnt really offer and job opportunities anyway.
Why do you think that is? Complusitory education seems to be the easy issue to blame it on, with everyone going into college to "get an edge in their careers" suddenly a single college degree isn't so special and masters is more career decisive, but even that is fading away as not "being good enough"
In theory it would make it sound like, since you have to be college educated to have decent earning potential (yes I know there are exceptions), it would generate more college graduates... and it does, but it seems that the colleges are getting the same "diploma-mill" push'em threw syndromes that k-12s have. I'd say a quarter of my college courses have been abso-fuckinglutely a waste of time (like "how to use microsoft office" or "how to research in a library"). Fuck, if you don't know how to research in a library you shouldn't be in college! I'm sure you could find a school that would accept a random person off the street, no matter how dumb, uneducated, or clueless that person is. Again I am not sure this is a funding issue, Prop13 shows that taking a way funding can do a number on schools' performance, but at the same time having easy access to college via aid & loans has only shown that they'll lower their standards to make more money.
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personally i rather doubt its a good idea to employ ceos, who, unlike people that actually own a business themself, arent liable with their own assets, but instead, to add insult to injury, recieve large severance packets as an incentive to fail at what theyre paid to do. shift all accountability from the top to the bottom and youll end up with the mess were in.
Guess that means you're not a big fan of the Dilbert Principle.
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although in all fairness as long as the drop out rate doesnt reach 100% the students are as responsible as is the failing of the school system.
I disagree. Students don't just magically "stop learning", that comes from being raised in an environment that encourages it through indifference, incompetence, and other major institutional problems.
The authoritarian mindset our schools have developed isn't helping any. The reason why our standardized tests tell you to pick the "best" answer and not the "correct" answer is because its not about education, it is about schooling (saying what they want you to say). I actually had a state test pose a question to me on "why slavery was necessary to the success of Georgia [in its colonial history]?" Well the question is totally kaput, by selecting any answer I am stating that Georgia required slavery in order to be successful... the way I put it to Europeans is when the progressives wanted to give us institutional, compulsory, gov run, gov mandated/required schooling.... they decided to look to Europe and ended up picking the worst characteristics from every country they looked at, and the modern American schooling system was born.
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its not like germany a country famous for engineering has a surplus of them. and its easy to see why when, like myself, youve seen a company such a siemens from the inside and experienced what its like to live life in a dilbert comic.
being an engineer is becoming increasingly unappealing in a corporate world run by lawyers and businessmen who from the engineers perspective are mostly seen as a fairly efficient way of wasting oxygen and producing green house gases.
Well yea, you have to think harder not smarter...
