View 808: Thursday, 30 January, 2014

Another day devoured by locusts, on this one involves house problems that may be expensive, and threatens to consume even more days.  My apologies to subscribers. I am dancing about as fast as I can just now.

More tomorrow.

==========

Friday, Noon:  It looks as if there’s a happy ending.  Or at least not a tragic one.

View 808 Tuesday, January 28, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

The State of the Union address can be a dramatic setting for launching a dramatic change in policy. Five years ago President Obama used his first State of the Union address to announce that this would be an era of hope and change: that his election speeches were his agenda.

This year, the fifth State of the Union address, was less hopeful, and certainly less specific, with few specifics, and although the President tried to rouse some of the old fire, his heart didn’t seem to be in it.

Specifics were few. The main economic measure that will be remembered is a demand for a rise in the national minimum wage. The only specific on education was a reiteration of his faith in its effectiveness and its need for more money, and a proposal to provide pre-Kindergarten education to everyone, so that all Americans would have access to world class education.

I sometimes wonder what I would do if it were my task to tell the Congress of the United States what problems the Republic faces, and what ought to be done about them. I’ve given that some thought from time to time, but I never developed an actual program or wrote an actual speech. I’d be a lousy speechwriter for a politician anyway. That is, I used to be a good one, and my speeches for candidates whose campaigns I worked on were effective, but that’s not the same thing. The purposes of a State of the Union speech are many, some partisan and some are invocations of sentiments of national unity.

Mr. Reagan was good at blending those elements. So was Peggy Noonan, but Reagan had the habit of taking drafts of speeches and making them his own, rewriting in places, and often changing the whole direction and theme, often to the horror of his advisors who were sure they understood American politics better than their President did. They were generally wrong about this. Mr. Reagan was extraordinarily wide read and well informed, and had a real sense of history. He was also conscious of the dominating importance of bringing the Cold War to a successful close: a close that could only be successful if the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics could be put out of business without destroying much of the world in its death throes. This required careful management and a great deal of his attention, as well as political compromises with ruthless ideologues who did not appreciate the importance of 26,000 nuclear warheads aimed at the United States; and who did not hesitate to demand domestic political concessions from the President as the price of supporting his military and foreign policies.

We no longer have a Cold War. The Seventy Years War ended, and with considerably less slaughter than most strategists – including me – thought would be the price. The conflict with Russia is entirely different from the old Cold War, and is much closer to the more traditional balance of power international politics. Unfortunately, as the Seventy Years War ended, there was exhilaration among the neo-conservatives and other former Marxists who saw a new end of history – the inevitable rise of liberal democracy, would cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And meanwhile our economy depended on Middle East oil. As I had said during the Cold War, I have more faith in American science and engineering and good old fashioned American exceptionalism which could build the Empire State Building and Hoover Dam during the Great Depression, then come out of that to submerge the Third Reich and the Empire of Japan und a flood of tanks, airplanes, rifles, armored cars, liberty ships, battleships, thousands of tone of bombs in a bit under five years.

No matter. When we woke up from the dream of universal liberal democracy established in places where no such thing had ever been contemplated, we had spent the savings from the end of the cold war on a myriad of activates including the two longest wars in our history as we involved ourselves in the territorial disputes in Europe – the Balkans – as a consequence of our Entangling Alliance – NATO – and then in taking liberal democracy and nation building to three provinces of the Turkish Empire which had been thrown together into the Kingdom of Iraq, united Shiite and Sunni Arabs, Christians, Jews, and the non-Arab Kurds. More it was to be done by State Department career civil servants, and Bremer was accordingly dispatched to be the proconsul of Mesopotamia with the worst record since the Year of the Six Emperors in Roman times.

But that is all done, and done, and over. So what ought we to do now?

First, the President is correct in realizing that we have to stop sending expeditionary forces into foreign lands. Empires don’t do that; but of course creation of an Empire wasn’t the point of sending the Army into Iraq and Afghanistan. We went in there in the mistaken belief that would could implant liberal democracy – like Napoleon’s enthusiastic French soldiers, we would carry Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity on the point of our bayonets, or perhaps fire it from our Abrams tanks and drop it from our fighter bombers. Who could resist us?

Had we intended to establish Empire, there was an Iraqi Army for hire, and its soldiers desperate for jobs; and there were plenty of candidates to be the new President of Iraq with an American Resident Advisor. But that was not what we wanted. And what we wanted, which was to give them a liberal democracy, was not in our power of gift. We could have held on for a while, established a new and relatively stable dictatorship – or more likely three relatively stable dictatorships – and left gracefully; but what we could not do was leave behind a stable liberal democracy. But leave that, for those games are over, and the President is wise to retreat.

But that does not address the real problem of this Republic in these days of Moore’s Law. The new technology based on “microchips” – Large Scale Integrated Circuits – like all technologies follows an ogive or logistic curve – we called it an S Curve in The Strategy of Technology – and not a true exponential, but such curves appear to be exponential for some time before they tend to flatten out (but may then start a new S curve after a time); and Moore’s Law has applied for many years. LSIC based systems get twice as powerful for about half the cost at a period of about two years. That probably won’t continue for too much longer, but think about it: it has already changed the world. It has made possible the Internet which changes merchandise and marketing. It has changed manufacturing: America manufactures more now than it did in the old days, but it no longer needs masses of unionized blue color workers to do it. A lot of those skilled labor jobs which turned working men into middle class citizens are gone: first exported to places where they would be done cheaper, now consigned to robots. In general, if a job can be described in the old language of the Gilberths, it can probably be programmed into a robot.

And this is coupled with a education system that absorbs increasingly large amounts of money, but teaches very few students to do anything that someone else will pay them money to do.

Meanwhile the President is proud of the number of jobs he has created, but in fact he has created fewer jobs than the number of jobs which have just – vanished. The reason that unemployment is now below 7% — or can be said to be – is not because so many are going back to work, but because a larger number have simply given up trying to find work. By definition, once someone gives up trying to find work, that person is no longer unemployed.

The President addressed this situation by asking for larger minimum wages. He also asks for another extension of unemployment benefits. Pay people to be unemployed – and raise the minimum wages that must be paid to those who are employed. Does anyone believe that the President thinks this will solve the unemployment problem? Does anyone think this will solve the labor problems in these United States? I will leave this as an exercise for the reader.

The other solution to the problem, to restoring American to a nation that can build the Hoover Dam and the Empire State Building in fewer than five years even in the depths of a Great Depression, is education: and the President proposes that we raise the cost of education. He doesn’t put it that way, but he would throw more money into the education system; this has been going on since the Great Society with the result that the Universities and Colleges and Education Normal Schools have all become Universities and raised their prices, while the Junior Colleges demand upgrading of their titles, and everyone raises their prices; the accrediting organizations comply with this by demanding ever more expensive doodads as well as higher “qualifications” and credentials for those who absorb this new money, with results that are easy to see. My mother taught first grade in rural Florida, and her primary mission was to make sure that every kid in her class could read and knew the addition tables before leaving first grade. She was always a bit ashamed that she had only a two year Associate of Arts degree from the Florida State Teachers Normal School in Gainesville; but she was able to say that very few children left her first grade who had not learned to read and, as she put it, “those didn’t learn anything else either.” The notion that a child of normal intelligence, bright or dull, would leave first grade unable to read was unthinkable.

The President proposes that we give all children Pre-Kindergarten. This sounds a bit like Head Start, a program that everyone I know wishes well – I know no one who doesn’t want Head Start to work – yet no one has ever been able to show that it does any good at all. After three years in our school system you cannot tell which children were Head Start and which were not; and this is not from lack of trying. Everyone wishes that program would work; but no one can show that it does. Pre-Kindergarten is unlikely to fare better.

The only solution to the education problem is to insist that the schools work; that teachers teach the children to read. If you had a computer programming business, and some programmers came to you to say they could not program the computers you have, because the computers aren’t learning, you’d fire them and find programmers who could do the job. Similarly with teachers. Teachers who can’t teach should go find other careers, not think up reasons why they have failed. My wife for a while was the teacher of last resort in the County juvenile justice system – she got the kids who had been sent to reform school and who could not read. Hundreds, thousands of them. They all came with ten pounds of paperwork proving that it wasn’t the system’s fault that these pre-teens and teens could not read. They just simply couldn’t learn. Roberta threw away the excuse papers and taught them to read. After a while there were few to no discipline problems – kids who insisted they didn’t want to learn to read were so astonished when they began to learn and saw others learning that they discovered that after all, they really did want to learn. They had just been convinced that they couldn’t learn. There is plenty of data on this. The reason children don’t learn to read is that they have not been taught to read. If you want them to learn, find teachers who can and will do it. Don’t send them to pre-K, which isn’t going to teach them to read either. We’ve been through this before. Kids who can’t read are not likely to learn how to do stuff that other people will pay them money to do. And the schools are routinely turning out illiterates.

Teach the kids to read, and make them learn the addition and multiplication tables in the first two grades. It can be done. We used to do it. We did it at St. Anne’s on Highland Avenue in the Memphis district known as “Normal” because it was at one time the home of the West Tennessee Normal School which has since transmogrified into a University of Tennessee. But apparently no longer turns out teachers who can teach first graders to read.

The President did say something important: that we need more programs of apprenticeship. But those cannot be, since he also insists on high minimum wages. Just as the minimum wage laws have ended the “board job”, an important way for some to work their way through college. Apprenticeship programs were once an important way to enter the work force; but we don’t do much of that any more.

Instead as the President said (echoing probably the dumbest thing Bill Gates ever said) that we need Pre-K because every American kid deserves access to world class university education. Which is to say that a world class university education will become worthless since all can have it. No child left behind means no child gets ahead; and it works like a charm.

But that’s enough for the night.

Moore’s Law is making it possible to teach robots to do many of the jobs which brought much of the working class into the middle class. It is inexorable, and that genie is out of the bottle. It can’t be stuffed back in.

Schools are not teaching people to do things that other people will pay them money to do; yet we insist that everyone go to ever more expensive and increasingly irrelevant schools. Of course the wealthy are not deceived and apparently many teachers are not; while there are districts where teachers send their own kids to public schools, there are increasing numbers of districts where they try not to. Those who can escape the ghastly education system try to do so, but the trend is to close those loop holes, and “solve” the problem by throwing more money into the blob.

But I do not think you will hear much discussion of this sort in a State of the Union Address.

Defense

BAE Trials 3-D Printed Parts On Fast Jet

Aviation Week & Space Technology Jan 13, 2014 <http://www.aviationweek.com/awin/awst.aspx> , p. 27

Tony Osborne

London

BAE Systems looks to 3-D printing to reduce production costs

Printed headline: Print Preview

BAE Systems has begun flight trials of three-dimensional printed metallic components on the Panavia Tornado combat aircraft, as the company explores the potential benefits of the method.

A one-off component—a bracket made from printed stainless steel and designed to carry a fixed thermal-imaging camera—has been fitted to a U.K. Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 the company uses for flight testing. The bracket was produced in a fraction of the time and cost that similar items would have previously taken.

“The traditional methods of producing such components, designing the molds and building the tooling and associated waste that goes with that, is all eliminated through 3-D printing,” says Peter Bosley, head of design for Tornado at BAE Systems. “The time and cost saving is already significant.”

BAE Systems has been experimenting with different forms of 3-D printing for the last 15 years, although much of this work has focused on the use of polymers for rapid prototyping and materials development. But more recently, the company has been using 3-D printing to produce a range of ready-made parts to protect the aircraft on the ground and during maintenance, in a bid to reduce repair costs.

ArticleImage <http://www.aviationweek.com/aw_images/large/AW_01_13_2014_139_l.jpg>

BAE Systems is using 3-D printed parts on its flight-test Panavia Tornado, including a bracket (inset) to hold a fixed thermal-imaging camera. Credit: Tony Osborne/AW&ST; Inset: Bae Systems

Items produced include protective covers for Tornado cockpit radios, support struts on the air-intake doors and protective guards for power take-off shafts. Some of these parts are now in daily use with RAF Tornado squadrons in the U.K. and on deployment in Afghanistan.

The company says such parts now cost less than £100 ($164) per piece to manufacture, resulting in savings of more than £300,000 ($492,990). Potential savings are projected to be more than £1.2 million between now and 2017.

The 3-D printing machines are installed at the company’s facility at RAF Marham, Norfolk, where the RAF Tornado fleet undergoes maintenance. BAE Systems believes the process could be used to good advantage at other bases. Company executives foresee air forces taking their own 3-D printers with them in-theater, where critical spares could be printed on an as-needed basis.

“You are suddenly not fixed in terms of where you have to manufacture these things. You can manufacture the products at whatever base you want, providing you can get a machine there, which means you can also start to support other platforms such as ships and aircraft carriers,” says Mike Murray, the company’s head of Airframe Integration.

“And if it is feasible to get machines out on the front line, it also gives improved capability where we would not traditionally have any manufacturing support,” Murray adds.

Other trials have included flying a number of flight-cleared 3-D-printed non-metallic parts made out of materials such as ULTEM, a thermoplastic already used widely in aerospace, and Polyamide 12, a nylon-based plastic.

For the moment, the company is taking small steps. Engineers are currently looking to 3-D printing to create an in-cockpit stowage container for Tornado crews’ night-vision goggles. The containers could be produced using a mix of printed and polymer materials.

BAE Systems engineers believe larger-scale metallic components capable of standing up to the stress and temperatures faced by combat and commercial aircraft could be produced via 3-D printing in less than a decade. The company is already working closely with British universities on a range of printed materials.

In a recent trial in conjunction with Cranfield University, engineers produced a 1.2-meter (3.93-ft.)-long 3-D generic wing spar section from titanium using the Wire and Arc Additive Manufacture process. The piece took 37 hr. to produce, from the time the digital model was created in the computer to when the part was removed from the printing system.

At Southampton University, engineering students have already produced a radio-controlled aircraft produced entirely though the 3-D printing method. The university’s Laser Sintered Aircraft was built with just five “snap-together” components without the use of conventional fasteners.

“For engineers, it is a different way of thinking. Three-dimensional printing offers the ability to produce a single piece component without the need for fasteners,” says Bosley.

Moore’s Law is inexorable.

Subj: Laptop ruling challenges the Constitution

http://tinyurl.com/mygwgg5

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 807 Friday, January 24, 2014

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

I have made another discovery regarding hearing aids. When I got my new COSTCO hearing aids, the world changed for the better. However, I noticed that sometimes I could not quite hear someone, as for example at a LASFS meeting, where some people speak in lower tones. Everyone seemed to hear them but me; but then I hit on putting a finger in my ear. You would not think that would improve hearing, but it did, reliably.

So today I went back to COSTCO and asked about that, and was told that I probably needed somewhat larger ‘domes’ – the little rubber cones that go on the ends of the little tubes that lead into the ears. This would have the same effect as the larger domes. So we tried that, and lo! while the improvement is nothing like the difference between not having the devices and having them, it is a dramatic improvement – enough so that I have been wandering around the house with an oilcan lubricating squeaking hinges that I had not before known were squeaking.

I also got a fourth program for my devices. This one is the same as the primary program but reduces the sibilant sounds, which I was hearing as too loud. I can retune these things as often as I like until we get it right. I don’t know about other COSTCO outlets, but the people in the Burbank COSTCO Audio department are cheerful, competent, and eager to be helpful. If there are any COSTCO managers reading this, please let the Burbank GM know this…

We bought this house in 1968. Across the street on Laurel Terrace there is one layer of houses, then the beginning of a 50 square mile nature conservancy. If you go west on Laurel Terrace then south on Viewcrest you come to a tiny stub called Shady Oak Road. That goes east about half a block and ends at a gated driveway. A trail north leads up into the conservancy from there, and it’s my usual way of going up the hill to the main fire roads and around to the Tree People headquarters in the old fire station up there. The trail and the roads circle but never come near a large house that stands like an island in the conservancy. When we moved here that house belonged to and was occupied by Carmen Dragon, the conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra. If you look for Shady Oak Road you may be able to find it.

About 1972 Carmen Dragon moved out and the house was occupied by his son Daryl Dragon, keyboard artist with The Beach Boys. Daryl applied for the job of keyboard accompanist to Antoinette Tennille, got it, and then hired her as a keyboard accompanist for the Beach Boys, making her the only Beach Girl. Daryl Dragon was known as “The Captain”, and they developed an act called “The Captain and Tennille,” and presently they were married in 1975.

Prior to their marriage the Dragon House up there in the conservancy was the scene of wild parties, and was occupied by a number of musicians, including the Beach Boys. There were off road motorcycles, and although there is no direct connection between the Dragon House and the fire roads through the conservancy, they managed to develop trails, so that at any time when you were taking a walk through the hills you might encounter several young men driving recklessly through the chaparral. Someone painted out “Shady Oak Road” and repainted the street sign to read “Snow Mountain”, and if the wind was in the right direction there was no mistaking the smell of marijuana coming from the Dragon House. And the parties got very loud at night.

The Conservancy is a State Park, and is supposedly in the jurisdiction of State Park Rangers, but there are never very many of them. LAPD almost never goes up there. No one interfered with the Big Dragon Parties.

I have seen LAPD motorcycle units up in the conservancy when a film crew manages to get up to the flats to film a scene, but not otherwise. And one day at the highest point of the fire road – still a hundred yards from the true summit — an LAPD Homicide detective unit was wandering about on the fire roads asking about rumors of cultist activities up on the summit where the fire roads don’t go. Had I been up there? Yes. Had I seen Pentacles and witchcraft signs? Well, yes, sort of.

The detective who was asking me about what was going on up there was wearing Hollywood loafers and silk dress socks, neat wool slacks, and a blazer with brass buttons; he was never going to get up to the places he was asking about. I told him that sometimes a discharged veteran rearranged some of the rocks and brush to improve the area, and someone had drawn a Pentacle with rocks.

Actually there was a partly disabled veteran camping up there, and sometimes local community college fraternities and sororities had ceremonies up there, but there were no bodies up there (and no one was missing for that matter). The detective was clearly reluctant to go up the steep narrow trail to the summit, and I don’t blame him.

I am sure the detective was competent in his element, but he would have made an awful Scoutmaster. We used to take the Scouts up there to collect any trash left by hikers, and sometimes to clear a bit of brush on the upper trails, but of course our kids knew what they were doing in a briar patch. The summit hill is mostly a blackberry and laurel hell, impassible if you don’t know the trails. The thought of this expensively dressed detective finding his way in or out of there was a bit amusing. Nothing ever came of the investigation, of course.

Anyway, just after The Captain and Tennille were married, all the activities at the Dragon House stopped, everyone moved out, and the property went on the market. I could have bought it for half a million or so (in the early 1970’s), but with four boys to get through their educations I didn’t have anything like that to invest; and actually I wouldn’t have wanted to live up there. It’s a good mile from the Studio City village I live in, and half that from its nearest neighbor. A great place to live for a reclusive writer, but not for a busy household like ours. Now, of course, the land alone would go for several million dollars, and the house, although old, is worth at least two million.

The story we heard in the village was that Toni Tennille had laid down the law: The Captain would give up this pie-eyed retinue, stop drinking and doping, and get his act together or she was leaving. They moved – some said to his father’s place in Malibu, others said to Pasadena – and for a while The Captain and Tennille were a popular act. I rather liked their routines.

And over time I lost track of them. Understand I was never part of their circle, and if I met them it would have been at some event or another, and I don’t even remember which neighborhood gossip told me the story of Tennille laying down the law to the Captain. And, as I said, I lost track of them.

This week the news was out: after 39 years of marriage, Tennille was divorcing The Captain. He is quoted as saying he had no idea this was coming and has no notion of why she is doing this. It also transpires that he continues to live with her in the house in Arizona they built a decade ago.

Apparently The Captain has developed something like Parkinson’s and is no longer a reliable keyboard artist. He has no income. Tennille sometimes gets a gig, but mostly they live on the residuals of her backlist. She still gets some royalties. They haven’t had much in the way of a hit in a long time.

He has had the “like Parkinson’s” disorders for some years. Treatments for this sort of thing are expensive.

All of which leads to a speculation: why, after 39 years, should one of show business’s most stable couples break up for no visible reason? What has happened that would cause that? And one answer could be The Affordable Care Act. Consider: the income is very nearly all hers. The medical treatment expenses are all his. Under the Affordable Care Act, if he is destitute he is entitled to subsidies for his health care. He can apply for the best health care available because he cannot be turned down for his pre-existing condition. (He could have been until January 2014 when the Affordable Care Act took effect.) If it were not for his health care expenses, apparently they could live a decent retirement life, but medical expenses are eating up their retirement income. If they divorce and she gets it all, he is destitute and entitled to health insurance subsidies, and no insurance company can turn him down just because he has an expensive disorder.

Note that all the above is pure speculation. I am after all a science fiction writer.

I also wish them well. I would not call myself a fan of The Captain and Tennille, but I did enjoy several of their performances, and I was very much a fan of his father when he was at the Hollywood Bowl. I wish them well.

Virtual Pistol Practice

This is frickin’ awesome!

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

This is pretty cool, you have to click on the trigger in order to bring up the target.

Hand and eye coordination, sight alignment, etc.

VERY ACCURATE AND ADDICTIVE.

Check this one out, see how good you are with a Russian pistol, the Makarov. All text is in Russian.

Save powder and money! When the pistol appears, click on the trigger, aim, and fire. It’s really self-explanatory.

The more you fire, the liklier you are to get NRA solicitations.

You have 3 shots in 30 seconds to hit the target and get your score. It’s addictive.

http://www.deti.mil.by/templates/swf/Pistol/index.swf

I enthusiastically agree with Couv’s assessment. Lots of fun and free. And pretty good practice, too.

“An object like that, invisible to telescopes and with such large mass, can only be a black hole because no neutron star with more than three solar masses can exist.”

<http://www.astronomy.com/news/2014/01/spanish-researchers-discover-the-first-black-hole-orbiting-a-spinning-star>

Roland Dobbins

But then we have:

So, Hawking has now decided he was all wrong, and there’s really no such thing as a black hole.

<http://www.nature.com/news/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-1.14583>

He also notes that we can’t predict the weather with any accuracy; does this mean that he isn’t a ‘warmist’?

Roland Dobbins

I invite explanations from those who think about these things…

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

View 807 Tuesday, January 21, 2014

“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.”

President Barack Obama, January 31, 2009

If you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan. Period.

Barrack Obama, famously.

Another day of recuperation. I’m almost back, healthwise, although my energy levels are still low, and it takes about as much energy to do routine housekeeping as it does to write an essay. Worse, the most serious sign of aging for me is the time it takes to focus in on a new subject, and how easily it is to be interrupted – after which it takes almost as long to get back to work as it did the first time, but it also takes a while just to get focused on the routine task that has to be done now before I can even think about returning to work. But over time all this is abating.

Roberta is about a week behind me in recovery.

Educating the Brightest

"It says little we haven’t been saying here for years, but the long term effect of ignoring the brightest 10% so that you can devote a larger portion of education to bringing up those just below normal up to normal is disastrous."

I recall a lesson from a high school economics class… Two people shoveling, one who is 10% faster than the other. Two shovels are available, one that can shovel lift 10% more material than the other. Which of the two people should get the better shovel? If the goal is to increase the overall production, then the better shoveler should get the better shovel If the goal is to try to equalize the output between the two, then give the better shovel to the less capable person.

Obviously, this is a very simplistic demonstration of how to allocate resources. But the concept can be applied to education. Of course… the first thing that needs to be done is to decide: What is the goal?

Karl

But whatever the goal, you must have enough resources to get the job done. If there are only two holes and they’ll be dug in a day no matter what method you use that’s one thing; but if resources are scarce, the thoughts of fairness and generosity have to go be the wayside. The early colonists learned this: if we all starve, there is nothing to give to the poor. Wealthy societies can bash down the curbs to provide ramps for the disabled; but as the wealth vanishes, this is one activity that goes to the bottom of the city worker list. We have that in Los Angeles. In a great year for tax collectors they dutifully go out and bash another curb or two, but in the past few years that no longer happens. One corner near us has three bashed curbs with ramps, and a couple of years ago two of them got yellow bumpy ramp things inserted, but there has never been enough money to bash the fourth curb, and there seems not enough even to put the yellow thing in at the third. Meanwhile every street has its potholes.

Without proper education of the brightest our productivity falls and falls.

There is a lot of capital out there. That’s what big income discrepancies are: accumulations of capital. But if there are not educated workers to hire, expanding business looks overseas for places to invest. For good or ill, the industrial revolution demands the best efforts of the brightest. If instead the goal of the schools is the welfare of the school employees including teachers, and the second goal is to appear to be fair, the results will be horrid for the Republic.

One thing income discrepancy does is make it simple enough for the wealthy to pass not merely wealth, but education to its next generation. Whatever the three children of Bill and Melinda Gates inherit, it will not be $70,000 in school debts.

You ask the right question: what is the goal. It used to be that the goal was liberty. That had the great merit of being one of the better ways to increase productivity. And one goal used to be to educate each child to yeye’s highest potential. This is no problem if you have enough resources: but if it takes as much effort to raise a dull normal child to the productivity of a normal as it does to raise the productivity of a bright normal to a new level, if you have limited resources it’s obvious what you must do if you are to be sustaining.

We see recently the argument that IQ can be raised, and that 10,000 hours of practice will allow one to master almost any subject. This is asserted by people who have some reason to think it, but there is this obvious fact: if you aren’t learning much you won’t devote 10,000 hours to any given subject, so it’s arguable that only those with a natural talent will stay with it: so have you raised IQ or managed to overcome nature with proper nurture, or…

But it seems obvious to me.

For those with children to educate it is important that you do not trust the schools for certain elementary but important things. One is to teach them to read. By read I mean that before they leave first grade they can read any normal English word they encounter, even if it takes a bit of effort for something like polychromatic or deamimatosis, and yes I made that last one up, but if you can read you read that one.

The other thing children should learn before the end of first grade is the addition tables up to 20 plus 20. By end of second grade (and many can learn this by end of first) they should know the multiplication tables up to 20 x 20, and I’d recommend giving them a bonus incentive to learn to 25 x 25. It’s rote learning, much like giving a computer a lookup table, and it’s worth it because it makes arithmetical calculations a lot easier and simpler. While it is possible to know algebra and calculus without being very good with arithmetic, it is much harder because you can’t know if you missed the answer by misunderstanding or just by bad arithmetic. Knowing the plus and times tables, and I mean really knowing them, also gives you some insights into the way numbers work. Clearly you learn that 9 times 11 is the same as 11 times 9 (and you should have memorized both) but you will also cotton on to some obvious principles.

As to how to make young children learn stuff like plus and times tables, I suggest bribes. Money works. It’s cheap at the price, because the alternative will be waste of tuition money paid to expensive schools, and increased student tuition debt. Trust me on this. A few bucks spent on the times tables will generate a very high payoff in later years…

Common Core = Cargo Cult

http://minx.cc/?post=346625

"Professional Highly-Educated Education Researchers noted that high-level early readers were usually just identifying words at a glance — reading in a "whole word" way. While kids using Phonics read more slowly. Phonics kids were slower readers and struggled with it more.

So hey — let’s stop teaching kids this slow method of reading called Phonics and just teach them "Whole Word" reading!!! Win, win, win!!! It’s easier for the students, and even easier for the teachers, as they don’t have to teach the step-by-step Phonics method of reading. They can just say the word "horse" is horse and keep saying it until these stupid kids start learning that "horse" means horse.

Here’s the problem: This is Cargo Cult mentality. Yes, the high-lanrneig, early-raednig kids are in fact using the Wlohe Wrod raenidg mhoted, just as you, reading that gibberish I just wrote, employed Whole Word reading — looking at the first and last letters of the word and using context and years and years of experience in how the written language works, and what words are expected to come in which place in a sentence to read, fairly easily, a bunch of misspelled words as the words I intended."

—

Jason Merrell

We waste a great deal of our educational resources to begin with. This is an interesting essay, most of which I might have written myself: http://minx.cc/?post=346625 I recommend it. Good demonstration. Cargo Cult is a good label for the concept, and the entire essay is worth while.

Dr. Pournelle:

I don’t know if you’ve read Conquest’s "Harvest of Sorrow", but the more time that goes by, the more Obamacare comes to resemble the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. They share the common threads of:

* megalomaniacal central planning fantasies.

* wildly incompetent planning.

* even more wildly incompetent execution.

* an utterly delusional assessment mechanism.

* a total willingness to tell literally any lie in support of it.

* a complicit Western press eager to believe the lies.

* a total disregard for the negative results.

* an almost childlike glee in the harm being done.

When the whole thing does come crashing in on itself, I expect that Obama will declare the system, "dizzy with success"…

I have corresponded with Robert Conquest for many years, and we met at a couple of conferences, including one in Moscow just as the USSR was crashing. I do not know what he would think of this observation, but it is interesting to me. Thank you.

Yup.

http://www.havenews.com/news/commentary/an-example-of-why-the-marine-corps-works-1.259735?page=0

David Couvillon

Colonel, U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, Retired.; Former Governor of Wasit Province, Iraq; Righter of Wrongs; Wrong most of the time; Distinguished Expert, TV remote control; Chef de Hot Dog Excellance; Avoider of Yard Work

Codevilla: ‘The bureaucrats’ personal interests come first. The welfare and reputation of the agency come second. Everything else is incidental.’

<http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/20/a-self-licking-ice-cream-cone/>

—–

Roland Dobbins

The Iron Law applies to the Company and indeed the entire Intelligence Establishment.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.