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This is a very clear articulation of my professional experience as well. I feel like I have to drop out of "aesthetic perfection" mode in order to just do what I can to help someone else; and and that is what they will actually pay for, since they don't care about the perfection of fine details.
The [older, lower capacity] Pop Icon, by the way, is free right now with airtime. https://shop.tracfone.com/shop/en/tracfonestore/phones/tf-al...
You can get one online from Tracfone for $10, but then you have to pay shipping. https://shop.tracfone.com/shop/en/tracfonestore/phones/tf-al...
Perhaps from one of these sites:
http://www.bnf.fr/fr/la_bnf/anx_dep/a.collections_sonores_en...
What you're describing sounds like the Apple, Google, or Facebook ecosystem. How is it different from any of those?
This is not a 'strawman', this is the actual content of every substantive criticism I received in 12 years of homeschooling my child. Because we followed a structured curriculum and she excelled in verbal ability, they had no other basis for criticism.
Also, at the time we were homeschooling, there was literally no relevant research in the ERIC database by anti-homeschoolers--it consisted entirely of polemics about socialization.
This highlights why compulsory public schooling was so long in being established. It follows the trajectory of the US transitioning from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy, and children were actually expected to participate in both but even more so in the agricultural economy. Only in the 20th century were people expected to not work at a 'real' job until the age of 22.
It would be more honest if this mission were made explicit--to serve as a holding place for children without daytime caretakers. Then, one of its primary objectives would be to pragmatically assess which children were capable of self-care, or even full independence, before the arbitrarily designated age of graduation.
Whether teachers have noble motivations is completely irrelevant to whether the institutions perform their function well. All it means is that the teachers are working for institutions that take advantage of them.
The literacy rate cannot function as a measure of the success of public education in the US. Rather, it is a measure of how useless the US public education system is, because it accomplishes little more than maintaining a basic level of literacy for the majority of the US population.
"it is generally accepted that literacy rates in the United States were quite high before compulsory schooling was mandated starting in the 1840's."[1] See the extensive citations at the link.
>I think you're mistakenly assuming the point of public school is to educate. I think it exists more so the proles have somewhere to dump their kids when they're working. The "education" happens to be incidental.
You are absolutely correct.
The point of public school in the US has always been to 'educate' in the broader cultural sense, not in the narrow sense of learning a subject (or range of subjects) or learning how to do a particular job. From its earliest forms in the US in the early 19th century until it was widely institutionalized by the late 19th century, it was always explicitly promoted as a method of integrating into 'productive' society all the religious outsiders, immigrants, lower classes, Indians, Blacks--everyone who was not a middle-class, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
This is still an explicit objective of public school, except that now it also has a normative function for the middle class--in other words, it has become the de facto normal condition of the middle class to have had a public school experience. That is why the defenders of public schools nowadays go further and claim that without having had a public school experience, a child literally has no place in adult society and is incapable of functioning normally. This is the single most common public objection to homeschooling, even more than fears of child abuse, child neglect, or educational neglect.
I had a similar experience in grammar school. I was the only qualified advanced student in English, so I spent class time sitting in the hallway going through the advanced reading exercises by myself.
I agree, it's an anecdotal rationalization, as is yours. Yet, it's also true that creators actively frustrate efficient use of distribution platforms in support of their bad business models.
This is no different from the situation during the US Prohibition era. Pragmatically speaking, the threat of punishment did not cause sufficient change in social behavior or attitudes. The ideal model of using law to manipulate society failed.
If transfer of ownership does not actually occur when a digital product is "purchased", then how can one argue that ownership is lost when a digital product is "stolen"? In both cases, what is happening involves licensed use, not ownership. What is lost when a digital product is pirated is not ownership, AKA property rights; what is lost is potential demand for licensing rights. What is lost when a physical item is stolen is actual possession, which would enable one to use or sell the actual item. Losing actual possession of the item will also cause loss of demand, though, since someone else having possession enables them to use or sell the actual item in competition with the legitimate owner, who is concerned with maintaining market demand for the physical items.
To the extent that this advice about prison applies to business, it applies in an organization where pathological behavior is glorified as "leadership" and everyone else feels like a wage-slave who is being manipulated. In that environment, it applies perfectly for the low-ranking employee without strong networks.
I don't even understand why some college students still lug around tons of worthless paper textbooks.
Nothing has changed in the last 20 years in terms of the economic model for the textbook publishing industry. The strategy is still about how to create artificial demand with useless features and how to create artificial scarcity with exclusive deals. Yes, 20 years ago they really were literally taking the same product (like, the same text and photos) from 20 years before and jacking up the price 1000% by putting fake "revised edition" labels on them. Now that production costs have dropped, distribution costs have dropped, and sources of information have exploded, they are looking for new ways to jazz up old content to appeal to students and professors. But it is the same hopelessly corrupt and wasteful industry.
How about a prepaid Android phone for $10? So, technically it is subsidized, but there is no contract to sign.
The notion of implicit involvement is a PR strategy for legitimizing a government. If a majority of the population do not feel implicitly involved, they will not care if the government is overthrown.
I have found that reacting to news in "real time" (for example, as it is fed to me through TV or Facebook) leads to a loss of perspective. The purported urgency of the story overwhelms its broader significance. Discovering news items later or second-hand enables me to research multiple perspectives after some people have had time to digest the event. On the other hand, sometimes the first-hand accounts get edited to have sensational elements removed, and the sanitized versions are less informative.
The so-called "civic duty to vote" is really a civic duty to support whatever is done by the representatives chosen by the plurality of voters. As a task supposedly necessary to maintain democratic society, it is lacking in any personal responsibility; and its practical consequence mostly consists in accepting whatever the people in power decide to do.
Like a love shack, but using electronics.
Precisely. They needed to ditch the old Neighborhood Hobby Shop Full of Expert Geeks marketing strategy in order to be competitive in the mass consumer market. Radio Shack was always targeting the mass market. It would have required a huge change of internal culture in the 1990s for Radio Shack to actually cater to the niche hacker/maker community.
It sounds like what some Radio Shack stores tried to be, and maybe what Radio Shack marketed itself as in the 1960s.
No, Best Buy is more like RadioShack as it was becoming when it was self-destructing 15 years ago. Fry's (which ironically took over an Incredible Universe location where I live) represents what RadioShack would have naturally turned into with proper business strategy.
Yes, the hobbyist was not so much the ideal customer as the ideal held by the typical customer. I am also a former RadioShack employee (twice over, from the '80s and the '90s) and although I enjoyed meeting hobbyists, they were neither my favorite customers nor my bread and butter. My bread and butter were people buying AV stuff, phones, and Christmas toys. My favorite customers were people who asked me to tinker with their radios, change watch batteries, or talk about the newest technology.
I have struggled with the same issues. Most work involves fitting into a social hierarchy and being rewarded by managers for preserving the appearance of tribal unity.
I finally had to leave corporate life for good. I discovered that what I do compulsively, other people compulsively avoid, and so I marketed it as my special skill. I also had to choose a field that encourages churn, so that I could be competitive as a freelancer. Eventually I found a job with an institution that gave me more autonomy than I would ever have in the corporate world. Ironically, my commercial skills have helped protect me from institutional politics. But I may get sucked in by ambition.
In contrast to the states promoting zipper merging, Indiana recently redesigned some interchanges to effectively eliminate the single merge point. They added extra lanes so that one "preferred" lane (the one that formerly backed up everyone for three miles) is no longer the sole access for any of the off-ramps. Now, everyone has basically three miles in which to merge into, out of, or across this lane, rather than piling into it all at once.
This picture doesn't show the full extent of the redesign, but the yellow highlighted part is the former problem lane.
http://www.in.gov/indot/files/MPOICI69_NBInterchange_2012.JP...
One useful economic definition of middle class is obtained by applying Frederick Strobel's distinction between those who are labor-dependent those who are capital-enhanced.
The middle class are the ones who fluctuate between the two categories: They have to keep working, but as long as they do, they have some surplus income. If they spend too much and go into debt, their surplus income goes away, and they have to work more.
This is useful because it explains how some can consider themselves to be "working class" or "middle class" and yet have income that is both above average and above median. They still have working class (or middle class) anxieties, mostly because of their local economy or their bad spending habits.