The problem is schools aren't adjusting correctly to new realities.
Yes. This from the summary is not so much a statement about the students as it is an open admission that the teachers' testing and/or teaching methods are ineffective:
Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material
The US economy has been a mirage for some time now. I welcome the pop, so that the focus of the economy shifts to things that are real, and benefit the people. Maybe we'll even get a democratic system of government out of it
You welcome the pop? First please share some examples of times when sudden downturns and extended economic turmoil led to great benefit for the people, or a turn toward a more democratic system of government.
The question from the poll is
Do you think the American Dream--that if you work hard you'll get ahead--still holds true, never held true, or once held true but does not anymore?
If I took the poll I would have felt obligated to answer "never held true," not because I don't believe in the "American Dream" but because this is not and never was the definition of it.
Better descriptions of the "American Dream" that I would have been able to agree with might be:
1. Opportunities exist to get ahead without requiring that you be "born into them."
2. You are more likely to get ahead if you work hard than if you don't.
3. The American economic system is better at providing these opportunities than the economic systems of many other countries in the world.
I don't think I'm nitpicking on grammar either, I've met plenty of people who think that working hard is or should be a guarantee and if it isn't in their case it's because the whole concept is bullshit. That's not healthy both because it blinds some people to opportunities that really do exist, and it bolsters support for other systems that are downright bad for people.
The innovation problem in EU is well known and it is financial. If you have a startup and need VC money, it's much easier to obtain it in the US. This is what explains people moving there, because the VCs demand that their funds are spent inside the US.
My comments (and TFA's observations about the European economy) are not limited to startups, or even tech. The sluggishness of economic growth in Europe is quite broad. I hope it will improve.
The problem can't be regulation, because whatever innovation made in the US ends up on the EU market as well.
It sounds like you're thinking of regulations around consumer protection e.g. privacy, which is in the news a lot. There are a lot more regulations in play than that. Labor regulation is a huge space just to name one example.
But the regulations preserve people's privacy and stop tech oligarchs from abusing consumers so much. I think that might be a reasonable tradeoff.
It's possible that some regulations might be effective in doing that, and could come at a reasonable cost.
There's a bit more to the overall issue of regulation and economic growth than just this one thing though, in a community of half a billion people.
Yeah, it's a good thing that Linux, Skype, Python and the World Wide Web were invented by good ol' Americans.
Worth mentioning that Torvalds, van Rossum, and Berners-Lee all moved to the US. The business and research opportunities may have had something to do with that.
But look, the claim isn't that no innovation comes out of Europe. It's just that there would be a lot more, and stronger economic growth in general, if regulation were more sane.
I hear you, I share many of your concerns. I would just underline your point
I know it's not universal, nor limited to USA.
All your talk about "stated values" makes me wonder if you don't hold your fellow Americans to a different standard than others. It's true that US policy has an outsized effect on many people around the world, but it's also true that your average farmer in Iowa never asked for that responsibility.
I don't think it's a free speech thing, because nobody's telling you you can't say something, only pointing out that if you say certain things it might not help the conversation, might not have the effect you actually want. Another part of free speech is being willing to consider another point of view, so thanks for that.
I can't tell if you're someone that reads racism into everything, but please don't.
I'm not. I think racism is a real problem but I also see people crying racism to bully people into silence on topics that really need to be discussed in the open. I also see people who don't consider themselves racist saying terrible things about one group of people that they would never feel comfortable saying about another, and now and then I call it out.
Americans are well-known globally for doing incredibly stupid things.
It's true that the US has done some stupid things, but here you're applying a seriously inaccurate and unhelpful generalization to a diverse nation of 350 million people. I'd call it racist. That doesn't mean you're saying it out of some sort of hatred of Americans, but maybe you're affected by the endless propaganda out there that amplifies anything negative an American does while minimizing accomplishments (the same technique used by people who don't like immigrants). Or at the very least you've been conditioned to think it's completely normal to say "Fucking Americans" in response to some office worker in Maine making a simple mistake using unfamiliar technology. To take your example...
being antizionist does not make me antisemitic. It's not like I said "all Americans are/do X."
... if you went around saying "Fucking Jews" because you heard some Jewish office worker in a small far-away town made a clerical error, I might be led to believe you're antisemitic. It certainly wouldn't help the conversation.
Hmm? Americans are a race?
Funny, every time I've been asked this question about group X, it's been right after someone made generalized disparaging remarks about group X. If you don't want to use the word "racist" because you don't consider them a race that's fine, use some other word. The concept remains the same: when the rhetoric strays into disparaging others because of where they were born and who their parents were, it doesn't help the conversation.
BTW, I'm American. Are you saying I'm racist agains myself?
Totally possible. Or maybe you did not have racist intent but your words can still have racist effect, which doesn't help the conversation. After all, people don't know who you are.
I was pointing out that American government (theoretically representing its people) seems to make constantly worse decisions daily.
While I may not agree that this story of a relatively trivial office blunder proves that, it's certainly a more articulate and constructive thing to say than "Fucking Americans." I'll take it.
Have you heard of tainting the jury pool though? What the hell are they doing posting anything anywhere, doctored or not?
Yeah, and I mentioned it in another comment. Though honestly, a case like this is unlikely to exhaust the local jury pool, if it goes to jury at all.
Fucking Americans.
We're all happy to listen to your helpful suggestions on how to best optimize police procedure in a small far-away town, but there's no need to be racist. It doesn't help the conversation for anyone, and it just makes you look bad.
Uh, I’m gonna go with malice until someone can actually validate the actual innocence of their “mistake” and excuse for evidence tampering.
You know, before the public starts wondering just how many other prison sentences were created or enhanced by the exact same “oops”.
There was apparently no evidence tampering. The photo was not evidence. It was a photo taken for PR purposes. A photo of evidence. There's no indication that the photo, original or doctored, is being presented as evidence to any court.
The need for validation is understandable. Which is why, according to TFA,
“To remain fully transparent, we will be inviting the news media to come look at the original evidence, so they can see that the evidence does actually exist.”
They aren't editing an evidence photo, they're editing a copy of an evidence photo
It's not even that. The photo isn't evidence, the objects in the photo are evidence and they'll be going to court. The photo itself was taken specifically for PR purposes, as mentioned in TFA.
Also from TFA:
To remain fully transparent, we will be inviting the news media to come look at the original evidence, so they can see that the evidence does actually exist.
It appears that the original photo isn't evidence either. It's a photo of evidence. The actual evidence that would be presented in court consists of the various physical objects you see in the photo. It's plausible that this photo, not being evidence, was not subject to any of the procedures that would be applied to actual digital evidence, for example, a digital photo seized from a suspect's computer. So it's not clear that this casts significant doubt on their handling of actual evidence. I could see a scenario where this kind of PR snafu could affect a jury pool though.
This would be similar to
A contest between people with and without exoskeletons would be pretty awful, but a separate Olympics just for people with powered exoskeletons would be excellent for promoting the development of exoskeletons, awareness of their value and limitations, a culture around practical and responsible use, etc.
... what can be explained by incompetence.
It's only getting harder though. AI makes the incompetent more capable.
Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.
