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June 12, 2012 03:21 PM UTC

Tuesday Open Thread

  • 32 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

–Henry David Thoreau

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32 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread”

  2. Don’t screw with The Oatmeal h/t mashable

    Almost a year ago, the wildly popular comics artist, whose real name is Matthew Inman, wrote an angry blog post against humor aggregator website FunnyJunk, deriding the platform for allowing (and ad-serving) uncredited images of his work.

    FunnyJunk fired back Monday with a letter claiming defamation – and asking for $20,000 in damages.

    Naturally, Inman then wrote an even angrier blog post that annotates the legal request. In addition to calling the claims “fiction” and the lawyer, media attorney Charles Carreon, a “jackass,” he carefully detailed his plan to respond to the letter:

    I’m going to try and raise $20,000 in donations.

    I’m going to take a photo of the raised money.

    I’m going to mail you that photo, along with this drawing of your mom seducing a kodiak bear

    I’m going to take the money and donate one half to the National Wildlife Federation and the other half to the American Cancer Society

    In just over an hour, “Operation: Bearlove Good. Cancer Bad” already reached its $20,000 goal on IndieGoGo and is still climbing. At time of writing, the figure has broken past the $30,000 mark and is growing like crazy.

  3. 1) Orwellian Communism is just an Executive Order away.

    2) The Grateful Guvs know all about this plan, as both the left AND the media are in on it.  We need some real-world interpretation here lest the mighty all-powerful UN use land use planning in Garfield County, CO to seize control of North America.  

    And it is a soft underbelly when you think of it that way.

    Anyhow, its a good day over in the Letters section of the Glenwood paper…

    http://www.postindependent.com…  

    1. Ok, I’m fessin’ up. I knew about it and didn’t dutifully write the Garfield County paper and explain it for the folks over there. My bad.

  4. Yesterday I posted a story in the open thread of a student named Heydi, an honors student and  undocumented high school graduate, to be deported the day after the ceremonies.

    Today I’m greeted with the headline:


    Virginia teen Heydi Mejia is a granted reprieve from deportation

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/…

    And how did she learn of the reprieve?

    Mejia’s reprieve came unannounced in a fax that arrived at her attorney’s office in the late afternoon. It represented the first step in what could be a long legal process..

    KUDOS to the Washington Post – Newspapers can still make a difference in the lives of people struggling against archaic laws and bigotry.  

  5. In the ‘you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff’ category, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending about $1.1 million to develop a way to physiologically measure how engaged students are by their teachers’ lessons. This involves “galvanic skin response” bracelets that kids would wear so their engagement levels could be measured.

    If this tells us anything, it is that the obsession with measurement and data in school reform has reached new nutty heights.

    mroe at the Washington Post

    And another take on the matter from our Daily Mail friends across the pond.

    The move is part of the billionaire’s mission to evaluate and improve the quality of teachers, which has already included controversial initiatives such as fitting classrooms with video cameras.

    ‘Why would anybody spent money on this when some school systems can’t afford to pay their electric bills?’ Education blogger Valerie Strauss wrote in the Washington Post.

    ‘The obsession with measurement in data and school reform has reached nutty new heights. ‘Teacher Anthony Cody, writing in Education Week, commented: ‘The wonderful thing about having human beings as teachers is that we are naturally empathetic. We do not need galvanic skin sensors to detect when our students are drowsy or disinterested — we can look around the room in an instant and know!’

    Others have pointed out limitations with the bracelets, including that they are not able to tell whether a student was responding to their teacher or something a friend whispers in their ear.The bracelets are also so far unable to distinguish whether a heightened response is due to excitement or anxiety, and whether a drop is response is due to relaxation or boredom.

    1. I have 2 degrees. One in science, another in education. When you come from science and look at education research, you’re struck by the lack of rigor. Experiments are poorly designed and measurement is frequently based on personal observations or standardized tests. It’s hard to tell when and how learning occurs. Measurements like these, properly aggregated and normalized, could be very revealing.  

      2. Others have pointed out limitations with the bracelets, including that they are not able to tell whether a student was responding to their teacher or something a friend whispers in their ear.The bracelets are also so far unable to distinguish whether a heightened response is due to excitement or anxiety, and whether a drop is response is due to relaxation or boredom.

        This is precisely the problem with the computer mindset….. Data of any kind is somehow valid….even tho, you don’t know what it is you are measuring…

        1. It’s not a computer mindset, it is a data mindset, which is really saying a scientific mindset as opposed to an arts mindset. Is teaching science or art or both. My view is that if you can do something to reduce test taking, increase the variety and quality of metrics available, you might actually learn something about what makes a teacher effective. Helping a teacher understand engagement seems like it is potentially valuable – and testing these devices is an important part of the equation for understanding education. A whole suite of sensors might even be better.

        2. First off, I have no idea if anything will come out of this. It may just come out as random gibberish.

          But, suppose the students wear the bracelets all day, every day, for a year. You might be able to address questions like:

          • Is there a correlation between measured engagement and achievement?
          • Does having a music/art class help with engagement in subsequent classes?
          • Is there a sequence of classes that tends to foster/hinder engagement?
          • For teachers, what units/teaching styles foster engagement? Is that reflected in measured achievement?
          • And on and on…

          It’s very easy to be cynical about these efforts, but try to think about what you might be able to learn and how you would design the experiment or analyze the data. It could be very useful.

          1. Galvanic skin/muscle response is a reaction to external & internal stimuli.  The relationship between sympathetic activity and aroused emotions hasn’t been tied to a specific elicited emotions — so just what is being measured?  Fear, anger, the startle response, sexual feelings, … are all reactions that produce similar galvanic skin responses.

            I’m quite sure I & my 5th grade brethren had heightened responses during Mademoiselle Cecile’s French class but not sure how much French any of us retained.    

  6. Honeywell CEO David Cote made news recently by calling for corporations to pay zero taxes in the United States, something he claims would boost the creation of jobs. But Honeywell has paid an effective tax rate of 2 percent in the last four years and cut 1,000 jobs in the U.S. during that time.

    Cote argued that if corporations paid no taxes, they would reinvest that money in creating jobs — an oft-repeated conservative and Libertarian claim that is rejected by almost all available evidence. Take Cote’s own company, for instance. Honeywell is a profitable company. It made earnings of $825 million in 2011, an increase over the $708 million it made in 2010, and saw a related increase in the value of its shares, where profts on the shares from one year to the next were nearly $1.

    During the last four years, Honeywell’s effective tax rate was 2.0 percent, and that was only because it paid taxes in 2011. From 2008-2010, Honeywell had an effective tax rare of -0.7 percent. In the last two years, Honeywell cut 1,000 jobs in the U.S., while adding 11,000 jobs abroad. So despite paying basically no taxes in the U.S. in recent years, Honeywell continued to ship jobs overseas.

    So much for lower taxes leading to more American jobs.

    The meme that the wealth “job creators” will invest in jobs if they could just have their taxes lowered is bullshit. I am sure there are many more similar examples to illustrate this point, I just don’t have the time to do the research.

    http://crooksandliars.com/kenn…

    1. and that’s why the bullshit fleecing of the 99% continues.  If corporations are people then they need to pay equitable share of taxes and not be allowed to off-shore earnings and jobs at the expense of tax payer subsidies.

      Even Yertle McConnell admits that Bush tax cuts and extensions haven’t worked but through some GOP econ-fairy magic he thinks extending them in perpetuity will finally let benevolent corporations overcome the Uncertainty ogre.  It’s all economic fairy fables for the GOP leaders.

    2. The truth about the corporate tax rate is that it’s much more a matter of the rate at which they aren’t paying rather than the rate at which you are.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the corporate rate is 25%.  If you are paying zero percent of 25% now, how much less will you be paying at zero percent of an only 15% rate? Even a liberal arts major should be able to figure this one out.

      Corporations are sitting on tons of profits, paying next to nothing in taxes and not creating jobs.  So even less nothing (if there were such a thing) would lead them to creating jobs? When creating jobs has nothing to do with their goals (maximizing profit) in the first place and, in fact, cutting jobs has been their favored method of increasing profit to add to the pile they’re already sitting on?  In what alternate universe does this make any sense?

      If corporations are people, they are sociopaths incapable of caring about anything outside themselves, certainly not the welfare of the flesh and blood variety of people. That doesn’t make corporations or the profit motive that rules them evil.  They are incapable of good or evil because, guess what?  They aren’t people. That’s why they need to be regulated by actual sentient beings, such as…people. More specifically we, the people, through our democratically elected representative form of government.

      1. What you are missing is Honeywell created 10,000 jobs outside the U.S.  Honeywell is simply a leech on U.S. society.

        They get all the benefits of our society and commons – courts to protect their patents and enforce their contracts, police departments to protect their headquarters and management, public education to educate what workers they do have in the U.S., a military to protect their interests overseas, roads to transport their goods, ports to import and export their goods – I could go on, but I think you get my point.  And, for all of these benefits they pay almost no taxes.

        Now, do you see what you are missing?

  7. Why America Needs Universal Health Care

    By Froma Harrop

    For now, let’s drop the talk about wanting a liberal America or a conservative America. What we truly need is a modern America. No country can be modern spending twice what its rich competitors do on health care while leaving millions without any coverage.

    If the U.S. Supreme Court declares the essential “individual mandate” in the federal Affordable Care Act unconstitutional — or Republicans throw out the reforms — then it’s back to the past, back to the economy-dragging health care mess we’ve been calling a “system.”

    Republicans say that Americans don’t want top-down government control of their health care. But what we have now is top-down corporate control of health care. Insurers, drugmakers, sellers of expensive equipment, hospital executives, labs, home-health-care services and others unnamed prosper by exploiting the chaos in our health care system.

    They get other payers (be they private or government) to purchase $50 drugs when $10 drugs are just as effective. They make more money if patients have to be readmitted into the hospital. They profit from pushing surgery, when careful watching or less invasive therapy might do the trick at far lower cost and risk. They casually order CT scans without much thought to the expense or the patients’ exposure to radiation.

    The motives are undoubtedly mixed. Some providers see opportunity in siphoning the poorly regulated Niagara of health care dollars into their pockets. Many doctors prescribe far more tests and surgery than do their colleagues, either out of habit or fear of being sued. (Republicans are right about the need for tort reform to curb litigation against responsible doctors.)

    The whole thing is well worth reading. Harrop’s conclusion:

    Only government can force order into the jungle of profitable waste and crazy cross-subsidies — most of it piled on the backs of taxpayers and employers. America can’t be modern without a system of universal coverage that promotes wise use of health care resources. Let’s stop fooling around and get on with it.

    http://www.realclearpolitics.c…

    This is the problem with Obama care. It tweaks a few things for the better but doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Mandate without a public option never made sense as a way to get all of us affordable coverage. It’s why not enough of us are seeing enough real benefit to get the public on board.  More people like me, self employed and self insured with no serious health issues, are still being priced out of coverage. Forcing us to buy it won’t make it affordable. We still won’t have disposable income to contribute to the economy as consumers of goods and services beyond barely keeping afloat. That won’t create the needed demand to get out of the economic doldrums.

    As long as the only affordable options, especially for the self insured, are very high co-pay, very high deductible with caps, we will continue to be, not only the the only modern nation in which the primary cause of bankruptcy, mostly among the insured, is health crises but the only modern nation where health crises cause bankruptcy at all. We need to make medicare universal, get rid of all the profit skimming middlemen between us and our healthcare and leave only the bells and whistles, not the means of staying alive and keeping our homes, to private for profit insurers.

    It already works better than the private sector alone for vets and seniors. It can work for everyone.

  8. Arizona and Texas got #1 and #2. But following them at #3 is high taxes, high regulation, dysfunctional state government California.

    And at #4 – Colorado! With this oh so true warning:

    Still, business owners should be aware of some drawbacks. The state’s personal property tax can become an impediment to growth. In Colorado, personal business property, such as a computer or furniture, is taxable for as long as a business owns it.

    And for those that think this is typical business bitching about taxes – this is by far the smallest tax payment 99% of the businesses in Colorado make.

    1. poll-taxes for mail-in elections probably haven’t helped our rankings either. . . ?

      Have you given any serious thought to writing Roxie Huber a letter, Dave?   Just sayin’ . . .  

    2. How are you doing on ponying up 45 cents to vote?

      Oh, you shredded your ballot.

      It’s hard to take anything seriously after learning that.

      Maybe you should confine your comments to the 10 states where mailing a ballot is free.

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