I apologize for the intermittent posting recently. It's a product of my work and sleep schedule being erratic this past week. I'll link extra today to make up for it.
The Links:
Here's an interesting tidbit:
almost half of Chinese super wealthy want to leave their country while very few of US super wealthy want to leave ours. And here I thought our socialist money grubbing tax and spend democrat president for life was chasing them all away.
This is one of those long and somewhat complex articles that ends in me telling you the financial system is ripping off old people. Let me make it really short: The California Teacher's Retirement Fund, through a series of deals they probably didn't realize they were making, now owns about $100 million in IOUs from Caesar's casino and resort in Las Vegas. That debt is pretty much worthless and they'll probably never get to collect. Coming to a state retirement system near you. Thanks Private Equity!
Yet another article about poor old people getting their Social Security checks garnished to pay off decades old student loans they didn't realize they had.
Healthcare spending is one of the biggest expenses facing retired Americans. It's also an expense which is difficult to predict.
Jonelle Marte covers this challenge by focusing on those who care for elderly family members. She finds that almost half spent more than $5000 per year. Median income is around $50,000. That means these people are spending 10% or more of their income paying for the healthcare of elderly relatives. Sure, let's cut social security and medicare and see where the burden falls.
The CDC's public health blog tackles how to help old people become disaster prepared. I'd start by moving grandma out of the suburbs. I mean look at that brick facade, it's screaming 'loot my house!'
Letting the rich take all the money.
Hard working decent people can’t make a living, can’t get ahead, don’t benefit from the labor and loss of time that go into work, have no sense of security in their jobs or in their health, and don’t see how their children will have better lives. They want to blame someone, and the social barriers that kept the collective id behind bars have dropped, leaving them free to blame those they’ve always blamed: the poor and sick, the immigrant, and the liberal intellectuals who reject their values and their beliefs. The airwaves are full of Fox News and worse encouraging these prejudices. If Hofstadter is wrong, and economic woes are the moving factor, the setting is ripe for trouble.
Inequality is hurting state tax revenues. I guess the 1% aren't paying their fair share?
The CS Monitor asks the important question:
Did Hillary say anything important in Iowa?
Clinton talked like a candidate. And by that we’re not just referring to her coy “Hello Iowa, I’m baaaack!” at the start of her speech to the crowd. Her address focused a lot on economic issues, specially pitched to try and appeal to middle class voters. It sounded like the first draft of a stump speech – the kind of thing she’ll repeat over and over in the months to come, with some tailoring of the edges for her particular audience.
The lobbyists are coming!
Yup, election season is entering the home stretch and the republicans are really trying to make sure they don't blow their chance at a majority in the senate by recruiting right wing lobbyists into their cause. I'm sure it took a lot of persuading.
Storyline has been pretty good all week. Rather than link a story, I'll just say head over and check it out.
Seemingly at random,
the American Journal of Public Health publishes some research on the role of public health in preventing and mitigating armed conflict. What really stood out to me was this section:
Since the end of World War II, there have been 248 armed conflicts in 153 locations around the world. The United States launched 201 overseas military operations between the end of World War II and 2001
Pax Americana baby!
Can America and it's allies even destroy ISIS? I'm doubtful.
Dan Drezner reviews War and Gold and gives us a history of the gold standard free from people shouting Ron Paul.
Stop me if you've heard this already:
American prosperity was built on slavery and torture.
What was going on at the Federal Reserve on 9/11? While long, it's actually pretty interesting to see what they were all doing to make sure the world didn't implode financially.
What would happen if we just gave homeless people houses? I mean, there are tons of run down or even condemned places in our major cities. What if we said, hey you get to live here so long as you fix it up?
Just in case you forgot, the NSA really really wants to know everything. Quite literally everything. And they'll do just about anything to know everything. For example,
they routinely infect computers around the world with spyware.
Not to be left out,
New Zealand had it's own super secret surveillance program. Duh.
Schools often implement dress codes as a way to address challenges or mount a turnaround campaign. What's interesting is how dress codes tend to cause high rates of suspension and detention among minority students. Often times those policies are pushing an overly white-bread vision of what a kid should look like onto a population which couldn't care less.
In this case, it appears that 90% of the students being disciplined for dress code violations are women. They're being told they're "causing a distraction." So, it looks like dress codes are also enforcing patriarchy? Clearly women ought to be punished for male sexuality.
The New Republic reviews that new Dana Goldstein book I've already linked about.
They also review Elizabeth Green's Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works.
The firing-to-success idea rests on the myth that teacher are born, not made, and it is the central theme of Green’s book. Green calls this “the fallacy of the natural-born teacher,” the idea that good teaching is “an innate quality, a mysterious idiosyncrasy some people were randomly assigned at birth.” Combating that myth, and demonstrating that struggling teachers can improve their craft, is something advocated by leading education professors Green profiles—Magdalene Lampert, David Cohen, Deborah Ball—but also Teach for America–style education reformers like Lemov. Unlike the accountability hawks, this group is interested not only in telling teachers whether they are succeeding, but instructing them on “what to do to improve.” Because teaching is a mass profession, it must rely not on superstars but on improving the skills of ordinary people.
Here is a link to an interview with Elizabeth Green by economist Russ Roberts.
Here is an interesting comment about the interview and about teaching by Arnold Kling.
6. For me, the hardest things for a teacher include:
–understanding how students get things wrong, so that you can steer them from wrong to right.
–dealing with the trade-off between introducing new concepts and trying to solidify the concepts you taught last week, particularly when you have students who are at different levels of mastery
–trying to engage in cognitive instruction and deal with behavioral issues at the same time
–motivating students to reveal to themselves what they do not know and to work on those deficiencies
Kling also wrote this about the above New Republic review:
Her book is also reviewed in the
New Republic (pointer from
Mark Thoma). The review, by Richard D. Kahlenberg, is tendentiously political and uninformative. He says that Green has “one big idea” and then fails to mention what it is, and in fact he seems to have missed it completely. Kahlenberg really likes the idea of raising teacher salaries a lot. But if Green is correct that good teaching is not just a talent you are born with, then you should not need to attract talented people into teaching by paying them more. Instead, you should put those resources into giving teachers better feedback and training.
I see Kahlenberg’s review as an illustration of the way that people look at education through biased political lenses (not that I claim to be innocent here). This only increases my skepticism about anyone’s solution.
File this one in your America is for white people only file:
Black actress gets accosted by police while kissing her boyfriend because they thought she was a prostitute.
Campus sexual assaults in Florida tend to place the burden on the accuser. Are we at all surprised? Colleges benefit from doing as little as possible to combat campus rape.
She went to Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare for an examination, and to the university police, but they did not question the suspect or his roommate. Instead, they asked the woman if she wanted the suspect questioned; she never gave a “yes” or “no” answer, so they closed the case 18 days after her initial report.
A map showing the most educated city in every state.
Who is smarter, scrabble champions or crossword champions? Why does the format of this web side make me doubt the research they apparently digest?
A dating app for the 1%. Or at least something like that. Maybe it's better branded as a dating app for complete assholes. I have a feeling it's going to be mostly a sausage fest.
Microsoft made it official yesterday that it is purchasing Mojang, creators of Minecraft for $2.5 billion. I hope they let Minecraft continue having a life of it's own and don't close out the large community of modders.
Here is Notch's goodbye letter.
The soda I spent most of my youth drinking, Surge, is making a comeback. Oh how I miss those all night video game sessions in Justin's basement.
