Thanks for posting this. I will definitely add this to my ever-expanding lit review for my thesis on SQL Injection Attacks/Web App Development Frameworks
On "eugenics" - what if the most significant factor in differences in intelligence is social rather than genetic? What if intensive parenting practices like near-constant eye contact and talking to infants and toddlers, long hours of reading to preschoolers, and a steady stream of enriching extra-curricular activites for schoolage kids accounts for larger intelligence gains over the generations than could be explained by genetic variations alone?
I suspect those plans don't exist because the premiums would have to be so high to make it profitable that it would make more sense financially for most self-employed couples to have one spouse get a job with a group plan that has to cover you even if you decide to have kids.
actually I think a profit-based insurance model is the problem. you cannot take care of shareholders and patients at the same time.
but since you have a profit-based model, excluding planned (or unplanned for that matter) pregnancies from coverage is the same problem as excluding pre-existing conditions. insurance companies cherry-pick the risk pool to increase profits - they only want to give insurance to people unlikely to need it.
for private insurance to provide any social value, you need a large risk pool that includes healthy and high-risk patients, and the insurance companies must be required to actually cover people who need medical care.
the healthy can't be allowed to opt out, and the insurance companies can't be allowed to decline coverage to anyone in the group.
it's impossible to buy non-group health insurance for a planned pregnancy. and there's enough scary stuff that COULD happen that you wouldn't want to be pregnant without. Old people have medicare. It's young people who have any medical needs at all who are screwed by the current system.
There's an arugment in favor of elite brand-name degrees, presumeably over state universities, or vocational degrees:
"The research of Till Von Wachter, the economist at Columbia University, suggests that not all people graduating into a recession see their life chances dimmed: those with degrees from elite universities catch up fairly quickly to where they otherwise would have been if they’d graduated in better times; it’s the masses beneath them that are left behind. Princeton’s 2009 graduating class found more jobs in financial services than in any other industry. According to Princeton’s career-services director, Beverly Hamilton-Chandler, campus visits and hiring by the big investment banks have been down, but that decline has been partly offset by an uptick in recruiting by hedge funds and boutique financial firms."
If I were 16 now I'd spend the extra time on Open Courseware and go to college only when I had done enough exploring on my own to really take advantage of the profs' expertise.
Teaching under unions is a middle-class, family friendly occupation.
Teaching under Teach for America is a 2-year volunteer gig with unsustainably long hours.
If the unions were to disappear tomorrow I just don't think you'd be able to generate enough enthusiastic effective young people at that burn rate to fill out the entire system.
In many suburban schools, it's actually pretty easy for a group of involved parents to pressure the district to not renew the next year's contract of a new teacher they don't like, as long as it's done before the teacher is tenured (~three years in my state). Maybe this is one reason schools without a critical mass of involved parents suffer under the current system.
I don't understand why they can't just point you at the MIT and Stanford lectures and let you work at your own pace. If you have to have a grade, you could present your work at some regular interval.
One of the obstacles is security. Programmers don't have the rights to even see their software in production environments. Designers and testers have access only to small (often not representative) subsets of data, and it's different subsets than the users see. Moving data from one system to another isn't easy when you don't have anyone who has enough access to look at the data in both systems.
maybe, maybe not. I understand the viewpoint, but it's not how I'm experiencing parenthood. Looking at pictures of my kids when they were babies and toddlers and preschoolers - they look so unformed. It's like watching a sculpture come to life out of a block of marble, watching them slowly become more themselves.
apparently several newspapers run off a Django install, including the newspaper that employed the web developers who wrote it:
http://notesofgenius.com/django-web-framework