Trees are healthy for human psychology. I'm glad cities are planting them.
Strange, though, how different perspectives can change perceptions. The photograph in the article is said to depict a wealthy city with a large number of trees, but just looking at the way all those cars are parked in the road, slowing traffic and posing a constant threat of a crash resulting from a moment's distraction makes me feel claustrophobic.
More the way the speech assumes that the purpose of taxes and the use of monies thereby gained is to make people more equal, rather than giving them equal opportunity to make more of themselves, or to cushion only those physically or mentally incapable of keeping themselves alive.
TED's argument that the talk is overly political would appear to be supported by the fact that this article appears on a site dedicated almost exclusively to politics. Out of 56 non-external article links the site's home page, only three lead to non-political articles. Those are, respectively, a story about congressmen having their houses burglarized, a take on the BrainGate robotic arm story, and a stub of an article mentioning that 13% of US citizens are born abroad.
Having read the text of the talk, it is in my opinion completely political, and while I may agree with his basic point; he fails to cite examples of where implementation of his propositions had any positive effect. The tone of self-righteous loathing used when describing his ideological opponents does little to encourage sober consideration of his arguments.
As a final point, the speech makes no attempt to address the bear in the room, i.e., the question of whether it is right to take by force from one person and give to another, regardless of how beneficial the effects.
It's an extremely political talk being publicized by an entirely political web site with a title more suited to a Girls Gone Wild commercial than talk on socioeconomics. "Too Hot for TED" indeed.
It probably isn't difficult to get around such laws in light of the fact that you're actually purchasing a license to use the software and not in fact buying the software. The license-purchase paradigm usually means the vendor can do whatever they please, up to and including pulling the software right off your machine should they feel like it. Examples of the aforementioned include the kindle book scandal and sony pulling games out of their online marketplace that people had already paid for.
The magic is a balanced equation. Either the consumers and producers are both capitalists and strive to create the best value per dollar, or the profit has to be taken out of the equation with public healthcare, with the best value per tax dollar being dependent on the good will of the bureaucracy. Right now, we have an unbalanced equation where producers strive for the most profit and the least liability, and insured consumers have absolutely no reason to even pay attention to how much money their insurance company pays in exchange for treatment, the quality of which the consumer feels is almost totally out of their control.
Put the power, and the responsibility, back into the hands of patients who until now had no reason to care, and you will see a vast, rapid improvement in the state of healthcare.
I would say the problem could also be treated with less regulation, or to be more accurate, less litigation. Amounts to the same thing in the end, I suppose.
You could fix a lot of the damage by switching insurance from a gambling basis to a contractual basis. Health insurance would be a contract between an individual and a corporation wherein the individual pays little to nothing if he remains healthy, but enters into a mortgage based on the cost of the healthcare should he require it. The maximum value of the mortgage could be assessed by the insurance company similarly to assessments for premiums, and related to the individual's total income, savings, and property. Paying a traditional monthly premium would boost the person's maximum mortgage.
The current system operates counter to both private and public paradigms, as it does not encourage consumers to seek the best value for their money nor eliminate the pursuit of profit by service providers. It is a MASSIVE example of the prisoner's dilemma, where each agent is motivated toward actions detrimental to the structure as a whole.
Let's build a future where people aren't packed together like sardines twenty-four hours a day. Urban living takes the idea of personal space and crushes it down to a bubble three inches around your head, to the point where people think it's acceptable for your neighbors to hear you through the walls, to spend an hour every day sitting in a metal box with fifty strangers you don't talk to or even acknowledge, to walk by graffiti and not take it as a personal insult to your home city and by extension yourself. If the news that someone you know got mugged doesn't badly shock you, you owe it yourself to move somewhere better.
Presumably, the intended usage scenario is when the student does not have access to the answer of the problem from a different source, like the back of the book. In that case, I would submit that being given the correct answer to a calculation helps the student FAR more than being forced to estimate it.
Suppose you are studying math, and come upon a question to which you don't know the answer. Which better helps you to understand, starting from "I need to figure out how to do this" or "I need to figure out why the answer is 0.0001."?
Further, this has little to no application in the real world classroom. For tests in which calculators would simply give the student the answer, students are simply not allowed to use calculators at all. I would argue that, in an exam environment, there is effectively no margin between "a normal calculator would be cheating so you have to use paper" and "this has multiple steps such that a simple calculator will not give you the right answer without understanding." In light of the existence of pen and paper, and simple 8-digit calculators, this product addresses a problem that simply doesn't exist.
Strange, though, how different perspectives can change perceptions. The photograph in the article is said to depict a wealthy city with a large number of trees, but just looking at the way all those cars are parked in the road, slowing traffic and posing a constant threat of a crash resulting from a moment's distraction makes me feel claustrophobic.