One thing most people never get with this topic is the enormous variation between groups, whether regional, socio-economic, ethno-cultural, etc. Fareed Zakaria has said something to the effect that America could be cleanly split into two nations, where the children of one perform at or better than the level of European and even some East Asian nations, whereas the children of the other perform abysmally, on par with the poorest of the developing world. In America, aggregate measurements are meaningless.
And it isn't just IT. Isn't it illegal in California and New York to use services like 23andMe because of state laws mandating that DNA tests can only be performed by "doctor's order"? If I, in New York, want to mail my DNA to 23andMe legally, I must cross the Hudson to New Jersey and mail from a post office there. The law will always be far behind what innovation demands.
Cost of goods sold for an artist are fixed whether their song is streamed 100 times or 100 millions times. After that cost is recouped, it shouldn't matter much what the rate paid to the artist per stream is. Why are we still clinging to this expectation that artists must be multimillionaires to be satisfied with their careers?
I’m seeing educational value in this, musical output as a way of teaching programming to beginners, especially to auditory learners (or to the blind, for that matter). Is there anything out there like this that’s specifically intended as an educational tool?