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1. Comment - Africa is springing into fertile ground for WiMAX

   (Dec 4, 2008 - 11:21 AM)

   I know all about return on investment (and name calling gives me some insight into your largely un-informed opinion.) I ran an ISP for sometime and the went to work for a CLEC that had operations in Canada. Canada has a fraction of the population of the US and manages to have broadband in areas that are much more rural than the US. The US provides universal access fees and tax breaks to companies who invest in telecom infrastructure in rural areas, but companies still don't build out there. Wireless is a great way to ameliorate rural build out costs and increase ROI.
   
   Hillary is brilliant woman. You might be, too, but I don't see it. We're all allowed to make mistakes under the pressure and glare of TV lights.
   
   You've been listening to Rush Limbaugh too much. I know that most states have reciprocal agreements (I was an education minor) that have them accepting each other's teacher certifications. Maine uses the National Teacher Exam for its certification. Its certification is reciprocal anywhere in the Northeast as far south as Maryland. Check out http://www.ets.org/portal/site/ets for more information on exams and http://www.nasdtec.org/agreement.tpl for more information on reciprocity. You'll find your teaching credentials will be accepted by most states. After all, we want local control of our schools. If we want that, then all the states are going to have different requirements for teachers. For that we will much different levels qualifications, some better than others. Whatever level that is, you still must be certified to teach. Suck it up. Get the certification. If you plan to move to another state, see if they'll take your credentials. Chances are, they will. The second website has the reciprocal agreements for all 50 states and the territories.
   
   In your state starting pay might be 42K, but here in Maine its 35K while a living wage was computed at 45K. 35K is considered poverty wages for a family. That teacher works around 40 weeks per year. I know waitresses that make better money than that working fewer hours. Heaven help you if your a teacher in Texas or Mississippi. I don't know where you live, but where I live $56K per year is not a high salary. Hell, I went to college with a guy who bartended 3 nights per week and he made better money then, that I do now.
   
   My girlfriend is a masters educated teacher who is at school from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm every day, then comes home and grades papers for another couple of hours every night. She spends a few hours on the weekends also doing school work. Frequently she's in her classroom on weekends. In addition, she has collateral duties on various committees around the school. She must also take courses every year in order to maintain her certification and license. She teaches in New York. Maine requires criminal background screenings. She probably works more than you do and she's responsible for your children for more than 6 hours per day. I would say that when summer comes around and she spends a couple of weeks in summer courses, that she needs a break.
   
   Most people with PhD's in chemistry probably couldn't teach chemistry to high schoolers. Teaching is a skill in and of itself. I know a chemistry teacher. She works very hard, is certified and worked on Lithium Ion battery research before she went into teaching. The two skills are very different. BTW, she also spends several hours correcting/reading papers every night until very late. Her days are 13 and 14 hours long, too. Where I live, if you want to teach science, you must get a science related degree (Engineering, Math, Chemistry, Physics, etc.) and then get your teaching credentials in addition to that (another year of college after the 4 you've taken majoring in science and minoring in education.).
   
   Your comment about teaching high schoolers who can't read is way off base. Most high schoolers that are going to college have the necessary skills. Your comment about the low skilled students that have been advanced to graduation is a problem, but that is one of local school policy, not education in general or certifications.
   
   Your comment about "New Math" is not even correct. I was in school 30 years ago and was taught it. Its used today and called something else. Whatever they call it today has everything to do about teaching algebraic principles to primary schoolers. Its not working. There you go doing the name calling again.
   
   I was a history major. I have a pretty good vision of History. Can you imagine what the tax rates in the country would be like if we went to War with a balanced budget amendment? That would have crushed the US economy 5 years ago rather than this year. Under a balanced budget amendment, the US could not afford the military it runs, nor would it have been able to go to war. We simply can't afford it. The current giveaway to Wall St. wouldn't be possible either. The very large financial institutions would have collapsed by now and we'd all be out of work. We would be looking at 25% unemployment _again_. A balanced budget amendment probably would not have been ratified even if it did pass. It lost by one vote in the senate and that could be anyone's vote, not just Al Gore's. I don't remember whether Olympia Snowe (R Maine) or Susan Collins (R Maine) voted for it or not.
   
   The democrats left the republicans with a budget surplus in 2001. The debt has now been tripled in the last 8 years. That doesn't seem like responsible spending to me.
   
   The "conservatives" want to cut unfunded mandates from the budget. What that means is that they want to do away with the laws that provide for federal funding of special education. The law calls for that to be funded by the federal government at 40%. The feds currently are paying about 6%. That law was passed on a Republican watch, BTW. The spending problems you site were rejected, for other reasons such as earmarks and other things not related to the social spending and the Republican wants for "market" based answers. Well, we can all see how the markets do when they're un-regulated. Unregulated markets will leave out whole segments of the neediest people.
   
   The Republican plan was to put money in at the top. Give money to the wealthy and it will trickle down. Well, no economy anywhere has ever been built from the top down. They are built from the bottom up. If you're building a house, would you start with the roof? No, you start with the foundation. Put money in at the bottom where people will spend it. It bubbles up to the wealthy and we make more wealthy people along the way.
   
   The defense spending numbers you cite are not correct. When, Mr. Clinton left office, the US defense budget was about 350B per year. Now its 750B per year plus the 250B per year that we spend in Iraq. That's a 300% increase in defense spending. There are medical costs that go with that to take care of the 35,000 or so wounded veterans that are going to need up to 60 years of medical care because they are now disabled and the government needs to pick up the tab for that.
   
   Most of the discretionary spending you cite is health care related costs (Medicare/Medicaid). There is much profit being made by the health care industry (especially pharmaceuticals) that is being made from the sickness and misery of others. It is immoral and indefensible. The number one contributor of lobbying money to congress is the health care industry and of that the largest component comes from pharmaceutical companies. I certainly don't agree with Obama's health care plan. I didn't agree with John McCain's either. I don't like the idea of health insurance from companies that are more interested in profits than health care.
   
   We are hemorrhaging debt. At some point we have to pay the piper and our kids are left holding the bill. We have this problem because of trade imbalances caused mostly by oil imports, but also, now manufacturing imports. Your Dell computer may have been assembled in USA, but every component in it was made overseas. Even auto manufacturers and defense contractors are buying parts from China. That's a national security issue. Worse is that we're now exporting our ability to manufacture. So if we're spending $700B more than we're making, we're going broke and then we have to borrow. That's not sustainable. Much of that debt is held by China and they're not exactly our friends.
   
   You are correct about capitalization of securities and that Reagan was not the architect of that. That came after but the principal of money injected at the top and trickling down and let the markets resolve the inequities is a Reagan idea that has been shown as a dismal failure. Regan did propose elimination of the rules that kept banks from selling securities. Corporations want inequity. That's how monopolies/oligarchies are built.
   
   Yes Reagan did cut taxes which put his budget out of balance by 300B. His budgets were always out of balance and debt tripled under his watch, too. Mr Bush II had to raise taxes to compensate. And yes, Reagan got his ideas from the economists you cite, but unregulated markets don't work. They never have. Every time we try it results in disaster.
   
   I won't get into the whole sub-prime mess. That's what happens when you have unregulated markets. The Great Depression also started out as a mortgage crisis with under capitalized securities and people borrowing money against real assets to invest in a stock market that was in a bubble. Those mortgages and loans were also to people who could not afford the debt either. I did not mis-state the financial melt-down. Europe's involvement was because the Americans sold it to them. People thought "Mortgage Backed" securities would be a safe investment. They were wrong. The banks hid the fact that the mortgages were bad and then wrote worthless insurance policies to back them up: Credit Default Swaps. Again, it comes down to banks selling securities and unregulated mortgage lending. So we have uncapitalized securities. Then we have the too big to fail thing. Keynes is probably spinning in his grave.
   
   Bush II did the tax cuts and it hasn't helped. The economy has had net losses in all categories since Mr. Bush II took office.
   
   I never claimed that services should be independent of costs. That also goes for War. You're putting words in my mouth. I believe in pay as you go. I don't even have a credit card, nor do I want one. I don't even like the idea of taking out a loan for a car.
   
   The corporate welfare you speak about is not from the democrats, but the republicans who think that pharmaceutical companies need tax breaks to do research that the government is largely paying for in the first place, or that the oil companies need tax breaks to drill. Thats all part of the cost of doing business and the pharmaceutical companies are feeding you a line of crap when they tell they need the money for research. Their profit numbers are reported after research costs. Otherwise it wouldn't be profit would it? We can also point to companies that get tax breaks and are not taxed for overseas investments which is a huge incentive to outsource jobs overseas. We give billions to AIG while we have children starving in rural America. We give billions to Citigroup, while there are many, many homeless and starving people on the streets of our cities. I don't see any of that corporate welfare putting people to work. AT&T announced 12,000 layoffs today.
   
   And yes, we do need liberal/progressive policies because the conservative/regressive policies have been tried in the past and they haven't worked. (The definition of insanity is to continue doing the same thing expecting a different result. --Einstein) We've been there. We've done that. Corporations will not take care of the poor, they will employ slaves and children if they can. Its amazing that 150 years after the abolition of slavery, American industry is still about slavery. Corporations will not work for the common good, only their own enlightened self interest (remember your economics 101 course?).
   
   I'm not saying the government should get larger (you put words in my mouth), only that it look out for the rest of us: to protect us from the corporations. Just look at what industry does when its unregulated. All you have to do is to look at the poisoned pet foods or toys coated with lead based paint coming into the country from overseas. I can't believe anyone is still making lead based paint anywhere in the world given that we know its dangerous to everyone involved in the production and use of it. Unregulated businesses will still produce the stuff no matter how dangerous it is.
   
   We could cut some military spending like aircraft that cost almost as much as an aircraft carrier, wastful spending on contractors rather than employing people directly. The job of government has to be done. We could do it with civil servants which cost less than contractors or we can use contractors that are in it for profit, not the common good. Its time we worked for the common good, not the corporate good. We could eliminate the department of homeland security. A very simple solution to stop 9/11 would have been for the customs service to have the FBI terrorist watch list.
   
   Sure we could go back to 1906 when children were dying of TB in textile mills and we had people in poor houses or locked people up for inability to pay a debt (that's really productive...remove a person's source of income and hope they can pay the debt.) or homes for wayward girls (read single mothers.) elderly dying on the streets, etc.
   
   I refer you back to the 5th chapter of Mark to see where I'm coming from.
   
   He who does not learn from history is doomed to repeat it and we have.
   
   I'll take my history degree (with an education minor) and go back to work, now.
   
   And because you can't make arguments without stooping to insults. We're done. Until you went there, this was fun.

2. Comment - Africa is springing into fertile ground for WiMAX

   (Dec 3, 2008 - 10:28 AM)

   Foxfyre's rant was just that and largely off base. Rural areas are not prohibitively expensive, just expensive for the return on the investment, no matter how much federal "universal access fees" the telecoms get for actually connecting rural areas.
   
   America is not hemorrhaging cash, we're hemorrhaging debt. US debt has tripled since Bush II took office.
   
   The democrats complaint about spending is that it went for war rather than peace. For the 2 trillion that we've spent in Iraq, we could have rebuilt every road, bridge, hospital and school in America and given the economy the real boost that it needed rather than squandering what little treasure we had from an economy that has been in decline since the Nixonian era when manufacturing migration out of the country started in earnest because American companies don't/couldn't/wouldn't get the whole quality/customer service thing.
   
   No teacher left standing...er...I mean no child left behind is a failure, yet another unfunded federal mandate.
   
   Most states accept the National Teacher's exam as the credential for teaching. Its been like that for a decade. Most teachers can now cross state lines. And yes, most professionals should go back to school and bone up on child development, curriculum development and classroom management. Those skills are needed if one wants to teach. Teaching is not as easy as you make it sound. That person with advanced degrees may be very good at what that person does, but that doesn't qualify them to teach. If teacher pay were higher, there would be a financial incentive for folks to become teachers rather than spending 40K on schooling only to get a teaching job (as a professional with a degree) for less than a waitress makes. Also, your local school district won't hire the person with advanced degrees because a person with advanced degrees gets a higher level of pay than a person without the advanced degrees. Whoever told you that public education could be done cheaply, lied.
   
   The US does not teach math very well. It hasn't since the 60's. Math scores have been declining ever since the introduction of "New Math." Not enough time is spent on the rote learning of things like multiplication tables, etc. They're trying to teach theory and concepts to kids who simply can't understand those principals at an early age. Its a child development thing that teachers learn in college.
   
   Non-Defense spending has increased since the Clinton administration (I agree). However, defense spending has tripled since Bush II has taken office. The US economy cannot sustain the current levels of debt or spending. Reaganomics is a dismal failure and every time it has been tried, it has resulted in unmitigated financial disaster (I refer you to Lessaiz-Faire which proceeded the Great Depression, Savings and Loan de-regulation which brought on a recession, Elimination of the Glass-Stiegel(sp?) act which brought us Enron and other dot bombs), The end of the Reagan era and Bush I who had to raise taxes to get the debt under control. We've gone to war and done it on borrowed money and your kids are going to be the ones left with the bill.
   
   The US cannot sustain $700 billion/year in trade deficits be that for oil, labor or other manufactured goods. You can't have a service/knowledge economy without something for it to service.
   
   If the telecoms want a monopoly, they have to provide service to all areas where they have a monopoly and DSL is dead. Even small rural phone companies are replacing copper with fiber when the copper trunks come up for replacement.
   
   The telecoms (#2 contributor of lobbying money to congress BTW) refusal to offer advanced services to rural areas is a blatant rip-off of the people living in those areas who pay top dollar, more long distance rates, etc for substandard service. There isn't investment in rural areas not because those invenstments won't pay off, but because the payoff takes longer and its not as high. Telecoms wouldn't serve rural areas at all if they weren't mandated to.
   
   Now on to Obama. Obama is not Bill Clinton. As a president, you choose people to carry out policy. Hillary Clinton, while having no formal foreign policy experience is an Ivy League educated lawyer. She spent 8 years around the White House and knows how to navigate there. She's not a bad choice and will carry out policy as assigned and will argue with Obama. Some of the "retreads" as you point out are well qualified and are more conservative than Obama is. I expect there will be lively debates within the White House and what we will get is fairly moderate well though out policy that is created in concert with others rather than unilateral largely uninformed decisions made by an intellectually un-curious person who only wanted to talk to people who agreed with him. The people that Obama has chosen are more conservative than he is. Mr. Obama has already outclassed the current president and he hasn't even taken office, yet. Mr. Obama is showing good leadership skills and I expect people to carry out policy as instructed. Mr. Obama's policies will be much different from Mr. Clinton's. I much prefer a progressive policy rather than a regressive policy the conservatives would have us take. The conservatives would return us to policies of 1906 which didn't work then and certainly won't work now.
   
   Your rant was more emotional and uneducated than the rant you responded to.