Weird Thought
Ulrika O'Brien
reminded me of a piece of looney fringe Libertarian economics I had
read decades ago -- guy was opposed to the legality of corporations
on the theory that incorporation allows individuals to duck out of
direct responsibility for their actions by allowing them to create
an artificial person (the corporate entity) which then absorbs the
legal and financial responsibility for actions taken by the
individuals and, in certain circumstances, the corporation can then
be the victim of the same actions it is then going to be held
accountable for. I don't know enough criminal and corporate law to
assess whether that's entirely right, but if it is, at all, isn't it
funny that, by and large, it's the "individual responsibility" right
that is also, usually, most interested in the health and welfare of
corporations.
In a related bit of cloud gathering, it occurred to me that the push
for potentially oppressive and weird technology-suppression
copyright protection legislation would probably lose all or most of
its steam if artificial persons couldn't own copyright. And I
wonder if it would really be so terrible if copyright expired a
decent period after the expiry of the people who created a thing.
And if artificial persons couldn't hold copyright, I swear there's
an AI story in there somewhere, struggling to get out. Wonder if an
AI could be a corporation.
If none of the above seems wholly pointful, rest assured it wasn't
meant to be. This is just me ruminating "aloud".
--
"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong
to each other." -- Mother Teresa
Kevin J. Maroney
wrote:
>I find it interesting that on the CBC news tonight there was a report
>that the Arthur Andersen managing partner who was in charge of the Enron
>audit has been fired; he is reported to have destroyed lots of document
>and emails requested by the investigators.
>
>It seems unlikely anything in the way of criminal prosecution is going
>to befall this individual.
Shadow VP Joe Lieberman is already suggesting that, at a minimum,
Arthur Andersen personnel might be good targets for obstruction of
justice indictments.
--
Kevin J. Maroney | k...@panix.com
Games are my entire waking life.
Ulrika O'Brien
gra...@dsl.ca says...
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 02:08:12 GMT,
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> scripsit:
> > Something about the various stuff coming out about Enron lately
> > reminded me of a piece of looney fringe Libertarian economics I had
> > read decades ago -- guy was opposed to the legality of corporations
> > on the theory that incorporation allows individuals to duck out of
> > direct responsibility for their actions by allowing them to create
> > an artificial person (the corporate entity) which then absorbs the
> > legal and financial responsibility for actions taken by the
> > individuals and, in certain circumstances, the corporation can then
> > be the victim of the same actions it is then going to be held
> > accountable for.
>
> that the Arthur Andersen managing partner who was in charge of the Enron
> audit has been fired; he is reported to have destroyed lots of document
> and emails requested by the investigators.
A similar report on NPR was one of the multiple tidbits that was
driving my musings, in fact.
> It seems unlikely anything in the way of criminal prosecution is going
> to befall this individual.
Yes. I wonder how many of the Enron execs who conveniently sold off
their stock while it was still worth something will, either? I
mean, I suppose they're potentially liable for prosecution for
insider trading, but there's so much more that seems to have gone
down that was deeply, profoundly wrong but apparently, somehow not
actually illegal.
> > In a related bit of cloud gathering, it occurred to me that the push
> > for potentially oppressive and weird technology-suppression copyright
> > protection legislation would probably lose all or most of its steam if
> > artificial persons couldn't own copyright. And I wonder if it would
> > really be so terrible if copyright expired a decent period after the
> > expiry of the people who created a thing.
>
> It wouldn't be terrible at all. It might put some music companies out
> of business, but I don't think it would be anything like impossible to
> create an alternative distribution network.
Well, indeed, or even a similar but less slimy one. And for that
matter, reading Ani DiFranco's essay in the Nation's piece on big
media, I realized that I had succumbed to one of the same
corporate assumptions that many of her interviewers had: that the
center and point of making music is to make, widely distribute and
sell recordings. For her, the point in performance is performing,
see, and as one of those people who moan about the lack of live
music in my life, I reckon I have some sympathy with that view, too.
> > And if artificial persons couldn't hold copyright, I swear there's
> > an AI story in there somewhere, struggling to get out. Wonder if an
> > AI could be a corporation.
>
> This is a standard trope in some sf; the title of address for AIs in
> Alexis Gilliland's Rosinante books is 'Corporate'.
Well, I didn't expect it was an original idea, really. I haven't
read any Gilliland, eckshoolly.
Ulrika O'Brien
gra...@dsl.ca says...
> Now, map this on to joint stock corporations, their interesting history,
> present forms, and probable future events. (So far as I can tell, we're
> in the late middle or early late of stage three.)
Hum. Yes, a rather illuminating analogy. (And very lucidly
rendered, may I add?) Which all leads me to wonder what the next
source of wealth/mechanism for concentrating it might be. I know
guess I have an idea what Marx thought, but I suspect he was
operating off faulty empirical data in addition to borrowing from
all the wrong philosophers...
Mark Atwood
>
> The last time, the shift from land based wealth to industry based wealth
> was accompanied by real competition between nation states over
> *everything* to do with organizational models; there were sufficently
> slow communications that marcher states were a real possibility;
EXPN "marcher states"
--
Mark Atwood | Well done is better than well said.
m...@pobox.com |
http://www.pobox.com/~mra
Jason Stokes
>Something about the various stuff coming out about Enron lately
>reminded me of a piece of looney fringe Libertarian economics I had
>read decades ago -- guy was opposed to the legality of corporations
>on the theory that incorporation allows individuals to duck out of
>direct responsibility for their actions by allowing them to create
>an artificial person (the corporate entity) which then absorbs the
>legal and financial responsibility for actions taken by the
>individuals and, in certain circumstances, the corporation can then
>be the victim of the same actions it is then going to be held
>accountable for. I don't know enough criminal and corporate law to
>assess whether that's entirely right, but if it is, at all, isn't it
>funny that, by and large, it's the "individual responsibility" right
>that is also, usually, most interested in the health and welfare of
>corporations.
I'm hardly an expert, but there's plenty of provision under existing US law
for charging and punishing the principles involved in this particular
scandal -- securities law, fraud, negligance. The political will might be
weak, but the law for individually punishing those responsible is there.
Charlie Stross
as <uaob...@earthlink.net> declared:
> If none of the above seems wholly pointful, rest assured it wasn't
> meant to be. This is just me ruminating "aloud".
Cough, cough. (Asimov's SF. October/November 2001. Story
called "Troubadour". Modesty prevents me from naming the
author, but it's got all these themes in it.)
-- Charlie
Avedon Carol
<uaob...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>Something about the various stuff coming out about Enron lately
>reminded me of a piece of looney fringe Libertarian economics I had
>read decades ago -- guy was opposed to the legality of corporations
>on the theory that incorporation allows individuals to duck out of
>direct responsibility for their actions by allowing them to create
>an artificial person (the corporate entity) which then absorbs the
>legal and financial responsibility for actions taken by the
>individuals and, in certain circumstances, the corporation can then
>be the victim of the same actions it is then going to be held
>accountable for. I don't know enough criminal and corporate law to
>assess whether that's entirely right, but if it is, at all, isn't it
>funny that, by and large, it's the "individual responsibility" right
>that is also, usually, most interested in the health and welfare of
>corporations.
It's a good point. You could say that the "freedom" that these folks
are fighting for is explicitly the freedom from responsibility for
their actions as well as from responsibility to their community.
(Joshua Mica Marshall has lately been taking digs at the
administration and their pals for their interesting evasions of
responsibility.)
>In a related bit of cloud gathering, it occurred to me that the push
>for potentially oppressive and weird technology-suppression
>copyright protection legislation would probably lose all or most of
>its steam if artificial persons couldn't own copyright.
Certainly, to the extent that large and powerful corporations are the
ones who have the influence to fight for such laws in the first place.
And at the same time, people might be more sympathetic to copyright
law's demands if they had good reason to believe that royalties were
really going to the creators rather than to their corporate owners.
>And I
>wonder if it would really be so terrible if copyright expired a
>decent period after the expiry of the people who created a thing.
It used to work pretty well that way.
>And if artificial persons couldn't hold copyright, I swear there's
>an AI story in there somewhere, struggling to get out. Wonder if an
>AI could be a corporation.
It seems to me that the argument for an AI being a person is still
better than the claim that a body made up of many individual people
who already have unique identities is a "person".
>If none of the above seems wholly pointful, rest assured it wasn't
>meant to be. This is just me ruminating "aloud".
Works for me.
--
Avedon www.sideshow.idps.co.uk
"At holiday parties, Republican political operatives boasted freely about
their success in snaring the White House. A common refrain, told in a
joking style, was: 'We stole the election fair and square.'" (Robert Parry)
Marilee J. Layman
But no lobsters, right? I think I'm on the June mags now.
--
Marilee J. Layman
Bali Sterling Beads at Wholesale
http://www.basicbali.com
Michael J. Lowrey
>
> Something about the various stuff coming out about Enron lately
> reminded me of a piece of looney fringe Libertarian economics I had
> read decades ago -- guy was opposed to the legality of corporations
> on the theory that incorporation allows individuals to duck out of
> direct responsibility for their actions by allowing them to create
> an artificial person (the corporate entity) which then absorbs the
> legal and financial responsibility for actions taken by the
> individuals and, in certain circumstances, the corporation can then
> be the victim of the same actions it is then going to be held
> accountable for. I don't know enough criminal and corporate law to
> assess whether that's entirely right, but if it is, at all, isn't it
> funny that, by and large, it's the "individual responsibility" right
> that is also, usually, most interested in the health and welfare of
> corporations.
It's not just looney fringe libertarians who feel that way.
I've long held to a modified version of that theory myself,
based on all the hankypanky that goes on with criminality
performed under the cover of corporate identity. At a
minimum, "piercing the corporate veil" in the case of
criminality should be a couple of orders of magnitude easier
than it is. I suspect a lot of libertarians, conservatives
and minimalists might agree with me on this.
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
sick of dummy corporations
Michael J. Lowrey
> I'm hardly an expert, but there's plenty of provision under existing US law
> for charging and punishing the principles involved in this particular
> scandal -- securities law, fraud, negligance. The political will might be
> weak, but the law for individually punishing those responsible is there.
I became a cynic on the concept of corporations based on my
experience in working for an agency which was trying to
enforce the existing US laws on criminals who hid behind
corporations.
Michael J. Lowrey
> This time, there is one global economy, entirely capable of being
> subject to comprehensive capture by an aristocracy control access to
> participation in control of the mechanisms of wealth generation, really
> fast communications, and a widespread belief that This Way Is The Right
> Way.
>
> The probable outcome is something very much like the antebellum US South
> free economy; some very, very rich people, a services class catering to
> that group of rich people,a small middle class, and a whole lot of
> people who are struggling to get by.
We're well on the way already, now that that pesky peace and
prosperity have been eliminated. (ObOnion: 'Mere days from
assuming the presidency and closing the door on eight years
of Bill Clinton, president-elect George W. Bush assured the
nation in a televised address Tuesday that "our long
national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally
over."'
http://www.theonion.com/onion3701/bush_nightmare.html )
> The material prosperity of that struggling group is likely to be
> reasonably high; their relative access to medical services and their
> chances of class mobility are likely to be really bad.
That latter is why (some of us suspect) the Right Wing is
spending so much time and energy in trying to destroy public
schools in the U.S.: if adequately funded, they have this
nasty tendency to encourage class mobility and pay teachers
well.
Ulrika O'Brien
cha...@nospam.antipope.org says...
Bugger. I wonder if any of the local libraries takes Asimov's.
Kris Hasson-Jones
Stokes) splashed into the river and bubbled:
I can see possibilities for racketeering, too, as a civil
remedy--there is more than one entity, cooperating to achieve a common
goal, and using illegal means.
--
Kris Hasson Jones sni...@pacifier.com
Nancy Lebovitz
Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> wrote:
>On 16 Jan 2002 00:41:32 -0800,
>Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> scripsit:
>> Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> writes:
>>> The last time, the shift from land based wealth to industry based wealth
>>> was accompanied by real competition between nation states over
>>> *everything* to do with organizational models; there were sufficently
>>> slow communications that marcher states were a real possibility;
>>
>> EXPN "marcher states"
>
>has access to the full available tech level of the day, it doesn't have
>comparably capable powers on all its borders, and can expand at rates
>and on a scope not available to the established powers in the interior
>of the trading system.
>
>The late Roman Republic, with the eastern mediterranean civilization on
>one side and the howling wilderness of Gaul on the other, is an example;
>so are the western European kingdoms at the start of the Age of
>Navigation, or the United States at the start of the Nineteenth.
>
ISTR "march states" from Poul Anderson--regions on the fringe of
an empire which fight the exterior barbarians and eventually show
a tendency to try to take over the empire.
Different aspects of the same thing?
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com 100 new slogans
And on the eighth day, God said, "OK, Murphy, you take over".
Kevin J. Maroney
wrote:
>>> I find it interesting that on the CBC news tonight there was a report
>>> that the Arthur Andersen managing partner who was in charge of the Enron
>>> audit has been fired; he is reported to have destroyed lots of document
>>> and emails requested by the investigators.
>
>help.
Well, if by "wide distribution" you mean "front page on even really
bad newspapers", I think it qualifies.
Avram Grumer
Kevin J. Maroney <k...@panix.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 00:20:50 -0500, Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca>
> wrote:
> >>> I find it interesting that on the CBC news tonight there was a
> >>> report that the Arthur Andersen managing partner who was in
> >>> charge of the Enron audit has been fired; he is reported to have
> >>> destroyed lots of document and emails requested by the
> >>> investigators.
> >
> >I hope that's getting wide distribution, but I am not sure that will
> >help.
>
> Well, if by "wide distribution" you mean "front page on even really
> bad newspapers", I think it qualifies.
Chris was telling me that this isn't the first trouble Arthur Andersen
has gotten into; they were fined by the SEC not long ago. She
interviewed with them coming out of school, and she's now really glad
that they didn't hire her.
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
In the country of the assless, the half-assed man is king.
Kate Schaefer
news:MPG.16af36b36...@news.earthlink.net...
> In article <slrna4ajjt....@raq981.uk2net.com.antipope.org>,
> cha...@nospam.antipope.org says...
> > Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
> > as <uaob...@earthlink.net> declared:
> >
> > > If none of the above seems wholly pointful, rest assured it wasn't
> > > meant to be. This is just me ruminating "aloud".
> >
> > Cough, cough. (Asimov's SF. October/November 2001. Story
> > called "Troubadour". Modesty prevents me from naming the
> > author, but it's got all these themes in it.)
>
> Bugger. I wonder if any of the local libraries takes Asimov's.
Charlie's fiction came up several times in programming planning meetings
for Potlatch this year (we have a rough theme, "Revolution Then," looking
at how sf explores, explains, exploits, makes possible, social change),
both in the form of: "Yeah, Charlie Stross writes about stuff like that,"
said in stereo with someone I'd never met before, and "Who?" said by
several people I'd expect to have read his stories.
Bernard Peek
<oran...@uwm.edu> writes
>It's not just looney fringe libertarians who feel that way.
>I've long held to a modified version of that theory myself,
>based on all the hankypanky that goes on with criminality
>performed under the cover of corporate identity. At a
>minimum, "piercing the corporate veil" in the case of
>criminality should be a couple of orders of magnitude easier
>than it is. I suspect a lot of libertarians, conservatives
>and minimalists might agree with me on this.
I think that US law is the same as English law on this. It's impossible
for a corporation to instruct anyone to perform a criminal act.
Therefore if an employee commits a criminal act then they aren't acting
for the corporation and so don't have any immunity from prosecution. So
the reasons why corporations don't get prosecuted is that their
employees are the criminals. Perhaps employees don't get prosecuted
because the fuzzy nature of responsibility in organisations makes it
difficult to pin down just which employee should be prosecuted.
There's a new offence over here called Corporate Manslaughter. It's
designed to make corporations responsible even if it's impossible to
decide which of their employees is responsible.
--
Bernard Peek
b...@shrdlu.com
In search of cognoscenti
Eloise Beltz-Decker
> > In a related bit of cloud gathering, it occurred to me that the push
> > for potentially oppressive and weird technology-suppression copyright
> > protection legislation would probably lose all or most of its steam if
> > artificial persons couldn't own copyright. And I wonder if it would
> > really be so terrible if copyright expired a decent period after the
> > expiry of the people who created a thing.
> It wouldn't be terrible at all. It might put some music companies out
> of business, but I don't think it would be anything like impossible to
> create an alternative distribution network.
Music companies *as we know them*, I'd like to suggest. However,
companies like Rhino Records (the Dover Books of the recording industry)
would find it much easier to keep favorite, obscure backlist in print,
because the big corps wouldn't have a multi-decade stranglehold on all use
of given recordings.
--
Eloise Beltz-Decker + elo...@ripco.com + http://www.ripco.com/~eloise
*"We have a problem with annoying, overused, past-the-sell-by-date
* pop-culture flotsam cluttering the spoken language. That's my my final
* answer, which I would like to vote it off the island, because the tribe
* has spoken, and you are the weakest link, goodbye. In-con-THEE-vable!
* (D'oh!)" - Sarah Bunting, http://www.tomatonation.com/
Eloise Beltz-Decker
<in re music-distribution companies>
> Well, indeed, or even a similar but less slimy one. And for that
> matter, reading Ani DiFranco's essay in the Nation's piece on big
> media, I realized that I had succumbed to one of the same
> corporate assumptions that many of her interviewers had: that the
> center and point of making music is to make, widely distribute and
> sell recordings. For her, the point in performance is performing,
> see, and as one of those people who moan about the lack of live
> music in my life, I reckon I have some sympathy with that view, too.
Y'know, that is an interesting idea. As a filker and performer, I
will often buy a CD so I can learn a given song off it well enough to
perform it myself. I'm not quite sure what the implication of that is, but
there's got to be one somewhere.
Eloise Beltz-Decker
<long bit left for context>
> Well, here I am about to digress at some length.
>
> During the transition from tribal cultures to the entrenched
> aristocracies of the Late Medieval period, the span of time from
> approximately 600 CE to 1500 CE in North-West Europe (after which we get
> the beginnings of nation states, absolute monarchs, and the meaningful
> rise of process industry and corporations as social forces, all things I
> would like to leave out for the nonce), mechanisms of land tenure went
> through three stages.
>
> So, I'm about to generalize wildly; the 'three stages' was a hint about
> that, though the patterns do hold.
>
> Initially, land was tribal; it was held by the whole tribe, and
> adminstered by the king, who gave bits of it out to various nobles, who
> might themselves repeat this process; all such lands would return to the
> king at the death of the noble, so no permanent land tenure existed,
> beyond the hypothetical permanence of the tribal territory.
>
> Enter Christianity, and the difficulty of giving an impermanent gift to
> an eternal god; this resulted in the monastic charters and the notion of
> permanent title to land. Noble families wanted in on this, and faked
> monastic foundations to get permanent title. This was eventually
> resolved into the institutions of hereditary land tenure, so that
> instead of a tribal land holding, there were a number of individual
> hereditary holdings, held by various noble families and the church.
I'm pretty darn sure that individual land ownership was
well-entrenched even by Roman times, before Christ's putative birth. It
might still have a religious basis, but if so, it's not That Big Bearded
Dude With The Nacreous Gates Whose Boy Got Whacked By Pilate.
Matthew Austern
> And if artificial persons couldn't hold copyright, I swear there's
> an AI story in there somewhere, struggling to get out. Wonder if an
> AI could be a corporation.
Our own Charlie Stross is writing a series of stories (the first three
have been published in Asimov's) that involves questions like that.
One of the throwaway ideas in them is, if I've got this right,
something like an AI cellular automaton where the cells are robot
corporations.
Joyce Reynolds-Ward
<sni...@pacifier.com> wrote:
snip
>I can see possibilities for racketeering, too, as a civil
>remedy--there is more than one entity, cooperating to achieve a common
>goal, and using illegal means.
Unfortunately, I think court decisions have pretty much eliminated the
use of RICO in civil securities litigation. I'm not certain if that's
a side-effect of the fallout from WPPSS or not, but yes, I *have* seen
RICO charges in civil securities litigation, back when I was doing the
paralegal thing and ending up as a complex securities litigation trial
prep slave. I disappeared from the field, and came back about 5 years
later, and RICO was apparently not even allowable in *criminal*
securities litigation then...but that was 10 years ago, and things
could have changed again.
jrw
Robert Sneddon
(in message <slrna4b9fk....@hunding.localdomain>):
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 09:07:30 -0600,
> Michael J. Lowrey <oran...@uwm.edu> scripsit:
>> Graydon Saunders wrote:
>>
>> That latter is why (some of us suspect) the Right Wing is
>> spending so much time and energy in trying to destroy public
>> schools in the U.S.: if adequately funded, they have this
>> nasty tendency to encourage class mobility and pay teachers
>> well.
>
> They do, yes, although I strongly suspect that the desire to destroy
> public schools has much more to do with a desire to prevent the teaching
> of a non-creationist world view than any other social agenda.
Where's the money in that?
When Republicans are busy, follow the money. Religion and class
consciousness are all very well, but money is where its at, man. The
Republican party as currently constituted is filled to the brim with
second-generation nouveau riche, who aren't interested in where the
money came from and who ignored most of the tenets of Christianity to
accumiulate their family's fortunes. Decayed gentility with no maney
are not highly visible in either major party, it is worth noting.
No, the real thing to look for in the Republican's attitudes to the
school system is what just got passed; funding for compulsory testing
of elementary school children. The bloated capitalists know they need a
well-educated workforce to keep the dollars rolling in; not necessarily
broadly-educated, of course. Critical thinking, art, history, social
structures, politicas, no. The tests will be for reading, writing and
'rithmetic, the essential skills for worker drones in today's high-tech
economy.
--
Robert Sneddon -- nojay (at) antipope (dot) org
================================================================
Hogwasher: You don't have to sacrifice friendliness for power
http://www.asar.com/cgi-bin/product.pl?58/hogwasher.html
================================================================
Mark Atwood
>
> No, the real thing to look for in the Republican's attitudes to the
> school system is what just got passed; funding for compulsory testing
> of elementary school children. The bloated capitalists know they need a
> well-educated workforce to keep the dollars rolling in; not necessarily
> broadly-educated, of course. Critical thinking, art, history, social
> structures, politicas, no. The tests will be for reading, writing and
> 'rithmetic, the essential skills for worker drones in today's high-tech
> economy.
When the schools *did* try to teach such stuff in a scalable and
institutional and consistant manner, they invariably fuck it up. Art
and music will be missed, yes. But I think they will make a comeback
if your model is correct, as it is being discovered that having art
and music training is a cheap way of identifying and training some
of the more valuable types of "worker drones".
But school taught "history" and school "politics", and even school
taught "critical thinking" taught are always, to use a SFnal term,
lies-taught-to-children, it's just a matter of whos lies get taught at
Truth. I would prefer ignorance to falseness and propaganda.
It's easier to fill a mind than it is to change it.
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> Robert Sneddon <fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> writes:
> >
> > No, the real thing to look for in the Republican's attitudes to the
> > school system is what just got passed; funding for compulsory testing
> > of elementary school children. The bloated capitalists know they need a
> > well-educated workforce to keep the dollars rolling in; not necessarily
> > broadly-educated, of course. Critical thinking, art, history, social
> > structures, politicas, no. The tests will be for reading, writing and
> > 'rithmetic, the essential skills for worker drones in today's high-tech
> > economy.
>
> When the schools *did* try to teach such stuff in a scalable and
> institutional and consistant manner, they invariably fuck it up. Art
> and music will be missed, yes. But I think they will make a comeback
> if your model is correct, as it is being discovered that having art
> and music training is a cheap way of identifying and training some
> of the more valuable types of "worker drones".
>
> But school taught "history" and school "politics", and even school
> taught "critical thinking" taught are always, to use a SFnal term,
> lies-taught-to-children, it's just a matter of whos lies get taught at
> Truth. I would prefer ignorance to falseness and propaganda.
I submit Richard Montgomery High School, Montgomery County, Maryland.
Your absolute is refuted.
--
Heather Anne Nicoll - Darkhawk - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
Just a world that we all must share, it's not enough just to stand and
stare: Is it only a dream that there'll be no more turning away?
--Pink Floyd, "On the Turning Away"
Alison Scott
>Robert Sneddon <fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> writes:
>>
>> No, the real thing to look for in the Republican's attitudes to the
>> school system is what just got passed; funding for compulsory testing
>> of elementary school children. The bloated capitalists know they need a
>> well-educated workforce to keep the dollars rolling in; not necessarily
>> broadly-educated, of course. Critical thinking, art, history, social
>> structures, politicas, no. The tests will be for reading, writing and
>> 'rithmetic, the essential skills for worker drones in today's high-tech
>> economy.
>
>When the schools *did* try to teach such stuff in a scalable and
>institutional and consistant manner, they invariably fuck it up. Art
>and music will be missed, yes. But I think they will make a comeback
>if your model is correct, as it is being discovered that having art
>and music training is a cheap way of identifying and training some
>of the more valuable types of "worker drones".
OK. The UK has a national curriculum, and kids here are grotesquely
over-tested (my guess is that it's unlikely to be a big issue for my
kids, given how addicted their parents are to internet self-tests like
"What Internal Organ are you?"). At any rate, the curriculum includes
plenty of stuff on critical thinking, art, music, etc and so forth; to
my mind it's rather stronger on those than on things like, say,
actually getting the little blighters to read books.
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/parents/curriculum/home.cfm?fuseaction=doc1
That's the homepage for the curriculum, from which you can read the
entire thing. There follows the key stage 1 curriculum in geography;
key stage 1 is, roughly speaking, 7 year olds. This is what they're
expected to achieve (though, to be fair, there's no formal testing in
geography).
Geographical enquiry and skills
1 In undertaking geographical enquiry, pupils should be taught to:
a ask geographical questions [for example, 'What is it like to live
in this place?']
b observe and record [for example, identify buildings in the street
and complete a chart]
c express their own views about people, places and environments
[for example, about litter in the school]
d communicate in different ways [for example, in pictures, speech,
writing].
Geographical enquiry and skills
2 In developing geographical skills, pupils should be taught to:
a use geographical vocabulary [for example, hill, river, motorway,
near, far, north, south]
b use fieldwork skills [for example, recording information on a
school plan or local area map]
c use globes, maps and plans at a range of scales [for example,
following a route on a map]
d use secondary sources of information [for example, CD-ROMs,
pictures, photographs, stories, information texts, videos, artefacts]
e make maps and plans [for example, a pictorial map of a place in a
story].
Knowledge and understanding of places
3 Pupils should be taught to:
a identify and describe what places are like [for example, in terms
of landscape, jobs, weather]
b identify and describe where places are [for example, position on
a map, whether they are on a river]
c recognise how places have become the way they are and how they
are changing [for example, the quality of the environment in a street]
d recognise how places compare with other places [for example,
compare the local area with places elsewhere in the United Kingdom]
e recognise how places are linked to other places in the world [for
example, food from other countries].
Knowledge and understanding of patterns and processes
4 Pupils should be taught to:
a make observations about where things are located [for example, a
pedestrian crossing near school gates] and about other features in the
environment [for example, seasonal changes in weather]
b recognise changes in physical and human features [for example,
heavy rain flooding fields].
Knowledge and understanding of environmental change and sustainable
development
5 Pupils should be taught to:
a recognise changes in the environment [for example, traffic
pollution in a street]
b recognise how the environment may be improved and sustained [for
example, by restricting the number of cars].
Breadth of study
6 During the key stage, pupils should be taught the Knowledge, skills
and understanding through the study of two localities:
a the locality of the school
b a locality either in the United Kingdom or overseas that has
physical and/or human features that contrast with those in the
locality of the school.
7 In their study of localities, pupils should:
a study at a local scale
b carry out fieldwork investigations outside the classroom.
--
Alison Scott ali...@kittywompus.com & www.kittywompus.com
The Plokta News Network -- News and Views for SF Fans
www.plokta.com/pnn
Del Cotter
Charlie Stross <cha...@nospam.antipope.org> said:
>as <uaob...@earthlink.net> declared:
>> If none of the above seems wholly pointful, rest assured it wasn't
>> meant to be. This is just me ruminating "aloud".
>
>Cough, cough. (Asimov's SF. October/November 2001. Story
>called "Troubadour". Modesty prevents me from naming the
>author, but it's got all these themes in it.)
I finally bought the June 2001 _Asimov's_, and liked "Lobsters" a lot,
but I was waiting for my renewed subscription to come through to my new
address like I'd asked. I had assumed they were messing about for
months the way they did last time, but last week a pile of _Asimov's_
turned up at once; the person who lives at my old address forwarded them
to me.
Let's see, October/November... ooh look, they've got Simon Ings as well.
I'm having Lucon flashbacks!
--
. . . . Del Cotter d...@branta.demon.co.uk . . . .
JustRead:nTheHundredDays:SMStirlingOnTheOceansOfEternity:TerryPratchettT
heFifthElephant:KenMacLeodCosmonautKeep:JRRTolkienTheFellowshipOfTheRing
ToRead:ChinaMievillePerdidoStreetStation:MichaelMarshallSmithOnlyForward
Lucy Kemnitzer
This is all true, but there's more -- the big push for Republicans has
been to privatize education. They have a bunch of different schemes:
from public money vouchers for people to spend on private schooling,
to the testing scam, to shenanigans with curriculum, to the perversion
of the charter school (I mean perverting the idea of the charter
school, not that charter schools are necessarily perversions: there's
a lot of different things called the same name, there) --
subcontracting whole school systems is the current rage.
They sell it as a money saver. "Why, yes, naturally, if you can do
the arithmetic, you'll see that we'll have lots more money to spend on
teachers, supplies, support staff and field trips, if we just divert a
bunch of it to a profit-making outfit first! Can't you do the math?
Five minus twio is seven!"
The want to do the same thing to all the public amenities, across the
board.
Oh, but I also wanted to say that ideology in its own right has a
definite part to play in all this, too, aside from the money.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Arthur D. Hlavaty
wrote:
>Chris was telling me that this isn't the first trouble Arthur Andersen
>has gotten into; they were fined by the SEC not long ago. She
>interviewed with them coming out of school, and she's now really glad
>that they didn't hire her.
I've been wondering: Why don't people hate accountants the way they
hate lawyers? (OK, there are no divorce accountants, but still...)
They are the same sort of accessories to the crimes of companies and
governments (see Paul Krugman recently on the creative accounting used
by state governments). Their work could easily be portrayed, as the
law is, as a kind of "mystification" of what could be expressed in
simple terms. (Wrong in both cases, of course.) <slashout> Let's hate
a new minority </slashout>
--
Arthur D.Hlavaty hla...@panix.com
Church of the SuperGenius in Wile E. we trust
E-zine available on request
Michael J. Lowrey
>
> In message <3C458D41...@uwm.edu>, Michael J. Lowrey
> <oran...@uwm.edu> writes
>
> >It's not just looney fringe libertarians who feel that way.
> >I've long held to a modified version of that theory myself,
> >based on all the hankypanky that goes on with criminality
> >performed under the cover of corporate identity. At a
> >minimum, "piercing the corporate veil" in the case of
> >criminality should be a couple of orders of magnitude easier
> >than it is. I suspect a lot of libertarians, conservatives
> >and minimalists might agree with me on this.
>
> I think that US law is the same as English law on this. It's impossible
> for a corporation to instruct anyone to perform a criminal act.
> Therefore if an employee commits a criminal act then they aren't acting
> for the corporation and so don't have any immunity from prosecution. So
> the reasons why corporations don't get prosecuted is that their
> employees are the criminals. Perhaps employees don't get prosecuted
> because the fuzzy nature of responsibility in organisations makes it
> difficult to pin down just which employee should be prosecuted.
But in empirical practice, the corporate entity is a handy
cloak for the small-time (defined here as under $10 million
US) swindlers and tax-cheats to rip off suppliers,
employees, and municipalities, then waltz away from their
responsibilities, leaving the cast-off corporate shell to
'pay the price' of their criminalities. They then set up
some new corporation[s] (possibly through a tax haven
'nation') and begin the dance anew. (See also the article
Ulrika posted a link to, mentioning that "Enron Corp., whose
collapse last year is said to be the worst corporate failure
in history, has 2,832 subsidiaries, of which 874 are
registered in the Cayman Islands or other tax and bank
secrecy havens.")
http://www.newmassmedia.com/nac.phtml?code=har&db=nac_fea&ref=18688
--
Michael J. Lowrey
Mark Atwood
> >
> > But school taught "history" and school "politics", and even school
> > taught "critical thinking" taught are always, to use a SFnal term,
> > lies-taught-to-children, it's just a matter of whos lies get taught at
> > Truth. I would prefer ignorance to falseness and propaganda.
>
> I submit Richard Montgomery High School, Montgomery County, Maryland.
>
> Your absolute is refuted.
Does it scale?
We could and did build the best damn Early Headstarts in the US, back
in pilot stage, because they got the best 2% of the theraputic day
care teachers to staff them. It's not scaling worth a damn.
The nose-bleed echelon public schools do so well because they have
either the cream of the teachers, the cream of the students, or more
likely, both.
Now, show me away to teach critical thinking, and historical and
political analysis; with students and teachers at the mean. Within one
SD of the mean. (That includes one SD *below* the mean, BTW). Define a
way to do it that only requires available skills and efforts at those
levels, by procedures and scalable techniques, on a population of a
hundred million kids and ten million teachers; depending only on
readily available skill levels and work habits, and specifically *not*
on the heroic efforts of a handful of superlative masterworkers.
Take it out of the realm of individual craftsmanship, and into the world
of mass production and consistant Denning-style quality, and *then*
and only then, will you have "refuted" me.
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> Take it out of the realm of individual craftsmanship, and into the world
> of mass production and consistant Denning-style quality, and *then*
> and only then, will you have "refuted" me.
A single counterexample is sufficient to refute "always".
David Joseph Greenbaum
in fleeting electrons:
>But school taught "history" and school "politics", and even school
>taught "critical thinking" taught are always, to use a SFnal term,
>lies-taught-to-children, it's just a matter of whos lies get taught at
>Truth. I would prefer ignorance to falseness and propaganda.
Yeah, you're right. You get obscenities like the Florida law banning
curricula discussing communism or socialism, or crap like the South
Carolina History curriculum, which purported to teach critical thinking
skills and good citizenship through a year-long course on the epic drama
of South Carolinian history thoroughly dusted with a lot of moonlight
and magnolias BS. You get these things because our fair nation is not
culturally uniform, and is not politically uniform, and because there's
disagreements on just what "critical thinking skills" and "good
citizenship" *mean*.
But preferring ignorance to imperfect knowledge is like throwing the
orphanage out with the juice from the rendering vats.
(My private inclination is toward extraordinarily intensive writing and
composition training in the middle-school grades. Forcing the chilluns
to produce several thousand words per month in expository and
narrative essays. To get the homework done, you chain them to computers
and don't let them go until they've produced the requisite number of
syntactically correct sentences.
Dave G.
--
Siamese twins: one, maddened by
The other's moral bigotry,
Resolved at length to misbehave "Twins" Robert Graves
And drink them both into the grave. ca. 1967
Nancy Lebovitz
Robert Sneddon <fr...@nospam.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> No, the real thing to look for in the Republican's attitudes to the
>school system is what just got passed; funding for compulsory testing
>of elementary school children. The bloated capitalists know they need a
>well-educated workforce to keep the dollars rolling in; not necessarily
>broadly-educated, of course. Critical thinking, art, history, social
>structures, politicas, no. The tests will be for reading, writing and
>'rithmetic, the essential skills for worker drones in today's high-tech
>economy.
>
boring--that an educational testing company managed to got to the
right politician at the right time.
Randolph Fritz
Robert Sneddon wrote:
>
> No, the real thing to look for in the Republican's attitudes to the
> school system is what just got passed; funding for compulsory testing
> of elementary school children. The bloated capitalists know they need a
> well-educated workforce to keep the dollars rolling in; not necessarily
> broadly-educated, of course. Critical thinking, art, history, social
> structures, politicas, no. The tests will be for reading, writing and
> 'rithmetic, the essential skills for worker drones in today's high-tech
> economy.
>
Those were the essential skills in the late 19th century. :-)
Randolph
Kate Secor
> Take it out of the realm of individual craftsmanship, and into the world
> of mass production and consistant Denning-style quality, and *then*
> and only then, will you have "refuted" me.
I submit to you that trying to teach "critical thinking" on any level
other than that of "individual craftsmanship" sort of belies the point
of critical thinking, no? I'm not sure you can teach "how to question
the system" with a system.
Of course, every school I've ever gone to has emphasized critical
thinking, and they haven't all been private, and they haven't all even
been any good.
Aiglet
Mark Atwood
>
> >But school taught "history" and school "politics", and even school
> >taught "critical thinking" taught are always, to use a SFnal term,
> >lies-taught-to-children, it's just a matter of whos lies get taught at
> >Truth. I would prefer ignorance to falseness and propaganda.
>
> Yeah, you're right. You get obscenities like the Florida law banning
> curricula discussing communism or socialism, or crap like the South
> Carolina History curriculum, which purported to teach critical thinking
> skills and good citizenship through a year-long course on the epic drama
> of South Carolinian history thoroughly dusted with a lot of moonlight
> and magnolias BS.
I dont mind stupidies like that as badly as I otherwise would, because
I know that that low available quality of educational (for the lack of
a better term) effeciency and "quality" (in the industrial sense),
makes mincemeat out of bad curriculum just as readily as it does good
stuff.
Doesnt matter if it's old nag or handraised organic freerange prime
beef, it all tastes the same after it's be put thru the grinder, been
overcooked, and had enough A1 poured on it.
Mark Atwood
>
> Teaching critical thinking is a solved problem, by the way; require
> every student to things that will hurt them severely if they exercise
> poor judgement.
We agree on something, then. This.
The problem is that "people" want to shelter and share each other from
risks, which is a good idea, and then they include as a "risk" stuff
like "fallout from your own damn boneheaded stupidity", and that's not
a good idea.
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 17:00:50 -0500,
> Arthur D Hlavaty <hla...@panix.com> scripsit:
> > On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 12:44:10 -0500, Avram Grumer <av...@grumer.org>
> > wrote:
> >>Chris was telling me that this isn't the first trouble Arthur Andersen
> >>has gotten into; they were fined by the SEC not long ago. She
> >>interviewed with them coming out of school, and she's now really glad
> >>that they didn't hire her.
> >
> > I've been wondering: Why don't people hate accountants the way they
> > hate lawyers?
>
> reasonable fees.
Also, I suspect, because it seems to me that the law is one of those
subjects, like writing, where uninformed opinions are seen as
equivalently valid as informed ones.
Most people are aware of the sort of skill disparities possible between
basic numeracy, skilled numeracy, and specific specialized mathematical
skills such as those an accountant would use.
I wonder suddenly if this is a problem common to a lot of fields where
specialized language-processing is the primary skill.
Mark Atwood
> Mark Atwood wrote:
>
> > Take it out of the realm of individual craftsmanship, and into the world
> > of mass production and consistant Denning-style quality, and *then*
> > and only then, will you have "refuted" me.
>
> I submit to you that trying to teach "critical thinking" on any level
> other than that of "individual craftsmanship" sort of belies the point
> of critical thinking, no? I'm not sure you can teach "how to question
> the system" with a system.
You are probably right.
ObSF:
This exact issue, btw, is the motivation for the creation The Young Lady's Primer in the first place, in _The Diamond Age_.
One of the Vicky Equity Lords commissioned the Primer because he was
afraid that his children were raising his grandchildren too much "in
the system", and that they would not suffiecenly be the kind of
independent free thinker that allowed *him* to become an Equity Lord
in the first place.
Ulrika O'Brien
says...
> But school taught "history" and school "politics", and even school
> taught "critical thinking" taught are always, to use a SFnal term,
> lies-taught-to-children, it's just a matter of whos lies get taught at
> Truth. I would prefer ignorance to falseness and propaganda.
Funny. I could have sworn I learned critical thinking skills in
public institutions. I wonder how I managed to get confused, since
I've never attended a private school at any point. Huh.
--
"If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten we belong
to each other." -- Mother Teresa
Ulrika O'Brien
says...
> dark...@mailandnews.com (Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)) writes:
> > >
> > > But school taught "history" and school "politics", and even school
> > > taught "critical thinking" taught are always, to use a SFnal term,
> > > lies-taught-to-children, it's just a matter of whos lies get taught at
> > > Truth. I would prefer ignorance to falseness and propaganda.
> >
> > I submit Richard Montgomery High School, Montgomery County, Maryland.
> >
> > Your absolute is refuted.
>
> Does it scale?
Well, you've demonstrated that *you* didn't learn any critical
thinking skills in public school.
You offered a universal claim. Darkhawk offered a single
counterexample. A single counterexample is sufficient to refute a
universal claim. You obviously don't know it and didn't spot it
when it went by. Here's a hint: all the pieces you need are in the
quoted sections above.
Mark Atwood
> >
> > The problem is that "people" want to shelter and share each other from
> > risks, which is a good idea, and then they include as a "risk" stuff
> > like "fallout from your own damn boneheaded stupidity", and that's not
> > a good idea.
>
If you do not, then the word "moral" just got defined out of existance.
Some would think that is a good thing, but if you cannot make moral
judgements, in some framework, you cannot make judgements about
anything.
Mark Atwood
> public institutions. I wonder how I managed to get confused, since
> I've never attended a private school at any point. Huh.
I learned critical thinking while attending public schools as well, but
not because they were trying to teach it.
Ulrika O'Brien
says...
> Some would think that is a good thing, but if you cannot make moral
> judgements, in some framework, you cannot make judgements about
> anything.
Nonsense. One does not follow from the other. Indeed, they are
utterly unrelated.
Ulrika O'Brien
says...
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> writes:
> >
> > Funny. I could have sworn I learned critical thinking skills in
> > public institutions. I wonder how I managed to get confused, since
> > I've never attended a private school at any point. Huh.
>
> I learned critical thinking while attending public schools as well, but
> not because they were trying to teach it.
You went to bad schools. Too bad for you.
Kris Hasson-Jones
Reynolds-Ward) splashed into the river and bubbled:
There must be case law excepting securities stuff, then, because I do
civil RICO cases every couple of years in non-securities stuff.
--
Kris Hasson Jones sni...@pacifier.com
Richard Horton
wrote:
>A marcher state is off on the edge of the trade system, so that while it
>has access to the full available tech level of the day, it doesn't have
>comparably capable powers on all its borders, and can expand at rates
>and on a scope not available to the established powers in the interior
>of the trading system.
I believe the title "Marquis" is cognate with "Marcher" in this sense.
(See the recent Interzone story "Marcher" by Chris Beckett.)
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.tangentonline.com)
Richard Horton
<mjla...@erols.com> wrote:
>On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 09:57:17 +0000, Charlie Stross
><cha...@nospam.antipope.org> wrote:
>
>>Stoned koala bears drooled eucalyptus spittle in awe
>>as <uaob...@earthlink.net> declared:
>>
>>> If none of the above seems wholly pointful, rest assured it wasn't
>>> meant to be. This is just me ruminating "aloud".
>>
>>Cough, cough. (Asimov's SF. October/November 2001. Story
>>called "Troubadour". Modesty prevents me from naming the
>>author, but it's got all these themes in it.)
>
>But no lobsters, right? I think I'm on the June mags now.
But them damn lobsters are back in "Tourist".
Kate Secor
> (My private inclination is toward extraordinarily intensive writing and
> composition training in the middle-school grades. Forcing the chilluns
> to produce several thousand words per month in expository and
> narrative essays. To get the homework done, you chain them to computers
> and don't let them go until they've produced the requisite number of
> syntactically correct sentences.
That's pretty much what I *got* in middle school -- we had to read the
"classics" (in French and English, since I went to a bilingual school),
and then write about them. And we were expected to write coherently if
we wanted good grades.
Of course, they were also making us hand-write everything, so I have
good handwriting, a skill which is rapidly being lost.
Aiglet
(I *can't* make my handwriting illegible. I've tried.)
Keith F. Lynch
> Our own Charlie Stross is writing a series of stories (the first
> three have been published in Asimov's) that involves questions like
> that. One of the throwaway ideas in them is, if I've got this
> right, something like an AI cellular automaton where the cells are
> robot corporations.
I'm skeptical of that working. Courts have held that multiple
corporations that simply own each other, or are all owned by the
same person or set of people, are really just one corporation.
Similarly with someone who owned a trucking business, and tried to
have each truck as a separate corporation. Sure, he had filled out
all the paperwork, so it was all official. But as soon as a court
looked at it, it was thrown out.
--
Keith F. Lynch - k...@keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/
I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but
unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me
HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.
Josh Kaderlan
Robert Sneddon
(in message <slrna4c6ro....@panix3.panix.com>):
Not essential. Useful, certainly, but in the main agricultural workers
then didn't need particularly high levels of skill in the three R's to
do their work successfully. Today's agricultural worker has to be able
to read the safety instructions on barrels of chemicals, calculate
dosages, keep up with governmental meddl^H^H^H^H^H regulations etc.
etc. For this labour they are paid a lot more than the illiterate
worker of the late 19th century.
Factory workers and even skilled craftsmen of the late 19th century
were often functionally illiterate and innummerate. Modern workers who
can't read and write to quite a high standard are pretty well useless
and functionally dangerous to themselves and their co-workers.
--
Robert Sneddon -- nojay (at) antipope (dot) org
================================================================
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http://www.asar.com/cgi-bin/product.pl?58/hogwasher.html
================================================================
David Joseph Greenbaum
in fleeting electrons:
>> (My private inclination is toward extraordinarily intensive writing and
>> composition training in the middle-school grades. Forcing the chilluns
>> to produce several thousand words per month in expository and
>> narrative essays. To get the homework done, you chain them to computers
>> and don't let them go until they've produced the requisite number of
>> syntactically correct sentences.
>
>That's pretty much what I *got* in middle school -- we had to read the
>"classics" (in French and English, since I went to a bilingual school),
>and then write about them. And we were expected to write coherently if
>we wanted good grades.
I didn't get it until I went to away to prep school. Public school did
not make my style reliable. Much juvenile writing is gormless,
meandering nonsense; too many kids come to university with crippled
prose in their pens, trite phrases steeped in moronic cliché.
Me, until tenth grade. I only suffered the needed training at the
hands of Leslie Morgan-Dwinell, Gorgeous Grammar-Fascist.
Thanks to her wherever she is! Her gentle Pain pushed a steady, decent
style down my throat.
>Of course, they were also making us hand-write everything, so I have
>good handwriting, a skill which is rapidly being lost.
Cursive? I love cursive. I appreciate handwriting for beauty as well
as content.
Robert Sneddon
(in message <Hyr18.19078$3E2.166...@newssvr15.news.prodigy.com>):
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 09:02:27 -0500, Marilee J. Layman
> <mjla...@erols.com> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 09:57:17 +0000, Charlie Stross
>> <cha...@nospam.antipope.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Cough, cough. (Asimov's SF. October/November 2001. Story
>>> called "Troubadour". Modesty prevents me from naming the
>>> author, but it's got all these themes in it.)
>>
>> But no lobsters, right? I think I'm on the June mags now.
>
> But them damn lobsters are back in "Tourist".
And in "Router", still to come (assuming Gardner has actually bought
it).
--
Robert Sneddon -- nojay (at) antipope (dot) org
==============================================================
Posted with Hogwasher. For a free Test Drive click on:
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==============================================================
Avram Grumer
Arthur D. Hlavaty <hla...@panix.com> wrote:
> I've been wondering: Why don't people hate accountants the way they
> hate lawyers? (OK, there are no divorce accountants, but still...)
> They are the same sort of accessories to the crimes of companies and
> governments (see Paul Krugman recently on the creative accounting
> used by state governments). Their work could easily be portrayed, as
> the law is, as a kind of "mystification" of what could be expressed
> in simple terms. (Wrong in both cases, of course.) <slashout> Let's
> hate a new minority </slashout>
The world of accounting doesn't have quite the same power that the law
does to turn your life inside-out.
--
Avram Grumer | av...@grumer.org | http://www.PigsAndFishes.org
In the country of the assless, the half-assed man is king.
Mark Atwood
>
> 'You screwed up'; 'yup, I screwed up' is a different context from 'which
> of these two choices with unknowable consequences is the better choice?'
>
> I'm saying that the former is not a moral question, but a factual one;
> the later remains a moral question.
When moral judgements come into play is when it's "You/I screwed up
*again*, now what are I/you and you/I going to do, and what will I/You
be trusted with next time".
Those are the *important* questions.
Josh Kaderlan
> In article <eotb4ucc1059mgcad...@4ax.com>,
> Arthur D. Hlavaty <hla...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>> I've been wondering: Why don't people hate accountants the way they
>> hate lawyers? (OK, there are no divorce accountants, but still...)
>> They are the same sort of accessories to the crimes of companies and
>> governments (see Paul Krugman recently on the creative accounting
>> used by state governments). Their work could easily be portrayed, as
>> the law is, as a kind of "mystification" of what could be expressed
>> in simple terms. (Wrong in both cases, of course.) <slashout> Let's
>> hate a new minority </slashout>
>
> The world of accounting doesn't have quite the same power that the law
> does to turn your life inside-out.
Tell that to the IRS.
-Josh
David Dyer-Bennet
> Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> wrote:
> > On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 17:00:50 -0500,
> > Arthur D Hlavaty <hla...@panix.com> scripsit:
> > > On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 12:44:10 -0500, Avram Grumer <av...@grumer.org>
> > > wrote:
> > >>Chris was telling me that this isn't the first trouble Arthur Andersen
> > >>has gotten into; they were fined by the SEC not long ago. She
> > >>interviewed with them coming out of school, and she's now really glad
> > >>that they didn't hire her.
> > >
> > > I've been wondering: Why don't people hate accountants the way they
> > > hate lawyers?
> >
> > Because, on the whole, accountants solve your problems for quite
> > reasonable fees.
>
> Also, I suspect, because it seems to me that the law is one of those
> subjects, like writing, where uninformed opinions are seen as
> equivalently valid as informed ones.
>
> Most people are aware of the sort of skill disparities possible between
> basic numeracy, skilled numeracy, and specific specialized mathematical
> skills such as those an accountant would use.
Accountants do not pervert arithmetic, though. Their columns of
numbers add up just the way mine do. Lawyers *do* pervert language.
Both can employ their skills to pervert justice, and both are supposed
to be neutral "public utilities" rather than moral beings.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, dd...@dd-b.net / Ghugle: the Fannish Ghod of Queries
Book log: http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/Ouroboros/booknotes/
Photos: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> > Also, I suspect, because it seems to me that the law is one of those
> > subjects, like writing, where uninformed opinions are seen as
> > equivalently valid as informed ones.
> >
> > Most people are aware of the sort of skill disparities possible between
> > basic numeracy, skilled numeracy, and specific specialized mathematical
> > skills such as those an accountant would use.
>
> Accountants do not pervert arithmetic, though. Their columns of
> numbers add up just the way mine do. Lawyers *do* pervert language.
You do realise, I hope, that I am a paralegal, and thus have done a
reasonable amount of work in the time that I was employed by a law
office and the time I was earning my certification learning some of the
terms of art and the protocols of the skillset of the legal subdialect
of English?
- Darkhawk, who believes her opinion thereby
partially informed
Joyce Reynolds-Ward
wrote:
snip
>Teaching critical thinking is a solved problem, by the way; require
>every student to things that will hurt them severely if they exercise
>poor judgement.
Standard horse ownership situation; as in the novice horseman who buys
an untrained horse and tries to train it without professional help.
Otherwise known as "green on green=black on blue" in rec.equestrian.
Often very painful and expensive lessons are dealt out to those who
engage in such experiences. Horse training is one of those things
which requires a certain amount of quality critical thinking and
analysis to do it safely and without injury to human or horse.
>This is regarded as unacceptably expensive; it's not actually difficult
>to implement.
Happens quite frequently in *quality* horseback riding schools. Note
the emphasis on *quality.* A good riding instructor is one who
minimizes the potential for injury while a student is acquiring the
level of skill and judgement needed to work with approx. 1000 lbs of
large, fundamentally paranoid and hierarchially-oriented animal. Even
the most reliable horse has been known to experience a brain fart or
two.
>I disagree with the 'unacceptably expensive' part; it is, in my view, a
>different sort of risk, not a greater risk.
Yep.
jrw
Joyce Reynolds-Ward
wrote:
snip
>I submit to you that trying to teach "critical thinking" on any level
>other than that of "individual craftsmanship" sort of belies the point
>of critical thinking, no? I'm not sure you can teach "how to question
>the system" with a system.
Sure you can.
The fastest and best way I know how to do so involves horses, however.
While there are training systems for both horses and humans, each
person has to adapt them to their own personality and how they best
relate to horses. Some people manage just fine with aggressive,
heavy-handed styles (shudder); others do well with different degrees
of assertiveness. Horse people are very individualistic and
opinionated, nonetheless while most of us apply the systems
differently, we all still operate off of the same systems. I don't
think I know of *anyone* in the horse world who doesn't develop
opinions and question the basic systems after a bit of experience;
after all, that's one reason why wreck.eq has its reputation.
Nonetheless, the training process and progression for novice horses
and humans is still pretty much the same, within the boundaries of
"too much Planet Fluffybunny Woo-Woo" and "I'm gonna kill the SOB if
it puts one hoof out of line."
The reason why horses are the fastest and the best as opposed to dogs,
BTW, is that the price tag on horses today is higher than dogs and the
Consequences For Fucking Up are one hell of a lot bigger (you're more
likely to get seriously hurt or killed screwing up with a horse than a
dog). Whether you fuck up a five figure baby (no joke--I've seen
price tags on yearlings from 1k to 50+k, depending on breed and
intended riding discipline) either from loving it to pieces or beating
the crap out of it, you've still fucked it up. And, no matter what,
there's always the chance of significant personal injury if you don't
exercise adequate critical thinking to deal with a situation. Most
bad equine situations *can* be prevented, with aforethought, even with
novices. Thinking ahead and dealing with a situation before it
happens shuts down a lot of problems.
>Of course, every school I've ever gone to has emphasized critical
>thinking, and they haven't all been private, and they haven't all even
>been any good.
Yep. I swear the best one yet has been the Western barn I ride at.
jrw
Joyce Reynolds-Ward
<hla...@panix.com> wrote:
snip
>I've been wondering: Why don't people hate accountants the way they
>hate lawyers? (OK, there are no divorce accountants, but still...)
>They are the same sort of accessories to the crimes of companies and
>governments (see Paul Krugman recently on the creative accounting used
>by state governments). Their work could easily be portrayed, as the
>law is, as a kind of "mystification" of what could be expressed in
>simple terms. (Wrong in both cases, of course.) <slashout> Let's hate
>a new minority </slashout>
Uh...you've not heard all the nasty bean-counter jokes?
Of course, I hang out with the sales crew and the legal crew. After a
spell in the world of complex securities litigation, I have very
little respect for accountants. Even less than I do for lawyers.
jrw
Joyce Reynolds-Ward
<sni...@pacifier.com> wrote:
snip
>There must be case law excepting securities stuff, then, because I do
>civil RICO cases every couple of years in non-securities stuff.
Yeah, there is. I remember that it came in after the WPPSS securities
litigation..that, plus the RICO charges kept getting tossed out. Wish
I could remember the details, but I do recall reading that RICO was
redefined with regard to securities law--it was in the Oregonian,
even, sometime in the late 80s/early 90s.
Mind you, in securities law, RICO charges were simply a long-shot
aiming for triple damages. We *knew* they were long shots, but the
lawyers tossed 'em in anyway on the off chance that *someone* wouldn't
chuck 'em out. As I recall, they were hard to prove on that level but
the triple damages available were too much to pass up.
jrw
Randolph Fritz
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll) wrote:
>
> Also, I suspect, because it seems to me that the law is one of those
> subjects, like writing, where uninformed opinions are seen as
> equivalently valid as informed ones.
>
> Most people are aware of the sort of skill disparities possible between
> basic numeracy, skilled numeracy, and specific specialized mathematical
> skills such as those an accountant would use.
>
> specialized language-processing is the primary skill.
>
Happens to photographers and architects, too. :-(
Randolph
Randolph Fritz
Robert Sneddon wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 19:31:52 -0500, Randolph Fritz wrote
> (in message <slrna4c6ro....@panix3.panix.com>):
>
>> In article <01HW.B86B3B790...@news.cis.dfn.de>,
>> Robert Sneddon wrote:
>>>
>>> The tests will be for reading, writing and
>>> 'rithmetic, the essential skills for worker drones in today's high-tech
>>> economy.
>>>
>>
>> Those were the essential skills in the late 19th century. :-)
>
> Not essential. Useful, certainly, but in the main agricultural workers
> then didn't need particularly high levels of skill in the three R's to
>
I wish I'd said--essentially to running the British Empire and keeping
shop. :-)
Randolph
Nancy Lebovitz
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> writes:
>>
>> Teaching critical thinking is a solved problem, by the way; require
>> every student to things that will hurt them severely if they exercise
>> poor judgement.
>
>
>The problem is that "people" want to shelter and share each other from
>risks, which is a good idea, and then they include as a "risk" stuff
>like "fallout from your own damn boneheaded stupidity", and that's not
>a good idea.
OBSF: Heinlein's _Job_, in which (iirc) it's mentioned that people
need to live in enronments where it's possible to survive and learn from
a lot of their mistake.
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com 100 new slogans
And on the eighth day, God said, "OK, Murphy, you take over".
Josh Kaderlan
>
> Accountants do not pervert arithmetic, though. Their columns of
> numbers add up just the way mine do. Lawyers *do* pervert language.
No, they don't. They use jargon just like any other skilled profession.
Since their jargon tends to be less obviously jargon than other
professions, though, it can look from the outside as if they're perverting
language. But they're not.
-Josh
Mark Atwood
>
> Analagous things happen in lots and lots of situations; much of the
> problem is that the places where this used to happen in schools -- shops
> and ranges, mostly -- aren't there any more.
The lack of ranges in schools?! What are you, some kind of gun nut?!
Doug Wickstrom
<slrna4cpe...@localhost.zer0.org>
Josh Kaderlan <j...@zer0.org> excited the ether to say:
Nah. Their accountants only find the irregularities. It's their
lawyers who decide you did it deliberately and stick it to you.
--
Doug Wickstrom
"It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion." --Unknown
Doug Wickstrom
<slrna4cvc...@localhost.zer0.org>
Josh Kaderlan <j...@zer0.org> excited the ether to say:
>In article <m266618...@gw.dd-b.net>, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
Can we agree rather that they've been known to rather severely
stretch language and meanings in attempts to cover things they
don't? Anyone remember the infamous plea "not guilty on the
grounds of conveniently temporary insanity induced by eating too
much junk food"? That one attempted to stretch "insanity" all
out of recognizable shape.
Johan Anglemark
<slrna4d1e9....@hunding.localdomain>:
>On 16 Jan 2002 23:30:32 -0800, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> scripsit:
>> Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> writes:
>>> Analagous things happen in lots and lots of situations; much of the
>>> problem is that the places where this used to happen in schools --
>>> shops and ranges, mostly -- aren't there any more.
>>
>> The lack of ranges in schools?! What are you, some kind of gun nut?!
>
>It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary' --
>sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the social
>standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:
[....]
>- shoot above 80% scores at 25m targets with a firearm
[....]
>It's a skill I think everyone should have, in other words.
Why? I can't name a single person of any age I know, who needs or has ever
needed to use a gun, except for whan forced to. Mind you, I loved shooting
when I did my military service, but I can't understand how you can rank it
as an essential skill.
-j
--
Johan Anglemark - http://anglemark.pp.se
Lejd av Upsala SF-sällskap - http://sfweb.dang.se
Trinker
Graydon Saunders wrote:
>
> On 16 Jan 2002 23:30:32 -0800, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> scripsit:
> > Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> writes:
> >> Analagous things happen in lots and lots of situations; much of the
> >> problem is that the places where this used to happen in schools --
> >> shops and ranges, mostly -- aren't there any more.
> >
> > The lack of ranges in schools?! What are you, some kind of gun nut?!
>
> It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary' --
> sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the social
> standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:[...]
You are making allowances for disabilities, yes?
I'd like to suggest an addendum to your list, as well --
Has learned to cope with/understand disability issues
(I believe that everyone should have some basic experience with
navigating in a wheelchair; interacting without vision; dealing
with communication issues stemming from deafness/hearing
impairment. For a start.)
Oh, and
Has learned basic CPR and first aid
--Trinker
Mark Atwood
>
> It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary' --
> sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the social
> standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:
I STR posting a similar list over in rasfw a year or so ago, and
got chewed out for it, something about "what about the people who
are physically incapable of these things".
Here we go:
On 19 Jun 2000 13:33:33 -0700, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> in article <m3ya412...@flash.localdomain>, wrote:
> I think that *everyone* should, at least once in their life, go to bed
> bone tired, work hard though a cold night, build a sandbag retaining
> wall, dig a hole deeper than they are tall, change a diaper, build and
> demolish a structure, split wood, start a fire to get warm, change a
> flat tire, unclog and wash a toilet, balance a checkbook, make and
> live to a personal budget, and *especially* plant, weed, and harvest a
> garden, and then cook, eat, and share the produce.
Your list sounds far less likely to get anyone to do than mine.
Trinker
David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> Accountants do not pervert arithmetic, though. Their columns of
> numbers add up just the way mine do. Lawyers *do* pervert language.
> Both can employ their skills to pervert justice, and both are supposed
> to be neutral "public utilities" rather than moral beings.
The problem, usually expressed as "the bean counters", is not
in the actual math. It's in the interpretation of the math,
and the reduction of humans and etc. into "the bottom line".
--Trinker
Trinker
Graydon Saunders wrote:
>
> On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 01:01:15 -0800,
> Trinker <trinke...@yahoo.com> scripsit:
> >
> >
> > Graydon Saunders wrote:
> >>
> >> On 16 Jan 2002 23:30:32 -0800, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> scripsit:
> >> > Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> writes:
> >> >> Analagous things happen in lots and lots of situations; much of the
> >> >> problem is that the places where this used to happen in schools --
> >> >> shops and ranges, mostly -- aren't there any more.
> >> >
> >> > The lack of ranges in schools?! What are you, some kind of gun nut?!
> >>
> >> It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary' --
> >> sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the social
> >> standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:[...]
> >
> > You are making allowances for disabilities, yes?
>
> Yes. I'd hate to see a really standard list, in fact; a per-school list
> with options would be a good sort of scale, if the schools aren't too
> big.
<nod>
I find Mark's list interesting, as well.
The toilet bit amused me, as it's also a rant of a friend of mine,
who went so far as to write up a Web page detailing the care and
repair of a toilet. The rest of his list (excluding the budget
and checkbook, which I agree with), seems far more about
*physicality*, to me.
I think I like the way these skills are presented in various
scouting organizations. It would be an interesting approach
to teaching, as well, rather than the "thou shalt take this class
during this year" method.
I'm amused to note that I suspect I *could* make the nails on
your list, except that I don't know how nails are made! (Not
by hand, anyway.) But forge skills I have. Also to note that
I don't think I've ever lived in a place that had a paintable
ceiling or floor. Maybe my high school dormitory had ceilings
that could be painted...
I wish my father had lived long enough for me to ask him whether
he'd deliberately set out to teach me quite a bit of the stuff
on your list, or if these things had just been what he'd been
interested in, himself. I think it's rather cool that in addition
to what's on your list, I also know how to make a ceramic pot
using three (four?) different forms of construction. And how to
make paper, and bind a book.
> > I'd like to suggest an addendum to your list, as well --
> >
> > Has learned to cope with/understand disability issues
> >
> > (I believe that everyone should have some basic experience with
> > navigating in a wheelchair; interacting without vision; dealing with
> > communication issues stemming from deafness/hearing impairment. For a
> > start.)
>
> I'd go for that. (And I think, rather like the nails are enough to get
> across the reality of all that metal having been bent, that would about
> do, with the possible addition of time on crutches.)
<nod> That was pointed out to me some years ago as a blind spot
in my experience/mental space of disability.
> > Oh, and
> > Has learned basic CPR and first aid
>
> I would actually put those _after_ the age 14 cutoff I was imagining to
> apply. First Aid is taking responsibility for other people, and much
> harder than anything on that list.
Ah. Good point. Still, I think it's a skill that isn't as
widespread as it ought to be. Speaking of which, I should
really do something about my lapsed certification.
--Trinker
Johan Anglemark
<gra...@dsl.ca>:
>On 17 Jan 2002 08:38:51 GMT, Johan Anglemark <jo...@anglemark.pp.se>
>scripsit:
>> My trusted friend Graydon Saunders wrote:
>>
>>>It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary'
>>>-- sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the
>>>social standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:
>>
>> [....]
>>>- shoot above 80% scores at 25m targets with a firearm
>> [....]
>>
>>>It's a skill I think everyone should have, in other words.
>>
>> Why? I can't name a single person of any age I know, who needs or has
>> ever needed to use a gun, except for whan forced to. Mind you, I loved
>> shooting when I did my military service, but I can't understand how
>> you can rank it as an essential skill.
>
>You ever needed to make nails?
Not really, no.
>It's an angle of reality; the 'use' of that list is make something real,
>as things become real in by smell and kinesthetics. The citizens of a
>Western democracy will be exercising force, quite lethal force, through
>their government and the servants thereof, and they should have some
>faint glimmer of the heft and the smell and the haste of it.
OK, I'll buy that.
Hal O'Brien
> Ulrika O'Brien <uaob...@earthlink.net> writes:
> >
> > Funny. I could have sworn I learned critical thinking skills in
> > public institutions. I wonder how I managed to get confused, since
> > I've never attended a private school at any point. Huh.
>
> I learned critical thinking while attending public schools as well...
Not proven.
> ...but
> not because they were trying to teach it.
Given your lack of observational skills evident in this thread, how
do you know that?
-- Hal
Hal O'Brien
> dark...@mailandnews.com (Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)) writes:
>
> >
> > Most people are aware of the sort of skill disparities possible between
> > basic numeracy, skilled numeracy, and specific specialized mathematical
> > skills such as those an accountant would use.
>
> Accountants do not pervert arithmetic, though. Their columns of
> numbers add up just the way mine do. Lawyers *do* pervert language.
> Both can employ their skills to pervert justice, and both are supposed
> to be neutral "public utilities" rather than moral beings.
>
You must have a different sample of accountants than I do. My
experience has been of a number of individual accountants, actuaries,
CFOs, etc., who come to policy decisions first, and then select their
data to support them accordingly. So, yes, their numbers "add up" --
quite carefully, and deliberately, to support their point-of-view.
-- Hal
Max
> Of course, they were also making us hand-write everything, so I have
> good handwriting, a skill which is rapidly being lost.
They made me hand write everything. Didn't make my handwriting any good. I
deliberately changed the shape of all my letters when I was about 18 so my
handwriting is now more legible, but it's still not particularly pleasant.
The weird thing is, I taught myself to mirror write before I changed the
way I write in general - I can still mirror write but it's in my old
handwriting. Also, if I try to write right-handed (I'm basically left
handed) that comes out as a cross between the old and new letter forms.
But I try to have a keyboard available for anything I want to be read once
I'm done writing it these days.
Max
Arthur D. Hlavaty
wrote:
Exactly. Legal language has to approximate the precision of
mathematical language.
--
Arthur D.Hlavaty hla...@panix.com
Church of the SuperGenius in Wile E. we trust
E-zine available on request
Arthur D. Hlavaty
wrote:
>You must have a different sample of accountants than I do. My
>experience has been of a number of individual accountants, actuaries,
>CFOs, etc., who come to policy decisions first, and then select their
>data to support them accordingly. So, yes, their numbers "add up" --
>quite carefully, and deliberately, to support their point-of-view.
There's the old story of the big corporation that chose an accounting
firm by asking each one, "How much is 2 + 2?" The correct answer was,
"What did you have in mind?"
Arthur D. Hlavaty
Reynolds-Ward) wrote:
>On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 17:00:50 -0500, Arthur D. Hlavaty
><hla...@panix.com> wrote:
>
>snip
>
>>I've been wondering: Why don't people hate accountants the way they
>>hate lawyers? (OK, there are no divorce accountants, but still...)
>>They are the same sort of accessories to the crimes of companies and
>>governments (see Paul Krugman recently on the creative accounting used
>>by state governments). Their work could easily be portrayed, as the
>>law is, as a kind of "mystification" of what could be expressed in
>>simple terms. (Wrong in both cases, of course.) <slashout> Let's hate
>>a new minority </slashout>
>
>Uh...you've not heard all the nasty bean-counter jokes?
I always thought the term was more general.
Kip Williams
> Happens quite frequently in *quality* horseback riding schools. Note
> the emphasis on *quality.* A good riding instructor is one who
> minimizes the potential for injury while a student is acquiring the
> level of skill and judgement needed to work with approx. 1000 lbs of
> large, fundamentally paranoid and hierarchially-oriented animal. Even
> the most reliable horse has been known to experience a brain fart or
> two.
A good riding instructor also knows that it's a bad sign when
someone wants to learn to ride a horse, but doesn't want to know how
to dismount.
--
--Kip (Williams) ...at http://members.home.net/kipw/
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape
those who dream only by night." --Poe
Kip Williams
>
> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 17:00:50 -0500, Arthur D. Hlavaty
> <hla...@panix.com> wrote:
>
> snip
>
> >I've been wondering: Why don't people hate accountants the way they
> >hate lawyers? (OK, there are no divorce accountants, but still...)
> >They are the same sort of accessories to the crimes of companies and
> >governments (see Paul Krugman recently on the creative accounting used
> >by state governments). Their work could easily be portrayed, as the
> >law is, as a kind of "mystification" of what could be expressed in
> >simple terms. (Wrong in both cases, of course.) <slashout> Let's hate
> >a new minority </slashout>
>
> Uh...you've not heard all the nasty bean-counter jokes?
A man opens a can of beans, only to find nothing inside but sauce.
Damn bean counters!
Richard Horton
wrote:
>It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary' --
>sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the social
>standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:
>
>- cooked a formal dinner for a family of 8
>- made five kilos of acceptably uniform nails and a good forge weld
>- produced a piece of embroidery at least four inches square
>- shoot above 80% scores at 25m targets with a firearm
>- constructed and finished some useful wooden object with at least one
> actual join in its construction and at least five component pieces
>- assembled/operated a number of consumer products from the instructions
>- appropriately painted all six surfaces of a room, using at least two
> kinds of paint and constrasting colours for the window and door trim
>- wired a switched wall socket from the panel
>- swam a kilometer
>- installed a sink
>- I don't want to go with small engines, since this is my ideal world,
> and it'd be small fuel cells or something, but if the category of
> 'portable fueled device' remains, something to address that.
Is this where we say "You are Robert Heinlein AICMFP"?
--
Rich Horton | Stable Email: mailto://richard...@sff.net
Home Page: http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton
Also visit SF Site (http://www.sfsite.com) and Tangent Online (http://www.tangentonline.com)
Michael J. Lowrey
>
> In a fit of divine composition, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> inscribed
> in fleeting electrons:
> >But school taught "history" and school "politics", and even school
> >taught "critical thinking" taught are always, to use a SFnal term,
> >lies-taught-to-children, it's just a matter of whos lies get taught at
> >Truth. I would prefer ignorance to falseness and propaganda.
>
> Yeah, you're right. You get obscenities like the Florida law banning
> curricula discussing communism or socialism, or crap like the South
> Carolina History curriculum, which purported to teach critical thinking
> skills and good citizenship through a year-long course on the epic drama
> of South Carolinian history thoroughly dusted with a lot of moonlight
> and magnolias BS.
While there are and always have been good, decent individual
South Carolinians, I think S.C. as a state has a good claim
to being the most frequently evil of all 50 U.S. states in
its interactions with the rest of the world. An honest
discussion of S.C. history would have to discuss so much
ugliness that it probably would get the teachers fired.
--
Michael J. Lowrey
Michael J. Lowrey
> Also, I suspect, because it seems to me that the law is one of those
> subjects, like writing, where uninformed opinions are seen as
> equivalently valid as informed ones.
>
> I wonder suddenly if this is a problem common to a lot of fields where
> specialized language-processing is the primary skill.
Education. Political science. Government.
Yep, I think you're on to something here.
--
Michael J. "Orange Mike" Lowrey
James S. Battista
Poli-sci's in the list because undergraduate poli-sci education
does a remarkable job of avoiding political science. You could
easily have an undergraduate degree in political science and
yet be utterly surprised about how people like, well, me spend our
time.
--
James S. Coleman Battista
--A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man
(J. Springfield)
Lucy Kemnitzer
wrote:
>On 16 Jan 2002 23:30:32 -0800, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> scripsit:
>> Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> writes:
>>> Analagous things happen in lots and lots of situations; much of the
>>> problem is that the places where this used to happen in schools --
>>> shops and ranges, mostly -- aren't there any more.
>>
>> The lack of ranges in schools?! What are you, some kind of gun nut?!
>
>It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary' --
>sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the social
>standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:
>
>- cooked a formal dinner for a family of 8
>- made five kilos of acceptably uniform nails and a good forge weld
>- produced a piece of embroidery at least four inches square
>- shoot above 80% scores at 25m targets with a firearm
>- constructed and finished some useful wooden object with at least one
> actual join in its construction and at least five component pieces
>- assembled/operated a number of consumer products from the instructions
>- appropriately painted all six surfaces of a room, using at least two
> kinds of paint and constrasting colours for the window and door trim
>- wired a switched wall socket from the panel
>- swam a kilometer
>- installed a sink
>- I don't want to go with small engines, since this is my ideal world,
> and it'd be small fuel cells or something, but if the category of
> 'portable fueled device' remains, something to address that.
>
>As well as the reading, writing, history, mathematics, problem solving,
>newtonian mechanics, evolutionary biology, music, and drawing in the
>academic half.
>
>It's a skill I think everyone should have, in other words.
>
I hate this kind of list. I hate hate hate hate them, hate them hate
them hate them.
As for the particulars. At the school where I work most these days
there are eight hundred children between the ages of eleven and
fourteen. I cannot imagine coming up with two hundred and sixty-seven
rooms to be painted every year. And enough forge time and space for
them all.
Lucy Kemnitzer
Lucy Kemnitzer
wrote:
>On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 01:01:15 -0800,
>Trinker <trinke...@yahoo.com> scripsit:
>>
>>
>> Graydon Saunders wrote:
>>>
>>> On 16 Jan 2002 23:30:32 -0800, Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> scripsit:
>>> > Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca> writes:
>>> >> Analagous things happen in lots and lots of situations; much of the
>>> >> problem is that the places where this used to happen in schools --
>>> >> shops and ranges, mostly -- aren't there any more.
>>> >
>>> > The lack of ranges in schools?! What are you, some kind of gun nut?!
>>>
>>> It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary' --
>>> sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the social
>>> standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:[...]
>>
>> You are making allowances for disabilities, yes?
>
>Yes. I'd hate to see a really standard list, in fact; a per-school list
>with options would be a good sort of scale, if the schools aren't too
>big.
>
The schools are too big, Graydon (see my other post)
Lucy Kemnitzer
Andrew Plotkin
> Of course, they were also making us hand-write everything, so I have
> good handwriting, a skill which is rapidly being lost.
> Aiglet
> (I *can't* make my handwriting illegible. I've tried.)
Try, and you will fail. Through inaction, you will succeed.
(Stop writing things by hand, and use a computer for everything. Wait
fifteen years. If you haven't experienced significant handwriting
degradation, I'll give you your money back...)
--Z
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*
* Make your vote count. Get your vote counted.
Robert Sneddon
(in message <3c46e48...@cnews.newsguy.com>):
>
> As for the particulars. At the school where I work most these days
> there are eight hundred children between the ages of eleven and
> fourteen. I cannot imagine coming up with two hundred and sixty-seven
> rooms to be painted every year.
In Ankh-Morpork, those convicted of minor crimes are being set
community service sentences instead of being tossed into the scorpion
pit. Said sentences include wallpapering old people's homes. Some of
said old people are having to walk sideways into rooms...
--
Robert Sneddon -- nojay (at) antipope (dot) org
==============================================================
Posted with Hogwasher. Mac first, Mac only:
http://www.asar.com/cgi-bin/product.pl?58/hogwasher.html
==============================================================
Robert Sneddon
(in message <slrna4ctm3....@panix3.panix.com>):
> In article <01HW.B86BBEBD0...@news.cis.dfn.de>,
> Robert Sneddon wrote:
>> On Wed, 16 Jan 2002 19:31:52 -0500, Randolph Fritz wrote
>> (in message <slrna4c6ro....@panix3.panix.com>):
>>
>>
>> Not essential. Useful, certainly, but in the main agricultural workers
>> then didn't need particularly high levels of skill in the three R's to
>> do their work successfully. [...]
>>
>
> I wish I'd said--essentially to running the British Empire and keeping
> shop. :-)
Napoleon's described Britain as a "nation of shopkeepers". He also was
famously quoted as saying "An army marches on its stomach". He failed
to see the dichotomy.
Running the Empire didn't take a lot of British warm bodies; we were
the Lords of Creation, and one word would set a thousand wogs building
a road or laying a railway line. The soldiers of John Company were
often unlettered, but with drill and discipline they could deliver six
rounds a minute aimed from Martini rifles, and stand in square until
the howling hordes turned and ran.
Certainly early Victorian (1850's) society was big on Improvement of
the Masses, but most of this was to bring up their moral standards to
those of the upper classes (which, in reality, tended not to match
their utterances on the subject). Universal schooling was one of the
benefits, and certainly helped Britain's pre-eminent position in the
world over the following fifty years, but then perhaps thirty percent
of the population worked in hereditary labouring tasks like
agriculture, fishing and mining, where literacy was not that important.
--
Robert Sneddon -- nojay (at) antipope (dot) org
================================================================
Hogwasher: You don't have to sacrifice friendliness for power
http://www.asar.com/cgi-bin/product.pl?58/hogwasher.html
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Trinker
Lucy Kemnitzer wrote:
> >> Graydon Saunders wrote:
> >>>
> >>> It this was my perfect world, no one would graduate from 'elementary' --
> >>> sometime around the age of 14 -- school, and acquire thereby the social
> >>> standing necessary to enter into contracts, save as they:[...]
[...]
> The schools are too big, Graydon (see my other post)
Does it matter if you radically restructure how you arrange a school?
--Trinker
Trinker
Lucy Kemnitzer wrote:
>
> On Thu, 17 Jan 2002 03:05:29 -0500, Graydon Saunders <gra...@dsl.ca>
> wrote:
[...]
> >It's a skill I think everyone should have, in other words.
>
> I hate this kind of list. I hate hate hate hate them, hate them hate
> them hate them.
>
> As for the particulars. At the school where I work most these days
> there are eight hundred children between the ages of eleven and
> fourteen. I cannot imagine coming up with two hundred and sixty-seven
> rooms to be painted every year.
You only need one room, to be repainted 267 times. ;)
> And enough forge time and space for
> them all.
You don't have to do all 267 kids at once...
--Trinker
Kevin J. Maroney
<hla...@panix.com> wrote:
>Exactly. Legal language has to approximate the precision of
>mathematical language.
When lawyers try to be as precise as mathematicians, people think
they're perverting the language and insist that they talk "in plain
English".
Imagine how difficult accounting would be if words like "receivable"
were disparaged as "perversions".
--
Kevin J. Maroney | k...@panix.com
Games are my entire waking life.
Kris Hasson-Jones
Reynolds-Ward) splashed into the river and bubbled:
>Mind you, in securities law, RICO charges were simply a long-shot
>aiming for triple damages. We *knew* they were long shots, but the
>lawyers tossed 'em in anyway on the off chance that *someone* wouldn't
>chuck 'em out. As I recall, they were hard to prove on that level but
>the triple damages available were too much to pass up.
I think that's why we use it, too. The last case that I can discuss
that we pled RICO in was settled before trial, in part because of the
threat of triple damages.
--
Kris Hasson Jones sni...@pacifier.com