Skip to main content
Post a Comment

A Response to Starving the Future (NY Times)

In response to an article on the growth of China and India regarding education:

The debate is often framed as a business choice; it is a quality of life and equality choice. 

 Many of the choices for a better America are obvious, but the people making the decisions are often the same people that benefit from the 'broken' system:

  • Reduce inequality (taxation, change laws that favor the powerful and wealthy)
  • Increase education, making it independent of financing
  • Provide nationalized healthcare
  • Rein in the healthcare industry
  • Rein in corporate power over government and politics
  • Reducing inequality goes a long way. Often, suggested solutions for problems are merely band-aids, since the underlying problem is often a matter of resources.

Lower inequality means:

  • Better health, reduced obesity
  • Less crime, less violence
  • Better educational outcomes
  • Better economic performance for all, not just a few

Correlation is not causation, but working toward a better life for Americans, while reducing inequality, can keep America strong.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars I finished reading this crying. It is a work of neurobiology, social science, anthropology, and history, but ultimately it is a work of great humanity, suggesting ways that humans, our groups, our systems, and our societies can be made better. View all my reviews
Post a Comment
Read more

A Journey — if You Dare — Into the Minds of Silicon Valley Programmers

My responses in a NY Times comment section for the book, Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson : #1 - Link Although I've been a software developer for 15 years, and for longer alternating between a project manager, team lead, or analyst, mostly in finance, and now with a cancer center, I found it funny that you blame the people doing the coding for not seeing the harm it could cause. First, most scientific advancement has dark elements, and it is usually not the science but how it is used and sold by business people that is the problem. This leads to the second problem, in that it is not coding that is in itself problematic, but specifically how technology is harnessed to sell. It is normal and desirable to track users, to log actions, to collect telemetry, so as to monitor systems, respond to errors, and to develop new features, but that normal engineering practice has been used to surveil users for the purpose of selling. Blaming
Post a Comment
Read more

Don't learn to code. Learn to think.

A response to  Don't learn to code. Learn to think. : Below is is my usual response when I see an article stating that everyone should learn to code:  Rather than programming, it is more important to impart the thinking of computer science (CS) than a specific implementation. Programming can be an end point for some students, but it is likely that programming itself will be increasingly automated, so that one needs more the general concepts common in CS. Even then, programming itself is to some degree a grunt task that one progresses beyond:  The following are typical components of a CS degree: algorithms & flowcharting systems thinking logical systems and set theory object-orientation & patterns probability, statistics, mathematics All of the above can be useful in an increasingly automated and data-driven world.
1 comment
Read more