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Open Thread 12/3

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– Where fighting this might have at least resulted in an awareness of what was happening, years of Democrats chasing votes that were never going to come their way resulted in zealots quietly passing laws at the state level making abortion more and more difficult to obtain. I guess that’s what the anti-choice minority in the Democratic Party calls “winning.” They must be so pleased.

– I don’t mind Amazon’s drone program as much as some people, but there is something disquieting about it.

– It is pretty amazing that a smear against Obama can be dumb enough for the GOP to drop.

– This story of recovering a stolen bike off a rack is the greatest thing I’ve ever read.

– Willie fucking Bloomquist?

– No, you decided to buy Mirah Playing Cards even though you still have most of your Christmas shopping ahead of you.

Comments

  2. 2

    Of course, when hospitals break down their billings to every single aspirin and suture, they incur tremendous administrative costs to keep track of and bill for all of that, item by item. It’s like a corporation employing an accountant to bill customers for every paper clip that’s used. Of course, no business would ever do that, because it’s so horribly inefficient and costly — except hospitals.

  4. 4

    U.S. Test Scores Remain Stagnant While Other Countries See Rapid Rise
    Massachusetts, Connecticut and Florida administered the tests separately — in math, Massachusetts beat the U.S. average, scoring similarly to Germany and Poland; Connecticut scored higher than the U.S. average but not higher than the OECD average; and Florida, a favorite state of the education reform movement, performed lower than both.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....74075.html

    I cannot believe that Florida, with all of it’s reforms, scored worse. Obviously the test was rigged.

    Since the US scored badly, we can use this to gut the teacher unions and stop paying our teachers those stupid salaries and spend the money of Football. We can enforce teaching only to the Test so our scores go up, and stop all that critical thinking crap. That will get those scores to rise.

  5. 5

    This is so sad.

    Indeed, high-poverty schools in the U.S. posted dismal scores on the PISA tests, akin to countries such as Kazakhstan, Romania and Cyprus.

    Wealthy schools, by contrast, did very well on all three tests. Students in the most affluent U.S. schools — where fewer than 10 percent of children are eligible for subsidized lunches — scored so highly that if treated as a separate jurisdiction, they would have placed second only to Shanghai in science and reading and would have ranked sixth in the world in math.

    So schools with resources do better. Who would have thunk it?

    Still, the survey found that the teens did solidly well, few were advanced…

    In math, for instance, fewer than 9 percent of U.S. students scored advanced, compared to a whopping 55 percent of students in Shanghai, 40 percent in Singapore and more than 16 percent in Canada. In science, just 7 percent of U.S. students reached the top two levels of performance, compared with 27 percent in Shanghai and 17 percent in Finland. The U.S. also had significantly higher proportions of students scoring at the lowest levels than most of its international rivals.

    One possible explanation: Unlike the state standardized tests most American teens are accustomed to, the PISA tests include open-response questions designed to measure critical thinking and problem-solving.

    IMHO, conservatives are purposely not allowing teachers to teach our kids to think for themselves. They would rather be a stupid third world country where their own kids had the advantages and only them, then a thriving first world country where everyone had opportunity but it would mean that conservatives had to compete.

    Over the next generations, our country is going to get creamed by foreign innovation and creativity, and I will blame the conservatives and the greedy.

    http://www.politico.com/story/.....00575.html

  6. 6

    5)I believe it is called the Dead Man’s pedal.

    Also, their is a Congressional/FRA mandate, called Positive Train Control that must be met by 2015. The railroads want an extension, probably won’t get it now.

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