Letters to the Editor
kostya
Published Letters: 15 Editor's Choice: 6
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Damn transhumans!
[Read the article: Surviving American capitalism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You can only get to the first 500 words of the Blinder article, but the entire Meyerson letter is posted at Brad Delongs's site. I thought his quote of Clinton's "you earn what you learn" was particularly appropriate as it's pretty clear only a small fraction of the population will earn PhDs, or even MDs and JDs. Indeed, students are more likely to quit high school before graduation than go on to earn a higher degree. California, a center for innovation globally, is somewhat ironically also at the bottom nationally when it comes to K-12 spending per student. It spends only about a third of what other "innovation cultures" outside the US spend in anticipation of an offshored future (e.g. Finland spends around €12,500/yr per lower-grade pupil). California's voters it seems has given up on even appearing to walk the walk; they're down with the idea of a big underclass.
In his recent book The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil speculates how biology-transcending beings that can access and process 100 billion times more information than a human will treat the unaugemented population. Will transhumans consider humans chattel? Will they act like benevolent pet owners? Will transhumans be subject to human laws, and if not, what property will humans be allowed to keep? Will money cease to exist? About all we know at this point is that if they let us keep our names, they probably won't eat us.
Blinder sees this mighty wedge forming and possibly obliterating middle-class existence, but can't make out its ultimate meaning. Perhaps the race to transhumanity is already on for the super-rich and super-brainy? If so, jettisoning the bottom four quintiles of a society may seem a necessary sacrifice for those striving to get the first upgrades.
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...since Herbert Hoover
[Read the article: Bush's Card trick]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree with the first letter-writer that comparison between Bush and Hoover is unfair. Indeed, Blumenthal rejects the comparison himself in his penultimate paragraph.
While Hoover had a reputation as the "do nothing president," his life trajectory to the presidency was anything but do nothing. At the point in his life when the current inhabitant of the White House was rising at the crack of noon and shoving white powder up his nose, the PhD mining engineer Hoover was designing coal mines in China. And look at Hoover's hobby when he became wealthy -- he and his wife Lou translated from Latin and published an illustrated and annotated version of the 1556 mining classic, Georgius Agricola's De rerum metallica.
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No one is discussing...
[Read the article: What we mean when we say "genocide"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Epistemicide is the mother of genocide.
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Premature celebration
[Read the article: Tom DeLay steps down]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Unfortunately, the best con-artists back out of the game early and with líttle fanfare. The time it takes the marks to figure out the extent of their damages give the scoundrel time to insulate himself from the inevitable outcry when the public figures out how badly they've been taken. DeLay scams have gutted the treasury, dumped massive debt on the unborn and forced many of our best public servants from their posts. I'm sure Hot Tub Tom just loves it when his detractors obsess on his golf trips.
"You better a blame' sight give YOURSELF a good cussing, for you're the one that's entitled to it most. You hain't done a thing from the start that had any sense in it, except coming out so cool and cheeky with that imaginary blue-arrow mark. That WAS bright--it was right down bully; and it was the thing that saved us. For if it hadn't been for that they'd a jailed us till them Englishmen's baggage come--and then--the penitentiary, you bet! But that trick took 'em to the graveyard, and the gold done us a still bigger kindness; for if the excited fools hadn't let go all holts and made that rush to get a look we'd a slept in our cravats to-night--cravats warranted to WEAR, too--longer than WE'D need 'em."
-- Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
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Offshoring of education
[Read the article: Bad schools, dumb kids]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Schooling programs are necessarily designed to serve the needs of the economy. The modern American school system's development was greatly facilitiated by the great 19th century capitalists such as Carnegie, Astor, Morgan and Rockefeller. In addition to training docile, but capable, factory and office workers, they also pushed truly wierd ideas like bionomics as the basis for the creation of an over-class to deal with the modern scientific world's complexities and override the clumsy notions of 18th democracy. To a large extent they succeeded. The problem is that America now suffers from both the obviation of paticipatory democracy (which required good generalist literacy) and a decline in the demand for skilled office and factory workers.
Ironically, this piece starts off with whining from Bill Gates, the country's richest man and a college drop-out, and finishs with ignorant young people struggling with the limits of their eternalized childhood fog and Newspeak glosses (Jay Leno has been doing a similar segment for years). Let's be honest: America's corporate elites have found it expedient to wiggle out of their social contract with Americans and make new deals elsewhere. At least Bill got richer last year; most high-school graduates didn't.
The Chinese girls seemed best at US-president-naming, which also comes as little surprise. A study this month from IBM's Institute for Business Value and Fudan University in Shanghai suggests that lack of educated staff is one of the main hurdles to Chinese corporate dominance in international markets. Thus, education is a top priority in China these days. The Chinese have been sending out teachers and school officials worldwide to study the best practices of the world's top public school systems. Here in Finland, we had Chinese teachers observing in our kids classes for several weeks. Finnish 15-year-olds, it seems, do very well in math, history, geography and novel problem-solving, and the Chinese are interested in incorporating Finnish approaches in their teaching. Haven't seen any Chinese teachers sitting in your kids classes lately? Now that's something for Oprah to really worry about.