Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Can Hardly Wait


Busy etc. but I will get to this as soon as I can.

12 comments:

  1. McMegan in comments: "If you think that engineers are not held accountable for quite specific performance metrics, you must not know many engineers."

    Commenter response: "I'm an engineer and I'm not held to any performance metrics."

    McMegan: *crickets*

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  2. It's possible for a teacher in New York City to retire at 55 and draw down an annual pension of more than $60,000, plus lifetime health benefits for herself and her family.

    OUTRAGEOUS!!!

    I stand with Malcolm Stevenson "Steve" Forbes, Jr. and his courageous crusade for the 'flat tax', aka to pay less on the income generated by the money he inherited the old-fashioned way.
    ~

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  3. I actually skimmed her post. Impossible to read "carefully"; its just too stupid.

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  4. Another case where Megan makes evidence fit her assumptions instead of evidence leading her to a conclusion.

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  5. Whenever Megan compares government to private enterprise, it is painfully obvious that she doesn't have the faintest clue how business works.

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  6. A career military officer who receives his/her commission at age 25 can put in a good 20-25 years and retire at 45-50 years old with full benefits and retirement pay ON THE TAXPAYERS DIME for only not fucking up egregiously during that time.

    Does Megan have something against that, too? Or is she only against folks who actually work hard to improve society and earn a bit of living compensation for their efforts?

    Granted that the public education system does not work the way it should--in theory it is designed to educated folks in order to raise the base level of society's quality of life. The privileged elite KNOW that the game is rigged and that unregulated capitalism allows them what's winning the game to shut out all competition. That, of course, is why they have always striven to eliminate true public education (or cap its effects to producing factory dregs rather than actual thinkers).

    --Cole

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  7. I wonder if tall, female econobloggers are also required to meet specific performance metrics, because I can think of one who isn't doing a very good job.

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  8. Man, she has a serious hate-on for teachers. Maybe she resents the (apparently, given her history as a "journalist") terrible education she's received.

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  9. As always, the questions we ask determine the answers we receive.

    McMegan, who hates teachers, asks "How can we pay them less?" and "How can we make it easier to fire them?"

    I'd ask, "How can we keep good teachers?" "How can we cultivate promising young teachers?" and "How can we prevent burnout?"

    Shockingly, these approaches are in direct opposition, and the latter leads to better teaching while the former does not.

    Kain's been writing some good posts on education. I just wish we lived in a world where the stupid-evil- crazy crowd didn't have such a commanding voice, and where every issue wasn't framed by Megan McArdle, Paul Ryan, Newt Gingrich, Marc Thiessen, Liz Cheney, Grover Norquist, Andrew Breitbart, etc.

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  10. Teachers themselves have explained and demonstrated to us what needs to be done, but instead of making class sizes smaller, up-to-date text books and materials, and lots of parent involvement, conservative and democrats insist on blaming the teachers and looking for ways to make teacher's lives more useless and unbearable.

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  11. "useless" was the wrong word. I think I meant "ineffectual" or "powerless". Wrote too fast and didn't preview.

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  12. An oversimplification (I confess) but a profound truth I was taught, shortly after I moved on to college, at an event to enroll alumni:

    Private schools are there to manipulate pupils for the benefit of the institution, for instance by getting them into prestigious colleges.

    That's what I accused my school (private) of doing; the teacher's response was, essentially, Yeah, so? Exit me, having learned something for a change.

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