Now you're back to that pesky math thing again! :D

Highly debatable, we don't have the highest quality health care in the world, in fact I believe Costa Rica is ranked higher than the USA. Our education is some of the worst too for how rich our country is.

From a government standpoint there is the budget to evaluate. I know that we take bids, and go with whatever we think is the best for our dollar. I work IT in a public school system (k-12) and know that what we decide to buy technology wise is a well thought out process that has room for growth and follows a replacement cycle. This goes for everything. Private companies also have budgets but I think it is different because I have done side/contract work for private sector companies and for the most part they took my advice regardless of the cost. Sometimes they would ask for a cheaper or easier solution but for the most part spending money was not as big of a problem as it is in the public sector.

Of course management never really comes down and asks us what we think, but sometimes they do take our advice. I went to a bunch of MS training for the vista launch and got to see vista, exchange 2007 and office 2007 and when I got back they wanted to have a brief meeting with me to see what, if any, benefits we would get from rolling out to Vista. I told them we would not really get any benefits for end users, that most of the new features benefit IT people if anything. They agreed and we are not rolling out vista any time soon - thank the gods!

What can I say? I'm a born again Pythagorean. Number is the within of all things. :-)

Which helps to explain how we've become so shortsighted that we can't manage to find a way to encourage the use of compatible browsers based on internet standards.

It doesn't have anything to do with government vs private sector though. Teachers are poorly paid in both sectors, with private schools often paying less. Combine that with apathetic parents who often defend their children's misdeeds, and it's no wonder we aren't keeping up. When I see people championing things like school vouchers I always marvel at the fact that they're never suggesting that teacher pay be increased to attract the best and brightest. Don't they believe in the free market?

Not to mention what we spend on other things, look what the war over in Iraq has cost us, and on top of that it has cost us almost 4,000 US soldiers lives. Our economy is way down and I think we could better spend our tax dollars on both health care and education to make it up to par. However when the poor get educated the rich no longer hold the power, but that is a completely different subject all together.

Also, I beg to differ, when a government facility purchases computers they usually do it in a lot of bulk all with the same configuration all to be used to play solitaire half the day.

That's probably why businesses choose Windows over Mac.

"Macs don't have built in solitare..."

That's what I said! :D The US is not near the top of that list (quality of healthcare), despite paying the most for healthcare.

Nope, they have chess instead....:rolleyes:


I'll admit when I have worked help desk I have played online games in the down time hehe.

Speaking of which, did anyone catch Magnus Carlsen’s impressive finish in the Biel Grandmaster Tournament? At 16 years old, he’s the youngest tournament winner there ever.

After leading the tournament with a full point, he lost two rounds in a row. Then he came from behind to crush Teymour Radjabov, the 9th strongest player in the world. That brought him into a playoff with Alexander Onischuk, 2006 US Chess Champion, which he won.

So the answer is to make every American taxpayer pay for it? I'm not being harsh here, but there are built-in problems with this since I am presently dealing with it right now with my kids. The problem with government "anything" is that it becomes a Buearocratic nightmare. We end up paying more money just to keep the great experiment going ad-nauseum. Currently they are looking for ways of teaching sex education to as low as kindergarten--including introduction of homosexuality. Now, to me, as a parent, this drives me to put my children in to private school. Guess what? Now I am paying $6k a year PLUS my taxes so that everyone else can send their kids to K-12.
There was once a bill to have vouchers where you could spend them where you wanted to augment the price of education. This meant the death nell for the inefficient Public School System. The bill was immediately killed, of course, and the inefficiency continues.

To bring it back to the original post. This tendency to move from an efficient system to an inefficient system always makes my blood boil--mostly because it forces me to use the inefficient system because I have no choice in the matter.

In engineering, this is a natural tendency of all systems. It is called "Entropy". According to Shannon, in the most general sense, the antithesis of entropy is information.

There are two different issues here. The first is who determines what gets taught in schools. Personally, I'd much rather have kids being taught about homosexuals than have them brainwashed into believing that Creationism is Science.

The second issue has to do with whether or not Government is less efficient than the private sector. I think that has to do with where on the corporate ladder you stand.

If you're the CEO of a large company, that system very efficiently pours millions of dollars per year into your bank account. If you're a typical working stiff, not so much. In addition to making less than 0.01% of the money that the CEO makes, you have no idea if your job will still exist next week, let alone next year or until you retire.

On the other hand, if you're a government official high on the totem pole, you're pulling in somewhere from $150,000 to perhaps as much as $400,000 per year, so it isn't quite as efficient for you. Your underlings are making a significant percentage of your salary, and they are relatively secure in their positions, so for them it is far more efficient than the private sector.

Notice that I've made no attempt to compare "productivity" here. That's because government typically fills needs that the private sector cannot. Nowhere on Earth does the private sector build and indefinitely maintain roads for example. Sure, they do on a small scale in rare cases, but only when they can't get Government to do it for them. Much of what "business" accomplishes, it could not without government's contributions. Most of the problems businesses cause (Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Enron, and many, many others ) occur when government controls are lax.

And Schneb, you're not paying taxes simply to send other kids to school. You're paying taxes so that when your kids graduate they can enter an educated society, without which their own educations would be useless.

With my wife a retired schoolteacher (K, 1, & 2 over a span of 35 years) and me a retired university prof with 35 years of teaching the results of primary and secondary education, I can say you're absolutely right. They know about sex, but can't read, can barely write an English sentence, use a calculator to do simple arithmetic, don't know the multiplication tables, have no grasp of geography and very little of history, and in spite of their abysmal ignorance, feel good about themselves; lots of unearned self-esteem.

If I didn't have 7 grandchildren, I'd offer to pay for them all to do that. Unfortunately 40+ K is outside my retirement reach.

Well, I have to ask, what are other countries doing that we are not that they have less crime, higher rates of education, better health care, and a better standard of living? How do they accomplish it, and why can't we accomplish it?

I mean I think technology actually hurts us in some ways. Things like internet message boards have kids writing in text lingo (or l33t speak - whatever you want to call it) and applications like MS word have adaptive AI features that correct your common grammar and spelling mistakes, so a lot of times people nowadays are just relying on the technology to make it right for them. Thus, they are never learning from their mistakes. I am all for technology making life easier for us, there is no doubt about that.

What encourages this type of behavior in our government facilities and in our education system? I don't think there is a simple answer to that question, but I do think there is a complicated one. It probably won't even be the right answer, but that is something I think we would have to deal with to ever change.

I agree with the original poster that when we micro manage everything down to its most bare naked essentials, we lose sight of some things. Obviously being forced to use only IE version 6 is ridiculous. In fact there is only one reason I could think of why this would happen. You need to work in a legacy active X environment that is not compatible yet with IE 7. Other than that, really any web browser should suffice. I think when we try to micro manage everything from Government to Education this happens. I find it hilarious how republicans preach smaller government but practice more bureaucracy. I find it ridiculous that we live in one of the "richest" nations and we don't have free health care or free higher education. I also can't believe how poor our education system is compared to other nations.

And other people pay taxes to maintain the roads and bridges that lead to, emergency services that protect, and in some cases policies that subsidize schools that they believe teach bigotry and flawed science.

There is a simple answer: responsibility. Everyone in America knows their rights, but nobody accepts responsibility for their own actions. Once again, it's up to the leaders to show the way. Start with Golden parachutes. They have to go because they don't hold executives accountable for their failures. Next, require companies to clean up after themselves so that taxpayers don't have to foot the bill. Finally, work your way down to employees, parents and students.

After all that's done, we may have a populace educated enough to avoid booby traps like Windows and IE. ;)

I thought democracy, by definition, means that the people rule. So, in turn wouldn't that mean we need to voice our needs for change? If no one ever speaks up, what makes you think our leaders will do anything else besides line their pockets with wealth and riches?

I agree with your 100% on the idea that there needs to be accountability. It seems that in our Government no one is accountable for their actions or their mistakes.

That's because our Government is not in charge. It's run through lobbyists by large corporations, many of whom see government the same way they see their employees: an expense to be passed on to customers.

I have to concur. Furthermore, if there is a lack of high-quality public education, democracy itself is threatened. And that is the real crux of the matter.

We’ve had the same debate in Norway many a time, both with regards to education and to the public health sector.

I would replace "Government" with "North American Society". Kids knock over gravestones and get a slap on the wrist if anyone bothers to try to catch them and succeeds; they're just little kids, after all. A minister or priest diddles little kids and is simply moved to another venue; mustn't bring shame on the church. A bank teller is suspected of diddling the books and is simply fired; don't want the negative PR, after all. Teachers who are hopelessly incompetent have tenure; what can a school board do, they'll say. Parole boards and the justice system bring screams of rage from victims, but nothing changes. These are all symptoms of a society gone as soft as baby poop, and so self-centered that they won't bother with anything that doesn't directly effect them.