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theseus51
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Name: David
Country: United States
State: Hawaii
Metro: Honolulu
Birthday: 12/26/1980
Gender: Male
Interests: I am a child of Generation E, so I chat online, sometimes watch tv, and RTS or poker games are sometimes used to cure boredom. Of course the usual hanging out with friends, or talking on the phone with various friends. My friends say I'm smart/witty, funny, and interesting. Heh what do they know. I'm also usually upbeat/positive with an overriding sense of sarcasm and rebellion against authority.
Expertise: Logic, Finance, Politics, Buddhism and Computer stuffs.
Occupation: Computer related
Industry: Government
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  theseus51
Member Since:
6/23/2002
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| Apparently there was a report issued by the Pew Center on States, as to the ranking of the budget mess of each State. Here's how the two main local newspapers reported it:
http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091112/BUSINESS/911120315
Study: Hawaii in worse fiscal shape than many states
http://www.starbulletin.com/news/breaking/69892642.html
Hawaii's budget woes not as harsh as many other states', report finds
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| http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20091029/NEWS01/910290350
Layoffs will hit 'thousands' if Hawaii furloughs are blocked - Rather than laying off teachers, like most other states did due to their bloated budget, Hawaii decided to furlough them. It means we have the shortest school year for public schools, 163 days. The next lowest is 173 days, and the average is 180 days. The trade off is that we have less instructional days, but also have smaller class sizes (due to no layoffs). If we restore instructional days, without more money, then the only other area to cut is teacher jobs.
The teachers could've taken the furlough days on training days, or holidays, to avoid cutting instructional days. But then they suffer the pay cuts without a day off. So the union opted to have the furlough days ONLY on instructional days, which was done on purpose to piss off the parents, so the parents would protest and complain to the Governor and the legislature. If there was minimal loss of instructional days, parents might they may think the pay cuts are no big deal, and the teachers don't mind the pay cuts, which is not what the union wanted at all. They wanted parents pissed off.
Anyway, I was struck by one sentence in the article:
"Some 22,000 people work for the Department of Education. About 13,000 are teachers."
Paraphrasing my old post, http://theseus51.xanga.com/704521343/item, we spend $14,000 per student, with an average class size is 15 students, costing $210,000 per classroom. Assuming the average teacher makes about $50,000, it would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
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| I haven't been doing much, so haven't been able to think of anything to update with. Also haven't read any articles that I thought were that interesting. But I'll just post a bunch of random stuff I guess.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113889251
A Bitter Rift Divides Atheists - There is a schism is Atheism. Those who want to engage with the religious, and those who want to mock and insult them. Basically the split would be between the liberal atheists, and the fundamentalist atheists.
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I also watched Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" and I thought it was hilarious. Probably would have been funnier if I could understand everything that was being said, but their British accents made some words hard to understand, but I got the gist of it.
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"Never hit a man when he's down? Bullshit. Show me a better time."
Page 112 of Staff Sgt. David Bellavia's "House to House"
I read "House to House", a soldier's account of the battle of Falluajah in Iraq. This was at the peak of President Bush's Global War on Common Sense, and it was a pretty intense book. They were fighting with everything from anti-tank bombs, to hand to hand combat with their bare fists and pocket knives. With death at every turn, the intensity of it all was nullified a bit because I knew the hero would live, for obvious reasons.
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| http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1929553,00.html
Want Peace? Give a Nuke the Nobel - How nuclear weapons created more peace and less death in the world.
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| My friend posted on facebook "President Obama wins Nobel Peace Prize". I clicked on it, thinking it was something funny from theonion.com or some other satire. But I quickly realized it was an actual headline. Wow. Isn't he in the middle of sending even more troops to Afghanistan?
I mean I know they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter and Al Gore just to stick it to George W. Bush, and that's fine. The Nobel Peace Prize has always been political, and there isn't a Nobel Warmonger Prize to give to Bush, so giving his critics the Peace one was the next best thing. But come on, this is too much.
Kinda reminds me a few years ago when Time Magazine named their person of the year as "You", meaning everyone in the world won the prize. It made an already devalued prize (based on previous winners), a total joke.
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