I saw something the other day that made me think the end is near. The exclusive Porsche dealer on Interstate 80 had signs on all its shiny, expensive sports cars that indicated the thriftiness of the cars' miles per gallon. Today reading the newspaper my feeling was only reinforced.
• John McCain proposed a $300 million dollar prize to some inventor who can come up with a better mousetrap, uh, car battery. I'm thinking to myself, well, that makes sense since there's no obvious economic benefit to the person or company who resolves the energy crisis… I'm only surprised that it took John McCain all those years in the Senate to figure it out…Good Lord he must think we are so stupid.
• The topic of stupidity leads to the dominant topic in the Sacramento Bee today, education, or lack of it. Maybe we are dumb enough to think that the inventors are all out there waiting for a government financial incentive to solve the biggest problem of the 21st century. Perhaps we don't know the difference between a paltry $300 million and the potential to invent something that could dominate a multi-billion dollar industry. Maybe we are stupid since the schools in California are getting bad marks. Uncle Sam, who everyone knows is very smart, thinks that taking money away will help, ala, No Child Left Behind. Who does Uncle Sam think he's going to help by taking money away that provides teachers, books, etc?
• So then Dan Walters is chiming in on education through his column. I usually respect Dan's opinions but not today. He says that Charter Schools must have the answer because they "showed overall stronger educational outcomes than traditional public schools, even when the data are adjusted for ethnic, linguistic and economic factors." Well just maybe the wrong things are being adjusted. Perhaps a key difference is that the kids have at least one parent aware enough of their child's education to choose and place them in a Charter School? Did they adjust for parent involvement in their calculations? Oh, but that would place responsibility on the parents, i.e., the voters, and LORD knows we can't do that because that's too much like making excuses. I don't know how you factor out the impacts of poverty when looking at school performance in the first place. Guess I should have paid more attention in school.
• So the problem is that in places like LA, 50% or fewer of the kids are graduating from HS. There are probably lots of reasons but maybe it has more to do with our generation cranking down the bar. We've established a society that values play, recreation and distraction above all things. We work to retire early. We want the biggest house, the fastest car and we don't want to work too hard for it, we want it to come through magical increases in equity of stocks or houses or commodities. It is no wonder that the kids aren't motivated to work hard when all us adults are modeling that there's really an easy way if we ride the right bubble. All the bubbles have burst now, I suppose we should all get used to working for a living again.
• Here's a sticky issue that I don't know how to resolve. Thanks to NAFTA and other similar agreements, we send so much of our work over the borders. My own business writing web content is regularly compromised by foreigners educated here and working in their home country where the level of wages are well below our minimum wage. Most of the web work is being done outside the country and practically anything you do on a computer can be farmed out at pennies on the dollar to India and other parts of Asia. And believe me, this work is being farmed out regardless of what you are paying here for it. I met with a business owner this morning who said they had to abandon color correcting of photography because it is now possible to send the files to India where they are only too happy to work on your photos for $3 per hour.
So how do we stem the tide of work being sent outside the US when we are consistently converting all work into digital solutions? How do we create jobs here for our children? How do we motivate the kids to work hard if the bar is going to be cranked down to a standard of living equivalent to the third world?
• Another cheery story is a headline giving dire warnings about global warming which the extreme right still insists is liberal fiction. A top NASA scientist is quoted saying we are "toast" unless we get global warming under control today. He goes so far as to predict mass extinctions within the next few decades unless we stop what we are doing now.
And with all of this bad news, how do we motivate kids about studying algebra in preparation for their future? The kids must be wondering what for, a future of what? Is the best we can offer them poverty, extinction and wonderful new batteries? When will our leadership demonstrate some conviction and will?
The air outside is smoky today. It feels like a fall day when the farmers burn the rice fields, but the news says that the smoke is the result of 800 forest fires set off by lightening last weekend. I'm thinking it's more likely caused by John McCain who was in Fresno yesterday making his battery speech; talk about blowing smoke!
|
